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Government’s ‘bewildering flurry’ of coronavirus lockdown laws led to wrong convictions - Lady Hale

Baroness Hale (House of Lords)
Baroness Hale (House of Lords)

People have been wrongly fined and prosecuted for breaking lockdown thanks to the government’s last-minute and confused introduction of new laws, the former president of the Supreme Court said today.

Baroness Hale said the UK has seen a “bewildering flurry” of coronavirus laws since the end of March, with one set being published just 20 minutes before it came into force.

She told the House of Lords constitution committee this morning government guidance has been confused for legally-enforceable rules, suggesting the BBC news website often offered clearer explanations of the Covid-19 rules.

“Certainly at the early stage of the lockdown, there was huge confusion as to what was law and what was guidance”, she said.

“The guidance purported both to interpret the regulations and to give guidance on how they should be applied, not only by people who were trying to do their best but also by people enforcing them.

“I think there’s every reason to believe that some of the enforcement …will have been used in respect of things that were not actually in the regulations but only in the guidance. “That’s clearly inappropriate and the government must always make a clear distinction between what is law and what is merely advice about how people should be behaving.

“That is almost the clearest moral to come from this sorry set of affairs.”

The first set of coronavirus laws were introduced in late March, when Parliament was in recess, and led to prosecutions of those breaking the stay-at-home rule as well as thousands of fines being dished out.

Baroness Hale, giving evidence to the committee with fellow former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption, said there was no need to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of the new laws.

“It meant Parliament had no opportunity to debate them for several weeks”, she said. “What’s happened since then is a bewildering flurry of new regulations coming in at very short notice.”

Lord Sumption said MPs and Lords were “effectively stymied”, and scrutiny of the later sets of lockdown laws, including a vote in Parliament last night on today’s new tiers system had only happened “as a result of political pressure rather than constitutional scruple”.

“I certainly think it’s desirable that government has to explain, and produce evidence, in support of drastic decisions they to make”, he said.

“The best and most constitutional way of doing that is for them to face scrutiny, not only to committees but both chambers.”

Baroness Hale also accused the government of failing to draw up an effective framework for different levels of lockdown laws, which she said would have avoided unnecessary public confusion.

“We understand the huge complexity of trying to deal with the pandemic, and how hard it is to make choices that have to be made”, she said.

“What strikes me is the first lockdown - which went on from March to July - was a time when the government could have provided a settled framework which everyone would understand, which then could be applied from time to time as appropriate, and every from place to place as appropriate.

“If such a plan was formulated, we wouldn’t have had the constant chopping and changing between the different levels of control.”

Of the government’s efforts to publicise the rules, she added: “People should be told where they can find out what they need to know, and what they are told when they find it out ought to be clear and accurate.

“One of the difficulties is you need to get on the Internet to find out most of this stuff, and sometimes it’s the BBC website rather than the government website that had the clearest information. That seems to me to be unacceptable.”

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