Violent Crime Reduction Bill

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, on bringing this idea forward in Committee and persisting with it at Third Reading, now that the Government have indicated their support for the basic idea. I, too, have some reservations about the drafting—I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me for that. As drafted, it requires the prosecution to prove that the purpose of recording the criminal offence was to obtain gratification for the person making the recording or for the gratification of someone else. It would be better if a statutory defence were included, so that it was an offence for any person intentionally to make an audio or visual recording of a criminal offence and then, in subsection (2), for it to be a defence to show that it had been done for a legitimate reason—however that is expressed. I am also concerned that we know about these things because the media publish them in a ““shock, horror”” way—““Look at what these people are doing!””. At the same time, one wonders whether there is not a secondary purpose in the publication of material of that kind. Although I applaud how subsection (2) is drafted, in the traditional Liberal way, I wonder whether it goes far enough.