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9.35 pm
Mr. Leslie: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all hon. Members for their participation in the debate, particularly the members of Standing Committee D, some of whom are still in the Chamber. I would like to put on record how grateful I am for their help in the passage of the Bill through the Committee. The Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs also gave the Bill close consideration in its first report, for which I am grateful.
The Courts Bill is a key part of the Government's overall aim to improve and modernise the criminal justice system. This Bill in particular contains a wide range of significant improvements to the entire justice system, to the work of the civil and family courts, and to the operation of the criminal courts. Courts are an institution central to the operation of our constitution, and are also integral to a fair and decent society. They need to be focused on good, just decision making, serving the interests of the public, of victims and of witnesses. We rely on the courts to deliver fair outcomes. We therefore have a duty to keep the courts efficient and effective in what they do. The new framework for the administration of the courts provided for in this Bill is a major reform that will create a more modern, more flexible institution, able to respond to local needs and changing circumstances, creating a unified courts administration that brings together in a new executive
agency the magistrates courts, county courts and Crown courts. This will mean improved management and better use of resources.The creation of courts boards will mean more reflective arrangements to replicate those within the community concerned with the input of the courts management, who will be able to look across the bigger picture. These arrangements will be better conceived than those for the magistrates courts committees. There will be new powers to improve safety and security in courthouses, with new court security officer posts being created. Proper arrangements for court inspection are also included in the Bill, as is a more appropriate structure for making court procedure rules and practice directions, along with new powers for the courts to impose costs on third parties for serious misconduct, and new powers for the civil courts to award damages as periodical payments, rather than simply in a lump sum.
Importantly, the Bill also contains new fine enforcement powers. Fine enforcement is a critical issue right now; we need to ensure that the courts have the power to enforce against those who are defaulting on their fines. The Bill also contains new collection order powers for the courts, powers to deduct from earnings and benefits, an ability to allow fines to be discharged by unpaid work, and new powers to pilot innovative collection measures.
All in all, the Bill signals important changes for the administration of justice, and I commend it to the House.
9.38 pm
Mr. Hawkins: I echo the Minister's thanks to the many people who have participated in the debates on the Bill—not only the members of the Standing Committee in this House but those who were involved in another place. I shall turn to what happened to the Bill in another place in a moment. I should also like to pay particular tribute to the Clerks who helped us on the Bill in Committee. Members of the Opposition parties are always particularly indebted to the Clerks for all their help with the tabling of amendments and discussions, and this Bill is no exception. I am sure that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) would agree that we have been particularly well served by the Clerk who helped this Bill's Committee.
The Bill had a long early stage in another place. Many of my noble friends played a big part in discussions there, including Baroness Anelay of St. Johns and Lord Hunt of Wirral to name but two. The battle was long. More than five months were spent on the Bill. The good news from the Conservative Benches was that during that time we persuaded the Government to accept a wide range of amendments and to make concessions. The combined Opposition forces inflicted defeats on the Government, who accepted some of those defeats with good grace—I see the Minister smiling at that—and accepted that we were right. Further welcome concessions have been made this evening on the Heath and Hawkins amendments, as we have called them. I shall certainly think back to tonight with pleasure when the first member of the Northern Ireland Bar becomes the Official Solicitor for Northern Ireland.
The Opposition led the campaign and won concessions from the Government on things that directly affect magistrates. We succeeded in establishing
that the supplemental list should not be abolished, as the Government originally intended, and that justices' clerks should be assigned to local justice areas. We established the fact that there should be a statutory duty on the Lord Chancellor to consult lay magistrates on matters affecting them. We managed to ensure, at least in clause 30, that courts should be locally accessible.We wanted to hold the Lord Chancellor to account for the closure of more than 100 magistrates courts since the Government came to power. When we began the debate in Committee on 26 June 2003, I observed at column 26 that it was unfortunate that the Government had not put the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor), an acknowledged expert and distinguished lay magistrate, on the Committee. I am delighted that he is in the Chamber. Perhaps he will favour us with some of the things he might have said in Committee had he been given the opportunity to do so.We also established in another place that an assessment of the Lord Chancellor's performance should be included in the new annual report of the unified courts administration. We further established that if the Lord Chancellor wants to change the guidelines on how the courts boards operate, he must obtain parliamentary approval first. However, we remain concerned that some of the new provisions for courts boards were not initially in a form that won the confidence of the magistracy. It is fair to say that some of the concerns that we and the Liberal Democrats share about courts boards have been ventilated again tonight. The Government were defeated several times in another place on clauses 4 and 5. We wanted to ensure that courts boards have at least two magistrates as members and that if the Lord Chancellor rejected the advice of courts boards, he should give them his reasons for doing so. Those were but two of the defeats that the Government suffered in another place.
The Opposition are enormously indebted to the Magistrates Association and the Central Council of Magistrates Courts Committees for their advice throughout the Bill's proceedings. I have also been grateful for advice from bodies such as the Institute of Legal Executives, the Medical Protection Society, the Fleet Street Lawyers Society, the Newspaper Society and many others. Without the help that we get from such organisations, we would not achieve as much success as we do in another place and persuade the Government to accept the logic of our arguments.
I am still disappointed that the Bill does not protect the position of the lay magistracy enough, that there are insufficient safeguards to prevent yet further court closures, and that we have not achieved enough to stop the Government's agenda of moving to more and more batch processing of cases. We debated and divided on some of those issues this evening.
None the less, I believe that in many of its provisions—certainly those that were not contentious—the Bill will probably become a useful Act. I hope that, even though we have not been able to defeat the Government on all the issues relating to magistrates courts, we will find other means of defending the lay magistracy and preventing further court closures. We hope that, as the Bill has progressed toward the statute
book, the Opposition have played some part in improving it substantially from the form in which it originally emerged in another place.9.45 pm
Mr. Heath: The Bill's genesis lies in another era—an era when the soi-disant Cardinal Wolsey of our time sat secure on the Woolsack in his full-bottomed wig, when magistrates and large parts of the judiciary were desperately concerned about the contents of the Bill, when magistrates clerks felt that they were being given the short end of the stick, and when many people felt that the Government simply had no idea of how to deliver justice effectively and locally other than through a modernising, centralising, integrating process. The Bill has ended in the era of decaff, the era of new "justice lite".
In the process, the Bill has been improved by the attentions of my noble Friends and the noble Friends of the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins). It has been helped by the Government's interest in getting their legislation though and by their listening to some of the arguments—I give credit to the Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs for having listened to some of our arguments and responded positively. The Bill has been improved because of the weight of opinion outside this place that has been brought to bear on its provisions. The Bill that leaves this House this evening is a much better Bill than the one that was introduced in another place many months ago.
I still have doubts about some of the provisions. We have won serious improvements, but I continue to doubt whether the Bill will deliver the level of accessibility that we want. I would have liked to have seen an explicit recognition of the need for the independence of the judiciary, as well as a better structure for the courts boards, especially those in London. However, I accept that the attentions of hon. Members on both sides of the House, both in Committee and during later stages, have improved the Bill.
None of us has ever quarrelled with the stated intention to provide for a unified court system that will serve the interests of justice and of our constituents better than the present system does. I think that we will achieve that—marginally. I wish that we could have gone further, but I am content that, as it leaves this House, the Bill is sufficiently workable to achieve some of its objectives.
I, too, thank all those who have been involved with the Bill. It has been a delight to work on it as a non-lawyer—a distinction I share with the Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. We sometimes felt outnumbered by the lawyers in Committee and elsewhere—
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