My Lords, I generally support this important legislation, but I expressed at Second Reading and again in Committee my sense of unease about the whole concept of serious violence reduction orders but also about the detail of their implementation. It is clear that my arguments have not borne the fruit I would hope to see, because I have read—since she kindly copied it to me—my noble friend’s letter to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, in which the Government made it clear that they did not see any scope for budging either on the principle or on the detail of the implementation of these provisions. So, rather than engage in a discussion across a broad front, I shall simply focus my few remarks on Amendments 90K and 90L in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, which deal with what might be the most egregious question on this subject, that of “ought to know” or “ought to have known”, depending on how it is phrased in the Bill.
The Government are proposing that people should be subject to these orders, which are serious constraints on their liberties and which have potentially severe reputational consequences. In some cases, these may be merited, but in the case of “ought to have known” it is extremely difficult to accept that the burden on those who receive these orders is merited, on the basis not of their carrying a knife, not even that they knew a knife was being carried but that they ought to have known a knife was being carried.
There are three essential problems. The first is meaning. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, pointed to the difficulties that arise from the variability of language. The expression “ought to have known” is one that we can easily use in different ways in ordinary, natural language. But we are dealing here with language that ought to be drafted in a precise fashion and can be applied in a predictable way in a court of law, because we want our laws to be predictable. We want people to know that, if they do this or that, they will be in trouble, but if they do not do so, then that is okay. I do not know what “ought to have known” means in a legal sense.
The second problem is evidence. Even if you had a clear understanding of what the words “ought to have known” mean, how is that to be established in a court of law when, as I have said before to your Lordships, it is difficult enough to establish in a court of law what somebody did or did not know, let alone what they ought to have known. There is an evidential question here.
The third problem arises from the first two. It will be a decision of this Parliament to adopt this language which throws a huge interpretational burden on the courts. We do not know how the courts are going to interpret or implement this language. I do not want to draw unfair parallels, but when we discussed in Committee and on Report the question of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences for public protection, it was clear that the Home Secretary of the day, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, did not expect the provision to be applied by the courts with the liberality that the judges felt obliged to apply because of how it had been drafted. I hope I have explained that correctly. In other words, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, thought it would be applied only occasionally, but when the judges read what they were expected to do, they felt obliged to apply it more liberally to far more cases, which had never been his intention when he had proposed it. We are potentially in similar circumstances here. We simply have no idea, if we agree this language, how it is going to be applied by the courts in actual cases: with what breadth or how frequently it will be applied to people who were not carrying a knife and did not know that a knife was being carried but it is felt on some basis that they ought to have known.
I am not trying to detract from the other amendments in this group by focusing my remarks on this narrow point, which has been addressed by other noble Lords. I am focusing on these two amendments because I would hope that my noble friend might, after reflecting on it, be willing to come forward at Third Reading with something that rethought this approach. Or at the very least, if it did not rethink it, she would say
that she was going to add words or guidance or some other supplement to the Bill which would make the circumstances in which this applied very specific such that we had that level of certainty that we did not impose this burden on the courts. We should have certainty in law but also certainty in our own minds as to how frequently and commonly this penalty would be applied in the event of “ought to have known” cases.