I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this, we are to take new clause 2—

First, I want to congratulate the Bill's promoter, the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson), on having got it this far. Of course, I have some disagreements with the details of the Bill, some of which he knows about. Others I shall outline in our debate today and on subsequent Fridays, when we shall give the Bill the detailed scrutiny that it requires.

I mean no disrespect to the hon. Member when I say that, on examining the Bill in detail. I feel that it does not appear to have been as well thought out as it might have been. I appreciate that the Home Office has been helpful to the hon. Gentleman, but it is no compliment to the Home Office when I say that the Bill merited further thought. Points of detail show the desire to put the Bill on the statute book with speed without considering the longer-term implications for the integrity of our jury and criminal justice system. Therefore, it is a matter of regret to me that, along with my hon. Friends, I felt it necessary to table several amendments to change the Bill in major respects.

Hon. Members will appreciate that it is unfortunate that the House did not decide to give the Bill a proper Second Reading because that would have ironed out some of the Bill's defects. It would have clarified many of the issues and might indeed have shortened our deliberations today.

I understand that there is a problem regarding the composition of juries in Britain, and I am in no sense saying that there is nothing the matter and that we should simply leave the law as it stands. I recognise that there are defects and I am anxious to try to help to make the Bill as sound as possible.

The Bill's first major defect concerns those matters that are left out. It is not my intention to argue for major increases in the number of people disqualified from jury service, but there are major omissions. The fact that those omissions have occurred is recognised by the hon. Gentleman and the Under-Secretary of State. I do not know whether the Government will seek to make up for those defects later.

New clause 1 seeks to bring within the scope of the Bill people who have been given custodial sentences which have been served outside the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. On the face of it, it is absurd that a person sentenced to imprisonment in Britain who serves that sentence in Britain, should be disqualified from jury service for either a period of 10 years or for life, depending upon the nature of the sentence, when an individual who has had a similar conviction in France or Germany should, on his return to Britain, be fully eligible to serve on a jury. That makes no sense at all.

I have only to mention football hooligans to make that clear. If, after the regrettable behaviour of our football supporters abroad, one of them is convicted and serves a sentence of perhaps a week or two in gaol abroad, on his return to Britain he would be eligible to serve on a jury immediately. A football hooligan who commits his offence not in Paris, Vienna or Brussels, or some other European capital, but in London, Manchester, Liverpool or Southampton would be debarred from jury service for 10 years. I need not give many more examples to show that this must be a defect in our law. It need not apply only to British people who commit offences and serve their sentences abroad. It could also apply to people from abroad coming here, but that will be the subject of later amendments.

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that people who are convicted of football hooligan offences, for which they would usually receive short sentences of imprisonment, be put on probation or made to serve a community service order, should be stopped from serving on juries?

I am saying that it is an anomaly that we should not put on an equal basis people who have been sentenced abroad and people who have been sentenced here. The hon. and learned Gentleman's detailed points are more properly the subject of later amendments. I have serious reservations about the way in which the Bill seeks to disqualify from jury service people who have been placed on probation or who have served a community service order. However, the hon. and learned Gentleman will appreciate that I want to deal with that later. At the moment I am saying that there should be parity between people who have served sentences abroad and those who have served sentences here as regards their eligibility for jury service.

I want to reduce the disqualifications, both for community service orders and for probation, so that there would still be parity between the two. Because of the differences in the criminal justice systems of various countries, it is more difficult to equate non-custodial sentences than it is to equate custodial sentences. A month in prison is understood to be a specific sentence, whether it is served in Paris or London. Other criminal justice systems are different, so the concept of probation and community service orders are more difficult to define. However, I take the hon. and learned Gentleman's point. We can deal with that later.

Is it common practice for foreign countries and their courts to inform the British authorities when they sentence a British national to a term of imprisonment? If not, does the hon. Gentleman seriously believe that that should be the general practice?

As far as I know, it is not the general custom and I have serious misgivings as to whether it should be. Indeed, I do not think that it should. However, I take the hon. Gentleman's point. He will go on to ask how a provision of the sort that I am advocating in new clause 1 could be enforced. I want to come later to the question of enforcement because it runs throughout the Bill, not just in relation to the new clause.

In Committee there was widespread recognition that this was a particularly difficult area and the Home Office gave us no clear sign of how the Bill would be enforced, even for those who were sentenced and imprisoned in Britain or who served community service orders here. It is a difficult area. I am certainly not advocating that there should be a major bureaucratic system whereby one country informs another of such offences. In any case, it would have sinister implications for civil liberties if that were to happen. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 has a bearing on the Bill, and I shall say something about that later.

There are difficulties in the enforecment of the Juries Act 1974 now. It is by no means certain that all individuals who are disqualified from serving on a jury are prevented from so doing. If the nature of the disqualification is made clear to people who are empanelled on a jury, they would be committing a criminal offence by serving on that jury. In the end, that may have to be the main safeguard in the enforceability of this legislation. Any other system would have major implications for civil liberties.

I had a good look at the Juries Act 1974, the basis for this legislation, in relation to the new clauses that I have tabled. The points covered in new clauses 1 and 2 appear not to be covered by that Act. Therefore, the defect in the Act has been carried forward into the Bill. The sin of omission of the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon is not as serious as it would have been had there been scope for the provisions in new clauses 1 and 2 within the Juries Act 1974.

The Bill covers areas outside the United Kingdom—it covers the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Later amendments will be concerned specifically with the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, so I shall not deal with those territories now. I have mentioned the problem of football hooligans and difficulties in European countries, but the issues go wider.

One other matter will impinge significantly on offences committed abroad. I understand that this Session the Government will present a Bill to allow prisoners to be transferred from one country to another.

indicated assent.

The Minister nods.

As the Bill is drafted, if a prisoner serving a sentence in, for example, Holland, is, under the new proposals, to be transferred to serve the remainder of his sentence in the United Kingdom, if that is his wish, he would automatically come within the scope of the Bill. That is my interpretation. Perhaps the Minister will clarify that point. Under the proposed arrangements, the prisoner would no longer serve all his sentence in Holland, but would serve part of it in a prison in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, we do not yet know what the scope of the prisoner transfer treaty legislation will be, so we do not know which countries or offences will be covered. As far as I know, mainly European countries will be covered, and the legislation will not extend to countries where sentencing practices are different from ours. There are obvious reasons for that which are not the subject of our debate.

We would be left in an anomalous position if new clause 1 were not passed. I welcome the idea of prisoner transfer because it is right in principle that prisoners should serve their sentences, wherever possible, in their own country and near their families rather than in distant parts. However, there is a difficulty in that a prisoner transferred to this country would be disqualified from serving on a jury because he was obliged to serve the remainder of his sentence in a British prison, whereas a prisoner in a country with which we did not enter into such an arrangement would have to serve the whole of his sentence in that foreign country and, on return to Britain, would be eligible for jury service as soon as his name came on to the voting list. Within a year—or five months, if the prisoner returned to this country at the beginning of October — the prisoner would be eligible to serve on a jury. For that reason, there is a major anomaly.

Another difficulty is the reason for the latter part of new clause 1. Sometimes an offence in another country is not an offence in this country. Also, what is regarded as a minor offence in this country may be regarded as a serious offence in another country. Therefore, there would be anomalies if there were not the qualification in the second part of new clause 1—

"provided that the conviction would have resulted in a custodial sentence in a court in the United Kingdom or the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man."

I shall give some examples. It is well known that in some countries, for religious reasons, it is illegal to drink alcohol. It is not illegal in this country. It would he absurd to disqualify someone from jury service if he had been sentenced in a foreign country for breaking its law on alcohol. Another example is that in Moscow people have been convicted for selling bibles. It is an offence in some countries to be a member of a trade union. It looks as if that will soon be an offence in this country, but we have not quite got there yet.

The situation is not as clear as the hon. Gentleman makes out. A person who sells bibles in Moscow might also be unjustly charged with an offence that, if committed in this country, on conviction, would carry a custodial sentence. However, for a so-called crime of selling bibles we would not impose such a sentence. The comparison is not as simple as the hon. Gentleman suggests.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Sometimes the offence is not selling bibles. Sometimes it is described as an offence against the state. Acts such as the Official Secrets Act concern offences against the state. Therefore, it is difficult in one new clause to cover all the possibilities. We should have had not one new clause but about 15, but that would have been unduly complicated and beyond my drafting abilities.

Nevertheless, as no proposal was forthcoming from the Government when the Bill was debated in Committee, it would be wrong for the House to allow the measure to go through without the opportunity to consider the implications of the points that the hon. Gentleman and I have made. Otherwise, we should do a disservice to the concept of a jury system that works sensibly and is widely understood.

I shall give one or two other examples. Sometimes political refugees come to this country, who, after a time, would normally be eligible for jury service, but they may have run foul of the law in their own countries. That may be why they sought admission to this country as political refugees. It would be absurd for us to penalise them, by denying them their civil rights, for an offence committed in another country. If we penalised them, that would be in breach of the standards that we advocate.

An example is the number of refugees who have sought admission to this country from Iran, who were fleeing for their lives and may have run foul of the law in that country for reasons that we would consider not reprehensible but worthy. People who object to regimes in other countries such as South Africa, El Salvador and Chile, make their way to this country as political refugees. We would not wish to penalise them. That is why I inserted the provision that the conviction

"would have resulted in a custodial sentence in a court in the United Kingdom".

It is a difficult matter. I appreciate that the way in which people are charged in a foreign country would have to have some influence on the way in which the charge was interpreted here.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, if his new clause is to be practical, it would be necessary for someone in this country to make a value judgment about whether the charge was trumped up or genuine?

I accept that the wording of new clause 1 is defective to that extent, if not in other respects, because of the difficulty of interpreting the nature of charges in other countries. Whether a charge would be equivalent to a charge in this country is a quite different matter. In practice, it would not apply to all that many people. Individuals coming from abroad to Britain, possibly as political refugees, would not be eligible to go on the voting list, which is a precondition of being selected for jury service. Section 1 of the 1974 Act provides that eligibility applies if

"he is for the time being registered as a parliamentary or local government elector and is not less than eighteen nor more than sixty-five years of age; and he has been ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man for any period of at least five years since attaining the age of thirteen."

Some of those about whom we are talking would be debarred from serving on juries because of the 1974 Act. But whereas the criterion of being on a voting list is clear and can be tested and seen objectively, the qualification that someone should have been in this country for at least five years since attaining the age of 13 is rather more difficult. I doubt whether all those who serve on juries necessarily qualify in that respect.

Given the length of time that people will be disqualified under the Bill, we shall have to consider the matter under a later amendment. My only concern is to bring a little sanity to what would appear to be a major anomaly. Some of the examples I gave may be a little far-fetched, but the question of British football hooligans or other Britons committing offences abroad, serving sentences abroad and then returning to Britain is relevant to the Bill—even if, because of the existing nature of the qualification arrangements under the 1974 Act, some of the examples I gave would not be relevant until people had been in this country long enough to qualify for jury service.

New clause 2 concerns a different matter. It deals with people who have been sentenced by court martial or standing civilian court under the various statutes specified in the new clause. Such people would mainly be in the armed forces, or civilians working in association with and helping the armed forces in some station abroad. I interpret the Bill as meaning that any soldier court martialled and given a custodial sentence—indeed, possibly some other sentence—in Britain would be disqualified. Although that is my interpretation of the Bill, there is an element of ambiguity and I would welcome some clarification of the matter.

It would clearly be anomalous if a soldier who had committed an offence which would also be an offence under civilian law were allowed to serve on a jury subsequent to his discharge from the forces, while an ordinary citizen would be disqualified. That is the basic thinking in trying to get new clause 2 within the ambit of the Bill.

There are one or two difficulties. Not all sentences by court martial are civilian offences. I have been studying information about custody within the armed forces. It is not easy to obtain, but I understand that there are two service detention establishments in Britain — the royal naval detention quarters at Portsmouth and the military corrective training centre at Colchester. When I did my national service, we called them glasshouses. Perhaps that expression is still used.

There may be a number of similar establishments abroad, but I do not have the details of them. There are bound to be such establishments wherever British troops are serving. It probably depends on the severity of the sentence whether a person will serve his sentence abroad or whether he will be brought back to Colchester or Portsmouth. The figures that I have apply to both Colchester and Portsmouth. Some of the offences would be parallel with civilian offences.

I obtained my figures from the minutes of evidence given to the 1976 Select Committee dealing with the Armed Forces Bill, and they relate to 1975. They show that in that year 1,328 military people were admitted to the military corrective training centre at Colchester and 882 to Portsmouth. The offences included vehicle offences, indecency, drugs, violence and theft. However, they also included two offences that would hardly have a civilian parallel—desertion or absence without leave, for which 714 persons were admitted to Colchester and 282 to Portsmouth, and disobedience or insubordination, for which 27 persons were admitted to Colchester and 229 to Portsmouth. I wonder about the differences between the figures for the two establishments, but that is not relevant now.

Obviously it would be necessary to look at the nature of the offence. It would hardly be right that desertion or absence without leave from the armed forces, for which a custodial sentence had been imposed by a court martial, should disqualify someone from jury service. I appreciate that it is a tangled and complex area. To allow for all the possibilities would make what is a very simple Bill into one that would be far too complicated.

The hon. Gentleman is giving a virtuoso performance. He is proposing a new clause and then arguing against it. What is he saying to the House? Is it that the Bill should include all court martials, or that because they comprise some offences that are not general civilian offences we should not include them? Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is just taking up time that he should not take up.

The last possibility put forward by the Minister is not correct. I have put forward a new clause but I have admitted that there may be some anomalies in its wording. We had no guidance in Committee from either the Minister or the promoter of the Bill, so it is reasonable to put questions to the Government. It is clear that the Minister will admit that there is a major defect in the Bill. It is reasonable for me to put forward the new clause even though I appreciate that there may be technical difficulties in one or two respects. I was hoping for more help from the Minister as he has had the opportunity to study the Bill in far more detail than I have been able to do.

A more substantial defect and criticism of what the hon. Gentleman said is that existing law already makes provision for the disqualification of persons who have been convicted under the Acts that he has cited. He must make a case that it is necessary to introduce the new clause at all. Is he really arguing that the Army Act 1955, the Air Force Act 1955 and the Naval Discipline Act 1957 are not already covered by existing legislation and that, therefore, they must be included in any amendment?

I have studied the Juries Act 1974 several times. I cannot find any provision covering my intention in new clause 2. My understanding is that, currently, a soldier may serve six months in custody in Colchester, could be discharged from the forces and would be eligible to serve as a member of a jury as soon as his name went on the electoral register. If that is wrong, it is a misinterpretation on my part.

The fact remains that because of the wider provisions of the Bill — that is, the larger number of people who will be disqualified — the new clause must have relevance, whether or not I am right on the first point. I am arguing the point for the sake of logic and consistency, not because I want to get into the deeper complexities of some offences which are military and not civilian offences.

As I pointed out, I am concerned because not all sentences before courts martial are civilian offences. It is also difficult to draw a precise parallel between probation and community service orders in civilian courts and what happens to members of the armed forces, because the punishments are of a different order and, again, there is difficulty in equating a military punishment with a civilian one.

We have arrived quickly at some tangled points of detail. Nevertheless, there is a point of principle here and there are defects in the Bill. Probably the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon was reluctant, if he thought of the point at all, to deal with it because it would have made the Bill more complicated. I am simply saying that, while we are considering what is a significant measure in terms of the jury system, we should not readily allow anomalies either to creep in or to be perpetuated.

I am grateful for the opportunity of a Report stage and — glancing hopefully at the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs)—a Third Reading for the Bill today.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Battersea for the personal diligence with which he has researched the measure and for the painstaking care with which he has combed through every line. The attendance on the Labour Benches behind him, at least for the first 30 minutes of his speech, was a living testament to the extent to which his sentiments are shared by his hon. Friends.

The hon. Gentleman said that he meant no offence to me when he said that the Bill might have merited further thought. I hope that he will accept that I mean no offence to him when I say that the same could be said about some of the amendments. I can see a certain degree of logic behind new clause 1, although I shall, for other reasons, ask the House not to support it. If the purpose of the Bill is to keep serious criminals off juries, obviously there is a strand of logic in saying that it should not matter too much whether he is a criminal in the United Kingdom or anywhere else in the world. That I understand and acknowledge. However, that understanding and acknowledgement is not sufficient to lead me to support the new clause.

One of the great merits of the Bill as drafted is that it is simple to understand. The disqualification from jury service is based on the sentence received. In being sentence-based it has the benefit of simplicity. It follows, however, that the Bill, if it were to apply to anywhere other than the United Kingdom, could apply only to a legal and penal system which had a sentencing policy directly compatible with ours. That situation does not exist elsewhere in the world. The hon. Member for Battersea may mention other countries, but no other country has a sentencing policy directly comparable with ours, and immense complications would creep in if an amendment on the lines that he has suggested were adopted.

10.15 am

The secondary purpose of the Bill is to ensure that people in Britain who serve on a British jury have faith in the British system of justice. There is no reason why somebody who feels that he has been offended by the Botswana or Saudi Arabian system of justice should carry that offence forward into a feeling of offence against the British system of justice. Indeed, the reverse might have occurred; his faith in the British jury system could have been restored as a result of the treatment that he received in some other country.

I ask the House to reject the new clause because it would be impracticable and unworkable. Not only would it ask people to consider what offences they might have committed in the past and where they might have been committed; it would ask the highly hypothetical question whether those offences, if committed in the United Kingdom, would have resulted in a custodial sentence. That would be an entirely unrealistic question to ask any potential juror.

I ask hon. Members to put themselves in the position of somebody who happened to be abroad seven or eight years ago. That person is now living at home in Bishops Stortford or somewhere suitably anonymous in the home counties. Through the letterbox one day drops a little form inviting him to serve on a jury. At the bottom of page 4 of the form he sees the small print of the new clause. At that point he remembers the occasion, seven years previously, when his ship put into port at, say, Fernando Po. He remembers the port well. He remembers the evening, the night club, what went on afterwards and, with dismal regret, he remembers the following morning in the local magistrates court and the sentence that he then received.

He is now asked to remember whether, if that offence had been committed in the United Kingdom, it would—not could, but would — have resulted in a custodial sentence. He must, in addition, put himself in the position of the average magistrate on the Clapham omnibus and try to decide whether that offence committed at that time would, under British law, have resulted in his being sent to prison. On the basis of that judgment he must fill in his jury form. If that judgment is held to be in error by some court official who comes to the conclusion that the offence would have resulted in a prison sentence in the United Kingdom, the potential juror would have committed an offence through filling in the jury form falsely. Because of that impracticality, the new clause would damage the Bill.

The second new clause has a greater strand of logic to it, a strand that I can cheerfully accept, though it is virtually superfluous as the law exists. The hon. Member for Battersea said that he had turned several times to the 1974 Act. It is regrettable that he did not turn to the 1967 Act which, if not the parent of the Bill, is at least one of the grandparents. In that Act there is reference to the Criminal Justice Act 1961, section 38(2)(b) of which refers to custodial sentences awarded in the armed forces and covers virtually all the points that the hon. Gentleman made. The House can, therefore, readily reject both new clauses.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) on bringing forward a much-needed measure, which will make a substantial contribution to the public appreciation of the sanctity of the jury system. It will remove some of the criticism and absurdity when people who have no interest in justice are sitting on juries and thereby taking an important part in the administration of justice.

I thank the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) for his close interest in the Bill because it is important that even the most simple and necessary of measures should be made subject to close scrutiny. Only by that process can we make sure that every eventuality is covered and that matters that would otherwise slip by are given due attention.

I do not, however, agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon if he is saying that we should be attacking only the evil of someone who has contempt for the British legal system. That is one of the evils that we must be opposing but it is not by any means the only one. I do not accept that those who have a clear and proven propensity to dishonesty should sit on our juries, irrespective of whether they have a contempt for the British system of justice. I do not think that those who are mentally unstable and given to acts of violence for which they have been punished in courts of law should sit on our juries, irrespective of whether they may or may not have contempt for the British legal system. If my hon. Friend is advancing the Bill on the narrow basis that it must deal only with someone who has contempt for the British legal system, I beg leave to disagree with him. I think that the Bill's attention should go wider than that.

That would bring me logically to support new clause 1. The spirit of the clause is right for the reasons that I have given. Any kind of acutely dishonest person should not sit on juries, and the same goes for any violently unstable person who has been proven to be unstable. However, logic is one thing and practicality is another, and I am inclined to agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon that it is somewhat impracticable to apply the criteria that would be necessary in the circumstances to make new clause 1 effective.

However, a certain amount of justification for the clause will be joined to this measure in due course. For if the Repatriation of Prisoners Bill becomes law, those who are eligible for sentences of imprisonment in Britain, even though they have been imposed abroad, will automatically be covered by the provisions in the Bill to a substantial extent. Those who would otherwise be outside the ambit of the Bill will be brought into it. Some of the difficulties that the hon. Member for Battersea envisages will be embraced within the system in any event. I accept that the impracticalities of new clause 1 would be considerable and therefore reluctantly, for there is much merit in the spirit of the hon. Gentleman's arguments, I must support the opposition to new clause 1. I do not see any point in introducing a new measure to the statute book which is too complicated for people immediately to understand.

As for new clause 2, I make no criticism of the hon. Member for Battersea for not knowing that offences under military legislation come within the ambit of existing civil legislation if they result in custody. Why should he know that merely by reading the parent legislation? I expect that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will confirm what I have just said with all the authority that he brings to these matters. If that is so, and my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon and I seem to be in agreement, there is no point in cluttering up the statute book with additional words that are unnecessary. I do not think that there will be many left in doubt that the position is well covered by existing legislation. I join in the opposition to new clause 2.

First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) on introducing the Bill and on having taken it so far. I hope very much that the House will enable the Bill to pass successfully through its consideration on Report and will give it a Third Reading today. On behalf of the Government, I pledge our total support for it.

It is clear to us that there are too many people with quite serious criminal records who are permitted by the present arrangements to serve on juries, because the present system of disqualifications is outmoded. It has been rendered outmoded by the emergence of new sentences such as suspended sentences and community service orders, expressly devised alternatives to imprisonment that catch people who 15 to 20 years ago would have gone to prison but who now do not. As a consequence, they do not find themselves disqualified. This is not acceptable and the issue has been drawn to our attention in many newspaper articles, which have highlighted the consequences of convicted criminals serving on juries. We discussed some of the cases in Committee and if necessary I shall remind the House, as I know my hon. Friend will, of some of them later if anyone really needs persuading that the Bill is necessary.

The proposals of my hon. Friend will markedly widen the bands of disqualification, but in no sense does he go too far. I shall demonstrate later that the Bill contains relatively modest proposals compared with others that have been put before the House.

If the integrity of the jury system is to be maintained, it is crucial that people should not serve on juries who might be seen in the light of their criminal records to have little or no allegiance to the system of justice and no interest in maintaining it. I hope that that will be the view of all those who are gathered in the Chamber today. I cannot think of anyone on the Opposition Benches who would have the remotest interest in trying to perpetuate a situation in which those with lengthy criminal records were permitted to serve on juries.

The hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) began rather pretentiously by talking about difficulties. We shall see during the course of what promises to be a lengthy and interesting day precisely what the nature of those difficulties is. At present we see them only "through a glass darkly". There is some evidence that the difficulties that the hon. Gentleman sees are those on the side of making it more difficult for those with criminal records to serve on juries. However, there is more than a hint—this is a point to which I shall return if later debates take their promised course—that the difficulties that the hon. Gentleman finds are those that will lead to too many crooks continuing to serve on juries. If that is the way in which his argument develops, I am not sure that that will be regarded outside the House as a particularly reputable argument to be advanced in the House by a spokesman of the official Opposition.

We shall find whether on these matters of detail the difficulties upon which the hon. Gentleman dwelt at considerable and perhaps inordinate length, especially in moving the new clause, are those of real substance or are only difficulties that exist in his own mind, rather in the way of the man who thinks that he has pink elephants in his drawing room, is utterly convinced that they are there, and takes a great deal of persuading that they are not. As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) has said, only those who are sentenced by a court martial overseas to 28 days or less and are not sent back to Britain will not be covered by the Bill.

I do not want to take up the time of the House by repeating the arguments that were advanced so eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon. My hon. Friend pointed out with striking eloquence the difficulties presented in new clause 1.

The hon. Member for Battersea is starting what promises to be a lengthy day as close to a good point as he is likely to get. At least he has made reference to a possible difficulty and hiatus in the Bill—one that we all acknowledge. Plainly, if someone is convicted of a very serious offence overseas, it can be said that he should be brought within the provisions of the Bill. If there were an easy way of doing that, I would be much attracted to the idea. However, there is no consistency in sentencing practice outside the United Kingdom, or any consistent view of what or what is not a criminal offence.

If minded to make such a provision—and there are reasons why, in many cases, I would want to do so—we would have to indulge in the speculative venture of predicting what the sentence might or might not have been had the individual committed the offence and been brought to book in Britain. That would be contrary to the interests of justice overall to a greater degree than the danger to justice that is posed if people return after serving in foreign prisons and are then called to jury service. The point is narrowly balanced, but, on balance, I am persuaded by the eloquence of my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon that we are right to resist it.

The hon. Gentleman's principal concern seems to be that the civil rights of offenders should not be denied. There is therefore a slight illogicality, to put it mildly, in his advancing a new clause which involves the very difficult exercise of predicting — presumably not just upon the view of the offender — what the sentence imposed in this country would have been. That does not sit easily with the hon. Gentleman's primary concern which, to judge from his arguments in Committee, is that the civil rights of offenders should not be violated by the proposals in the Bill. Our concern is for the best interests of justice.

The Minister's accusations against me are totally unfounded and have no basis in the new clause. The upshot of what the Minister is saying is that it would be too complicated to change the Bill in order to pre vent a British football hooligan sentenced abroad from serving on a jury, whereas a similar football hooligan sentenced in this country would be debarred.

Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Because of the reasons connected with people sentenced in Arab countries for drinking offences and so on, it 'would be difficult to remove that anomaly. Although the hon. Gentleman detained the House for 33 minutes, he did not suggest any practical way in which that distinction could be made. That suggests that, in the case of his new clause, all is not quite as it appears on the surface.

It is only fair that I should give the hon. Gentleman candidly, on the first opportunity that I have to do so on the Floor of the House, my initial impression of his new clauses. I did so with equal forthrightness in relation to the amendments that he tabled in Committee. I believe that his concern with the Bill is that it attempts to keep too many crooks off juries. If he wishes to make lengthy speeches today in order to tell me that I am wrong, I will give him three cheers. I hope that in the hours of debate before us he will make it clear that the official Opposition share the concern of the police force, many members of the public and many reputable organs of the press about the presence on juries of a number of people who 20 years ago would have been disqualified but who, because of an uncorrected anomaly, are now free — notwithstanding a lengthy list of convictions—to serve on juries. If he can show that the problems that that will pose—the possibility of the bringing in of perverse verdicts and the fact that such people would be much more readily open to bribery or blackmail—are of as much concern to the Opposition as they are to me, this debate will have been a useful exercise.

I will return to the point that the Minister has put to me when we discuss the later amendments. However, if we follow the logic of his arguments, is he not saying that anybody who is convicted of any criminal offence in this country, even if the sentence is a fine, should be debarred from serving on a jury? I am not saying that too many crooks are being kept off juries. I am saying that there is a dividing line and one must decide where to draw it.

No doubt the hon. Gentleman will refine his points during the debate, but if that is all that he wishes to say I shall have a little more sympathy for his position, even if I cannot agree with him.

Many people would prefer the list of disqualified persons to be widened even further than it is by this measure. When the hon. Gentleman rehearsed his arguments in Committee, it was not just my hon. Friends who were profoundly sceptical. The hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Ryman) who, having been a practitioner in the criminal courts for some 20 years, is more concerned with the administration of justice and a little less troubled about interference with the civil rights of criminals, also felt that this was too modest a measure, and indeed gave the hon. Gentleman the biggest tongue-lashing that he has probably ever had from a colleague.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will give way in a minute. I do not include the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) in my strictures. I know that he is troubled by many of these points.

My hon. Friend the Member for New Forest (Mr. McNair-Wilson) introduced a private Member's Bill last Session which would have disqualified anyone who had been convicted of an offence that could have led to a sentence of imprisonment being imposed — whether or not it did so — unless the sentence was one of conditional or absolute discharge. Under such a Bill over 1 million people would have been disqualified. I made it clear that I supported that measure. However, it met with some opposition, and my hon. Friend has therefore thought it right to restrict the grounds of disqualification to come to terms with that opposition.

The House of Lords contains many distinguished Members with considerable experience of legal matters, and it is right that they should play an active part in these proceedings. Last Session, Lord Wigoder introduced a measure providing for the extension of disqualification to those convicted on two occasions of offences that could have been tried on indictment, even if they were in the event tried in magistrates courts. That formulation was too complex. My hon. Friend has thought about these suggestions and come back to the House with a measure that in effect merely recognises the advances and changes in penal policy since the present list of disqualifications was formulated in the 1967 Act after the Morris committee sat in 1965. Suspended sentences and community service orders are express alternatives to custody, and one must assume that anyone convicted and sentenced in that way would otherwise have gone to prison.

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It is also clear that as a result of the dramatic increase in resources the probation service is now better equipped than ever to deal not just with the minor offender but with more serious offenders. It therefore seemed right to my hon. Friend—and I agree with him—that we should extend disqualification to those who have been sentenced to a term of probation. My hon. Friend recognises that at this point he is drawing near to a borderline. He therefore halved from 10 to five years the length of time for which someone will be disqualified. Intellectually, this is a cogent set of proposals.

I have praised the hon. Member for Blyth Valley, and eureka, he has appeared. He and my learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) and a number of criminal law practitioners whom I know only too well believe that this proposal is not too severe but too modest.

Against that background, we will view with ever-increasing scepticism the proposals of the official Opposition to water down what is already a fairly effectively watered down proposal.

I had not intended to intervene at this stage, although I intended to do so later. I do so now because the Minister has taken the argument much wider than I expected. He cited the example of suspended sentences. As we know from his public statements, he is well aware that the effect of such sentences has been to increase rather than to decrease the number of people going to prison because the powers were inappropriately used and added a further rung to the ladder of escalation to prison——

Order. The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) has been tempted by the Minister to go rather wide. I appreciate that the Minister is trying to help the House by setting the scene, as it were, for the amendments which are to follow. Nevertheless, we must not anticipate amendments or stray into a Second Reading debate.

I was conscious of straying in that direction and I accept your courteous guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I should merely add that I am not prepared to suggest that the courts have been using the powers improperly, but anyone who has transgressed to the extent of receiving a suspended period of imprisonment should not, in my view, play a crucial part in the administration of justice in the 1980s.

If that is the division between the position of my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon and the Government and that of the official Opposition, for which the hon. Member for Hammersmith speaks in another capacity, let us be clear about it as the public should know what credibility to attach to recent rather populist observations from the Leader of the Opposition suggesting that law and order policy would be safe in the hands of the Labour party. As the hours roll on, we shall listen with great interest to the official Opposition spokesman on this as I believe that the proposition that law and order is safe with Labour is very much on trial in the Opposition response to my hon. Friend's Bill.

I beg to move amendment No. 1, in page 1, line 8, leave out 'ten' and insert 'seven'.

I welcome the opportunity to introduce the amendment, the more so because I can now answer fully within the terms of the amendment the allegations made by the Minister in the debate on new clauses 1 and 2.

It is quite wrong for the Minister, as a by-product of a discussion about the nature of our jury system, to accuse the Opposition of not believing in law and order and the catching and bringing to justice of criminals. He came close to saying that anyone who had committed any offence at all should be barred from jury service. I do not believe that any person in this country would go so far as that. It is entirely consistent to believe strongly that criminals should be caught and brought to justice and in the importance of a proper jury system that is fair and seen to be fair.

The Minister knows as well as anyone that people who are fined are not caught by the Bill whereas those who receive other types of sentence are caught. The amendment covers the whole range of people who have committed the offences covered by the Bill.

That exposes exactly the dilemma. If, having made the point about fines, the hon. Gentleman proposed that they should be included in the list of disqualifications, we could at least respect the fact that we started from the same standpoint. His position seems to be, however, that because for perfectly proper reasons my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) took the view that fines covered too wide a range of offences and that on balance he wished to exclude them, although at the upper end they relate to fairly serious offences, that argument can be used to prise out other exclusions. That calls into question his genuine commitment to any measure that will actually bite on a problem that concerns not just Conservative Members but his own former colleague Lord Harris, who wrote an eloquent article about it in The Times in far more stringent terms than I have used and who held the onerous office of Minister of State, Home Office throughout the Labour Government.

The Minister's intervention was so long that it was virtually a speech, but I will try to develop those arguments as the debate proceeds.

New clauses 1 and 2 sought to increase the number of people disqualified from serving on juries. The Minister is now using that to say that we seek to reduce the number of people able to serve on juries. Certainly, some of the later amendments are intended to have that effect, but if we are to have a sensible jury system we must discuss seriously and not in such impassioned terms the point at which it is reasonable and proper to draw the line between excluding anyone who has had any criminal convictions and excluding only those who have served long periods in prison. The line must be drawn somewhere and the question underlying almost all the amendments is where it should be drawn.

It is quite improper for the Minister to make allegations purely for party political advantage when he well knows that we are all united in the wish to have a jury system that works reasonable and effectively. There may be differences of judgment about where the line should be drawn, which was the reason for some of the debates in Standing Committee, but the allegations that he has made today suggest that he wants a different set of debates from those that most hon. Members wish.

It is no use the hon. Gentleman simply saying that and expecting us to accept it. It is by his deeds that he shall be known, not just by what he says. Far from tightening up the law, the amendment will make it easier for anyone sentenced to between three months and five years' imprisonment to serve on a jury earlier. The present disqualification is for 10 years. The hon. Gentleman proposes to reduce it to seven years. That being so, it is no wonder that we are profoundly sceptical about his commitment.

I must throw that one back at the Minister as I have doubts about his own commitment to these issues when, instead of having a Bill produced by his Department on a matter about which he claims to feel so strongly, he is content to ride on the coattails of the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) who had the good fortune to come high in the ballot for private Members' Bills. If the Minister judges the matter to be so serious why did he not get the Department to prepare legislation rather than allowing it to be introduced in this way and then trying to claim credit for taking a stand when, but for the vagaries of the ballot, there might have been no such legislation this Session? The Minister cannot have it both ways.

Again, in seeking to wriggle off the hook of a perfectly sound charge against him, the hon. Gentleman gets it wrong. Our manifesto contains a commitment to legislate on this. That commitment is significantly absent from the Labour manifesto, so heaven knows what a Labour Government would have done. The manifesto sets out a programme for an entire Parliament. The question of what conies in when is always difficult. As the hon. Gentleman knows, important Home Office legislation has already gone through this Session. It would have been nonsense to tell my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon, given his commitment to introduce this measure, that we wanted to do it ourselves so it would have to wait another year. My hon. Friend is perfectly capable of taking the Bill through, provided that there is some commitment from the Opposition. That is what seems to be absent today.

Order. Earlier, I explained to the House that I would allow a fairly wide-ranging debate on new clause 1 to set the scene for the other amendments. My duty is to protect the business of the House. There is much business on today's Order Paper. We are now dealing with the fairly restricted point of whether there should be a disqualification period of 10 years or seven years. I ask hon. Members to address themselves to that narrow point.

I agree completely with what you have said, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The Under-Secretary of State briefly described the present disqualification provisions under the Juries Act 1974. At present, anyone who has served a sentence of five or more years is disqualified from jury service for life, and anyone who has had a prison sentence of three months or longer is disqualified from jury service forthe following 10 years. The amendment concerns the change being made in the Bill.

The Bill brings a greatly increased number of people within its scope. The Under-Secretary of State estimated that about 250,000 people — I may have the figure wrong—would, from now on, be disqualified from jury service. That disqualification covers not only people who have served a prison sentence of more than three months—the present position — but those who have served much shorter sentences and those who have received other punishments that are not custodial.

We should consider reducing the number of years of disqualification from 10 to seven not, as the Under-Secretary of State said, because that is a way of getting more crooks on to juries. The Bill, with the amendment, would greatly reduce the number of people qualified for jury service. As the Bill is drafted, it brings a large number of people within its scope.

Is it right that the disqualification period should be that long for all the sentences contained in clause 1? Frankly, I have doubts about that, notwithstanding the hon. Gentleman's strictures. I shall give the reasons for my doubts in a nutshell. It is all very well to say that someone who has committed a criminal offence is therefore suspect as a jury member. People who have served their sentences and are going straight have the right to be regarded as law-abiding citizens in all respects. We should be careful before we stipulate too long a period during which they are disqualified from serving on a jury, merely because it is suspected that one or two of them might not be totally in sympathy with the aims they serve on a jury.

People serving on juries will include those who have committed offences and never been caught and those who have never committed offences but are still hostile to the idea of bringing criminals to justice. The Under-Secretary of State is too glibly making a direct association between people who have committed certain offences and their motives for serving on a jury.

The main reason the disqualification period should be reduced from 10 years to seven years is that people who have committed offences and then gone straight have the right to be rehabilitated in all senses of the word. If they are not, they cannot become law-abiding citizens. They cannot be expected to go straight if society continues to penalise them long after they have served the formal sentences imposed by the courts. That is the main reason we passed the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. That is why we say that, after a certain period, people are rehabilitated and should, in all respects, be entitled to be treated as if they had never been sentenced and punished.

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that someone who cannot sit on a jury because he is disqualified is more likely to commit further offences because we are not rehabilitating him to the 100 per cent. level?

I am not saying that. The matter is not that simple, as the hon. and learned Gentleman knows. We must think hard before we state that, in addition to serving a sentence, many years must pass before those individuals are treated in all respects as having expunged their offences and therefore able to take part in society in the same way as everyone else. We must consider how much we load the practices of our society against the ex-criminal so that, in the following years, he will continue to be punished in a different sense. The purpose of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act was to deal with those people. Hon. Members who served on the Standing Committee will recall that the Committee debated an amendment to give parity to the terms of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act and the period during which individuals are disqualified from jury service.

The hon. Gentleman has used the words "penalised" and "punished" about someone prevented from sitting on a jury. A person whose civil rights are affected in that way is not penalised in the same way as if, for example, he had been deprived of a vote at a general election. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we must bear in mind that a judge in a jury trial will first look for a unanimous verdict, or, at least, a verdict of 10 to two? The hon. Gentleman referred to one or two people who may not be completely rehabilitated. Two or three people sitting on a jury might interfere considerably with the interests of justice. Should not the interests of justice be paramount in our thinking on this matter?

Justice matters a great deal. There is a difficulty in the hon. Gentleman's point, and I believe that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that problem. I referred to it a few moments ago. There is no direct relationship between a person who has served a prison sentence or who has been punished in another way and a person who is unwilling to treat jury service in the way we would wish. There is no relationship between people who have never committed a criminal offence and their willingness to serve with the right motives on a jury. One of the difficulties of a jury system is that juries will always include people—even though we might debar some of them under the Bill—whose motives may not be as pure and proper as we wish. That problem is inherent in a jury system. If we go down that path, we can ask why there should be a jury rather than one, two or three judges. We would become involved in difficulties similar to those in Northern Ireland. We must say that we firmly believe in the jury system, and that we will discuss the amendment in terms of whether it will help to make the jury system better. We should do that in relation to the Bill's proposals and the amendment I have tabled.

We must consider the way people who have been offenders take their place in society. The amendment means not that we shall have more crooks serving on juries, as the Under-Secretary of State said, but that society will be better protected if people who have committed criminal offences are, after serving their punishment, enabled to have all the civil rights, freedoms and powers ordinary people normally would have. That is a simple proposition. Some of the disqualification provisions in the Bill go too far.

It would be appropriate to reduce the period of disqualification from 10 years to seven years. People who at present are for 10 years debarred from jury service will be debarred for seven years if my amendment is accepted. A far greater number of people will be disqualified under a combination of my amendment and the Bill as it stands.

11 am

We are talking about people who, at the moment, are not disqualified — those who have served less than a three-month custodial sentence — and who, under my amendment, would be disqualified for seven years. That does not seem an unreasonable proposition. Those on suspended sentences, who clearly may not be as much of a threat to society as those put inside, would now be disqualified for seven years, as would people on community service orders. The Minister has said that a community service order is an alternative to imprisonment, and because more people are given alternatives to imprisonment, we should not be too easy on them. He said that in years gone by they would have been put inside but now, because we have different methods of punishment, they are not.

The Minister has forgotten one thing. It is the courts that have decided that some people do not deserve the rigours of a custodial sentence, for whatever reason—and the courts are there to look into those reasons—and that they should be given a punishment that does not take them out of society. That is why we have suspended sentences, community service orders, and probation, to which we shall be coming later.

The purpose of my amendment is to deal with those who have served shorter prison sentences, and for whom seven years' disqualification would seem to be enough, and, secondly, with people on community service orders and suspended sentences.

There is another matter to which I wish to refer, which the Minister has not yet mentioned. It is regrettable that many people who come before the courts and who are sentenced tend, on completion of their sentence, to re-offend and have a further sentence imposed upon them. The figures are alarming, but the fact that that happens means that habitual offenders who have already run foul of the law will be debarred from jury service anyway. Even if we reduce the period of disqualification from 10 to seven years the statistics show that the likelihood of such people re-offending is that they will do so within seven years. It is most unusual for someone who has committed an offence not to commit another for at least seven years, if they are to go on committing offences. The number of people who would be excluded from serving on juries by this amendment would not be all that many.

There is another group of people about whom I am worried and who have not been mentioned — fine defaulters who are sent to prison. As the Bill stands, fine defaulters sent to prison even for a short period — as I interpret the Bill — are likely to be debarred from jury service. If that is not the case I should be delighted to hear it.

I make no point of criticism; may I assure the hon. Gentleman that that is not the case.

About 21,000 fine defaulters a year go to prison. If they are not to be excluded from jury service, I am relieved, because that takes one large group of people out of the scope of the Bill.

The tendency to re-offend, which is a distressing one, makes a material difference to the number of people who will be caught by the Bill's provisions. We should take that fact into account before saying that the amendment will affect a significant number of people. I do not know the figures. The Minister, with all the resources of the Home Office at his disposal, would be better placed to tell the House what difference my amendment would make to the number of people affected. It seems to me that it probably would not make all that much difference but it would make enough to make the amendment worth while.

My argument for the amendment, in a nutshell, is that while, of course, we should keep off juries people who have recently committed serious offences and been punished for them, we should think hard before we make the period of disqualification so long, as, in effect, to be saying to people, "No matter what the offence, though you have had some punishment other than a fine, you will be debarred from serving on a jury for a very long time." Excluding probation, we are talking about a disqualification for 10 years. That is too long. We must arrive at a balance. On balance, I believe that the 10-year period is too long, and that is why I have tabled the amendment.

It is beginning to take a degree of fortitude to listen to the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) and my hon. Friend the Minister engaging in a rather esoteric game of parliamentary ping-pong over the finer points of what is, at the end of the day, my Bill. I shall, therefore, be relatively brief in putting the case against the amendment. It is easy to be brief, because the amendment runs counter to the Bill's main purpose.

At the moment, 250,000 people are disqualified from jury service. They are people who have been sent to prison for five years or more, in which case they are disqualified for life, or they are people who have been to prison for between three months and five years in which case they are disqualified for 10 years.

The purpose of the Bill is to increase the number of people disqualified from jury service. The effects of the Bill, as drafted, will be make a further 250,000 people ineligible, which will therefore mean about 500,000 people being disqualified from jury service. It is a modest measure.

Surely the hon. Gentleman's intention is not to increase the number of people disqualified, but to be sure that he is disqualifying people who could not. be relied on to respect the rules of law while carrying out jury service.

That is the purpose, but I suggest——

It is different.

I do not believe that it is. I suggest that to look at the number of people who are disqualified is a reasonable way to measure the effect of the Bill upon restoring confidence in the jury system generally.

The Bill has been widely welcomed as a modest measure. It has had two predecessors in the past three or four years, both of which would probably have had the effect of disqualifying about 1 million people from jury service. The Bill goes only half that far. As there has been a wide welcome for the Bill outside this place, I am reluctant to accept any amendment which would reduce below 500,000 the number of people disqualified from jury service and could, conceivably, reduce the number below the present 250,000. That is the principal reason for my objection.

The second reason why I ask the House to reject the amendment comes from the painstaking care with which I have listened to the speech of the hon. Member for Battersea. The hon. Gentleman seems to have based almost all his observations on the offender's point of view—the person who has been to prison.

I consider the Bill occasionally in that light, but more frequently, and I suggest more necessarily, I study the need for the Bill through the eyes of the average British citizen who looks to the judicial system for some protection from the lawlessness that he sees around him.

I ask hon. Members to consider the feelings of the average British citizen if he were to hear that in 1984 courts were to have juries composed of people who had been in prison as recently as 1977. If that were to be the case, which is a substantial dilution of the present law, I believe that the faith that it is so necessary to have in our judicial system would be not reinforced, which is the Bill's main purpose, but perhaps seriously damaged.

I apologise for not being here at the beginning of the debate. I had every intention of being here and had changed some of my arrangements for this morning, but, unfortunately, I was caught on an immigration case involving, as usual, the rather daft immigration laws operated by this Government. Consequently, I give advance warning to anyone going to a concert at Hammersmith Odeon tomorrow night that the drummer will not be there, because he cannot get into the country at present. So there will be problems unless I can sort something out in the next 24 hours.

I shall confine my remarks to the amendment, but I hope that it will be borne in mind that the Minister has taken the matter much further than I had originally estimated. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) rightly alerted me to some of the Bill's dangers, and I was worried about them. However, having heard the Minister, I am now even more worried. I respect what the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) has said, and I think that his intentions are valid. However, politicians should provide leadership in, above all, matters of law and order. I believe that the hon. Gentleman is pursuing a populist trend, which is to get tough and do something about all these dreadful things. If I though that that prevented crime, I would be happy to follow that trend, but as the Minister knows, it does not do so. The Minister's argument fails because he does not talk about preventing crime and protecting civil rights, and he does not recognise that what he is doing runs counter to some of his Department's arguments.

The proposal is for an extension of 10 years for certain types of sentence. The Minister apparently wants to prevent people from serving on juries if, in some way or another, they do not support the rule of law. However, that is the first fallacy. Those who know offenders are aware that they are often tougher in their interpretation of how the law should be applied than others. I am rather sad that one of the Bill's sponsors, the hon. Member for Westminster, North (Mr. Wheeler) — a Conservative Member — is not here today. With his experience as a prison governor, he will confirm what I have said. It does not follow that because a person has a conviction he will be bad news on a jury. He might be bad news at times for the defendant, but the reverse is not always true.

I accept that the Minister should try to stop a person serving on a jury if he has committed particularly serious offences of corruption and so on over a period of time. However, the Bill will not achieve that. Indeed, the 10-year provision will certainly not achieve that. I am even worried about the seven-year period. I can accept the imprisonment provision. But let us consider the next provision relating to youth custody or detention. Some young people are sent to detention centres on a second or third offence when they are about 17 years old, and never re-offend. The same is true of borstal. Some years ago, when I was a probation officer, a young lady aged about 17 was under my supervision. If I remember rightly, she had committed a minor offence, involving shoplifting. Her parents would not have her back and she was homeless. She was difficult to contain in hostels, because she bucked the system wherever she was, and we had nowhere to put her. Very reluctantly, I made the sort of recommendation that we had to make from time to time to send her to borstal. As the judge said, we did not know what else to do with her.

11.15 am

The Minister has failed the House badly, because he knows that crime peaks in the teenage years. Indeed, I am glad to have confirmation of that from some hon. Members. People tend to commit offences between the ages of 13 and 20. The vast bulk of crime is committed then, and after that, it tails off. Those who continue to offend are the problem ones, who are likely to become recidivists. They are often very pathetic individuals, who are addicted to alcohol, and so on. They are the sad cases, but the bulk of young offenders grow out of it.

That young lady left borstal when she was 18 or 18½, having served her full sentence. However, she will not be allowed to serve on a jury until she is 28. Why not? There is no evidence to suggest that she was not a good citizen by the age of 21, yet her crime will be held against her.

I am even more concerned about suspended sentences, for the reasons that I have already given the Minister. Suspended sentences were introduced with the specific aim of reducing the prison population. The idea was that the courts would use suspended sentences to keep people out of prison. However, I defy the Minister to deny that as a result of those sentences the prison population has increased. The courts have used them inappropriately. I am not greatly criticising the courts, but the assumption is made—as so often happens in courts—that crimes are committed in some rational way. Some of them are, but most of them are committed irrationally. In inner-city areas about 70 per cent. of them are committed under the influence of drink. Thus, someone who would not have been sentenced to prison receives a suspended sentence, commits another offence and is then sent to prison for both of them. It might be said that that is fine and that such people should not serve on a jury. There may be a case for saying that, but that is not the Minister's case.

The crime rate, particularly under this Government, has increased more rapidly than under almost any other Government in recent years. Indeed, that is another reason why the Minister fails in his law and order argument. It has also increased because of the way in which we have changed sentencing. There are now more people in prison than ever before. Britain has more people in prison than almost any other comparable country. The only two Western countries to compare with us are the United States of America and West Germany. However, it is significant that those three systems were modelled on each other.

Thus, suspended sentences are a very dubious reason for excluding people for 10 years. Someone who had committed a relatively minor offence could receive a suspended sentence if, in particular, he had previous findings of guilt. Thus, a person who is just 17 and has a couple of findings of guilt against him, may suddenly receive a suspended sentence for a minor offence. He may never again get into trouble, but he will still be told that he is not a good enough citizen to serve on a jury for another 10 years.

The Minister will say that community service orders are an alternative to prison. In view of the debates in the House at the time, the Home Office quite correctly said that community service was an alternative to prison.

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I shall give way to the Minister in a moment. But for his own sake, he had better hear me out.

However, in reality, magistrates have used community service as a sentence in its own right. I shall cite the case of one magistrate, although in many ways I respect that person despite the great problems that I had when I was a probation officer. That magistrate would say that he had the Home Office circular saying that community service was an alternative to prison but that there was nothing in the Act, and that he believed that community service should be a sentence in its own right and would use it in that way. Does the Minister want to intervene now?

I shall wait.

I had a feeeling that the hon. Gentleman might say that.

The hon. Gentleman knows only too well that suspended sentences are specifically an alternative to imprisonment. He cannot slide away from that by saying that the courts are using them for something else. The hon. Gentleman also knows that community service is treated as an alternative to prison and is generally applied only as a last chance of turning people away from prison. He must give us a little more than the sentimental argument that the offenders that he has known are very committed to the administration of justice before he can deliver on some of his rather excessive statements and assertions.

That is a typically pathetic response from the Minister, because once again he is missing the main point.

I am saying that the hon. Gentleman's Department has the evidence—and he knows it—that that sentence has not always been used as a strict alternative to imprisonment. The hon. Gentleman knows that the prison population would not be so high if it had been used as it was intended. I should point out that this is not the criticism of the courts that the Minister thinks that it is. In a rather unpleasant way, the Minister has tried to distort the argument. I have considerable respect for the way in which a number of judges and magistrates try to handle the situation.

What has gone wrong over the years is that as sentences at the top end of the scale have been lengthened the pyramid has been jacked up. That is why there are more people in prison today. The Minister knows that. The Home Secretary and his predecessor know that, but the Minister made no recognition of it in his contribution today.

It is reasonable for a magistrate to say that a community service order is a sentence in its own right. The Minister is not prepared to apply the test. If what he says is true, if a community service order is breached the person who breaches it should automatically go to prison. In practice they very rarely go to prison. That gives the lie to the Minister's intervention. If when such orders were breached all concerned, or 90 per cent. of them, were sent to prison, one could argue that they are an alternative to prison, but because so few are sent to prison it is clear that they are not being used as an alternative.

Newspapers such as The Sun may rant and rave about what is happening, but the Bill uses a sledgehammer to crack a nut and will cause other problems. The hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon must be prepared to give leadership to people and not just follow a populist trend. I know that it is unpopular to argue as I have today. I get a lot of stick for it in my constituency. The Conservative candidate at the 1979 election used a beautiful slogan on the following lines: "Clive Soley knows all about the problems of criminals, but he does not know anything about the problems of victims. The Tory party will cut crime." It did not, but that is another matter.

We have cut crime.

That is not true. Crime has risen rapidly. The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) is taking only the figures for the last 12 months. Even taking the drop in that time into account the overall figures show that crime has increased. The hon. and learned Gentleman should not distort the figures.

There is a need for leadership. We do not want to continue to increase the prison population and prevent people from serving on juries because they committed a serious crime in their adolescent years. We are criminalising them and saying that they must stay outside the system because the Government and the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon think that we can catch a small number of people who should not serve on juries. I agree that there is a problem because some people should not serve on juries, but this is the wrong way of going about it. Further problems will be caused. Anyone who has worked in the courts or prisons should be aware o f that and we should all beware of eroding a well-established tradition.

In Victorian England, when people in a curious way had a much greater regard for the law than the present Government have, and when people were aware of the need to protect civil liberties in a way that the Government are not, a measure of this nature could never have been conceived.

I shall not be tempted to prove how this Government's attitude to law and order is showing signs of success, although there has been a fall in the level of crime for the first time in four years. The fall is 4 per cent. in London and there has been a reduction of 25 per cent. in armed robberies. That is a substantial achievement.

We are in danger of losing sight of the real issue—whether, and to what extent, criminals should be judges. That is what jurymen are. They have to decide the facts. The judge in a criminal court has only to rule on matters of law, sum up and direct the jury on those matters. The jurymen are the judges. We are talking about whether criminals should be judges.

Last time I spoke I complimented the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) on testing a matter that would not otherwise have been tested. But this amendment will make it easier for villains to sit as judges. The public will think that anyone who makes such a suggestion is up the pole. I mean no disrespect to the hon. Gentleman but the issue goes beyond testing the detail of the Bill.

The hon. Gentleman suggests that villains should sit on juries more easily because under existing law a person is disqualified for jury service for life if he has been sentenced to more than five years. A person is also disqualified for 10 years if he is sentenced to prison, detention or youth custody for more than three months.

By the reduction in the time ban from 10 years to seven years a number of people will be released for jury service who are now disqualified. Some of the worst types of people will be released—those sentenced to the most serious sentences. Persistent offenders with whom the courts have lost all patience will be released. Such people will have been told that the public must be protected from them. The amendment would release for jury service people who have been convicted of armed robbery, serious violence or a succession of burglaries. They are the very people we do not want to sit on our juries as judges of the rights and wrongs of other citizens.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) talks about allowing persistent offenders to sit on juries. What does he mean by persistent offender? In the terms of the amendment a persistent offender would have to commit an offence every seven years. Can the hon. and learned Gentleman explain the effect of my amendment, taken in conjunction with the Bill on the number of people disqualified? Does he admit that my amendment, with the other provisions in the Bill, will result in a significant increase in the number of people disqualified?

Perhaps more people will be disqualified, but my objection to the amendment is that it specifically helps people sentenced to the longer terms of imprisonment. That runs directly contrary to the wishes of the people. The amendment will release to serve as judges people who have been convicted of reasonably high degrees of criminality, as evidenced by the lengthy sentences served. That will happen more often than before because in the old days if one committed a certain offence one would be sent to prison for a substantial time. Recently, because of a "more enlightened" approach to sentencing, some people who would have served sentences in excess of three months are not sent to prison. Others are given suspended sentences or put on probation, not necessarily for "enlightened" reasons. They will be able to serve as jurymen for no better reason than that we need to keep the prisons emptier to prevent a decline in the penal system.

The same criminal whom Parliament said should not sit on a jury for 10 years or perhaps for life, is being made eligible for judgeship, not because he has changed, but because there is a slightly different attitude—perhaps for no better reason than to keep the prisons empty. That is absurd. The hon. Gentleman says that people have a right, once they have served their sentences, to be regarded as ordinary citizens. I agree with him. People who have served prison sentences should not be deprived for the rest of their lives of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They should have the right to live normal lives.

Nevertheless, most people would draw the line at people who have shown a substantial propensity to criminality being judges. That is what we are talking about. We are not talking about the ordinary freedoms of living. We are talking about people being judges, and I draw the line at that. Rehabilitation is one thing, but the opportunity to be good citizens is another. To say that these people should be judges is a long way from the point——

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Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will allow me to finish my point. There will be plenty of other opportunities for him to speak.

At one stage the hon. Gentleman went so far as to say—it underlines his lack of objectivity in the amendment—that people cannot be expected to go straight if they are not allowed to sit on juries. A person who has served a prison sentence, has been convicted in our courts, and has the determination to live a good and honest life, as he must be encouraged to do, will not say, "I would do that, I would live an honest life, but because I am being stopped from sitting on a jury I will stay a criminal for the rest of my days." That is utterly preposterous.

The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley)—it looks as though he has been called out to deal with another immigration problem—spoke about young people who had been sent to borstal or youth custody or given some form of custodial sentence. He said that perhaps such sentences were not justified and that because it might be a mistake, they should not be disqualified for 10 years. If people have been wrongly setenced to custody, either on the recommendation of a probation officer or on the mistaken judgment of a judge, that may not be justified—I see that the hon. Member for Hammersmith has now returned to the Chamber. But for the purpose of deciding whether they should serve on juries after seven or 10 years that does not matter, in my opinion. It is just bad luck. It is not the end of the world. They are not cut off from their right to live or to enjoy life or to rehabilitate themselves. The difference between a seven-year or 10-year period of disqualification does not affect that.

I see no merit in the argument that has been advanced in favour of the amendment by the hon. Member for Hammersmith. The British public do not want more villains sitting as judges. Therefore, the amendment must be thrown out.

I apologise for not being here at the beginning of the debate, but I was unavoidably detained somewhere else. I want to raise only a few points at this stage, following what has been said in the debate. I am anxious to save time, and, if I may say so, with respect, some hon. Members have raised some thoroughly irrelevant and bad points.

The problem of 10 or seven in the amendment must be seen against the background of what strikes at the very root of the administration of justice — either unsuitable people sitting on juries, or juries being interfered with by those who wish to pervert the course of justice. It has been said, and I said as much in Committee, that the Bill does not go far enough. I personally would favour more sweeping reforms to exclude from jury service not only the people caught by the Bill but many others.

The administration of justice depends on the integrity of those who serve in it. If we have members of juries with a propensity against the administration of justice, however understandable that is in view of their previous experience, the whole process is perverted. There have been innumerable cases in recent years in which trials have been interrupted, juries discharged, huge sums of public money wasted, and defendants and witnesses have been inconvenienced and endured hardship because someone on the jury has been found, after the trial started, unsuitable to sit on the jury.

There are two possibilities. First, a perfectly respectable person on a jury may be interfered with, either by bribery or threats from outside. The other possibility is that there are people sitting on juries who are unsuitable to do so because, for example, they bear an unremitting hostility towards police officers and will never convict on any evidence given by any police officer in any circumstance. What is the point of permitting such people to serve on juries? It must pervert the whole administration of justice.

It has been rightly said on both sides of the House that in this country we are proud of our system of administration of justice, and that we should all work to make that system fairer and more efficient. One has only to attend courts these days to see juries acquitting in cases where there is overwhelming evidence of guilt, not because of a lacuna in the evidence, but because there is someone on the jury—perhaps more than one person—who is utterly perverse and will not convict in any circumstances.

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If my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) wishes to interrupt, I shall gladly give way, but perhaps he will allow me to finish what I am saying. There are people who bear hostility towards the administration of justice, and it is in the interests of the administration of justice that these people should not partake in its processes.

My hon. Friend will know and, I am sure, agree with me that perverse judgments have been made by juries for hundreds of years, and that the strength of the jury system is that we accept the fact that at times there will be perverse judgments, instead of structuring juries to stop that, particularly when the perverse judgments do not necessarily come from the people my hon. Friend is attacking.

Order. I assume that the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Ryman) is getting towards the end of his introduction, and that he will tell the House why the provisions of the clause should operate for seven and not 10 years.

I am, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You are quite correct to draw attention to the relatively narrow ambit of the amendment. However, I must deal with the interruption, which wholly missed the point.

All of us, whether we support or oppose the amendment, believe in the jury system. I, of course, strongly believe in the jury system. There have been fairly recent amendments in the law to strengthen the operation of the jury system. For example, the introduction of majority verdicts was calculated to strengthen the jury system, as the amendment envisages, because experience showed that there had been occasions when someone was being unreasonably awkward in the administration of justice and who, just for the sake of being awkward, would pervert the course of justice, in the sense of ignoring all the evidence and bringing in perverse verdicts. That was why unanimous verdicts were abolished and why it was made possible, after an interval of two hours and 10 minutes, to bring in majority verdicts on the direction of the judge.

I do not see the logic of the amendment. Why was the figure of seven selected? Why was it not five or four, or three or eight? No logical reason has been put forward. As I understand it, with respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, the purpose of the amendment is to fly a kite in order to make a plea on behalf of people in an exaggerated manner in order to reduce the number of persons disqualified to serve on juries. I do not understand the logic of the amendment if it has logic. I do not understand the reason of the amendment if it has reason. I do not understand the figure in the amendment if the figure has been calculated in any mathematical or scientific way. As far as I can see, it has simply been put forward as a vehicle for complaining in a vague and general way about a measure which is long overdue.

There were various altercations in the debate as to who should bring in such a Bill and when it should be brought forward. My recollection is that—perhaps the Under-Secretary of State or my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea will be able to help me—in the previous Parliament there were attempts in the House to bring in such legislation in another Bill. The Government later changed their mind about it because complaints were made that such a fundamental measure should not be tacked on to another Bill. My recollection about that is rather vague, but I think the measure is long overdue. I welcome it, and I cannot support the amendment.

I am glad to follow that excellent contribution from the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Ryman). I appreciate that it created great discomfiture in the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) who has been becoming rather irascible during the course of the morning. He and his hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) fail to realise how out on a limb they are on this issue. Regardless of party and interest any of those who practise on the courts are profoundly troubled about the present situation and feel that something must be clone. That is why we have the Bill.

The hon. Member for Blyth Valley stated roundly—I am grateful for his support of a proposition that I put forward earlier—that these amendments are being used as a peg upon which is hung a basic failure to grasp the seriousness of the situation, as perceived by others throughout the system, and a basic unwillingness to come to terms with the need for change. That is why I was staggered when the hon. Member for Battersea said that his amendment did not seem to be an unreasonable proposition. It is utterly unreasonable and falls comprehensively below the level of events, when there is such widespread concern, to suggest that far from tightening the bonds they should in a material respect be loosened. He is saying that people, having served a term of imprisonment between three months and five years who are disqualified under the present inadequate law for 10 years, should, if we accept the amendment, be disqualified for only seven years. My hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) ably made the point, and I do not need to extend it except in two small respects.

The hon. Member for Battersea prayed in aid the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. That simply is not right. That Act mainly enables offenders to avoid answering questions by prospective employers about their spent convictions provided that a given period has elapsed. That period depends on the length of the sentence. But the Act has nothing whatever to do with rehabilitation in a wider sense. In any case, there are numerous exceptions from the Act and some of those—I hope that I have the hon. Gentleman's attention because he needs to understand this—relate to jobs associated with the administration of justice. So there can be no argument based on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, that someone who would have to disclose a previous conviction in relation to a job connected with the administration of justice should be allowed to serve on a jury earlier than would otherwise be the case.

The hon. Gentleman has not achieved what he claimed he set out to achieve—to bring the Bill into line with the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act—because any sentence beyond six months' imprisonment is not spent until after 10 years whereas the hon. Gentleman's amendment would mean that anyone sentenced to a term of imprisonment of up to five years would be able to serve on a jury three years earlier than is presently the case.

I appreciate that the hon. Member for Hammersmith has considerable experience of one part of the criminal justice system and, as a general rule, I have a considerable respect for him. However, I am bound to say that he does not add to his credibility when he uses as a basis for an attack upon this proposal what I can only say is an anecdotal and sentimental account of the willingness of offenders to uphold justice, almost as if justice would be enhanced if juries were comprised only of people who had previously been sentenced by the courts. I should have thought that the more authentic voice of the villain, although I accept that it is equally anecdotal, came in a Daily Mail interview with Mr. John Luck who served on a jury unlawfully. He spent three and a half years in prison and would through the courtesy of the hon. Gentleman, if we were to accept his amendment, be able to serve on a jury three years earlier. He was reported as saying:

"I hate the Old Bill … and as far as I am concerned the defendants are not guilty unless they have been molesting kids … If a guy has done a bit of thieving to get a few bob that's all right with me. In my book he's not guilty. I've always made my views very plain on that. I made myself foreman in two of the cases. No one seemed keen to do it."

About the case that he tried he went on to say:

"They were guilty, bang to rights. All they had done was to turn over a Paki shop. The Paki was in court and he didn't seem very worried."

I do not know whether those that the hon. Gentleman supervised have given him the right impression or whether Mr. John Luck is the authentic voice of the criminal. That is not something on which it is helpful to speculate. What matters is that the administration of justice should be protected. The burden of proving that serious offenders should be protected. The burden of proving that serious offenders should serve on juries rests on those who advance the proposition and nothing that the hon. Gentleman has said strengthens that belief. The balance of public convenience must favour the maxim—when in doubt, exclude. That is why the distinction is drawn between the more serious range of penalties, which are not dependent on proving that every person sentenced to community service order or suspended sentence would, were this disposal not available, have gone to prison. As the hon. Member for Blyth Valley said, that is to miss the point. What matters is that those sentences are imposed by the courts only when a serious offence has been committed. The commission of a serious offence for which someone has been punished must call into question their commitment to the system. The period of 10 years is inevitably a rough and ready one but it has already been established in respect of the exclusions based on the Morris committee. It is far better to cleave to that, than that, in the pursuit of what to so many people seems to be a rather narrow adherence to the interests of the offender rather than the broad appreciation of the rights of the community, the hon. Gentleman should persist in the seven-year amendment.

I am grateful to the Minister for that particular example. He will agree with me that what he is after is a person with the attitude and values that were expressed. Those attitudes and values will not change in another three years. Therefore, the only logical road to go down in the case of such people is the one down which my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Ryman) went, and to say that some jurors are suspect and should not serve on juries and therefore we should have a 10-year rather than a seven-year rule. That man's views will not have changed one iota.

The hon. Gentleman is right but the logic of his case is not exactly that which he is advancing. The logic is to say that there should be a lifetime prohibition on such people as there is on those sentenced to more than five years' imprisonment. The essential modesty of this proposal is evidenced by the fact that, notwithstanding such considerations, my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon says 10 years. I am content to go along with him in the belief that, with the exception of one or two hon. Members that we see before us today, most hon. Members and people in the other place will find that these provisions represent a sensible compromise. It will not do to advance the argument that 10 years is not stringent enough to support the proposition that 10 years should be seven years. That is logic which Lewis Carroll would have immortalised in one of his novels. Supporters of that view are out on a limb. The amendment that has been advanced, and the way in which hon. Members have kicked against the pricks of common sense in this measure is irritating not just to Conservative Members but to the hon. Member for Blyth Valley, with his massive experience.

I draw the attention of the hon. Members for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) and for Hammersmith to the fact that after five years as Minister of State, Home Office during the previous Labour Government, Lord Harris of Greenwich has condemned the present arrangements in his arguments in The Times with much more formidable eloquence than I can deploy. That must count for something. Do not the hon. Members see the sheer illogicality of their position? They are asking the House to soften a provision that as long ago as 1967 the Government formed by the party that they support saw fit to put into the law, based on the then sentencing structure. That cannot be right.

Does the Minister agree that we have spent some time today on the numbers game? Does the hon. Gentleman further agree that Lords are not allowed to sit as jurors, as peers of the realm? They do not have withdrawal symptoms because they are not allowed to sit as jurors. Have the Minister and his advisers considered a complete ban for life from serving on a jury for certain categories of criminals? It is simple logic. That would be suitable for certain crimes with which the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) has to deal. Would it not be possible for the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) to consider amending the Bill, deleting the provision for 10 years and inserting a category of criminals who would be banned for life from serving on juries?

I accept the hon. Gentleman's point. My hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) proposes to leave the law as it is so that only those sentenced to terms of imprisonment of over five years are banned for life. In the spirit of compromise that has resulted from the two Bills introduced last Session, that is right. I do not blame the hon. Gentleman for making that point. I have made it clear that I was attracted by a much more severe proposal advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest (Mr. McNair-Wilson) last Session. It startled me that the hon. Member for Hammersmith supported my hon. Friend's thinking, when he also opposes a much less stringent requirement than that.

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I shall not give the hon. Gentleman the opportunity to perpetuate that illogicality. He knows that it is a fair point. I suspect, as does the hon. Member for Blyth Valley, that the hon. Members for Hammersmith and for Battersea are out of sorts with any proposal to strengthen the law. We should not play into their hands by prolonging the argument. The amendment should be rejected out of hand by the House in the confident belief that, in doing so, it is doing the right thing.

I beg to move amendment No. 2, in page 1, line 9, leave out 'or the Channel Islands'.

With this it will be convenient to take the following amendments: No. 3, in page 1, line 9, leave out

`or the Isle of Man'.

No. 9, in page 1, line 19, leave out 'or the Channel Islands'.

No. 10, in page 1, line 19, leave out

`or the Isle of Man'.

This group of amendments is concerned with the extension of the Bill's provisions to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The references to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are made in two places. First, in clause 1 the disqualification will include

"A person who at any time in the ten years has, in the United Kingdom or the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man"

served the specified sentences, or has had a suspended sentence or a community service order imposed upon him. When the Bill deals with probation, similar words are used:

"A person who at any time in the last five years, has in the United Kingdom or the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, been placed on probation."

I appreciate that the same phrase appears in the Juries Act 1974. Before the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) draws my attention to earlier legislation, let me say that I am prepared to concede that it has been carried forward from previous Bills. It tends to be a justification in the House that because something has appeared in legislation from time immemorial as at has been amended or adapted over the years, that makes it all right. However, if we challenge the existence of certain concepts, we are told it is not a valid argument because from time immemorial it has always been that way.

That may or may not be the argument in this instance. I tabled the amendments because I am genuinely puzzled why the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are included. I could speculate that one reason is that the legal and criminal justice systems in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are so similar to the system in the United Kingdom that, to all intents and purposes, they may be regarded as the same in the Bill. Furthermore, no other country has a criminal justice system that is so similar that it could be regarded as part of ours for the purposes of the Bill.

In a later amendment we shall deal with the Republic of Ireland. I do not want to merge two debates that you properly have considered should be kept separate, Mr. Deputy Speaker. However, it is slightly difficult to follow the reasoning for the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man being included.

My general proposition might run counter to the amendment, but it was tabled to establish a debate. I wish the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man to be more widely included in our legislation as a matter of course, but that will have to be argued on another occasion. I draw the attention of the House and the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon to the fact that while the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are included in clause 1, the Act covers only England and Wales. Therefore, at that level, too, there may be some illogicality.

I wonder why the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are included. If the argument is that the criminal justice systems of the two sets of islands are so like that of the United Kingdom, why did the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon not seek to include other parts of the world where the criminal justice systems are also similar to ours?

I suspect that we have reached the groups of amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) without the expectation that he would have to propose and have a serious debate upon them.

The answers to the points that the hon. Gentleman raised are straightforward. The amendments would lead in two significant ways to inconsistency in British law, which would be highly undesirable. In the first place, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands not only have judicial systems that are close to ours, but they have available to their courts—this is the crucial point—a mirror image of the pattern of sentencing available to courts in England. Similarly, in the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, citizens are ultimately subject to the wishes of this Parliament. The hon. Member for Battersea cannot say that citizens in the fish Republic or other countries have a pattern of sentencing available to their courts that is so similar to this country's as that of the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands or that any citizens other than those of this country are so subject to the wishes of this Parliament. However, that is not the biggest and most glaring of the inconsistencies that would arise.

I should like to correct the hon. Gentleman. The Minister may have a further correction. My understanding is that the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are less subject to the wishes of Parliament than many British dependent territories.

I can give only my personal opinion. That is not right. The phrase

"the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands"

is an almost invariable component of any legislation. Their judicial systems seem virtually identical to that in the United Kingdom. It is valid for the Bill to seek to do no more than to extend the present law and the present sytem of disqualification to the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

Inconsistencies would be likely to arise if the amendment were passed. It would mean that someone in Liverpool who had been sentenced to four and a half years' imprisonment would be disqualified from jury service for 10 years, but someone 60 or 70 miles away in Douglas on the Isle of Man, who had received an identical sentence in an almost identical court, probably for an identical crime, would not be disqualified. That would do nothing to restore faith in the jury system, which is one of the principal purposes of the Bill.

12 noon

There is a further inconsistency. The Bill changes the law only for those who have been in prison for less than five years. It makes no attempt to change the law for those who have been in prison for more than five years. The life disqualification would continue, and currently that applies to the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The consequence of the amendment would be that, for example, someone who in Douglas was sentenced to five and a half years in prison would be disqualified for life, whereas, if he were sentenced to four and a half years, he would be subject to no disqualification. There would not be the intermediate threshold of 10 years disqualification that has become fundamental to jury service qualification in the United Kingdom. For those two reasons, I urge the House to reject the amendment.

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

I beg to move amendment No. 4, in page 1, line 9, at end insert

'or the Republic of Ireland'.

With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment No. 11, in page 1, line 19, at end insert

'or the Republic of Ireland'.

This amendment deals with a point of greater substance — whether those who have been sentenced in the courts of the Republic of Ireland should, when they return to Britain, be subject to the provisions of the Bill. As the Bill is presently drafted, they are not so subject.

I listened with interest to what the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) said in the previous short debate on the amendments concerning the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. It is not for me to correct him on one or two factual points about the constitutional position of the islands, but if he argues that their criminal justice system is similar to that of the United Kingdom—and I almost fed him his speech—and that it is right that the Bill should cover them, is not the criminal justice system in the Republic of Ireland also so close to to ours that, therefore, it logically should be encompassed by the Bill?

I hasten to explain that I am happy that there are no proposals now—and I hope that there never will be—to prevent people from Ireland from voting in British elections and playing a full part in British life. That proposal was under discussion some time ago, and I am glad that it is no longer an issue for debate—I hope that it never will be. It is right and proper that people from Ireland living in Britain should have the full opportunity to take part in our life and accept their full responsibilities.

In the Juries Act 1974, the qualification for serving on a jury is based on registration as a parliamentary or local government elector. People from Ireland who are resident in Britain are on the voting list in the same way as British and Commonwealth citizens. Inevitably, they are selected for jury service in the same way as anybody else. They qualify once their names appear on the voting list. Would not it make sense for the Bill to include the Republic of Ireland in the same way as it includes the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man?

Despite the tragedy of events in Northern Ireland, there is a great deal of closeness between this country and the Republic. Many institutions operate in a similar way. Our systems of criminal justice are not all that different. It would make a great deal of sense to accept the amendment. If we do not, somebody who may have been subjected to a probation order or served a month's imprisonment in the Republic of Ireland would, on his return to Britain, be eligible to serve on a jury virtually immediately. That is illogical.

Of course, we are talking not only about Irish people but about British citizens who go to Ireland. They may run foul of the law there and receive sentences which, if they had received them in Britain, would have debarred them from jury service. I am suggesting a fairly minor change, but it is wholly logical and on all fours with the provisions for the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

Having tabled earlier amendments about those islands to obtain a clear statement from the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon about the reasons for including them, it is logical to take the same point and apply it to the Republic of Ireland and include that country, as the amendments suggest.

I acknowledge what the hon. Gentleman said about the amendment not being enormous in substance, but the principle underlying it has a certain significance which, consequently, makes me reluctant to accept it.

The present law on disqualification from jury service is based clearly upon the sentence that has been passed. Therefore, it has enormous benefits of clarity. One of the benefits of my Bill is that it is also based upon the sentence passed. It assumes that if that is to be extended to any territories, they must at least have a consistency of sentencing policy. The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands have such consistency, not only in their judicial systems but in their sentencing policy. That cannot be said for the Republic of Ireland.

Certain sentences available to British courts may not be available to Irish courts. The sentencing standards may be rather different also. Perhaps most important, the Irish judicial system is subject ultimately to the will of a Parliament other than ours. I do not think that, in those circumstances, we should introduce the subject of disqualification on the lines of the amendment.

I beg to move amendment No. 13, in page 1, line 18, leave out 'five years' and insert 'twelve months'.

With this we shall discuss amendment No. 14, in page 1, leave out line 20 and insert `completed a probation order'.

We come now to the most important issue in the Bill — the one which, in a sense, gives many people the greatest cause for concern. For the first time in this country, persons who have had a probation order made against them will be debarred from serving on a jury for five years.

Whatever our disagreement about the other sentences and the arguments that we have used, those arguments would hardly apply in the case of probation. It has always been considered by the courts, by Parliament and by people generally that the courts in Britain give a probation order for an offence that is less serious than that for which they give a community service order, a suspended sentence or a custodial sentence.

That is almost inevitable because a probation order entails the supervision of the individual for from six months to three years. In the majority of cases probation orders last for one or two years. I must tread warily here because my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) is much more experienced in matters of probation than I am and will correct me if I misinterpret the way in which the system operates.

We are here discussing the least serious of sentences for the least serious offences. I am not condoning sentences which give rise to people being put on probation. I am simply saying that the courts have taken a view about the offender and his sentence which puts the offender and the sentence on a less serious plain than other offenders and offences which we have been discussing.

In England and Wales, 36,480 people commenced probation supervision in 1982. As the average length of a probation order is more than one year, more people than that number will be on probation at any one time, perhaps between 40,000 and 45,000. That means that we are talking about a large number of people who commence probation supervision.

Those who are placed on probation have committed a wide variety of offences. The figures for 1982 show that over half of them committed the offences of theft or handling stolen goods. The second largest category was burglary, and there followed a range of other offences for which the percentages of the total receiving probation were under 10.

I have discussed the matter with representatives of the National Association of Probation Officers who share my concern about an additional form of punishment being placed on the persons with whom they deal in the course of supervising probation orders.

It is widely acknowledged that the inclusion of probation is the weakest argument for the Bill. There is no widespread concern in the country that persons who have served under a probation order are in some way likely to undermine the criminal justice system should they continue to serve on juries.

Many of the people about whom I am talking will not wish to serve on juries, anyway. Indeed, most of them will probably regard serving on a jury as a confounded nuisance and are more likely to commit the offence of refusing to serve than they are likely to demand to be allowed to serve, and that point could have underlined some of our earlier discussion.

Nevertheless, we are talking about a quite large group of people and about debarring them when there has been no debate in the country to suggest that these people cause juries to bring in perverse verdicts. The debate in the country about perverse verdicts has been widespread and, as I made clear in my earlier remarks, we recognise the position; I leave aside whatever the Minister may have said about my motives. The arguments for debarring people from serving because a probation order has been made against them are thin.

My amendment would accept the principle of the Bill. An amendment to delete all the provisions in relation to probation could not be tabled at this stage; we debated and voted on that subject in Committee. Thus, my amendment would lessen the impact of the provisions concerning probation by amending the clause to read:

"A person who at any time in the last … twelve months … has in the United Kingdom or the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man … completed a probation order."

The period of disqualification would thereby be during the lifetime of the probation order plus a further 12 months thereafter. I do not think that even the Minister in his most hostile mood would say that that proposal, modest as it is, would undermine the integrity of the criminal justice system.

12.15 pm

The report of the departmental committee on jury service, of which the chairman was Lord Morris, was published in April 1965. It said in paragraph 142:

"We have come to the view that the criterion for disqualification should be conviction for an offence which has resulted in imprisonment or some other form of detention being imposed. It is true that this will involve accepting as jurors persons who have been convicted and dealt with in other ways, for example by being fined or being placed on probation. But it seems to us consistent with the general approach adopted in the preceding paragraphs to limit disqualification to persons who have been sent to prison or other penal institutions. In the first place, the fact that the court has seen fit to impose a punishment of this nature is some indication that the offence (or the offender's previous record) was of a serious character. Second, we think that a person who has been deprived of his freedom by a court is far more likely to be biased in his judgment as a juror than a person who has been dealt with more leniently."

The recommendation of the Morris report was that it should not apply to probation—indeed, that it should not apply to non-custodial sentences — and that report represented the latest and fullest assessment of the work of the jury system in Britain. It came to the conclusion that probation should not be a reason for disqualification.

Set against that, my amendment is very modest indeed. It is not out of keeping with the main aims of the Bill. Nor would it damage the integrity of the jury system. Indeed, no examples have been quoted of anybody on probation making the sort of statements in opposition to the jury system that the Minister, in his one anecdotal piece ofevidence, gave about a more serious offender serving on a jury.

The difficulty facing us is that most of the evidence supporting the Bill is anecdotal, although perhaps that is not a difficulty regarding probation because there is not even much anecdotal evidence about that. At any rate, there is no evidence of substance about it. It would be a pity, for the reasons that I have stated, for the House to go so far as to take away the obligation and right to serve on a jury from people who in the recent past have been subjected to a probation order.

I concede that somebody who is currently on probation should not serve on a jury. I said that in Committee and I repeat it now. But to debar people for so long as the Bill suggests—for five years, and perhaps for up to four and a half years after they have completed the probation order, remembering that the probation order might be only for six months—is unduly onerous and is out of keeping with the stated aims of the Bill, be they the more moderate version of the aims as adduced by the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) or the more aggressive aims as put forward by the Minister.

I could quote at length various statistics relating to the probation service. I will refer to only one other set of figures. In 1982, a report containing probation statistics in England and Wales gave in table 210 details of the termination of probation orders covering the full range of probation orders for various years. I will confine myself to 1982. In that year, 68 per cent. of probation orders ran their full course, 3 per cent. were replaced by conditional discharge orders and 11 per cent. were terminated early because of good progress.

It is significant that 11 per cent. of probation orders were terminated early for good progress, yet the very people for whom probation had worked so well, and in respect of whom the orders could be stopped earlier than the courts had originally decided, are to face five years of debarment or disqualification from jury service. There were other reasons for termination. I understand that 2 per cent. of terminations were due to a failure to comply with the requirements and 14 per cent. following conviction for a further offence. Reconviction would bring those concerned within the scope of the Bill if previously they were no longer within it. Another 2 per cent. of probation orders were terminated for other reasons.

No good case has been made out, or can be made out, for not accepting the amendments. They are fully in keeping with the spirit of the Bill. They are modest proposals that will lessen the impact of the disqualification by reducing its period for those who have been made the subject of a probation order. I contend that the amendments are reasonable and sensible, and I hope that they will be accepted by the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon.

I support the basic argument of my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs). He has saved me some time for he has covered much of the ground that I intended to traverse.

The amendment shows the basic fallacy in the thinking underlying the Bill. It is said that people should be prevented from serving on a jury on the basis of the nature of the sentence that was imposed upon them. Everything that has been said by the Minister and the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) has shown that that is not really what they are worried about. They want to remove from jury service those who have committed certain types of offences or—this is the Minister's case, although he has not been bold enough to say so—those who hold certain attitudes and values which they think are unacceptable. That is why there is logic in disqualifying for ever. If we are to obtain what the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) wants, we shall have to prevent people from serving on juries because of the attitudes and values that they express, which is what the Minister wants, or because of the nature of the offence or the number of offences, that they have committed.

I am the first to concede that there is a good case for considering the possibility of stopping people from serving on juries for a period, perhaps in some circumstances for ever, because of the number of offences that they have committed or the type of offence for which they have been convicted. There is no justice in disqualifying on the basis of the sentence and certainly none on the Minister's attitude towards values and actions. The Minister's approach would mean that we should have to have some test of attitudes and values to determine who would be suitable or unsuitable to serve on a jury.

When the Minister intervened to explain to the House the sort of person that he wanted to prevent serving on a jury, he gave the game away by reading part of the interview that appeared in the Daily Mail. He said, in effect, that he was not really concerned about sentences of five years, seven years, 10 years, probation orders or driving disqualifications. It was clear that he was interested in stopping those who share the attitudes and values that were set out in the interview from serving on a jury.

I share the Minister's concern about a man with such views serving on a jury, but he will not stop that happening and nor will the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon. The Minister conceded that after three years had elapsed the interviewee could give exactly the same interview to another newspaper and that that newspaper could produce a headline saying "This man has denounced juries by saying that he will not do anything to support the 'Old Bill—. The editor could write an editorial to the effect that it was disgraceful that a man who expressed such a view was disqualified for serving on a jury for five years or 10 years and that he should be banned for longer.

What would the Minister do then? What would the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon do? Would they say, "We must change the law because public pressure is telling us that we must be tougher?" In other words, they would be saying, "We must not give leadership. We must not think this issue through. It is not necessary to think about the implications. We must respond to public pressure and we shall do that by extending the period of disqualification. Let us extend the period of disqualification to 15 years, 20 years or for life."

I take strong exception to the attacks—sadly, there has been one from the Opposition Benches—on juries and jurors. I do not share the view of the Minister and the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) that juries are infiltrated by those who are not suitable to serve on them. The jury system is one of the best means devised by human beings of determining guilt or innocence. I make no apology for the fact that, unlike the Minister and his Back Bench colleagues, I am here to defend the jury system and not to undermine it. My purpose is not to make carping criticism of it of the sort that has been indulged in by the Minister and the hon. and learned Member for Burton. It is rather typical of some lawyers — thank goodness not all — that when they get into difficulties with their arguments they try to muddy the waters. The Minister betrayed that intention in his intervention in which he referred to the Daily Mail. He demonstrated that his concern was to stop people with certain attitudes and values from serving on juries. It would do him more credit if he came clean and explained that he wants to control the type of person who serves on a jury and that he will bring forward proposals to achieve that purpose.

My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea was right to say that the majority of probation orders are made for those who have committed minor offences. The majority of those persons are teenagers. A probation order is made if the court decides that the offender needs to be advised, assisted and befriended. That is a summary of the words that appear in a probation order. The purpose of such an order is to help the offender to change his or her behaviour for the better. However, some probation orders are made for those who have committed serious offences. I supervised some of those cases and I realised that some of my clients were especially difficult and dangerous. I knew that in some cases they posed far more of a danger to society and the fabric of society than some of those who had served long prison sentences.

In some instances I was supervising those who had not been caught for committing offences of a particularly dangerous sort. A person might receive 18 months' imprisonment for shoplifting because of the number of previous convictions recorded against him. All the offences might involve bad behaviour but basically that behaviour causes a nuisance and not a danger. On the other hand, someone might be placed on probation for a first offence because the nature of the offence shows that his problems are such that he is likely to get into extremely serious trouble and pose a serious risk to other members of society. In those circumstances, the courts might well recommend the making of a probation order. The Minister and his hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon must know that.

Exclusion from jury service should not be determined on the basis of the sentence. Exclusion should be based on the nature of the offence or on the number of offences. As I have said, the majority of offenders are teenagers who do not offend thereafter. There is a case for picking on people who are still offending in their twenties and beyond. The Minister will confirm that it is they who are likely to go on offending.

There is a case for excluding such people for a very long time, but it does not follow that, as the Minister tried to imply in his attack on juries, those people are the ones who would give perverse judgments. Often the perverse judgments are made by those who have never been in trouble before. If the Minister concedes that the jury system is desirable and that people who have offended do not necessarily make perverse judgments, he is conceding the thrust of my argument that there is no point in trying to disqualify on the basis of the sentence of a court.

Nonsense.

I do not want to hear seated comments from the Minister. I want hard, clear arguments. We are serious about defending the needs of law and order, but we should be equally serious about defending the jury system from being eroded in irrelevant ways that are not likely to achieve what the Minister or his hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon want.

I am worried about the Bill, and I should have thought that the Minister and his hon. Friend, who are both lawyers, would also be worried. They should know better. Our courts are designed to prevent the rough justice that would take over if people simply expressed their feelings about what had happened. Yet the Bill is a response to an editorial in the Daily Mail about a juror who said that he did not like the "Old Bill".

It is a panic reaction, and does not get to grips with the real problems. The problems are that crime is rising, particularly under the present Government, and that we need a jury system in which people will have confidence. This Bill will not deal with those problems.

The Minister might have to read out an identical article in a few years' time, and then he would be stuck. 'What would he do then? Would he say that people who had been on probation must be banned for 10 years? He would find himself going down a never-ending road.

There would be logic in disqualifying those who have had more than 10 convictions beyond the juvenile court stage. One might disqualify people for 10 or 20 years on that basis. One could also disqualify those who had committed certain types of offence such as large-scale fraud and corruption — which certainly indicate that someone is prepared to undermine the system of administration in the country — and certain offences involving violence or dishonesty. However, to disqualify on the basis of a probation order or a community service order not only is wrong in principle but will not achieve what the Bill is expected to achieve. The lawyers on the Conservative Benches should think again and not simply muddy the waters with cheap attacks on other people' s intentions.

I keep a mental list of those lawyers whom I would pay not to defend me. The Minister and his hon. Friend are in danger of being added to that list.

This is not my Bill and I am not obliged to reply to the debate. However, I should like briefly to take up what the hon. Member for Hammersmith, North (Mr. Soley) has said. It was a bit much of him to end his speech with a high-minded rejection and personal attacks——

It was the Minister who started it.

when he had spent the whole of his speech making a travesty of our arguments. The hon. Member for Battersea and his hon. Friend are here today to delay progress on the Bill. They would be pleased to see the Bill fail to complete its stages. I say that openly and frankly. When another Opposition Member made the same frank comment about the fate of his own Bill, he was cheered to the echo by the hon. Gentleman. Let us not have any cant about this.

Will the hon.. Gentleman give way?

The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins) has just arrived, no doubt to help in delaying the progress of the Bill. I do not intend to play that game.

It is nonsense to suggest that anything in the Bill would undermine the jury system. That is about as sensible as suggesting that if a person looks to the restoration of an old building when nothing has been done about it for a number of years he is thus showing his contempt and dislike of old buildings. That is utter nonsense.

When the Morris committee considered the state of the law in 1965 it took the view that for the first time in our law some statutory intervention was needed to keep a certain number of criminals from serving on juries. It defended that view as follows:

"These considerations have made us conscious of the need to maintain the system of trial by jury as one that both merits and commands public respect. It is vitally important that it should be a fair, sensible, and workable system for ensuring that law and order are maintained, that justice is done, and that liberties are preserved."

It was saying with considerable eloquence that those who care about the jury system must keep it under review and ensure that things do not creep in which bring it into disrepute. In view of the evidence of numerous practitioners and the police that a large number of juries include people with long criminal records, it is thought right to respond with the kind of Bill that my hon. Friend has introduced.

My hon. Friend has resisted the temptation to exclude for a long period all those with criminal records. The Bill is carefully tailored and he believes that it is now at the outer limit of acceptability, bringing probation orders into exclusion but limiting the period to five years. That is essentially a modest proposal, given that, as the hon. Member for Hammersmith as a practising probation officer well knows, the dramatic increase in resources given to the probation service in the past decade has meant that an increasing number of serious offenders have been brought into probation. As it is not possible to make a distinction between the two categories, it is necessary in the interests of the public to provide for a blanket disqualification of this kind. The fact that it may be unfair to some is a risk that must be taken when the consequence of not acting would be to be unfair to many.

A distinction can be made on the basis of the offence rather than the sentence.

I do not think so. Theft might be theft of the Crown jewels or of a milk bottle. In the end, one cannot know what goes on in the jury room and I regret that it is necessary to reply to the calumnies of the hon. Gentleman, but I willingly state my utter confidence in the jury system. Nevertheless, the system needs to be burnished and cannot long survive the widespread allegations that criminals on juries are making it even more difficult to arrive at a fair verdict.

Where is the evidence?

As the hon. Gentleman, who has only just arrived, well knows, this is not a matter capable of absolute proof, but the concern is so widespread that he does his constituents no service by seeming to fly in the face of it.

I shall be brief as I do not wish to delay this very good measure. I have no difficulty in opposing the amendments. I do not believe that the people who sent me here want persons convicted of theft, handling stolen property or burglary, which accounts for a high proportion of those sentenced to probation, to sit as jurors judging criminal cases. That is not what the public want.

Of course probation sentences suggest that the offences are less serious than others and the Bill takes account of that by making the disqualification proportionately less severe. As those of us who practise in the courts well know, however, very serious offences sometimes result in probation sentences. One therefore cannot take the risk of saying that anyone sentenced to probation has committed no offence worth mentioning and expect the public to regard it as a good thing to have such people on juries.

I am sorry that the National Association of Probation Officers does not particularly like the measure. We are told that probationary offenders might be "embarrassed". I am sorry if that is so but I think that I can just about live with that.

I briefly take issue with the Under-Secretary of State and, as one who has been a Member rather longer than he has, give him a little advice. The House does not take kindly to arrogance and pomposity, even from lawyers. The House allows lawyers a great deal of scope. Obviously, the hon. Gentleman does not often attend the House on Friday, or he would know that it is normal for hon. Members with other engagements to come to the Chamber in the early part of the morning and leave by lunchtime or to be elsewhere in the early part of the morning and come in later in the morning for the rest of the debate.

I invite the hon. Gentleman to observe that it is not the rule of the House that hon. Members on Report, or during any other debate, must be present for the whole of the proceedings. That would be a novel step. I should be interested to know whether the hon. Gentleman's view is held by the Government or whether it is his personal observation. It is a ludicrous view, because at least one Conservative Back-Bench Member now sitting behind the Under-Secretary of State performs radically during Friday sessions without being present for the whole time. No names, no pack drill—but the hon. Gentleman involved will know who I am talking about. I make no objection to that type of conduct in this place.

It ill becomes the Under-Secretary of State to adopt the hypocritical pose that an hon. Member who has not been present for the whole of the proceedings is, in a sense, precluded from participating in the debate. It would be a new feature of parliamentary proceedings if hon. Members were to be excluded from participating in the debate if they had not been sitting in their places from the start. I invite the Under-Secretary of State to consider the effect on Government policy generally if those hon. Members who cannot always be present for the whole of a debate, including debates on Report, were to be excluded from participating. I do not believe that the Under-Secretary of State seriously believes that his argument to me, when I intervened from a sedentary position earlier, is capable of being sustained. I do not ask him, because he is so arrogant, to withdraw the remark. It is what one expects from people of his class and his profession.

I oppose the Bill. I gave notice to the Under-Secretary of State that, in view of its treatment, I was prepared to listen to Conservative Members' arguments. There is little one can read in Hansard on the Bill. I am prepared to listen and, if necessary, to participate if I believe that the liberties of the subject and my constituents will be eroded because of the attempt to ensure that juries are packed only with people who are likely—I hope to show this if we get as far as Third Reading—to be strongly in favour all the time of law and order and of not putting criminals away. On Third Reading the arguments that should have been put forward earlier will be exposed. The Bill is illogical. The Under-Secretary of State has provoked me. I intend to remind the House on Third Reading of the Bill's basic illogical flaws.

The press have mounted a limited campaign during the passage of this small Bill. The Conservative press must show that it is part of the law and order lobby, so it has come out in support of the Bill.

Earlier, the Under-Secretary of State quoted an article in the Daily Mail about a man wo had committed criminal offences and had served on a jury. Let me bring to the attention of the Minister and the House an article in The Times of 25 February. It may be the same case as the one to which the Minister referred. The article was about the Daily Mail taking up a criminal juror. The article referred to the juror who filled in his form on the first day and went on a jury. He was not sure whether he was disqualified so he went to the citizens advice bureau which told him that he would probably be all right. After that, the juror contacted three national newspapers including the Daily Mail.

Will the hon. Gentleman explain the relevance of his remarks to this amendment?

They were preliminary remarks. Part of the Bill will undermine the jury system. That may not be the conscious intent of Conservative Members, but I suspect that it probably is. The amendments seem to reflect the Conservative party's attitude towards the jury system. We have seen increased police vetting of jurors and yet Conservative Members do not raise an eyebrow about that. The advantage of the jury system is that it reflects a cross-section of society. To exclude those who some time in the past—that means those on probation—have completed what is only a minor sentence, is scandalous. That is what the amendment does. It deprives those people of their civil rights.

The hon. and learned Member for Fylde (Sir E. Gardner) is quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying that the Bill would

"distinguish between serious crimes on the basis of the gravity of the offence itself and not rely exclusively on the sentence passed for it."

The hon. and learned Member was talking about the gravity of the offence, but those who have been placed on probation are hardly those who have committed grave offences.

There is no dispute in the House that those who have committed serious offences should be excluded from serving on a jury, but the amendment does not deal with such people. Only minor offenders, in the main, are placed on probation. This is the first time that a jury disqualification will be extended to that category of offender. Whether they should be excluded raises an important principle. Perhaps they should, for a short lime after committing offences, but the clause is excessive and arbitrary. It sets a five-year period and has no regard to the subsequent good behaviour of the offender or the fact that he may have reformed and changed his ways. As my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) said, a great many offenders do.

Is not my hon. Friend aware that the Bill is based on the assumption that he is criticising? It is based on the assumption that people will change their ways in that people are disqualified for 10 years and not for life. The argument for 10 years, or for any other period, will need to be explored further a little later, but I hope chat my hon. Friend will accept that his argument seems to be shared by the Bill's sponsors.

That is a genuine point. If there is a chance that people will change their ways, and it seems that they will, they should not be excluded from jury service. That is the very reason why those who have been on probation and who change their ways should be allowed to serve.

Thus, the amendment is modest and is more sensible than the arbitrary period of five years. Twelve months after the probation order has been served, civil rights are restored to that individual. It is a modest and reasonable amendment and is better than the original provision. It should be borne in mind that we are talking about people who have committed only minor offences and who are supervised throughout their period on probation. Invariably, the probation period is fairly short. Most of those involved are youngsters who are often caught in a vicious downward spiral, which could eventually lead them to prison. We need to find ways of helping them out of it. Restoring their civil rights represents one small way of giving them the opportunity to go straight. We should accordingly seek to restore their civil rights, and I support this modest amendment.

I shall try to be brief in response to what has been a relatively lengthy debate.

With a slight note of reluctance this time, I must urge the House once again not to accept the amendment. The hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) said that the coverage of probation offenders was the Bill's weakest point. I should be reluctant to accept that phraseology, but, in extending the Bill to probation offenders, I accept that we are extending disqualification from jury service to less serious offences than those previously included.

However, the Bill's fundamental purpose is to exclude from jury service those who have been found guilty of an offence of a significant degree of seriousness. In this instance, the measurement of seriousness must be the sentence that is passed. It is not correct simply to say that the recipients of probation orders are all young, basically innocent at heart and not fundamentally guilty of major offences. In 1982, 36,500 probation orders were imposed, so they are a major part of our sentencing system. Not all the recipients by any means were young offenders. As has already been mentioned, 52 per cent. of probation orders were for theft and handling stolen goods and 17 per cent. for burglary.

I tried to do some research to see what my attitude should be. I discovered from a survey carried out in 1971 that 58 per cent. of those awarded probation orders went on to commit an indictable offence within the following six years. I would therefore be reluctant to put anyone on a jury who had a six in 10 chance of going on to commit an indictable offence. That is the principal reason why I urge the House to reject the amendment.

My further objection to the amendment has substance, but it is technical. The amendment refers to the disqualification running not from the time from which a probation order is served, but from the time when it is completed. If the amendment were agreed, the disqualification period would not start until probation had come to an end. That would lead to the ludicrous position of someone being qualified for jury service while on probation and disqualified when the probation was at an end.

I beg to move amendment No. 12, in page 2, leave out subsection (3) and insert—

'(3) This Act shall come into force on such day as the Secretary of State may by order made by statutory instrument appoint.'.

If the Bill is approved by both Houses, it is intended that it should come into force two months after it is passed. I am not certain that the major differences in eligibility can be fully taken into account administratively in that time.

I thought that was the reason behind the amendment. I have given it serious thought and am prepared to accept it.

I thank the hon. Gentleman. That will shorten what would have been a short speech anyway.

The Bill is complicated and will be difficult to administer. I want to ensure that there will be enough time. It is not for me to say how much time is necessary. I debated whether to suggest a specific period, but thought that inappropriate. Only the Minister and the Home Office can judge how long it will take to put the Bill into effect. I hope that the Minister will also agree to it.

Those of us who support the Bill have been told that we are undermining the jury system. That is so patently absurd as to put a question mark over the judgment of those who make that allegation and who oppose the Bill's provisions.

If all the burglars, thieves and blackmailers formed themselves into a union and asked for representation here for consideration of a measure to make it a little more difficult for them to conduct their nefarious practices without being convicted, they could not do better than to assemble Opposition Members to table amendments such as we have seen here today. I do not go as far as to say that they advocate a thieves' or robbers' charter because that would be an absurd exaggeration. However, if the union were told that moderation was the sensible way and that any diminution of the strength of the proposals would be desirable, similar arguments to those advanced today would be used.

My hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) and the Minister will later refer to some of the important aspects of the Bill. Having gone so far in changing the system of sentencing, we should consider whether we should amend the jury rules to take account of those changes. For example, in 1974 when the last similar measure was passed, suspended sentences were not in existence. As a result, people were disqualified from serving on juries who now, because of the march of time and the new approach to sentencing, are no longer disqualified. Is that what Parliament originally intended? Is that what the people of this country intended? Clearly the answer is no.

The second aspect to consider is whether there are people who are not disqualified who now should be disqualified. The serious problem of jury nobbling has arisen recently. Of course, no one knows in advance whether they will sit on a jury in a certain case, but there is little point in denying the fact that a person with convictions for crime is more vulnerable to approaches from people who want to nobble juries, and certainly may be more susceptible to such approaches and less likely to report those approaches to the police. In 1982, 13 cases at the Old Bailey had to be stopped after jurors had been approached for jury nobbling. To some extent, those matters are reasonably dealt with in the Bill, and I congratulate my hon. Friend on that——

rose——

Perhaps I may be allowed to carry on, because the hon. Gentleman will have his opportunity to speak.

I am one of those who do not believe that the Bill goes far enough. The evil that it is intended to prevent is having people who are dishonest, people who are contemptuous of our system, people who are unstable and have been proven to be so by conviction for crimes of violence, from sitting as judges—that is, as jurymen—on others.

In my opinion, therefore, the Bill deals only with a narrow aspect of the problem—the people who are contemptuous of our system. It should go wider and deal with people who are fined. When a judge makes a decision about how to sentence someone who has committed theft, burglary or some other offence — making a choice to sentence that person to probation, a short term of imprisonment, a suspended sentence or a fine — it is sometimes a matter that requires a fine judgment about the person, and it may have little to do with the seriousness of the offence. One court may fine the person; another court may place that person on probation. In the latter case, the person would be disqualified under the Bill; in the former, the person would not be disqualified. It is therefore logical and desirable that people who are subjected, certainly to substantial fines, and perhaps even to lesser fines as a result of committing quite serious offences, should also be disqualified.

So the Bill is limited. If, by any chance, the Bill is talked out — there may be Opposition Members who have no intention of allowing this desirable measure to reach the statute book—I hope that my hon. Friend will take the matter away—if not my hon. Friend, perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister will do so—and consider seriously, when it is reintroduced, whether to strengthen the provisions and make them wider. I say that, not because hon. Gentlemen who may wish to talk the Bill out should be taught a lesson — that is not a reason for introducing legislation — but because it will provide Conservative Members who are in favour of a stronger measure with an opportunity to strengthen the Bill.

The Bill substantially advances respect for the integrity of the jury system. That integrity is vital, not only because the public must have confidence that justice is being done while they follow their ordinary walks of life, but because the accused in any criminal trial must have confidence that the matter is being fairly judged. There is at least one example of a person with many previous convictions sitting on a jury who said, "I would convict everybody." If there is lack of confidence in our system by those who are accused, convicted and sentenced in the courts, they will have a chip on their shoulder. It makes it far less likely that they will serve their sentences in a proper way and far more likely that they will come out of prison very much more embittered. Therefore, from their point of view, it is vital that our jury system should be beyond reproach. It is extremely important that the jury system should be beyond reproach because only then can the interests of the innocent be protected.

The Bill is vital to the administration of justice because it helps to create confidence in the system. It is vital because it helps to preserve the good name of British justice which all hon. Members must be so jealous to maintain. I support the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon on advancing it.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) made several interesting observations. He said that some Labour Members might be here to talk the Bill out. Coming from the hon. and learned Gentleman that is a serious accusation. Presumably he is speaking from a position of some moral authority. I take it that he has never turned up on a Friday to talk any Bill out on any occasion in his career in the House. I see that the hon. and learned Gentleman is smiling, so I imagine that his remarks were somewhat tongue in cheek.

The Under-Secretary of State said that Labour Members sometimes turn up to oppose Bills. I wonder what the House is coming to. Are the Government so full of themselves—particularly the Minister—that they feel that everything they do must go through with no opposition? That really is remarkable.

My hon. Friend has hit on an important point. Both the Minister's attitude and that of his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) have shown contempt not just for juries, but for this House. They do not want the matter discussed. I am not here to talk the Bill out; nor is my hon. Friend. We are here to raise specific issues and to dismiss what we say is an attack on the House as much as on the jury system.

I understand that my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) has offered some concessions to the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson), which I believe have unfortunately been rejected. We might not have been discussing the matter now if his suggestions had been accepted. However, that is a matter for the hon. Gentleman, who is promoting the Bill, and his hon. Friend.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton said that we should amend the law because sentencing policy had changed substantially since the original legislation on the disqualification of jurors. That is right. The question is in what way one should amend the law and how far one should go. I should have thought that the change in sentencing policy—the House will recognise that I am not speaking as a lawyer and that I am therefore in danger of treading on ground that perhaps lawyers regard as their preserve—is something that would have been warmly welcomed in the House as giving greater discretion to the courts to make the punishment fit the crime and to try to relieve the pressure on our overcrowded prisons.

I thought that the system of suspended sentences was supported in the House without that necessarily having any implications for the business of disqualifying jurors from serving. That point was obviously not made at the time when sentencing policy was changed and it is rather late in the day, some years after the change, for any hon. Members to say that that is a reason. After all, it was open to the hon. and learned Member for Burton, a s a distinguished lawyer, as indeed is the Under-Secretary of State, to suggest to the Government at any time that they should amend the disqualification for jury service legislation in the light of the changes in sentencing policy.

If that is such a fundamental part of the Government's approach to law and order—I understand that the Government are in favour of the Bill—it is surprising that the Government have not brought forward legislation of their own instead of leaving it to private Members. This can hardly be said to be a private Member's Bill which is a matter of conscience. It is very much a matter of public: policy. Public policy concerns every hon. Member. That is why some of us feel that the matter should he fully debated before the House gives the Bill a Third Reading and it goes to another place where their Lordships, who have great legal experience, will be waiting to dot the i's and cross the t's, perhaps taking into account some of the amendments moved by my hon. Friends, but rejected by the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton talked about jury nobbling. That is a legal expression about which those of us who do not practise in the courts do not know much. I accept that there is a certain amount of jury nobbling. The hon. and learned Gentleman referred to 13 cases at the Old Bailey. Obviously, that is not the only criminal court in the country. No doubt there are some instances of jury nobbling at Crown courts. I do not understand the logic of this. If the Bill goes through, will the amount of jury nobbling be reduced? Those who are nobbled are presumably those who complain to the judge, after which the case is set aside for a new jury. I do not know the precise procedure, but no doubt the hon. and learned Gentleman could tell us.

How would the Bill affect jury nobbling? What. guarantee is there that it will be reduced? We know about it only from what goes on when a court finds out about it. Therefore, we are talking about the nobbling that is known, as distinct from that which is unknown.

I have some sympathy with the hon. and learned Gentleman's point of view. He believes that the jury nobbling that is known is the tip of the iceberg. That implies that the majority of people who serve on a jury, if approached for nobbling purposes by a criminal element supporting the defendant in the dock, would not reveal that to the judge. They would not say that they had been approached illegally by someone who tried to influence their views. From the amount of jury nobbling that is known, one must deduce that many jurors are got at but the fact is never revealed, which says something about the quality of those jurors. However, there is no necessary connection between a juror who is nobbled and who does not reveal the facts and the ability of that juror to take a proper part in a trial when a criminal is in the dock. The Bill will not prevent either the jury nobbling that becomes known or the vast amount of nobbling, if there is any, that is not known. Therefore, it is wrong to use such arguments when the Bill can have no impact on that procedure.

I make it clear, in case there should be any doubt, that the Opposition are opposed to jury nobbling. We want to know whether the Bill will have any impact. We are waiting for other distinguished Conserative lawyers, including the Minister, to tell us whether the Bill, if it becomes law, would restrict the jury nobbling that becomes known and on what basis one could conclude that it would restrict unknown jury nobbling—the submerged part of the iceberg of that practice—which we all condemn.

I take issue with the hon. and learned Gentleman on an unfortunate remark that he made. He goes much further than the sponsors of the Bill. I suspect that they would not advance those arguments. My argument is not with them, but with the hon. and learned Gentleman. He talked of getting rid of unstable people on juries. I stress the words "unstable people". The Bill assumes that, if there is a desire to disqualify more people with criminal convictions, there is somehow a connection between instability and a criminal record. The hon. and learned Gentleman made an important point, but it is not entirely related to what is in the Bill or what might be desirable when selecting jurors.

In case the hon. Gentleman is in danger of misunderstanding me, I must make it clear that I referred to those who had manifested an instability that showed itself in violence, and had then been convicted of it.

I apologise to the hon. and learned Gentleman for getting it wrong. If his words were taken at face value, we should seek disqualification of those who are mentally ill. But there is no, suggestion in the Bill—or, indeed, in the hon. Gentleman's speech—that there should be any test for that. I shall return to the issue of tests later.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) would bar many more people. He does not realise that the very power that he is seeking to use against others could be used against him. I do not think that he is a suitable person to serve on a jury.

Order. I remind the House that we are on Third Reading and we must stick closely to what is in the Bill.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I hope that, on reflection, the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) will want to reconsider his remark about my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence). Conduct between hon. Members should not go so far as to suggest that any of us would not be suitable to serve on juries. I know that none of us do, but the remark should be withdrawn.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The remarks of the hon. Member for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley) might apply if I were not following the logic of the hon. and learned Member for Burton. His logic is that some people should be judged as not suitable to serve on juries. My argument, which is perfectly reasonable, is that, if we go down that road, I could say that he was not a suitable person to serve on a jury. It is intensely dangerous to the hon. and learned Gentleman, myself and everybody else to take such a line. I did not intend to insult the hon. and learned Gentleman. It is simply my view of the position.

I am grateful for the opportunity of being allowed to continue my speech following those interruptions.

Having clarified a number of the points made by the hon. and learned Member for Burton, I turn to the Bill itself. I am not a lawyer. Perhaps the lips of lawyers might curl at the idea that someone who is not a lawyer should presume above his station to speak about a Bill that is basically a matter of law. However, I hope to show that the Bill goes a long way beyond the interests of law and lawyers. It deals with the whole question of the sort of society in which we wish to live.

There is a basic fallacy in the Bill — that only criminals are opposed to law and order. In other words, only those who have been convicted are a danger to the jury system. I wish to make it quite clear that I fully support the present law that those convicted of and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for serious criminal offences should be disqualified from jury service.

The Bill goes much further than that. It virtually excludes not all—as the hon. and learned Member for Burton would have us do — but most categories of criminals who are not currently excluded from the right of jury service for a period of 10 years. If criminals are thought to be the only persons who are a threat to the jury system, I have news for the promoter and sponsors of the Bill, and perhaps the Minister if he also believes that. Many other people in our society, not convicted of criminal offences, may have a great deal of sympathy for defendants in the dock.

A noble earl, a prominent Member of another place, has great sympathy for some of the most prominent criminals in the country. Two such criminals—I am sure that most hon. Members would not share his sympathy for them — are the moors murderers. Hon. Members will know the noble earl of whom I speak. I am not in any way seeking to denigrate him. However, if he were to serve on a jury, which I understand is not possible, he—there must be many, good Christians and others with great personal convictions about law and order and the way in which we should treat criminals in society—might feel kindly disposed towards the defendant in the dock on the basis, there but for the grace of God go I.

Such people would not be disqualified from jury service under the Bill or even under the draconian proposals of the hon. and learned Member for Burton. Some people feel that we are here not to judge one another, in the words of Jesus Christ.

Order. I remind the hon. Member that the Bill deals with disqualification from jury service on criminal grounds. He should relate his remarks to that.

Given the drift and length of the hon. Gentleman's speech, may we have an assurance that he will be present next week for the Bill's Third Reading, when it will be top of the business if today's debate continues?

Certainly, if I am still speaking when the time for debate runs out this afternoon.

Many criminals are not caught, but the Bill does not cover that aspect. Indeed, the suggestions of the hon. and learned Member for Burton to extend the proposals for disqualification beyond the limits of the Bill would ensure that many people who were capable of being on a jury and delivering an honest verdict in the light of the evidence would be excluded. That would endanger our whole system of justice.

Will the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon explain why the period of 10 years has been specified? What is the special virtue of that time? Why not five or 15 years? Is it suggested that criminals will somehow have a change of heart during those 10 years and that after 10 years they will not merely have purged their original offence but, so to speak, will have relieved themselves of the accusation that they could be got at during the course of the prosecution case being presented in court?

I suggest that after 10 years nobody will change much more than they would have changed after five years, and in that respect the Bill is illogical. If I am told that the Bill must contain a period, then, following the logic of the Bill, which I do not accept, convicted criminals should be excluded for life. Why think that a criminal after 10 years will be fitted to serve on a jury but will not be so fitted after five, six or seven years?

It seems that the whole purpose of the Bill is to shore up the crumbling edifice of law and order under the Conservatives. The police capability of bringing criminals to court and getting them convicted is diminishing all the time. A recent parliamentary answer from the Home Office told us that clear-up rates for crime in different areas vary from the excellent in Durham and Northumberland, for example, to the extremely poor in the Metropolitan police area. One of the factors behind the Bill is that the police are so worried about their ineffectiveness in combating and clearing up crime that they are more than ever determined that, when they have a potential criminal in the dock, he will be convicted. That is a serious threat to civil liberty.

If the Bill is enacted, how many criminals are likely to be excluded from the right to serve on a jury?

I know that the hon. Gentleman is terribly upset that we are all getting at him because he has not played a part in the Bill's consideration hitherto. However, we become irritated when he asks questions of the sort that he has just posed, because it is clear that he has not even read the reports of the previous proceedings. At the beginning of the consideration of the Bill in Committee the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) properly asked me how many disqualifications there would be, and I told him that they would increase from the present 250,000 to about 500,000. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman is doing himself much good by the way in which he is conducting himself in this debate.

I thank the Minister for that information. It seems that the Bill will exclude many people who, in the opinion of many of my hon. Friends, should not necessarily be disqualified from jury service on the basis of disqualification within the Bill.

It is alleged that one of the reasons for introducing the Bill is to tighten the system of securing convictions by ensuring that criminals who appear in the dock are properly convicted and not let off. The theory seems to be that it is more important that we put criminals away than to safeguard the interests of defendants when there is considerable doubt whether they committed a crime.

Basic to the Bill is getting rid of people who have been convicted and who are, therefore, unworthy. In the speeches that I have heard today it seems that there is an underlying feeling that certain undesirable people—the definition of "undesirable" being a criminal conviction—should be excluded. It is thought that that would make the jury system work much better, which really means that more convictions would be secured. The Bill will not make the jury system fairer or more just, which are surely worthwhile objectives in a democratic society. It appears that the objective of the Bill is to secure more convictions. I do not necessarily regard that as a worthy aim. We need to ensure that criminals who commit offences are apprehended by the police and brought before the courts. It is then for the courts and juries to determine, in the light of the evidence, whether they should be convicted. There will obviously be factors, such as extenuating circumstances, to be taken into account.

The Bill deals with only certain categories of criminals, and many categories are not included. As the hon. and learned Member for Burton said, should those who are fined be disqualified from jury service? Many minor offences carry the penalty of a fine, a suspended sentence, a community service order or a probation order. Is there any logic in making a distinction on the basis of the sentence that is passed by the court? Should one try to measure the seriousness of the crime by the category of offence?

The Minister made the point that theft covers a variety of serious and trivial offences. I do not know whether sentences necessarily reflect the seriousness of an offence—sub specie aeternitatis—but it is certainly true that courts in different parts of the country impose different sentences for similar offences. How will the sponsors of the Bill deal with that point of logic?

If an offence is committed in one part of the country, it may be dealt with by a police caution or in a magistrates' court. If it went to the Crown court, it would bring the offender within the provisions of the Bill. The sentencing policy of Crown courts varies in different parts of the country. In some areas an offence could lead to disqualification from jury service under the Bill. In other areas, the offence would result in a different sentence and would not lead to disqualification. There are many variations in the way in which minor offences are treated by different courts, even if they are tried by juries.

The provisions of the Bill are illogical. They are a threat to the civil liberties of those who are accused of crimes. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial. We do not want to have a system under which people get a biased trial because all 12 good men and true on the jury are dedicated to bringing criminals to justice and have a pathological hatred of the criminal fraternity.

Is the hon. Gentleman seriously suggesting that the Bill which deals only with disqualification would lead to juries being biased in one way or another? Is he also suggesting that every jury should include someone with a criminal record?

No. The Bill disqualifies a certain number of people from jury service, but the whole thrust of the Bill and of the arguments made by Conservative Members is that the jury system needs to be tightened up. The thinking behind the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill lies behind this Bill, too. The two should be viewed together as not tightening up law and order, but tightening up in a way that should be resisted because the desired effect will not be achieved. This Bill will present a serious blow to people's ability to sit in judgment on their peers, merely because some have a minor criminal record.

I do believe that I am alone in being startled by the speech of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins). We have known the hon. Gentleman for many years. He is a pleasant enough chap and has served his turn at the Department of Trade and the Department of Health and Social Security. Who knew of the volcanic passions lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be unleashed in a great speech exhorting us to keep crooks on juries? Was that in his election manifesto? Perhaps not.

Cheap.

It is all very well to say "cheap", but the hon. Member for Walthamstow subjected me to virulent abuse for daring to point out that, although filled with opinions about the Bill, he had not taken the trouble to attend the debate or to read the report of the Committee stage, which would have dealt with most of his arguments. There is a professional approach to our work in this place. It includes preparing the ground before making a speech.

The hon. Gentleman has made a travesty of the arguments. First, there was the little interplay between the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) to the effect that what we were really saying was that we did not want hon. Members to speak in the debate in opposition to the Bill. That is patent nonsense. What we do not want is that those who oppose the Bill should hide behind amendments which purport to be designed to help but which are in fact designed to hinder and to obstruct.

Let people have the courage of their convictions. The effect of my saying that was that the hon. Member for Walthamstow at least came out in his true colours and showed that his intentions towards the Bill were as black as the gear that he is wearing. He is entitled to do that. At least there has been some honesty instead of everyone claiming to want to improve the Bill. The hon. Gentleman does not want the Bill, and neither does the official Opposition spokesman.

In their efforts to avoid the essential logic of the proposal the Opposition have teetered on the edge of what even on their not very elevated standards have been some of the most ludicrous pronouncements that I have heard in the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley) anticipated me, leaping to his feet with even more alacrity than I, when the hon. Member for Walthamstow seemed seriously to suggest that the only way to maintain criminal justice in this country was to ensure that every jury the length and breadth of the kingdom had a leavening of criminals to ensure that justice was done. The hon. Member for Walthamstow shakes his head. Perhaps he will take more care in the aftermath of the debate then he did in preparing for it and will read the report of his speech. Certainly no sensible person hearing it could fail to be driven to that conclusion.

It is tempting to spend my allocated time dealing with the arguments advanced by the hon. Member for Walthamstow, but I end my comments as I began them in Committee. The Morris committee recognised in 1965 that to preserve public respect for the jury system and to preserve the jury system as the basic bastion of our liberty which I believe it to be, the committee believed it to be and indeed we all believe it to be, changes were necessary because we could not continue with a situation in which almost no one was excluded from jury service. To their credit, the then Labour Government supported the Morris committee's view and legislated to the effect that people who had served more than five years in prison should be excluded for life and those sentenced to imprisonment for between three months and five years should be excluded for 10 years.

In the 20 years that have elapsed since then, penal policy has changed and penalties not yet devised when the Morris committee reported have been introduced—for instance, community service orders and suspended sentences—which are expressly, or in practice, alternatives to imprisonment and are certainly used only for people who have become fairly immersed in crime. Those sentences are at the graver end of the disposal range, even though they are non-custodial. It is beyond peradventure that many, if not all, of the people who now receive such sentences would previously have been sent to prison.

On probation orders, the hon. Member for Hammersmith, North——

Hammersmith.

I apologise. I am glad to note that the hon. Gentleman's web of influence now extends to the south as well as the north. That is one of the few happy things that I can find to say about him today.

As the hon. Gentleman well knows, the probation service has rightly extended the gamut of its activities to take in far more serious criminals than before. I am glad to see the hon. Gentleman nod his assent to that. We are not prepared to say, as Opposition Members have teetered on the brink of saying, that the arrangements carefully thought out by the Morris committee 20 years ago and adopted with appropriate alacrity by the Labour Government were wrong. The Opposition are trying to turn back the clock, whereas my hon. Friend merely seeks to keep the exclusions in line with the present trend of penal policy. Try as I may—I believe that at my best I can be quite ingenious—I cannot think of even one good reason why anyone should take the trouble to come here and say that people sentenced to some of the graver penalties available to the courts have any real or sufficient interest in the administration of justice such that they can be trusted to sit on juries without exclusion for a period of years.

It is no good Opposition Members criticising my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) for the essential modesty of his proposal by saying, "Why do we not ban them all for life?" My hon. Friend has striven hard to find a consensus. The extent to which some Opposition Members are alienated from common sense, despite a Bill which is generous in recognising that a case can be made for a number of people with criminal records staying on juries, can be seen in the number who are outside the fold. That says less about the proposal's merits and more about many Labour Members' attitudes towards law and order.

My attitude to the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson) differs from the attitudes of the Under-Secretary of State and some of his colleagues who are supporting him. I respect the hon. Gentleman who, for the wrong reasons, has gone down a road which is mistaken in terms of what he wishes to achieve. The Bill will achieve other measures which, I am sure, the hon. Gentleman does not intend. I cannot extend that generosity to the Under-Secretary of State or to the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), who have different aims. I was under the impression that the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon was considering conceding certain amendments at a later stage, and I am sorry that that is not the case. My attitude towards the Bill is hardening. That view has implications for the choices open to the hon. Gentleman.

The hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon took up the issue in the light of publicity about certain people serving on juries. That was felt to be undesirable in view of certain matters known about them. As other hon. Members have said, the hon. Gentleman went down that road in the context of talk—unsubstantiated in the majority of cases—about jury nobbling. The hon. Gentleman said, "Here is a popular issue to which I can respond. I can do something about it. What can I do about it?" The hon. Gentleman made a basic mistake in the logic he used in thinking that the way to get to the core of the problem is to screen out from juries people who have certain convictions.

I have argued that the Bill does not screen out those people whom the hon. Gentleman intended to disqualify. It allows some people to be eligible for jury service after waiting a longer time than at present. On both those counts, the Bill fails. There are other ways of achieving the hon. Gentleman's aim. I respect the hon. Gentleman's position, although I disagree with him. He took the wrong road. The hon. Gentleman failed to exercise political judgment and leadership in responding to people who were shouting about the need to stop juries being nobbled. He found himself embarked on a path that would neither achieve his aim nor do anything to give credit to the jury system, of which we are rightly proud.

Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman has been supported—I do not think supported is the right word—by the Under-Secretary of State and the hon. and learned Member for Burton, whose intentions differ. The hon. and learned Member for Burton—I am not sure how much this point applies to the Under-Secretary of State — made it clear that he would like to go further. In responding to my points, he made it clear that he would like people with a history of psychiatric illness to be excluded from jury service as well. I said that the hon. Gentleman might not be a good person to serve on a jury.

If we allow people such as the hon. and learned Member for Burton to judge who is a suitable person to be on a jury, then I too could make such a judgment. would make the same subjective judgment about him as he has made about others. I could not possibly share, his attitudes and values. I would not trust him to make what I would regard as a good judgment on a jury. If I believe that, I can say that he is not a suitable person. It is intensely dangerous.

The Bill undermines the jury system. The Minister and the hon. and learned Member for Burton have consistently avoided that issue. The Minister has cottoned on to the Bill because he knows that it is a popular issue. If it were not. the Government would have brought forward the measure themselves as my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins) pointed out. The hon. and learned Member for Burton, and possibly the Minister, support the Bill because they do not like certain aspects of the jury system and would like to cut them out. The hon. and learned Member for Burton wants to limit jury trials to certain cases.

The hon. and [earned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) is disqualified from serving on a jury because he is a barrister and a Member of Parliament.

I am greatly relieved to hear that.

Order. I must remind the hon. Member that we are discussing disqualificaton on criminal grounds.

I was going to say—perhaps I should not—that that does not disqualify the hon. and learned Member for Burton from practising in court and putting forward the values about which I am so critical.

I shall return to the central criticism that I made about a number of amendments. The argument has been advanced that some people serving on juries can be get at or can give perverse judgments. That is the core of the argument of not only the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon but of other Conservative Members. The Minister presumably agrees with that. He wants to stop such people serving on juries. Not a shred of evidence has been produced by anyone during the debate nor, to my knowledge — I will be corrected if I am wrong — by those who have studied the background discussions in more detail, or in Committee, to show that the people who make perverse decisions on juries are necessarily themselves, or are connected with, people who have convictions of the type described in the Bill.

I have had the advantage, I suppose, of mixing over many years with a great many people who have been criminal offenders. As I have already said, many of them will back the court in giving harsher sentences. That is one of my problems. The hon. Member for Eltharn (Mr. Bottomley) readily conceded that many of them have harsh and punitive attitudes towards other offenders.

My guess is that what happens on juries — no one knows because we do not do the research in the way that we should — is that the people who make the perverse judgments are often not offenders but those people who have certain attitudes and views about the police and other beliefs, some of which may be about the political system. It is not necessarily easier to nobble someone who has a previous conviction. I will expand on that in a moment.

My hon. Friend is making the point that I tried, inadequately no doubt, to make earlier. The Bill is an inadequate substitute for what the Government would really like. I do not make this accusation against the Bill's sponsors. The Government, and people who think like the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), want psychological testing of jurors to ensure that they will be suitable.

My hon. Friend has made a very telling point. The hon. and learned Member for Burton said that there were some people whose attitudes, or whatever, were unsuitable, and he was not unique in saying that.

We had that point a few minutes ago. We are being subjected to something that is pretty close to repetition and empty filibustering.

The hon. Gentleman should realise that I have replied to an intervention.

Once it is decided that some people should serve on juries and that others should not, certain logical consequences flow. However, before coming to that point, I should add that those who have committed offences will not necessarily be the easiest jurors to nobble. Unless the juror is known to the individuals concerned, it is not that easy—although unfortunately it is still too easy—to get hold of his records from the Criminal Records Office. However, some people can manage that all right, and sadly they have sometimes been connected in one way or another with Government. But by and large that is not the problem. Sometimes people are nobbled because they are known, but more often they are got at because there is something in their background that enables them to be blackmailed or threatened. Obviously, that "something" could be an offence, but it could be—and often is—a host of other things.

The Bill does not deal with that and, indeed, it is almost impossible for it to do so. We then come to the logical contradiction that has already been mentioned. I do not want to go over it in too much painful detail, but there is a danger that if we do not put feelings on the record—that is the importance of these debates, even if the Minister does not like having them—we shall return to the same problem in a few years' time. I shall not repeat the reasons that I gave earlier, but it will need only another newspaper case in which the man who has been disqualified for 10 years serves on a jury in his 11th year and gives an interview saying this or that for the Minister or someone else to come back to the House and say that the period must be extended. That is why the issue is so important. The Minister is getting his foot in the door and trying to push it open. I do not think that the hon. Member for Skipton is doing that intentionally, but I believe that the Minister and the hon. and learned Member for Burton are. That is one of the most fundamental differences, which I hope that the hon. Member for Skipton will consider. There is a noticeable difference in his approach.

There is a case for saying that some people should not serve on juries because they will not support the criminal justice system, and that some people should be excluded on that basis. The hon. Member for Skipton has used the sentence as his basis——

I am the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon, not the hon. Member for Skipton. I do not mind, but the people of Ripon do.

I appreciate that. My constituency was once called Hammersmith, North but it is now just Hammersmith although its boundaries have not changed one iota.

The hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon and his hon. Friends have fallen into the trap of using sentences as the basis. After all, it could be said that after the period has expired, the person's attitudes and values have not changed so he is still a problem on the jury. There are several ways of dealing with that. The next step is to carry out some psychological test. However, that psychological test would really be about attitudes and values. To screen out the type of person cited by the Minister in the article in the Daily Mail one would have to ask him controlled questions about his attitude towards the police and law and order, as well as questions about his previous background and experience, such as the sort of work that he had done and his convictions. If one concluded that the person's attitudes and values were particularly unattractive and challenged the basis of the rule of law, one would have to say, "This person is not suitable to serve on a jury." One would disqualify a person not for five years or 10 years, but until his values and attitudes had changed. That would be impossible.

The hon. and learned Member for Burton came close to going down that road. He made it clear that he wanted to include people with a psychiatric history. That is a behaviouralist approach which has nothing to do with morality. A person who has been mentally ill can have a powerful and proper sense of justice and of what is right and wrong. A person who has never been mentally ill or caught for any criminal offence can be evil and immoral.

The other road is the logical road, if we must go down any road at all. The logical road would operate on the basis of the offence rather than the sentence. That method would still not be perfect, but it would be more clear-cut. One could say that someone convicted of serious corruption or bribery is a person who, by the nature of the offence——

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have not heard other speeches, but I have been listening to the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley). Surely he is arguing about what he would like the Bill to contain. I thought that on Third Reading one could discuss only what is in the Bill.

The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) is relating his remarks to what is in the Bill and is saying why he is criticising it.

I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is important to explain why the Bill's provisions are not adequate. I cannot do that and deal with interventions unless I discuss the alternatives.

One could specify people convicted of corruption or other serious crime. That would overlap the Bill's provisions. Attempted murder, for example, might be specified. One might restrict the provision to people whose case has been heard by a jury. That would be another way of drawing a line.

There is no hard evidence to show that the problem that the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon is trying to solve will be solved by this method. If that is so, are we not right to say that the whole jury system is so precious and important to us—it is to the Opposition, although I am beginning to wonder about the Minister and some of his colleagues — that it is worth defending in its original form? I suggest that it is.

The Minister made great play of Lord Harris's view. Lord Harris changed his political party, which is not surprising in view of certain of his attitudes and values. One of the problems that Lord Harris encountered was the assumption that one can deal with problems of this nature by eroding the civil liberties of jurors. We are talking about what type of people make good jurors. It does not necessarily follow that such a person will be one of those mentioned in the Bill.

The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) is striving vainly to find a philosophical reason to justify talking out the Bill. He asks whether the jury in its original form is worth defending. What does he mean by its original form? Does he mean when every criminal was permitted to serve on a jury, save in one or two exceptional cases? Does he accept the Morris committee reforms of 1965? What is he really saying? There seems to be a lack of definition in some of his extraordinary philosophical observations. What should the disqualifications for jury service actually be?

That is a fair question. All I am saying is that the system is working satisfactorily. Of course there are problems in it, and the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon has identified them. However, he has not told us how to deal with them. In my opinion, it would be better to leave the system unchanged, because even what I suggested would produce problems at the margins. I make no bones about that.

The Minister is not on good ground when he says that we must change the system because of changes in the sentencing policy in previous years. We know from experience, whether in this century or the last, that juries make perverse judgments. They do so for many reasons, not least because they sometimes do not like the excessively heavy sentences that are imposed. We all remember, in the capital punishment debate in the House, that some Conservative Members rightly pointed to the danger that juries would not convict if they knew that the person would be hanged. That argument carried a lot of weight. It was a classic case of trying to deal with a technical problem by means of an inappropriate response which, in this case, would merely label people as criminals for a long time and not allow them to be rehabilitated in the normal way, simply in an effort to stop something happening that has been happening for many years, and which in any case would not be stopped by this Bill.

I want to say a word about the type of sentences that the hon. Gentleman proposes in the Bill. I come back to the subject of probation, because it gives the lie to the position that the Government have adopted in this connection. As I said earlier, many people are placed on probation for serious offences. Incidentally, may I correct the Minister on one issue? Probation is not particularly new. I was having serious cases put on probation as long ago as the early 1970s. So there is nothing new about that. The courts took into account the circumstances in which the offence took place and then made a judgment as to whether it was likely to happen again.

The classic case is that of a person who has seriously assaulted — and sometimes attempted to murder — a member of his own family, but when there is no other history of violence towards people outside the family. On looking into the background, one discovers all sorts of problems within the family, that being where the danger lay. Attempted murder is a serious charge. The court takes the view, often correctly, that the person is not really a danger to society once he is removed from the family situation. Such a person can end up on probation.

The Minister and the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon have a fair point when they say that in such circumstances we must make it five years before such a person can serve on a jury. However, that does not cover two crucial issues: first, the person's attitudes and values may be perfectly acceptable as a juror, as compared with a person who has not committed an offence, who may have the most appalling attitudes and values, and who may be quite prepared to sell for a certain amount of money his vote on the jury; secondly, if that person is excluded for only five years, and the charge is one of attempted murder, he can go to The Sun or the Daily Mail in six years' time and say, "I was on that jury, and I know why I think … " and so on. It is wide open to abuse. The hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon has not solved that crucial problem.

Does my hon. Friend feel that people who are prepared to sell their civil rights would necessarily be appropriate people?

That is a fair point.

I have already made the point, and I do not want to go over the ground in great depth, that suspended sentences did not result, as they were supposed to, in people who would previously have gone to prison getting a noncustodial sentence. What it resulted in was people who would previously have got a non-custodial sentence getting a suspended sentence. The Minister knows that that is correct, from his figures. He has been told that by civil servants, as have all his predecessors since the late 1970s, when it became overwhelmingly clear from the figures. I defy the Minister to deny that what I have just said is correct. That is the view of the present Home Secretary, the previous Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary before that.

A suspended prison sentence is a prison sentence that has been imposed by the court but suspended until such time as it expires or the person commits another offence and the sentence is imposed. We are in the rather ridiculous trap of excluding people who are subject to a suspended sentence, which should be treated as a prison sentence, even though the statistics tell us that those are not usually—although in some circumstances they will be—people who would have been sent to prison.

The argument on community service orders is even more powerful. It is not, as the Minister implied in one of his contributions, used almost universally as an alternative to prison. It is used frequently as an alternative to imprisonment but I have no hesitation in quoting a magistrate at Clerkenwell court for whom, as I have already said, I have respect, even though his decisions caused me many problems as a probation officer. He took the view, rightly, legally and properly, that Parliament intended a sentence of community service to be a sentence in its own right. Nothing in the Act says that community service is an alternative to imprisonment. Because he wanted to send fewer people to prison he chose to use that as an alternative to imprisonment.

I am sure that that is not what Parliament intended at the time. Perhaps my hon. Friend will confirm that it is not unusual, when there has been a breach of a community service order, for a fine to be imposed instead of the sentence of imprisonment which, notionally, it was supposed to replace. Equally, it is by no means unusual, even where a suspended prison sentence is imposed and another offence is subsequently committed within the suspension period, for a prison sentence not to result. Whatever Parliament intended, such provisions have become sui generis.

My hon. Friend has anticipated me. The Minister was less than forthcoming to the House. He knows from the figures available to him that my hon. Friend is right. People sentenced to a community service order who are in breach of that order are frequently not sent to prison. My hon. Friend took that further. I can think of some cases, although they are a little more rare, where people have committed yet another offence while a community service order has been in effect, yet they still have not been sent to prison.

The rest of the lie in the Government's argument is in the overall figures. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Dubs) will tell me if I am wrong, because I have not kept up with these matters as much as I should have liked in recent years, but I think that the prison population figure is between 43,000 and 44,000 at the moment. That is as high as it has ever been in Britain. Yet somehow or other the Minister has tried to argue that all the non-custodial sentences have made a change in the law necessary. That was the core of his argument. We know from the statistics that non-custodial sentences have had virtually no effect upon the number and length of custodial sentences. The Home Secretary knows why, although he does not like to talk about it. The previous Home Secretary knew and, to his credit, did talk about it. The courts have extended the period of sentences at the higher level and jacked up sentences all along the line. In doing so——

Order. We must now come back to the provisions of the Bill and deal with them.

You are right, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to bring me back to the Bill. I was going to say that previously there would have been prison sentences and fines in some cases, but now there is a wider range of options including community service orders, suspended sentences and probation.

It is not a good Bill. It was conceived by the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon in good faith. I accept that, and that his intentions were good. However, for the wrong reasons, he travelled down the wrong road under the pressure of public opinion. He did not exercise the quality of leadership and judgment that people are sent to the House to exercise. At the same time he has allowed the Government and some of his colleagues who would like to restrict the use of the jury system to use this as an opportunity to undermine it, which is sad. I do not accuse the hon. Gentleman of doing that intentionally.

Everything that we have heard from the Minister and the hon. and learned Member for Burton confirms that. The hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon was present when he heard me say to his hon. and learned Friend that he wanted to include in the Bill people who had been mentally ill. He saw the hon. and learned Gentleman smiling at me. He knows that to be true. I know his position, having talked to him about it previously. He is opening the door to a dangerous measure that is unnecessary and will not achieve what he wanted. I ask the House to think carefully before it passes the Bill.

I endorse a great deal of what was said by my hon. Friends the Members for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) and for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins), who made an excellent contribution to the debate.

There is no challenge to the present law whereby those who have been in prison for five years or more are disqualified for life from serving on a jury. It is accepted that that is reasonable; it is not at stake. Another factor relevant to our considerations is the right of the prosecution as well as of the defence to challenge jurors at a trial. Before a trial there is a panel of jurors. If the defence feels that the presence of a juror on the jury will be prejudicial to his client, he can challenge that juror. The prosecution has that right as well. That is an important part of the system. That must be borne in mind when we consider how loaded the jury system is against the prosecution. That is the argument of Conservative Members, but the prosecution has that right.

The Government have tried to introduce measures similar to that of the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Watson). However, they are worse in many respects, showing the road that the Government want to go down. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith rightly said, the Bill is opening up the way for the Government's measures. The Government tried it in 1982. On 6 July 1982, The Guardian stated:

"The change proposed by the Government"——

Order. We are talking about the provisions of the present Bill. The hon. Member must relate his remarks to them.

It is valid to say that the Bill is the thin edge of the wedge. The Government's original proposal is relevant to the debate. I wish only to quote briefly from the newspaper, and I hope that you will allow me to do so, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The article says:

"The change proposed by the Government would have excluded millions more people. Many minor offences are still liable to imprisonment—carving initials on a park bench, for example, or stealing a milk bottle. To have excluded all these people from jury service would have meant disqualifying millions because every year over two million people aged over 17 are found guilty of indictable or summary offences."

That is what the Government were proposing in 1982. They were forced to abandon that measure.

If the Government support the Bill, why did they not introduce their own Bill in their own time, rather than taking up private Members' time? They had to scrap their measure in 1982 because it was unworkable and unpopular. They are trying to reintroduce it through the back door.

There has been a major change in sentencing policy since the existing rules were drawn up. However, we must remember that there has been excessive gaol sentencing in Britain compared with other European countries. Indeed, Britain has the highest proportion of its population in gaol. That is one reason why suspended sentences, community service orders, and so on, were introduced. They are good measures — certainly far better than putting people in gaol.

Rather than such sentencing being a reason for barring people from jury service, I believe the opposite to be true. That sentencing relates to minor offences. If they were not minor, the people involved would find themselves in gaol. I see no reason why such people should be disqualified from jury service.

Many of the hon. Gentleman's arguments were put forward on Report by other hon. Members. Will the hon. Gentleman comment on the Committee stage of the Bill, which lasted for less than one and a half hours? Why are we now hearing speeches from the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues that are taking a full day on a Bill that most people think should be passed?

I was not appointed to the Committee, but I have read the Official Report of 7 March. I spoke to one of the amendments, but I did not hear the hon. Gentleman speaking to any of them. I feel strongly about the Bill covering persons on probation orders.

The hon. Gentleman is attempting to subvert the will of the majority by prolonging the debate. Did he apply to serve on the Committee? I know that he did not. Was the hon. Gentleman here when many of the arguments were put forward? It is no good the hon. Gentleman smiling, because it is not funny. If he feels so strongly about the Bill, why was he not in the Chamber when the amendments were dealt with on Report?

The Minister is wrong. I was here earlier and contributed to the debate on the amendment concerning the probation service. However, I thank the Under-Secretary for his intervention because I did not know, being a relatively new Member, that one had to apply to serve on a Standing Committee. I shall now apply to serve on various Committees that interest me. I thought that one spoke on, say, Second Reading and then the Whip might approach one and say, "You made a reasonable contribution. Would you like to be a member of the Standing Committee?"

If the hon. Gentleman's party ever becomes the Government, the best way for him to keep off any committee is to carry on making the sort of speeches that he is making today.

That intervention does not warrant comment.

The Minister made a monstrous suggestion when he said tht hon. Members who wished to contrbute on Report should first have served on the Standing Committee. That would negate many of our procedures and unduly restrict the right of many hon. Members to contribute to debates.

I agree with my hon. Friend. No hon. Member should be debarred from speaking in debates on the Floor of the House, irrespective of whether they have previously participated in Committee, on Report or whatever.

The Bill would, for the first time, extend disqualification from jury service to people who have been subjected to suspended sentences, community service orders and probation orders. That would represent an additional sentence. When they were given their sentences, they were not told in court that they would also lose their civil right to serve on a jury. This is a bit of double sentencing on the part of the Government, if they support the Bill.

Let us not forget that we are speaking of minor offences. Suspended sentences, community service orders and probation orders are imposed on people who have committed minor offences, and in my earlier contribution—during which I can only assume that the Minister was asleep—I referred to what the hon. and learned Member for Fylde (Sir E. Gardner) had said. As a QC, he said, in effect, "We must get tough and deal with serious offenders in relation to jury service disqualification." That was the purpose of the Bill, he added.

We do not dispute the fact that serious offenders should be kept off juries, but the Bill is concerned with minor offenders and those who have served their time. That is far from what the hon. and learned Member for Fylde and other Conservative Members have been saying about the need to disqualify serious offenders. Even the Daily Mail, in some glossy language, has written about disqualifying serious offenders.

In part, the Bill undermines the jury system, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) pointed out. If the Government want a fair jury system, why was their response, such as it was, to the question of police vetting of jurors so negative? The great advantage of a proper jury system is that it represents a cross-section of the community. In my submission, rehabilitated minor offenders — for example, those who have been on probation — represent part of that cross-section of the community. They should have a right to a place on the jury. Although Conservative Members have not had the frankness to admit this, they are trying to influence the attitudes of those who serve on juries. They wish only those with the "right attitudes" to serve upon them. The game was given away by the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) when he talked about unstable people serving on juries.

Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that the Bill is directed to criminal records and not instability.

rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Can the Question be put in the middle of a Member's speech?

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I should be grateful for your guidance. We are now on Third Reading and we have been faced with the most curious display of lengthy speeches by London Labour Members who seem to be following the GLC antipolice and anti-justice line. Will the debate be resumed as first business next Friday, and are as many hon. Members likely to be present as there have been today?

The hon. Gentleman knows that that is not a matter of judgment for the Chair.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for Opposition Members to talk endlessly about their deeply held objections in principle to the Bill but produce a total of zero when the time comes to vote?

Whether speeches are in order is a matter for the Chair.