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Policing and Crime Bill

I have listened to the debate with interest. I have always been very worried about administratively depriving people of their liberty and about control orders and things. It really depends how long these injunctions last. Society has to be able to defend itself; a huge amount of what we have erected almost goes in favour of the criminal, so we are very often powerless to stop people. You read about marauding done by feral youths in the street, and so on. It is reasonable to have new powers to try to inhibit their activities, and I do not think that we should limit them to people of a certain age because this could happen at any age. However, if we are going to lower the standards of proof, the measures must be fairly temporary, so that they are just a stop-gap to try to inhibit activity until something proper is done about it, at which point the criminal standards of proof would cut in. As long as there is a fairly short sunset on these injunctions, I tend to go in favour of what the Government propose.