Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, when I spoke in the debate on the Queen’s Speech in December last year, I pointed out, as many others had already done, that we had had five major criminal justice Bills in as many years. I thought then that this year was going to prove the exception and that we would be spared. How wrong I was. Instead of one new Bill, we have two: the Bill currently before us, with 166 clauses and 21 schedules, and the Policing and Crime Bill, now in the other place, with 116 clauses and eight schedules. Successive Lord Chief Justices have said over and again that we cannot go on like this, yet we have ignored their warnings. Even the professional lawyers and judges are finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of change. It is a basic requirement of the rule of law by which Ministers are bound that the law, particularly the criminal law, should be accessible to all. I invite the Minister, as the very first thing he says in reply, to explain why we alone among western nations seem to need so much new criminal legislation every year. The reason may be—I suspect it is—that when Governments reach the end of 12 years in power, they feel the need to become hyperactive for fear that it be said that they have run out of steam. What a blessing that would be. The present Bill is a good example of what is wrong. As we know, it has nine parts. The first four all propose major changes to the existing law. Each, in my view, is of sufficient importance to justify a separate Second Reading debate, a point that has been made by many noble Lords—all except the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. We cannot do that, though; we have to pick and choose. The result is that our debate today is not a debate in the strict sense. We jump from subject matter to subject matter, and in the end the Minister will have the almost impossible task of replying to a multitude of different, disconnected subjects. It should not be like that. It is, though, so we have to choose. I would like to say much on the subject of the sentencing commission, but instead I will concentrate my fire on the proposals to modify the rule relating to provocation. Here one comes up again, at the very first hurdle, to a great irony. Although we have had all this criminal legislation since this Government came into power, there is one area of the law which cries out for reform but has scarcely been touched. That, of course, is the law of murder. For many years now, the most senior judges in the land have been saying that the law of murder is in a mess and needs radical reform, but that cannot be done by the judges alone—it needs Parliament to take a hand. In 2005, the Government seemed to have got the message. They invited the Law Commission to prepare a new framework for the law of murder, which it so badly needs. In 2006, the Law Commission produced its report. What did the Government do? For nearly two years, they did nothing. Then they produced a consultation paper, which completely ignored the first 64 pages of the Law Commission’s report. Instead, they picked out three relatively minor topics including, in particular, the partial defences on a charge of murder—provocation and diminished responsibility. I hope that the Minister, when he replies, will explain to the House why the Government have still done nothing about the major recommendations in the Law Commission report. Is it because Ministers cannot agree on what should be done? Or is it perhaps because the whole subject of murder, including the subject of the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, is so politically sensitive that it is better not to touch it at all? The only explanation given in the consultative report is simply not an explanation at all. It is that the Government have decided not to proceed on what they call a step-by-step basis. But why? It is so very odd for, on the very same page on which they say that, they point out correctly that the law is in a mess, just because it has developed historically on a piecemeal basis without regard to how the law, ""as a whole fits together"." By inviting us to proceed now on a step-by-step or piecemeal basis, surely they are committing the very same error which they have identified higher up on the very same page. To me, it seems little more than a waste of time for us to be considering the partial defences to a charge of murder until we have decided what the definition of murder should be. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, pointed out, if it be the fact that the House of Commons did not have time to consider this matter at all, then it is little short of what he described as being a scandal. It is said in the ministerial foreword that provocation is an area of the most pressing concern, but here the Ministers are quite simply wrong. It was an area of pressing concern until the decision of the Privy Council, in the case of the Attorney-General for Jersey v Holley in 2005. That was a decision of nine Law Lords, convened expressly for the purpose of putting provocation on a satisfactory basis, and that it has done, so what is the pressing concern? A great deal in Part 2 is, to my mind, very questionable. If we were to enact it as drafted, I suspect that it would take many years for the courts to sort it out. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, said that we must deal with all these things in Committee, but I have a more radical solution. In my view, our best course is to ask the Government to think again on Part 2, or at any rate on the question of provocation—to take it away now and come back with it when they have agreed on proposals for the reform of the law of murder as a whole.