Clause 37
Serious Crime Bill [Lords]
5:45 pm
Vernon Coaker (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Gedling, Labour)
I ask the Committee to resist the amendment, which would change the rules regarding the admissibility of evidence in proceedings relating to an order from those that apply in civil proceedingsto those that apply in a trial on indictment. The amendment also seeks to provide that in proceedings for an order, the relevant person cannot be required to answer any question or to produce any document that they could not be required to answer or produce at such a trial.
The amendment is undesirable because the civil procedure rules already provide significant and wide-ranging powers to manage the evidence that will come before the court. The court is best placed to determine which pieces of evidence are relevant and should be admitted in proceedings and what weight should be accorded to each. The court will ensure that only relevant and appropriate evidence is admitted. It is both unnecessary and inappropriate to constrain that flexibility, and I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment. He went over some old ground in his comments, but these are civil orders, not a criminal penalty, so the strict rules of evidence that apply to criminal trials should not apply. Instead, the civil rules of evidence should apply, particularly in relation to hearsay.