Viscount Eccles (Con)

My Lords, I will make a very short intervention before my Front Bench replies. I believe we should remember that Farage, in more or less a chance remark, said he thought that the council should be abolished. So, the issues raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, are very important, and I very much admire the detailed presentation he made to your Lordships’ House on these clauses. I am grateful for what I would regard as the rescue mission on which the Government have gone to make the best of a bad job. Certainly, the hare that was run in March last year, to which the Government made their reply, was a very unfortunate hare. It was something to do with two-tier justice. It would have been better to let that hare run. Hares run in circuits: they come back to where they started and, very often, everything settles down. Instead of that, we have had to have some very careful work done to get us to where we are. All over the House, we will be grateful that the Sentencing Council has in effect received a vote of confidence. We were looking for that and we are very grateful that it has happened. But we should not forget the rather troubled way in which the two parties that have the greatest experience of government and the implementation of policy got themselves into a tangle quite unnecessarily.