Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I think this will be the last time that I speak on the Bill because Third Reading will be formal. I begin by paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Verma. I appreciate her reasons for tabling this amendment, and I am grateful that she mentioned the Odysseus Trust because Kate Beattie, in particular, has done an enormous amount of work—through consultation and otherwise—and it is right to mention that. It is excellent that the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, is in her place. She runs the Judicial Appointments Commission and no doubt has more expertise about training than most. As a former part-time judge, I say that the Judicial Studies Board now has an extremely well developed programme for training. When I came to the Bar a depressingly long time ago, the idea that judges needed training was considered to be blasphemy or sacrilege. These days all senior judges, and junior ones too, realise that they need all the help they can get to develop skills with new legislation. In this case, it is particularly important because the expertise has remained within the High Court and I suspect that County Court judges will be on the receiving end of most cases because those are the most user-friendly courts where there is access to justice. Those judges will require the kind of training from which I benefited when I sat as a judge. I was very impressed by the Government’s training programmes on the Human Rights Act and the Civil Partnership Act which were run by the Judicial Studies Board. They were most beneficial. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about judicial training. It is not the business of the Government; it is simply the business of the Government to help the training to take place. The Forced Marriage Unit has admirable guidance, but it is not statutory. As we discovered when we went around the country, one of the problems was that although the guidance was good, it lacked impact and force. I welcome the fact that the guidance will now be given real force and will not be bureaucratically handled. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to deal with that. Perhaps I may make one other valedictory comment. At the end of the Second Reading debate on 26 January—a remarkable debate in which so many noble Lords spoke and ensured that this House would be a catalyst for reform, which is one of our vital functions in addition to scrutiny; I do not think that such a debate would have taken place in the other place in the same way—after saying that the Bill could be improved, I said: "““We hope that the Bill will be supported from all sides of the House and that the Government will recognise the need to enact ""this measure urgently as a matter of high parliamentary priority so that it may become law by the end of this year. We have waited too long, and too many vulnerable children and young adults have been grossly abused for us to delay further””.—[Official Report, 26/1/07; col. 1324.]" I believe that those concluding words will now come to pass. They will do so because the Minister, in particular, has been more than a midwife. Her team, in what is now the Ministry of Justice, has been brilliant and outstanding in taking a simple idea and writing what was five pages in 18 pages in much better form. The Official Opposition has been co-operative throughout, and my party has been generous enough not to seek to make narrow party-political capital out of this being called a Liberal Democrat measure. We welcome the fact that the Government will effectively make this a government Bill in the other place. The Prime Minister personally has had conversations in particular with the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, to whom I also pay tribute—she has been a silent and strong supporter of the Bill. All of that means that there is a very real chance that a Private Member’s Bill will become the law of the land very quickly. For all of that, I express my gratitude.