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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My noble friend will recall that it was part of the vaunt of the coalition that the statute book would be tidied up so that there were far fewer redundant statutes. There are in fact hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, of redundant statutory provisions—I have a book of them upstairs by my desk. Given that this has not been brought into force now for nine years, in the spirit of clear statute-making would it not be better simply to repeal the original provision and, if the Government wished to have something like it in the future, to introduce that in a proper way in a Bill?