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7.30 pm
Amendment No. 52 is slightly different, as the Opposition seek, in effect, to require the consent of only magistrates for any reorganisation of a local justice area. That would be both unworkable and unfair, especially to local authorities and local courts boards, to which equal consideration should perhaps be given on proposed reorganisations. In fact, that amendment would give a magistrate the power to exercise a veto on the proposed shape of local justice areas, and it might even allow for such reorganisation to be prevented by a single opposing magistrate, despite any view that may have been provided by either the local authority or the local courts board. Clearly, that would be undesirable.
Nevertheless, it is, of course, entirely right that local magistrates should be involved in such decisions, which is why we have provided in clause 8(6)(a) for consultation with justices of the peace, as well as the local authorities and local courts boards, before any reorganisation. Amendment No. 52 is quite unacceptable. It cannot be right to give magistrates the power of veto over proposed reorganisations when the local courts board, which is a more representative body, might be consulted only in passing.
I hope that those amendments are now seen in that light—they are unnecessary and undesirable—and I invite the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome to withdraw the amendment.
Mr. Heath: While listening to the hon. Gentleman, I was trying to remember the laws of thermodynamics, although not as digression from what he was saying. Is it the third law of thermodynamics that states that entropy increases in any system? It seems a bizarre legislative stroke of genius to legislate right from the start of proceedings for an increase in entropy in the system that is to be set up. That seemed to be the tenor of what the hon. Gentleman said. He said that he had a nice, neat system, but someone at some stage in the future might want to make it very untidy, by creating local justice areas that cross police authority areas or criminal justice areas, as the hon. Gentleman called them. I do not know anyone who calls them criminal justice areas, but I am sure that there is a Government consultative paper somewhere that refers to them as such.
The Minister thinks that a future Secretary of State may want to create local justice areas where they do not exist at the moment, so he believes that he ought to include that possibility in the Bill, or allow for that possible eventuality by leaving arrangements open, because it would be nice to have a bit of untidiness if someone wanted it at some future stage. Well, that is a strange way to create a system.
I listened hard to the hon. Gentleman's argument on amendment No. 4, as well. He reiterated a point that he made in Committee, where I was happy to accept it, that
the building blocks—we have all learned to call them that—of the new system are the local justice areas, but he then said that including my amendment, which seeks to ensure that they do not cross boundaries, would somehow give primacy to the courts board, rather than the local justice area. Well, of course, it would not.If there were a sensible way to frame an amendment saying that courts areas must consist of an integer of local justice areas, I suppose that we could have done such things that way—it would come to exactly the same thing—and that would have presumably passed the Minister's test about which comes first, the chicken or the egg. However, that would not make a jot of difference to the outcome, which is to try to ensure that we have an orderly system that builds on those blocks, so that, if the boundaries of a local justice area spilled over in future, there would be the corollary amendment to the courts board area to maintain the integrity and sensible nature of the system, without, as the hon. Gentleman put it, compromising the effectiveness of the arrangements.
Why should I bother? Those arrangements will be dealt with administratively; they do not have to be stated in the Bill. I simply think that, with a Bill that is essentially intended to unify the courts system, it is preferable to say what we mean, rather than not to say what we mean, and to start from a basis of hard structures, rather than fuzzy structures, which is what the Minister apparently prefers when dealing with an eventuality that he cannot identify.
If we were in Committee, I should be very tempted to press the amendment to a Division. Given that we are now debating the Bill on Report, that I have done my best to persuade the Minister of the correctness of my point of view and that he has failed dismally to respond to what I have said, there would be very little point in pressing the amendment to a Division. So, with some regret and some sadness at the lack of precision that the Minister has evidenced in his response to this group of amendments, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Mr. Leslie: I beg to move amendment No. 37, in page 9, line 8, leave out paragraph (c).
Madam Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to take Government amendments Nos. 39 and 40.
Government new schedule—Transitional provisions and savings.
Government amendments Nos. 44 and 45.
Mr. Leslie: This group of miscellaneous Government amendments essentially covers four different policy areas, but the amendments are significant none the less and I shall briefly run through the reasons why we have tabled them.
Government amendment No. 37 deals with rules to make provision for the election of the chairman and deputy chairmen of a bench of magistrates in a local justice area. As a bit of background, I wish to say that clause 17 provides for the magistrates of a local justice area to elect from their number a chairman and one or more deputy chairmen and gives the Lord Chancellor a rule-making power to designate how that will operate. Clause 17 would simply re-enact those parts of section 22 of the Justices of the Peace Act 1997 that relate to those elections. However, the framework for the current rules would disfranchise magistrates who have been appointed only recently to a local justice area, restricting participation to those who have experience in that local justice area.
Opposition Members certainly highlighted such issues in Committee. Having heard the debate in Committee and considered such issues, I thought that those arrangements seemed rather odd, so I then agreed to reconsider the provision. It is not the Government's intention to prevent any justices from taking part in the full range of their duties and therefore, to make that clear, we wish to delete clause 17(5)(c), so that there will be no suggestion that only those with more experience should take part in or contest those chairmen or deputy chairmen elections.
We do not have a tradition in this country of limiting any franchise to people who have lived within the borders of a constituency for a certain time. People can vote as soon as they are on the electoral roll. We believe therefore that the same principle should apply to lay justices when choosing the chairman for their area. The current rules to do not exploit such a bias against newer local magistrates, but that change will make it clear that we have no intention of taking such a discriminatory approach.
Government amendment No. 39 relates to the appointment of the Official Solicitor for Northern Ireland. The Official Solicitor is the person responsible for acting in the interests of children and others people where no one else is suitable, willing or able to act on their behalf. Such cases are typically referred to the Official Solicitor by the courts. In England and Wales, the post of Official Solicitor can be filled by either a solicitor or a barrister. However, there is a question mark over whether a barrister would be entitled to appointment to the Northern Ireland post.
Following discussions in Committee—I am grateful to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) for pointing this out—I have taken the opportunity to consult the professions in Northern Ireland about a proposed change. Not surprisingly, the Bar considers the current position to be indefensible. However, the Law Society considers that a full consultation exercise might be required before it could take a view one way or the other. While noting the Law Society's requests, I have decided that the opportunity should now be taken to open that post to barristers, so under Government amendment No. 39, the Government seek to end the apparent anomaly and to remove the different eligibility criteria for the posts, allowing barristers the chance to be appointed as the Official Solicitor for Northern Ireland. I trust that the House will agree that that makes good sense.
Government amendment No. 40 and new schedule 1 are transitional, smoothing measures to ensure, among other things, that the provisions for new local justice areas will initially be the same as the petty sessions areas at the date of commencement. The new schedule includes several transitional provisions designed to aid the smooth passage from the current arrangements to the new ones. We believe that users of the court system will find it more helpful to have those included in the Bill, and I hope that the House will accept that that is to be welcomed. Continuity is the main purpose of the new schedule, so that, for example, justices' clerks will be treated as having been appointed and designated as clerks under the Bill and as having been assigned to the areas in which they have been working prior to the commencement of the Act. It will also safeguard their compensation entitlements, about which many Members are concerned. Lay justices who are currently on panels for family proceedings courts will be treated as having been authorised to sit in those courts under the Bill. Those entered on the supplemental list will automatically go on the new list. Entries on the current register of judgments will be treated as included in the new register.
Furthermore, the schedule allows for what are known as savings provisions, which were new to me. The function of a savings provision in legislation is to preserve or "save" a law, a right, a privilege or an obligation that would otherwise be repealed or cease to have effect. We therefore intend the Bill to permit a saving of the contracting-out orders already made under the previous legislation and the saving of provisions to ensure that the positions of Keeper of the Rolls, chairmen of benches, senior district judges and courts inspectors can continue. Often, that kind of transitional and saving provision is made by order, after legislation is enacted, but we felt that it was important to bring those forward so that they can go into the Bill proper, although other transitional provisions may need to be made by order under clause 109(3)(b) later. Again, I hope that the House will agree that that is a positive step.
Finally, Government amendments Nos. 44 and 45 allow the continuing presence of lay magistrates sitting on local police authorities as currently provided for in the Police Act 1996. Although the Bill has the effect of abolishing magistrates courts committees, it is clear that we still need to make provision for a mechanism whereby magistrates are selected to sit on police authorities as under the 1996 Act. Lay justices make a full and professional contribution to the work of police authorities, and that should be continued. The amendments therefore allow for a continuity of input from a key section of the criminal justice system. We propose to adapt the current system used in the appointment of independent members of police authorities, whereby a selection panel provides a shortlist from which other police authority members may make a final selection. The procedure with independent members is one whereby the selection panel produces a long list, which the Secretary of State reduces by half, and the designated members of the local police authority make the final selection. In the case of lay justices, it is sufficient to remove the role of the Secretary of State, and we feel that it is right to have localised rather than Whitehall-based selection.
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