Tuesday 12th December 2023
(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
Public Bill CommitteesCriminal Justice Bill 2023-24 View all Criminal Justice Bill 2023-24 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 12 December 2023 - (12 Dec 2023)
Alex Norris
Q
Rebecca Bryant: Yes. I would like to bust a few myths, if that is possible while giving evidence. There is a perception in the media and the community that young people are the main perpetrators of antisocial behaviour when, in fact, they are not: the vast majority of antisocial behaviour is perpetrated by adults.
In focusing on young people, we should be thinking about how they are impacted by antisocial behaviour. They are often victims. You will have seen terrible films on TikTok and social media outlets of fights, violence and aggression. That means that those young people are victims rather than perpetrators as a whole. We certainly need to recognise that if we can get in early and use the early intervention and prevention tools available to us to stop the antisocial behaviour or stop those young people becoming antisocial, we will be able to reduce antisocial behaviour as a whole.
Antisocial behaviour is often a precursor to more serious crime, so if we can use our opportunity—I call it a “golden moment”—to intervene with a young person, perhaps with an alternative trusted adult from outside the home, and work with them to understand the impact of the behaviour that they may be perpetrating, that in itself does not fall into the idea that we should be reducing the CPN to the age of 10.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Laura Farris)
Q
Harvey Redgrave: I am in favour of this measure. I think it was used relatively effectively under the last Labour Government in relation to prolific offenders. [Interruption.] Sorry, do I need to speak a bit louder?
The Chair
Please try to speak up a bit.
Harvey Redgrave: I am in favour of the measure. It is right to test more offenders, particularly prolific offenders, many of whom are driven by addiction. The more we can divert offenders into treatment to address their offending behaviour, the better. I think there needs to be a broader look at how we deal with prolific offenders who recycle around the system sometimes tens or hundreds of times before they stop their offending. There used to be something called the prolific and other priority offenders programme, which was disbanded along with the whole infrastructure around it.
There is a need to place this drug-testing measure within a broader set of interventions that look at how we grip prolific offenders, how judges are able to defer sentencing, and how offenders are able to be rehabilitated and dealt with much earlier on rather than them serving short sentences, coming out, reoffending and going back in at great expense to the taxpayer.
Laura Farris
Q
The other question I wanted to ask is about Crest Advisory’s role in Baroness Casey’s review—again, if you were not personally involved in that, you can correct me. I think Crest Advisory played some role in supporting her review into the misconduct issues in the Met police, and there are two provisions in this Bill that at least partially respond to that. I would like to look at clause 73, which is on ethical policing and the duty of candour. In the light of your work with Baroness Casey, do you think it is important, and if so why? What does it answer in relation to her findings about failings in the Metropolitan police?
Harvey Redgrave: To clarify, some of my team at Crest Advisory were seconded in to support Baroness Casey on her review, but obviously she led the review and wrote it herself. It is really important that we look at the ethics and systems around misconduct within policing. There is a crisis of public confidence in policing at the moment, particularly among women. The Commissioner of the Met has spoken repeatedly about wanting to have more say and control over getting rid of officers when there are cases of misconduct, and I think the Government have acted on some of that.
I support the measure, but I would argue that there is a case for going even further and looking at the whole system around vetting and how that takes place within policing, and the system of who really upholds the professional standards within policing. Which body do we hold responsible—the College of Policing, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, or the Home Office? It feels to me like there is a slight lack of clarity at the moment about where the buck stops on some of this at a national level, with each force able to adopt slightly different practices.
Laura Farris
Q
Harvey Redgrave: I think that it is helpful and is a welcome step, but I am not sure that, in isolation, it will be enough to bring about the kind of culture change that Baroness Casey believes is necessary, within not just the Met but policing as a whole.
Laura Farris
Q
Harvey Redgrave: It comes back to the question of whether the chief constable should have more discretion over being able to hire and fire people, and to be able to get rid of people they are unhappy with. We have created systems and processes over the last 20 or 30 years that have taken some of that discretion away. It is a balance, and we need proper professional standards to be upheld by the College of Policing. In general, I think it a good thing for there to be greater discretion for chief constables to be able to act when they believe there is misconduct within their force.
Laura Farris
Q
We heard from the Crown Prosecution Service this morning, and it said that it did not think such an offence was necessary because the mechanics of an assault charge apply anyway—obviously, with actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm, if that should arise. There is also a statutory aggravating factor for assaulting a retail worker. Do you have a view on this? If you do, could you set out what it is and why?
Harvey Redgrave: Shoplifting is a real concern and we need some deterrents in the system, but I am not sure that we get those deterrents through harsher sentencing. A bigger problem is whether we are catching offenders, charging them, and convicting them. All the evidence shows that for this type of offending, it is swiftness and certainty that deter rather than severity. Not many shoplifters are thinking about aggravating factors or how long they are going to spend in prison.
Laura Farris
Q
Harvey Redgrave: In general, the Bill probably focuses too much on sentence lengths and not enough on what is happening at the front end, around the police’s ability to catch, detain and bring offenders to justice. That is where I think the real gap is.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)
Q
Rebecca, thank you for joining us this afternoon. In response to the shadow Minister, you raised questions about reducing the minimum age for community protection notices from 16 to 10, which is enclosed within clause 67 of the Bill. Do you agree that bringing 10 to 15-year-olds into the scope of CPNs provides an opportunity to halt a path into criminality that might otherwise occur? Combined with that, there is an opportunity to make other interventions to try to prevent the young person from getting into crime.
Rebecca Bryant: It is using a hammer to crack a nut. For 10 and 11-year-olds in particular who are on the cusp of causing antisocial behaviour, there are many other tools available to partners. I am not necessarily thinking about fining parents, because a lot of the young people who are involved in antisocial behaviour come from more deprived backgrounds, and breaching and fining is not going to enable change.
What we are looking for is a change of behaviour in the longer term. Yes, we are looking to prevent in the first instance, but then we look for change. Being able to engage with a young person and their parents by putting in positive mentoring and other youth interventions would surely have longer term success than a community protection notice would have. Also, there is a community protection warning before a notice; that kind of warning and discussion between a parent, a child and the authorities, which could be the housing provider, the local authority or the police, has much more impact when you are offering a positive intervention.
Chris Philp
Q
Rebecca Bryant: More extreme antisocial behaviour is often a criminal offence, so potentially there would be criminality and therefore a charge. That may be welcome in some cases, but not a blanket reduction to say that anybody from the age of 10 could have a CPN, which could then lead to breach and fine. As I say, from our members’ perspective, that seems too young.
Chris Philp
Q
Rebecca Bryant: First, our members absolutely welcome the repeal of the Vagrancy Act. It is outdated and clunky, and has not been fit for purpose for many years. The replacement powers suggested in the Bill are generally welcomed by our members. I think there is some movement around more community rehabilitation. The people we are talking about here are particularly vulnerable members of society who have been through significant trauma or who have significant mental health problems, drugs and alcohol addiction, and their behaviours and rough sleeping are due to those underlying facts. Thinking about community rehabilitation and support to change is as important as moving people on and creating the powers to do that.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
Q
Harvey Redgrave: No, it needs to be attached to more resourcing.
Chris Philp
Q
Andy Marsh, can I continue the line of questioning about the warrantless power of entry where it is necessary to recover stolen goods when there is no time to get a warrant? Andy Cooke just mentioned that the inspectorate would keep a close eye on whether that power, if granted by Parliament, is being exercised properly. Could you confirm for the Committee’s benefit whether you would in due course, if this were passed, produce some authorised professional practice to make sure that police forces exercise the power in a way that is responsible?
Andy Marsh: Minister Philp, as you are aware I am strongly supportive of police officers conducting all reasonable lines of inquiry to catch criminals and keep communities safe. It caused me great frustration as a chief if ever a letter landed on my desk to say, “My bike’s on sale on eBay, my daughter’s phone is in a house and you said you couldn’t do anything”.
We have already started our plans to hardwire this new power into our guidance, our training and our standard setting to do our very best, along with working in partnership with His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services to ensure that we use this power consistently in two respects. I do not want to see circumstances where the power should be used, where it is not and people could be caught and property returned; and I certainly do not want it to be used in such a way that would undermine confidence in policing. As in many things in policing, we need to get this just right. The College has a fundamental role in achieving consistency and getting it just right.
Chris Philp
Q
Andy Marsh: I do.
Chris Philp
Q
Andy Marsh: I am.
Chris Philp
Q
Andy Marsh: It should be a very significant moment in policing. The first code of ethics was put in place in 2014. I could explain to the Committee why we think we are able to improve on that, but we have to talk about why it is going to make a big difference. The College is able to put a code of practice in place which requires a chief constable to have due regard.
We wanted to make that code of practice as strong as possible around a duty of candour, but there were many other things in it—for example, a duty on a chief constable to ensure ethical behaviour in a force, through their processes, policies, reward recognition, promotion, application of the victims code, challenging unprofessional behaviour, looking after staff welfare, dealing with misconduct and vetting properly.
Even before we get to the duty of candour, which is very strong, this is the strongest lever the College of Policing can pull in order to bring about cultural change around standards in policing. We will be working with the launch of the second two parts of the code in January, which is different from the legal code. We will be working on supporting policing over a change programme to secure that cultural change, over many months—possibly years.
Chris Philp
Q
As you know, we made assaulting a public-facing worker a statutory aggravating factor for other assault offences in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. We have already created a separate offence of assaulting emergency workers. Some people now say that we should have a separate offence for assaulting a retail worker, to give it more prominence. Others say, “Well, where do you draw the line?” You could have an offence for assaulting a teacher, a local councillor—and so it might go on. What is your opinion about whether there is any use in creating that separate, stand-alone offence?
Andy Cooke: I think I am right in saying it is an offence in Scotland, but I do not know how much that has resulted in a change in offending behaviour. I have not particularly looked at that point. It is a question of where you draw the line. The key issue is not whether a new offence should be constructed for assaulting a shop worker. It is more about how well, or not, policing is dealing with assaults, full stop; and how well police officers are dealing with the offence of shoplifting and the ancillary offences that sometimes go with that. I am aware that the National Police Chiefs’ Council is doing an awful lot of work around this at the moment, working with the PCC for Sussex and yourself, Minister.
Certainly, there has been a large reduction in the number of positive outcomes or detections for shoplifting over the last five or six years. That is not acceptable. It is in line with an awful lot of the other core charge and outcome rates that we have seen across policing. This is more about ensuring that the police across England and Wales treat this more seriously, particularly where there are aggravated offences alongside, such as assault. That is what Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman is attempting to do on behalf of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Rather long-windedly, to come back to your initial question, without seeing the evidence for how that reduces offences or increases detections, I would not necessarily be in favour of a separate offence.
Chris Philp
Q
Andy Cooke: All those issues will be captured by the police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy inspections that we do every two years on every police force across England and Wales. We will look at reasonable lines of inquiry particularly and at the overall outcome rates—not just charge rates, because the out-of-court disposals are important as well, as it is whatever is the best sanction to fit the individual and the community at the end of the day. We look right across that to ensure that policing is doing what it should be doing, as we do every week of the year, and will continue to do so.
This is a really important issue for me, because these are crimes that strike at the heart of communities and neighbourhoods. It is really important that policing gets confidence and trust back. Whether that is the confidence and trust of shop workers or across neighbourhoods and communities, whichever way it is, a large part of getting that confidence and trust back is by the police showing themselves to be effective in what they do. The police need to increase their efforts to do so.
Chris Philp
Q
Andy Marsh: The College is supporting policing with guidance around dealing with retail crime, particularly persistent offenders. I agree with everything that has been said: much more needs to be done in order to deal with this crime type.
In relation to the specific offence, I can see that there are two purposes to it. The first is that it might well act as a deterrent. The College of Policing holds the evidence base for policing. We cannot categorically tell you there is an evidence base for deterrence, but that would be one of the reasons for putting it in place. I think the second, more important reason is for Parliament to signal its concern about a particularly disruptive crime that damages the fabric of our communities and society. This sends out a signal that the police need to do better. I am supportive of the proposal.
Chris Philp
Q
Moving on to a proposal contained in clause 21, which relates to giving police access to driver licence records—particularly the photograph—which currently are only readily accessible for road traffic purposes. The idea is that they can be used for facial recognition searches, where an image is retrieved from a crime scene from CCTV. That might include a shoplifting offence. This would make the DVLA driving licence database searchable by the police, in the same way that other databases are, including for facial recognition purposes. In your view, both Andy Marsh and Andy Cooke, would that assist the police in investigations? Is that a measure you would support?
Andy Marsh: I am supportive.
Andy Cooke: Yes, I support it. What goes alongside that is ensuring that the actions of the police on facial recognition are ethical and lawful. I am a big supporter of facial recognition used in the right way, and I think that opening up that database would benefit the detection of crime.
Chris Philp
Q
Do you agree with the Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, in saying that this measure will help chief constables better to manage their workforce and root out officers guilty of misconduct where appropriate and where necessary?
Andy Cooke: It would certainly help in relation to that. At the moment, the only recourse is judicial review, which as we know can be exceptionally expensive and difficult, so I see no problem at all in having that right of appeal for a chief constable.
Andy Marsh: The code of ethics, which we have just been talking about, puts a responsibility—in fact, a duty—on a chief constable to discharge their responsibilities around standards, conduct and behaviour; and I have been in a position, as a chief, where I have not been able to do that because ultimately I haven’t had the decision on who I ultimately have serving alongside me as a police officer. They are not employees—they are servants of the Crown. I have found that to be a deeply unsatisfactory position, so I am supportive of this.
Jess Phillips
Q
Andy Marsh: Yes, I do. That is a periodic hard stop, let us say, where there is a full review, but there should be a number of different control measures, both automated data searches and a duty—a responsibility to report and self-report—that will occur in real time between those vetting periods.
Laura Farris
Q
Andy Marsh: To explain the process, when a complaint is raised, internally and externally, the chief constable will have a delegated appropriate authority, which tends to be the deputy chief constable. They will have a pretty much weekly meeting, but sometimes it is a real-time daily meeting if something crops up that they need to consider.
The first thing that would happen is that a complaint would reach a threshold of gross misconduct or, indeed, criminal. Once it has reached that threshold, the deputy chief constable—the delegated appropriate authority—needs to make a decision about what should happen to that person. Should they be suspended? Can they continue with their duties? Should they engage in some degree of protected-type duty? What I can say, from my experience of working with police forces across England and Wales, is that the threshold and the tolerance before suspension has dropped substantially.
Laura Farris
Q
Andy Marsh: No, I am not expressing it clearly, because if it would appear to be a substantial complaint—a complaint which would undermine the trust and confidence of the public should that officer remain serving—then they should be suspended. Actually, I can reassure you, in all the cases that I am aware of and that I look at where there are allegations of violence against women and girls, I see a very low threshold for suspension, so if I have misled you at all, I am sorry.
Laura Farris
Q
Andy Marsh: Then they are very likely to be suspended, and I am really happy to write to the Committee and share the guidance and information—
Laura Farris
Q
Andy Marsh: It is very low. If I was accused of any form of domestic abuse, verbal or physical, or coercive control, I can guarantee you that I would be suspended.
Alex Cunningham
Q
Andy Marsh: In explaining this, I am in no way seeking to justify a lack of attention, but when a call is made to a police control room, they will triage it and they will use something called a threat, harm and risk matrix. If the offender has left the scene and no one is at immediate risk, that is unlikely to secure an immediate deployment. There is more likely to be a follow-up investigation. The retail crime action plan and guidance on our website, and all the focus on the use of images and facial recognition and on persistent offenders, is bringing a much sharper focus to an area of standards and police response that has slipped to an unacceptably low level.
Alex Cunningham
Q
Dame Vera Baird: I think they probably need to be strengthened quite a lot. I do not think there is anything in there that could criminalise somebody who provided a means for doing it as opposed to encouraging it. So if someone provides—I do not know—a knife or some drugs, I am not sure there is provision for that, and I think that is a big miss. This is a really worrying area and we need to legislate, and that is one of the good things in the Bill.
Laura Farris
Q
In that context, coercive control is making its way through in different forms. I have a narrow question about what you thought about the use of MAPPA—multi-agency public protection arrangements—in relation to the management of a serious coercive control offence.
Dame Vera Baird: I think it is good to state that formally. I am sure that it happens now quite a lot.
Laura Farris
Q
Dame Vera Baird: It is a strict regime and it is very carefully managed. The probation service is aware of the high level of risk. It is definitely beneficial for dangerous offenders, and the probation service has recognised domestic abusers. Even when they have not committed domestic abuse offences, it still recognised them as presenting that danger, if they are already in MAPPA. I am sure that the most coercively controlling offenders already go into MAPPA. It is not a closed box that you can only fight your way into through these five categories of offending. It is much wider than that, but let’s do it—fine.
Laura Farris
Q
Dame Vera Baird: That is a very interesting question, but they are better and they have positive bits to them, don’t they?
Laura Farris
A DAPO does allow GPS monitoring, for example.
Dame Vera Baird: That is an improvement on the current model. There will have to be close working between those who apply for the DAPOs and those who are running MAPPA to make sure that there is no overlap or missing bits and so forth. This cross-boundary working is going to be particularly important with that. But they are both good steps. I do think MAPPA is slightly redundant, but let us do it, and the DAPOs and those positive requirements are definitely a big step forward. What you said about the statutory instrument is really interesting—
Laura Farris
Lord Bellamy, today in the Lords—
Dame Vera Baird: Yes, that is really good to hear, but these are going into statute. Why is the protection for women only going into a statutory instrument, which frankly fewer people will ever get to know about? Why is it being done in that way? Why is it not in here with these?
Laura Farris
I will have to revert to the Committee on the answer to that, because I actually do not know.
Dame Vera Baird: Anyway, I am not supposed to ask you questions—[Laughter.]
Laura Farris
Q
Dame Vera Baird: I think it is bound to, yes. I have felt since their inception that DAPOs, because of those positive requirements, were likelier to be more effective than just the negative nature of whatever they were called—I forget what they are called currently.
MAPPA is an effective mechanism. You raise very interesting questions about how they will interact, and I just think it is about cross-working, really, between police and probation in particular. They have to work in IOM anyway, so they must have ways of working together that ought to be reasonably effective. But I hope that you will, as it were, as a Government draw to their attention the need for an understanding of how those mechanisms will work together, because that would be an important way to point out that it needs to be done effectively.
Alex Cunningham
Q
Jonathan Hall: No, I do not think so at the moment. I am in constant contact with counter-terrorism police and the Home Office. I am not aware that the Government are looking for yet further types of measure; if they were, I think they would have sought to bring them in within this Criminal Justice Bill. All that this particular measure does is allow an existing measure, polygraphs, to be applied to a wider range of people. My beef with that is that it allows it to be applied to people who have never been convicted of terrorism, without it going in front of a judge. So I think that the answer is no.
Laura Farris
Q
Jonathan Hall: I was in favour of polygraph measures after Fishmongers’ Hall. It was partly on the back of one of my recommendations that polygraph measures were brought in. They always, or at least for a long time, existed for sex offenders. You will recall Usman Khan, who was clearly a very deceptive man. My view was that polygraph measures could be useful.
Laura Farris
Q
Jonathan Hall: Let us say that someone is in the community. They could be asked about their daily routine. The most likely outcome is that someone who is subject to a polygraph measure would feel that they have to tell the truth, and the evidence is that people who are subject to polygraphs make admissions. You could say, “Are you in touch with the well-known terrorist Jonathan Hall?”, and the effect of polygraphs tends to be that people go, “Actually, I am,” because they are worried about giving it away through the polygraph measure. That would give counter-terrorism police an amazing source of information to show that, contrary to what that person had been telling his probation officer, he was still in touch with the dangerous terrorist Jonathan Hall. That would allow new licence conditions, for example: if Jonathan Hall lived in a certain part of Birmingham, a licence condition could be imposed that prevented that person from going there.
Laura Farris
Q
Jonathan Hall: Yes. You are completely right. This is not about extracting evidence that can be used in a criminal trial; it is about extracting information that is relevant to the management of offenders. If you think about a released terrorist offender who is now serving their sentence in the community, what you want to know is what their pattern of life is, who they are meeting, where they are going and what their objectives are. Are they visiting shops that sell knives, for example? Usman Khan must have gone to a shop to buy knives and tape to create the weapons used to kill two people. There are lots of factual matters that they can be asked about.
One of the benefits of the polygraph, I suppose, is that ultimately it is not covert. While MI5 and the police may have covert monitoring, it would be quite hard for them to put that information to the suspect. If the suspect has made an admission—“Yes, I am going to meet Jonathan Hall, the well-known terrorist,” or “Yes, I am going to visit knife shops”—that can be put to the offender, and you can work on rehabilitating the offender.
The Chair
As there are no further questions, I would like to thank the witness for giving evidence.
Alex Cunningham
Q
Professor Lewis: I am afraid that is not something that we have looked at.
Chris Philp
Q
Professor Lewis: Many paragraphs of the schedule do implement our recommendations. We are extremely pleased to see our recommendations implemented extremely swiftly. This project only reported over a year ago. We obviously do think that the changes we recommended would make a difference in the ways I mentioned earlier, which included improving enforcement and the ability to seize offenders’ assets, limiting unrealistic and in some cases unfair orders, and allowing victims to receive compensation more promptly.
We estimated at the time that the reforms could lead to an extra £8 million in funds being retrieved from criminals in England and Wales every year. That obviously helps to return more money that can be used on public services, for instance. I am happy to talk in more detail about specific recommendations if that would be helpful.
Chris Philp
Q
Professor Lewis: One of the things we thought was most important, in addition to trying to make the system more efficient, was to balance it with also making it more fair. In terms of efficiency, we recommended things like expediting the setting of a confiscation timetable, which is in paragraph 12, and creating a settlement process, which already happens informally—we call it EROC, which stands for early resolution of confiscation. That has been implemented in paragraph 13. We note also that better enforcement will improve the recovery of funds.
There have been several recommendations that have been implemented in order to improve enforcement. Enforcement plans, which largely implement our recommendations for contingent orders, are in paragraph 16; and allowing enforcement to take place in the Crown court as well as the magistrates court is in paragraph 17. We think that those will make the system much more efficient and will radically improve enforcement.
In terms of fairness, it is really important that orders accurately deflect a defendant’s benefit from crime. There are two ways in which we have recommended, and the Government have introduced clauses to implement, improving the fairness of confiscation orders. One concerns where someone has made only a temporary gain—for example, a money launderer who allows their bank account to be used to transfer £1,000,000 but gets paid £10,000 for doing that. When the gain is only temporary their benefit from crime is not really £1,000,000, given that they do not get to keep that. At the moment, orders can be made in the amount of the temporary gain and that recommendation has been taken up. I will find the paragraph for you in a moment.
Chris Philp
Q
Professor Lewis: I am happy to address that. The temporary gain issue is in paragraph 8. The other improvement to the calculation of benefit is in circumstances where the defendant has already disgorged some of the proceeds of their crime—so, for example, that may have been forfeited or seized by the state already. That should not be double counted, so that the defendant then has to pay back something that has already been seized by the state. That is in paragraph 5. We are very pleased to see those fairness recommendations, as well as the efficiency gains.
In terms of deadlines, ultimately there is a deadline: it is called the default term of imprisonment. When a confiscation order is made against a defendant, a term of imprisonment in default is set. The defendant may end up serving this period of imprisonment if it is activated by the court, on the basis that the defendant has demonstrated either wilful refusal to pay the confiscation order or culpable neglect in failing to pay it. The defendant can of course secure release from the default term by paying the confiscation debt. In the consultation paper we cite a case where, as the person is being taken off to prison, finally the confiscation debt is settled. So, we do know that that does work—at least, anecdotally.
In the consultation paper we provisionally proposed something that would be even more stringent than that. At the moment the defendant is released halfway through the default term. After that, there is no more threat of imprisonment. We provisionally proposed that the defendant should be released only on licence, similar to the way in which life prisoners are released, for example. I think that was probably our most controversial proposal. There were some people who were in favour of that, but lots of people thought it extremely draconian; another sector thought that it really would not work, and within that was His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. In other words, probation is not really designed to get people to pay their confiscation orders; it has another purpose. It has a rehabilitative purpose.
Ultimately, we decided that there are better ways to try to ensure enforcement. So, yes, there is the default term that remains, and that is a real threat to defendants. However, we also recommended confiscation assistance orders, requiring the defendant to attend enforcement hearings after the default term has been served and requiring the provision of financial information with penalties for non-compliance or providing false information. The first two of those—assistance orders and requiring the defendant to attend enforcement hearings after serving the default term—are both in schedule 4.
Chris Philp
Q
Professor Lewis: Again, we do not have a view; it is not something that we have looked at. Obviously, in our hate crime project we looked at circumstances where sentences were aggravated because of hostility towards a protected characteristic, and we recommended equalising the protection that the various protected characteristics carry so that every protected characteristic would have aggravated offences, as well as enhanced sentencing for those offences that do not have aggravated versions. However, we have not looked specifically at the individually aggravated offences such as the ones for assaulting a police officer and so on, I am afraid.
Chris Philp
Q
Professor Lewis: We do not have a corporate view, because we have not done work on it. You are right to worry that one is drawing very fine lines, and once one has added one offence, there is another group of people who are not included in the bespoke offences. One ends up with a proliferation of bespoke offences for different categories of function.
Chris Philp
Q
Professor Lewis: I do not think that I would go further than that. I think that concern should be considered, but I do not think that I am in a position to have a personal view, having not looked at it in any depth.