Compensation Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 21:"Page 4, line 10, leave out subsection (2)." The noble Lord said: Clause 5(1) makes it an offence for anyone to provide regulated claims management services unless they are authorised persons, are exempt, have the benefit of a waiver or are not acting in the course of business. Clause 5(2) gives a defence to a person who may be charged under subsection (1) if he shows that that he did not know that he was committing an offence and could not reasonably have been expected to know it. It is a basic principle of criminal law that ignorance of the law is no defence. That principle may, on first hearing, sound unfair, but it has worked well and it has a logical basis. It makes it more difficult to put up bogus defences which waste the time of the court and could occasionally lead to guilty people being acquitted. If someone really does not know that what he is doing is wrong, he will not be prosecuted or, if he is prosecuted, he will receive a light or nominal sentence. For example, when it becomes an offence, as it shortly will be, to smoke in a pub, a lot of people are likely not to be aware of it until after the law comes in. Some of them will be foreign visitors who have no reason to know that it is now unlawful to light a cigarette in a pub. What will happen in practice is that they will be told to put out their cigarettes and they will not be prosecuted. Clause 5(2) makes ignorance of the law a defence if that ignorance is reasonable. I believe that that provision is unique. In discussions earlier with the Minister and the Bill team, I said so and asked for precedents. The department produced a list of five. All of them deal with a different point. Perhaps I may be a little technical. Although ignorance of the law is no defence, in general, ignorance of the facts which make your action an offence is normally a defence, because you have to intend to carry out a criminal act to establish what we still know in Latin as mens rea. However, some offences are offences of strict liability; that is, someone may know the law absolutely, but does not know all facts relevant to his offence. These arise mostly in the consumer field. For example, the publication of a misleading advertisement or the sale of food unfit for human consumption is an offence, even if the person who publishes the advertisement does not know that it is misleading or the person who is selling the food does not know that it is bad. That is ignorance of the facts, not of the law. In some cases, statute makes ignorance of the facts a defence if the defendant did not know, and had no reason to know, that those facts existed. That applies both to publication of misleading advertisements and sale of bad food, which were the two examples given by the Bill team. All five examples fall into this category. I therefore believe that Clause 5(2) is unique and would be a bad precedent. Making ignorance of the law a defence means in principle that there could be longer hearings and loopholes. In those circumstances, I believe that it is right that Clause 5(2) should be deleted, and I beg to move.