My Lords, I, too, support these amendments. I shall add two very brief points in relation to Amendment 277, which was moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. First, the noble Baroness referred in her speech to the Appellate Committee decision in R v J. The Committee may be interested to know that in that decision Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the senior Law Lord, said at paragraph 15 that the history of the 1956 Act
“has been shown to result in much internal inconsistency and lack of coherence”.
His Lordship added that the fact that an unambiguous statutory provision—and it is unambiguous—is
“anachronistic, or discredited, or unconvincing”
does not enable a court to do anything about it. This Committee and Parliament are, of course, under no such inhibition, and for the reasons that have been given, I hope we will do something about it.
The only other point I want to make is that any defendant in any criminal case who believes that the passage of time results in unfairness to them is perfectly entitled to submit to the court that it would be an abuse of process for the trial to continue. They are perfectly entitled so to argue, but that is not a reason why we should not amend the law in the way suggested.