Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I understand fully where the Government are coming from on this, and I am sympathetic to anything that tries to stop the distress caused by some of these publications to victims of crime and their close friends and families. As the Minister has already discovered, the problem is in the detail of how to do it without slipping into undesirable censorship. I make the point in passing that if we had a similar rule for newspapers publicising these sorts of crimes, most of the articles would not be published. After looking at yesterday’s reporting of the poor 17 year-old girl who was killed as a result of an internet connection, one could well argue, as I suspect some of her friends and family may, that the detail and description given in the articles was undesirable and unacceptable. Of course, newspapers profit from that, so there is a delicate line here. I leave that to one side because the important question relates to how we draft legislation in such a way that does not stop the release of good books and films. The Minister will know that this goes back to the publication of a book by Gitta Sereny about the Mary Bell case. I think that it was a good and important book because it explained a lot about why children kill. However, the media storm around it developed into a suggestion for legislation of this type. There is a case for it because there are examples of acute distress being caused to victims by people exploiting the horror of what they have done. At this stage, I would ask the Minister to look at the degree of flexibility available. I know why he moved to the indictable offence factor as a way of trying to judge the seriousness of the issue, but I am troubled by the fact that that also catches other people. In other circumstances, I mentioned to him the book by John Healey, a recovered alcoholic. It is the only book I know that was written by someone who was a vagrant alcoholic for some 15 years, who came off the drink and published a book that won an autobiographical prize and became a Channel 4 film that also won awards. Like most vagrant alcoholics, he has many convictions, most of which were petty—being drunk and disorderly and so on—but among them were several indictable offences. That book would not have been written if ultimately some payment had not been involved because it helped his development and it helped the development of the film that won the award. As I have indicated, it was also an important book in describing the process by which a person becomes a vagrant alcoholic and the processes by which they can abandon that position. It therefore has an important element. We have talked about the well-known cases of Mary Bell, Dennis Nilsen and so on. But, thinking about it, the book by Jean Genet, the French author, would probably never have been published. We therefore have to think carefully about this aspect, and I have a solution for the Minister. I understand the dilemma of getting this right. I wonder whether we could do more on the rights of the victim. The Government have introduced legislation in other areas where the victim has a greater say in what happens in sentencing. Without overriding the court, their views can be heard and considered. I am not sure whether in this case there is not an area where we can say that there must be some identifiable person with a genuine interest—a friend, relative or whoever—who needs to express concern before the process can be triggered. In other words, the process would start only if you had a person saying, "I find this just too painful". I repeat for the benefit of the media that they need to think very hard about how they approach these things. If we introduce such a law for the media, most of the stories about violent crimes will not be reported. Although I do not like the way that they report crime, I have to say that that would be a serious mistake. The same applies to books and films. I ask the Minister to look again at the way in which we trigger this process. That is important. If we have a blanket provision of indictable offences, for example, I am almost sure that John Healey’s book, The Grass Arena, and the Channel 4 film based on it, as well as books by people such as Jean Genet would not be published.