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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I have put my name to Amendment 134 in the belief that the Government are quite right, in general, on the principles in this part of the Bill but they are wrong not to have made an exception in this case. These are very modest amendments to allow exceptions to be made. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, mentioned one reason why exceptions need to be made: DfID. This Government are working hard to follow the amount of aid that this country has committed—and I pay tribute to the Opposition. But it is not only DfID. The FCO realises that soft power is very important, and the Department for Business also realises that companies need to be socially responsible. Corporate responsibility has become a very important standard for this country. This is recognised across almost all of government, and I urge my noble friend and the Ministry of Justice to join the other departments in making sure that companies listed here that have the potential to cause enormous damage—the extractive industries, in particular, whose work is accelerating at an enormous rate, and also agribusiness as commodity prices go up; there are a number of businesses whose turnover and impact in the world is growing day by day at a rate that was quite unimaginable even a decade ago—that needs to be balanced by better access to justice, not worse. It is for that reason that I support these amendments.