My Lords, I support both these amendments. My noble friend Lady Kennedy of Cradley is seeking to get rid of time limits relating to having sex with girls aged between 13 and 16 before 1 May 2004. As she said in her comprehensive introduction to the amendment, it is not known whether this anomaly, which a number of noble Lords have described, affects thousands of girls or fewer. It is simply not known. Nevertheless, from my understanding of the way she presented the case and the other comments on the amendment, it clearly seems to be a loophole which could be closed.
The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, explained why common assault is different in domestic abuse cases from general common assault. As I think I have said in other Committees, I fairly regularly sit in domestic abuse courts in magistrates’ courts, and I have to say that I disagree with the concluding comments of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, that we seem to have moved on from common assault with domestic violence protection orders. Certainly, the way I view them, and I do those courts as well, they are very different because they are dealing with the civil standard. You can have cases where people have simply been abusive to each other and you are dealing with a very different type of case, in my experience, from common assault cases which you see in a more standard domestic abuse court.
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I want to pick up the point made by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. She put it very clearly that there is no offence of domestic common assault; there
is no such thing, only common assault. However, one way of recognising that common assault in a domestic context is different—we are told repeatedly, and certainly this is my experience, that it happens repeatedly and maybe in an escalating way—is by extending the time limit up to two years. That seems to me like quite a neat fix, rather than coming up with a separate charge altogether. I thought that was a succinct way of expressing why the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, is a good one.
In the introduction of my noble friend Lady Kennedy, she asked for the intervention of a number of lawyers—and, my goodness, towards the end of this debate, she got it. We have heard from Lord Bingham and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, the history of how these types of offences against girls have been charged over the last 150 years or more. I hope that has given my noble friend Lady Kennedy—as it has certainly given me—something to ponder. We strongly support both amendments.