Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, in moving this amendment I will also speak to a number of amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, in the same group. We now reach Part 3, Chapter 1 "anonymity in investigations"—yet another new subject in this Bill—so it is worth repeating yet again the advice that I offered to the Government at Second Reading. In future, they might find it easier to introduce Bills to this House on individual subjects, or at least not too many subjects at once. That might be useful not only for the drafting of the Bills but quite good politically and in terms of business management. When we look at the size of this Bill—its number of parts and the different subjects that it covers—the Government should be reminded of that more than once. We now come to anonymity in investigations and investigation anonymity orders. These are a new form of anonymity order that are aimed, we are told, very precisely at combating gang-related violence. Indeed, they are so precise that they relate to the offences of murder and manslaughter committed with a gun or a knife and involving gangs the majority of whom are between 11 and 30. That is the precision that we are talking about. In other words, these are designed to be very specific indeed. In Committee, we probed the limits that have been set down as to why the age of 30 was chosen and not 31, and we listened with interest and care to the responses of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. The noble Lord made the case that gang-related homicides are a particularly difficult category of cases because the level of witness intimidation is likely to be high. We are prepared to accept that argument because the clauses in the Bill are about granting anonymity to witnesses. The principles of open justice and transparency are put on to the table. We accept that there are circumstances in which the interests of justice require there to be orders made of the sort that we are debating. Gang-related violence can be a real problem, and we agree that the justice system must have the appropriate tools at its disposal to deal with that problem. I am sure that the Minister will try to convince us that the Government have struck exactly the right balance. I presume that that is why the investigation anonymity orders apply to such a narrow set of circumstances. All I can say at this stage is that we are nearly convinced. Amendment 76 would remove Clause 65(4), which allows the Secretary of State to amend—which we suspect really means widen—the conditions governing the orders. We expressed unhappiness in Committee that the Secretary of State should have the power to be able to widen something of this sort. Although we have almost been convinced that the Government are serious about keeping these orders restricted to a narrow category of offence, subsection (4) to some extent undermines that assurance. The Government knew this from the Committee stage, and I trust that the Minister has a briefing in front of him that will try to reassure me. Certainly, they have had the whole of the summer to consider that. To go further, in a spirit of helpfulness, we have given the Government another option—that is, Amendment 76CA. Very simply, it allows Parliament to have its say on a report, which must be prepared by the Secretary of State, on how well—or not, as the case may be—investigation anonymity orders are working after two years. We have accepted that there may be a case for having such orders, which is, sadly, why I cannot support the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, who has taken a more robust approach than ours to having so many Bills in one Bill, and suggested deleting large chunks of it. We are certainly looking for assurances from the Government that they have taken due note of a need for proper parliamentary scrutiny of any changes that they seek to make. I do not think that that is too burdensome a requirement. Having said that, and to go back to my first amendment, we would prefer it if the Government could at least drop subsection (4) and remove from themselves the power to widen this proposal. I beg to move.