Member

Some noble Lords may have been sent some back and forth correspondence between me and my noble friend the Minister—effectively, the department—which has been collated by the NGO Justice. I declare an interest as a council member of that organisation, which I know many noble Lords support. What that correspondence seems to boil down to is that the department’s view is that, in a very small number of cases—there is no data on exactly how many cases—this is needed, because there would not otherwise be provision for this vulnerable person: no safe housing and so on. If that is true for a defendant, it would be true for a witness or another vulnerable person, so I do not see that that provides an adequate justification. It would be the equivalent of bringing back debtors’ prisons because of inadequacies in our social housing or our welfare state, and I do not think any of us would want to see that in 2026, as it now is.