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Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill [Lords]

I had no intention of misleading the House. Had I done so, Mr. Deputy Speaker would have pulled me up. I was making the serious point that amendment No. 201 will create a loophole. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham told me that, because I am a lawyer, I should know this or that. I know a bit about intent, although I may be rusty—it was not my principal sphere of activity in the latter years of my practice as a lawyer before I entered this place. However, I know that throughout the law of England and Wales and, I suspect, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, too, in many cases there is a subjective test of intent and in many there is an objective test of intent—to put it in legal jargon. Secondly, in legal terms of art, there is also throughout the law of England and Wales and, I suspect, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, too, the concept of basic intent and the concept of specific intent; for example, section 18 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which refers to the intent to cause grievous bodily harm. That is an offence of specific intent, which means looking at the actions of an individual and at what was passing through their mind—their mens rea, or guilty mind, to translate the Latin. The difficulty with amendment No. 201 is that it relies on a wholly subjective test of the individual’s state of mind, because its first word is disjunctive—namely ““or””. Were the amendment to be passed, a person would no longer have the particular defence in the second line of subsection (3) of clause 7 that"““he did not know, and could not reasonably be expected to know””." The person would simply have to say that they did not intend to seek to engage in an activity from which they knew they were barred. That is a wholly subjective test, which will create a large loophole.