I shall be brief, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I welcome my hon. and gallant Friend the Minister’s tone. He has sought to be constructive. I appreciate that he has made a number of concessions, and I am glad the Government have done that. In particular, I welcome his tribute to the noble Lord Mackay and others. Anyone who knows anything about the law and Government does not lightly mix with James Mackay, and I am glad that has been recognised. I also welcome and endorse the comments made about the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton) in this regard.
On defence justice issues, I rather agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), the Chair of the Defence Committee. There has been movement and I am glad about that, but I am still not convinced by the salami-slicing point. I cannot for the life of me see how Lords amendment 1B creates any difficulty.
My real concern—the additional point I was going to make beyond the interventions I have already made—is about the way the defence serious crimes unit will be structured. Hopefully, there will not be a large number of cases to prosecute, but those involving rape and serious sexual offences in particular will almost invariably require great sensitivity in handling the investigation and the presentation in court, both in prosecution and in defending. Inevitably, such cases—where a member of the forces is either a complainant or a victim, or perhaps both—will by their nature, very properly, engage the highest level of public interest in the broadest sense. The concern is whether a small prosecuting body will
ever be able to gather the critical mass of expertise to adequately do justice in those cases, whatever the good intentions.