Member

Noble Lords will recall that, during the Report stage of the Public Order Act 2023, a number of Peers, most notably the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, and the then Minister, my noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom, sought to introduce amendments to clarify and constrain these defences. Those debates revealed a shared concern across the House that complexity and judicial direction were undermining the effectiveness of the law. The amendments before us today pursue the same objective but in a more straightforward way. Rather than endlessly refining what counts as a reasonable excuse, they would remove that ambiguity altogether.