Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims (Amendment) Bill

Lord Lester of Herne Hill Excerpts

Friday 27th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, I, too, support the Bill, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and echo what has been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, about his unrivalled qualifications for carrying this gift from the other place into this House. Perhaps I may say a word about that process. This is a Private Member’s Bill from the other place, and those who have read the right honourable Jack Straw MP’s interesting article in today’s Times newspaper will note that he said:

“I can’t remember a time when Commons business was so light and the Lords so overloaded”.

One of the points that Mr Straw made was:

“The infant mortality of Private Member’s Bills is so high because they are vulnerable to all the 19th-century filibustering devices that were abolished decades ago for government Bills. These backbench measures should be taken from their Friday ghetto and brought into the normal Monday-Thursday Commons week. They should be sensibly timetabled like any others, so that MPs would be able to vote on their merits. This apparently prosaic change would wholly alter, for the better, the authority of MPs”.

We are privileged in this House to be able to introduce Private Member’s Bills, some of which actually reach the statute book without the fetters placed by the other place upon that process. This is a rare Bill that has been able to pass through the other place with government support and reach us today. Speaking for myself—I hope without causing offence to the other place—I suggest that when we consider reform of this place, it will be important to consider the reform of the procedures of Parliament as a whole and not merely ourselves. As to our procedure for Private Member’s Bills—and I speak as someone incontinent in my use of that procedure in the past 19 years—it has been very beneficial here, and it is a great day when something comes from the Commons as important as this Bill, about which I shall say very little because the Minister will be pleased with me if I am more brief than barristers normally are.

I should like to say just a few things. First, we are told by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice, Mr Crispin Blunt MP, who supported the Bill in the other place, that,

“the Government are committed to preventing the creation of unnecessary criminal offences”.

I fully support that and I look forward to the Queen’s Speech to see whether we are presented with yet another Bill containing further criminal offences. I hope that we will not be, because in the past two decades too many unnecessary criminal offences have been produced, especially by my former department, the Home Office. What the Minister said in support of the Bill in the other place is therefore good news.

On that occasion, he also said that the Government,

“consider the extension of the criminal law in the relatively limited way proposed in the Bill to be justified and appropriate. In reaching that conclusion, we have had regard to the possibility that those responsible for very serious injury may escape conviction”,

and—the noble Lord, Lord Laming, referred to this already—

“the vulnerability of both child and adult victims; and the special responsibility that members of the same household bear for the vulnerable with whom they live”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/10/11; col. 1184.]

I shall not bore the House or take time by reciting that speech, and I hope that in his reply my noble friend the Minister will draw upon what was said in the other place.

One of the impressive aspects of the speech was the care with which the Minister in the other place explained why this is a proportionate measure and why it would be wrong to go further. When we introduce new crimes or extend existing crimes, there are some who believe that our purpose is to enforce morals. That was of course Lord Devlin’s famous idea: that the purpose of the criminal law was the enforcement of morals. I do not take that view. I think that the purpose of the criminal law is utilitarian; it is to deter serious wrongdoing and to punish.

We must be very careful, especially in the domestic violence field, to know exactly what we are doing. I give a couple of examples. The first is female genital mutilation. We passed a law some time ago to make that appalling atrocity a crime. There has been no prosecution. We then had to consider forced marriage, and the previous Government rightly came to the view that there was no point in making forced marriage a crime as we had sufficient criminal law, so this House and the other place eventually decided to use civil law and civil protection on the ground that it was better to use civil law than the police and the criminal standard of proof in dealing with such a sensitive matter. As Members of the House will know, the Government are now consulting on whether we should add forced marriage as a crime as well as a civil wrong. I think it would be risky to do that, as it might dishonour families and deter, but that is a very controversial matter.

There seems nothing controversial in what is proposed here. Therefore, to please the Minister with my brevity, I will leave it to him to develop what has been so well developed in the other place.