If this legislation goes through, there will be minor financial consequences for us and I don't see any significant financial consequences in the period between now and the Bill becoming law other than the time of ourselves in discussing this today. But there isn't anything significant. There's nothing that will impact upon our performance as the public prosecution service in that time.
Okay. And what about afterwards, then? Because one of the pieces of thinking behind this Act is to collect data to see whether this change in the law actually works. Do you want to talk us through a little bit about how that might affect you? I don't know who to ask on this.
Certainly. Well, I think that we are going to need to maintain a clear record of any cases that are referred to the CPS from the police and that will—. Normally, we do this through our case management system, which is England-and-Wales wide, and you'd put a flag on. So, for example, domestic abuse, there's a flag for that, and assault on a child, there's a flag for that. But this would be a very specific flag for assault on a child—reasonable chastisement. Trying to get that through on a system that covers all of England and Wales—it's quite expensive, unbelievably; it wouldn't happen. So, we would keep a manual log of every referral. That would be unmanageable if we were dealing with hundreds and hundreds of cases.
So, you're not anticipating hundreds and hundreds.