If I may say so, sometimes one is in the middle of the flow of one’s argument and people jump up and down when one has not quite finished explaining the overall framework. The essential problem here is not the code itself, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, kindly said—it is not a bad document, I venture to suggest—but a lack of awareness, police not doing their job and nobody knowing quite what should be done if that were to happen. The idea behind the basic framework of this legislation is to force the relevant bodies to take steps to comply with the code. That is why Clause 6 says:
“Each criminal justice body which provides services … must … take … steps”
and “must … keep under review”. Clause 7 provides that they must provide various activities, et cetera, and must collect information, that a local policing body must do this, that and the other and that the various constabularies referred to later must do these things. The idea is that we have a code and a framework, and we must make sure that the bodies responsible for enabling victims’ rights do so.
In the Government’s view, you do not materially increase the likelihood of them doing so by putting the code into a schedule, any more than you increase that likelihood—to deal with another point—by converting a “should” into a “must”. That is another bit of fine tuning. The principles of the code are set out in Clause 2; for example, that you “should provide information”. You could say that you “must provide information”, but that does not really change the enforceability unless you have a whole statutory framework for what the information should be, who should provide it and how it is to be done. That is all in the code at the moment, where it should be.
I do not want to refer again to angels dancing on pins, but I think we are slightly at cross-purposes as to what we mean by things “in law”, “legal enforceability”, or “statutory codes”. That is the Government’s basic position on this.