My Lords, I thank both noble Lords for explaining the amendment, which was of course also tabled in Committee, seeking to confer a pardon on persons, living and deceased, who were convicted under that part of Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 which was repealed by Section 8 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981.
Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 was originally a wide-ranging provision, and some of it is still in force today. The part with which the noble Lord’s amendment is concerned is the offence of being a suspected person, frequenting, in effect, any public place,
“with intent to commit felony”,
or, as it became, an arrestable offence. The noble Lord has illustrated from his own experience, and the Home Affairs Select Committee identified in 1980, that this so-called “sus” offence was used in a discriminatory and unfair way, particularly in relation to young black men. However, as the noble Lord has also acknowledged, not every conviction under this provision, certainly not going all the way back to 1824, was wrong or unfair. In fact, the Home Affairs Select Committee concluded:
“The most powerful argument against ‘sus’ is that it is a fundamentally unsatisfactory offence in principle”.
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As we have discussed in relation to pardons for historic gay sex offences, where an abolished offence was not on the face of it discriminatory, it can be difficult to define the non-criminal conduct which should now be the subject of a pardon. The noble Lord’s amendment does not attempt to do this in relation to the “suspected person” offence in Section 4; rather, it provides for a blanket pardon for everyone who has ever been convicted of or cautioned for it. As I said in Committee, pardoning is exceptional by nature, and any argument for granting a collective statutory pardon must be very clear and compelling.
The Government are not currently persuaded by the noble Lord’s argument that the way this offence was used to target young black men up to the 1970s, with the consequences that that had not only for them but also for relations between the black community and the police, was a historic wrong needing the same kind of response as the one suffered by gay and bisexual men, which we have addressed in the Bill. However, even if we were to accept that the case had been made for a statutory pardon, we would not want to provide for a blanket pardon as in this amendment. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to see how we could distinguish between those, living and dead, who over nearly 200 years were justifiably convicted of this offence and those against whom it was used in a discriminatory and unfair way.
I hope that I have shown that the Government have considered the matter further since Committee and that, with that explanation, the noble Lord will be happy to withdraw the amendment.