Coroners and Justice Bill

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, for standing in so manfully in the place of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. I, too, agree with the analysis of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, about the flaws in the amendment itself. However, I take it very much as it was put by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile—that it is a probing amendment to enable us to have this debate. It was not suggested that these amendments are necessarily correct in form, so I make no point about that at all. We would argue very strongly that we should not make the best the enemy of the good. In responding to Amendment 150, I must acknowledge that there are those who would have wished—I count among them each participant in this debate—that we had dealt with the whole area of murder law comprehensively and at once. We made clear at the outset that the provisions of the Bill are the first part of a staged approach. We will be looking at the Law Commission’s other recommendations, especially those on a new structure of homicide comprising new offences of first degree murder, second degree murder and manslaughter, in the light of the effect of the changes to the partial defences proposed in Clauses 42 to 46. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, said that we should have dealt with the structure first and the partial defences second, but noble Lords who have spoken know as well as I that these provisions have caused real interest and contention over a number of years. Many jurists have scratched their heads, debated, disagreed and made contributions, and it was clear that there was no unanimity of view about whether those proposals were definitively the best that could be devised. The issue is therefore whether we should do nothing or whether we should try to grapple with those things where there seemed to be some consensus and where there is an opportunity to do a bit of good and to take a step or two further along this road. The Government decided that we should try to deal with some of the issues that have caused difficulty.