Fraud Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am absolutely conscious of that. The question, which we will want to debate when we return to this topic, will be whether that is an adequate response in the circumstances where that is the only aspect on which one would be proceeding against those people. That creates difficulties, because we would not necessarily then be able to include in the same proceedings the people who were abstracting the electricity—the severing of indictments and issues of that sort. But I do not want to go further than that; I just want to indicate the sort of areas that we will need to consider. The point that I wanted to make was that the Law Commission is publishing a report on participation in crime and any reform of the law that flows from that work would inform this area of law as well. Secondly, we do not yet know how effectively the provisions on multiple offending in the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 will work. Obviously, we hope that they will work. If they are in force, I am not aware that they have yet been operated in any case. Thirdly, in congratulating the Law Commission, noble Lords have assumed that it must have got it right: that these offences cover everything. Again, we do not yet know that that optimism will turn out to be correct.