Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, Amendments 33, 34, 35, 42 and 43 are minor and technical consequential amendments, which provide clarification of the provision of the alcohol, abstinence and monitoring requirement introduced by an amendment on Report. Our intention is that new requirements should be available to the courts in England and Wales but not to the courts in Scotland or Northern Ireland. The amendment therefore ensures that the new requirement will not be capable of being imposed by a court in England and Wales on a person who is resident in Scotland or Northern Ireland. I beg to move.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I welcome these amendments. I am grateful to the Government for addressing an area that I overlooked in the amendments that I had drafted. I also should like to place on record my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, who, with me, met the domestic violence groups, as we had promised in the previous proceedings. We had a very useful and fruitful meeting with open discussion. At the end, everyone agreed that it was very clear that there was never any intention that the pilots should involve domestic violence, particularly not at the beginning, because the issues around domestic violence are so complex. The organisations involved in domestic violence very much want to be consulted at every stage of further development and the programmes in place to help people cope in situations of domestic violence are very important in trying to provide a safer and more stable society.

Amendment 33 agreed.