Member

If the Government oppose these amendments, they must defend the following position: that the courts should be allowed to impose requirements that in reality will not be policed. That would not merely be poor lawmaking; it would be dangerous. We have already seen where unenforceable orders lead. The chaos that surrounded criminal behaviour orders and football banning orders, where breaches have gone undetected or unenforced for months, shows that if you design a system without the basic infrastructure for compliance, you do not get rehabilitation or simple obedience; you get contempt. You get offenders who learn that nothing happens when they ignore the rules and victims who lose faith in justice altogether, and our society falls apart. Public confidence is not an abstract principle; it is the foundation of the rule of law. Every time an offender in breach of their conditions walks past a victim with impunity or conducts themselves in other similar breaches, we erode that foundation of the rule of law and of our society.