I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this notable debate—notable not just for its quality but for the rare and even forceful unanimity that it evoked among nearly all lawyers who spoke. I exempt, of course, the Minister, who was paid, or possibly not paid, for taking the opposing view.
I thought that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, put it most pithily when he said that the presumption was unnecessary, wrong in principle and potentially dangerous in practice. He was swiftly outdone by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who, if I may say so, correctly described it as a presumption on favour of the wrongdoer—the person against whom a quashing order is to be made. Even the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, who attempted a characteristically fair-minded defence of the presumption, confessed that he was not persuaded that it was necessary.
Of its necessity, I was not persuaded by the Minister in his speech. He still seemed unsure whether it is a presumption at all—but if it is not a presumption, what on earth is it, save for a sort of fertiliser for, as he put it, encouraging the growth of jurisprudence, which I think we are all agreed it would be? I hope that the Minister is right that “adequate redress” is broader than “effective remedy”, but, sadly, neither his words, or still less mine, are any substitute for the authoritative judicial ruling that would no doubt take great time and effort to achieve. These subsections are not something that we should have in this Bill, and they would be a damaging precedent for other Bills.
Finally, we are in the extraordinarily privileged position in this Committee to hear from very senior judges whose lives have been devoted to the interpretation of such laws what the practical defects of proposed laws would be. I hope that we will not only hear them but act accordingly when, as we surely will, we come back to this on Report. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.