House of Lords
(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Arab Spring
(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Cox
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the implications of the Arab spring for religious minorities in the countries concerned.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)
My Lords, it is hard to generalise, given the differing circumstances in each country, but, that said, religious minorities have clearly suffered grievous oppression, often predating the so-called Arab spring, in Egypt, Iran, Iraq and, indeed, elsewhere. Egypt, in particular, has witnessed an upsurge in vicious sectarian violence and we continue to urge the Egyptian authorities to establish conditions in which all discrimination on the basis of religion is prevented. We deplore all discrimination against religious minorities and all constraints on their freedom to practise their faiths.
Baroness Cox
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Does he agree that in these early days of the so-called Arab spring, the impact on religious minorities has so far been favourable for the Jewish and Christian communities in Tunisia, but, as he has already indicated, cause for deep concern in Egypt? Although the Baha’i community has so far been spared violence there, attacks against Coptic Christians have numbered more than 44 since 25 January, and a recent report by Amnesty International claims that discrimination and attacks against the Copts have actually increased since the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces took power. In addition to encouraging the Egyptian leadership to ensure religious freedom for all its religious minorities, will the Government call to account those who are perpetrating the violence?
Lord Howell of Guildford
The noble Baroness is absolutely right in pointing to the violence in Egypt, a matter that must concern all those who believe in freedom of religious worship. We continue to urge the Egyptian authorities on the prime importance of pluralist and non-sectarian policies. The Egyptians are moving towards bringing in a new unified law that will be even-handed between Copts and Muslims, or so we understand. They are also talking about an anti-discrimination law. Those who can be established as being guilty of some of these nastier events should certainly be brought before the courts, but that is a matter for the Egyptian legal authorities.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
How does the Minister respond to critics such as Ann Widdecombe, who say that there are double standards on the part of the Prime Minister in that, quite properly, we withdraw aid from Uganda because it discriminates against homosexuals but do not use our aid policy against countries that manifestly discriminate against Christians and other religious minorities?
Lord Howell of Guildford
It is not quite correct that the withdrawal of aid is geared to particular attitudes on policies in the way that the noble Lord describes. Support for Governments through aid is brought into question where they are upholding policies that we clearly regard as highly undesirable and objectionable. It does not mean to say that aid does not continue through non-governmental agencies and, as directly as we can organise it, to good development causes and projects—indeed, even in support of private sector operations. These things can be done without having to uphold the views of Governments. The noble Lord says that that is double standards, but in the real world one has to talk about selectivity and to make selections and choices. Some Governments are clearly ones whom we want to support; some are ones whom we would have great reluctance to do anything to enhance or entrench.
The Lord Bishop of Exeter
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his insistence on the importance of constitutional guarantees and anti-discrimination measures, but does he recognise the importance—I think he has begun to go there—of remedying some of the institutional shortcomings that limit human development and social cohesion? I am aware of the high levels of economic disfranchisement among some of the religious minorities throughout the Middle East that risk inflaming and adding to the fuel of a volatile social mix in some of the poorest areas, particularly where religious communities live in close proximity to one another. How are such considerations informing government policy towards the region?
Lord Howell of Guildford
The right reverend Prelate is correct that a whole nexus of undesirable social customs and pressures creates the bad conditions in which this kind of discrimination can occur. Our policies, such as our Arab partnership policy, contain specific modules or elements that are designed, for instance, to support the rights and position of women, to promote family law in every possible way and to challenge some of the highly coercive and illiberal practices of the past. There are difficulties, as the right reverend Prelate will appreciate, but we must not go around intruding heavily on the practices of other countries. Why should we do that? However, we must certainly support and encourage the kinds of practices that bring equality and decent values to countries where, in the past, darker customs have prevailed.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
My Lords, have the Government had any consultations with these Middle East Governments about reforming personal status laws so that the 14 million Christians who live in the Middle East might have access to divorce in civil courts if they wish to do so, rather than having to convert to Islam or other religions?
Lord Howell of Guildford
Those issues come into our fairly constant dialogue and exchanges with the countries of the Middle East as they go through reform processes at varying speeds and to varying degrees. That is the content of our exchanges in seeking to support and encourage the peaceful, democratic, liberalised development and opening up of these countries, which is directly in our own interest as a great trading nation as well.
Lord Alton of Liverpool
My Lords, I am grateful. Does the Minister agree that there are worrying parallels with the situation in Iraq and Palestine, where large numbers of Christian minorities from the ancient churches have had to flee? Has he seen the figures published by the Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organisations showing that over 100,000 Coptic Christians have left the country since March this year—I declare a non-financial interest as president of the UK Coptic Association—and in particular the quotation from its director that:
“Copts are not emigrating voluntarily, they are coerced into that by threats and intimidation of hard-line Salafists, and the lack of protection they are getting from the Egyptian regime”?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I have seen a range of figures, although whether I have seen the specific reports that the noble Lord refers to, I am not so sure. I am the first to agree that these are large and worrying figures. The noble Lord mentioned Iraq. Although I do not think the Arab spring has operated to the particular detriment of religious minorities there, there have been a number of targeted attacks on minority communities—Christian, Yazidi, Shabak and others. These are worrying matters and we are constantly raising them with the Baghdad Government. As for the Egyptian situation, I have already indicated our extreme concern and our continuing dialogue, and that will certainly continue.
Police: Custody
(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Sheldon
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many people have been in police custody during the past 12 months, and how many of them were black or Asian.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)
My Lords, the Government hold data only on those taken into police custody at the point of arrest. According to the latest statistics from the Home Office Statistical Bulletin, of the nearly 1.4 million people arrested in 2009-10, 8 per cent identified themselves as black and 6 per cent identified themselves as Asian.
Lord Sheldon
The Guardian’s analysis of 1 million court records shows that black offenders are 44 per cent more likely than white offenders to be sent to prison for driving offences and Asian offenders are 41 per cent more likely than white offenders to be sent to prison for drug offences. Why should black and Asian offenders be so much more frequently imprisoned than white offenders?
Lord Henley
My Lords, one has to accept that the figures are not exactly proportionate; neither are the figures cited by the noble Lord. They are not proportionate to the population as a whole. Similarly, they would not be proportionate by age profile, gender or any other measure. Having said that, we are very keen that the criminal justice system should be neutral in these matters as far as possible, and I hope that it is. However, there is scope for others to undertake more in-depth analysis of why that should be. I cannot comment on the figures that the noble Lord has given me but, as I said, arrests are broadly, although not quite, proportionate. They are disproportionate in many other ways, depending on how one looks at them.
Baroness Hussein-Ece
My Lords, at last week’s excellent Scarman lecture, the Deputy Prime Minister highlighted that there are more than 400 more young black British men in prison than at the Russell group universities. Does the Minister share my concern that, with the vast majority of young black people unemployed, this is an indictment of years of failure to tackle poor education, employment and opportunities for young black men in our society? What action is being taken to address this?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I accept my noble friend’s point and share her concerns on these matters. On policing, for which the Home Office is responsible, we are committed to delivering a police service that promotes equality, does not discriminate against anyone because of their race and is effective in rooting out and tackling racism. Where there are disproportionate numbers in one group as opposed to another, that invites further research. That is something we should do. However, at this stage I would not want to comment on why there are, as my noble friend puts it, more black people in prison than there are at the Russell group universities.
Lord Clinton-Davis
Would the Minister say that racism of any kind is unacceptable in our society, especially as far as the police are concerned? Would he distance the Government from the racism practised by certain sections of the police today?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I do not accept that the police act in a racist manner. I do accept that where one group is disproportionately involved in crime it deserves some degree of analysis and is something that we need to look at. However, I totally reject the noble Lord’s complaint about racism in the police force. That allegation has been made in the past. It is something that the police have addressed over the years and something that they have dealt with themselves.
Baroness Knight of Collingtree
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that it is just as wrong to apprehend or arrest a person because of the colour of his skin as it is to exonerate somebody who is quite clearly guilty for the same reason?
Lord Henley
My Lords, as I made clear, I do not believe that the police are guilty of racism. The police should, quite rightly, arrest those they think are committing offences and the criminal justice system should prosecute those people, irrespective of the colour of their skin, their gender or anything else.
Baroness Howells of St Davids
My Lords, since the closure of the CRE, what steps have been taken to assist the police in dealing with the institutional racism that was clearly declared in the Scarman report?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I think the noble Baroness is referring to the Macpherson report, not the Scarman report. Allegations were made about institutional racism at that time. The police have addressed that matter and I do not believe that there is racism within the police service as a whole.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree that confidence among ethnic minorities in the even-handedness of the police in keeping people in police custody would be greatly enhanced if we could improve our record of recruiting more black and Asian police officers?
Lord Henley
My Lords, again, that is something that I believe the police are managing to do in the 43 police forces up and down the country so that they better reflect the communities they serve. With the introduction of police commissioners, that, again, will be a matter that police forces will be able to continue to address in years to come.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that there is particular concern about deaths in police custody among members of black and minority ethnic communities. Often investigations fall to the IPCC to undertake. Can he tell me why, despite months of notice that a new chairman was required, the Government have yet to appoint a new chairman of the IPCC?
Lord Henley
My Lords, again, I note the concerns expressed by the noble Lord. I join him in agreeing that every death in police custody is a tragedy. If he looks at the figures that the IPCC published, he will find that the deaths in custody—sad though every single one of them was—are generally proportionate to the ethnic make-up of the detainees as a whole. As regards the appointment of a new chairman to the IPCC, I hope that we will be able to make an announcement shortly.
Lord Morgan
My Lords, the Minister has frequently referred to the need for more in-depth analysis and more research. However, we have had masses of it. The Runnymede Trust in the 1980s spelt out precisely this issue—the disproportionate amount of sentencing of people of Afro-Caribbean background. When on earth will the authorities take any action?
Lord Henley
My Lords, a great deal of research has been done. The noble Lord refers to research that was done as long ago as the 1980s. We are talking about the figures we have at the moment, which deserve further in-depth analysis. However, I do not think that the mere fact that there are disproportionate numbers being either arrested or charged necessarily amounts to racism. That is wrong. They are disproportionate in a whole host of other ways, whether by age, gender, socio-economic factors or whatever.
EU: Member States’ Budgets
(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Willoughby de Broke
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the proposal by the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs that the European Commission should have the power to scrutinise member states’ budgets and impose such financial penalties as the Commission deems fit.
The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)
My Lords, the Government strongly support the recently agreed economic governance legislation to strengthen the stability and growth pact. This provides for stronger and more responsible economic governance across the European Union. Under the new legislation, a range of financial sanctions can be imposed by the Council within the euro area where member states are deemed not to have taken adequate action. Sanctions are set out under Article 136, which applies to the euro area only.
Lord Willoughby de Broke
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. However, the statement by Commissioner Olli Rehn applies not just to the eurozone but to the whole of the EU, including this country. Therefore, will the Minister confirm that today’s Autumn Statement by the Chancellor is nothing more than an aspiration—a wish list? Will he confirm to the House that this will have to be ticked off and agreed by the European Commission before it can take any effect?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, this country has always been party to the stability and growth pact, but as I am sure the noble Lord knows, under Protocol 15 the UK has an opt-out, which means that we have to endeavour to avoid excessive deficits but are not subject to any sanctions such as members of the euro area are. Furthermore, the UK secured particular treatment that ensures—has ensured and will ensure—that Parliament will always be allowed to scrutinise the UK’s budget ahead of the European Commission.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Is it not remarkable that the very same people in all parties who are always criticising the European Union for failing—lamentably, they would say—to ensure that people such as the Greeks, Portuguese, Irish and anybody you would like to mention are not meeting their commitments should now complain when we are tightening up the very scrutiny that they have been demanding? As the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, has said, this is not just the 17 but the 27.
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I am not going to say who should be complaining about what. All I would say is that the eurozone has got itself into a position where it really needs to get on and strengthen its own governance arrangements. We will do everything to encourage it to do that but we, as the UK, have a particular position that we will also protect to make sure that Parliament is able to scrutinise our budget first.
Lord Higgins
My Lords, given the UK opt-out, is it the case that the final part of the noble Lord’s initial Question is not correct as far as UK is concerned?
Lord Sassoon
No, my Lords. I believe that the whole of my Answer was completely correct.
Lord Sassoon
I beg my noble friend’s pardon. I think that a number of false premises were used to back up that supplementary question.
Lord Barnett
My Lords, if the eurozone decides to strengthen its fiscal rules, which many press upon it as being vital if they are to work, but there is no question of a change in the treaty, what would the Government do, because we clearly would not be involved?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, this is a fast-evolving set of proposals. Indeed, the euro area’s Finance Ministers are meeting later this afternoon. One of the issues on the table is that the Commission and the euro group are exploring the possibility of limited treaty changes, and Mr Van Rompuy is due to present the outcome of that work to the December European Council. When we see any proposals—if there are any—we will consider what we should do about them.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, when looking at what is happening in Italy and Greece, is my noble friend not concerned that adding to a fiscal deficit problem a democratic deficit problem could result in considerable difficulties?
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, a few years ago was there not a proposal that the Commission be given a duty of auditing the national accounts of member states? That proposal was turned down at the time by the Council. Is it not the case that if it had not been turned down and had been accepted, we would have had an earlier insight into the problems of Greece, the Greeks would have been unable to falsify their accounts, and the grave problems we all now face might have been significantly reduced?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I very much doubt it. We are looking at the proposals for strengthening governance as they have been put on the table, and that is clearly what needs to be done. We should not rely on the auditors to sort out all our problems.
Lord Newby
My Lords, if the eurozone’s Finance Ministers decide that they want limited treaty changes, will the Minister be prepared to go slightly beyond his earlier answer and confirm that the UK Government will not stand in the way of any treaty changes to bring greater discipline within the eurozone, because it is clearly in our national interest as much as theirs that new rules are put in place?
Lord Sassoon
I am of course prepared to go a bit further in answer to my noble friend’s question. If such treaty changes are put forward, the Government will look to advance the UK’s national interest at that point, as appropriate. Above all, that means protecting and safeguarding our essential economic interests, and we will seek to do that.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, is it not grotesque that an organisation that has not had its accounts signed off by its own internal auditors for 17 years—there being no external auditor—should be handed these powers, given that if it had been a private company in this country the directors would have been in prison every year for the past 17 years?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I certainly agree that it is very unsatisfactory that for the 17th year in a row the Court of Auditors has not been able to give an unqualified statement of assurance.
Young People: NEET
(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they intend to reverse the increase in the number of 16 to 24 year-olds not in education, employment or training announced for the third quarter of this year.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)
My Lords, we have a coherent strategy to reduce the number of 16 to 24 year-olds not in education, employment or training. This includes measures to increase the participation age and a new youth contract worth nearly £1 billion. The contract will provide more intensive support for all 18 to 24-year-olds, and builds on support that is already available through Jobcentre Plus and the work programme.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
I thank the Minister for that reply, but with a record 1.16 million young people not in education, employment or training, do the Government now acknowledge the folly of scrapping the future jobs fund, axing the educational maintenance allowance and trebling tuition fees at a time when the economy, through their own policies, was already slowing down? Despite the measures being announced today, is it not the truth that a generation of young people has been badly let down by a Government that is so out of touch that it did nothing for 18 months while youth unemployment continued to rise?
Lord Freud
I should like to pick up one aspect of that question, which is the nostalgia displayed for the future jobs fund. When you look at the results of the future jobs fund, you find that, two months after the period ended for a major cohort early on, about half of the people who took part were back on benefit. If you look at what happened under work experience, two months after the first cohort went through, roughly half of the people were off benefit—the same. The difference was that the future jobs fund cost £6,500 whereas the work experience cost £325—20 times cheaper. That is the difference of our activity in looking after youth. We are just as effective, but we are doing it cost-effectively.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I welcome the Government's expansion of apprenticeships, but it is wrong to assume that this on its own will lower unemployment. Currently, most apprenticeships go to young people already in jobs. Only if a job with an apprenticeship is offered to a young person currently on jobseeker’s allowance will unemployment fall. What steps are being taken to develop closer work between DWP and BIS to ensure that apprenticeships indeed go to unemployed young people?
Lord Freud
We are very concerned to have apprenticeships going to the people who need them most. Last week, we announced incentives for employers effectively to take an extra 20,000 people off JSA by giving incentives of £1,500 to do that. We are having a massive increase in apprenticeships. The starts have gone up to about 440,000 this year, which is up 50 per cent on the previous year.
Lord Touhig
My Lords, for many young people in this country, the only experience they have of full-time employment is looking for a job in the first place. When the Government's new unemployment scheme for young people is up and running, how many weeks will it take to place an unemployed youngster in work?
Lord Freud
We have a very elaborate structure to help youngsters back into the workplace. The most important element of that is the work programme, which is our new structural programme to help everyone back into work. Youngsters go into that after either nine months or, if they are regarded as particularly vulnerable, three months. That programme is designed to offer them individual support.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the situation we are in with young people out of work is far too serious for traditional remedies and that we need some way to acknowledge the structural unemployment? In the past seven years, youth unemployment has been at double the rate of the rest of the unemployment figure. Is it not possible that we need new ways—I mentioned yesterday a Minister solely responsible for youth unemployment, or even a cross-party grouping which could tackle this in a serious way?
Lord Freud
My Lords, we are tackling this in a serious way. It is a very complicated issue, but the trick is to understand what has to be done to help youngsters. Only four things help youngsters: educational qualifications, apprenticeships, a job or work experience. We are trying to boost those elements massively in our youth contract.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, the Minister will have heard it said this morning that applications from young people to be students at university next year have fallen by 16 per cent. He has just mentioned the importance of qualifications for young people. Can he tell us why he thinks those applications have fallen by 16 per cent?
Lord Freud
My Lords, one effect of increased fees at universities is that youngsters realise the relative attraction of apprenticeships.
Lord Freud
There has been a substantial increase in the number of apprenticeships with, as I said, 442,000 starting in 2010-11. We are putting a lot of money towards supporting them, and this is something that other advanced economies such as Germany have concentrated on. I, for one, welcome the rebalancing of our education and support systems in this country.
Lord Boswell of Aynho
My Lords, given that I used to employ people, I think that I would feel more comfortable, as I hope the Minister would, about employing a person with a decent apprenticeship which has captured their imagination and given them educational attainments than somebody with a questionable degree from a less good and less vocationally related university, which may well be an inappropriate direction for their talents.
Lord Freud
My Lords, we have a real problem in our education system which we are aiming to correct. One of the most shocking things in the report on vocational qualifications from Professor Wolf was the number of youngsters whom we are failing with regard to vocational qualifications—350,000 16 to 18 year-olds a year. If we can get that sorted out and get those young people into good apprenticeships, we will have done a lot to solve the problem that we are all worried about.
London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Advertising and Trading) (England) Regulations 2011
(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Garden of Frognal
That the draft regulations laid before the House on 10 October be approved.
Relevant document: 29th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, considered in Grand Committee on 22 November.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
(12 years, 11 months ago)
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“Evidence base for the destruction, retention and use of fingerprints and DNA profiles
(1) Chapter 1 of Part 1 of this Act shall take effect following the completion of a report on the impact of its provisions by the Secretary of State.
(2) A report commissioned under subsection (1) shall include an evidence-based assessment of the risk of offending following an arrest which did not lead to a conviction.
(3) Evidence assessed under subsection (2) shall cover a period of at least 6 years.
(4) The Secretary of State must make the report, and the Government’s response to any recommendations made in that report, available to the Leaders of the Opposition in both Houses of Parliament.”
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 7 and 8 standing in my name and those of my noble friends Lord Rosser and Lord Tunnicliffe.
As all noble Lords will be aware, Chapter 1 of the Bill relates to the destruction, retention and use of fingerprints. For me, this is one of the most important parts of the Bill. As we agreed at Second Reading, there is a difficult balance to be struck between protecting people’s freedoms from police or government interference and protecting their freedom not to become victims of interference or violence from criminals or terrorists. These balances should be guided by evidence and by an assessment of risk and not by liberal or libertarian ideology. The changes proposed by the Government go too far in restricting the use of fingerprints and DNA profiles, and will make it harder for the police to solve and prevent serious crimes. It will also make their work more bureaucratic.
Amendment 1 would ensure that Chapter 1 took effect only after an evidence-based study had been completed analysing the risk of offending following an arrest which did not lead to a conviction of at least six years. The Minister may well tell me that such an evidence-based study would take too long. However, if such a study leads to saving lives, I for one strongly suggest that the time will be well spent. Why is this so important? It is important because the evidence base used by the Government to inform their decision to reduce the period of retention of DNA and fingerprint profiles is extremely weak. If we get this wrong, the implications for victims will be huge. There are countless examples of people who were arrested and not convicted but whose DNA retention was critical in catching them and convicting them of rape or murder at a later date. This is particularly important in relation to rape cases.
As the Minister will know, rape cases have not only a notoriously low conviction rate but a notoriously low charge rate. That is because the trauma for the victim is so great and because of problems with evidence. Many perpetrators of serious sexual crimes are not brought to justice for their first offence. In about 70 per cent of cases in which a rape suspect is arrested, there is no charge. According to Home Office papers, in cases where there is no charge, DNA will be kept in only very limited circumstances so that in many cases the DNA will be destroyed even though it might be critical in catching a repeat offender for a nasty and violent sexual offence.
The Minister will know that a considerable number of cases have been solved because of DNA. Kensley Larrier was arrested in 2002 for the possession of an offensive weapon. The case never reached court, but two years later he raped someone and was found because of a DNA match. Lee and Stephen Ainsby raped and kidnapped a 17 year-old girl in Barnsley. Lee Ainsby’s DNA was found years later in a case review. It had been taken because he had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Under the proposed system the DNA would not have been kept. Without that DNA those two men would still be free and justice for that young girl would not have been done. Abdul Azad was arrested for violent disorder in Birmingham in February 2005 but released without charge. In July 2005 he raped someone in Stafford and was identified only because the police had his DNA. The senior investigating officer for the case said:
“We would never have caught him had his DNA not already been on the database—he didn’t even live locally so we had no intelligence leads either”.
Case after case would have been much harder for the police to solve under the new rules. The Minister may well cite the S and Marper decision by the ECHR that blanket retention and storage of DNA and fingerprints contravenes Article 8 of ECHR. My Government responded with an extensive evidence-led consultation. However, the ECHR decision also recognised the importance of the retention of DNA in fingerprint profiles for individuals who have been arrested and/or charged but not convicted. It is the state’s primary duty to protect citizens’ fundamental rights to life, liberty and security under Articles 2 and 5. The ECHR objection was based on the blanket and indiscriminate approach to retention. Therefore, the argument is about minimising risk to the public of individuals committing an offence in the future and balancing that risk management against considerations of privacy. Evidence-led risk analysis was done two years ago by the Home Office which concluded that the effective length of the retention of DNA profiles was six years for both those arrested and/or charged for a serious offence, and for a minor offence. Conservatives were so convinced by this evidence that they voted in favour of its conclusions on a six-year retention limit contained in the Crime and Security Act 2010 when the noble Lord and his party were in opposition.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)
Was that not part of the wash-up process, and was it not an improvement on the existing regime when it could be kept indefinitely? We were bringing it down to six years.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, as I explained, because we looked at the evidence we did indeed bring it down to six years. If the noble Lord looked at that evidence it would show that six years is the appropriate amount of time for DNA evidence to be kept.
Following the election, based on no new evidence, the Government announced that they would legislate to adopt the protections of the Scottish model. It was based on no evidence but was simply a judgment of the appropriate balance. A review of the Scottish system by Professor Fraser one year after it was introduced assessed the success only of the current system and did not compare whether a longer retention period would be beneficial or whether retention for three years was detrimental to solving serious crimes. The Government persist in seeking to apply the Scottish model in England and Wales when all the evidence and strong police advice from both sides of the border is that Scotland should instead apply the model of England and Wales. Scotland’s rape conviction rate is less than half that of England and Wales. The DNA database in Scotland is far less effective in solving crime than that in England and Wales. In 2009-10 a DNA profile loaded on to the DNA database in England and Wales had an 18 per cent higher chance of finding a match than was the case in Scotland. That is evidence that our system in England and Wales is far preferable and much more efficient and effective than the system in Scotland.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness. She mentioned 23,000 offences. Do they include minor offences?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I would like to be able to answer the noble Lord but I regret that I cannot. I will come back to him in writing.
The statistics and the lack of evidence for the Government’s proposals mean that Amendment 1 is essential.
I turn to Amendments 7 and 8, in my name and those of my noble friends Lord Tunnicliffe and Lord Rosser. Persons arrested for or charged with a qualifying serious offence should have their DNA and fingerprints stored for six years. This replicates the provisions of the Crime and Security Act 2010, which was passed by Parliament but never brought into force. The six-year limit is based on Home Office analysis and reflects a proportionate response to the ECHR decision. As I mentioned earlier, the three-year figure comes from the Scottish model, which was based on no analysis of risk to public security. That is why Amendments 2 and 3 are essential. They will ensure a six-year rather than a three-year limit for the retention of DNA and fingerprints. I beg to move.
Lord Goldsmith
My Lords, I strongly support the amendment moved by my noble friend. As noble Lords will know, I have some experience in dealing with crime from the years when I held office in government. Two things became very clear during that period. The first was the enormous value of DNA in solving serious crime. Time and time again, cases came before me involving DNA, including a number of cases that came from the so-called cold cases review, which involved investigating crimes from a number of years before. There were some remarkable discoveries—for example, the so-called Sheffield shoe rapist who was discovered, some 20 years after he had committed, I think, four rapes, two attempted rapes and probably many more, as a result of a match to DNA from his sister who had been arrested, I think, for a driving offence. That would never have come to light but for the cold cases review and if that DNA had not been retained. It is not simply a case of bringing those who deserve it to justice; it is also a question of protecting others from that person. Those who have been convicted, particularly of such serious offences, as a result of DNA are at least off the streets and therefore less likely to cause harm to women, in particular. That is the second point I want to underline.
My noble friend rightly made the point that there is no more important series of cases for DNA evidence than serious sexual crimes, rape and other offences against women. That is the second thing that I discovered in my time. These are difficult cases to deal with and to convict on, but they cause huge anxiety, shame and sorrow. The great tragedy is when they do not result in a satisfactory result. I am therefore extremely worried about the Government’s proposal to remove without a proper evidential base evidence that could be used in just such cases. In the light of what my noble friend said, this change should not take place until and unless there is clear, convincing evidence that it is not going to put more people at risk or leave more criminals on the streets. For that reason, I strongly support this amendment and the other two amendments in this group.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I want briefly to intervene because I feel quite strongly about this subject. I am not a lawyer, but I think I have my finger on the pulse of the people who were my constituents in Workington. The criminal justice system, even under my own Government, was often felt to be completely out of control in the sense that, as far as many people on the street are concerned, the legal system simply does not work in the United Kingdom. There is a total disconnect between the people who stand behind this initiative and the wider public in the United Kingdom. If you were to do an honest poll of people on the streets of Britain, not a poll simply of libertarian opinion, and ask them their view of DNA and its retention, particularly in the context of their lack of confidence in the criminal justice system, you would find overwhelming support for the retention of this material.
The Government have got the balance wrong. They have taken the libertarian position too far and, in the event that this becomes law, they are going to end up with a number of cases surfacing in the national media, particularly in the tabloids, that reveal that people had committed offences and had not been tracked down simply because DNA had not been retained as a result of this legislation. I object very strongly because I believe that the Government are making a major mistake.
From a Conservative position, the Government would do well to look among their own supporters. Among many of the Conservatives who I know and mix with, there is overwhelming support for DNA retention. Many Conservative supporters simply do not understand why the Government are going down this route. I do not know whether they are being driven by the libertarian agenda that is being pushed by the Liberal Democrats in the coalition—they may well be—but if they are, they should take stock of what they are doing because they are making a mistake and they are upsetting their own supporters, who feel as strongly as I do. The Minister will mix with people in the county of Cumbria, where he lives. If he discusses this with his colleagues in the county of Cumbria, he will find the same view: that we should retain this material as it is a way of safeguarding the future of the criminal justice system and making it more operationally effective.
Finally, this is only one of a number of initiatives that the Government are taking in this Bill. They are introducing what some believe to be a more liberal regime in the use of cameras and CCTV. Again, the public support those cameras. I understand that the Government were involved in a consultation exercise earlier this year. I have not seen the result of that consultation exercise, but what interests me is who was consulted. Was it the people on the street, who have strong attitudes on these matters and who invariably fail to respond to consultations, or was it again this libertarian opinion, which worries me when it manages to secure changes in legislation in the form that we see today?
Let me just say where I stand on DNA. I believe that there should be a national DNA bank, established initially on a voluntary basis, whereby we no longer stigmatise the retention of DNA. I believe that millions of people would provide their DNA if only to prove that that is the route we should be going down. Only at the end of a process of introducing voluntary DNA will we be prepared at some stage in the future to take the necessary initiative to store all people’s DNA compulsorily—but let us start with a voluntary basis. There might be some entrepreneur who is prepared to fund that kind of approach to the retention of DNA, but it is only by taking away the stigma that we release ourselves from the arguments that have led to this legislative change that we are confronted with today.
Lord Condon
My Lords, I also support Amendment 1, for the reasons set out so eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I respect entirely the Government’s wish to revisit the balance and to ensure that there is public confidence in the retention of DNA. I have not been an overstrident defender of police powers or police databases for their own sake. However, this is one area where the Government are in danger of getting it wrong and coming down on the side of a change that will not be in the interests of the public.
It is now 12 years since I retired as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and there have been more advances in DNA science in those 12 years than in the whole history before that period. More and more cases can be reviewed in a cold case way, particularly in the area of sexual offences and violence, where the database has been invaluable in bringing to justice people who have been vicious assailants of both men and women.
If, as I suspect, the Government are not of a mind to give much way on this amendment, I hope the Minister will at least give us some reassurance on how the advances in science and DNA will not be neutralised by shedding DNA databases, which will be so valuable in looking back as well as forward.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I rise with diffidence to support my Government, because I think that the issues are extremely difficult and that one has to balance very unalike aspects of our society and culture. I was going to say, until the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said it for me, that the logical conclusion to question of the retention of DNA, fingerprints and so on would be for the whole population to be required to give its DNA, fingerprints and so on. That has a simplistic appeal to it. The argument against it, however, is rather the same as the argument against there being surveillance cameras on every corner, in every street and in every lane—the same as the argument against intrusive surveillance through telecommunications. After all, if one could tap any and every conversation all the time, one would no doubt have another huge reservoir of information wherewith to convict criminals.
Lord Soley
Perhaps I may intervene briefly in support of this proposed new clause and to add to what my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith and my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours have said. There is an additional argument. I agree entirely about the cold case and about a voluntary database. Indeed, in this House and prior to being in this House, I have said that we should have a voluntary database and that I should be delighted to be on it.
In a sense, my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, is that the difference between this and cameras is that it is much harder to come up with ways in which a DNA database could be misused by the authorities or anyone else. There is a deterrent factor. The final and only different point that I want to make to those that have already been made is that we should not rule out the deterrent effect of a DNA database. If a person on that database has raped or killed, or has carried out a violent attack, their DNA will be on that database and they know it.
Put yourself in the mind of the victim for a while and think of their rights. Victims have rights, which it is important to respect. As a deterrent factor, a database of DNA is very useful. It also enables the person who is not guilty of an offence—there have been a number of those recently—to be ruled out at a much earlier stage. The gentleman in Bristol who was wrongly accused initially of a murder in Bristol last year would have been ruled out much more quickly had the DNA database with his DNA on it been available. It is important both as a deterrent to further violent crime and as a protection for those who are wrongly accused. Quite simply, never ever rule out the rights of the victims, which we are very fond of doing at times. In the House of Lords where we do not deal with these things directly on a constituency basis, as my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours said, you do not see the victim quite as starkly as you might. Those victims have rights, which we should defend and protect.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, I should like to ask the Minister whether the Government considered an alternative way of reducing recourse to the DNA database that would, on the one hand, have restricted the police from searching the database except where there was a proposal to press charges for serious violence or a serious sexual offence, and on the other hand where the person arrested requests that the database should be searched for the purposes of exoneration.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I am so glad that I prompted my noble friend Lord Phillips to speak before me because he put into words much better than I could have done things that I was trying to articulate in my own mind. He mentioned the possibility of a 100 per cent compulsory database, and I too had been working towards that as a question. I cannot, however, follow the suggestion of a voluntary database. I am not a psychologist and I cannot put myself into the mindset of an offender, but it is difficult to believe that a voluntary database would be any sort of deterrent at all.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness. It would dilute the stigma.
Baroness Hamwee
The noble Lord, Lord Soley, talked about deterrence in the context of a voluntary database. I take the point about stigma, but only a little bit.
On the requirement for further evidence sought in the amendment, as the noble Lord, Lord Condon, has said, the science and the technology are both galloping forward very fast, and logically one could make an argument for continually looking for further evidence as the science goes forward and never coming to a conclusion. It is always possible to ask for more evidence, and we will hear from the Minister what evidence the Home Office has looked for. However, I would like to ask him in this context about the post-implementation review mentioned in the impact assessment. There are a number of boxes under that heading that are not completed. Perhaps he can tell the Committee something about the establishment of the criteria for the assessment under a post-implementation review, because that would be helpful.
I am not sure that the amendments in this group that seek to extend the period are entirely consistent. We are in Committee, so I understand that, but to seek to decide whether to increase or decrease the time period while at the same time calling for further evidence before implementing this part of the Bill does not quite seem to hang together. However, that is probably a picky and unworthy argument because, as my noble friend said, the noble Baroness has raised matters that are extremely important.
Lord Dear
My Lords, we have discussed the rapid advances in DNA technology, but a fact that noble Lords may wish to take note of is that we are literally on the brink of a breakthrough in DNA analysis whereby, although the same sample being tested in the laboratory does not produce a hit on the database, it will nevertheless produce a pretty good description of the person who has given the sample. That will move the debate into a whole new area. I say that to put the record straight on just how fast databases are moving forward.
There is no doubt that if legislated for as we are considering, DNA technology will undoubtedly bring some convictions from cold case reviews. Indeed, that has already been mentioned from the Cross Benches. However, I have to say that, as a proportion of the total number of cases dealt with and convictions brought each year, the number will be relatively very small. Undoubtedly these reviews will frequently focus on serious cases involving rape or violence where the victim has suffered enormous trauma.
Having concluded my brief opening remarks, I have little else to say other than that I support the stance taken by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury. There has been far too much intervention in the privacy of the individual. We are currently reading in the newspapers about the conduct of the Leveson inquiry, which is yet another example of possible intervention in another sphere. That thrust of the interventionist state into our lives is something that this Bill seeks to reverse. Although this is an emotional issue, it raises great interest in the criminal justice system and in my former service, the police service. I shall make very few new friends in the service when I say that I believe that the safeguards proposed by the Government in trying to search for this balance are appropriate. I therefore support what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, has said as well as the general thrust of this Bill.
The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, I associate myself with the comments of my noble friend Lord Dear and the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury. Certain things can go wrong all too easily. DNA is not a straight yes/no; at the end of the day, if something is done in a laboratory, you are talking about an analogue match that is reduced to certain points. We have seen sometimes the misinterpretation of fingerprints. When a computer has reduced it to X points, it is not necessarily a true match. There have been miscarriages of justice as a result. People have refused to admit mistakes later because of the tendency of the system to try to cover up its mistakes for the greater good, in order not to discredit something that is widely accepted as evidence.
I am also worried that, if DNA exists and is associated with a case, you use it to try to prove some guilt. You do not know how it got there. I might have tried on a jersey in a department store and left a couple of hairs on it. It might later have been bought by someone else and the knife that went into the person might have carried one of my hairs inside the wound. With our DNA techniques, it could be deduced that I was the person who was at the place in question—you do not know
The trouble is that, because we have an adversarial system, we do not seek to find the truth in our courts; we see who has got the best lawyers to discredit the evidence on the other side. That can be dangerous sometimes with things such as DNA, which is fairly new. We have widely different quoted figures for what an exact match is and for the probability of a match that do not take into account laboratory accuracy. We need to think about exactly how accurate it really is. You also get criminal seeding of sites, which has been going on for a long time—taking ashtrays from pubs and leaving DNA evidence elsewhere to sow false things.
What worries me, finally, is what we saw happen with RIPA—that is, function creep. This will start off in the serious crime arena and then get extended, because it is an easy way to find who was where when or who handled what. We have to be very careful about making sure that that does not happen if we are going to retain DNA as evidence. That is why I approve of the Government’s stand and of what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said.
We seem to treat very lightly the fact that someone should be arrested. Actually, that goes on your record and it stays there even if you are never then prosecuted or a charge is not laid properly. The fact that you have been arrested will disbar you from all sorts of things. A simple example is the American visa waiver scheme. I am fairly certain that you cannot get a US visa waiver if you have been arrested. For some people, there is no smoke without fire. We have to be very careful before thinking that just an arrest is okay and that it is all forgotten in the wash—it is not.
Lord Macdonald of River Glaven
My Lords, this is a difficult and sensitive issue, and I have great sympathy with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said a moment ago. When he was Attorney-General and I was Director of Public Prosecutions, we often saw the result of DNA evidence in successful prosecutions. Nobody for one moment would underestimate, in spite of what has been said recently, the importance and the potency of that evidence, particularly in cold-case reviews.
Nevertheless, I am driven to support the Government’s position on this amendment, largely because of the sentiment that was expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. The rational and honest conclusion of the previous Government’s policy was a national DNA database. The policy was discriminatory in a sense that has not been addressed so far in this debate. Everybody knows that more young black men than young white men are arrested on the streets of our cities by proportion of population, and therefore more are swabbed. Therefore, a database that was growing as that one was, uncontrolled by any process of anti-discrimination, was inherently dangerous.
The safe process, if the Government had wanted to go down that road, as was once explained very eloquently by Lord Justice Sedley on the “Today” programme, was to institute a national DNA database. That was the logical and only fair extension of the previous Government’s policy. I cannot support the concept of a national DNA database. It seems an inherently totalitarian concept. The idea that newborn babies would be separated from their mothers in our hospitals to be swabbed before being returned for suckling, or however the process is conducted, seems deeply totalitarian and unacceptable.
The Scots have got it about right. These are questions of balance. Of course the position of victims is critical, but we also have to develop a system which achieves a balance between justice for victims and justice for defendants in a free society in which the Government play an appropriate and not overly intrusive role in people’s lives.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, before we go further with the fantasy of newborn babies being separated from their mothers to be swabbed, let us remember that all newborn babies have a pinprick test of their heels in order to get a blood sample for a Guthrie test to be sure that they do not suffer from a serious metabolic disorder—namely, PKU—and that these samples are retained. So a database, in that sense, exists. We should discuss the uses of databases rather than what exists or how samples are taken.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)
My Lords, I start by picking up on the point made by my noble friend Lady Hamwee about Amendments 1, 7 and 8 not being consequential. I do not know what are the ultimate intentions of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, but I agree with my noble friend that Amendments 7 and 8 are not consequential on Amendment 1. Certainly if the noble Baroness was minded to divide the House on Amendment 1, I would not accept the consequences of the House’s decision as being binding on Amendments 7 and 8. However, I shall leave that to the noble Baroness when she gets to them.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, made clear, Amendment 1 would delay the implementation of these provisions by several months. I remind the House that the provisions in Part 1, Chapter 1 of the Bill represent the response of the Government to the European Court of Human Rights judgment in the S and Marper case, to which the noble Baroness referred, which is already three years old. If the previous Government had implemented compliance legislation when they had the chance in 2009-10, we would not now have more than 1 million innocent people recorded on the DNA and fingerprint databases and we would not have had to legislate again on this subject in this Bill.
The previous Government’s proposals, to which the noble Baroness referred and which she obviously still supports, received at that time virtually no support at all beyond her own Front Bench. She has obviously since then dragged up a bit more support from her Back Benches. Our proposals, which very much adopt the Scottish model, have been welcomed by a wide variety of organisations such as Liberty, Justice, the Law Society, the Criminal Bar Association and GeneWatch. They all gave evidence to the Public Bill Committee in another place and welcomed the Government’s general approach in this area. The Scottish model has also found favour with the Joint Committee on Human Rights and with the Constitution Committee, which have both referred to it.
The noble Baroness referred to evidence from the 2009 analysis, which was based on only three years of evidence, as I understand it, extrapolated to a point where it was essentially of, it could be argued, no real value. I refer the noble Baroness to our analysis, which was published in September and used five years of evidence, looking crucially at the likelihood of conviction. Therefore, further analysis is unnecessary.
However, I can tell my noble friend Lady Hamwee that there will be a post-implementation review, as there always is, and if we failed to include something in our impact assessment again I can only say that Homer nodded on this occasion and that we will make sure that that does not happen in future. I believe that further analysis is unnecessary and our proposals to retain unconvicted persons’ DNA for only three years are correct, and then only in respect of serious offences.
The analysis has been looked at by many independent experts, who have considered it closely. For example, as my honourable friend the Minister for Crime and Security, James Brokenshire, said in Committee in the other place,
“the Information Commissioner states that he ‘does not consider that the evidence presented supports a general period of anything like six years’”.—[Official Report, Commons, Protection of Freedoms Bill Committee, 29/3/2011; col. 212.]
We have consistently supported the adoption of the protections of the Scottish model, and that was a central plank of our programme for government announced last May. We believe that our proposals represent an appropriate balance—and I was very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dear, for using the word balance—between the rights of those who have not been convicted by a court and the need to protect the public in some of the most difficult cases.
If the noble Baroness would like a little support from her own Back Benches, I can also refer her to the widely respected independent website Straight Statistics, whose board of directors is chaired by her noble friend Lord Lipsey. It has examined the research and reached the conclusion that:
“Despite the limitations of the analysis, acknowledged by its authors, it does suggest that the retention periods allowed under the 2001 and 2003 Acts were unduly long, as were those proposed in the 2010 Bill. The present bill, which is broadly similar to the law in Scotland, gets the balance more nearly right”.
The noble Baroness seemed to imply that we offered full support to the 2010 Bill. Again, I remind her, as I did in my intervention, that that Bill went through in the wash-up, very rapidly. Obviously, we offered it support in that six years was considered an improvement on the situation in the past, but we have not yet brought those provisions into effect and we have no intention of doing so. We think it better to bring forward these proposals, which are more likely to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgment.
Again, I refer the noble Baroness to comments made by the then Policing Minister, when the noble Baroness’s party was in government, who said to the Public Bill Committee on the Crime and Security Bill that,
“we have obviously considered the judgment”—
that is, the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights—
“and how far we can push the boundary of the judgment in relation to our wish to have protection for the public”.—[Official Report, Commons, Crime and Security Bill Committee, 26/1/2010; col. 71.]
In our judgment, we should be seeking a balance, rather than riding roughshod over the rights of the million or more innocent people whose DNA profile is on the database despite them never having been convicted of any crime.
I turn to Amendments 7 and 8, which deal with the period for which we seek to retain the DNA and fingerprints of innocent people, which was discussed at some length in another place. These amendments would replace the Government’s provisions, which meet our coalition commitment to adopt the protections of the Scottish model, with the core of the last Government’s Crime and Security Act, which was rushed through in the run-up to the election. The party opposite persists in its approach to keep the DNA and fingerprints of innocent people for many years, no matter what those people have been accused of and no matter how little evidence was ever uncovered.
The noble Baroness referred to some 23,000 offenders. I was never quite sure where they had come from and whether they were alleged rapists, alleged something else or just people who had been arrested. Similarly, at the Labour Party conference in September, the shadow Home Secretary said that this Government will,
“take 17,000 suspected rapists off”
the DNA database, which,
“will make it even harder to bring rapists to justice”.
Of course, we all believe that increasing the conviction rate for rape and other serious offences is important. But are those on the Front Bench really saying that, in order to increase that conviction rate, we need to keep the details of thousands of innocent people on the DNA database because some of them in the future may go on to commit serious crimes?
I say to the noble Baroness that the conclusions of the report from the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, last year are far more important. She looked at the handling of rape by the police and by criminal justice and made some 23 recommendations in that area. While her terms of reference did not include the criminal law, her report recommended reassessing the essential elements of investigating rape cases, supporting victims to improve the handling of investigations and improving victim support, which would build stronger cases. Her recommendations on that occasion included ensuring that all police officers adopt ACPO’s Guidance on Investigating and Prosecuting Rape and adopting the protocol between the Crown Prosecution Service, the police and local authorities on exchange of information. I say to the Committee that these issues are more likely to be of assistance in increasing the conviction rate for rape than keeping 1 million—or whatever number we think it is—innocent people’s DNA on the national database.
In any event, the contention that every individual suspected of rape will instantly come off the database is just not true. Those charged with a qualifying offence, including rape, will have their DNA held for three years, and the police will be able to apply to the courts to extend that by a further two years. Those arrested for but not charged with a qualifying offence where the victim is vulnerable will also have their DNA held for three years, subject to the approval of the new independent commissioner. We have consistently taken the view, both during the passage of the Crime and Security Act and in advancing our proposals in this Bill, that the correct approach is to ensure that those convicted in the past of serious offences have their DNA added to the database, while those arrested for, but not convicted of, more minor offences should not have their biometrics held beyond the end of the investigation.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I wonder if the noble Lord would answer a question that was asked of me, and which came up in discussion when we were arguing about this the other evening. What is the difference between holding personal information in the form of a photograph—a simple photograph, such as a passport photograph—in a national database, as against holding DNA?
Lord Henley
I am trying to remember who it was, but I think the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, made the point that he found somewhat scary the idea that we should have a national database with everyone's DNA on it, which was being promoted by the noble Lord and others of his colleagues. I feel exactly the same as my noble friend and I hope that that is a suitable response to the noble Lord. As I said, the idea that you could hold all that information in the form of DNA is very different from holding photographs. The noble Lord is speaking from a sedentary position but, if I could continue to try to answer him, that is a great distinction from keeping a photograph. I find the idea scary; obviously, the noble Lord does not.
Lord Soley
If I might intervene, my noble friend is right. The database is holding our photographs from driving licences and passports. The noble Lord’s blood group, and mine, will be on the database too. It will virtually be a national one for the National Health Service. What we do with the data and how we control their use is what matters, but I ask the noble Lord to remember that he is talking about something here that may well prevent many people being killed or raped, or suffering serious abuse. There is not enough thinking here going on about the victims and potential victims.
Lord Henley
As I said, my Lords, there is a balance. What the noble Lord is advocating could also lead to a great many miscarriages of justice, as the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, pointed out. I appreciate that noble Lords opposite would like to bring in identity cards and a national database of the DNA of every person in the country. We do not go down that route; we feel that there should be an appropriate balance between what is kept and what is not. That is why I would reject the amendments.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
I would like to return to the question asked by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, which is a serious one. The information that is retained from a genetic profile for the purposes of the forensic database is not revealing information, such as susceptibility to disease or other genetic factors. It is a selection of the DNA evidence that used to be referred to as “junk DNA”, which is not known to code for any personally sensitive feature of persons. In that respect it is what in other aspects of privacy legislation is called an identifier. That suggests that in some ways it is less personal than a photograph of someone’s face.
Lord Henley
Sorry, but I do not accept that. I refer the noble Baroness to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, that we are in the early days of knowing what DNA can and might achieve in the future. We are offering a very large amount of information to be stored in that DNA. I find that idea scary. Obviously some noble Lords, such as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, do not; indeed, they positively welcome it. On this, there will have to be a philosophical divide between the noble Lord and myself.
For the reasons that I have given, I would certainly not support the amendment and I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, will feel able to withdraw it because I do not think it would command the support of the House.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response and to all noble Lords who have participated in this short but excellent debate. I do not really understand what the Minister is saying about the wash-up. He seems to imply that if a Bill is agreed to in the wash-up, it does not have as much authority as other Bills.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I was not saying that at all, though sometimes Bills are rushed through without quite the same scrutiny that they normally deserve. The noble Baroness was trying to imply that that Act had the full support of the Official Opposition. My point was that, yes, we signed up to it because it was an improvement on what was there before, but we still felt that it did not go far enough in that it left the term at six years. We are proposing something different: three years, with the possible extension of another two years.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
I am grateful to the Minister.
The noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, talked about the culture of society. He is right to do so. From our discussion today, it is clear that there is a fine line between the preservation of the freedom and privacy of individuals and the protection of citizens from crime and the delivery of justice, and there is a clear discrepancy in that balance. My Benches believe in protecting the freedom of citizens to be protected from crime and the freedom of victims of crime to see their assailants brought to justice. That is the side of that fine line that we fall on. That is the culture in which I wish to live. I wish people to be protected from crime and I wish assailants to be brought to justice so that the victims of crime have proper justice.
The noble Lords, Lord Dear and Lord Condon, spoke of advances in science, which are very important. I respectfully suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Condon, that the very fact that there are such fantastic advances in science, and the fact that our country leads in DNA technology, should perhaps make us think that now is not a good time to reduce the length of time for which our DNA is kept precisely because science may enable us to make better use of those samples in the future.
My noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith and the noble Lord, Lord Condon, talked about the value of DNA in solving serious crimes, including in the review of cold cases. I agree with them. The Minister spoke of the excellent report of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern. I certainly welcome all the recommendations that she made, which will make a difference to convictions for rape if they are implemented. However, those convictions will be added to if we are able to retain DNA; even more perpetrators will be brought to justice.
My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours and others are absolutely right when they talk about having their finger on the pulse. That is not to say that we as legislators should follow our citizens in every way; we have a duty to lead. However, in this instance the citizens of our country who believe that they gain better protection from the longer retention of DNA are absolutely right. That is certainly the case in the Forest of Dean, where I come from.
Yes, the Government certainly have an obligation to ensure that individuals are protected from unjustified interference, but they also have an obligation to protect people from crime and to deliver justice for the victims of horrific crimes. With their proposals in Chapter 1, the Government are abrogating their responsibility in these areas. The balance that we have all been talking about this afternoon is important and, in this instance, the Government have got the balance wrong.
I will withdraw my amendment but I will read the debate thoroughly in Hansard. I have to say that it is my intention to bring something back on Report. The noble Lord assumes that, were I to do so, I would not have the votes of the House behind me but we shall see. It is extremely important that the citizens of our country see that we take this issue seriously. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
“(c) any biographical information relating to the material referred to in paragraphs (a) and (b).”
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 3. These are among a number of probing amendments that I tabled following receipt of a briefing from the Information Commissioner, which I am aware has been sent quite widely to your Lordships. Therefore, I hope I do not need to spend too long on any of the individual items. It seems that I need not consider with too much suspicion or cynicism whether the Information Commissioner might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I am very happy to rely on a briefing from him.
Amendments 2 and 3 would add references to biographical information relating to the material dealt with by Clause 1. The commissioner is concerned that, although there is provision to delete fingerprints and DNA profiles, allied biographical information that is held on the police national computer or the police national database is not referred to. Perhaps the Minister can help me with the basis of these amendments. Is the PNC record also deleted when the DNA profile is removed? At present, records held on the PNC are readily accessible. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, may tell me that I am wrong, but it has been suggested that because that information is there access is frequently used to run a name check on individuals who come into contact with the police. Noble Lords will understand the inaccurate assumptions that may be made as a result of this.
The fifth principle of data protection states:
“Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes”.
It seems to me that we should be looking at biographical information alongside the technical information. I beg to move.
Lord Henley
As my noble friend has explained, these amendments were tabled following receipt of a letter from the Information Commissioner, which I think a large number of us have seen. They seek to amend Clause 1 by extending the scope of the provisions for deleting fingerprints and DNA of those arrested but not charged or subsequently not convicted to all police records held on that individual. For ease, I shall refer to these records as “arrest-only records”. In our view there is no need to extend the scope of the clause to cover arrest-only records. What is retained on police records should continue to be an operational matter for chief police officers to decide.
As your Lordships may be aware, the Association of Chief Police Officers has already issued guidance to forces in the light of the Supreme Court judgment earlier this year in the case of GC & C v the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. ACPO issued a letter on 16 June to chief officers which said that,
“if the biometric data is deleted or destroyed, then there is no need—and therefore no justification—for the retention of the arrest record on the Police National Computer. Therefore, if the biometric data is to be deleted or destroyed, then so must be the arrest record on the PNC”.
Therefore, in effect, ACPO has already put a deletion process into effect for arrest-only records held on the PNC. To go further and then delete all records from every other police database, whether national or local, would, in our view, be a step too far. On balance we think that the approach taken in the ACPO letter is the correct and appropriate one. It creates the correct balance—I apologise again for using the word “balance”—between civil liberties and public protection. It also creates consistency between the retention of arrest-only records on the PNC and the treatment of fingerprints and DNA profiles in the Bill.
We have to appreciate that, once the details are removed from the PNC, front-line operational officers will not be able to tell whether an individual has previously been arrested and not subsequently cautioned or convicted. They will not have access at that point to the police national database nor will they necessarily be able to check local records. That, we believe, provides the necessary safeguards for individuals. The fact that a person was arrested or went to trial is a matter of fact and keeping those details on databases that are not readily available to all police officers means that that information will not be visible to the officer making the stop.
Going further and deleting all arrest-only records from all databases means that the police would have no way of knowing that an individual had come to their attention before. It would also mean that the enhanced criminal record checks could not show details of those arrests where they are relevant to a particular application. Such an approach would significantly weaken the public protection afforded by the criminal record regime. I hesitate to refer to it, but it could result in another Huntley-type case where relevant information about previous suspicious behaviour is not disclosed. I accept that in that particular case the records were not effective in preventing what subsequently happened, but that does not alter the fact that the records were there to show a history of arrest linked to a certain type of offending.
I appreciate that at this stage they are probing amendments, but their effect would be that all police databases would be reduced simply to holding details of cautions and convictions. All other intelligence would be removed. In our view, that would hamper the ability of the police properly to protect the public, and for that reason I cannot support the amendments. I therefore hope that my noble friend will be prepared to withdraw the amendment.
The Earl of Erroll
I am quite intrigued by this. The police have a policy in some cases of arrest first and ask questions later, particularly when householders are defending their property, and so on. These people will therefore effectively be regarded in perpetuity—or at least for as long as they live—as having behaved undesirably, even though they have never been in front of a judge or the courts and we should therefore deem them to be innocent. I am worried by the attitude that that should stay on file. I fully realise that we must watch out for cases such as that of Huntley, but they are surely dealt with by the other provisions, whereby you are allowed to retain the records in certain circumstances.
Lord Henley
My Lords, again I repeat the word “balance”. It is a question of balance as to what is appropriate. Again I stress that it is a matter of fact, referring to the noble Earl’s example, that that person has been arrested. He might not have been appropriately arrested and the noble Earl might feel that that should not have happened. However, the simple fact is that he was arrested and there are occasions when keeping that information may be of some use.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, like the noble Earl, I blinked at the words “a step too far” and I appreciate that the Minister went on to try to explain that. It would be only right to read his explanation in order to seek to understand it. However, I have more questions now than when I introduced these amendments.
I should also say that I have a little difficulty in relying on ACPO guidance, if I have correctly understood its status. There is no question about whether it is proper. However, it is one thing for a statute to allow something and for ACPO then to withdraw a little from it, but that is not as good as the statute being clear. I was also not sure how that lay with the Minister’s comment about this being an operational matter for the police. Having added to the list of questions in my head, I will of course withdraw the amendment. This issue may be something that I can discuss with the Minister between this stage and the next. A lot of complications and procedures are not evident in the Bill, which of course deals with just one aspect of the way that the police organise themselves. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 22. These amendments deal with two provisions about speculative searches. Clause 1, on the destruction of fingerprints and the DNA profile, and Clause 22, on the destruction of samples, state that they do not prevent a speculative search,
“within such time as may reasonably be required for the search if the responsible chief officer of police considers the search to be desirable”.
My amendments relate to the term “desirable” and propose wording taken from Clause 15, whereby, instead of when it is “desirable”, fingerprints and DNA can be kept when,
“necessary for the prevention or detection of crime, or the investigation of an offence”.
Without wanting unduly to hinder the police's discretion, it seems to me that those two provisions are very wide. The Explanatory Notes states that the material could be retained for a “short period”. I do not read that into the two clauses. Perhaps the Minister can help me with that and about what limitations there might be on this apparently wide provision. I beg to move.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I have some sympathy with what I think the noble Baroness is trying to get at with the amendments, certainly from my understanding of the letter from the Information Commissioner, but we believe that her amendments would both seriously undermine the effectiveness of the national DNA database and significantly increase the cost of the administration of the system at a time when police budgets are under significant pressure.
In terms of effectiveness, we are advised by the police service that the key point in the taking and retention cycle for DNA and fingerprints is the carrying out of a speculative search immediately following arrest and sampling. For those of your Lordships who are not familiar with this process, it involves the comparison of the newly-taken DNA and fingerprints with material from previous crime scenes and with those whose biometrics are retained following conviction or, in the limited circumstances that we will be discussing shortly, from those suspected but not convicted of serious offences.
It is that speculative searching process which results in the identification of those who have already committed crimes, which I would hope that all of your Lordships would agree is a vital public protection measure. To give an example, a speculative search was undertaken on the DNA profile of Mark Dixie in June 2006, when he was arrested following a fight at the pub where he worked. He was not charged with that offence, but his DNA was matched to biological material left at the scene of the murder of Sally Anne Bowman the previous September. As a result, he was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Government consider that carrying out a speculative search in each case where DNA and fingerprints have been taken on arrest is vital to the effectiveness of the database in identifying such crimes and far outweighs any additional intrusion in Article 8 terms. Indeed, in its recent report on the Bill, the Joint Committee on Human Rights commented at paragraph 45 of its report that,
“an additional final search before destruction is unlikely to pose such an additional interference to create a separate violation of Article 8 … which could not be justified”.
I appreciate that my noble friend does not want to stop such searches, merely to require the circumstances to be considered before a search is carried out. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, it would add to the delay and cost of each arrest for such consideration to be given. There were nearly 1.4 million arrests for recordable offences in 2009-10, a figure I gave to the House earlier today at Question Time. Thus, the additional time required for police officers to consider whether searches were necessary would run to many thousands of hours and could well result in many thousands of additional hours spent in detention by those being investigated.
I can assure my noble friend that we considered this issue carefully in bringing forward our proposals and we consider that carrying out a speculative search in every case is an appropriate use of the DNA and fingerprints taken on arrest. For those reasons, I cannot support Amendments 4 and 22 and I therefore hope that my noble friend will be prepared to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, indeed I shall do so. When the Minister said “cost”, I wrote the word “balance” because, as he said, it has come up in every line of every clause and on every page. I think I am left with understanding that the short period to which the Explanatory Notes refer—I appreciate that they are not binding—is the period for which the material is retained. The Minister is nodding at that. Having clarified that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
“( ) For the purpose of this section, an investigation is concluded when it is so certified by the responsible chief of police.”
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, Clause 2(2) provides for the retention of certain material,
“until the conclusion of the investigation of the offence or”,
as the case may be, the conclusion of proceedings, where proceedings are taken. My amendment seeks to define what is meant by the conclusion of an investigation for the purposes of this clause.
“Conclusion of proceedings” seems to be relatively clear. Presumably one gets to the end of a case or the end of an appeal. Alternatively, when an appeal is not possible, I suppose there is always the possibility of a case being reopened by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, but I shall not try to go there. However, we also ought to be clear about when an investigation is regarded as concluded. There has already been a good deal of reference today to cold cases. How cold does a case have to be before it is concluded? If it is cold but not solved, is it still unconcluded? I simply suggest, partly as a way of exploring this matter, that an investigation should be regarded as concluded when it is certified by the responsible chief of police. I beg to move.
Lord Dear
My Lords, I have the greatest respect for the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, but I have to say from practical experience of commanding the largest force in the British Isles other than the Metropolitan Police—having previously headed the operations department of the Metropolitan Police—that in practical terms, forgetting the philosophical benefits or disbenefits of the amendment, it does not stack up.
There are thousands of offences on police books and well over half of them remain undetected. Therefore, seeking a certificate for every single one of them when one believed that an investigation was concluded would frankly be a bureaucratic nightmare. Quite apart from that, at the very serious end of offences it is not uncommon to have 50, 80 or 100 detectives and others working on an investigation. As the case winds on, that number will be run down until, months or even years later, you finish with perhaps five or six. There will come a point when everyone will know that the investigation has stopped because they will simply have run out of avenues to explore, but in my experience no chief officer would wish to say categorically, “It is finished”, because that would be slamming a door in the face of victims. We have already spoken in your Lordships’ House about the need to balance the rights and feelings of victims among other things, and that is absolutely right. I do not think that any chief officer of police would wish to say, “We have now certified that this is finished and as far as you, the victim, are concerned—or you, the general public, are concerned—we have now closed our books”, and I do not believe that the public would wish to hear it.
Therefore, with the greatest respect and although I understand where the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, is coming from, on practical and philosophical grounds—and, if those fail, then certainly on grounds of sensibility to feelings—the amendment does not have my support.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for tabling this amendment, and for the explanation from the noble Lord, Lord Dear. I think that it demonstrates that there is potential confusion in this part of the Bill. The noble Baroness asked about cold cases. I understand the difficulty described by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, in saying whether or not a case has been concluded. However, if in subsection (2) we are saying that,
“material may be retained until the conclusion”,
we need to be a little more specific. The noble Lord talked about the practicalities but also the philosophical nature of these issues. Philosophy is a great thing but when it comes to legislation perhaps it needs to be a little more specific.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Hamwee for moving her amendment. It relates to the briefing from the Information Commissioner that was circulated prior to the Committee stage. He expressed some concern that the reference in Clause 2 to the conclusion of the investigation was too open-ended.
I am sure that we would all wish the police to be able to conclude every investigation swiftly with either a conviction or conclusion that no crime has been committed. But, we would all acknowledge that in reality that is not the case, as the noble Lord, Lord Dear, has explained. There will often be cases when it is impossible to identify a suspect immediately and when evidence must be retained for a significant period in the hope of identifying a suspect in the future. My noble friend Lady Hamwee and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to cold cases. The case that comes to my mind is the one that has recently been reopened on the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Evidence, including biometric material, must be retained in these circumstances to enable comparison with the suspect and, for example, to ensure that the suspect’s legal team can examine and probe all the previous police lines of inquiry. If all evidence is not retained in such circumstances, the suspect identified later will be able to argue to the court that the destruction of such material would render it impossible for him to receive a fair trial. In such circumstances, even if Amendment 5 were to be made to the Bill, a chief officer would be unable to certify an investigation as complete, which is I think what the noble Lord, Lord Dear, was referring to. In addition, where it is possible for the police to conclude an investigation the introduction of such a certification requirement for all investigations would impose a new bureaucratic process on the police that would be both unnecessary and, when aggregated across the number of investigations conducted, costly. The illustration given by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, makes that quite clear.
For the reasons I have given, we are unable to accept Amendment 5, and I therefore ask my noble friend to consider withdrawing it.
Baroness Berridge
My Lords, I presume that the amendment relates to the previous paragraph in relation,
“to section 63D material taken … in connection with the investigation of an offence in which it is suspected that the person to whom the material relates has been involved”.
On my reading, there is an enormous safeguard in that once the police become convinced that the person has not been involved, the negative applies. The person’s DNA material is taken but if it is then established that that person was not connected to the offence at all, surely the ability to retain the material in those circumstances fails. Therefore you do not have an enormous amount of material being retained until the conclusion of the proceedings. Will the Minister clarify whether I am correct in my understanding that the police can retain that material until the conclusion of the proceedings but only if they remain convinced that that person is still suspected of being involved in the commission of the offence?
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, perhaps I might intervene briefly. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, made some effective practical points against the amendment. However, I am afraid that I am one of those simple souls who find it easier to look at these matters in relation to an example rather than in a general academic sense. There is a clear-cut case in which some of these issues might have arisen: namely, that of the gentleman in Bristol who was arrested—I forget whether he was charged—for the murder of Miss Yeates. It is now universally agreed that this was a mistake. Somebody else has been convicted and sentenced.
I do not expect my noble friend to be able to answer this because it is a bit of a bouncer, and it applies to all the amendments that we have so far discussed. How would the Government's proposals for retention apply to that case, and what difference would the amendments that have so far been discussed make to the case? I do not know the answer and would have to speculate. I suggest that it might be sensible if the Minister wrote to me about this rather than attempting an answer off the cuff.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Berridge for her intervention. I am pleased to confirm that her analysis of the subsection preceding the one we are discussing is correct. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lord Newton. I will take his advice, consider his points and be sure to write to him. I have been given some comfort on the way in which we may be able to respond to his query by the intervention of my noble friend concerning the subsection preceding the one my noble friend Lady Hamwee seeks to amend.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, one always knows about one-third of the way into a sentence that a “but” is coming. I anticipated it when the noble Lord, Lord Dear, started to make his comments. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, about the application of these provisions. That is a safeguard, but it seems to me that it is more of an answer to the noble Lord, Lord Dear, than it is to me.
Of course I understand the practical problems. I said a few minutes ago that all the amendments are probing. The problem often is that when one tables an amendment to probe, it is taken as if one means every word. I am looking for an answer to my underlying question and I am not sure that I have yet heard it. What worries me is that even on the fairly narrow track that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, identified, there is the possibility of driving a coach and horses through what we all think we are agreeing this afternoon. I do not seek to apply more bureaucracy, but I do seek clarity. I am not yet clear, but there are more stages and I will not make more of a nuisance of myself at this stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Rosser
Lord Rosser
My Lords, this group of amendments would remove, following a government amendment in the other place, the requirement to gain approval from the biometric commissioner to retain DNA and fingerprint profiles for three years for those arrested for, but not charged with, qualifying offences; remove the provision to allow the police to apply for a two-year extension in the case of persons arrested for, or charged with, a qualifying offence; and provide for persons over 18 arrested for or charged with a minor offence to have their DNA and fingerprints stored for six years, replicating the evidence-led provisions of the Crime and Security Act 2010.
On the retention of DNA for qualifying offences—serious offences—research by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, which was assessed in a Home Office report in 2009, showed that the seriousness of the initial offence for which the person was arrested does not necessarily predict the seriousness of subsequent offences with which they may be associated. As a result of the Government’s proposal on qualifying offences—I make no apology for returning to the figure—17,000 people arrested but not charged with rape will be removed from the database. It would be helpful to know the Government’s assessment of the impact of this development. In addition, as my noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon said, rape has a low charge rate as well as a low conviction rate. Approximately 70 per cent of individuals arrested for rape are not charged, and we know the reasons why. It is often because of the impact of the trauma suffered by victims and problems over securing conclusive evidence.
As an example of the point that I am making, I repeat that Kensley Larrier was arrested in May 2002 for possession of an offensive weapon, which is not classified as a qualifying offence under this Bill. His DNA was taken at the time and retained, although the case never reached court. In July 2004, a rape was committed in the north of England, and DNA from that investigation was speculatively searched against the National DNA Database and matched against the acquittal sample. Larrier was convicted and jailed for five years and was entered on the sex offenders register for life, and that would not happen under this Bill. I repeat that the evidence from the Jill Dando institute shows that the seriousness of the initial offence for which the person was arrested does not necessarily predict the seriousness of subsequent offences.
The Government’s proposals in this Bill, with its references to qualifying offences, are forcing a false distinction in the risk of further offences on the basis of little or no evidence and are shifting the burden of risk assessment on to the police. The judgment of the balance between risk to the public and the right to privacy is the responsibility of the Government, who should not place added administrative burdens on the police. Since the Government have accepted the argument that in some cases there will be a strong enough risk to public safety to warrant retention beyond three years, the way to go about it is not to create a convoluted and bureaucratic system where the burden lies on the police to make that judgment.
With that in mind, it would be helpful if the Minister could say something about the thinking behind the Commissioner for the Retention and Use of Biometric Material, because it would appear that the commissioner will be able to agree to the retention of DNA only for a person who has been arrested and not charged with a qualifying offence—that is, a serious offence—where the victim is vulnerable or where the person arrested knows the victim. The police will also have to show why they consider that the retention of the material is necessary to assist in the prevention or detection of a crime, which may be more easily said than done. If the person has committed a non-qualifying offence, as in the Kensley Larrier case, to which I referred, no application, as I understand it, can be made to the commissioner.
It is also far from clear that the Government’s intended definition of “vulnerable adult” will even cover many rape victims. In the light of the evidence on rape cases and of the findings of the Jill Dando institute, why are the Government having the additional hurdle of the commissioner at all and certainly with such restrictive powers in relation to the retention of DNA? Will the Minister say whether the powers that the Government intend to give the commissioner mean that we shall have a system similar to that in Scotland, or is the argument still being made that there are significant variations from that system?
In evidence to the Public Bill Committee in the House of Commons earlier this year, the Association of Chief Police Officers said it had been in close contact with colleagues in Scotland on the National DNA Database Strategy Board, and they had indicated that the system proposed by the Government in this Bill had not led to any extensions and was quite complex to operate. Asked why it had not led to any applications for extensions, ACPO said that it thought it was because there were 6 million records on the National DNA Database; it had always argued that it was impossible to create a regime of individual intervention for a database of 6 million and it was necessary to make decisions based on automation, but that in effect the Scottish model had to rely on a judgment being made against an individual profile.
Lord Henley
My Lords, it seems that with this group of amendments the noble Lord first wishes to, in effect, remove the independent biometrics commissioner and then, as we discussed earlier, extend the period of DNA retention automatically to six years for virtually all offences. Amendments 6, 9 and 10 would leave the decision entirely in the hands of the police. Obviously I can see the attraction of effectively automating the process to reduce the administrative burden placed on the police in those cases. However, the Government consider this to be completely outweighed by the additional protection given to the arrested person by the safeguard of the commissioner’s consideration. We considered this issue very carefully in drawing up our proposals.
We accept that it is appropriate in limited circumstances to retain material where a person has been arrested for a qualifying offence but not subsequently charged, and those circumstances are set out in new Section 63G(2) and (3) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which would be inserted by Clause 3 of this Bill. However, given that in such cases the charging standard has not been met, we believe that further safeguards are necessary, and the independent scrutiny of the commissioner provides that safeguard.
In support of his arguments, the noble Lord produced the case of Kensley Larrier, whose DNA, he claimed, was vital in getting him convicted of rape. My advice is that the DNA was not the key to his subsequent conviction for rape and on that occasion it was the complainant who took the police to the block of flats where he lived and described him in such detail that he could easily be identified. No doubt the noble Lord will say that that is just one example and will produce others, but it was not a very good example and it does not particularly support his case. Again, it is a question of finding the right balance.
I also remind your Lordships that the evidential charging standard is that there is a “realistic prospect of conviction”, which is defined in the Code for Crown Prosecutors as,
“an objective, impartial and reasonable jury or bench of magistrates or judge hearing a case alone, properly directed and acting in accordance with the law”,
that,
“is more likely than not to convict the defendant of the charge alleged”.
Where the charging standard has not been met but the police believe there are valid reasons to retain the material, we believe that the process of applying to the commissioner, which we are determined to make as straightforward, simple and unbureaucratic as possible, provides an important safeguard.
As I have indicated, we believe that the police should be able to retain biometric material in limited circumstances. In this respect, therefore, the Bill goes beyond the Scottish system in allowing for the retention of material from persons who have been arrested but not charged, which is why we believe that there should be the safeguard that we have set out to form the biometric commissioner. As my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said at Second Reading in another place:
“We must protect the most vulnerable in society, so when the victim of the alleged offence is under 18, vulnerable or in a close personal relationship with the arrested person … the police will apply to the commissioner for retention. I believe that these rules give the police the tools they need without putting the DNA of a large number of innocent people on the database”.—[Official Report, Commons, 1/3/11; col. 207.]
For that reason, I cannot offer a crumb of comfort to the noble Lord in his Amendments 6, 9 and 10.
Amendment 13 would provide for a six-year retention period in the case of a person arrested for or charged with, but not convicted of, a minor offence. Clause 4 delivers another of the key protections of the Scottish model. Read with Clause 1 it provides for the destruction of the DNA profiles and fingerprints of anyone who has been arrested for or charged with a recordable offence that is not a qualifying offence but who is not subsequently convicted. The Government’s view is that not retaining that material taken from those arrested for or charged with a minor offence but not subsequently convicted strikes the right balance between public protection and individual freedoms.
The European Court of Human Rights was clear on this point. A key passage of the Marper judgment, the case to which we referred earlier and which this Bill implements, stated that it was struck by the indiscriminate nature of the power of retention then in force, and highlighted the fact that,
“material may be retained irrespective of the gravity of the offence with which the individual was originally suspected”.
Obviously, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, takes a contrary view. He says that we should retain as much of this DNA material as possible for as long as possible. Some of his noble friends, such as the noble Lords, Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Soley, want ultimately to have everyone’s DNA on the register. The party opposite says that retaining someone’s DNA profile on a database is not much of an intrusion. It compared it to keeping a photograph and said that it is not much of an intrusion compared with the risk of even one rape or serious assault left unsolved. I do not accept that.
We have argued consistently, both before the election and since, that the previous Government’s models went too far. We think that the Scottish model strikes a far better balance between the competing interests, as the Joint Committee concluded when it examined the previous Government’s proposals. As I made clear in the debate on the earlier amendment, I believe that a great many others support us on this issue.
As for the research conducted by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, the noble Lord should remember that its director later noted that it was incomplete and based on data to which it was not given direct access. In September 2009, Gloria Laycock, director at the institute, said of the research study:
“That was probably a mistake with hindsight. We should have just said ‘you might as well just stick your finger in the air and think of a number’”.
I took that from a briefing provided by Liberty, for which I am most grateful. The noble Lord also might have looked at that and might have found it of some use in his arguments. We are trying to find the right balance and we believe that we have. I hope therefore that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Rosser
I thank the Minister for his response. It throws into sharp contrast the fundamental difference of view between this side and the Government over the length of time that DNA samples should be retained, and the types of cases for which they should be retained. I do not think the Minister has sought to argue that retaining them for the longer period of time, which is what we are advocating, would not lead to more people who have committed serious offences being apprehended. He gets around replying to that argument simply by talking of a so-called balance. On this side we have made it clear that we are in favour of a balance that seeks to apprehend those who have committed serious offences and one that reduces the number of people who are likely to be the victims of serious crime.
However, there is obviously a fundamental difference on this view, which was expressed by the Minister during our discussion on the previous amendment. I will withdraw this amendment for the moment, but we will consider whether to bring back a similar amendment on Report.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, as we have already discussed, among other things Clause 3 sets out the rules governing the retention of the DNA profile of a person arrested for a serious offence but not charged with that offence. In such cases, the police can apply to the biometrics commissioner to retain the DNA in certain circumstances, including where the alleged victim of the offence is a vulnerable adult. The amendment seeks to replace the definition of “vulnerable adult” as used in this context.
Currently, Clause 3 defines a vulnerable adult by reference to Section 60(1) of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006. However, as we will come on to when we reach Part 5 of the Bill, Clauses 65 and 66 seek to amend the definition of a vulnerable adult in the 2006 Act to mean any person over the age of 18 in receipt of a regulated activity, for example health or personal care. The changes made by these clauses to the definitions of vulnerable adult and regulated activity put the emphasis on the activity and the person carrying out that activity. It no longer attempts to define vulnerability or label a person as a “vulnerable adult”. As a result, the definition is not particularly helpful in the context of Clause 3.
Amendment 11 therefore draws on the definition in Section 5(6) of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, which defines a vulnerable adult as,
“a person aged 16 or over whose ability to protect himself from violence, abuse or neglect is significantly impaired through physical or mental disability or illness, through old age or otherwise”.
We believe that this definition is far more apposite for the purposes of Clause 3. The reason why the amendment inserts the definition in full in new Section 63G(10) of PACE rather than merely referring to the 2004 Act is that our definition refers to persons aged 18 or over, as the definitions in new Section 63G(2), as inserted by Clause 3, already include all those aged under 18.
I hope your Lordships will agree that this definition is sensible, and I commend it to the Committee.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, the government amendments brought in at the Report stage of this Bill in the House of Commons stipulate that DNA and fingerprint profiles from individuals arrested but not charged with a serious offence could be retained only with the permission of the biometrics commissioner on the condition that the alleged victim is aged under 18, a vulnerable adult, associated with the alleged perpetrator or necessary to assist in the prevention or detection of crime. The effect of that is that many individuals who are arrested for a serious offence will not have their DNA retained at all.
From the definition given in government Amendment 11, it looks as though the Government are setting a higher burden of proof and imposing a greater administrative burden on police, which will have a dissuasive effect on the retention of DNA for serious offences. A false distinction is potentially being made between the risk associated with those arrested and those arrested and charged. As we discussed earlier, rape cases have chronically low charge and conviction rates. The amendment could therefore have an impact on the safety of women. I listened to the reasons which the Minister gave for introducing the new definition, but it would appear to be tighter. I therefore seek an assurance from her that the new definition will include victims in women’s refuges and sheltered housing, and rape victims.
I do not fully understand the purpose behind the amendment, nor do I understand which individuals, if any, the Government wish to exclude through the definition. I do not understand why the definition that we already have cannot be used. I suggest that the definition of a “vulnerable adult” should be common to all legislation, because that is the proper way for us as legislators to act. It is both logical and makes sense to citizens who have to deal with the legislation. I am wholly in favour of common definitions. If we are talking about vulnerable adults in one Bill, we should have the same definition in another. I do not accept that the new definition as put forward by the Minister in this amendment is necessary or desirable.
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, perhaps I may build briefly on those comments because lurking in them was the question that I was going to ask. I suppose that I had better declare an interest, in that, whatever definition is used, I am a vulnerable old person, so it probably makes no difference to me.
The question is: does the Bill change the definition in the 2006 Act? On the basis of what the Minister was just saying, it leaves one definition in that Act and puts another in this Act. I think that it is very odd that we should have two definitions of vulnerable persons, whether adult, children or any other category of person. If a definition is right for one purpose, I cannot see why it is not right for another.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, let me try to explain a little further. We are trying to ensure that, when we refer to “vulnerable adult” in the context of those who are the victims of crime, we are clear about the people who have been affected by the crime against them. Later on in the Bill, in a different context, the term “vulnerable adult” is deployed differently, because it relates to regulated activity and what access a person might have in terms of the activity being carried out at that time. The amendment tries to make sure that, in this context, we define “vulnerable adult” as the person who is the victim, rather than trying to define it in terms of what activity might be used against them, which occurs later in the Bill. I might have to write further to the noble Baroness.
Perhaps I may add that those seeking refuge from an abusive relationship would be covered by the third limb of new Section 63G(2); that is, by being associated with the suspect. However, given the nature of the questions that the noble Baroness has asked and the sensitivity of the topic—I would not want to give anybody the wrong impression about it—it would probably be best for me to come back to her in writing.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, before we go to a vote, I respectfully suggest that the noble Baroness considers withdrawing the amendment and bringing it back on Report. I do not wish to vote against it but I should like further confirmation that the people who should be covered by this definition of “vulnerable adult” are properly considered and covered by it.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
I am grateful to the noble Baroness. I think, on reflection, that that would be the right course. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 15, 16 and 17. These are identical amendments to Clauses 4, 5, 6 and 7, which permit the continued retention of material in specified circumstances indefinitely, irrespective—at any rate in statutory terms—of any ongoing necessity for crime prevention and detection purposes.
I have referred before to the fifth principle of data protection, which I have quoted, and my amendments would permit retention for as long as is necessary for the prevention and detection of crime, investigation of an offence or the conduct of a prosecution. That is the wording used in Clause 16, which I am not seeking to amend, and which the Information Commissioner has told us more closely accords with the requirements of the Data Protection Act.
I may be told that there is too much bureaucracy involved in this but it would be appropriate for the Committee to hear an explanation from the Minister as to why indefinite retention is allowed in the context of the generally wholly welcomed provisions limiting retention. I beg to move.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I hope to deal with this issue relatively briefly. My noble friend has got it right when she refers to additional bureaucracy. If we move from unconditional indefinite retention to a necessity test, as is suggested in her amendments, this would require the police to keep under continual review some 4.5 million or so convicted individuals whose DNA is retained on the national DNA database, as well as the 3 million or more whose fingerprints are held without a DNA profile. That would be a huge administrative exercise which the police would not be happy to take on.
My noble friend made a point about why we are retaining it indefinitely for certain people and not for others. Recently published research notes that, at least on average, conviction rates for individuals with no prior convictions will be lower than for individuals who are proven offenders. That is why we believe we are right in retaining material from the unconvicted only in certain specific circumstances, as we discussed earlier, while retaining the material from all those with convictions for recordable offences. Such retention is preventive, not punitive. It is done in respect of a group of individuals who pose a considerably higher risk of future offending—significantly higher than that of the general population—because of their past proven criminality.
I hope that with those assurances—that it is a group more likely to offend in future and that it would be a massive bureaucratic exercise for the police to undertake—my noble friend will accept that her amendments are unnecessary.
Baroness Hamwee
I am not sure about their not being necessary, but I can see they may be undesirable. I shall not comment on police happiness.
Lord Henley
It is not purely police happiness—it is also police cost. If my noble friend’s amendment were accepted, looking at 4.5 million entries on an annual basis would divert an awful lot of police man hours away from the job.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I am being inappropriately flippant in a serious context. Perhaps I had better just beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Earl of Erroll
“Privacy Commissioner
(1) The Secretary of State shall appoint a Commissioner to be known as the Privacy Commissioner (referred to in this section as “the Commissioner”).
(2) It shall be the duty of the Commissioner to promote respect for individual privacy.
(3) The Commissioner shall have all the duties and functions set out in—
(a) section 51 of the Data Protection Act 1998 (Data Protection Commissioner),(b) section 57 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Interception of Communications Commissioner),(c) section 91 of the Police Act 1997 and section 62 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Chief Surveillance Commissioner),(d) section 20 of this Act (Commissioner for the Retention and Use of Biometric Material),(e) section 34 of this Act (Surveillance Camera Commissioner).(4) The Commissioner shall have all the powers which attach to the offices set out in subsection (3).
(5) The Commissioner shall arrange for the dissemination in such form and manner as he considers appropriate of such information as it may appear to him expedient to give to the public about any matter within the scope of his functions under this Act, and may give advice to any person as to any of those matters.
(6) Any reference in any enactment, instrument or other document to a person carrying out the duties and functions set out in subsection (3) shall be construed, in relation to any time after the commencement of this section, as a reference to the Commissioner.
(7) Any appointment made to any of the offices set out in subsection (3) is hereby terminated.”
The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, this amendment probes an idea. I am afraid that it was borrowed from one proposed in another place and, although it is not perfect, it will do just to sound out the concept and idea. I think that that is very important.
I spoke along these lines a long time ago in a debate on the report of the Science and Technology Committee on personal internet security, on 10 October 2008 in col. 467, if anyone is interested enough to look it up. We are getting a plethora of commissioners, with five of them looking at different aspects of information privacy, so there is a huge opportunity for things to fall between the cracks when there is no overlap—or there is an overlap, and nobody knows whose jurisdiction it falls within. Every time we have another thing, we invent another commissioner, and that concerns me. We are not taking an overall overview approach to this issue. Also, as new things emerge, where do you fit them in? Which commissioner do you fit them with, or do you invent a new commissioner each time?
The second challenge that I had was with the logical difficulty of a commissioner reporting back through the very person on whom he is reporting—because most of them, except for the Information Commissioner, report to the Secretary of State and on things that the Secretary of State’s department is doing. The Secretary of State has the right to edit the report before it goes public, in the public interest, which can mean almost anything. So I am challenged by that idea. The reason why I like the set-up for the Information Commissioner under the Data Protection Act is because that commissioner reports to Parliament and is appointed by Her Majesty using letters patent. Therefore, that commissioner reports directly to us. On the other hand, there is a challenge for the Information Commissioner as a single person. For example, when that commissioner had to criticise Parliament over expenses, I know that the previous Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, felt very exposed as a single person; some complaints were aimed very personally at him. So at that point, I thought that maybe we should have an authority—more of a group of people. So I would rather draw all these commissioners into one personal information protection authority, or PIPA, which would be answerable to Parliament, not through the Secretary of State. Philosophically, in a democracy, that would be a far better way in which to organise it all. Anything new could go into that; they could work out whose responsibility the different bits were. Some of them would have a very high security classification, as some of the aspects for the Surveillance Commissioner have to have.
I am promoting this, hoping that it will find favour, but as usual I expect that the Civil Service would prefer to retain control over their commissioners and the people reporting on them. I think that that is unfortunate. One reason for choosing PIPA is that you have to remember that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I am not sure whether I go down the route of paying the piper but the question of accountability, which this amendment raises, is immensely important. Parliament has decided over the years to agree the appointment of a number of commissioners to provide oversight. For that oversight to work in the best way, the line of accountability is one that one has to look at. I am not sure whether having a single commissioner is practicable, but the issue highlighted by this amendment is a very important one and I am glad that the noble Earl has brought it to the Committee.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, as the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, has explained, this proposed new clause seeks to combine a number of distinct statutory commissioners into a single privacy commissioner. As the noble Earl predicted, I am afraid that the Government are not persuaded that any benefits which may arise from such a merger would offset the disadvantages. Each of the five commissioners listed in subsection (3) of the proposed new clause requires a high degree of knowledge of relevant legislation and procedures to operate in specialist and technical areas.
Before I explain why the Government propose to set up the commissioners in this way, I will address the issue of accountability, as it is one that my noble friend Lady Hamwee raised as well. The noble Earl suggested that his privacy commissioner should be directly accountable to Parliament. The existing commissioners are independent officeholders and there is no question that they discharge their functions without fear or favour. If there were a question of a conflict of interest—I do not accept that there is—it would apply equally to a situation where the privacy commissioner would be directly accountable to Parliament. Parliament is subject to the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and thus to the jurisdiction of the Information Commissioner, so a conflict of interest could equally arise if he reported directly to Parliament. The existing accountability arrangements work well and I see no reason to change them.
Going back to the five commissioners, there is no doubt that in some cases the work of the various commissioners can be related but, in each case, there remain specific and crucial differences where their work remains distinct. To roll up all of the functions of the various commissioners would be to risk watering down the skills and expertise that are brought to bear in each of the areas. Moreover, given the wide diversion of roles and responsibilities of the five commissioners listed in the proposed new clause, I am not convinced that it would be possible for a single individual to provide adequate oversight in any given area—a point which I think that my noble friend Lady Hamwee made.
If a privacy commissioner were to be appointed, I envisage that he or she would quickly need several deputy commissioners, or a large body of support staff, to oversee the specific areas currently overseen by separate individuals. This would create an unwieldy body which, in all probability, would have less influence and impact, compared with the existing commissioners operating in niche areas. We can take the Interception of Communications Commissioner as an example of the specialist knowledge required in this area. That commissioner provides oversight of the intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities by keeping under review their use of interception powers and their powers to acquire communications data. The role is very specific and the commissioner’s powers to require disclosure by the intelligence agencies, and others, of highly classified information means that it is a highly sensitive post that could not be amalgamated with a range of other, unrelated commissioner functions.
That said, we fully accept that there is a need for these various officeholders to work closely together, and I assure your Lordships that this is already happening. The Public Bill Committee that considered this Bill in the other place heard testimony from the Information Commissioner and the interim CCTV regulator. Both commissioners were clear that where their functions touched on similar areas, they remain adept at establishing and maintaining effective working relationships, so that they can complement rather than duplicate the work of the other. I see no reason to doubt why this cannot continue to be the model in the future.
While there is certainly some common ground between the work of the new Surveillance Camera Commissioner and the Information Commissioner, there are also important differences. The Information Commissioner highlighted, in his evidence to the Public Bill Committee, that his consideration of CCTV is limited to the sphere of data protection and, as such, that his office is not concerned with the effective use of cameras. Indeed, the commissioner saw this separation of functions as advantageous, stating,
“if you are specifically identified as Mr Privacy and expected to come down on the privacy side all the time, it is difficult to make judgments about the release of official information”.—[Official Report, Commons, Protection of Freedoms Bill Committee, 24/3/11; col. 97.]
Furthermore, the noble Earl might remember—I know that he has a great deal of experience in this area—that public confidence in CCTV is driven by both the proportionality and the effectiveness of deployment. The public want, rightly, to see that when surveillance cameras are deployed they help to bring criminals to justice.
In that same evidence session, the deputy Information Commissioner stated that,
“if the cameras do not work, we are not concerned, because cameras that do not work cannot intrude on someone’s privacy and that is what our driver is”.—[Official Report, Commons, Protection of Freedoms Bill Committee, 24/3/11; col. 99.]
I would therefore be concerned about having all these functions under the umbrella of a privacy commissioner. It is important to note that the Information Commissioner plays a key role not only in making sure that personal data are properly protected but that information is freely available to the public in accordance with freedom of information legislation. A single privacy commissioner would undoubtedly tilt the overall balance of the role to the detriment of the Government’s objectives to promote openness and transparency.
In short, it is our view that the five commissioners that are the subject of the amendment all undertake sufficiently distinct roles to justify their separate identities. Where their roles interconnect, I am confident that they will, as now, work together effectively to ensure that they complement rather than duplicate each other’s work. We will of course keep the landscape of commissioners under review but, for the reasons that I have set out, I am not persuaded of the case for a single privacy commissioner. I hope that the noble Earl accepts these arguments and will be prepared to withdraw his amendment, but I am grateful to him for putting it forward in order for us to discuss these matters.
The Earl of Erroll
I thank the Minister for that reply. In fact, what she described was rather what I ended up thinking. I have to admit that the amendment is defective in that it is not quite what I thought; it came quickly from someone else in order to solve the problem of putting something on paper. A single commissioner certainly could not do that job. I had envisaged someone at the top but then four or five departments underneath, some with much higher security ratings than others. It would just be a matter of co-ordination. From that point of view, I am glad to hear from the Minister that this is already happening with the collaboration between the commissioners on the ground. I hope that that will continue with the other commissioners if the structure stays separate. Bringing them together under a single overarching review may still possibly have advantages, but for the moment I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
“( ) For the purposes of this section, a person shall not be considered to have consented to the taking of section 63D material unless that person has been fully informed of its potential use and retention.”
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, my amendment deals with informed consent. It would provide that a person is not considered to have consented to the taking of material without having been fully informed of its potential use and retention. I am hoping that the Minister will tell me that this is not necessary because that happens and will happen. If I am correct in that assumption, I look forward to hearing on what basis the information is given, but if I am not correct, I look forward to assurances regarding how that will be put in place. I beg to move.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I do not wish to return to our earlier discussion about the desirability of a voluntary or mandatory DNA database. However, I seek an assurance from the Minister, pursuant to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that citizens will still be able to give their DNA voluntarily should they so wish. I know that my right honourable friend David Blunkett did so to show that the DNA database was not something to be feared and that there was no stigma related to it. Listening to the debates in the Chamber this afternoon, I feel even more strongly about the retention of DNA now than I did before. I might well go along to a police station and voluntarily give my DNA.
The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, this is quite an important principle. I notice that when it comes to cautions and reprimands, particularly reprimands, the police certainly do not warn youngsters of the full implications of accepting one. They do not realise that it is a plea of guilt to a criminal offence, which will stay on their record for certain purposes throughout their life. In fact, I have discovered that even some solicitors in the county courts do not realise that. Therefore, it is important that the police have a duty to advise people properly of the full implications of these things, partly so that the police realise them as well. I support this amendment.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I start with the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, about her desire to give DNA voluntarily. I take note of that. There is nothing to stop her. I was going to suggest that a special database could be set up, possibly named after her noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, who seemed so keen on the idea. However, we will now have to call it the Baroness Royall database, and it can collect the DNA of all those members of the party opposite who want to hand it over voluntarily, and all those others who want to deal with the problem of stigma that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, talked about earlier.
There is, however, a much more serious point here: the informed consent of individuals when they come to give their DNA. They might be doing so as part of some operation that the police are mounting where they deliberately want to exclude certain people from their investigations and, therefore, want to take fingerprints or DNA. It is right that we get the appropriate consent set out. That is why comprehensive guidance on the operation of these powers is set out in PACE Code of Practice D, which was revised in March this year to take account of the 2010 Act. It will need to be revised again once the Bill receives Royal Assent. Code D sets out the information that needs to be provided to a person before their fingerprints and/or DNA are taken. Annexe F of the code specifically sets out the requirements to be followed. Note for Guidance F1—to confuse noble Lords even further—underlines the importance of true informed consent. I shall read an extract from it to give assurance that appropriate guidance is offered. It will be revised in the appropriate manner after the passage of the Bill. It states:
“Fingerprints, footwear impressions and samples given voluntarily for the purposes of elimination play an important part in many police investigations. It is, therefore, important to make sure innocent volunteers are not deterred from participating and their consent to their fingerprints, footwear impressions and DNA being used for the purposes of a specific investigation is fully informed and voluntary. If the police or volunteer seek to have the fingerprints, footwear impressions or samples retained for use after the specific investigation ends, it is important the volunteer’s consent to this is also fully informed and voluntary”.
It is very important that the people covered by the new details in Clause 10, particularly new subsection (3), which refers to people who have,
“previously been convicted of a recordable offence”,
are properly informed, under the code of practice, of just what they are consenting to and for how long their DNA will be retained. Therefore, I think my noble friend will accept that her amendment is not necessary. We will make sure that the code of practice is revised in the appropriate manner and that will be done at an appropriate moment after the passage of the Bill. I hope therefore that she will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, that is very helpful. As the noble Earl has said, there are consequences of which not everyone is always aware. His point about the police understanding what they are doing is an important factor. I look forward to the script of the sitcom of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, turning up at a police station and saying, “Please will you take my DNA and record it”. I think that they might be a little baffled but no doubt she will take Hansard with her. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
“( ) Destruction of copies of section 63D material under this section must be processed individually.”
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, the destruction of material by way of batches, and what the material was which was to be destroyed, was dealt with in Committee in the Commons. Reading the debate of 5 April after I had received the Information Commissioner’s briefing, it seemed to me that the discussion slightly petered out. My Amendment 21, which would provide for copies to be processed individually, is tabled to enable the Minister to give assurances—no doubt he will seek to do so—that the deletion of all DNA profile information will be the norm and that retention will occur only in exceptional circumstances. I understand from the debate in the Commons that there are some practical issues around how destruction is dealt with. Perhaps the Minister can reassure the Committee in regard to the subject of the amendment. I beg to move.
Lord Henley
My Lords, my noble friend is again right when she says that there are some technical problems with this issue. I shall say a little about that in a moment once I have set out the position. It might help if I set out a little of the background in this area. Because of the way in which DNA samples have historically been processed in batches—typically of 96, I am told—it is impractical to delete all processing records held within a forensic science laboratory, as batches will inevitably contain a mixture of profiles from convicted and unconvicted individuals, and records must be retained for evidential purposes of convicted individuals, not least in the event of a subsequent appeal or referral to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Action is already under way, led by the National DNA Database Strategy Board and the Protection of Freedoms Bill Implementation Project Board, chaired by Chief Constable Chris Sims on behalf of ACPO, to address the potential for relinking records by removing any link between police barcode numbers and laboratory processing records. One forensic science provider already does this. The strategy board is already working with the laboratories to make this change by the middle of next year. This will break the link between the police and laboratory records and prevent any illicit relinking of names to profiles. The revised procedures will apply to both new and existing samples. From mid-2012, it will be impossible to carry out this relinking. Once the forensic science provider is informed that an individual’s DNA profile has been removed from the database, the link between the police barcode and the laboratory reference will be broken and restoration will not be possible.
None the less, we understand the concerns that have been expressed in this area, and my honourable friend the Minister for Crime and Security recently met representatives of the company which supplies the DNA profiling machines which produce these interim records. They are working on a proposal to enable the deletion of these records rather than merely breaking the links as I have described. If the cost of doing so is not wholly excessive, we will require the destruction of these records. I hope that my noble friend will bear with me for a while until those discussions have been completed and the company can tell us what will be physically possible and what will not be possible. In the mean time, I hope that she will be satisfied by the fact that we feel that we can break the link between the police barcode and the laboratory reference. Once we have broken that link, it will not be restored. Therefore, Amendment 21 will not be necessary.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, that is very helpful information and updating. I suppose the obvious question is whether the Minister is asking me to bear with him for a period which may be longer than that between Committee and Report stage. I do not know whether he has been informed of how long the investigations may take.
Lord Henley
I certainly cannot guarantee to do anything between Committee and Report and I doubt even necessarily between Committee and Third Reading. We will do what we can. If I can bring any further intelligence to the House in the Bill’s later stages, I will certainly do so. However, it would be wrong for me to give any assurances at this stage. The important thing to say is that we can at least break the link between the police barcode and the laboratory. Whether we can do something better will depend on what the company manufacturing these machines manages to do.
Baroness Berridge
My Lords, I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister could confirm that the anonymising of these profiles in the batches of innocent people’s material is compatible with our duties as outlined by the European Court in relation to the retention of innocent people’s material. When speaking to the people in charge of this procedure in various companies, will he bear in mind the fact that the Government might in the future legislate to prevent innocent people’s DNA being deleted from the database? If that should occur, what is the possibility of relinking people’s profiles with the police national computer? Is there any way in which their names, addresses and identifying details on the national computer can be got rid of to prevent that eventuality ever happening so that the samples remain completely anonymous and can never be reconnected to a name and address?
Lord Henley
I will have to take advice on this but my understanding is—I will write to my noble friend if I am wrong about this—that once we have broken the link between the police barcode and the samples, it is broken and cannot be repaired. However, if I am wrong on that, I will let my noble friend know. As regards whether we can get improvements made to the machines so that we can properly delete these things, that will have to wait on the discussions to which I referred earlier.
Baroness Doocey
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, in moving Amendment 23, I shall speak also to Amendment 41. Both amendments deal with the collection of DNA under the Terrorism Act 2000 and the governance surrounding the storage of that DNA. I declare an interest as a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority.
Under Schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act, the police have considerable power and may act “whether or not” they have “grounds for suspecting”. They may also, under Schedule 7, take DNA and fingerprint samples from suspects, although the proportion of cases where this occurs is rather small. However, there remains a need for clarity and transparency in relation to this biometric information, its storage, and the governance surrounding it.
The Bill limits to six months the retention of DNA profiles taken as a result of Schedule 7 examinations. This is a great improvement on indefinite retention, but it is still contentious to retain such profiles at all, bearing in mind the nature of the power under which they were first obtained. The six-month period is recognition of the time required to obtain a DNA profile and carry out the necessary checks to identify whether or not an individual poses a threat and then for a national security determination application to be made, which, if approved, would allow for a further two-year retention but on a renewable basis.
Therefore, in theory, a DNA sample obtained from an individual who has never been convicted of a crime can be retained by the police indefinitely. Amendment 23 would redress this balance by ensuring that whenever DNA is taken, the same governance rules apply, whereby the data are not retained if the person is subsequently not arrested.
Amendment 41 deals with the governance of all databases where DNA material is held—not just the DNA database. The Bill would strengthen the oversight and governance of the National DNA Database, but these rules should apply also in respect of all databases, including the counterterrorism DNA database. This would be in line with the findings of the 2011 Annual report of The Ethics Group: National DNA Database, which concluded:
“All databases containing DNA information including the counter terrorism database held by the police service should be subject to a robust statutory governance framework, appropriate systems and controls, and should be transparent and only be used for statutory purposes”.
This was accepted by the National DNA Database Strategy Board.
The Bill limits to six months the retention of DNA profiles taken as a result of Schedule 7, but there must be clarity in terms of where such profiles and the physical samples are retained. The National DNA Database retains all profiles obtained as a result of individuals being arrested for a recordable offence. However, if only certain DNA profiles obtained from a Schedule 7 examination, which are not recordable, are retained on the separate counterterrorism DNA database, we need clarity about where the remaining profiles are retained and, more importantly, who has access to them. We cannot have a system where DNA profiles from individuals not convicted of any crime are not stored and managed with the same safeguards as DNA obtained from an individual as a result of an arrest.
There are certain elements of governance that need to be observed for the counterterrorism DNA databases, including scientific standards, ethical oversight and meeting the Data Protection Act requirements. Amendment 41 would ensure that suitable governance arrangements are in place for all DNA samples and profiles that are retained by the police. I beg to move.
Lord Goldsmith
Perhaps I may make some observations on the amendment that are very much in the nature of trying to understand what it is intended to do, and I am sorry if I have misunderstood it.
As I read the Bill, there are two circumstances in which material that has been taken in relation to a person who has been detained under Schedule 7 may be retained. In one case, it is retained indefinitely in circumstances where that person has previously been convicted of a recordable offence, other than a single exempt conviction, or is so convicted before the end of a further period. Therefore, if a person has been convicted previously of a recordable offence, DNA or material taken under Schedule 7 may be retained indefinitely. There is a second circumstance in which the material can be retained for six months, which is where the person has no previous convictions or only a single exempt conviction.
I regret that I do not understand at the moment what the noble Baroness’s amendment would do. It would add the words,
“and subsequently arrested for an offence directly related to the reasons for detention”.
For example, if this was the case as regards a person who had previously been convicted of a recordable offence, one would somehow have to wait to see whether that person was subsequently arrested—and I do not know within what period that would apply—for an offence that would also have to qualify as being directly related to the reasons for detention. Only in those circumstances could the material be retained. I do not understand how anyone will know at any point whether that person is going to be subsequently arrested. Nor do I understand why they should be,
“arrested for an offence directly related to the reasons for detention”.
I have to some extent demonstrated my colours in relation to DNA but, at least in the case of a person who has previously been convicted of a recordable offence, I see no reason at all why the material should not be retained. I do not see why one should add a condition whereby somehow you are going to be able to discover subsequently that a person would be arrested for an offence and, furthermore, that that offence is directly related to the reasons for the original detention—whatever, with respect, that means.
At the moment, I do not understand the amendment and, for those reasons, I could not support it.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I do not know whether I can bring light to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, but I will see what I can manage. I will speak to my noble friend’s amendments and, because they have been grouped together, in due course speak to the government amendments in my name—Amendments 24 to 37.
My noble friend helpfully set out her views on the provisions in Schedule 1 in respect of the retention of material taken as a result of a Schedule 7 examination. Schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000 is a national security border power that enables examining officers to stop, search and question a person at a port or in a border area to determine whether they are someone who is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, without reasonable suspicion that they are so concerned. Given that most major terrorist plots have involved individuals travelling across international borders to plan and prepare their attacks, it is only right that the police are given appropriate powers to examine persons, including through the taking and retention of biometric material—in this context, in order to identify and disrupt such individuals.
Imposing a requirement to arrest an individual for terrorism offences as a condition for retention and use of material taken under these powers, would fundamentally undermine their use as a means to identify those involved in terrorist activity and to gather intelligence. Such intelligence can provide vital contributions towards wider intelligence-based investigations in respect of national security. Terrorism investigations are, by their very nature, long and complex, and at the end of a Schedule 7 examination it may not be immediately apparent that an arrest is appropriate.
Attaching a requirement for arrest would furthermore offer no additional safeguards. The Bill already provides safeguards for material taken from a person detained under Schedule 7. There is a defined retention period of six months, which is considerably shorter than the three years’ retention period that applies where a person has been arrested for a terrorist offence under Section 41 of the 2000 Act. The new biometric commissioner will also have a general oversight role in respect of the retention and use of biometric material taken under Schedule 7.
I hope that that helps partially to explain matters to the noble and learned Lord and reassures my noble friend that the provisions in the Bill are transparent and will provide strong protection against unnecessary retention of material taken from individuals detained under Schedule 7 to the 2000 Act.
Turning now to the governance arrangements for the DNA databases, the subject of Amendment 41, I think it is important to note that all DNA material retained by the police will as a result of the Bill be subject to comprehensive regulation, irrespective of the databases on which it is held. Indeed, although the overwhelming majority of DNA information retained by the police will continue to be held on the National DNA Database, where this is not the case, such material will be subject to the requirements of the regimes set out in the Bill, and covered by all the relevant safeguards.
Regarding the counterterrorism database, only DNA profiles obtained by the police in relation to national security—including counterterrorism investigations—will be held on the database. It has already, in effect, been placed on a statutory footing by virtue of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which provides for all material not otherwise subject to statutory restriction, and is already overseen by the National DNA Strategy Board in respect of compliance with agreed national standards and protocols.
The Forensic Science Regulator is also closely involved in ensuring that DNA analysis and validation meet acceptable standards, as he is with the National DNA Database. In addition, we should not forget the new biometrics commissioner’s general oversight function under Clause 20. If the commissioner had concerns about the governance arrangements, I am confident that he or she would not be reticent in bringing such concerns to the attention of the Home Secretary.
Perhaps I may briefly address the government amendments, starting with Amendments 24 to 28. These address three separate matters. First, Amendments 24 to 28 to Part 3 of Schedule 1 are intended to clarify the application and scope of the provisions for the retention and destruction of biometric material to which Section 18 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 applies. Section 18 mostly covers biometric material acquired covertly and material supplied by overseas authorities.
The Government are clear that material obtained under Section 18 of the 2008 Act should be subject to a clear and robust regime for the destruction and retention of such material. As such, we have proposed limiting retention to three years—on the basis of a national security determination extendable for renewable two-year periods—after which it must be destroyed.
However, the proposed destruction requirements in Section 18 are not expressly limited to material obtained from known persons. We are concerned that this will lead to anonymous material and, in particular, material taken from crime scenes, having to be destroyed at the three-year point. Indeed, as currently drafted the Bill requires just that. This unintended consequence would result in the destruction of material before the police were able to identify the individual to whom it belonged, complete an investigation of an offence—potentially compromising prosecutions in the process—or make a case for its retention on national security grounds. For these reasons, the amendments are designed to prevent the automatic and premature destruction after three years of anonymous and unidentified crime scene material obtained by the police.
We do not consider that anonymous material or material taken from a crime scene—where it is also anonymous—should be subject to the same destruction requirements as material obtained from known individuals. Rather, it should still be possible for the police and other law enforcement authorities to retain such material indefinitely. However, we recognise that not all crime scene material will be anonymous in nature and as such want to make clear that where there is provision for indefinite retention of unidentified material, once identified, such material will be subject to the same retention and destruction requirements of material where the identity of its owner is known on acquisition.
Amendment 26 will exclude from Section 18 of the Counter-Terrorism Act material taken under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011, as it will become shortly. This is consistent with the exclusion of other existing statutory regimes from the scope of Section 18 to avoid enacting overlapping and conflicting provisions. We consider that all these amendments enhance the provisions in Schedule 1 by making clear how they are intended to operate.
Amendment 29 would omit paragraphs 6(4) and 7 from Schedule 1 to the Bill. Those paragraphs, which contain provisions in respect of the retention and use of biometric material in Scotland for national security purposes have, in effect, been made redundant by the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2011, which itself gave effect to the changes that those provisions would have made. Simply put, the provisions are no longer needed and can therefore be removed from the Bill. There are three consequential amendments to Clause 113 and Schedule 10 which we will need to come back to later in the passage of the Bill.
Finally, Amendments 30 to 37 to Parts 7 and 8 of Schedule 1 extend the list of purposes to which material taken under the Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1989 and held pursuant to a national security determination may be used. They further ensure that the order-making powers conferred on the Secretary of State to amend the Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order applies in respect of provisions regarding a transferred matter where it is ancillary to an excepted or reserved matter.
Amendments 30 to 33 provide that the purposes for which material retained pursuant to a national security determination which was taken under the Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order may be used are the same as for the rest of the UK. That is, that such material can be used for the prevention and detection of crime, the investigation of an offence or for identification purposes, in addition to that for national security and terrorist investigations.
Amendments 34 to 37 are technical amendments. They amend the Secretary of State’s order-making powers so that the Secretary of State is able to make provision in respect of transferred matters where such provision is ancillary to excepted or reserved matters.
I apologise for taking so much time on those government amendments, but I hope that my noble friend will be content with the explanation I have given of her Amendments 41 and 23. I hope that she will feel able to withdraw her amendment, and I will move mine in their proper place.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, forgive my intervening at this stage. I am grateful to the Minister for his response to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. From what I heard of his response, I think that I would agree with him that her amendments should not be pressed, but I imagine that they are probing amendments.
As I mentioned earlier this afternoon, I intend to bring forward amendments on Report relating both to a period during which evidence can be collected before the Government’s proposals were introduced and to the period for which DNA samples and fingerprints could be retained—for six years rather than three years. If my amendments are accepted, a consequential amendment will be required to subsection (6) proposed in government Amendment 28, but that is for a later stage. For the moment, I am content to accept the noble Lord’s amendments.
Baroness Doocey
I thank my noble friend for the clear way in which he addressed my concerns. I say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, that as soon as he got to his feet, I thought to myself, “I hope I will never get to court and meet someone like him”, because I think I would just throw my hands up in horror and plead guilty, regardless of how innocent I was. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Henley
“(f) paragraphs 5 to 14 of Schedule 6 to the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011.”
“(4) Section 18 material which is not a DNA sample may be retained indefinitely if—
(a) it is held by the law enforcement authority in a form which does not include information which identifies the person to whom the material relates, and(b) the law enforcement authority does not know, and has never known, the identity of the person to whom the material relates.(5) In a case where section 18 material is being retained by a law enforcement authority under subsection (4), if—
(a) the law enforcement authority comes to know the identity of the person to whom the material relates, and(b) the material relates to a person who has no previous convictions or only one exempt conviction,the material may be retained by the law enforcement authority until the end of the retention period specified in subsection (6).(6) The retention period is the period of 3 years beginning with the date on which the identity of the person to whom the material relates comes to be known by the law enforcement authority.”
“(c) for purposes related to the prevention or detection of crime, the investigation of an offence or the conduct of a prosecution, or(d) for purposes related to the identification of a deceased person or of the person to whom the material relates.”
“(6) In this paragraph—
(a) the reference to using material includes a reference to allowing any check to be made against it and to disclosing it to any person,(b) the reference to crime includes a reference to any conduct which—(i) constitutes one or more criminal offences (whether under the law of Northern Ireland or of any country or territory outside Northern Ireland), or(ii) is, or corresponds to, any conduct which, if it all took place in Northern Ireland, would constitute one or more criminal offences, and(c) the references to an investigation and to a prosecution include references, respectively, to any investigation outside Northern Ireland of any crime or suspected crime and to a prosecution brought in respect of any crime in a country or territory outside Northern Ireland.”
““offence”, in relation to any country or territory outside Northern Ireland, includes an act punishable under the law of that country or territory, however it is described.”
““excepted or reserved matter” have the meanings given by section 4(1) of the Northern Ireland Act 1998,”
(b) is not prohibited by sub-paragraph (5)(a),”
Baroness Doocey
“( ) The Commissioner must make a report to the Secretary of State about the impact of the retention periods for fingerprints and DNA profiles on the police service, in particular, the estimated cost of processing samples on an individual basis.
( ) Such a report must be made within six months of this section coming into force.”
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, the Bill will place a large administrative and financial burden on all police forces. I believe that we need to monitor the impact of this, particularly in the current climate, when police budgets are under threat and facing severe cuts.
Each DNA profile and sample will need to be processed individually to ensure that they are deleted within the correct time parameters. Furthermore, this process must take into account any subsequent reoffending by the individual, as well as an application for extended retention.
The Metropolitan Police estimates that implementing the Bill will entail a one-off cost of £2.5 million, with ongoing costs of nearly half a million pounds a year. That is a huge sum of money when you consider how tight budgets are going to be, and it could pay for 10 police officers per year. Amendment 39 would ensure that the impact on the police service of the retention periods for fingerprints and DNA profiles and, in particular, the estimated costs of processing samples on an individual basis were reported back to Parliament.
An operational risk is also inherent in the complexity of the retention regime. While the Bill will in theory put in place mechanisms to ensure that DNA data are deleted at the right time, no system is perfect. If, as could well occur with the volumes involved, the deletion process were out of sync and not carried out at the appropriate time, DNA profiles which should have been deleted could remain on the database. If these profiles were then to be matched with the DNA from a crime scene or the victim of a serious crime, this evidence could not be used, since by law the profile should not have been there in the first place as it should not have been retained.
That is what happened in two cases, both of which necessitated changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. In both, a DNA match was obtained but their profiles should already have been deleted from the DNA database. In the first case, which concerned a rape, the judge refused to admit the evidence and the prosecution was abandoned, and in the other case a conviction for murder was quashed by the Court of Appeal on the grounds that the DNA evidence should not have been admitted. The House of Lords subsequently ruled that it should be left to the discretion of the trial judge as to whether evidence in these circumstances should be admitted. We would not want history to repeat itself.
We therefore need some form of reassurance that we will not be put in the invidious position of perhaps identifying another rapist or a murderer but not being able to use the DNA match in evidence. I beg to move.
The Earl of Erroll
Does a case collapse just because one bit of evidence is not quite right? I cannot believe that that one bit of evidence would be the only thing to bring about a conviction, in which case why on earth do we let people off? That seems quite dotty to me, as a lay man, unless the whole thing hinged on that one bit of evidence, in which case there could be some ambiguity about it.
Lord Henley
I suppose that a case could collapse just because one bit of evidence fell apart, although in the main there would be other bits of evidence. However, the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, is right to make that point.
My noble friend, in moving the amendment, is obviously concerned about the costs of the Bill to the police and what that might do in diverting resources away from front-line policing. That has also been a concern of mine, and it is why, for example, I resisted an amendment from my noble friend Lady Hamwee suggesting that we should be looking at all the entries on the database on an annual basis. That certainly would have had major cost implications.
The reasoning behind my noble friend’s amendment is to ask the commissioner to look at a number of issues, including the cost of implementing the Government’s proposals. I can see why she wants to do that—I understand that she is a member of the GLA—particularly in view of the costs for the Metropolitan Police Authority, which, by virtue of its size, will have the largest single bill for implementing the proposals set out in this chapter.
I have to say to my noble friend that the Government have been working very closely with ACPO, the National Policing Improvement Agency and private sector forensic science providers to keep the cost of our proposals as low as possible. We published a very full impact assessment of these proposals in February this year, setting out a transition cost of just over £10 million. I appreciate that my noble friend Lady Hamwee had some criticisms of one part of the impact assessment, and I said that even Homer nods from time to time. I contrast that figure of £10 million with the previous Government’s impact assessment for, say, the provisions in the Crime and Security Act, which had an estimated transitional cost of over £50 million. Therefore, I think that the Committee will see that we have done much work in this area.
We are not convinced that the proposed post-implementation review by the new commissioner would add significantly to our understanding of this issue, and it would impose an additional bureaucratic burden not only on him but on hard-pressed police forces. I also say to my noble friend that I believe the commissioner’s first six months in office are going to be very busy indeed in terms of examining a number of applications for extended retention and setting out guidance under Clause 22 of the Bill, without giving the new officeholder the additional task of a financial review.
That said, Clause 20(6) confers on the commissioner a general function of keeping under review the retention and use of biometric material, so it would be within his remit to examine the impact of the retention periods provided for in the Bill without the constraints imposed by the amendment. I certainly reassure my noble friend that we take very seriously the issues highlighted by her amendment but we do not think that it is necessary.
My noble friend also touched on some of the issues relating to the batch processing of DNA samples, with which I think we dealt on an earlier amendment. Again, I reassure her that we think it will be physically impossible to relink anything held on a police file, including the original DNA sample barcode, with any information stored in a forensic laboratory. However, as I said, more work needs to be done in that area, and we will certainly do that in due course. I hope to be able to let the House know more about that at a later stage if at all possible.
Therefore, I hope that my noble friend will feel that there are sufficient protections in the Bill and that she will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, before my noble friend responds, perhaps I may say to the Minister that he really should not take every question from me as being a criticism. Questions are sometimes completely straight questions.
Lord Henley
Of course questions from my noble friend are not criticisms. I hope that I answer them as well as I am able to do.
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response, which goes some way to reassure me but I still have major concerns, particularly about the financial implications on the Met. I would like to address these and the other issues that I raised perhaps outside the Chamber. At this stage, I am happy to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have just realised that I am about to ask my noble friend a question—my other noble friend.
The amendment would provide that as well as publishing the governance rules of the board, the Secretary of State would publish rules governing its composition. My question is an entirely simple one and there is nothing to be read between the lines. What will be the composition of the board and how will it be brought into the public domain? My noble friend Lady Stowell may say that governance covers composition, but clearly the membership of the board is important. It needs to be appropriate to its functions and the interests reflected in the composition are clearly a matter of public importance and concern. I beg to move.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for this amendment and I hope that my response will provide the reassurance that she is looking for. This is another issue that was covered in the letter from the Information Commissioner sent to several noble Lords before our Committee stage.
The simplest thing for me to do in the first instance is refer to paragraph 130 on page 31 of the Explanatory Notes, which states:
“The principal members of the Board are the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Association of Police Authorities (in future, following the enactment of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, a representative of Police and Crime Commissioners) and the Home Office, but there is also an independent element to the Board from non-police bodies, such as the Information Commissioner and the National DNA Database Ethics Group”.
I am happy to put on the record that the governance rules set out in new Section 63AB(6) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, as inserted by Clause 24, will include the full membership of the board and that members will continue to include an independent element in the form of representation from the Information Commissioner’s Office and the national DNA database ethics group. If any of your Lordships have any suggestions for others that might join the board to strengthen the independent element, I will be happy to receive them. Having heard my remarks, I hope that my noble friend Lady Hamwee will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I am grateful for that. It did not occur to me to look at the Explanatory Notes. My noble friend is quite right; I should have done so. Her emphasis on the independent element from non-police bodies is important. As she read out that list it sounded police-heavy. The police have to operate the system so I am not suggesting that they should not be properly represented but as the debates today and throughout the passage of this Bill amply illustrate—if we need that illustration—it is not only the police who have an interest in these provisions and in the operation of handling DNA material, which is the subject of these various clauses. I am not sure that I would feel that it is adequate that there is simply “an independent element” from the bodies referred to. I would like to see “an independent element”—period. There are plenty of organisations which call on the services of, if not the great and the good—they are not necessarily the best—those who are interested and willing to give the public service that is required for this sort of activity, using the wisdom and judgment obtained through public life, or simply through a period of years.
What can I refer to? We have just been abolishing them but standards committees in local government have used an independent element. I am sure that there are plenty of examples but they always escape you on these occasions. Perhaps I can take what my noble friend has said as something of an invitation to explore this a little after the Committee stage. To have elements from what might be regarded as the usual suspects—I do not say that pejoratively—may not serve the purpose as well as we could.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
I just want to re-emphasise that I would be grateful to any of your Lordships who have any suggestions to add on the independent element of the board after today’s debate.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I would also say that it is not uncommon for there to be advertisements for applications using the Nolan principles for an independent element to boards such as this. Perhaps after this evening I shall try to come up with some other examples. I am grateful for that and I put on the record that I am grateful to the information commissioner for the thoughtful way in which he and his office have briefed your Lordships. I warn the government Front Bench that I have not read through to the end of his briefing so there will no doubt be more to come in future parts of the Bill. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Before we agree this I wonder whether the Minister can give us advice on the costs of the collection of DNA and its retention. Will the Minister tell us the costs involved in the existing arrangements?
Lord Henley
I gave a figure earlier from the impact assessment that the costs on the police were some £10 million. I stick by that. If the noble Lord would like a copy of the impact assessment, I will make sure that he has it.
Lord Campbell-Savours
What is the actual cost of taking DNA from an individual person?
Lord Henley
I have not the first idea of the individual cost but I will take advice and write to the noble Lord.
“(2A) An offence is not committed under subsection (1) by a relevant person if—
(a) the vehicle is not registered under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994; or(b) the relevant person in question has reason to believe the vehicle is registered under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994, but that the registration details are incorrect.(2B) An offence is not committed under subsection (1)(b) in cases where—
(a) the vehicle is parked in such a way that it—(i) prevents the parking of vehicles elsewhere on land under the same ownership or control as the land on which the vehicle is parked; or(ii) prevents or restricts the passage of other vehicles or of individuals on that land; or(b) the land on which the vehicle is parked is designated for parking by residents of specific dwellings or by their guests; or(c) the vehicle is a vehicle designated or adapted for towing by a mechanically propelled vehicle.(2C) The defences under subsection (2A) or (2B) are, in relation to a person who immobilised, moved or restricted the movement of the vehicle in question in the course of a business, only available if the person in question—
(a) was a member of a trade association accredited for the purpose of the subsection in question by the appropriate national authority; and(b) acted in compliance with any code of practice approved for the purpose of the subsection in question by the appropriate national authority.”
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, Amendment 42 addresses the law of unintended consequences. The situation is similar to that of the Dangerous Dogs Act. As of some rogue dog owners, we had the Dangerous Dogs Act, and now we have some rogue wheel clampers, we have clauses that will outlaw not the rogues but the clamps. In doing so, they will trespass on the rights of residents and private landowners.
It is funny—funny peculiar rather than funny ha-ha—that despite drunk drivers killing pedestrians and passengers, we refuse to outlaw drink driving and only outlaw excess-drink driving; and that despite guns killing people, we outlaw the unauthorised ownership of guns rather than the guns themselves. We are now going to have a situation where guns, if they are licensed, will be legal on your own premises, but wheel clamping will be a criminal offence.
What have we done with wheel clamping? Instead of cracking down on rogue clampers, the Government seek to ban all wheel clamping on private land, even when it is undoubtedly of value and properly controlled. It is this part of the Bill that I seek to amend—not to give free rein to clampers but to build in robust and comprehensive regulation to the industry.
I will give six reasons for the amendment. First, how big a problem is posed by rogue clampers? We have seen them on television, but that does not necessarily make it a problem. No one likes being clamped, but the main reason for being clamped is that one has parked without authority on someone else's land. Vehicle immobilisation is one side of the coin, but the obverse side is irresponsible and selfish parking. However, without any consultation on this issue, the Government announced a complete ban on all clamping on private property. They provided no evidence for how many people are affected by rogue clampers and are putting the rights of unlawfully parked motorists above the rights of landowners who are only trying to protect their private property.
The issue of cowboy clampers was largely dealt with in the Crime and Security Act 2010. Sections 42 and 44 of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 introduced a series of regulations requiring wheel clamping companies to acquire licences and landowners to use only licensed companies, as well as an effective means of appeal for the motorist. However, the powers were never commenced and, strangely, the Government have set about reinventing the wheel.
How big a problem is it? Nick Clegg justified this part of the Bill by referring to his Your Freedom website on which 46,000 people left 14,000 ideas. Quite so—but I understand that only 24 of them wanted a ban on wheel clamping. Nevertheless, Mr Clegg suggested that those ideas led to this proposed ban on wheel clamping on private land.
Secondly, where does clamping work? Clamping or the mere threat of it probably deters more than 90 per cent of illegal parking on private land. The inconvenience of having a car clamped deters even the most persistent and selfish parker. This is fair when there are clear warning signs—and there are bound to be since the essence of effective clamping is not to clamp but to deter.
Thousands of residents will be badly affected by the Government's proposed ban. I remember when, on public rather than private land, I used to return late at night from a hospital where I worked to find that I could not park anywhere near my house, which was in the first non-parking controlled part of the street a couple of hundred yards from a Tube station and a famous music venue—the Forum, for noble Lords who know Kentish Town. Until we got residents’ parking, it was all but impossible to park within 10 or 15 minutes’ walk of my front door. It was a public road, but I fully understand what it must be like to come back to a block of flats like the one I used to live in near Highgate Tube and find that there is nowhere in the communal private parking area to leave one's car. I will quote a police spokesman from Gwent. He said:
“The concept of … legislation which removes the disincentive to behave irresponsibly is somewhat incongruous”.
What are the alternatives to which the rogues will turn if they cannot use wheel clamps? The Government want to deal with rogue clampers but have failed to add any provision to prevent such rogues moving from clamping to ticketing, where they will then be able to fleece the 40 per cent of drivers who pay their tickets. There is no requirement in the Bill for such operators to comply with any code of practice or provide an appeals service. Already, many rogue clampers have turned to ticketing as they do not need an SIA licence or to join an accredited trade association.
Julian Edwards, from Lancashire Trading Standards, said:
“Legal enforcement with the possibility of action through the courts”—
if there is just ticketing—
“can be far worse”—
than clamping—
“and ticketing companies are now ‘licking their lips in anticipation of a money bonanza’”.
Meanwhile, drivers could end up facing a bill for hundreds of pounds. What’s more, a ban will simply send a message to persistent fly-parkers that they have the freedom to flout private parking restrictions. This is a dangerous precedent to set with respect to private property, but those motorists who are pursued through the small claims court may find themselves wishing that they had been faced with a clamp on their car rather than a bailiff at their door.
Fourthly, who will suffer if all wheel clamping is outlawed? The effect of a blanket ban, no doubt unintended, would be myriad problems for motorists and property owners as it would leave some landowners with no redress against the rogue parker. People park on private land every day—at leisure centres, retail parks, local authority and other housing developments, parks, open spaces, hospitals, university campuses, school and church property, sheltered housing and railway stations. A ban on clamping and towing away would remove the right of the owner to protect their land. With a ban there would be nothing to stop selfish motorists parking across hospital ambulance bays, blocking emergency exits or wheelchair access ramps, or even parking on somebody's drive. Noble Lords can imagine if their private drive was near a pop festival, a railway station, a cinema or football ground and somebody left their car on it. On some housing estates, not just cars but trailers are left and the residents have no means of removing them from their parking areas.
The Reverend Adam Scott is a clergyman at St Michael and All Angels in south London, which is coterminous with a housing estate. He stated that the local amenity company serves thousands of people on the estate. It uses a reputable clamping firm, 70 per cent of whose work is for local authorities—but that 70 per cent is unaffected by the proposed ban. The Reverend Scott states:
“Our church halls are heavily used for a variety of community purposes including a nursery school, scouts and other youth activities, events for older people, blood donation and even as a polling station. We also have midweek services, weddings and funerals. Visitors to the church and halls are permitted to park and—with the current restrictions and clamping as a threat—there is usually space for their vehicles … Our concern is that this clause would lead to a war by motorists against residents and visitors to this and other estates”.
These residents want the House to appreciate that they are against rogue clampers extorting unreasonable sums from motorists, but want the ability to exercise proper stewardship of a community resource.
The chief executive of the Association of Residential Managing Agents, which represents firms managing leasehold blocks, said that a survey of his members found that 93 per cent believed that a total ban on wheel clamping was not the answer. He said that,
“the industry needs to be properly regulated to protect the interests of landowners, residents and motorists”.
Autumn Budget Forecast
(12 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)
My Lords, I refer the House to the autumn Statement made earlier in another place by my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, copies of which have been made available in the Printed Paper Office and the text of which will be printed in full in the Official Report. I commend my right honourable friend’s Statement to the House.
The following Statement was made earlier in the House of Commons.
“Let me start by placing squarely before the House of Commons and the British public the economic situation facing our country. Much of Europe now appears to be heading into a recession caused by a chronic lack of confidence in the ability of countries to deal with their debt. We will do whatever it takes to protect Britain from this debt storm while doing all we can to build the foundations of future growth.
Today we set out how we will do that by demonstrating that the country has the will to live within its means and keep interest rates low; by acting to stimulate the supply of money and credit to ensure that those low interest rates are passed on to families and businesses; by matching our determination on the deficit with an active enterprise policy for business and lasting investment in our infrastructure and education so that Britain can pay its way in the future; and at every opportunity by helping families with the cost of living.
The central forecast that we publish today from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility does not predict a recession here in Britain, but it has unsurprisingly revised down its short-term growth prospects for our country, for Europe and for the world. It expects gross domestic product in Britain to grow this year by 0.9 per cent and by 0.7 per cent next year. It then forecasts 2.1 per cent growth in 2013, 2.7 per cent in 2014, followed by 3 per cent in 2015 and 3 per cent again in 2016.
The OBR is clear that this central forecast assumes that,
‘the euro area finds a way through the current crisis and that policymakers eventually find a solution that delivers sovereign debt sustainability’.
If they do not, the OBR warns that there could be a ‘much worse outcome’ for Britain. I believe that it is right. We hope that this can be averted, but if the rest of Europe heads into recession, it may prove hard to avoid one here in the UK.
We are now undertaking extensive contingency planning to deal with all potential outcomes of the euro crisis. Like the Bank of England and the OECD yesterday, the OBR cites the chilling effect of the current instability as one of the central reasons for the reduction in its growth forecast. I want to thank Robert Chote and his fellow committee members, Stephen Nickell and Graham Parker, and their team for the rigorous work that they have done. Their forecast today demonstrates beyond any doubt their independence. This is an important point for the House. If we accept their numbers, we must also pay heed to their analysis. In addition to the eurozone crisis, the OBR gives two further reasons for the weaker forecasts. The first is what it calls the ‘external inflation shock’—the result, in its words, of,
‘unexpected rises in energy prices and global agricultural commodity prices’.
The OBR’s analysis—independent—is that this explains the slowdown in growth in Britain over the past 18 months.
Secondly, the OBR today has shown new evidence that an even bigger component of the growth that preceded the financial crisis was an unsustainable boom, and that the bust was deeper and had an even greater impact on our economy than previously thought. The result of that analysis is that the OBR has significantly reduced its assumptions about spare capacity in our economy and the trend rate of growth. That increases the OBR’s estimate of the proportion of the deficit that is structural—in other words, the part of the deficit that does not disappear even when the economy recovers. Our debt challenge is therefore even greater than we thought, because the boom was even bigger and the bust even deeper, and the effects will last even longer. Britain has had the highest structural budget deficit of any major economy in the world and the highest deficit in the entire history of our country outside war—and the last Government left it to this Government to sort that mess out.
The OBR’s analysis feeds directly through to borrowing numbers that are falling, but not at the rate that had been forecast. In 2009-10, the last Government were borrowing £156 billion a year. During the first year of this Government, that fell to £137 billion. This year the OBR expects it to fall again, to £127 billion, then to £120 billion next year, followed by £100 billion in 2013-14, £79 billion in 2014-15, then £53 billion in 2015-16 and £24 billion a year by 2016-17. However, I can report that because of the lower market interest rates that we have secured for Britain, debt interest payments over the Parliament are forecast to be £22 billion less than predicted.
The House might also like to know, given the economic events described by the Office for Budget Responsibility, what would have happened to borrowing without the action that this Government have taken.
The Treasury today estimates that borrowing by 2014-15 would have been running at well over £100 billion a year more and that Britain would have borrowed an additional £100 billion in total over the period. If we had pursued that path, we would now be in the centre of the sovereign debt storm.
The crisis we see unfolding in Europe has not undermined the case for the difficult decisions we have taken; it has made that case stronger. We held our deficit-reduction Budget on our terms last year, not on the market’s terms this year, as so many others have been forced to. In that Budget we set out a tough fiscal mandate: that we would eliminate the current structural deficit over the five-year forecast horizon. We supplemented the mandate with a fixed debt target: that we would get national debt as a proportion of national income falling by 2015-16. To be cautious, I set plans to meet both those budget rules one year early. That headroom has now disappeared, but I am clear that our rules must be adhered to, and I am taking action to ensure that they are. As a result, the OBR’s central projection is that we will meet both the fiscal mandate and the debt target.
The current structural deficit is forecast to fall from 4.6 per cent of GDP this year to become a current structural surplus of 0.5 per cent in five years’ time, and the debt-to-GDP ratio, which is forecast to stand at 67 per cent this year, is now set to peak at 78 per cent in 2014-15 and to be falling by the end of the current Parliament. So borrowing is falling, and debt will come down. It is not happening as quickly as we wished, because of the damage done to our economy by the ongoing financial crisis, but we are set to meet our budget rules, and we are going to see Britain through the debt storm.
There is a suggestion from some in the House that if you spend more, you will borrow less. That is something-for-nothing economics, and the House should know the risks that we would be running. Last April, the absence of a credible deficit plan meant that our country’s credit rating was on negative outlook and our market interest rates were higher than Italy’s; 18 months later, we are the only major western country whose credit rating has improved. Italy’s interest rates are now 7.2 per cent, and what are ours? They are less than 2.5 per cent. Yesterday we were even borrowing money more cheaply than Germany. Those who would put all that at risk by deliberately adding to our deficit must explain this.
Just a 1 per cent rise in our market interest rates would add £10 billion to mortgage bills every year: 1 per cent would mean that the average family with a mortgage would have to pay £1,000 more; 1 per cent would increase the cost of business loans by £7 billion; 1 per cent would force taxpayers to find an extra £21 billion in debt interest payments, much of it going to our foreign creditors. In other words, 1 per cent dwarfs any extra Government spending or tax cut funded by borrowing that people propose today—and that is the cost of just a 1 per cent rise. Italy’s rates have gone up by almost 3 per cent in the last year alone. We will not take this risk with the solvency of the British economy and the security of British families.
The current environment requires us to take further action on debt to ensure that Britain continues to live within its means. This is what we propose to do. First, there is no need to adjust the overall totals set out in the spending review. Taken all together, the measures that I will set out today require no extra borrowing and provide no extra savings across the whole spending review period. Secondly, I am announcing significant savings in current spending to make the fiscal position more sustainable in the medium and long term; but in the short term—over the next three years—we will use these savings to fund capital investments in infrastructure, regional growth and education, as well as help for young people to find work. Every pound spent in this way will be paid for by a pound saved permanently. That includes savings from further restraint on public sector pay.
For some workforces the two-year pay freeze will be coming to an end next spring, and for most it will be coming to an end during 2013. In the current circumstances, the country cannot afford the 2 per cent rise assumed by some government departments thereafter, so instead we will set public sector pay awards at an average of 1 per cent for each of the two years after the pay freeze ends. Many people are helped by pay progression—the annual increases in salary grades to which many are entitled even when pay is frozen. That is one of the reasons why public sector pay has risen at twice the rate of private sector pay over the last four years. While I accept that a 1 per cent average rise is tough, it is also fair to those who work to pay the taxes that will fund it. I can also announce that we are asking the independent pay review bodies to consider how public sector pay can be made more responsive to local labour markets, and we will ask them to report back by July next year. This is a significant step towards the creation of a more balanced economy in the regions of our country which does not squeeze out the private sector. Departmental budgets will be adjusted in line with the pay rises I have announced, with the exception of the NHS and school budgets, where the money saved will be retained in order to protect those budgets in real terms. This policy will save over £1 billion in current spending by 2014-15.
The deal we offer on public sector pensions is also fair to both taxpayers and public servants. The reforms are based on the independent report of John Hutton, a former Labour Pensions Secretary, and he says:
‘It is hard to imagine a better deal’,
than this. I would once again ask the unions why they are damaging our economy at a time like this and putting jobs at risk. I say call off the strikes tomorrow, come back to the table, complete the negotiations and let us agree generous pensions that are affordable to the taxpayer.
Let me turn to other areas of public spending, starting with overseas aid. This Government will stick by the commitments they have made to the poorest people in the world by increasing our international development budget—and the whole House should be proud of the help our country is providing to eradicate disease, save lives and educate children—but the spending plans of the Department for International Development meant that the UK was on course to exceed 0.7 per cent of national income in 2013. That I do not think can be justified and so we are adjusting those plans so we do not overshoot the target.
Turning to welfare payments, the annual increase in the basic state pension is protected by the triple lock introduced by this Government. This guarantees a rise either in line with earnings, prices or 2.5 per cent, whichever is greater. It means that the basic state pension will next April rise by £5.30 to £107.45—the largest ever cash rise in the basic state pension and a commitment of fairness to those who have worked hard all their lives. I wanted to make sure that poorer pensioners did not see a smaller rise in their income, so I can confirm today that we will also uprate the pension credit by £5.35 and pay for that with an increase in the threshold for the savings credit.
I also want to protect those who are not able to work because of their disabilities and those who, through no fault of their own, have lost jobs and are trying to find work, so I can confirm that we will uprate working-age benefits in line with September’s consumer prices index inflation number of 5.2 per cent. That will be a significant boost to the incomes of the poorest, especially when inflation is forecast to be considerably less than that by next April. We will also uprate with prices the disability elements of tax credits, and increase the child element of the child tax credit by £135 in line with inflation too. But we will not uprate the other elements of the working tax credit this coming year; and given the size of the uprating this year, we will no longer go ahead with the additional £110 rise in the child element, over and above inflation, that was planned. By April 2012, the child tax credit will have increased by £390 since the coalition came into power. The best way to support low-income working people is to take them out of tax altogether, and our increases in the income tax personal allowance this year and next will do that for over 1 million people.
Let me turn to future public spending. Today, I am setting expenditure totals for the two years following the end of the spending review period: 2015-16 and 2016-17. Total managed expenditure will fall during that period by 0.9 per cent a year in real terms— the same rate as set out for the existing period of the spending review, with a baseline that excludes the additional investments in infrastructure also announced today. These are large savings and we will set out in future how resources will be allocated between different areas of government.
I am also announcing a measure to control spending which is not for today or next year, or even for the next decade, but it directly addresses the long-term challenge Britain and so many other countries face with an ageing population. Our generation has been warned that the costs of providing decent state pensions are going to become more and more unaffordable unless we take further action.
Let us not leave it to our children to take emergency action to rescue the public finances; let us think ahead and take responsible, sensible steps now. Starting in 2026, we will increase the state pension age from 66 to 67, so that we can go on paying a decent pension to people who are living longer. Australia, America and Germany have all taken similar steps. This will not affect anyone within 14 years of receiving their state pension today. By saving a staggering £59 billion, it will mean a long-term future for the basic state pension.
We are showing a world that is sceptical that democratic western Governments can take tough decisions that Britain will pay its way in the world. That is the first thing that the Government can do in the current environment: keep our interest rates low and protect our country from the worst of the debt storm. But we need to make sure that those low interest rates are available to families and to businesses. It is monetary and credit policy that is, in a debt crisis, the principal and most powerful tool for stimulating demand.
Last month, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee decided to undertake further quantitative easing, and I have authorised an increase in the ceiling on its asset purchases to £275 billion. This will support demand across the economy, but we must do more to help those small businesses who cannot get access to credit at an affordable price.
We have already extended the last Government’s enterprise finance guarantee scheme, and we are today expanding it to include businesses with annual turnovers of up to £44 million and accrediting new lenders, such as Metro Bank. But this scheme is by itself not nearly ambitious enough and never will be within the constraints of state aid rules, so the Government are launching a major programme of credit easing to help small business. We have set a ceiling of £40 billion. At the same time, I have agreed with Mervyn King that we will reduce by £40 billion the asset purchase facility that the previous Government gave the Bank to buy business loans. Only a small proportion of the facility was ever used. I am publishing my exchange of letters with the governor today.
We are launching our national loan guarantee scheme. It will work on the simple principle that we use the hard-won low interest rates that the Government can borrow at to reduce the interest rates at which small businesses can borrow. We are using the credibility that we have earned in the international markets to help our domestic economy. New loans and overdrafts to businesses with a turnover of less than £50 million will be eligible for the scheme, so that it stays focused on smaller companies. We expect that it will lead to reductions of 1 percentage point in the rate of interest being charged to these companies, so a business facing a 7 per cent interest rate to get a £5 million loan could instead see its rate reduced to 6 per cent and its interest costs fall by up to £50,000.
We have developed with the Bank of England a mechanism to allocate funding to different banks based on how much they increase both net and gross lending to firms. There will be a clear audit trail to ensure the banks comply, for we will use the experience of the European Investment Bank’s loans for SMEs programme here in the UK to ensure that it works. We are getting state aid approval, so that the national loan guarantee scheme will be up and running in the next few months. Initially, £20 billion-worth of these guarantees will be available over the next two years. Alongside it, we are also launching a £1 billion business finance partnership. That is aimed at Britain’s mid-sized companies—a crucial part of our economy, neglected for too long and now identified by the CBI director-general and others as a future source of growth. The Government will invest in funds that lend directly to these businesses, in partnership with other investors such as pension funds and insurance companies. It will give these mid-cap companies a new source of investment outside the traditional banks.
If the business finance partnership takes off, I stand ready to increase its size; and we will develop further partnerships ideas and ideas for new bond issuance to help Britain’s small and medium-sized companies. No Government have attempted anything as ambitious as this before. We will not get every detail perfect first time round, but we do not want to make the best the enemy of the good. With the strain on the financial system increasing, the important thing is to get credit flowing to Britain’s small businesses.
The Government can use the low interest rates that we have secured to help young families, too, who want to buy a home but cannot afford the very large deposits that banks are now demanding. We will use mortgage indemnities to help 100,000 such families to buy newly built homes. We will also help construction firms that cannot get bank finance with a £400 million fund that will kick-start projects that already have planning permission; and we are going to reinvigorate the right to buy. This was one of the greatest social policies of all time. It brought home ownership within the reach of millions of aspiring families. It was slowly and stealthily strangled by the last Government, as discounts were cut and cut again. We will bring it back to life. Families in social housing will be able to buy their own homes at a discount of up to 50 per cent. We will use the receipts to build, for every home purchased, a new additional affordable home—so new homes for families who need them; new home ownership for families who aspire to it; and new jobs in the construction industry, so that we get Britain building. That is what our new right to buy will bring.
In the years leading up to the crash, our economy became dangerously overdependent on the success of a poorly regulated City of London. Meanwhile, employment by businesses in a region such as the West Midlands actually fell. By 2007, the previous Government were relying on finance for £1 in every £8 raised in taxation. That left Britain completely exposed when the banks failed, and I can confirm that, next month, we will publish our response to the report that we commissioned from John Vickers to protect taxpayers better.
It is this Government’s policy to ensure that we remain the home of global banks and that London is the world’s pre-eminent financial centre. That is why we will not agree to the introduction of an EU financial transaction tax. It is not a tax on bankers; it is a tax on people’s pensions. Instead, we have introduced a permanent bank levy to make sure that the banks pay their fair share. I have always said that we wished to raise £2.5 billion each and every year from this levy. To ensure we do that, I need to raise the rate of the levy to 0.088 per cent. That will be effective from l January next year. We will also take action to stop some large firms using complex asset-backed pension funding arrangements to claim double the amount of tax relief that was intended. This will save the Exchequer almost £500 million pounds a year.
Financial services will always be a very important industry for the UK, but we have to help other parts of the private sector in other parts of the country to grow. That means uncongested roads and railways for businesses to move products that cannot be reduced to a screen on a City trading floor. It means providing secure power sources at reasonable prices. It means creating new superfast digital networks for companies across our country. These do not exist today. If we look at what countries such as China or Brazil are building, we see why we risk falling behind the rest of the world. So today we are publishing the national infrastructure plan. For the first time, we are identifying over 500 infrastructure projects that we want to see built over the next decade and beyond: roads, railways, airport capacity, power stations, waste facilities and broadband networks. We are mobilising the finance needed to deliver them, too.
The savings that I have announced in the current Budget have enabled me today to fund, pound for pound, £5 billion of additional public spending on infrastructure over the next three years. New spending by Network Rail, guaranteed by the Government, will bring £1 billion more. We are committing a further £5 billion to future projects in the next spending period, so that the planning can start now. This is public money. By exploring guarantees and letting city mayors borrow against future tax receipts, we are looking for new ways to deploy it. But we need to put to work the many billions of pounds that British people save in British pension funds and get those savings invested in British projects. You could call it British savings for British jobs, Mr Speaker.
The Government have negotiated an agreement with two groups of British pension funds to unlock an additional £20 billion of private investment in modern infrastructure. We can today give the go-ahead around the country to 35 new road and rail schemes that support economic development. In the north-west, we will electrify the trans-Pennine express between Manchester and Leeds, build the Manchester Airport and Crewe link roads and work with Merseyside to turn the vision of the Atlantic gateway into reality.
In Yorkshire and Humber, there will be new stations and new tram capacity, and we will halve the tolls on the Humber Bridge. I want to pay tribute to my honourable friends the Members for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) and for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), and indeed other local MPs who have campaigned for years to make this happen. Under this Government it has.
In the north-east, we will bring forward investment on the Tyne and Wear Metro. In the Midlands, the A45, the A43, the A453, the Kettering bypass, the M1 and M6 will all be improved. In the south-west, the Bristol link road and the A380 bypass will go ahead. For families across the south-west facing the highest water charges in Britain, the Government will cut the household bills of all South West Water customers by £50 a year. In the east of England, we are going to make immediate improvements to the A14. In the south-east, we will build a new railway link between Oxford, Milton Keynes and Bedford that will create 12,000 new jobs. We are going to start working on a new crossing of the lower Thames, and we will explore all the options for maintaining the UK’s aviation hub status, with the exception of a third runway at Heathrow.
Here in London, we will work with the mayor on options for other new river crossings, for example at Silvertown. We are going to support the extension of the Northern line to Battersea, which could bring 25,000 jobs to the area. Devolved Administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will get their Barnett share, and we are working with them to improve the links between our nations, such as the M4 in south Wales and the overnight rail service to north of the border.
This all amounts to a huge commitment to overhauling the physical infrastructure of our nation. We will match it by overhauling the digital infrastructure, too. The Government are funding plans to bring superfast broadband to 90 per cent of homes and businesses across the country, and extend mobile phone coverage to 99 per cent of families. This will help to create a living, economically vibrant countryside.
Our great cities are at the heart of our regional economies, and we will help bring world-leading, superfast broadband and wi-fi connections to 10 of them, including the capitals of all four nations. We will go ahead with the 22 enterprise zones already announced, plus two further zones in Humber and Lancashire confirmed today. I can also confirm that capital allowances of 100 per cent will be available to encourage manufacturing and other industries into the zones in Liverpool, Sheffield, the Tees valley, Humber and the Black Country. Those allowances will also be available to the north-eastern enterprise zone, and we will consider extending to the port of Blyth to create new private sector jobs there, too. This Government’s new regional growth fund for England has already allocated £1.4 billion to 169 projects around the country. For every one pound we are putting in, we are attracting six pounds of private sector money alongside it. I am today putting a further £1 billion over this Parliament into the regional growth fund for England, with support as well for the devolved Administrations. If we do not get the private sector to take a greater share of economic activity in the regions, our economy will become more and more unbalanced, as it did over the last 10 years.
Government should not assume that this will happen by itself. We must help businesses to grow and succeed, and we can do that at a national level too, with our commitment, for example, to British science. At a time of difficult choices, we made ours last year when we committed to protect the science budget. Today we are confirming almost half a billion pounds for scientific projects, from supercomputing and satellite technology to a world-beating animal health laboratory, and Government can encourage many more of our small firms to export overseas for the first time. We are doubling to 50,000 the number of SMEs we are helping, and extending support to British mid-caps, who sometimes lack the overseas ambition of their German equivalents.
We will make it easier for UK-based firms to compete for Government procurement contracts and make new applications out of government data. We will provide funds for smaller technology firms in Britain that find it difficult to turn their innovations into commercial success. We have listened to the ideas from business groups about encouraging innovation in larger companies, and we will introduce a new ‘above the line’ research and development tax credit in 2013 that will increase its visibility and generosity.
We will give particular help to our energy-intensive industries. I have not shied away from supporting sensible steps to reduce this country’s dependency on volatile oil prices and reduce our carbon emissions. I am the Chancellor who funded the first ever green investment bank and introduced the carbon price floor. Our green deal will help people to insulate their home and cut their heating bills. I am worried about the combined impact of the green policies adopted not just in Britain but by the European Union on some of our heavy, energy-intensive industries. We are not going to save the planet by shutting down our steel mills, aluminium smelters and paper manufacturers. All we will be doing is exporting valuable jobs from this country, so we will help them with the costs of the EU trading scheme and the carbon price floor, increase their climate change levy relief and reduce the impact of the electricity market reforms on those businesses, too.
This amounts to a £250 million package over the Parliament, and it will keep industry and jobs here in Britain. It is a reminder to us all that we should not price British businesses out of the world economy. If we burden them with endless social and environmental goals, however worthy in their own right, not only will we not achieve those goals, but the businesses will fail, jobs will be lost, and our country will be poorer.
Our planning reforms strike the right balance between protecting our countryside while permitting economic development that creates jobs, but we need to go further to remove the lengthy delays and high costs of the current system, with new time limits on applications and new responsibilities for statutory consultees. We will make sure that the gold-plating of EU rules on things such as habitats do not place ridiculous costs on British businesses. Planning laws need reform, and so too do employment rules. We know many firms are afraid to hire new staff because of their fear about the costs involved if it does not work out. We are already doubling the period before an employee can bring an unfair dismissal claim and introducing fees for tribunals. Now we will call for evidence on further reforms to make it easier to hire people, including changing the TUPE regulations; reducing delay and uncertainty in the collective redundancy process; and introducing the idea of compensated no-fault dismissal for businesses with fewer than 10 employees.
We will cut the burden of health and safety rules on small firms, because we have regard for the health and safety of the British economy too. This Government have introduced flexible working practices and we are committed to fair rights for employees. But what about the right to get a job in the first place or the right to work all hours running a small business and not be sued out of existence by the costs of an employment tribunal? It is no good endlessly comparing ourselves with other European countries. The entire European continent is pricing itself out of the world economy. The same is true of taxes on business. If we tax firms out of existence, or out of the country, there will not be any tax revenues for anyone. We have set as our ambition the goal of giving this country the most competitive tax regime in the G20. Our corporate tax rate has already fallen from 28 per cent to 26 per cent, and I can confirm that it will fall again next April to 25 per cent.
We are undertaking major simplification of the tax code for businesses and individuals, including, this autumn, consulting on ideas to merge the administration of income tax and national insurance. We are publishing next week rules on the taxation of foreign profits, so that multinationals stop leaving Britain, and instead start coming here, and we will end low-value consignment relief for goods from the Channel Islands, which has been used by large companies to undercut shops on our high streets. We have supported enterprise by increasing the generosity of the enterprise investment scheme. Today, we are extending this scheme specifically to help new start-up businesses to get the seed investment they need. Even at the best of times they can struggle to get finance, and in the current credit conditions that struggle too often ends in failure. From April 2012, anyone investing up to £100,000 in a qualifying new start-up business will be eligible for income tax relief of 50 per cent, regardless of the rate at which they pay tax, and to get people investing in start-up Britain in 2012, for one year only, we will also waive any tax on capital gains invested through the new scheme. We can afford this with a freeze on the general capital gains tax threshold for next year.
I also want to help existing small businesses which find the current economic conditions tough. Business rates are a disproportionately large part of their fixed costs. In the Budget, I provided a holiday on business rates for small firms until October next year. I am today extending that rate relief holiday until April 2013. Over half a million small firms, including one-third of all shops, will have reduced rate bills or no rate bills for the whole of this year and for the whole of the next financial year too. To help all businesses, including larger ones, with next year’s rise in business rates, I will allow them to defer 60 per cent of the increase in their bills to the two following years.
I also want to help any business seeking to employ a young person who is out of work. The OBR forecasts that unemployment will rise from 8.1 per cent this year to 8.7 per cent next year, before falling to 6.2 per cent by the end of the forecast. Youth unemployment has been rising for seven years and is now unacceptably high. It is little comfort that this problem is affecting all western nations today. The problem is, of course, primarily a lack of jobs. But it is made worse by a lack of skills. Too many children are leaving school after 11 years of compulsory education without the basics that they need for the world of work.
Our new youth contract addresses both problems with the offer of private sector work experience for every young person unemployed for three months. After five months, there will be weekly signing on. After nine months, we will help pay for a job or an apprenticeship in a private business. Some 200,000 people will be helped in this way but, as the Deputy Prime Minister has said, this is a contract. Young people who do not engage with this offer will be considered for mandatory work activity, and those who drop out without good reason will lose their benefits.
If we are to tackle the economic performance of this country and tackle Britain’s decades-long problems with productivity, we have to transform our school system too, so that children leave school prepared for the world of work. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education is doing more to make that happen than anyone who ever had his job before him. The previous Government took six years to create 200 academies. He has created 1,200 academies in just 18 months. Supporting his education reform is a central plank of my economic policy, so today, with the savings that we have made, I am providing an extra £1.2 billion—as part of the additional investment in infrastructure—to spend on our schools.
Half of that will go to help local authorities with the greatest basic need for school places. The other £600 million will go to support my right honourable friend’s reforms and will fund 100 additional free schools. These schools will include new maths free schools for 16 to 18 year-olds. This will give our most talented young mathematicians the chance to flourish. Like the new university technical colleges, these maths free schools are exactly what Britain needs to match our competitors and produce more of the engineering and science graduates so important for our long-term economic success.
To ensure that children born into the poorest families have a real chance to become one of those graduates, we will take further steps to improve early education. Last year, it was this coalition Government who not only expanded free nursery education for all three and four year-olds, but gave children from the poorest fifth of families a new right to 15 hours of free nursery care a week at the age of two. I can tell the House today that we can double the number of children who will receive this free nursery care: 40 per cent of two year- olds—260,000 children—from the most disadvantaged families will get this support in their early years.
On education and early-years learning, this is how we change the life chances of our least well-off and genuinely lift children out of poverty and that is how we build an economy ready to compete in the world. It will take time. The damage that we have to repair is great. People know how difficult things are and how little money there is, but where we can help with the rising cost of living, we will. I have already offered councils the resources for another year’s freeze in the council tax. That will help millions of families, but I want to do more.
Commuters often travel long distances to go to work and bring an income home. Train fares are expensive and they are set to go up well above inflation to pay for the much needed investment in the new rail and new trains that we need, but RPI plus 3 per cent is too much. The Government will fund a reduction in the increase to RPI plus 1 per cent. This will apply across national rail regulated fares, across the London Tube and on London buses. It will help the millions of people who use our trains.
Millions more use their cars to go to work, and pick up the children from school. It is not a luxury for most people; it is a necessity. In the Budget I cut fuel duty by 1p. The plan was for fuel duty to be 3p higher in January and 5p higher by August next year. That would be tough for working families at a time like this, so despite all the constraints that are upon us, we are able to cancel the fuel duty increase planned for January, and fuel duty from August will be only 3p higher than it is now. Taxes on petrol will be a full 10p lower than they would have been without our action in the Budget and this autumn. Families will save £144 on filling up the average family car by the end of next year. At this tough time, we are helping where we can.
All that we are doing today—sticking to our deficit plan to keep interest rates as low as possible, increasing the supply of credit to pass those low rates on to families and businesses, rebalancing our economy with an active enterprise policy and new infrastructure, and providing help with the cost of living on fuel duty and rail fares—all that takes Britain in the right direction. It cannot transform our economic situation overnight.
People in this country understand the problems that Britain faces. They can watch the news any night of the week and see for themselves the crisis in the eurozone and the scale of the debt burden that we carry. People know that promises of quick fixes and more spending that this country cannot afford at times like this are like the promises of a quack doctor selling a miracle cure. We do not offer that today.
What we offer is a Government who have a plan to deal with our nation’s debts to keep rates low; a Government determined to support businesses and support jobs; a Government committed to take Britain safely through the storm. Leadership for tough times—that is what we offer. I commend this Statement to the House.”
Lord Myners
My Lords, the Minister must be delighted that he is the first Minister to be able to take advantage of this new procedural protocol so that he does not have to repeat the dire message that we received in the other place earlier today. Twelve months ago, when my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws introduced the debate on the Autumn Statement, he beguiled us with visions of sunlit uplands, growth, prosperity, low inflation and a resurgence in private investment. I fear that he would be deeply embarrassed and would squirm if he reread the words he used 12 months ago in the light of the Chancellor’s Statement today.
The Autumn Statement metamorphosed from a mid-year review of where we are with the economy into a Budget as it became clear that the growth and fiscal targets set by the Government are going to be missed by a country mile. The OBR has now reduced its forecast economic growth for this year, next year and the year after on no fewer than four occasions as a consequence of government policy.
Remember why we were invited to sign up to the agenda of unprecedented austerity. Cutting public expenditure, we were told, would free up resource for private sector expansion, the economy would spring back to life, unemployment would fall and inflation would subside. In fact, as we were told by the Chancellor today, what we are getting is lower growth and record unemployment: a 17-year peak for unemployment; a million young people out of work; female unemployment at the highest level since 1988; and the International Labour Organisation is forecasting that unemployment will increase by another 500,000 to 2.8 million. Inflation is way outside the target, more than double the rate of any of our major competitor countries. So much for the sunlit uplands that the Minister told us to expect 12 months ago.
The OBR tells us in paragraph 1.11 that the economy was in fact growing more strongly in 2009 and early 2010 than previous figures suggested. The policies pursued by my right honourable friend Mr Alistair Darling were working and government borrowing was coming down: it was £25 billion less in 2009-10 than forecast originally in the Budget for that year. The economy was growing, the deficit was falling, as we knew it had to do. We all know what has happened since: the economy has flatlined; growth has been lower than in any of the 27 EU countries over the last 12 months, except Cyprus, Portugal and Greece. The deficit is growing, not falling, and the Chancellor is now forecasting additional borrowings of £150 billion over the OBR fiscal period. Compared with the forecast he made 12 months ago, the borrowing figure has increased by £150 billion. This is the consequence of failure, not of success. We are having the pain but there is no sign of the gain.
There is no sign of a let-up: the OBR forecasts a surge in unemployment and makes two very vital points. First, the OBR now believes that the productive capacity in the economy has been permanently diminished and hence the structural element of the deficit is even higher. Secondly, the OBR and the Bank of England are unable to account for a marked decline in productivity. Yet the Government have no policies to address this decline in structural capacity and productivity. The Government and the Treasury in particular are suffering from collective cognitive dissonance. The Prime Minister told us a fortnight ago that getting the deficit down is,
“proving harder than anyone envisaged”.
Correct, Prime Minister, because the policies your Government are pursuing are actually causing the deficit to increase. The deficit is a consequence of lack of growth, not the cause.
The second area of cognitive dissonance relates to the sources of growth. Growth can be achieved from household consumption, but we know, and the OBR confirms, that that is falling as increased job uncertainty and a squeeze on real incomes—a squeeze that the OBR describes today as a post-war record—are having a severe impact on consumer confidence. The Government are clearly trying to take demand out of the economy. Large companies are sitting on cash and not investing because of the uncertainty. Small and medium-sized businesses cannot get credit to expand, and we are lecturing other countries to adopt the same austerity policies. From where is the demand going to come to increase economic growth? Is the Minister not familiar with John Maynard Keynes’s paradox of thrift? Where is the growth going to come from?
The third area of cognitive dissonance is along the lines of, “It’s all Europe’s fault”. Europe is no doubt very significant and we will be discussing this in Grand Committee on Thursday, but noble Lords should be clear that the economic slowdown in this country is primarily a result of a decline in domestic demand. In fact, the OBR and ONS data show that economic growth in the first nine months of this year, inasmuch as there has been any, has come from exports. Exports to Europe are up 17 per cent over the last nine months. It is domestic demand that is down; it is domestic demand that is forcing up the deficit and forcing up unemployment. Of course, as noble Lords will know, the flatlining of economic growth in the United Kingdom preceded the euro crisis by at least nine months.
This is the context, therefore, for an emergency Budget that has done nothing to add to aggregate demand and places a further squeeze on real incomes, particularly on those on middle incomes or those who are now increasingly fearful of losing employment.
I will look at a few items in the Chancellor’s Statement, and allow other Members of the House to bring up other issues. I shall start with credit easing. On the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday, the Chancellor said the Government would be lending to SMEs. Now it sounds as though it is more like an interest rate subsidy or that we will be lending to the banks to lend to SMEs. Can the Minister tell us when the policy changed? It cannot be that the Chancellor did not know his own policy, yet he very clearly said on the Andrew Marr programme that the Government would be lending to SMEs. Why did the policy change over a matter of three days? How will it work in practice? How much will it cost? Where do the skills lie in Government to evaluate risk?
It is clear that the Governor of the Bank of England wants nothing to do with credit easing. How will credit easing be co-ordinated with quantitative easing, and who will make the credit judgments? What assumptions have the Government made about the probability of default and loss in the event of default as a consequence of credit easing? There is absolutely nothing on this in the Chancellor’s autumn Statement. Has credit easing actually been approved by the Permanent Secretary? Does it pass the tests for value for money? How much will the banks benefit? My sneaking suspicion is that this is another back-hander to the banks, something that the banks will benefit from more than SMEs. We have the abject failure of Project Merlin as evidence of the ability of the banks to constantly outwit this Government.
Much was made in the leaks over the weekend about infrastructure expenditure: an extra £5 billion. I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth—this is a good move—but let us put it in context. This Government cut public expenditure investment by £50 billion a year ago. It is now increasing it by £5 billion over a four-year period: £1 billion per annum is going to be spent by the Government on additional infrastructure expenditure out of total government expenditure during that period of about £2.8 trillion. Mr Fallon said on “Newsnight” last night that pension fund participation in this programme was guaranteed. I invite the Minister to name some of the projects where agreements have been reached, to tell us what the pay arrangements are or the tolls that will be charged.
I draw the Minister’s attention to a statement issued by the National Association of Pension Funds this afternoon, which said,
“there are no plans or details on the table yet”.
Quite frankly, this does not cut the mustard. I remind the House that in this autumn Statement, the Government have said they will cut investment by public funds by the following amounts over the next four years: £2.4 billion, £3.2 billion, £2.5 billion, £2 billion, £2.4 billion and £4.1 billion. Those are the real numbers, not the figments of imagination that we got out of the proposals for infrastructure investment. Nor does the Treasury seem to have given any thought to how these funds would displace funds that otherwise would have been used to support new private sector investment.
I will also say a little about the bank levy. Project Merlin has clearly failed. The Governor of the Bank of England has said that lending to SMEs has contracted—not increased, contracted—by £5 billion over the last 12 months. Does the Minister agree with that number? What assumption have the Government made about how the bank levy will operate in the future? Will it be passed on to customers? Let us remember that the Government are not increasing the total tax paid by banks; they are merely adjusting the rate. This Government do not believe that the banks can pay any more tax but are planning to increase the tax on women and families by £1.3 billion a year through adjustments to the family tax credit. This is contemptible, verging on the wicked.
On spending cuts, the Chancellor says that he has been able to meet his moveable fiscal rules because he will cut spending by an additional £8.3 billion in 2015-16 and £15.1 billion in 2016-17. But other than the cut in the family tax credit, he says nothing about where these cuts will come from. Can the Minister tell us what will be cut?
In conclusion, plan A is no longer credible. It is no longer responsible, respectable or worthy of being taken seriously by anyone. These plans today have been hastily cobbled together. They do not come even close to passing the tests for a plan for growth. The Budget was described by the Chancellor as a march of the manufacturers. Today, we have had a march of the myth-makers. The Government have killed confidence in the economy. Labour’s five-point plan is practicable, fundable and implementable, and worthy of implementation compared with the dross that we have had in the autumn Statement today.
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, was not all that fun? I really think that at least the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, studied the documents, to which we will come in a minute, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Myners. There is nothing of substance from the opposition Benches, so we have the noble Lord, Lord Myners, brought out of retirement to give us a bit of theatre to cheer up our early evening. But we really have got some serious things to talk about.
The Statement made by my right honourable friend the Chancellor was made against a very difficult situation in the eurozone. The Government’s overriding priority is to demonstrate our commitment to live within this country’s means and to keep our interest rates low and stable. We have to ensure that we work to stimulate the supply of money and credit to make sure that those low interest rates are passed on to families and businesses. My right honourable friend’s Statement supports our business and invests in our infrastructure. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Myners, at least welcomes that increased investment in our infrastructure because that is what will lay the foundations for sustainable growth into the future.
If the noble Lord, Lord Myners, had spent time reading the documents today, he would understand some of the facts that have been laid out by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. Let me remind him and other noble Lords of some of that. First, yes, growth is lower. But why is growth lower? The OBR sets it out in forensic detail. First, it ascribes the lower growth to date as being substantially attributable to the higher inflation as a result of imports of commodities. Secondly, it highlights the current risks and the reasons for its reduction in the forecast growth as being principally as a result of difficulties in the eurozone. The noble Lord is shaking his head at those, but perhaps he will nod approvingly at this. Thirdly, he will have noticed when he talks about the structural deficit that the OBR’s analysis since it has re-looked at the numbers is that the so-called boom under Labour was even higher and more fictitious than before and that the structural deficit that it built up was even larger, which is why, additionally, we are not going to make up the structural shortfall that we need to make up.
Having said that, the OBR goes on to lay out its growth projections for the next few years. In terms of the top-line growth from 2012 through to 2016, those numbers in each year are forecast to be higher than the growth of the eurozone. So we should not talk down the prospects of the country. The noble Lord asked what the sources of that growth had been. If he had got as far as chart 1.4 in Autumn Statement 2011, which is not very far in, it shows exactly where the OBR expects the growth to come from. For example, it expects total investment to contribute four percentage points to growth between 2010 and 2016, while net trade will contribute two percentage points. The noble Lord, Lord Myners, shakes his head. Does he have better numbers? Does he not share the analysis of the OBR? Those are its numbers.
If the noble Lord was to look a bit further into the masterly document that the OBR has produced, its latest forecast for reduction in general government employment over the period 2011 to 2017 will be 710,000 jobs. It forecasts that in the same period the private sector will generate not 700,000 new jobs but 1.7 million new jobs. Again, I say to the noble Lord and others on the opposition Benches that the policies that this Government are driving through are those which will underpin sustained growth and, that the private sector is already delivering that growth.
On borrowing, we had all sorts of contradictory thoughts from the noble Lord. I am not sure whether he wants us to go faster or slower on the pace of balancing the budget. It was not at all clear to me. All I know is that, if we were sticking in the current environment to the previous Labour Government’s plans, borrowing in 2013-14 would not be the £79 billion which this Government will be borrowing, but £100 billion. To look at it another way, over the spending review period, under the plans of the previous Government, there would be an additional £100 billion of borrowing. That would not be just borrowing: it would be £100 billion of additional debt, with which a Labour Government would have wished to saddle this country.
As to credit easing, it will not be the Government who make the decision. Again, if the noble Lord had chosen to look at it, the banks will be taking those decisions.
The noble Lord also gets it wrong on the pension funds and infrastructure. The pension funds have come to us and have said that they wish to allocate something of the order of 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of their funds to infrastructure. They have asked us as the Government to facilitate that, which we are happy to do.
After all, this is the noble Lord who a few months ago—perhaps last month—was advising HSBC’s retail bank to move to Paris. This is a man who does not have the best interests of British banking or the British economy at heart.
Lord Sassoon
That was reported in the press. If the noble Lord would like to deny it, he is at liberty to do so.
Lord Myners
I think that that borders on an accusation of treachery and that the noble Lord owes me an apology. What I said was that it would not surprise me, in the circumstances, if the board of HSBC felt that it had to consider matters of location, which is exactly what it confirmed it was doing when it gave evidence to the Treasury Select Committee. To suggest in some way that I am guilty of some form of treachery is a monstrous suggestion, which I hope that the Minister will withdraw.
Lord Sassoon
The noble Lord, Lord Myners, mentions treachery, which never passed my lips. He was reported as saying that he suggested that HSBC should be moving its retail bank to Paris. If in fact that was not the advice he was giving, I am very glad that he has now clarified that.
This Government are making sure that we deal with the legacy of our predecessors—of his Government —and return our economy to sustainable growth. That means sticking to our deficit plan to keep interest rates as low as possible, which is what was at the heart of my right honourable friend’s Statement this afternoon.
Lord Newby
My Lords, first, I thank the Minister for not repeating the Statement made by the Chancellor in another place. This is a welcome change in your Lordships’ procedure. I wonder if I could ask him two questions about infrastructure.
We welcome the fact that the pension funds have said that they are prepared in principle to invest £20 billion in infrastructure, but as the noble Lord, Lord Myners, said, it is clear that there is a long way to go before those plans are concrete. Can the Minister tell us something about the timetable that the Government envisage before the first tranche of that £20 billion starts to flow into specific infrastructure projects? Clearly, time is of the essence on this.
Secondly, on infrastructure more generally, the Statement is silent on the question of social housing, which in my view is a very serious omission because we have a housing crisis. Not only is housing necessary in itself, it is also one of the quickest and easiest ways of creating employment up and down the country. Does the Government’s definition of infrastructure, particularly in relation to the pension fund money which may be coming in, extend to social housing and, more generally, what plans do the Government have on this front?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, there is no one more grateful than me for not having to read out 45 minutes of Statement, however excellent it is, so I am glad of the change in the rules of the House.
The situation with the pension funds is that two groups of funds approached us to ask if we as the Government could facilitate their creation of a collective vehicle through which they might invest. We have signed a memorandum of understanding with the groups of pension funds, and we will work quickly to help them set up a vehicle that will then be in place for them. We will be reporting on progress certainly by the Budget next year. Of course, there is nothing to stop those pension funds from investing now, and indeed some of them do so through private sector vehicles.
Further, the UK pension funds are not the only bodies putting up their hands and recognising the attraction of this asset class. Noble Lords may have seen only yesterday an interesting article by the chairman of the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, the CIC, in the Financial Times, saying that it was looking to invest in this sector. The appetite for investment in UK infrastructure is very strong. The UK pension fund vehicle will be additive, and we welcome that.
The housing strategy was published on 21 November. The Government have a clear plan for supporting the housing market in order to achieve a more stable and sustainable position. Without going in detail through every element of what that strategy consists of, we are introducing the new build indemnity scheme to support builders and lenders in increasing the supply of new homes by increasing the supply of affordable mortgage finance. We are launching the new £400 million “Get Britain Building” investment fund. We are bringing more empty homes and buildings back into use. We are invigorating the right to buy, and for the first time within that, the receipts from additional right-to-buy sales will be used to support the funding of new affordable homes for rent on a one-for-one basis. We are supporting locally planned large-scale developments and we are consulting on various planning obligations. What was set out on 21 November is a substantial and important package for housing.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
My Lords, can the Minister explain to the House the justification for reneging on the pledge to increase in real terms child tax credit, given that that increase was supposed to stop child poverty rising? Can he tell the House what the impact of that will be on the number of children living in poverty?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, the original £110 rise over inflation was announced at a time when the expectation as regards inflation was significantly lower than has turned out to be the case. The inflation increase that will be made is much higher than intended. Inflation in all the independent forecasts is expected to come down significantly next year, so by April 2012 when the uprating comes in, the inflation expectations are going to be different. That is the basis for the change now. On the distributional effects, those have been set out in considerable detail in a document that was put up on the Treasury’s website this afternoon.
Lord Empey
My Lords, I welcome many of the comments made in the Budget Statement but there is one that I want to ask the Minister to clarify. He announced that he was asking the independent pay review bodies to consider how public sector pay can be made more responsive to local labour markets. Can he explain what that means? How are the regions geographically defined? Further, if there were to be a reduction in public sector pay in some of the regions, would that lead on inevitably to reductions in benefits in those areas as well?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for drawing attention to this critical issue because it is potentially an important structural change in the economy. We want to make sure that in the labour markets in all the regions of the country there is no unfair competition or crowding out in any way of the ability of the private sector to hire people. Private sector pay has to be reflective of local market conditions where until now public sector pay has been set on a national basis. We have said that we will be asking the independent pay review bodies to consider how pay can be made more responsive to local labour market conditions, and they will report to us by July 2012.
Lord Higgins
My Lords, I think that it is perhaps rather unfortunate that the Statement was not repeated today because it is very well worth repeating. It includes a remarkable number of individual proposals that are going to help the recovery without endangering the Chancellor’s overall objective of maintaining what I think has become known as plan A, which will result in the deficit being reduced. Is it not rather surprising that the shadow Chancellor in another place continues to say that the proposals of the Government are cutting too fast and too soon? We have seen how very difficult it is to make cuts quickly, and in fact that is one of the problems we have had to face.
In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Myners, saying just now that the Government’s proposals are not respectable, does my noble friend accept that the OECD—perhaps as respectable a body as one could possibly imagine—has warmly endorsed the overall drive of the Chancellor’s policy? Moreover, is it not clear, since we have the advantage of the IBR forecast taking into account what is in the autumn Statement rather than making a forecast based on not knowing what the effects of the Chancellor’s Statement would be, that what the Government have proposed in the autumn Statement will effectively bring matters back on course so that the plans that the Chancellor originally had will be fulfilled?
Having said that, there are some concerns about the situation with regard to monetary policy. Paragraph 3.53 in the forecast of the OBR is very strange. It is important that we should maintain growth in the money supply if we are to see recovery. Can my noble friend tell us what the situation is so far as the money supply is concerned?
Lord Sassoon
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Higgins. I wondered whether we would get through this debate without mention of the money supply, but he has not disappointed me. We have had it as well. I agree absolutely with his analysis of the situation. As the OECD said yesterday, the UK’s consolidation programme strikes the right balance between addressing fiscal sustainability and preserving growth. I can also confirm what my noble friend says. The OBR analysis shows that we are on track to meet the fiscal mandate set out by the Chancellor last year. In respect of monetary easing, I can only draw my noble friend’s attention to the stance taken by the Bank of England with an additional £75 billion of asset purchases, which it believes is necessary in order to ensure that there is no undershoot of inflation, and the package of credit easing measures. The noble Lord, Lord Myners, did not seem to want to see it this way, but that package has been designed to complement the monetary easing with which the Bank of England is driving ahead.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, the economy has already suffered two major negative demand shocks, one from the Government’s excessively rapid fiscal retrenchment and the other from the crisis in the eurozone. Will the Government try to avoid creating a third substantial negative demand shock by allowing banks which have under Basel II to increase their capital in relation to risk assets to do so by the simple expedient of reducing their lending and their banking book? Will the Government take powers to ensure that this increase in capital is done exclusively as a result of rights issues, other capital issues or issues of synthetic capital such as contingent convertible bonds, or by increasing retention of earnings at the expense of dividends and bonuses? Does the Minister agree that, if that is not done, the Government will cause a devastating blow to the economy, which is already on the ropes from these other causes?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, the first thing to remind the House of is that it was my right honourable friend the Chancellor who took the lead in ensuring that the Basel III reforms on capital were phased in over a period to 2019, which was accepted by the G20 precisely for the reasons that the noble Lord gives; that is, that we did not want to place more burdens on the credit situation in the short term. Similarly, the Vickers commission has recommended that certain of its reforms be on a similarly extended timetable for the same reason. As for today’s measures, the £20 billion of underpinning of the national loan guarantee scheme is directed at ensuring that the flow of credit to small and medium-sized businesses continues, as it must do as we go into the recovery phase of the economy.
Baroness Wheatcroft
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Myners, referred to the march of the myth-makers. Does the Minister agree with me that perhaps the biggest myth was that we had done away with boom and bust? As a result of that, what we are paying in interest on our debt is more than what we are spending on education, and that is with interest rates at the low level that plan A had assumed. What does the Minister think will happen to those interest rates if we do not stick to plan A?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I dread to think what would happen to interest rates. The interest rates on our 10-year money have stayed rock solid. They are slightly down today, at below 2.3 per cent. Where is Italy? It is north of 7 per cent. Every 1 per cent increase in our interest rates would cost this country £21 billion or £22 billion. To look at it another way, by keeping our interest rates below the levels which were forecast by the OBR only in March this year at the time of the Budget, we have saved £21 billion or £22 billion on our interest bill, money that can be much better spent on our public services. I dread to think where we would be, but it would be in horrendous territory.
Lord Radice
I welcome the Government’s infrastructure schemes, but what impact will the measures announced in the Autumn Statement today have on output and jobs?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I can only refer again to the numbers in the OBR’s document. I do not want to detain the House by repeating them all, but they show the cumulative effect of all these measures, including the infrastructure measures. I am grateful to the noble Lord for drawing attention to those measures because they are now more central. The economic infrastructure in particular has become central to the Government’s thinking and planning in a way that it has never been under previous Governments.
Baroness Kramer
My Lords, there are some key measures in the Statement on which I congratulate the Government and which completely change the framework for both businesses and infrastructure to access financing. Over the long term, they will create the capacity for accelerated growth that we should all have seen more than a decade ago.
I have two questions for the Minister. First, micro-business is obviously the beginning of the business pipeline. The national loan guarantee scheme works through the banks, which pay no regard to micro-businesses. That does not seem to be a scheme that particularly helps them. They also seem to be too small for the business finance partnership. Will there be, or are there, mechanisms within credit easing to address that particular group of essential businesses?
Secondly, the Minister will guess that I am absolutely delighted that the Northern line will be financed against the community infrastructure levy and that similar powers may be given to various city mayors through tax increment financing mechanisms. Will he look at applying this far more widely, because many small infrastructure projects could come very quickly out of the pipeline, be well managed by local authorities working in co-ordination with each other and give us a much wider distribution of infrastructure as a spur to growth?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, on the first of the questions which my noble friend raises, money will indeed flow through the banks as a result of the guarantee scheme to micro-businesses, although I appreciate that it will always be tougher for them. It is worth noting that there will be banks coming into the credit easing framework that were not there previously—some of the new entrants into the market—so we are maximising the footprint through the banks. I draw attention to one of the other schemes that will be directly relevant to micro-businesses. The seed enterprise investment scheme and the related one-year CGT holiday are to encourage investment in new, early-stage companies. That will commence from April 2012, with a kick-starter of offering a CGT holiday.
On my noble friend’s second question, I well take the point about the importance of locally driven infrastructure schemes, which is why my right honourable friend the Chief Secretary announced the initial £500 million fund specifically for that purpose earlier in the autumn. Beyond that, the use of the CIL is being considered, but I would just caution that we need to think about the fiscal impact of widening that scheme.
Lord Wills
My Lords, since I came into this House some 18 months ago, one of the most notable features week after week has been the presence on the Bench to the right of the Minister of former Ministers who served with great distinction in previous Conservative Administrations, including three former Chancellors who served in the Treasury during the 1980s. Can the Minister shed any light on why not a single one of them is in their place today to support him in this most depressing Statement?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I take it as a sign of great confidence in the direction of policy of my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer because former Chancellors are never shy of giving their advice. If they are not giving it today, I assume that they are satisfied.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend is entirely right in what he has just said. Am I right in believing that the money that has been earmarked for HS2 is still there? If that is the case, could I suggest to him, bearing in mind the stimulating effect on the economy that infrastructure plans have wherever they take place, that it might be better to abandon that scheme and to use that money for reinstating more Beeching lines and other things, so that people all over the country have the benefit of the money that my right honourable friend the Chancellor has said they should have? Could we abandon that scheme in favour of others?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I am delighted that not only can we continue with the HS2 scheme, although it does not impact in any material way on the current spending review period, but also that a number of other exciting rail projects have been announced or confirmed today; for example, the reopening of the Oxford-Bedford link as part of the overall possible link between Oxford and Cambridge, the electrification of the trans-Pennine line, and lots more that is going in rail infrastructure.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
(12 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lucas
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is being optimistic in thinking that she will achieve what she sets out to achieve in her amendment. Governments usually have their heads well sunk into the sand by the time legislation gets this far, particularly with the Daily Mail behind it. However, I hope she achieves success in making sure that this business is properly regulated.
As the noble Baroness said, the real problem was that motorists were being subjected to rogue clampers and treated in completely unacceptable ways. That situation might have been dealt with in other ways but it is now being dealt with in this way. There is nothing that I can see in the Bill at the moment that will save motorists from being done in by rogue ticketers. Indeed, the clampers will not have to change their tactics much because in Clause 54 there is a provision for movable barriers. All they will need is a gate across the entrance to a car park and they will have effectively immobilised a car and put it in exactly the same position as if there was a clamp on it.
There are also individual barriers on individual parking places—those little posts that have a key turned in the top—and so individual parking spaces may, under the provisions of Clause 54, continue to be subject to the kind of practice the Bill objects to—that is, the immobilisation of a car, subject to a stiff penalty, without any regard to the needs of the occupant, or of a blue badge holder and so on.
Not only is the Bill deficient in that it allows a slight change of tactics to continue the practices objected to but it opens the business of ticketing to a whole range of untrustworthy organisations. It does not take much to find someone who will sell you a book of 20 parking tickets. You then go and slap them on any car you like and if the motorist pays up you get a cheque back—very nice. This can be done under the guise of protecting your own property—which you might be—or you might do it randomly. There is no proper control over this.
The people doing this are, as the noble Baroness said, being given access to the DVLA database; they are entitled to know whose car it is. If the police are occasionally corruptible, what do we think of these people? If you want to know whose car is parked somewhere, you make sure that you make friends with the person who gives you the ticket that you stick on the car and they will drop you the name and address as if it was public property. We have to make sure that there are tight regulations under the Bill for anyone engaged in ticketing, and also on those who are allowed to continue operating fixed barrier car parks, whether of the conventional kind such as you might find under the National Theatre or others where you drop in coins as you exit. There needs to be proper regulation of those people to make sure that we do not get the cowboys back in another guise.
I believe that the Government intend to license the British Parking Association—it is a totally reputable body and I am quite happy that it should be in charge of the scheme—but any organisation such as that will find it difficult to discipline its members unless the Government insist that the scheme has teeth and take a supervisory role so that if they start falling down on the job they can be brought to book. The Government cannot dodge their responsibilities by saying that tickets are okay. Tickets can end up in large bills for people. If those sending out the tickets choose to employ bailiffs who are not shy of employing all the tricks of the trade, people can end up with bills approaching a couple of thousand quid—not legally, but none the less they do. Why should motorists be subject to that kind of harassment just because of a badly drafted Bill?
We need to sort out the business and to make sure that anyone benefiting from the structures in the Bill is reputable; that it is easy to obtain redress when things have gone wrong and that it is cost-free to obtain that redress. This Bill does not do that yet. I hope the noble Baroness will receive support from her Front Bench in pushing for changes, even if she cannot get all that she asks for.
Baroness Randerson
My Lords, unlike the noble Baroness, I start from the point of view that clamping must be stopped. I have concerns about some aspects of the Bill, including the role of the accredited trade association. In practice, as the noble Lord said, there is only one and, although it may be a perfectly reputable organisation, not all of its members live up to the expectations that one has of them. As has been said, it is very difficult to police a members’ organisation. There needs to be a further effort, via legislation, to raise standards in the industry and there need to be mechanisms that ensure standards are raised, such as a guaranteed right of appeal.
The code of conduct must include a provision on clear bay markings, lighting and adequate size of parking bays. There have been too many cases of people being fined exorbitant amounts of money because one wheel of their car protrudes into the neighbouring parking bay. Irritating as that may be to you and I when we go to the supermarket and it is the last available parking bay, it is nevertheless the case that at night in a dark car park, when the markings have long ago rubbed off, that can be—and is— exploited. There is plenty of evidence of that.
Penalty charges and tickets should be levied only by companies that adhere to the code of conduct, to which I have referred, and the charges must be reasonable. A good benchmark would be the charges levied by local authorities. They vary of course from area to area, but the joy of that as a measure is that it takes account of the local market in parking provision and enables variation from one part of the country to another. It gives a reasonable comparison.
I should like to ask the Minister about the experience in Scotland. I understand that wheel clamping is illegal in Scotland: has there been the explosion in unfair and extortionate ticketing that the noble Baroness fears? I do not recall reading or hearing about that problem but it would be useful to hear about the experience in Scotland.
On Amendment 42, I want to raise a couple of practical issues relating to this. First, proposed new subsection (2A) refers to an offence not being committed,
“if … the vehicle is not registered under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act”.
As I understand it, that means that it would be legal to wheel clamp foreign vehicles. I wonder where that places us in terms of EU law and international law and whether it is possible to discriminate against foreign vehicles in that way. I am not for one minute suggesting that it is desirable to do so and I do not know whether the noble Baroness intended that outcome but, as far as I can see, included in those vehicles that are not registered would be foreign vehicles. That could cause a problem.
Lord Newton of Braintree
I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, on the Front Bench, because I told her that I would go away and stop being a nuisance. But before I decided to be a nuisance again, I established that it was not to her that I was going to be a nuisance but to my noble friend Lord Attlee.
I will not be that much of a nuisance, because having listened to the debates so far I found myself completely ambivalent about the merits of the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, the words of my noble friend Lord Lucas and the cautionary remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. I shall reflect on all that.
The point that interests me is on the appeals system. The noble Earl, who is answering this debate, presumably knows something about this from his transport connections. With appeals on ordinary parking offences we already have a pretty shambolic system. In London there are the London parking adjudicators; outside London there is another set of parking adjudicators, who are all part of the tribunal system, which is what I know something about. Outside London it depends on whether your council decides to opt in to decriminalise parking or pursue it in the ordinary, old-fashioned way through the magistrates’ courts. I do not think that the variation in the sort of justice depending on where you live is terribly sensible.
From reading the briefing that somebody—presumably the Government Whips’ Office—helpfully sent me, I have couple of questions. The briefing says:
“Government amendments to Schedule 4 have been tabled to make clear that notices to keepers and drivers must include relevant information about what impendent appeals/dispute resolution arrangements are available to them, in addition to any internal arrangements. We have also made a commitment not to commence the keeper liability provisions of Schedule 4 until the parking industry establishes an independent appeals body”.
I understand both those sentences on their own but I do not understand them taken together. Are we talking about an insistence that the industry must have a single approved appeals system, whether approved or not? Or are we saying that everybody who becomes eligible to benefit from Schedule 4 must have their own appeals system, and will that be approved or not? I simply do not know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that if there is to be a single approved appeals system that everybody has to join to get the benefits, that seems sensible. If there is to be an endless series of different appeals systems chosen by different providers, whether approved or not as providers or an appeals system, I do not think that is sensible. It puts me in mind of an absolutely daft proposal produced by another government department two or three years ago to have rival ombudsmen in a particular industry—I think that it was electricity or telecoms—chosen by the providers, not the customers. The worst providers would choose the least effective ombudsmen. This is just not a sensible way to run a railway. I would like to know the answer to my questions.
Baroness Grey-Thompson
I want briefly to support Amendment 42. I mentioned even more briefly at Second Reading that I am particularly keen on eradicating blue badge abuse. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for tabling the amendment, because it highlights where my concern most closely fits. I declare an interest, in that I have a blue badge. I support legal clamping but would like to stop illegal operators.
This is a personal view, but there are two groups of abusers. First, there are those people who steal or buy blue badges, which is an increasing market and can be very profitable. In some areas, it has been shown to have increased sevenfold to tenfold in recent years. Also in this group are those who borrow their grandmother's badge and see it as a right to use the family badge. The worst offenders are those who take grandma out and leave her in the car. We have laws for not leaving dogs in cars, but sadly not for grandmothers. When she was younger, my daughter and I used to play a game at the local shopping centre, which was “Count the grandma”.
In the second group, there are those who do not have a blue badge and who may be stopping for five minutes, while popping into a shop or picking up family, who blatantly abuse the system and stare out those who possess blue badges legally. Perhaps there is occasionally a good reason for stopping in those spaces, but I am passionate about blue badge abuse—not just for the abuse in itself but because I believe it shows a wider indication of attitude towards disabled people. I believe it is important to crack down on this. At a time when the media portrayal of disabled people is perhaps at its worst, the Glasgow Media Unit recently looked at some comparative data of media portrayal of disabled people from 2005-06 and 2010-11, which showed that the portrayal was significantly worse than at any time in the past 10 to 15 years. Recent articles have shown disabled people as benefit scroungers and workshy.
I spend a lot of time driving around the country and what I see, too often, is disabled people with hidden impairments being verbally abused because the system is not fully understood. It is only a few steps later that we see why some people think it perfectly acceptable to abuse the system rather than understand the reason for it. There is shocking abuse around the country. I see people who suddenly develop an incredible change of gait when they see me getting out of my car with my wheelchair, or whose limps mysteriously disappear as they walk around the corner. I do not mean to make light of this but it is really important.
It is not just about being close to the shops or the supermarkets—some supermarkets have tried very hard to combat this—but about being closer to work. It is about integrating disabled people in society and having a wide enough space to get a chair in and out of a car. It may be about getting your wheelchair and a child in and out of the car. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to give my car keys to complete strangers and ask them to pull my car out of a space, when someone has just parked across the yellow hash lines between spaces. Wherever I go, at any time of day or night and pretty much every day of the week, I see people abusing blue badge parking spaces. While I do not generally agree with increasing powers, I believe that we need to do more to protect disabled people who have parked legally. I believe in clamping for blue badge abuse, and perhaps we could do even more to protect parking for disabled people.
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I have an interest to declare: by virtue of my profession, I am a manager of commercial property. I well remember, not very long ago, a tenant of one of my clients explaining, in the context of a rear service yard behind some shops, how perilous it would be for the continuation of that facility were she not able to involve a clamping firm to deal with serial offenders, because that is what we need. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for raising this because I was unable to be present for Second Reading of this important Bill and therefore this is the first occasion I have had to comment on this matter.
The Government’s intentions certainly need clarification here. The Minister’s clear statement at Second Reading about there being no option but to ban clampers overlooks the need, as other noble Lords have mentioned, to have a workable system to discourage the abuses. I will not follow the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, about the number of apparently able-bodied people who I have seen leaping out of cars with blue badges, other than to draw the Committee’s attention to there being, I am told, quite a flourishing market in stolen and counterfeit blue badges themselves. Apart from that, we have a system where serial abusers of parking facilities are putting their cars where they should not and serial malefactors, in terms of clampers, follow on to make life disproportionately unpleasant for people who have sometimes inadvertently parked in the wrong place for a short period.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, our Amendment 43 in this group seeks to ban the use of fixed barriers by private parking operators unless they comply with new statutory rules on maximum parking charges and signage. The need for this amendment arises from the Government’s decision on Report in the Commons to introduce new subsection (3) into Clause 54, as has already been referred to, as a clarification in order to maintain the lawful use of fixed barriers in private car parks. However, the effect of that subsection appears to be also to reinstate mechanisms by which less principled operators will effectively be able to immobilise vehicles and prevent drivers from leaving without paying excessive or erroneous parking charges.
As Diana Johnson MP said during the debate in the other place,
“I am even more concerned that companies that wish to get round the law, operate in an intimidating way and issue excessive parking tickets will see this as an opportunity to go ahead. Under clause 54(3) putting down a barrier in effect immobilises a vehicle”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/10/11; col. 139.]
Subsection (3) risks creating a loophole that will see the return of the very same regime of rogue operators that the Bill is trying to eradicate. Our amendment seeks to ensure that only reputable operators are allowed to use the added measure of fixed barriers in order to ensure the on-the-spot payment of tickets. If not, they would have to pursue vehicle keepers through the DVLA as provided for by Schedule 4.
Reference has already been made to Schedule 4. Under it, landowners—that is, in this context, parking providers—may pursue vehicle keepers for unpaid parking charges through the DVLA, subject to certain conditions. Concerns have been expressed about that arrangement. Consumer groups, Citizens Advice and trading standards have pointed out that rogue ticketers, whose numbers may increase following any ban on clamping, will be able to access vehicle keepers’ highly sensitive information through the DVLA and pursue them for excessive or unfairly levied charges.
The present position is that existing regulations enable only those who provide parking in accordance with industry best practice to access details of vehicle keepers from the DVLA. Industry best practice is defined in the regulations as membership of an accredited trade association, of which the British Parking Association’s approved operator scheme is currently the only one. However, the concerns that have been expressed relate to the fact that adherence to best practice is equated with membership of the BPA. The BPA is a trade association and is not resourced or intended to enforce compliance. In addition, the BPA approved operator scheme is not independent since it is decided on by the membership—namely, the parking providers—and therefore does not guarantee fairness to consumers.
In her amendments, my noble friend Lady Hayter of Kentish Town has raised an important issue, which was referred to at Second Reading when reference was made to what would happen in the event of a total ban on clamping if people found their driveways being used if they happened, as has been said today, to live near a railway station, a football stadium or perhaps some other major leisure centre, where this is a hazard that at least some of them seem to face. It is not clear, if there is to be a complete ban on clamping, exactly what their redress would be. There certainly would not seem to be much point in calling the police, since even if they felt moved to act in relation to a car on someone’s driveway, it is highly unlikely that they would regard the issue as a particular priority. I hope that the Minister will not dismiss my noble friend’s amendments but will seek to address an answer to the issues and concerns that she has raised.
We have also heard concerns raised about the impact on disabled drivers. Does the minister believe that the Government’s proposals have an impact on disabled drivers? In written evidence to the Public Bill Committee, the British Parking Association said that it was particularly concerned that the equality impact assessment assumes that there will be no impact. We have certainly heard during today’s debate of circumstances that will have an adverse impact and which appear to arise directly from the provisions in the Government’s Bill. I hope that the Minister will give a straight answer on those concerns.
We would support the establishment of an independent appeals process, but it must apply across the whole sector, not just in relation to the BPA. I assume that the Minister would have no objections to that, but no doubt he will be stating his position shortly.
I conclude by saying that in this very interesting debate a significant number of concerns have been raised and there is a degree of consensus, though not complete, from all sides of the House about the concerns that need to be addressed. Because I accept that there are no easy answers, I invite the Minister to consider whether he might convene discussions outside the Chamber with the interested parties—those who have contributed to the debate today—to talk about those concerns and see if any consensus can be reached on progress that might be made in addressing them.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, her Amendment 42 seeks to introduce a number of exemptions to the ban on vehicle immobilisation and towing. The amendment would allow wheel clamping and towing to continue on private land where the vehicle was unregistered in the United Kingdom, causing an obstruction or parked in a residential estate where parking was permitted only for residents or their guests, or the vehicle was adapted for towing—in other words, it was a trailer or a caravan. I understand why she and others seek these amendments, but I personally have received complaints about the activities of rogue clamping companies.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for that lengthy and interesting explanation. I shall follow his example and read it carefully in Hansard. I would certainly like to be included in any delegation which the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, may choose to lead to the ministry. It seems to me that a number of points still require to be cleared up.
As regards this business of having a right to move a car that is causing an obstruction, that is pretty useless if you are immediately done for scratching its paintwork. How are you going to prove that you have done no damage? You will have to start off with a complete photographic survey. Then you will presumably have to pay a couple of hundred quid for a velvet-lined lorry to lift the thing up. The kit that is needed to move a car without damaging it is not the sort of kit that most people have. It does not seem to be a piece of law that will ever be beneficial to someone who has had his driveway blocked, to a hospital where people cannot gain access to where the ambulances come in, or wherever else it might be. They will not have the kit to take effective action because there will be too few occasions when this happens and there will be no private operators to respond.
I remain concerned about proposed subsection (3) and I do not think that its implications have been thought through. All you need is a chain on the ground attached to a post, and you could come along, stretch it out across the gateway to the park and padlock the other end. It is enough to immobilise a car. Or you could set out posts around the park and loop the chain around them. As the provision is currently phrased, it is an invitation to bad behaviour, although I understand why it is there and I do not want to inconvenience the ordinary municipal car park that has an up-and-down barrier, which is a sensible arrangement. However, we have to have a more rogue-proof provision. I look forward very much to the meeting.
Earl Attlee
Perhaps I may quickly respond to my noble friend. As regards large establishments such as hospitals, I imagine that they would use an accredited car park operator. As to the example of a discrete chain that you could suddenly pull up after the motorist has left, I remind my noble friend that the landholder would have to have good signage, otherwise he could fall foul of the offence of immobilising the vehicle.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for his response, and I thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Randerson, and the noble Lords, Lord Rosser, Lord Lucas and Lord Newton, for their contributions.
I am immensely disappointed because the response did not answer what for me are the two major issues—residential parking and disabled parking. The Minister has not responded at all on those matters. When talking to one of my colleagues from Northern Ireland, they said simply that it is illegal to park in a disabled space in Northern Ireland, and that the police enforce that law. I was also told what happened to other cars that park in disabled spaces—they were immobilised, albeit with a knife to the wheel, rather than by a wheel clamp. Nothing in the Bill will make it easier—in fact, it will be harder—to preserve the right of disabled people to park in disabled bays.
However, the real issue is that my amendments are not about car parks. There was the idea of having lighting, signage and so on, but I am talking about people’s own private car-parking spaces at a block of flats with perhaps five or 10 parking areas for those five or 10 flat owners. They do not want to put up CCTV, lights or signage. It is their private parking. That is the driver behind this issue, and I am afraid that none of the responses addresses such people’s needs. They do not want to issue tickets and go to the DVLA to find out who a car belongs to. They want to deter drivers from parking where they should not—whether that space is for a disabled vehicle or their own.
Earl Attlee
The noble Baroness gave an example of just a few parking slots in a housing estate, but does she agree that commonly available are small barriers or posts that you can put in place and would be very effective in stopping other motorists from effectively stealing the landholder’s parking slot?
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I look forward to the Minister giving money to all those people to pay for them. They are actually rather expensive. Perhaps some of the rogues who do asphalting at the front of houses could install those posts at the same time. I do not think that the noble Earl heard my example of Mr and Mrs Hubbard, who are disabled. Where are they going to get the money to put up an extra block to stop people parking in front of their sheltered accommodation? Having to do that would be extraordinary.
I am very concerned about the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about the greater use of the DVLA database. There are great dangers in expecting more people to have to chase the owner, rather than, having clamped the car, getting people to come round and sort the situation out there and then. I thought that we wanted there to be less, rather than more, access to private data. That is also the case regarding CCTV. I had thought that part of the Bill provided for less CCTV. I happen to be in favour of CCTV—many women are—but the whole thrust of the Bill is for less of it. Now little blocks of flats with five residents are meant to put CCTV outside so that they can see who has been parking in the middle of the night. That is difficult to understand.
On the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, I understand that we take a different position on clamping, but the issues that I am raising are exactly the same: what do you do about a block of flats that is next to a charging car park—although it could be anywhere—when ordinary residents cannot get into their garage or to their front door?
If they are disabled, where they park, there may be a ramp; if they have to park somewhere else, there may be steps, so they cannot go there. There seems to be no consideration of the small residential group. The idea of moving the car was raised earlier. You have to break into it to move it, so presumably that will damage the car straightaway. If you have a driving licence only for a motorbike and not for a car, you might not be licensed to move it at all. I find the idea of breaking into someone's car to move it as hard to understand as the answer.
The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, talked about serial offenders; this is a major problem. We are talking not about people who just overstay—they meant to move it but did not come back—but serial offenders who go into the car parking area, which is not a car park and where they should never have gone anyway, and leave the car there. I did not raise the issue of community facilities, such as churches, where it may be very difficult if you are going to a funeral or wedding and suddenly cannot drive in there. That was not the thrust of my amendments at all; I am interested in residential areas. Nevertheless, those points have not been answered.
The major points that I am interested in, particularly the blue badge system and disabled car parking areas, wherever they may be, or small residential areas, have not been answered. Nevertheless, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss this further and take up that offer. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
Lord Lucas
I shall speak also to Amendment 54. It seems to me that if we are to allow private operators the privilege of ticketing, we ought to expect the highest standards of them in both their propriety and their behaviour towards the motorist. We ought to look to them for the sort of regime that we wish that we could have with many local authorities who currently enforce ticketing. There seems to me no reason why we should import the standards of bad behaviour of, say, Camden, into the private sector, granting the private sector privileges on the basis of the bad precedents of the bad end of the local authorities.
Amendment 54 sets out some of the things that I think we should ensure that private operators granted that privilege should do. First, they should take steps to establish a current residential address of the keeper of the vehicle. That is one of the major causes of distress in local authority parking enforcement. They send tickets to old addresses or to people who previously owned the vehicle, and the first thing that the real registered keeper at his real address knows is when the bailiffs turn up, because the bailiffs actually take the trouble to check addresses before they send people round. It costs about 50p a time to gain their address. That ought to be a duty on private operators granted those privileges.
We must have a maximum. My noble friend has said that there will be a maximum; I am content with that. A feature of some of the rogues has been excessive maxima. We must make sure that the terms of the contract do not act as an unreasonable disincentive to appeal. My noble friend is working out an appeals procedure. He will be aware that there is a considerable disincentive built into the local authority system at the moment. You lose your discount if you appeal, and if you lose your appeal, you therefore pay double. That is absolutely as far as it should go. There has to be some disincentive, or people will just appeal anyway, but there has to be a limit on the disincentive.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, we have Amendment 53 in this group. I shall attempt to be reasonably brief as many of the points were made in the previous debate. However, to recap, it is under Schedule 4 that landowners—that is, parking providers—may pursue vehicle keepers for unpaid parking charges through the DVLA, subject to certain conditions. As I said earlier, some concerns have been expressed about this arrangement, not least by consumers’ groups and Citizens Advice. I think that the Minister will find, for instance, that Citizens Advice Scotland has some examples of the adverse impact of the scheme as it applies there and it can give information on that.
The question of access to information is potentially of some concern. In evidence to the House of Commons Transport Committee last week, the Corporate Affairs Director of the DVLA said that if there were an allegation, for example, about damage or harm done through the use of a vehicle, the person alleging the harm would be given details of the keeper of the vehicle from whom they could make inquiries as to who was the operator of the vehicle at the time the alleged harm was done. When asked to whom this information would be given, the DVLA representative said that if they were in the private parking field, the companies would have to be members of the accredited trade association—that is, the British Parking Association’s approved operator scheme, which is the only approved operator scheme in the parking sector.
When it was then suggested that as long as an organisation joined the BPA, the DVLA would hand over information to it about the keeper of a vehicle, the DVLA said that it would, provided that it was convinced by the details of the request and the organisation was known to be a member of the approved operator scheme. However, as the Minister will know, recent media stories have claimed that the personal details of more than a million motorists were sold to private clamping companies by the DVLA in 2010, which suggests that maybe the safeguards against giving information to organisations or representatives of organisations who should not be entitled to know details of the keeper of a vehicle are not as strong as they should be.
Our amendment seeks to address the issue by requiring private parking providers to demonstrate adherence with industry best practice—that relates to all private parking providers—on issues such as signage display or maximum penalties to gain details of the vehicle keeper from the DVLA. The amendment also places a burden of responsibility on the DVLA to ensure that a keeper’s personal information is provided only to reputable parking providers by establishing a code of conduct on fair practice, including appropriate penalty charges and requirements for the display of notices in respect of parking of vehicles on the relevant land. I hope that the Minister will give careful consideration to the amendment which seeks to ensure that there is a code of practice and that it is an independent code of conduct that is operated and run not only in the interests of the parking providers but in the interests of those who use the parking facilities.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, all the amendments in this group seek to amend in their various ways the provisions on keeper liability in Schedule 4 to the Bill. Amendments 44 and 54, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas, set out a further set of conditions that the creditor must comply with to claim unpaid parking charges from the keeper of a vehicle. Unless the Committee appears to desire it, I do not propose to weary it by going through each one in detail, much as I would enjoy doing so.
Although the amendments are clearly well intentioned and designed to offer further safeguards to the motorist, I would hope to persuade my noble friend that they are in the most part either unnecessary or inappropriate. I say that because the amendments do not appear appropriate for trespass situations which the Bill also covers, and in relation to private car parks. The issues that the amendments address can be dealt with either through self-regulation within the industry, or they will be matters that may be considered by the independent appeals body that will be established before the provisions come into effect.
First and foremost, we do not consider that it is appropriate to add further conditions over and above those contained in the schedule for landowners who wish to take action against those who trespass on their property. In relation to non-trespass situations—private car parks—a number of the suggested conditions will be subject to the individual facts of a given case and would anyway be dealt with by the disputes arrangements, whether that was an internal scheme or through the independent appeals body. We have already made it clear that any notice to the driver or keeper of the vehicle intending to recover unpaid parking charges must set out what the appeals arrangements are. As such, we believe that the conditions that we have set out in the schedule adequately cover what would be expected of the creditor in seeking to recover unpaid parking charges. It will be more appropriate for the independent appeals body to hear disputes and review the evidence presented by either party rather than seeking to specify these matters in legislation beforehand.
In addition, consumer protection legislation already applies to parking contracts and there is the added safeguard that only those parking providers who are members of an accredited trade association will have access to DVLA vehicle keeper data and can therefore pursue keeper liability as part of their general enforcement arrangements. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, who asked about the 1 million occasions when the DVLA data were accessed, an accredited trade association can get DVLA data. A high figure is representative of the high number of on-road offences in which keeper details were requested. It also covers private policing to, for example, supermarkets. The Government have made it clear to the parking industry that members of such accredited trade associations—in this case the British Parking Association’s Approved Operator Scheme—will need to sign up to a code of practice that will include an agreement to have disputes and complaints dealt with via an independent appeals body.
In a similar vein, the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, seeks further regulation in the form of a statutory code of conduct covering penalty charges and signage. Any creditor would have to demonstrate that they had complied with the code before being able to obtain keeper details from the DVLA. Again, this is an overregulatory approach that would apply to all private land, including to trespass situations. It is both inappropriate and unnecessary. As I mentioned, members of the British Parking Association's approved operator scheme already operate under a code of practice that provides guidance on both penalty charges and signage. The Bill also contains reserve powers to prescribe signage if this proves necessary.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, touched on Scotland and the experience of Citizens Advice. I will follow it up and if the noble Lord could assist me with further details, it would be much appreciated.
The purpose of Schedule 4 is simply to strengthen the arrangements for the enforcement of unpaid parking charges as an alternative to wheel clamping once the ban has come into force. Schedule 4 covers all land not subject to statutory control, from private car parks to the front driveways of private properties. It would be neither sensible nor appropriate in these circumstances to introduce wide-ranging regulation that would seriously impinge on the ability of smaller landowners to control parking on their land. The self-regulatory approach for larger operators as a condition of membership of a government-accredited trade association is the right approach for larger private car park operators and their agents.
I turn to the government amendments. As I indicated, we will not commence the keeper liability provisions in Schedule 4 until an independent appeals body is in place. Government Amendments 48, 50 and 52 reinforce this point. They clarify the conditions that must be met when issuing a ticket to a driver or vehicle keeper for an unpaid parking charge by requiring that the ticket must include details both of any arrangements offered internally by the company, and any arrangements available by independent adjudication or arbitration. This reinforces and strengthens the Government's commitment that Schedule 4 will not commence until an independent appeals service is in place.
I will deal briefly with government Amendments 56 and 57. They make a small change to Schedule 4 following representations from the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association. I declare a small interest as I attended its 2005 annual dinner and found myself sitting next to a lady who appeared to be the girl of my dreams. I am pleased to say that she is now the Countess Attlee. The schedule excludes vehicle hire firms from keeper liability provisions provided certain conditions are fulfilled when vehicles are hired out. The association pointed out that the definition of a hire agreement that refers to hire periods not exceeding six months does not reflect modern vehicle rental arrangements, in which longer periods of hire are commonplace. We accepted this point and amended the definition of a hire agreement so that it covers hire periods of any duration.
In summing up, I assure your Lordships and the Committee that the Government are fully committed to monitoring the effect of the ban on wheel clamping and the associated keeper liability provisions in Schedule 4. If there is evidence that we need to take further measures when the new arrangements are in place, we will of course consider this. We do not believe that there will be any need, but if evidence shows that problems exist, we will act. However, there have been no problems of note with rogue ticketing in Scotland, where wheel clamping has been banned since 1992. Given this assurance, I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas will withdraw his amendment and that he and the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, will support the government amendments.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, I assume the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will respond. However, in view of the momentous news that the noble Earl gave us, perhaps we on these Benches may offer our sincere congratulations on what clearly was a memorable occasion.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, there can be no more romantic venue at which to meet one’s wife. I am very grateful for what my noble friend has said. To the extent that I have continuing questions, they will be swept up into the meeting already referred to. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Henley
“( ) In sub-paragraph (2)(d) the reference to arrangements for the resolution of disputes or complaints includes—
(a) any procedures offered by the creditor for dealing informally with representations by the driver about the notice or any matter contained in it; and(b) any arrangements under which disputes or complaints (however described) may be referred by the driver to independent adjudication or arbitration.”
Lord Henley
“( ) In sub-paragraph (2)(g) the reference to arrangements for the resolution of disputes or complaints includes—
(a) any procedures offered by the creditor for dealing informally with representations by the keeper about the notice or any matter contained in it; and(b) any arrangements under which disputes or complaints (however described) may be referred by the keeper to independent adjudication or arbitration.”
Lord Henley
“( ) In sub-paragraph (2)(g) the reference to arrangements for the resolution of disputes or complaints includes—
(a) any procedures offered by the creditor for dealing informally with representations by the keeper about the notice or any matter contained in it; and(b) any arrangements under which disputes or complaints (however described) may be referred by the keeper to independent adjudication or arbitration.”
Lord Henley
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