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Mr. Blunkett: I am very happy to give the assurances on both counts, and I am also happy to give the hon. Gentleman the reassurance that our lawyers disagree with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) and think that the measures will make a substantial difference, and I would not have moved them if I did not think that they would.
Mr. Grieve: I am grateful to the Home Secretary for his comments.
I should like to finish with one other observation. As I said, the Bill has been a long one. I believe that it may do good, but looking to the future, I come back to the
basic principle—our desire to see justice done for victims, to prosecute criminals successfully and to punish them properly must never allow us to undermine the principles of fairness that have made our trial system a model of its kind in the world. I hope very much that the Home Secretary, who has constantly said that he believes in the principles of jury trial, will continue not only in what he tells us here, but in what he does in his office, to uphold them.
Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North): I should like to take a couple of minutes of the time of the House to make a couple of points, one of them general and one brief. The general point is to give a strong welcome to the Bill and to recognise the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and his team. The Bill will be deeply welcomed in areas such as mine, where we are attacked daily by antisocial behaviour. Some of the measures that have been introduced are long overdue and I wish to put on record my thanks to him for the way in which the matter has been pursued.
My specific point is to thank all the parties that were involved in the Committee stage of the Bill for their open-minded efforts in trying to secure a sensible sentencing guidelines council—an aspect of the Bill that has not been remarked upon to any great extent. We are in a position in which the judiciary, this House and the Executive almost seem locked in a constant battle as to what the appropriate sentence is for any given offence. I hope that the efforts that people from all parts of the House put into that work to try to get a well-balanced sentencing guidelines council will be taken further. I believe that we are halfway there in getting that broad-based council. It will be a great achievement if all three arms of the constitution are finally represented on it, perhaps next year or the year after, so that decisions on sentencing can achieve a broad-based consensus throughout society.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are debating the amendments rather than Third Reading.
Mr. Allen: I welcome the amendments that we are considering, which do not include the question about drug testing at 14, to which I would have referred if it had been in order to do so.
I put it on record for my right hon. Friend the now Secretary of State for International Development and hon. Members from all parts of the Committee that some great progress has been made. I thank the Home Secretary for what he has done today.
Simon Hughes: The Home Secretary was kind enough gently to mention that, possibly to the great relief of the Government, this may be the last Home Office Bill for which I am responsible in the near future on the Liberal Democrat Benches. I have been very happy to have that responsibility for the past four years, and I say sincerely to the Home Secretary, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Paul Goggins), and their now Cabinet colleague, the Secretary of State for International Development, that there has been a successful method of co-operation throughout the Bill in terms of extreme courtesy and a continuing ability to
have dialogue with Ministers. I pay tribute to them as a team. Of course, we have had differences of view, which have sometimes been very strong, but the Home Secretary and his team, as well as Baroness Scotland and her colleagues in the Lords, have worked hard to ensure that, where there could be maximum agreement, it has been achieved.I wish to give other inevitable thanks, but I am extremely happy to do so. First, I thank the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) and his successor, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), as well as the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), who has served on the Bill throughout its passage. He and his colleagues in the Lords, whom he has mentioned, together with colleagues such as the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins), who, like me, slaved on the Committee day in, day out, have contributed hugely both from experience and principle to make this a much better Bill.
Last, but absolutely not least, there is my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) and my four Lords colleagues, who did a huge amount of work—
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will address his remarks to the amendments.
Simon Hughes: Baroness Walmsley, Lord Dholakia, Lord Thomas of Gresford and Lord Roper worked over the past three days, as they worked with us previously—
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I have asked the hon. Gentleman to speak to the amendments.
Simon Hughes: My colleagues in the Lords equally worked on the amendments and their drafting and participated in meetings and negotiations in a way that has delivered us with the changes that are before the House.
I shall make a couple of comments on the remaining matters that have occupied us over the past few days and led to the amendments that we are considering. We were left with two substantive matters when the Bill left the Lords on Monday night. We were left first with the question of character and whether any bad character of a defendant could be brought back into play. I tell the Home Secretary that the answers that he gave to the hon. Member for Beaconsfield and the statement on the record in both Houses give us much more reassurance that the principle that a person is presumed innocent until proved guilty will be protected. That must be a fundamental principle of English law because, if changed, it would do away with one of the things that gives people most confidence in the system.
The matter that has occupied us most is whether to keep jury trials. We are grateful to the Home Secretary for accepting that clause 41, which would have meant that people could have elected out of jury trials for serious offences, could go. The clause would have produced a two-tier system. We are grateful that the Home Secretary and his colleagues were able to work with us to ensure that only in exceptional circumstances
after jury nobbling could there be a move away from jury trials.The most difficult measure was the subject of the negotiation that went right up to the wire this evening. We insisted that even in serious fraud cases, there must be a trial before a jury. We hugely welcome the Home Secretary's reassurance that clause 42 will not be implemented, the safeguard of the order subject to the affirmative resolution in both Houses and the prospect of getting a variant of jury trials that will work in such cases.
We have dealt well with the intimidation of juries, but I hope that the amendments will show three other things that will send a message from this place. We have stood by the independence of the judiciary, we have reaffirmed the independence of the magistracy and, above all, we have reaffirmed the primacy of juries. Today has been a good day for Parliament—and both Houses of Parliament—because both Houses have worked to ensure that the amendments that will finally be agreed tonight will uphold those three principles of the English justice system. We have done that part of our work well. We are right to be proud of that and our constituents who go to court in future will be grateful that if their case is serious, they will have a jury to judge them. That principle has stood the test of time for 800 years and this Parliament will uphold it today.
Vera Baird (Redcar): I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary on the amendments and the calibre of the Bill, which will fulfil the functions that he set out to make it fulfil and update and toughen up the criminal justice system. He has always said that trial by jury was not under attack by him at all but that he meant always only to strengthen it by ensuring that it was protected from abuse, especially by hardened criminals who would try to tamper with its functioning. Clause 43, when amended, will satisfactorily ensure that it will be better protected than it has been in the past. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary assured me recently in the House that it would be a last resort to remove a jury from such a trial and the amendments that he is making to the clause will make that position even clearer, so I congratulate him on that.
Clause 41, which will be removed from the Bill, would have allowed an opt-out on jury trials but was never central to my right hon. Friend's purpose, as he perhaps conceded tonight. The greatest and cleverest of us are frequently bedevilled by the law of unintended consequences. It is a great tribute to him, although I am not sure that he accepts them at their fullest, that some of the horror stories that have been put forward as possibly following from the clause are truly realistic. None the less, it is a great tribute to my right hon. Friend that he has acknowledged others' concerns. It has not been his main purpose, but he has been ready to relinquish the clause for the sake of caution and prudence.
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