Terrorism Act 2000 (Video Recording with Sound of Interviews and Associated Code of Practice) (Northern Ireland) Order 2020

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 10th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, as is quite normal when you are fairly far down the list, anything you thought you had to say of any originality seems to have been taken away and done better by those in front of you. My remarks will be even briefer than I originally intended. What drew me towards this was the use of digital technology to record stuff. It was not so much the fact that you have an accurate record of what is going on but how people with limited capacity to read and write English can interact with it through technology. I remind the House of my declared interests in this field.

However, if you have this information, you must know how to get people to interact with it. Voice operation, text-to-voice and voice-to-text technology is out there and fairly readily available. I hope that having a digital format will mean that the person involved in the case will be able to see and refer back to what they have said, as will those outside. It is quite simple: the written page for many people is a nice, comforting, familiar format, but, for many people out there, it is not. In the criminal justice system, lower levels of literacy are a recognised fact. I am not sure about the terrorism sector, but I would be very surprised if elements of this, at least, were not applicable. If used properly, it will help you get the right answer and organise your defences, and will make the person at the centre of any criminal proceedings slightly more aware of what is going on and what is being done to them. I hope that this would be an advantage. I believe the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, also referred to this.

The only other thing that comes up is: what are doing about slang, which changes very quickly? Youth groups tend to change it; it is language they use for a bit and then they dump it. I have a friend who is a JP—although not serving in Northern Ireland—and several years younger than me. She found herself listening to a case where a series of references went out. She and her colleagues were sure it was about sex, but they were not quite sure what bit of sex. Eventually they had to ask and were told. She described the experience as feeling like the person in those old sketches—the judge who said, “Who are the Beatles? I hear they are a popular beat combo.”

We should make sure we have a reference to this as we go backwards and forwards, because it might be important, not just here but somewhere else. Where we have a verbal record, we should note that verbal language changes fast. Can we make sure that we record that ?