Dangerous drivers who seriously injure others could spend longer in jail thanks to a new criminal offence.

For the vast majority of dangerous driving cases the maximum penalty of two years’ imprisonment provides the courts with sufficient and proportionate powers to punish offenders. The new offence of ‘causing serious injury by dangerous driving’ will carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison and allow the courts to impose tougher punishments on dangerous drivers.

Announcing the new offence, justice secretary Kenneth Clarke said: “Dangerous driving can destroy lives and have a devastating effect on victims and their families and friends. We have listened to the victims of dangerous drivers, their families, MPs, judges and road safety groups and their experiences have directly informed these changes. Making our roads safer is a priority – five people died on our roads each day last year, so we need to do everything we can to further improve safety.”

Road safety minister Mike Penning said: “The vast majority of motorists are safe and responsible but the wilfully reckless minority who put lives in danger must face serious penalties. We are taking action to help the police tackle drink and drug driving, as well as to crack down on uninsured and dangerous drivers, and this new offence will mean the courts can properly punish those who inflict serious injuries.” The change was welcomed by Andrew Howard, Head of Road Safety at the AA, who said: “These law changes should make sentences more proportionate to the devastation dangerous driving causes and should also deter people from driving badly.”

The changes will be taken forward as part of the Government’s Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which is rapidly becoming a grab bag of last minute proposals. The bill comes before the House of Commons again this week at Report stage. So far the bill, including plans to cut legal aid and curb payouts, which could benefit the insurance industry to the tune of £1bn a year, has been piloted through the Commons by justice minister Jonathan Djanogly. Djanogly has investments worth at least £250,000 in companies with insurance arms. His brother in law, in whose companies Djanogly’s children were shareholders, also stands to gain. Labour’s justice spokesman Andy Slaughter recently wrote to cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell calling for an investigation into Djanogly. Slaughter pointed to conflict of interest claims, given that the minister had neither resigned nor removed himself from discussions from which he could personally profit.

The outcome was that Djanogly has been stripped of his responsibility to regulate firms that ‘ambulance chase’ the public. According to the ‘Guardian’, in reply to Slaughter, O’Donnell said that while there is “no suggestion of any impropriety in relation” to Djanogly’s brother-in-law’s firms that “for the avoidance of doubt decisions about the regulation of individual (claims management companies) should henceforth be handled by another minister.”

The justice secretary will now be in charge of the industry, but this still leaves Djanogly in charge of legal aid and civil litigation, which means he will be able to identify growth areas for claims management companies. It will be interesting to see what role he plays in the Commons this week.

Word has it that there have been some fierce knock’em down and drag’em out battles in cabinet between Theresa May and Kenneth Clarke on the subject of mandatory prison sentences. If that is the case the home secretary has triumphed. David Cameron has intervened and decided.

Clarke made clear his personal opposition to the use of mandatory sentences at a hearing of the Commons home affairs committee on Tuesday. His preference is to give judges unfettered discretion to set sentences based on the facts of the cases for nearly all crimes except murder. He also made clear his view that a minimum mandatory sentence for juveniles under 18 was not part of the traditions of the British criminal justice system. But on Wednesday he announced a new sentencing regime, which includes:

• A mandatory life sentence for anyone convicted of a second very serious sexual or violent crime. This will mean that mandatory life sentences can be given for crimes other than murder
• Extending the category of the most serious sexual and violent offences.
• The Extended Determinate Sentence (EDS) – all dangerous criminals convicted of serious sexual and violent crimes will be imprisoned for at least two thirds of their sentence.
• Criminals who complete an EDS must then serve extended licence periods.
• Mandatory custodial sentence for aggravated knife possession by 16 and 17 years olds.
• Replacement of the much-criticised indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPP).

The new regime will be debated in the House of Commons next week as an addition to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. It is likely to increase the already record 87,000 prison population in England and Wales, putting a serious question mark over hopes of stabilising the jail population.

Already there has been opposition to the new regime. John Bache, the chairman of the Magistrates Association youth courts committee, said that while he agreed that removing knives from the streets was of paramount importance, the Magistrates Association was against mandatory sentences. Frances Crooke, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “We have nearly 12,000 life sentence prisoners – that’s more than Russia, Poland, German and France all added together. We are using the mandatory life sentence and discretionary life sentences like confetti.” Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “Subject to good sentencing guidelines, what’s wrong with allowing the courts to make sure that the sentence fits the crime?”

The justice secretary also announced additional measures “to better protect people from intruders, dangerous criminals and excessive no-win no-fee legal costs.” The measures include:

• Making squatting in residential buildings a criminal offence.
• Strengthening people’s rights to use force to defend themselves from intruders in their own homes.
• Giving magistrates power to hand down bigger fines.
• Banning referral fees that allow middle-men to profit from encouraging others to make unnecessary compensation claims.

These measures will also be debated as an addition to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill.

Twelve months ago in the Rose Garden we were promised a coalition government guided by progressive values and reason. Justice secretary Ken Clarke seemed to have been so guided, with a green paper setting out a rehabilitative revolution in penal reform, driven by the prohibitive human and financial cost of the current regime. After the Prime Minister’s rewriting of this bill that rehabilitative revolution lies in ruins.

The way it happened on Tuesday is as noteworthy as what happened. It is, to say the least, unusual for the introduction and first reading of a major bill to be prefaced – and thoroughly upstaged – by a Prime Ministerial press conference. Having backed the Clarke plans in private, he emerged to trash them in public as the justice secretary was forced by Downing Street to ditch more than 60% of his original proposals. In a brief exchange in the Commons debate, Ken Clarke confirmed that: “The proposals that I presented for consultation and the Green Paper were the proposals of the Prime Minister, the whole Cabinet and I.” The craven capitulation that followed was caused by the outcry from the Tory right and the tabloid press, and falling poll ratings on law and order. David Cameron defended his actions thus: “It is absolutely vital that the public have confidence in a criminal justice system that the state puts in place. Public confidence is not a side issue in this debate. It is the issue.”

The headline policy reversal was the complete abandonment of the proposed 50% sentence discount for guilty pleas, now deemed “too lenient”. Going beyond the scope of the current bill in some cases, the Prime Minister announced plans to impose a surprise tough “two strikes and you’re out” mandatory life sentence. He also announced that anyone guilty of a sexual or violent offence would spend two-thirds of the sentence in prison, rather than the current half.  The justice secretary has also quietly dropped his original plan to restore the discretion of judges on sentencing, which had proposed the scrapping of David Blunkett’s minimum mandatory sentences. A Ministry of Justice impact assessment estimates the redrawn sentencing package will save just 2,650 prison places each year – or £80m – compared with the original 6,450 and £210m saving. So there is a shortfall to be found, and probation looks vulnerable.

Speaking in the Commons, Clarke said: “Public confidence in the criminal justice system is unacceptably low. That is why we want to take forward plans for a new offence, with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of six months, for adults who use a knife to threaten and endanger. We will also consult on proposals to criminalise squatting, and we will bring forward legislation to clarify the law on self-defence. In addition, I can confirm our intention to improve the use of remand and reduce the number of foreign national prisoners in our jails….We are reviewing so-called indeterminate sentences of imprisonment for public protection, with a view to replacing them with a more sensible, tough system of long, determinate sentences.”

Curiously unremarked is clause 12 of the bill. This introduces an “interests of justice test” for police station advice. At the moment, anyone is entitled to free advice in the police station if they are arrested. For minor cases they get only telephone advice, for more major cases they get a lawyer in the police station for any interview. Clause 12 appears to say that advice in the police station will only be available if the Government decides in the individual case that it is in the interests of justice to do so, and there would also seem to be a financial barrier to negotiate. The role of “Director” in this context will be crucial. At best this will be a bureaucratic nightmare, at worst it creates scope for official abuse. Not a good day for Magna Carta or Human Rights legislation.

Linda Lee, president of the Law Society, has written to the Justice Secretary calling on him to pause legal aid reforms to allow more scrutiny.

She wrote: “The Legal Action Group (LAG) and the Law Society continue to have very serious reservations about the government’s proposals for changes to legal aid provision in England and Wales. We are therefore writing to you formally to request that the government publishes its proposals to reform legal aid as a draft bill to be scrutinised by a special joint committee of the House of Commons and the House of Lords or the justice committee and other select committees with an interest in legal aid and access to justice policy.”

She adds that an estimated 500,000 people would lose out on legal aid services annually and the haste in which the proposals were drafted has meant that many issues with far-reaching impacts on members of the public and the justice system have not been considered. The LAG calculates that the £49m in legal aid cuts to social welfare law will cost the government £286.2m in expense on other public services. For example, the proposed £7m cut in housing advice will cost the state £16m in other services such as benefit payments.

The letter goes on to say: “We also share the justice select committee’s concerns over the definition of domestic violence. It both acts as a perverse incentive to make false claims and prevents women who are victims, but do not wish to pursue a complaint in the courts, from receiving legal aid for assistance with the legal issues surrounding a relationship breakdown.” The letter refers to the government’s proposals to reform the system of litigation costs, the unintended consequences of which are profound; and the strong argument that reducing the damages of victims of negligence is unjust. This policy also needs to be paused, while the potential effects are properly analysed and researched by qualified stakeholders and experts.

The letter concludes: “As you are aware, such is the interest in the government’s plans for the legal aid scheme over 5,000 responses to the consultation were received by the Ministry of Justice. A draft bill would give an opportunity for a thorough, comprehensive consultation on the impact of this important legislation to take place and we would strongly urge you to consider this suggestion.”

Writing in the ‘Guardian’, Law Society CEO Des Walker said: “We at the Law Society find it surprising – and disappointing – that the current justice secretary appears to prefer to make cuts targeted to reduce the legal aid budget by £350m – which could put genuine redress beyond the reach of half a million people – without assessing the wider impact on access to justice for all of us…(when) we have offered a fully costed alternative, which would save £384m in the next 12 months when fully implemented and preserve the rights to legal aid for all those who need it most.” He adds that leaving fellow citizens to fight their own cause on their own, by denying them access to proper professional advice, represents a gross injustice when it is hard enough for full-time professional solicitors to keep up with both the current complexity and any changes in the law.

In May the Coalition Programme for Government committed to a full review of sentencing and rehabilitation policy. That review has now produced a detailed green paper in which Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke seeks to tear up rules on fixed jail terms for offenders and restore the discretion of judges when sentencing murderers and other serious offenders.

In the foreword to the green paper, the Justice Secretary said that, despite a 50% increase in the budget for prisons and managing offenders in the last ten years almost half of all adult offenders released from custody reoffend within a year. “It is also not acceptable that 75% of offenders sentenced to youth custody reoffend within a year. If we do not prevent and tackle offending by young people then the young offenders of today will become the prolific career criminals of tomorrow.” He was reported in the ‘Guardian’ as saying that the strategy in David Blunkett’s 2003 Criminal Justice Act, which lays down sentencing ‘starting points’ of 15 years, 30 years and ‘life must mean life’ for specified types of murder, had proved “ill-thought out and overly prescriptive”.

He added: “We do not need to tell judges that murder is a serious offence. They are perfectly capable of setting a minimum term. We need a more sensible approach that is not too prescriptive in cases such as mercy killings or husband and wife killings. All murders are wicked and some are more wicked than others.” He therefore proposes to simplify the sentencing framework to make it more comprehensible to the public, at the same time enhancing judicial discretion and reforming the indeterminate sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP)

Other proposals in the green paper include making offenders work hard through the discipline of regular working hours in prison, rehabilitating offenders by getting them off drugs and benefits and into honest work, and increasing reparation to victims. Youth justice is to be improved to prevent and tackle offending by young people and stop them becoming the career criminals of tomorrow. Working with communities is also proposed to reduce crime, with local people playing a more central role in criminal justice with increasing transparency so that local communities are better able to hold services to account. The aim is to move the focus from the centre to local areas and create more opportunities for other providers to deliver services.

It is reckoned that the sentencing reforms will generate savings of £210m a year as a result of needing 6,000 fewer prison places than previously planned. The estimate is that the daily prison population in England and Wales by 2014 will be 3,000 lower than the record 85,500 it is today. The policy of encouraging defendants to plead guilty early by offering a discount of up to 50% instead of 34% would mean 3,400 fewer prison places needed in 2014/15. Reducing the remand time in prison for people accused of minor offences who would not get a prison sentence on conviction will save a further 1,300 places a year.

The consultations on proposals continue to 4 March 2011, and a response setting out plans will be produced in May 2011. The full text of ‘Breaking the cycle: effective punishment, rehabilitation and sentencing of offenders’ can be found at: http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/docs/breaking-the-cycle.pdf

And a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.

When Kenneth Clark made his Commons statement on 15 November it was the detail of the slashing cuts in legal aid that made the headlines. But there was a second, equally important, consultation announced, on implementing Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendations on the reform of civil litigation costs and funding arrangements.
Lord Justice Jackson was commissioned in late 2008 by the then Master of the Rolls to undertake a review of the rules and principles governing the costs of civil litigation in England and Wales and to make recommendations to promote access to justice at proportionate costs. The review was established on the basis that the costs of civil litigation are too high, and the report made a broad range of recommendations for reducing those costs. A particular recommendation was to reform the operation of no win, no fee conditional fee agreements (CFAs), which are funding agreements under which lawyers are not paid if they lose, but may charge an uplift or a success fee of up to 100% on their base costs if they win.

The proposal is to abolish recoverability of high success fees and the associated after-the-event insurance premiums in CFA cases. Currently defendants must pay those additional costs if they lose. In addition, significant costs may arise from claimants’ purchase of after-the-event insurance (ATE), which may be taken out by parties to insure against the risk of having to pay their opponent’s costs and their own disbursements if they lose. The Secretary of State told the Commons: “We are proposing that claimants should have to pay their lawyer’s success fee. They will, therefore, take an interest in controlling the costs being incurred on their behalf. That will also reduce the disproportionate costs burden on defendants.” Also under consideration is a 10% increase in general damages to help the claimant to pay the success fee; a mechanism of qualified one-way costs shifting; and to allow damages-based agreements or contingency fees in litigation before the courts, another form of no win, no fee agreement. The Secretary of State added: “Other proposals would further encourage parties to make and accept reasonable offers, and introduce a new test to ensure that overall costs are proportionate. We also propose to increase the modest costs that can be recovered by people who win their cases when they represent themselves without lawyers.”

The proposed reforms have been criticised as complicating the prospects of obtaining legal representation for poor people. The fear is that costs of personal injury cases will be reduced by taking legal fees out of the damages awarded to the injured person, rather than by recovering additional funds from the losing party. The president of the Association of Personal Injuries Lawyers, Muiris Lyons, said:  “No win, no fee has helped provide access to justice for injured people who cannot otherwise afford it. The only party to benefit from this proposal is the negligent person, and through him his insurer…Those who will be affected most are likely to be people suffering serious or catastrophic injury, where the damages involved are often very high.” The Law Society said: “Neither we nor the government can know how the Jackson proposals will work in reality and whether the squeezed middle will have access to justice.” They are “considering strategies for defending access to justice.”

This very detailed consultation is aimed at the legal profession, the judiciary, insurance companies involved in civil litigation, and all with an interest in this area in England and Wales, and runs from 15 November 2010 to 14 February 2011. The full text can be found at:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/docs/jackson-consultation-paper.pdf

On Monday Ken Clarke took his knife to legal aid. The scale of the reductions revealed in the Green Paper  – £350m a year to be taken out of a £914m annual civil and family legal aid budget by 2014 – had been widely anticipated. The total bill of civil and criminal legal aid currently runs to £2.1bn a year, and a substantial contribution towards the reduction of 23% over four years in the Department’s budget was inevitable.

So far so predictable. But the surprises come in the parts of the legal aid budget that he has decided to protect. In his Commons statement he said: “I do not propose any changes to the scope of criminal legal aid… I plan to retain legal aid for asylum cases, for debt and housing matters where someone’s home is at immediate risk and for mental health cases. It will still be provided where people face intervention from the state in their family affairs that may result in their children being taken into care, and for cases involving domestic violence or forced marriage. I also propose that legal aid should remain available for cases where people seek to hold the state to account by judicial review and for some cases involving discrimination that are currently in scope. Legal assistance to bereaved families in inquests, including for deaths of active service personnel, will also remain in scope.”

The axe falls elsewhere, and the criterion is those areas that are not considered of sufficient priority to justify funding at the taxpayer’s expense. Out go private family law cases, unless domestic violence, forced marriage or child abduction is involved. Out go clinical negligence cases. Other categories to face the chop are education, employment, immigration, some debt and housing issues, and welfare benefits, except where there is a risk to anyone’s safety or liberty, or a risk of homelessness. According to the ‘Guardian’, there will be a reduction of 246,000 private family law cases predicted to save £178 m a year; a reduction in welfare and debt cases of 123,000 cases predicted to save £22m a year; around 43,700 fewer immigration cases predicted to save £18m a year; and 6,100 clinical negligence cases a year, saving £17m a year. These are the deepest and the most far reaching cuts since legal aid was created.

In response to the proposals of the coalition government, Clark’s Labour shadow Sadiq Khan said that they too would have cut legal aid, so it is a done deal. Opposition can only come from pressure groups. The Law Society said the changes to funding civil litigation confirmed their worst fears and is considering strategies for defending access to justice against the proposed cuts and responding in detail the Green Paper. Peter Walsh of Action against Medical Accidents said:  “Whatever the Ministry of Justice would save by scrapping legal aid will cost the NHS many times more. At the same time, the overall effect of changes will hit the poorest hardest, denying them access to justice even if they have been seriously harmed by negligence in the NHS.” Writing in the ‘Guardian’ Steve Hynes of the Legal Action Group said: “More than half a million people, half of all people assisted by civil legal aid each year, will lose out on being able to get help with housing, benefits, employment, debt and other legal problems. These are often truly desperate people.”

Linked with these cuts the Ministry of Justice has announced a very detailed consultation paper ‘Proposals for the Reform of Legal Aid in England and Wales’, aimed at providers of publicly funded legal services and others with an interest in the justice system. The consultation runs from 15 November 2010 to 14 February 2011, and the full text can be found at:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/docs/legal-aid-reform-consultation.pdf

Ken Clarke has been a big beast in the Westminster jungle for a long time and he more than most understands how the pecking order works. A minister’s standing in the eyes of his own and other departments is directly related to his success in standing up to the Treasury in any budgetary negotiations. On this basis, the Ministry of Justice’s above average cut of 23% in this week’s spending review is not good news, but he is such a wily operator that it is most unlikely that he would be wrong footed by a rookie Chancellor of the Exchequer. The suspicion must therefore be that he has got more or less what he wanted.

The upshot is that the department’s budget, which is currently £8.9bn a year, will fall to £7bn by 2014/15, seeing on average a 6% reduction in each of the four years covered by the spending review. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the MoJ will seek to make savings by reform of sentencing, improving the treatment given to mentally disordered offenders and through the increased use of public/private sector initiatives to reduce re-offending. The £1.3bn funding to maintain the current prison estate will continue, but plans to build a new 1,500 capacity prison have been put on hold. There will, he said, be reform to the criminal justice system, the closure of underused courts and a reduction in the legal aid bill. The Law Officers Department, comprising the Offices of the Attorney General and Solicitor General, will see a 25% reduction to its budget, and the Crown Prosecution Service will be required to greatly reduce its cost base. He said there needed to be access to justice but at a fair cost to the tax payer.
As always, the devil will be in the detail, and that will be revealed next month when the department concludes the consultations on reductions in legal aid and the proposed closure of 157 magistrates and crown courts. Already it is clear that there will be a saving of £350m in the legal aid bill and that most, if not all, the programme of court closures will be carried out. The department has produced outline plans for changes to court business hours, including weekend and evening sessions, in the forthcoming magistrates courts business strategy with the aim of improving access to justice and making greater use of the court estate. Other key priorities are the saving of £1bn from administration and frontline efficiency, including a one third reduction in administration, meaning 14,000 jobs will go; the courts and tribunals system will be brought together in a single agency; and the central London estate will be reduced from 18 buildings to four, saving £40m.

Legal aid has never been a vote winner, so it was an all too easy target in the government’s spending review. Law Society president Linda Lee said: “While the figure of £350m is less than some had feared, losing this amount of money from the system will inevitably prove to be a significant blow to legal service provision and access to justice. A creaking system is going to be less able to deliver the needs of the vulnerable in society. It is a basic feature of a democratic society which supports the rule of law that vulnerable people, whether they are children, or have mental health or housing problems, are accused of crimes or have suffered loss, are able to have access to legal advice and representation to secure justice.” For his part, Secretary of State Clarke said: “We need to create a justice system that punishes the guilty, reduces re-offending, protects our liberties, and helps those most in need. Over the period of this spending settlement the Ministry of Justice will be transformed into a lean, transparent, and affordable department.”

The full text of the Spending Review can be found at:
http://cdn.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sr2010_completereport.pdf

The Government has wasted no time in pursuing its aim to review the legal aid system as promised in the Coalition programme for government published in May.

In a written ministerial statement to Parliament on 23 June, Secretary of State for Justice Kenneth Clarke set out the background of the Government’s immediate priority to reduce the financial deficit and encourage economic recovery. The main burden of the deficit reduction is to be borne by reduced public spending, coupled with the most efficient and effective delivery of public services. He said: “I am seeking to develop an approach to legal aid spending which balances these necessary financial constraints with the interests of justice and the wider public interest. We will seek to develop an approach which is compatible with fair and necessary access to justice for those who need it most, the protection of the most vulnerable in our society, the efficient performance of the justice system, and our international legal obligations.” He concluded by stating that the government will consider the policy and intend to seek views on a proposed new approach in the autumn.

The Law Society had already fired its first shot across the bows in late May when it warned that plans announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to cut the Ministry of Justice budget by £325 million must not include front line legal aid services at a time when the public needs them the most. This warning came after a recent YouGov poll revealed public support for legal aid. The research, conducted on behalf of legal research company Jures, showed that over two-thirds of consumers backed publicly funded legal advice through the legal aid system for those unable to afford a lawyer. Law Society President Robert Heslett said: “In a time of austerity, it is no doubt tempting to see legal aid as an area where cuts could safely be made without arousing voter concern, but this is precisely the time when legal aid services are most needed, to protect ordinary people from unfair decisions about issues on their employment, housing and benefit entitlement; more than that, to ensure that children receive the best representation in care and family cases.” He added that he hoped the necessary cuts would come from the Legal Service Commission’s own administrative costs and the fees of a very few extremely well paid barristers rather than funds required for legal aid. “We are urging the Justice Secretary to make savings in areas that will not deny the public basic legal rights.”

Party manifestos are really little more than wish lists. But the unprecedented Tory and Liberal coalition agreement, produced at breakneck speed, and to be followed in due course by a final and fully comprehensive agreement, is something else. It is little short of a Queen’s speech for a whole parliament. Section 10 of the agreement is about civil liberties. The preamble states: “The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion.” There follow 12 specific pledges.

 Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV. As a result, surveillance has become an inescapable part of life. Britain has a larger DNA base and more police powers and email snooping than any comparable liberal democracy. The agreement pledges further regulation of CCTV, the ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason and the adoption of the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database. The presumption of innocence and the principle that every defendant has the right to be tried by a jury were weakened by the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 and the right to silence was further eroded by the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. Under the same Act an individual and his lawyers may be barred from court proceedings. Freedom to communicate in private has been effectively extinguished by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. The rights to freedom of assembly and demonstration were eroded by the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. The coalition agreement promises the protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury and the restoration of rights to non-violent protest.

In June last year, the law lords dealt a major blow to the controversial use of control orders on terror suspects, saying that reliance on secret evidence denies them a fair trial. The then Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, and Chris Grayling, the then shadow home secretary, went on record to welcome the law lords’ decision and to demand an end to “cruel and counter-productive punishments without trial”. Under section 44 Terrorism Act 2000 police can stop and search anyone in a designated area without suspicion that an offence has occurred. Last year a total of 117,278 people were stopped and searched. The coalition agreement promises safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.

Kenneth Clarke, the new Justice secretary, and his team, including Lord McNally, Lib Dem leader in the Lords, will immediately commence work on the promised ‘Freedom or Great Repeal Bill.’ Other major provisions include the scrapping of the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point Database; the outlawing of finger-printing of children at school without parental permission; and the extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency. There will be a review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech and a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

The full text of the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition Agreement can be found at:-

http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2010/05/Coalition_Agreement_published.aspx