Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill
10:30 am
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister, Justice; Harborough, Conservative)
I join the Minister in welcoming you, Sir Nicholas, and your colleague, Mr.O’Hara, as Chairmen, both of the evidence sessions and of the main Bill Committee, starting next week. I also welcome the Minister and his ministerial colleagues. I have done business with two of them, but not with the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, and I look forward to dealing with her arguments as we progress.
I, too, join the Minister in welcoming the two new Members of Parliament to the Committee. They are under no disadvantage whatever, because we are all new to this procedure. Whether it is any use we will shortly discover. I have some private doubts as to the usefulness of the arrangement—I say that these are private doubts because we are in Committee, so no one is listening—because the Public Bill Committee starts next week and there is, therefore, very little time between the closing of the evidence sessions on Thursday and the beginning of the Committee on Tuesday, for the Government to do anything about the evidence that they have received.
It would be ridiculous and unduly cynical of me to suggest that that was the entire point of the exercise and that this was a release valve system to allow outside bodies to think that they are having some input into the construction of the pudding, and for the Government to doff their cap to democracy, then move on and do precisely as they always intended to do. We shall see; I know that the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice is a man of immense good will and will seek to accommodate the criticisms, be they constructive or otherwise, that emanate from my party’s benches and those of the Liberal Democrats during the course of proceedings. Needless to say, I am pleased that he is contemplating, through discussions between the hon. Member for Tooting and my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood, adducing more evidence during the course of proceedings, namely from the Evangelical Alliance.
I made some suggestions to the Government in the summer about witnesses whom I thought were appropriate for this hearing. I cannot understand it, but, either the letter must have got lost or they did not find my suggestions entirely happy ones. I would have thought that it would have been useful in such a Bill to have heard evidence from, if not the Lord Chief Justice, perhaps his deputy, Sir Igor Judge, and from representatives from the council of circuit judges. That is, the Crown court judges, who have to deal, along with the magistrates, from whom we are hearing, with the bulk of first instance criminal cases.
I described the Bill on First Reading as a plum-duff. I could use any other suitable metaphor to demonstrate that it has been pulled together without a theme; no central argument seems to push through its core. It is simply a collection of nice ideas, in the Government’s thinking, which have been pulled together under one title, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. It seems to me that there are a number of issues in the Bill that should have been separated into different pieces of legislation. That would embarrass the Government because it would take the number of Bills from this Department and its predecessor into the stratosphere. I do not feel that it will add to public safety or reduce reoffending. However, we will discuss that in due course.
I am, none the less, content for the moment with the programme motion. I am sure that my hon. Friends sitting on what the Minister described as the Government Benches are merely rehearsing for what will be the inevitable—