Clause 15
Fraud Bill [Lords]
6:00 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General & Shadow Spokesman On Community Cohesion, Law Officers (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
My heart sinks. The last thing that I want to do is to encourage another criminal justice Act in any circumstances. Swords of Damocles concentrate minds wonderfully. The one thing that I have learned in politics in the past nine years is that most of the problems that we experience are due to inertia. Anything that shifts inertia is worth having.
I find it difficult to accept that introducing my sunset clause will suddenly mean that the existing law becomes unusable. I find that a poor argument. There are sunset clauses for all sorts of other things that we have done—or that we do—in this Parliament. They do not mean that the legislation becomes unusable as a result.