My Lords, since the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, spent much of last year calling the Prime Minister of the day a liar on the Floor of your Lordships’ House, I am surprised that she has only just now lost her trust in the Government. That was not my principal point in rising to speak; my point was to express a degree of support for the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. As he at least might recall, when we debated the insertion of serious violence reduction orders in the Sentencing Code during the passage of the then Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill last year, I expressed considerable concern about those orders. Indeed, I recall that in Committee I added my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, which raised these issues, principally on the grounds that I am extremely concerned by the increasing use of preventive justice, so to speak, by the Home Office and by police forces empowered by the Home Office, rather than taking coercive action on the basis of proven criminality or wrongdoing.
I have considerable sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but since we lost that point and the serious violence reduction orders were inserted in the Bill, it is right that the Government should carry out trials before they are extended throughout the whole country. I understand his point, but what is striking to me is that my noble friend the Minister has so far given no indication of what the tests are by which these trials are going to be assessed once they have been completed. What is success going to look like? What would persuade the Government to make amendments or changes or to drop the whole approach if we saw those results emerging from the trials? I hope my noble friend will be able to say something about that when he rises to respond to this short debate.
While I am on my feet, I say that Sections 60 and 61 of the same measure—the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of last year—empowered the Home Secretary to issue statutory guidance to police forces on the enforcement of what are referred to as “non-crime hate incidents”. This has so far not appeared, despite the fact that my noble friend the Minister very kindly wrote to me last October saying that the Government hoped to table the new statutory guidance before Christmas, or at least before the end of 2022.
When the Minister responds, would he be able to give us a date by which he expects the Home Secretary to put the draft statutory instrument before Parliament, so that we can debate it and get some parliamentary grip on this contentious but very important area of criminal justice?
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