Coroners and Justice Bill

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Low, for speaking to the amendment so comprehensively on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. I will take his last point first. He said that we should be able to do better. The truth is that, after extensive examination, it is not possible. I am grateful to the noble Lord for outlining the history of these offences, which go back as far as 1938. It is true that we are asked to grapple with this difficult and delicate issue about once a year. The impact of the legislation as currently framed is such that the Law Commission came to the view that the infanticide offence as currently drafted works and does so effectively. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, has argued as cogently as the noble Lord, Lord Low, has argued today that such cases could be dealt with under diminished responsibility instead. However, the Government are concerned that diminished responsibility would not provide an adequate response to all those cases. In particular, I am thinking of those mothers—often very young, as the noble Lord indicated—who kill their babies in a transient but highly disturbed state of mind after a clandestine birth and, in those very particular circumstances, might struggle to meet the evidential requirements of diminished responsibility. The Law Commission looked at the issue carefully and concluded that it was right to retain the offence. We concur. The amendments that we have made carefully respond to the judgment in the case of R v Gore. We think that they enable a tightening of the loophole that was created in that case. Regretfully, I do not believe that we can do better than the legislators in 1938. It is a comfort for me to say that we do not intend to change this, although we will continue to look at it as time goes on.