Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I, too, have added my name to the amendment. I should like to say how grateful I am to all those involved in trying to deal with this part of the Bill who have taken it so seriously, and to outside organisations, such as English PEN and the Howard League for Penal Reform, which have worked hard to set out and explain to the wider world why this is such a flawed proposal. We had a fair amount of time between Committee and Report, so I had a chance to try to get a little nearer to the bottom of how this very large piece of law, which in theory covers hundreds of thousands of people—all those with a conviction for an indictable offence and with a vast range of artistic expression—came into anyone’s mind. Why did the Government want to put this into the Bill? I am aware that there were consultations here and in Scotland, but it is clear that very small numbers responded. Most people who work in offender rehabilitation have never heard of these consultations, although presumably that was their fault because they would have been on a website somewhere. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for his reply to my Written Question during the recess. He told me that there were 24 responses to the consultation, including two from victims’ organisations, not including Victim Support, and one from a relative of a crime victim. I got a clue about from where this might have come from reading the equivalent Scottish documentation and I thank the Minister for the information about Scotland included in his letter of 14 October to those who had spoken in Committee. The Scottish material talks about preventing "defamation of murder victims". I began to see that a sensible germ of an idea was at the basis of all this. It is clear that defamation of murder victims by perpetrators would cause enormous distress and may call for a remedy. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, made that point very helpfully. However, it is not at all clear how we got from murder victims to all indictable offences and from books to all forms of artistic expression. When confronted with one or two bad examples of offensive behaviour, the Government have a tendency to look for a new law that aims to prevent it and stretches more widely to encompass a huge range of behaviour. But this measure must be the most dramatic example of that genre—if I can use that word. In his letter of 14 October, if I understand him correctly, the Minister says, as consolation, that the scheme does not prevent publication of any material. It prevents only the author keeping the money earned by it. The letter suggests that the books I mentioned by ex-prisoners give valuable insights into imprisonment and prison reform and that they could still be published, but that the authors would not be able to keep the money they made. From a Government who are committed to offender rehabilitation, this approach is absurd. The noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, is one of the most well known writers in the world. She has explained the importance of writing for rehabilitation better than many of us could. Writing, painting and making films are all better activities for society than violence, robbery and theft. We should welcome such rehabilitation and not take away the lawfully earned money of the rehabilitated.