Coroners and Justice Bill

May I also send my best wishes to the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle)? I hope that she recovers quickly from her illness. The Minister was right to say that several parts of the Bill have received all-party support. She was also right to say that it is a better Bill than when it was introduced, especially after the removal of the information-sharing provisions. As I said yesterday, the jurors' inquest provisions are slightly better than they were when we started. However, as we made clear yesterday, they have not improved enough. They still permit the exclusion of juries in cases in which it is essential that they are involved, and they still far too easily exclude the families involved. The rest of the Bill has scarcely been scrutinised at all and it is scandalous that we should pass the Bill in its present form. Several of the matters that we have discussed tonight are still not right. The data commissioner, for example, still has insufficient powers, especially over the private sector. The Sentencing Council provisions are still biased in favour of an old-fashioned, backward-looking view of the criminal justice system. The anonymous witness provisions are still seriously flawed. They fail to recognise the importance of special counsel and the Government have not responded to the penetrating debate in Committee about threats to property and how they should be handled in this legislation. We have not even reached the provisions for criminal memoirs and, although they are fine in principle, many of the details are confused and will cause serious difficulty if they reach the statute book in their present form. Above all, however, what happened yesterday means that the Bill cannot be passed in its present form. The motion before us says that "the Bill be now read a Third time", and it is the word "now" to which I object. Virtually none of the provisions on coroners were reached. Amendments to do with the duties of coroners, the make-up of inquest juries and how the medical examiner system would work and be governed were simply not discussed. There are serious problems in all those elements of the Bill. Even more important—and for me this is crucial—is the issue of the law on murder. The Bill reforms the whole law on murder, and the defences against it, but discussion in Committee revealed important weaknesses in the Government's approach to what is the most serious of crimes. We put forward an entirely different approach that took into account the Law Commission's original recommendations—which the Government ignored—and what was said in Committee. Those proposals have not been discussed at all. In many respects, the law on murder—what counts as murder—remains too narrow for some cases and too broad for others. What counts as murder does not respond fully to what the public would understand by the word "murder". Many deaths that the law would see as murder would be counted as accidental by most people, yet many other deaths are counted by the law as only manslaughter when most people would regard them as murder. That aspect of the law, which the Law Commission attempted to reform, has not been reformed at all by the Bill. The Government's diminished responsibility reforms are retrograde. They introduce far too much detail and specificity into a defence whose main function is to allow the jury to do justice. The introduction of an over medicalised form of defence—as the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) said, it does not include any consideration of developmental immaturity in young people—is only part of the problem. Other difficulties include the fact that the Bill uses far too strict a notion of causation, with the result that the Government are restricting a defence that should not be restricted. The Bill proposes that the notion of provocation to murder should be replaced by a defence of loss of control, but that is entirely unsatisfactory. In Committee, it became clear that the Government were jamming together two different types of situation. In one, a person can claim to have been justifiably angry at the victim of the homicide, with the result that the charge can be reduced to manslaughter. It is right in such cases that the defence—it is a sort of "blame the victim" defence—should be as narrow as possible. The test of loss of control remains perfectly proper in those cases, but the Bill confuses them with cases in which the defendant's fear of what might happen, rather than his anger, is at issue. Cases in the latter category include those that involve abused wives, but the Government have insisted, in the way that the Bill has been drafted, on maintaining a requirement for loss of control in those cases. I do not think that justice can be done if loss of control is included in such cases. Many of us came to the conclusion that cases based on anger and on fear should be entirely separate, yet the Government have not allowed any debate on that. I think that we are on the edge of a historic mistake in the law on murder, and it has all come about thanks to the procedural foul-ups in the way that the Government set up the debate. The Bill is still seriously defective. In one regard—the proposed secret, juryless inquests—it is objectionable, but it has not been scrutinised enough. I cannot vote for, and must vote against, a motion that includes that word "now".