Member

The exception is sex, which does not appear in Section 66 of the 2020 Act. On that—I think this has already been mentioned—in 2021 the Law Commission made strong arguments about why sex should not be included as an aggravating factor. That is not a debate that we have time to get into now, but it is a very difficult one about certain cases of violence against women and girls not effectively being caught. That is the perfect example of why we need more time to debate this. For those reasons, these Benches do not believe that the Government’s proposals are sound.