It seems to me that the list becomes longer as a concern about a particular problem becomes more salient. If I were aware of data—and I am not aware of any such data—that suggested that it was necessary to be more restrictive on people of a particular kind who are charged with particular kinds of offences because they're less likely to show up for court or they're more likely to commit other kinds of serious offences and so on, I would be more sympathetic.
The list as it has developed is sometimes because of individual cases and sometimes because of a simply broad concern about this being a serious thing, so one of the things we're going to do is we're going to show how serious it is by making a reverse onus offence. It seems to me that we do have to go back to first principles. The bail laws as they came in in the early 1970s were there to change a very serious problem that we had then. There are people who were studying the bail laws before 1971 like Professor Friedland, who has gone back into court and looked at things and said that we need to start again.
I think the three of us can start taking positions that are consistent with that. We've made it complicated. We've given the message that any time a person commits an offence while on bail, it necessarily means that the wrong decision was made. It's easy to say that after the fact, but if you said that in medicine, there would never be an operation carried out on an individual person because sometimes there are terrible consequences that are unforeseen.
What we want to do is correct wrong decisions. We want to address the decision-making process. The outcomes, we have less control of.