My Lords, I am sorry that I missed the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, opening this discussion, but I was somewhere else and I came here as soon as I could. My concern over this is with the concept of volunteers. As the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, says, there is a range of defensive systems here, including the truncheon itself, but I am concerned about giving volunteers Tasers. If you give a volunteer a Taser, all the volunteer has to do once it has gone off is to say that they do not want to be a volunteer anymore and disappear into the distance. Then you have nothing unless you have a criminal inquiry into what happened. My sense is that this set of clauses needs a lot more specificity.
My view is that the police could bring in some designated persons as firearms officers: they could recruit people from the Army and deploy them only to be firearms officers, which would be a logical and a budget-saving thing to do. The idea that we have to have fully trained constables standing outside embassies has always struck me as odd when we could recruit them much more cheaply. But with all those cases, you have a financial arrangement between the chief constable and that person, and they can therefore be disciplined and so on. Obviously if you shoot somebody, you have a criminal inquiry, but that is not the point here. We need to take this piece of the Bill and look at it again, to make sure we have the different types of defensive and offensive weapons, and the people who can use them, categorised. At the moment it feels that we will be opening a door we might find very difficult to close subsequently.