My Lords, like other noble Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Sandhurst on his maiden speech and welcome him to the House, where I am sure he will make a wonderful contribution.
I welcome much that is in this very large Bill. While I realise that the provisions on protest are controversial, I welcome the clarity they bring on the limits to legitimate protest. As the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Matt Twist, has said,
“Whatever the cause, activists do not have the right to cause unreasonable and serious disruption to … communities.”
I agree with that. I personally compare it to secondary picketing: an attempt to disrupt people who are not decision-makers in order to embarrass the true decision-makers. We outlawed secondary picketing, and no one would now bring it back. I think it will be the same in this case.
However, I have three areas of concern that I want to bring to the House’s attention which are united by what I call a theme of preventive justice. There was a movie some years ago in which preventive justice was taken to a point of refinement whereby merely having a thought with a criminal intention resulted in a raid by the police on your premises to ensure that you were unable to put it into execution. I have never thought that a particularly British, commendable or desirable approach to the administration of justice, but it appears to have had a powerful effect on successive Home Secretaries.
Starting in 1998, we had the ASBOs. From that, we have gone on to a whole quiver-full of administrative processes that place restrictions on people without the tedium of having to have a criminal conviction proven. This Bill adds a further arrow to that quiver in the shape of the serious violence reduction order. Other noble Lords have spoken about this. They have also pointed out that, coupled with the proposed statutory duty on public authorities to collaborate in relation to prospective serious violence—that is, to prevent it—these points raise important questions about the character of criminal justice in this country, about how it has evolved and about equalities.
My second concern continues the thread of preventive justice. I find myself in troubling agreement with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, and certain other noble Lords who have spoken, on the question of indeterminate sentences. Much of what I was going to say has been made otiose by the compelling speech, laden with statistics, made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, so I do not need to spend a great deal of time on that, but the fact that so many people are still languishing in prison under this cruel sentence, which has been found to be incompatible with our obligations on human rights, is simply a shame to this country. This Bill gives us a useful opportunity to set in hand a judicially led process for turning those sentences into determinate sentences.
Finally, the Bill presents an opportunity—again, it is not in the Bill, but I think it should be—to put an end to police forces’ kafkaesque practice of maintaining records of actions that are explicitly not criminal; that is, the Monty Pythonesque, self-contradictory non-crime hate incident. If there is any defence for this, it is again on the basis of preventive justice: “We want to know these things, because although they are by definition not crimes, there might be a crime some time in the future.” I do not think this is at all defensible, so I hope that in Committee there will be an opportunity to address those three areas at least and discuss them.
I hope that the Government will take the opportunity to put right these issues and bring back to our justice system a little less administrative pre-emption and a little more proving of things on the basis of evidence and facts.
7.05 pm