Clause 3 - Bail elsewhere than at police station
Criminal Justice Bill
5:30 pm
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield, Conservative)
That may happen under the current arrangements, but that is no reason why we should allow it to continue if difficulties may arise.
There is a difference between the example that the Minister has just given and the situation that we are discussing now. If things are working properly, it is desirable that a person who has been arrested should come into minimal contact with the police. He is rapidly told that he can go away but must come back and go to a police station on a specified day. In those circumstances, it is all too easy for a person to be ignorant of his responsibility. What if he never gets a letter? He might then be arrested without a warrant, which is draconian.
The Minister perfectly reasonably states that if a Member of Parliament was arrested outside the House of Commons and said that he was going away on holiday for seven weeks, the police officer would reply, ''Don't worry, because we'll get in touch with you.'' However, that Member of Parliament may never get his notice in writing. A Member of Parliament is a bad example in this instance, as he has a fixed address at these premises even if he does not have another address. However, for a lot of people, their address is a more difficult issue, and it troubles me that we are introducing a system where such a person may subsequently be scooped up off the street—arrested without a warrant—which could cause serious disruption to his life. Potentially, it is a humiliating procedure, and it might subsequently transpire that that person never received the notification because of a simple error that may have arisen as a result of the very brief initial contact that he had with a police officer.
Given the nature of the procedure, it is most undesirable that an individual should simply be sent on his way by a police officer without being given the necessary information to enable him to come back and attend a suitable police station at a later date.