My Lords, I will speak to the amendments to which I put my name in this group, which are in the names also of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but before I do so I will make a few remarks about two amendments that I have not put my name to but now see clearly that I should have done, namely Amendments 226A and 226B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top. These amendments address a part of the Bill that makes one potentially subject to a serious violence reduction order for what one “ought to have known”. The noble Baroness dealt with it from the point of view of its equalities implication when she spoke to her amendments. I will deal with it from the point of view of its absurdity.
What ought one to know? Your Lordships’ House is full of astonishingly complicated rules about which carpet you can and cannot stand on, what date you have to put amendments down by and things like that. As a relatively recent Peer, I have spent most of the last year wandering around the place wondering what I ought to know. Is that a basis for culpability of some sort? How is it to be established? I am not a lawyer at
all and I have no experience of the criminal justice system, but it is surely hard enough to establish in court as a matter of evidential fact what a particular person knew or did not know, let alone what they ought to have known. This is all to be worked out by a judge, without the benefit of the wisdom of a jury, with no particular guidance and no idea what “ought to have known” means. The whole thing is completely absurd. The idea that one should have one’s liberties restricted simply because of what one “ought to have known” should be taken out of the Bill. These amendments would effect that and I lend my support to them.
On the amendments to which I have put my name, noble Lords have already made the case extremely well. We need to start with a clear understanding that a serious violence reduction order is a criminal sanction. It is nothing less. We cannot make it the same as civil penalties. This all started back in the 1990s when parking offences were decriminalised. In my service as a local councillor, I benefited hugely from that. It was a tremendous idea and worked extremely well, but we cannot then carry on applying the same principle. An SVRO is not a parking ticket; it is a potentially serious restriction on your liberties that travels with you and, if you are a young person, stigmatises you, if are trying to make your way in university or wherever you might move to around the country, by making you go and register and so on. This is not a parking ticket; it is very much more serious.
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The rest of the amendments that I have put my name to in this group essentially try, as noble Lords have said, to match the criminal standard of the offence to the process that is followed. The evidence should be of a kind that is admissible in the criminal court. The standard of proof should be beyond a reasonable doubt and not on the balance of probabilities. The evidence in the proceedings that follow the criminal trial without the benefit of a jury should be led either by the prosecution, or by the defence, and not by random interlopers who might present themselves in court.
That may not be the Government’s intention—and I would be very happy to get my noble friend’s assurance that it is not—but as drafted it is perfectly possible that this hearing could turn into some sort of multiagency case conference, with all sorts of people turning up to give evidence to the judge as to whether a serious violence reduction order should be imposed. The whole process of fairness and balance would rely on the good sense of the judge. I am confident that that would be evident, but how much better would it be for everybody—indeed, for the judge—if he was working with the tried and tested processes of a criminal prosecution, using the evidence and the adversarial form that he is used to? That would give a much more just outcome if these orders are proceeded with.