Police and Justice Bill

I support the amendment, to which I have added my name. I am also grateful to the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association for its briefing on this matter. The noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, refers to debates that we had in 2003 discussing the Criminal Justice Act. I tabled a similar amendment then, but I agree that it was not as effective as this one, because mine addressed only the issue of disability. It did not consider the broader groups categorised in the noble Baroness’s amendment and I prefer hers. It is right that we should take that broader application forward. The difficulty is that none of us wants to impose greater bureaucracy on those who are trying to prevent, police and prosecute crime. It is proper to ensure that there is a collection of statistics on reported crime so that there is not only greater public awareness of what constitutes a crime but that people have greater confidence that if they report crimes, they will be taken seriously. The amendment is intended to ensure that those who are the victims of hate crimes have the confidence to support it—which currently they may not. It is possible that it is under-reported. We are not trying to encourage people who are the victims of what they think may be a crime that does not fall within this category to go ahead and report it. It is an attempt to balance bureaucracy with the effective reporting of crime. I note that before Mr Charles Clarke went the way of a few Cabinet Ministers recently, he said that he accepted that the way in which the Home Office collects statistics may not be sufficiently robust—he was talking about the broad range of crime statistics—and that there was a lack of public and police confidence in them. He said that there would be a Home Office review of the collection of statistics. When he comes to respond, can the Minister say whether the Government are still minded to carry forward that review and, if so, whether the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, in her amendment will form part of that broader review?