The Committee will not be surprised—I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will not  be—that my advice is to resist the new clause. Having said that, I entirely agree with the sentiment behind it. Hit-and-run driving is abhorrent and we need to clamp down on it. It is already an offence, punishable with six months’ imprisonment and a £5,000 fine. As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, the new clause would make available a raft of more significant penalties.

One of the unintended consequences would be that it would affect someone who genuinely did not know that they had been involved in an accident and, therefore, did not stop. That occasionally happens. It might not mean that they were not at fault for the accident, but they might not have realised that they had been involved—we have discussed truck drivers who cannot see what is happening on the road all around them. If someone in those circumstances failed to stop and was subsequently prosecuted, one of the side effects of the new clause would be that they could face 14 years in jail, which would be an over-reaction. However, we have said many times on previous clauses that one would expect the courts to be rational about the way they imposed such sentences, and that is the way to deal with the matter.

I am prepared to offer the hon. Gentleman the assurance that I shall take the matter up with the Home Office—indeed, I am already doing so—to look at sentencing guidelines, so that the existing penalties can be used more appropriately when people have failed to stop.