Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Indeed. Part of the problem is that we do not yet know what will be in the Bill. Although the Prime Minister has promised legislation in relation to policing, we have no idea what that legislation will be. Since the Government came to power, more than 3,000 new offences have been created, 430 of them by the Home Office. The creation of 3,000 new offences works out at a new offence for almost every day that Labour has been in power, and it is twice the rate seen under the two previous Conservative Administrations. I have lost count of the number of new offences in this Bill. The Guardian reports that it is 19. Perhaps one of the Ministers sitting on the Government Benches could do something useful, count them and let us know at the end of the debate. The Bill was published on the eve of the departure of Tony Blair, the previous Prime Minister, from Downing street. There could be no more fitting tribute to him or to the legislative incontinence that has characterised 10 years of this Government. I hesitate to mention ICM's poll in the News of the World yesterday. I appreciate that it may be in poor taste and that that poll had no impact at all, of course, on the Prime Minister's courageous decision not to call an early general election. However, that poll showed that 63 per cent. of voters in marginal seats think that the Government have done a bad job on law and order, and only 30 per cent. think that they have done a good job. More than half of Labour voters said that the Government had done a bad job. There have been 35 Bills, 3,000 offences have been created, but two thirds of voters say that the Government have done a bad job. Do Ministers by any chance think that those facts are related? Perhaps they should listen to the Law Society, which said in a briefing on the Bill that it"““strongly believes that the criminal justice system is suffering from 'change fatigue', and that new legislation, particularly that creating additional criminal offences or alternative ways of dealing with people who have re-offended, can be counterproductive if it unnecessarily results in the wastage of scarce resources””."