Criminal Defence Service Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. Apart from any illegal outgoings that we might not recognise, I cannot envisage a situation—and certainly our ambition would not be to have such a situation—where someone with a legitimate set of outgoings, which would take into account his family needs and so on, would be caught under the regulations. Indeed, one matter that we feel strongly about—and I think that I said this at Second Reading—and the reason we put a lot of this into regulation, is that if by some chance we caught someone by the way the regulations were set out, we would endeavour to address that immediately to ensure that the regulations did not do so. So I can see that the noble Lord is genuinely exercised about a problem where because of an administrative system some poor soul could find himself without the money. The contrary to that is our absolute ambition to frame the provision so that he would not be in that position, and that if someone did not have the means to pay, he would be covered by the test. The way to do that is to ensure that the system is robust and properly done, not, I would argue, to try and think of a list of ways in which all types of crime, or whatever, could be excluded in the magistrates’ court. It would be different in the Crown Court. I do not think that the noble Lord and I are at all in a different place. I would say that the provision is about the proper functioning of a scheme within the principle of being able to pay—if you can pay, you should pay—whereas the noble Lord is perhaps coming at the issue in a different way. Am I right in my assumption that we are in the same place?