My Lords, may I ask the Minister for a point of clarification? I stress again that I am not a lawyer, otherwise I probably would not be asking this question. If the Government’s view is that civil remedies already exist, is he saying that they are dependent on having first achieved a criminal conviction, or is he saying that they exist without having to go down the criminal court route? If the latter, presumably his argument that the Government wish to increase the number of convictions—they want to encourage victims to go down that route, thus they are not very keen on the civil remedies—has already been weakened by the fact that, as he is saying, civil remedies already exist.
4.45 pm