Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Lords Chamber

Debate on Amendment 224 resumed.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I think I backtracked quite a bit to say that the courts would then make the judgment call on whether the SVRO would be made, based on the facts of the case. I am not saying that, theoretically, it could not happen, but the courts may decide otherwise. It would depend on the facts of the case.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Perhaps I may just add that it seems so widely drawn that the first condition, in proposed new subsection (1), is that there has to be an offence. It does not say that there has to be an offence involving violence. So, first there has to be an offence. Then you engage proposed new subsection (3)(b): during the commission of the offence, whatever it might have been, did the person involved carry a knife? If the offence was, say, a driving offence, I am sure that an SVRO would not be applied for or granted, but there is a large area of discretion here. When you take it a little further into proposed new subsection (4), it is simply an offence—the carriage of a knife and the question of “ought to have known”. So the whole thing wanders off into this speculative landscape where evidence does not seem to matter and it is all mental constructions. I am sorry for going on.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

It is no problem at all; this is Committee, where we clarify these issues. But I think it is fair to say that the trigger for the SVRO, essentially, is the conviction.