This is the final question that the noble Earl will be asking me, because today is my 600th day in the job and his penultimate day in your Lordships’ House. I thank him very much for his contribution. There are too many people coming in and out of prison, especially in female establishments. The ave…
My Lords, I strongly support keeping these clauses in the Bill. I admire the moral courage of Ministers in this Government for putting these clauses in the Bill, despite the well-made arguments against doing so.
My calculation is that, in central London, a rampaging terrorist’s life expectancy is a…
My Lords, can I just make an observation that the question is whether we agree these clauses in the Bill or not? If we do not agree the clauses in the Bill, they will fall out of the Bill and then we cannot consider them at a later stage. If we want to consider them at a later stage, we must agree t…
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for moving her amendment. Noble Lords will recall my work on a particular police force and abnormal loads. I am confused that it was the chief inspector who informed the Home Secretary that there was a big problem. I am grateful to her for dealing with i…
My Lords, the bad news is that not all service personnel are absolute angels: it could be one junior soldier stealing a mobile phone from another junior serviceman. These arrangements are very sensible, and I agree with everything that the Minister has had to say. My only question for him, while I a…
My Lords, as well as moving my Amendment 403, I shall also speak to my Amendments 403A, 404, 413, 416D and 416M. We now come to amendments concerned with abnormal load movements and how the police manage them. At Second Reading, I outlined the problem, which is partly about certain officers taking u…
My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend on the Front Bench. I think we grossly underestimate how much damage to the UK economy is caused by stopping motorways, particularly the M25. I have not seen authoritative figures for how much it costs to block a motorway, which happens with road traffic …
My Lords, I have been in your Lordships’ House for 33 years. I have lost count of the number of times that Ministers have said that an amendment is unnecessary, and I have used the same argument myself. That being the case, how is it that we saw the M25 being blocked?
My Lords, I have Amendment 398 in this group. I will first address my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 345. My noble friend Lord Blencathra expertly articulated it, but I fear that I did not find it convincing. As I understand it, he is really proposing a function that should be undertaken only b…
My Lords, just briefly, in 2011, I went out with Hampshire traffic police who were demonstrating ANPR systems to me. We detected an uninsured motorist and they relieved the motorist of the car. I absolutely agree with my noble friend about the problem he describes.
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for the explanations of their amendments. I support the Government’s Amendments 308 and 309 for reasons that will be explained by the Minister. I go further and support the Amendments 312 and 313, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie. It must be so di…
My Lords, the problem of prostitution has been around since biblical times. I can understand why the noble Lord might not be very supportive of Amendments 310 and 311, but does my noble friend on the Front Bench not offer any solution to the problem of prostitution?
My Lords, I speak in strong support of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I do not know whether it is necessary. I declare an interest as a victim. My concern about the historic sex offences is the prison population. We have large numbers of historic sex offenders in prison. It cre…
The curtailment of phase 2a of HS2 was a peremptory decision taken with little thought and, I suggest, no good information. The result is that, as the noble Earl says, the west coast main line is currently full, as decided independently by the regulator, which declined all the applications for open …
The noble Earl is certainly right that the Scottish Government changed the limit. I cannot confirm his analysis of the results. Of course, in determining a new road safety strategy, the Government will not only take evidence but look at what has happened as a consequence of different levels. Whateve…
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her kind words about the new offence with respect to child sexual abuse image generators and I take the opportunity to recognise the work of the specialist police unit that has worked alongside me on these and other issues. Working at the front line of child sexual…
We have sought to explain that. We have said that the security in place at that time at Brize Norton was not good enough. The noble Earl will have seen that since that incident we have been looking at what we do to improve and enhance security in the short term in our military bases, and in the long…
The noble Earl makes a very generous point. I had a meeting with the managing director of the Parliamentary Digital Service yesterday, and one thing that he particularly said to me was that it is in its mission to ensure that the workforce has the right technical skills to deliver the services that …
My Lords, I have sympathy for the amendment and I am happy with the percentage suggested, but there is a difficulty. I spent most of 1995 running an NGO in Rwanda. In the winter of 1997-98, I was engaged in military operations in Bosnia; fortunately, it was a peacekeeping operation and it was for on…
This is the problem, though. When I was running an NGO in Africa, if I had taken a leave of absence and come back to the UK on R&R —some opportunity—but there was a debate about Rwanda, I would not have been able to take part.
The experts who work in the justice system and social services are the best placed to decide how to support mums and their babies when they are in the justice system. We have recently introduced social workers in four prisons. That is a really important role, and I am looking to see how well it is g…
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, who has clearly carefully applied himself to the details, in both his speech and instruction. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for so ably introducing the Bill.
I have the misfortune not to have a special connection to the Malv…
That it be an instruction to the Select Committee to whom the Malvern Hills Bill is committed that— (a) notwithstanding that the promoters themselves are under a restriction which prevents them from promoting provisions in the Bill which would have the effect of changing the existing levy arrangemen…
My Lords, is it correct that in the United Kingdom we have the highest rate of incarceration in Europe and are exceeded only by the United States? When did officials at the offender management units at MoJ realise that we were definitely going to run out of prison places? Was it in this Parliament o…
I thank the noble Earl for the question. Of course, we are aware that it is important to develop greater electricity supply and infrastructure. We are confident that we can work with our partners—on transport with Network Rail and more widely with National Grid—to develop the sort of capacity of whi…
My Lords, it is a great privilege to take part in this debate today, and I am so grateful to the noble Earl for his graciousness and generosity—I am afraid that I was just a little too keen. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough on her excellent maiden speech, and it i…