Clause 29 - Service of notices
Criminal Justice and Police Bill
10:30 am
Mr Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey, Liberal Democrat)
I am prepared to accept that. Given that I gave no notice of my question, I should be grateful if the Parliamentary Secretary would ask his officials to check on this matter. As I have repeatedly said, if people are not to be caught out by technicalities, the law must be as consistent and clear as possible. We do not want to give further work to lawyers—to use the Parliamentary Secretary's phrase—by requiring them to establish whether there was service and whether people knew there was service. We must ensure that the procedures are streamlined, common and collectively similar and will apply common time limits, regardless of whether the notice is being served on an offending pub, amusement arcade, sex shop or anything else.