Serious Crime Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 47: 47: Clause 42, page 26, line 36, leave out subsection (6) The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment No. 48. This is the first time I have spoken on Part 2. I thank the noble Baroness for her letters to my noble friend Lady Anelay on Part 2. One was dated 24 April; the other, in a manner that one gets rather used to with an office as efficient as the Home Office, was undated but sent, I believe, on17 April. I will refer to it as the long letter, as it issix pages long. A third letter, which opens ““Dear colleague””, dated 20 April, also dealt with amendments to Part 2. The Minister will remember that my noble friend Lady Anelay and I met her and her officials to discuss some of these issues. We are broadly content on these matters but I would be grateful for a response on a few further points, in particular so that the Minister can have them recorded in the Official Report. I wish to make a further point about Home Office correspondence, including letters to my noble friends Lady Anelay and Lady Noakes, one of which is dated today or perhaps yesterday. The Home Office, in its kindness, sent that letter by e-mail, allowing us to print it off. I do not know what it is about Home Office systems, but for some reason its use of Adobe for sending e-mail attachments means that it takes for ever to print them. Perhaps the Minister could ask her officials to look at that. Amendment No. 47, which was tabled as Amendment No. 96H in Committee, would remove subsection (6) of Clause 42, thereby removing the assumption that D, or the defendant, is able to do the act in question. The Minister stated in her letter that relying on Clause 58(1) as the test for deciding whether an individual is capable of encouraging or assisting, as I had suggested, would cover all the relevant avenues insufficiently. I am content with her response on that, which is covered in the first part of her letter. Amendment No. 48, which was AmendmentNo. 98 in Committee, would delete subsection (8)in Clause 42, removing the possibility of an act constituting: "““(a) a failure to act;""(b) the continuation of an act that has already begun; [and]""(c) an attempt to do an act””." Like Amendment No. 47, this remains a probing amendment. The Minister will remember that in Committee my noble friend asked the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, whether Clause 42 broke the link between prompt and action. For example, were a preacher to encourage another to blow up Parliament but did not commit the offence himself, would the Bill allow his prosecution? The Minister explained in her letter that that was not the case under Clause 42(8) but that the preacher could be prosecuted under the offence in Clause 39 regardless of whether an action followed. Although I am broadly content with that response, I should be grateful if the Minister could respondto two remaining doubts. First, were a preacher to publish a video encouraging one or a number of persons to blow up Parliament on the basis of religious fanaticism or whatever, at what pointwould that encouragement cease to be classified as encouragement of racial hatred and begin to be classified as straightforward encouragement? Would the two offences run parallel? Secondly, my noble friend asked the Minister whether the Government had estimated how many people would fall foul of this provision. If the Minister has an answer, I should be grateful if she could give it to the House. I begto move.