My Lords, I am grateful for that intervention and clarification. Perhaps I could explain why the Government do not think that this is a positive way to go.
The first point is that the present code is still a statutory code. It is grounded in statute, authorised by statute, has been subject to negative resolution in Parliament and therefore has a legal status. The Government’s position is that putting the code in a schedule to the Bill does not materially increase its legal enforceability, or indeed its legal status. Therefore, there does not seem to the Government to be a compelling reason to do it in either case. The Government would consider the present code to be subject to judicial review. There could be a legal challenge; in fact, the legislation on the face of it accepts that the code is admissible in legal proceedings, and so forth. So we already have a statutory code, and we are dealing with quite a fine point—whether putting in a schedule really has any material effect. The Government’s position is that, certainly legally, it has no effect—but in practice there is a very significant downside.
The downside is that what you have on the statute is no longer user-friendly and no longer contains the information that victims want when they reach for the code and want to know what to do, where to go, what the telephone number is and what the website is that they need to consult. You cannot put that in the statute, and I invite noble Lords to compare the code as currently reproduced in the amendment we are discussing with the code as published. The latter sets out 12 rights very clearly, has boxes that explain various things, tells you where to go, elaborates on the rights, et cetera, all in very user-friendly language. Either you abandon that—in which case, you abandon the signposting and everything we were discussing in the previous group—or you have two documents. And that, in the Government’s view, is not very satisfactory. Although we all have touching faith in the interest of the general public to read long schedules in the statutes that we pass, that is not actually the way to raise awareness. You raise awareness through other means.