Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, I have signed Amendment 334 on spiking, but I want to congratulate my noble friend Lady Owen of Alderley Edge as she yet again leads the way on the important issues in her other amendments. Clause 101, on spiking, is certainly welcome. The measure appeared in the previous version of the Bill in the previous Parliament, and I give credit to Richard Graham, the former MP for Gloucester, who brought this to the attention of Parliament. More broadly, I have a little question for the Minister. I am always very nervous when civil servants recommend that we remove things from existing legislation. I notice that the clause will remove Section 22 and Section 23 at the beginning and then there is the broader new Section 24. What has driven that? Too often things disappear and end up with some kind of defect or loophole. That is exactly what concerned my friend Joe Robertson MP, who tabled an amendment like my noble friend’s Amendment 334 on Report in the Commons, having tabled something similar in Committee. His concern was that there is a loophole and that spiking by a reckless act should also be an offence. I do not need to persuade your Lordships that spiking is a hideous, heinous activity which can destroy people’s physical and mental health. The evidence given by Colin Mackie from Spike Aware UK at Committee stage in the Commons was compelling, especially as it was driven by his personal experience of his 18 year-old son Greg dying through suspected spiking of the kind now known as prank spiking. At the moment, Clause 101 provides that there has to be an intent to injure, aggrieve or similar. I know that Ministers in the other place felt that the Bill covers recklessness, but I think it is pretty clear that the legislation does not particularly seem to cover prank spiking. Recklessness is a well-trodden principle in criminal law, dating back a couple of hundred years. It is definitively an alternative to intent so, if the prosecution fails to establish that someone meant to do something, it can also establish that their actions were so reckless that they should be convicted. Indeed, this is what manslaughter is—somebody gets convicted of killing but without having the intent to commit murder. The other example, perhaps not quite so dramatic, is actual bodily harm. The prosecution must establish the harm but can do so on the basis that what was done was reckless so that harm was bound to follow rather than simply that someone intended for harm to happen. I hope the Government will reconsider their conclusion that what we have before us in Clause 101 is sufficient. I understand that it may be that one MP has got particularly focused on this campaign, but it took Richard Graham to get focused on the issue of spiking for it to make any progress into legislation in the other place. I am grateful to this Administration for picking that up. I look forward to hearing from the Minister and hope again that there may be room for some consensus, not just compromise, on how we can make sure there are no loopholes in this law.