My Lords, I rise diffidently to agree wholeheartedly with the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, to this legislation. I strongly support Motion A; I cannot, I am afraid, support Motion A1 from the noble Lord, Lord Marks. I suggest that it would in fact compromise and complicate what is a valuable, new, flexible, broad power that gives a judge the ability to make whatever order he or she thinks is best calculated to do justice in the individual case, and to meet the problem that we have encountered over many years of not having any power to validate retrospectively anything that has happened in the past. I do not know whether anyone noticed the piece I wrote in the Times about my noble and learned friend Lord Hope’s Ahmed case, but that was a classic case in point which shrieked out for this new power.
So there it is: orders can now be made subject to whatever limitations or conditions the judge thinks right and appropriate, and I respectfully suggest that this is so much better than the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, with whom I am almost always in agreement—but surely not on this. He prefers retrospective legislation, but how unwieldy, inflexible and incapable of being adapted to the individual case that is, and how unwelcome as a whole we consider retrospective legislation—so I support Motion A.