Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Report stage
Monday 3rd July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, can the noble Lord explain why our courts, and our officials acting under their duties, reach such different decisions from the courts and officials on the continent? Why do we reject only 25% of claims for asylum, whereas France rejects 75%?

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, this is Report and that intervention is not appropriate, I am afraid.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Whether it is appropriate or not—and I tend to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, on that subject—it seems to me that the noble Lord who just intervened has made a very selective judgment without analysing the continental cases that have taken place. I have given a fair description of what happens in our jurisdiction; it is the one that I regard well, and I hope that your Lordships will too.

Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Committee stage
Monday 12th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of both my noble and learned friends, who sit to my right in the Chamber. I am particularly grateful, as I think the whole Committee is, to my noble and learned friend Lord Etherton for the very clear exposition he gave of the law and of the consequences of these provisions which change the law.

I will put my very short analysis of this into “faults” and “conclusions”. Clause 38 is word soup, full of tautology and contradictions—the sort of thing that makes fortunes for lawyers if they can get in front of judges, like my noble and learned friends in the very senior courts, and make esoteric arguments based on an analysis of the text. The word soup is most certainly not a consommé clarified by the use of egg whites, so that you can see through it to the bottom of the bowl. It is more like a sort of mad minestrone, into which the draftsman has thrown every word vegetable that he or she could find.

Let us look at Clause 38(3), where the “serious harm condition” is in inverted commas. I was taught at school never to use inverted commas, if you could avoid it, because they show a weakness in your argument, unless it is a quotation that someone said. It says:

“The ‘serious harm condition’ is that P would, before the end of the relevant period, face a real, imminent and foreseeable risk”.


Supposing we missed out the words “real, imminent and”, what difference would it make if it simply read,

“before the end of the relevant period, face a … foreseeable risk of serious and irreversible harm”?

If one missed out the words “and irreversible”, would it mean less if it read:

“The ‘serious harm condition’ is that P would, before the end of the relevant period, face a … foreseeable risk of serious … harm if removed from the United Kingdom”?


What are they trying to gain by the word soup—the possibility of making bizarre submissions in front of the senior courts in which my noble and learned friends sat?

After those comments, if you were asked, “What does all this mean?” by a lay man who might be up at 10.10 pm looking at parliamentary TV or parliamentlive.tv and fascinated by every word in this debate, you would say to him, “Just go and have a look at Clause 38(5)(c)”, which refers to

“where the standard of healthcare available to P in the relevant country or territory is lower than is available to P in the United Kingdom”.

They—or at least those who were well informed enough to be sitting up at 10.10 pm, watching parliamentary TV—would immediately say, “This is deliberate discrimination against gay men”. What else is this for?

We should be ashamed of ourselves if, at least when it comes to Report, we allow this kind of provision to remain in the Bill and do not help my noble and learned friends to pass their amendments. But I hope that we do not have to reach that stage, because this word soup should seem as ridiculous to our noble friends the Ministers as it does to some of us.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting, if not bewildering, debate—at least to us non-lawyers. My lay interpretation of the provisions we debated in this group is that they highlight the danger of asylum seekers being removed to countries where they could come to harm by making the level of proof required to suspend removal so high, and by making the evidence required to prevent their removal so compelling—within impossibly short timescales—as to make the likelihood of a successful claim diminishingly small. If it turns out that it is not diminishingly small enough, the provisions allow the Secretary of State to redefine what “serious and irreversible harm” means to make sure that the tap is turned off almost completely.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, questioned whether such an approach is compatible with existing law. It is quite clear what the Government are trying to do here: make it impossible for anyone to resist removal from this country under the provisions of the Bill. That is why we do not believe that Clauses 37 to 42 should stand part of the Bill.

Public Order Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Committee stage
Wednesday 16th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

If I am to be corrected, I am, but may I just offer a view? It is an offence to wilfully obstruct the highway. Of course, if you obstruct it because a person in your car is having a heart attack and needs attention, there will probably be a reasonable excuse for the obstruction and that is a defence. However, it is a summary offence to obstruct the highway, punishable by imprisonment.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

Before the noble Lord continues, I ask him to point to the provisions in this Bill that make up for the problem relating to highway obstruction that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, identified. Having read this in detail, my understanding is that nothing in the Bill addresses the noble Lord’s concern. Therefore, the question remains: why are we discussing this?

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support the original amendment, moved so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, and to oppose the amendment to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, which she moved just now. I hope she will forgive me for saying that her introduction of her amendment displayed a great deal of confusion, which is being much magnified in debate, about the differences, in so far as they exist, between the words “sex” and “gender”.

Gender is causing no confusion in the law, but I would urge the noble Baroness and others to take the trouble to have a look at the first legal textbook written on this subject, called A Practical Guide to Transsexual Law; it is authored by Robin White of Old Square Chambers in London, who is a trans woman herself and extremely expert in cases arising from trans issues, and her colleague in the same chambers, Nicola Newbegin. If noble Lords are suspicious about a lawyer in your Lordships’ number recommending the reading of a legal textbook, I reassure them that it is not because I want to make them go to sleep while doing their reading before they go to bed at night; it is actually one of the most fascinating textbooks written in recent years—and it has the virtue of being short as well.

The issues described in that book, which have interested me since I introduced the first transsexual rights Bill in the other place when I was a Member there, have evolved greatly over the years. I would say to those who are suspicious or uncomfortable about these issues that young people—people born after 1995, to date at random—they do not understand the problem. To them, trans people are included among their friends, and it is “just a thing, not an issue”, to quote one of my own daughters on the subject. It is becoming increasingly common for young people to move in circles where trans men and women, and, for that matter, gender diverse men and women, are absolutely standard parts of the community.

The Equality Act, which has been in existence for a considerable time, says that you must not be discriminated against because of your gender reassignment as a transsexual and that you may prefer the description “transgender person” or “trans male” or “female”. There is much more I could read out to your Lordships that illustrates that the law has been in place and has been well understood for a long time.

Let us just consider what the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, is trying to achieve in subsection (3) of her proposed new clause. I need to confess a sort of interest at this point, in that I am married to a circuit judge who tries criminal cases only. So perhaps I have a little bit more evidence in my mind—she certainly does not agree with everything I say, by any means— on how judges behave not just from my own practice but from a lot of discussion about these issues. The amendment provides:

“A court considering the seriousness of an offence … must treat the fact that the offence is aggravated by hostility or prejudice towards sex or gender as an aggravating factor when determining a sentence.”


Can one seriously suggest that a circuit judge, or a magistrate for that matter, does not understand what that means? If the judge understands what that means, surely it is as just as any other aggravating factor.

Let us look at it down the other end of the telescope. Five or six young women go out for a night out, and during the course of that night out an offence takes place in which there is hostility or prejudice towards the one of them who is a trans woman. Would it really be right for the other five to have an aggravated sentence brought upon the offender, if the hostility was towards them as women on the grounds of sex, but not that trans woman, if the hostility was shown to them on the grounds of gender? It is a nonsensical suggestion, and what is in the noble Baroness’s proposed new subsection (3) is just common sense—the sort of common sense that judges apply in the courts every day. So I would urge your Lordships to take the view that the use of the phrase “sex or gender” in this amendment is just good 2022 common sense and, if one is minded to support the amendment, one should support it in its original form.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I want to take a slightly different view of this. We support misogyny being treated as a hate crime and, personally, I do not understand the arguments of the Law Commission in relation to domestic violence and sexual offences. The same objections could be made to existing hate crimes such as homophobia, but they exist alongside these serious offences without difficulty. I wonder whether proposed new subsection (4) in the amendment is necessary.

May I suggest an alternative way out of the gender debate? I wonder whether, in line with the Law Commission’s report on hate crime in relation to other aspects of hate crime, the words in brackets—“or perceived sex”—should be added to the word “sex” at the end of new subsections (1)(a) and (1)(b) proposed by the amendment. I am thinking of the following hypothetical example. A man who shouts demeaning and derogatory terms for a woman, indicating a hatred of women, and who without provocation attacks a stranger in the street, indicating that the attack is motivated by a hatred of women, should be charged with the aggravated misogyny offence, whether the assailant is mistaken in identifying the victim as a woman or not. It should not matter whether the victim is a woman or not; it is the motivation of the attacker that is important. If that motivation is hatred of women, it should be an aggravating factor.

However, despite my concerns about the wording of the amendment, we have waited long enough for this important and necessary change in the law. Any defect in the wording of the amendment can be addressed in the other place, and if the noble Baroness divides the House, we will support her.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Lords Hansard - part one & Report stage
Monday 13th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, if domestic abuse is now included in the serious violence duty—and there is no more serious violence than murder—can the Minister say how the Government can resist this amendment, which we support?

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, if I may just say a few words in support of this amendment, which was moved with such clarity by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, two points seem to me to arise. The first is that if the reviews are held in a centralised way, they will be more efficient. There will be less of a postcode lottery when it comes to the review taking place. Secondly, and most importantly, if social services, medical services, the police and others know that there will be a review in every case in which there is murder as a result of a domestic situation, they will take greater care. We know that that has not, unfortunately, always been the case, whatever their good intentions.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Lords Hansard - part one & Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I also rise to speak particularly about Amendment 292D. I support the noble Lord, Lord Bach, with all his experience of being an excellent police and crime commissioner.

There are many other examples. The noble Lord gave two. I shall just give one. A 59 year-old senior civil servant who worked for the Ministry of Justice in a responsible position connected with the criminal justice system, wished to retire and stand to be a police and crime commissioner. He was disqualified because, at the age of 13, he had been fined £5 for each of two minor juvenile offences. It is completely disproportionate and absurd that such people should be disqualified.

I seek to compare those disqualification rules with the rules applying to Members of another place. The last figures I saw produced by IPSA, the standards authority for Members of the other place, revealed that, in recent years, 43% of the Members of the other place had convictions of one kind or another. Maybe that tells you a lot about the other place. Nevertheless, this distinction makes its own point.

In passing on to the other issues, I agree very much with my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe. Fundamental to this problem is the fact that we have 43 territorial police forces. This number ought to be at least quartered. If so, the structure—including police and crime commissioners—would be much more coherent. There would be far greater consistency and police forces which currently struggle to deal with very complex inquiries would be able to deal with them because they would have the critical mass of staff.

I turn next to police authorities. I hesitate to disagree with those noble Lords who tabled the first amendment in this group because I respect them all. Part of my experience as a Queen’s Counsel has been to advise police authorities when they have got into difficulties. I recall one case from the north of England in which the police authority concerned was institutionally corrupt and in the pockets of a small group of senior police officers. It had got itself into a hopeless mess and at least one criminal prosecution ensued. To describe it as an example of democratic effectiveness was an insult to both democracy and effectiveness.

I accept, of course, that some police commissioners are better than others. So are some Cabinet Ministers. So are some head teachers. So are some doctors. So are some Members of Parliament. This is inevitable. Some of the commissioners are very good, such as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and Dame Vera Baird, who was referred to earlier. Where police and crime commissioners are effective, they are very effective indeed.

Just think about it territorially. If one of these referendums took place and there was a police and crime commissioner in Cheshire but not in Lancashire, or one in north Wales but not in Dyfed-Powys, people in the areas that did not have a police and crime commissioner would be unlikely to say, “Oh, how wonderful; this is going to be run by our local council.” In the modern world, they will say, “Our democratic rights have been diluted.”

Other noble Lords remember, as I do, when the Welsh Assembly was created. In many parts of Wales, people said, “Nobody will know who their Assembly Members are. It’s all a waste of time. It will be completely ineffective.” It is true that, for a time, people tended not to know who their Welsh Assembly Members were. Today, however, if you look at the evolution of the Welsh Government during the last 20 years or so, it has become remarkably effective. It has brought people much closer to government.

I believe that police and crime commissioners are still evolving. They have a valuable role to play, particularly, as I said earlier, if the Government have the courage to reform the territorial policing services in this country.

As to the deposits, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. The £5,000 deposit is not reasonable. I would not oppose a much lower deposit of the kind that has to be put down by somebody standing to be elected as a Member of Parliament. The election process is expensive. Some kind of gatekeeping requirement of this kind is helpful.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, with the greatest respect to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, when he started talking about amalgamating police forces again and the Welsh Assembly, I wondered whether this was turning into a filibuster. However, we move on.

The issue raised by Amendment 292D that we all agree on is that it is ridiculous that somebody convicted of a very minor offence at a very young age should be disqualified. The other side of the coin is that there is no process for the recall of a police and crime commissioner who commits an offence in office or is guilty of misconduct. Because they are democratically elected, the only way to get rid of them is by another election. Compare this to MPs, for whom there is now a process by which a by-election can be triggered. I agree with Amendment 292D, but there is another side to the same coin which also needs to be addressed.

We on these Benches have always been opposed to police and crime commissioners, notwithstanding, as everybody has said, that there are some outstanding ones, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, was. Not just because he used to be my boss—this is the House of Peers now—I agree with almost everything the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe has said.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 10th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

Forgive me for the delay, my Lords—so many amendments, so little time, as it were.

I am grateful to Transform Justice for its briefing on this issue and for its assistance in drafting this amendment. Currently, simple cautions with no conditions attached are considered “spent” within the meaning of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 as soon as they have been given. This means that they do not have to be disclosed to potential employers. The Government propose to abolish simple cautions, so those who would previously have received a simple caution, which do not have to be disclosed, could potentially receive a diversionary caution, which, like conditional cautions currently, have to be disclosed for three months after the caution is given. Given the Government’s commitment to reform rehabilitation periods elsewhere in the Bill, we suggest that the rehabilitation period for diversionary cautions should be removed. In Part 11, Clause 164 already sets out various changes to the rehabilitation periods for different sentences. Removing the diversionary caution rehabilitation period should be added to the list of those changes.

The Government argue that a three-month spending period is required for a diversionary caution to support protection of the public. There is strong evidence that employment is one of the most, if not the most, important factors in enabling people to cease offending behaviour and to move on to crime-free lives as productive members of society. A three-month rehabilitation period is short enough to have little impact on public protection, but its existence will require people in employment or seeking employment to declare the caution and risk losing their job or be refused employment. It will also act as a barrier to those seeking education and volunteering opportunities. Research has found that employers discriminate against people with criminal records and that most do not differentiate between a caution and a conviction. Introducing a spending period for the diversionary caution will therefore hamper people’s efforts to gain employment while doing little for public protection. Diversionary cautions should follow the spending regime for the existing simple caution and end at the point at which the caution is given. I beg to move Amendment 189ZA.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord’s amendment. If I may, I will elasticate the rules of order slightly by referring to some other issues relating to the spending of cautions and of convictions.

In 2013 and 2014, an ad hoc committee of Members of this House and of the other place reported, sponsored by the National Children’s Bureau and the Michael Sieff Foundation, on the youth courts. I was part of that group, as was the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, who was very valuable member, and as was a certain Back-Bencher called Robert Buckland, who later became Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor. To be fair to him, despite having gone to the other side of good behaviour by becoming a member of the Cabinet, he always remained personally committed to what we had found. Our second recommendation was this:

“Children who have committed non-serious and non-violent offences, who have stopped offending, should have their criminal record expunged when they turn 18.”


I believe that that is a very important principle for which there is supporting evidence around the world. I am disappointed that the Bill is a touch pusillanimous in not picking up that recommendation—and I am grateful to say to the Minister that a number of our recommendations have been picked up.

If the noble Lord were to speak to Charlie Taylor, who held a very important position in the Ministry of Justice at that time, as chairman of the Youth Justice Board, and who is of course now Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, he would find that he is also very supportive of that recommendation, with his huge experience of dealing with young people, first as a teacher and then in the criminal justice sphere.

Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Paddick

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 26th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the town of Tredegar is noted for its town clock, which was erected, or at least its plinth was, as a result of funds collected at a bazaar. I believe that information to be correct—and from my position in my home I think I can see the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, nodding in agreement with those facts. The Tredegar clock is always regarded as a symbol of the stability of the town—a town that has been through thick and thin, having been a place where coal was mined and steel manufactured.

The Parole Board has become one of the pillars of our prison system, and the board is seen as being as reliable as that town clock as it has developed over the years. I therefore join the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, in being really rather determined to persuade Ministers that they should take another look at the role of the Parole Board in the sentencing and licence provisions provided for by this important Bill, which I support in principle, as someone who believes that the sentences for terrorism should be long but subject to a proper, just and reasonable form of review that gives reasons if it finds against a prisoner.

I am happy to support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, not for its content but for the principle that it raises, and I invite the Minister to reflect accordingly.

[Lord Paddick (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I apologise for any inconvenience caused by my noble friend Lady Hamwee and me not speaking in the last group, where our names were included in the speakers’ list in error.

The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, addresses the serious question of the impact on prisoners who have no prospect of being released early or of being released at all, something that the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, spoke about in an earlier group, as did my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames.

Some indication of the potential impact comes from a report in the Times, dated 20 January 2021, on inmates at the only remaining isolation unit for extremist prisoners in Her Majesty’s Prison Frankland. These isolation units were designed to keep the most dangerous ideological prisoners away from the general prison population so that they could not radicalise vulnerable inmates, as other noble Lords have mentioned in today’s debate. One of those units was mothballed before it was opened, another is empty, and the one at Frankland houses five prisoners out of a capacity of eight. There are currently about 200 terrorist prisoners in the UK.

According to the Times, a report by the independent monitoring board at the prison says that inmates in the unit have become more entrenched in their views, that they are refusing to co-operate or to engage in activities and programmes—except for the gym—and that they are distinguished from other prisoners by a lack of progression. They display antagonism and hostility to staff, with one of the prisoners responsible for a serious assault on a prison officer in the centre.

Locking people up with no incentive to behave or co-operate is likely to be counterproductive, and the Times report supports that assertion. We support the amendment.