I'm talking about something I don't have great knowledge of here. There was, at one stage, a series of targets for the police that bore down upon cases that secure what was called a sanction detection, which counted for Home Office figures. That disappeared some years ago. Some individual constabularies may still have targets, but, as far as I'm aware, we don't have a suite of national measures. The police are required to report against this, but we don't have targets. And, in my experience, the police are much more sensible these days than they may have been 20 years ago, in terms of trying to get cases charged in order to meet some notional target. It's much less of an issue than it ever was—much.
Okay. We've mentioned this, namely the risk of malicious reporting against parents involved in private family law cases. This happens now, of course. Is that going to increase if we change the law?
There is greater potential for it to increase. I think the numbers, again, will be tiny, and dwarfed by the number of cases where we have to deal with the fallout between a relationship breakdown between partners—whether they be living within the same house or living in different houses. Regrettably, there are times when children are used as part of this ongoing dispute. Getting into the subtleties of the father, say, smacking the child in a way that was reasonable chastisement or was not reasonable chastisement is probably part of a much bigger piece here. I can see it potentially arising. It's not something that would cause me concern, simply because we already have a well-developed approach to dealing with the way in which we evaluate the evidence from parties who may well have a particular position that they want to reinforce, sometimes through exaggeration of basic facts and sometimes through fabrication.
Are there any other unintended consequences that come to your mind if we introduce this law?