Written evidence to be reported to the House
Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill
4:45 pm
Christine Lawrie: My judgment is that there will not be large numbers of women involved. I might be wrong about that, but my assessment is that the measure would be used sparingly and with care, and our view is that we should make those resources available for that purpose. We would have to see how that panned out in practice. If we found that a lot of women who did not want or need help were coming through, then we might take a different view. At the moment our provisional position is that we would rather welcome this than not, and we would then see what the resource implications were—on the basis that my guess is that they are unlikely to be too heavy for us to cope.