Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

My Lords, I assume that the noble Lord has finished. I found the reply that the Minister gave rather disturbing as regards the issues it covered and did not cover. He spent the first half of his remarks talking about Amendment 96. We have yet to hear the reason why it is necessary to repeal all the ASBO provisions in advance of bringing in the arrangements for the new injunctions. That is quite an important point. The Minister supports a Government who I think believe in free-market principles. If the ASBO and the procedures around it are so inadequate, do not work and are so costly, what is to be lost by allowing both to coexist, at least for a period, until we see how the new regime works? In practice, people—local authorities, housing bodies or whatever—might vote with their feet and decide whether to use the IPNA route or the ASBO route. That would be consistent both with the Government’s principles about a free market and with their localism principle, and would also allow a bit of reality to creep into this—which would be unique for this Government and probably for all previous Governments. People would discover which system works by looking at the arrangements that people followed at a local level. The Government need to explain why it is not possible for the two systems to coexist so that we can see which ones work and which ones do not.