Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Martin of Springburn
The noble Lord is quite right. However, it is not only the Speaker who gets advice from the clerks; as I said, the Chairman of Ways and Means and the chairmen of committees do as well. It is done on the basis that of course, as the noble Baroness said, a matter can be given an airing. A Speaker can put forward an amendment as a safety valve for the House, to allow the matter to get an airing, while possibly knowing that the amendment will be defeated. However, as one noble Lord said, there is no way that a Speaker or his advisers would allow a situation where the guts were taken away from a piece of legislation that had previously been passed. If we pass this amendment, we are allowing someone to say, “I wasn’t happy with the last piece of legislation, so I will create an amendment and look for a near kindred piece of legislation to latch it on to”. That is not a good way to run a Parliament.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am not a lawyer but I am, I hope, filled with common sense. It strikes me as being quite nonsensical to allow an individual back into this country to pursue an appeal against exclusion. The exclusion decision, if I may say so, is taken on grounds that the noble Lord has admitted may well include protecting national security. Indeed, criminality and protecting national security are the only grounds on which high-harm individuals may be pursued. Their right of appeal is not removed. The question is whether they should be readmitted to this country to pursue that appeal. I suggest that is nonsensical and I cannot accept the noble Lord’s position on the matter.
I was explaining that for many of these cases the primary objective is to protect the public from individuals where credible evidence suggests involvement in terrorist-related activity or serious criminality. In other cases, it is to protect the public from individuals intent on inciting others to commit crime or on creating divisions between communities. Therefore, the legislative proposal is designed to target the highest-harm cases, and it is proportionate, for the protection of the public, to ensure that any appeal for which a full-merits appeal right still exists is from outside the United Kingdom.
Amendment 118C would potentially provide every individual refused under this provision with an in-country right of appeal as they would simply need to raise human rights or asylum grounds in their appeal. That cannot be right and for that reason we are unable to support the amendment. I hope that, in the light of my remarks, my noble friend Lord Avebury will understand the drivers behind this clause and why the Government have to ask him to withdraw his amendment.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
I have been listening to this debate without any particularly strong views either way. However, perhaps the Minister can assist with this question. On the assumption that a stateless person, for instance, or indeed anyone else who has been refused a return, is outside the country somewhere, how on earth does he or she actually continue an appeal?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, the process of appeal is open to anybody and the circumstances in which they have found themselves is a matter for them. This country and its Government have decided that their presence in this country is not conducive to the public good, which I think is a reasonable decision for the Government to make. It is open to challenge through the judicial process and that individual still has a right of appeal. It is not for me to suggest the details of ways in which that appeal should be processed.
Lord Morris of Aberavon
I rise briefly in support of the masterly way in which the noble Lord, Lord Dear, has introduced and covered every aspect of this amendment. I just want to say three things. First, freedom of speech is essential. There is always a tendency for there to be well intended restrictions, and then there are unintended consequences. This is what has happened in this particular sphere.
Secondly, it is crucial that the Director of Public Prosecutions has changed his mind. I have a great respect —having been the Attorney-General and responsible for the Director of Public Prosecutions—for the experience and wisdom of the director, whoever he happens to be. In this case, he has said—and I repeat what has already been said,
“we are unable to identify a case in which the alleged behaviour leading to conviction could not properly be characterised as ‘abusive’ as well as ‘insulting’”.
He said the word “insulting” could “safely be removed”. I think we should pay regard to that opinion. The correspondence we have heard of and received describes excess of zeal by a particular officer, which has led to the distress of those who have been prosecuted. The last example given by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, concerned the causing of distress to a pair of Labradors by saying “woof woof” in the hearing of a policeman. That is true; it happened, it was prosecuted and the person was convicted and fined £50. Fortunately, that conviction was quashed on appeal. I will not go on; I think the case is proved.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, like many other people, I received a large number of e-mails and letters all going one way in support of the noble Lord’s amendment. I would just like to tell the House about one letter I received. In my very untidy desk, I have lost it, but it was about a lay preacher who preaches on the street and preaches on Sundays in church. He happens to subscribe to a literal form of the Old Testament with which I do not agree, but he was preaching on his literal interpretation in the street. Someone complained to the police, and he was arrested and spent seven hours in the police station. He was placed on police bail on the order that he was not allowed to preach. If that is not an abuse of the freedom of speech, I do not know what is. I cannot understand why the Minister and the Government are not supporting this amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I was hoping that my noble friend Lord Macdonald would be in his place as he was a little earlier. I hope he is not stuck in a lift or something. I want to put on record on his behalf, on my behalf and on behalf a number of people who are becoming quite vocal, my wholehearted support for this amendment, and I speak for a number of colleagues. I put my name to the equivalent amendment at the previous stage and, as I recall it, the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, said, “For heaven’s sake, even the Liberal Democrats have this as party policy”. Well, we do; we would have gone further, but we are happy to go as far as is before us tonight.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Blair of Boughton
I agree with the conclusions of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that the abolition of the NPIA is hasty, ill thought out and potentially extremely damaging. I want to build on a question put by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, about training. What is the future plan for Bramshill House? There it sits, a grade 1 listed building, a place at which I was present when one of the Minister’s friends, Kenneth Clarke, was Home Secretary. He arrived late for a meeting, having just been appointed, to say that he was sorry he was late but he had stopped in the driveway to ring the Prime Minister to tell him that he had found a very suitable residence for the Home Secretary.
Bramshill provides two things of vital importance. First, it provides the strategic training for the most senior officers of the police service. Secondly, it is a centre of excellence for international and European police training. Are there plans for what will happen to Bramshill when the NPIA is abolished?
Baroness Butler-Sloss
I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, just said. I had the great privilege of being invited to Bramshill on several occasions to speak to different groups of police about family issues. The time I particularly remember was being left with the most senior group being trained, who I understood were destined for high office. I was introduced in two sentences and the door was shut, and I was facing about 50 men—as it happened the group was made up entirely of men—many of whom were not from United Kingdom police forces. Having somehow or other got my way through that, I learnt, when going to lunch, how enormously valuable it is for the police forces round the world to have the opportunity to go to Bramshill. It is a wonderful institution and I hope, as the noble Lord, Lord Blair said, that it will be given the greatest possible respect and encouragement to remain doing what it does so well at the moment.
Lord Henley
I will start at the end of the debate and deal with questions relating to both Bramshill and Harperley Hall. I ought to declare an interest in relation to Bramshill House. A branch of the Henley family lived there many years ago. That was not my own branch but a branch to which I am connected. It might be that they built it and lived there for a couple of hundred years. Later on it became a police college. I must declare that interest. As the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, knows, I also have—as she does—a hereditary interest in Durham. My family comes from there. As I said, if possible I will visit Harperley Hall and see what it does. I agree with her that its work is very important.
I want to get over the message that no decision has been made on either of these sites, particularly on Bramshill, but that we will be making a decision fairly soon. I should stress—all noble Lords should be aware—that Bramshill is a very expensive property. It costs something of the order of £5 million a year merely to maintain it. That is before one has thought about its actual function as a police training college. I also understand how important it is to the entire police service. I was a Minister many years ago in the MoD at about the time that we were thinking of disposing of Greenwich. I understood the importance of that to the Navy. I understand that Bramshill plays a similar role for the police service so any decisions on that will obviously be difficult to make. I hope that all noble Lords will accept that they will have to be made in due course. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary will update both Houses in due course with her thoughts on these matters.
I want to try to answer the various questions on the abolition of the National Policing Improvement Agency that were put by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and echoed by other noble Lords. She wanted to know about our rationale. She wanted an estimate of the savings and to know where the functions are going, whether the abolition will increase the funding burden on other police forces, whether it would lead to a loss of expertise, what the police professional body is going to do, what is its likely shape and what is the timing.
The most important thing is to get over the rationale behind the changes. I hope that in doing so I will answer some of the questions that have been put by other noble Lords. I was grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, in posing his group of questions on this, which were slightly different from those of the noble Baroness, although they come to the same point, accepted that the agency is not working as well as it might—I think those were his words—so this is not a decision that we want to get wrong.
All our reforms of the policing landscape must be underpinned by clarity of responsibility and appropriate governance arrangements to support an effective and efficient law enforcement response. We accept that the National Policing Improvement Agency has done much to bring about welcome changes to policing but now, in the context of these reforms, is the time to review its role and contribution. The closure of NPIA is a crucial element in a wider programme of reform that is reshaping the way that our policing is delivered and supported to provide a service better equipped to meet the challenges of the future.
Since the agency was established in 2007, its mission has grown considerably. It has operated and managed the development of the police service’s most critical national services, provided specialist operational services to police forces, helped to improve policing practice and developed national learning, leadership and people strategy products. We believe that that is a broad agenda for one agency to deliver and that the agency has collected too diverse a range of functions and responsibilities to retain strategic coherence. Put very simply, we think it has grown like Topsy. Despite some achievements, the agency’s mission is now too unfocused to deliver efficiently and effectively the level of professionalism that we need to see in policing. In these challenging times, we cannot afford to support organisations that are unfocused or unclear about their priorities and accountabilities. To support our wider policing reforms, we need focus and attention at the national level in priority areas. Closure of the agency provides a timely opportunity to ensure that key functions are given greater priority in successor bodies.
If I wanted, I could go through the areas where all the different bits are going and say which bits are going to the National Crime Agency, which are going to the Home Office and which will go to the new professional policing body. I do not know whether it would assist the Committee if I went through all those in detail or whether it would be easier to write a letter in due course and put a copy in the Library.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I strongly support these amendments and Amendment 22, to which I assume the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, will speak in a moment. Two All-Party Groups have today published their Report from the Joint Inquiry into Children who go Missing from Care—I am relieved that it came out today so that I can refer to it. In doing so, I need to declare an interest. At least I hope that it is an interest, because I should at this moment be at the annual general meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking, where I hope the group will decide to retain me as co-chair. However, I thought that it was more important that I should be present here to speak to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord McColl.
The report from the joint inquiry makes some extremely important and worrying comments and recommendations in relation to trafficked children, many of whom are foreign children trafficked into this country. It has found from having heard a lot of evidence that it is estimated from,
“the patchy and incomplete data that is available on trafficked children”—
which is one of the most worrying aspects of this report—
“that 60% of suspected child victims of trafficking in local authority care go missing”.
The noble Lord, Lord McColl, referred particularly to sexual exploitation, but the finding of the parliamentary groups is that:
“Being exploited for labour is the most common form of exploitation for trafficked children, followed by sexual exploitation, cannabis cultivation, domestic servitude, benefit fraud, street crime and forced marriage. Many of the victims are subject to multiple forms of exploitation”.
Among their key recommendations is:
“A completely new system of reporting incidents of children going missing from care, which combines data from both the police and local authorities”.
Although the Minister might be wondering why on earth I am talking about what he might think is a matter for the Department for Education, this issue affects the NCA just as much it affects local authorities through the Department for Education. One of the major problems is that the police are not given information about children going missing from care homes where they have been placed, either because the local authority does not have that information or because the children are in another local authority which is not the local authority concerned with the children. It is a crying scandal that nobody knows anything about large numbers of missing children in this country except the place from where they went. Those data are not passed to the police. The police must be proactive in finding out what is happening to children.
The figures that local authorities give are peanuts compared with the figures that the police give. Local authorities say that it is about 900; the police think that it is probably about 10,000. Some of those children are trafficked children. I am very concerned that the United Kingdom HTC at Birmingham, which is doing sterling work, does not receive all the relevant data. One of the great problems here is the lack of a national rapporteur, or an equivalent mechanism under Article 19 of the directive. No organisation, even the UKHTC, seems to be given all the relevant information about children and adults who are the victims of trafficking. Data are crucial. The Dutch rapporteur has come to this country from time to time explaining how, in Holland, she is responsible for all the data, which she can give to the relevant police authorities. That is an extremely important aspect.
Amendments 3A and 3B—and, indeed, Amendment 22—would remind the NCA of an overriding obligation to deal with one of the most important and worrying crimes in this country, which is the receipt of foreign people who are trafficked and the internal trafficking of our own children. The police need to be proactive. The NCA needs to make sure that police, right down the scale, are aware, so that if they see a child in an odd situation, they should find out whether that child is missing from a care home or foster home or, perhaps more importantly, wonder whether the child is a trafficked child.
The point made by the parliamentary group is that most child victims go missing within one week of being in care, often before being registered; and almost two-thirds of trafficked children are never found. One reason that the non-British trafficked children go missing from care is that they have been groomed by their traffickers not to let anybody in this country know about it, either because they are frightened of the police or, much more likely, because they have been threatened with what may happen to their families. They are not immediately obvious, but that does not mean that we do not have, and that the NCA should not have, an absolute obligation to seek out those children and adults who are in a similar position—in particular, if I may come back to it, to deal with the inadequate and patchy data. That is something that the NCA should have responsibility for in passing all the information it has to the UKHTC in Birmingham, if that is the best place.
I wonder whether the Government should rethink where national data should be placed to ensure that they are all produced—what CEOP, the NRM and everyone else, in particular local authorities which may end up with information about the children they take, have. The Department for Education should be working much more closely with the Ministry of Justice, police and local authorities. I believe that the only way in which it will work more closely is if it is stated in primary legislation what should be done.
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, regarding Amendment 22, I am concerned at the failure of the Bill to deal adequately with the problems of child trafficking. I was also concerned at Second Reading that the Minister’s only reference to child-related crime was a mention of the exploitation of children for sexual purposes. This is not the same as child trafficking; the two are separate issues and dealing with one does not necessarily deal with the other.
Because the Bill is silent on child trafficking, it is unclear where responsibility is going to lie. Will it be with CEOP or the new operational command for border policing and immigration crime, or will it be divided between the two? I very much agree with the comments made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, that the difficulty is we really need something that deals exclusively with children. The ideal solution would be the establishment of a child-focused operational command within the NCA that could deal with all problems pertaining to child-related crime, including all forms of child trafficking and child exploitation.
Amendment 22 would not force the NCA to establish such an operational command since that is clearly a policy decision. However putting the words “child trafficking” on the face of the Bill would make it abundantly clear that this was a prime duty that the NCA had to address.
From the official statistics, which are woefully inadequate, we know for certain that in the past two years more than 600 children were trafficked into the UK. However, this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg because it is almost impossible to get the real figures. One reason for this is because trafficking legislation requires evidence sometimes called double intent, which means that it is necessary to prove both an intent to transport and an intent to exploit. Often, evidence exists of one or the other, but seldom both. For example, trafficking legislation cannot be used if a child arrives in UK with an adult but there is no evidence to prove that the same adult will exploit the child during its time in the UK. Such cases are usually prosecuted under immigration legislation. They are then not recorded as child trafficking, they do not go into the official statistics, and the official figures therefore hugely underestimate the problem.
The types of child exploitation are varied. Domestic servitude is a major issue and always has been, but looking after cannabis plants—I think it is called “cultivation”—is a major issue for children, particularly those brought in from Vietnam. Vietnam has consistently ranked in the top two countries for child referrals since 2009 when the national referral mechanism began. Despite this, there has not been a single prosecution under UK law for the trafficking of children for forced labour in cultivating cannabis, although Vietnamese children are regularly arrested and prosecuted in the UK for drug-related offences.
I urge the Committee to support this amendment. If we can get the words “child trafficking” on the face of the Bill, it will elevate the problem to a major responsibility of the NCA and something that has to be taken very seriously, that cannot be split between different operational commands and cannot just be pushed to one side. This is a very serious problem and it needs to be seriously addressed.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
I am extremely grateful to the Minister for giving way. Will there be any reference, in any documentation such as the framework or anything else of significance for the NCA, to human trafficking?
Lord Henley
I refer the noble and learned Baroness, as I did at the beginning, to Clause 8 and its reference to the Children Act, which does not refer to trafficking but makes quite clear that the interests of children should be taken very seriously. That said, I do not believe that it is necessary—this is what I have been trying to explain to the noble and learned Baroness and to the rest of the House—to refer to it specifically in the Bill in the manner she suggests. Further, I take her back to the references that have been made to the EU directive. We believe that we will be compliant with that and it is very important that that is also there.
I see that I must give way again to the noble and learned Baroness.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
I apologise to the Minister, but it is just possible that he misunderstood me. I was asking whether, if these amendments were not accepted, there would be anything—not in primary or indeed in secondary legislation but at least in either the framework or other instructions to the NCA—to make very clear the importance of dealing with the trafficking of children and adults and the other points that we have made so that it was known in writing rather than being a general admonition.
Lord Henley
I take the noble and learned Baroness’s point and I will certainly consider a specific reference when it comes to the framework documents. I was dealing with what was in the Bill, which I think is very important due to the reason that I set out—the changing nature of crime. For example, 10 or 15 years ago we had never heard of cybercrime. Now we have. Things change and move on and the danger of listing things in primary legislation in the manner that she suggests is that it may confine us unnecessarily and is not the best way of dealing with these matters.
I hope that those assurances are sufficient for my noble friend to feel able to withdraw his amendment. We might want to have further words and noble Lords and noble Baronesses might want to see more in due course, but for the moment I hope that he is satisfied. I await what he has to say with interest.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I am sorry to say that I have been rather slow on the uptake and have only just read the report of the Constitution Committee. Since this is Committee stage, I believe that I am permitted to speak even though it is after the Minister.
I support what the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has proposed. I can see that there may well be great advantages in the National Crime Agency one day taking over the role of the Metropolitan Police. Nevertheless, as I understand it from what the Minister said, there will be a review as to whether this is the appropriate way to do it. I cannot see why the Government could not deal with this in one of two ways—I speak, of course, as a novice in the procedures of this House compared with the Minister and, indeed, with the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. If the Government are fairly clear that this is what they want to do, I cannot see why they cannot put it firmly in Clause 2 that they will transfer to the NCA from the Metropolitan Police, but not until 2013 or 2014 so that it does not come into force until after the Olympics and the Paralympics. Alternatively, if they do not know for certain that this is what they want to do, why on earth can they not just put in a very short Bill to deal with counterterrorism? That should not take an enormous amount of time going through both Houses, if it does not have added to it all the stuff that tends to be added to almost every Bill by any Government. It is possible to pare it down to just this point.
I share with diffidence, but none the less quite firmly, the concerns of the Constitution Committee set out in the first part of its report. Since the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is not here, I thought it was important that a Cross-Bencher should express a view so that it is not seen just as a party political manoeuvre of any sort.
I think that there are a number of disadvantages to using the super-affirmative procedure. First, although it is perhaps at the highest ranking of subordinate legislation, it is not primary legislation. Perhaps more importantly, if anything is wrong with the drafting—drafting is not always perfect—we cannot tease it out in debate. It stands or falls in its entirety. We can have amendments to primary legislation that we cannot have when using the super-affirmative procedure, even as I would understand it.
I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, but I particularly share the concerns of the Constitution Committee. I just wonder whether the Government are right to try to proceed this way on what seems to be a clear Henry VIII clause. Perhaps it is almost time that Henry VIII was put to bed.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I like the notion of Henry VIII being put to bed. He used to say that of others, did he not?
It will be clear to the House from my amendment before the dinner break that I am merely an ordinary lawyer. I am probably what my noble friend Lord Roper calls a “cooking solicitor”, the analogy being cooking sherry. I am glad to have understood a little better how these things work.
I did not want to come in before the Minister spoke, because I wanted to hear what he had to say. Like the noble and learned Baroness, I am a little confused about the rationale for postponing this measure when we know that this Bill will still be in Committee in this House—it will not even have reached the other House—after the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Like her, I am not sure why that is the case, unless the Government have some reason to feel that it would undermine the authority of the Metropolitan Police during the Games. I cannot see it, given that somebody who is being dealt with under some terrorism charge is not going to thumb their nose and say, “Yoohoo, you’re not going to have this function for much longer”. That is not life, is it? So I remain confused about that.
Like the noble and learned Baroness, I feel that although the super-affirmative procedure clearly gives more opportunity for debate and response than the simpler secondary legislation procedures, the response to what the Minister proposes is almost a nuclear option, because it would mean the whole order being rejected rather than dealing with small parts of it. On such a serious matter, which I know that the Government have thought about very seriously, I am reluctant to say—but I do say it—that I am not convinced. I expected the Minister to tell the Committee that legislative time was short, and so on. I do not think that he has prayed that in aid, but had he done so I would have said that this was so important an issue that time needs to be made for it.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I hope the House will forgive me for beginning with Part 2 and then moving to Part 1. My late brother, Michael Havers, had a dream in the 1980s of a unified family court which he discussed many times with me. In 2012, I therefore welcome very much the proposal for the single family court in Part 2 of the Bill and congratulate the Government on their acceptance of this recommendation in the Norgrove report.
A single family court, however, is the framework or the scaffolding, and it will be important to scrutinise with care the inside of the building and which of the other Norgrove recommendations—all of which I support—are taken forward. The single point of entry will provide a gateway for the direction of cases to their most appropriate tribunal within the hierarchy of the family courts. This will give, I assume, the responsibility for distribution of the family work to judges, district judges and justices’ clerks. This will also give the administration of family justice something of the excellent proposals which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, provided in his seminal report on access to justice in the civil courts in the 1990s.
We would hope, therefore, for greater flexibility in the deployment of judges, improved performance, and more efficient and swifter disposal of cases. I must warn the Government that that desired result may not be so easy to achieve when spouses, partners and parents are fighting their emotionally charged family disputes before judges and magistrates without lawyers, as there will very likely be greater delays and a great deal of clogging, particularly before the district judges and the family magistrates.
A single family court will create the opportunity for a stronger focus on the child’s best interests, welfare and also rights; I remind the House that children also have rights. There is an opportunity for a long-overdue dialogue between family judges and directors of social services, both at national and local level, which is very much supported by the Norgrove report. I encourage stronger emphasis on judicial training and judicial case management, and that the training of social workers include directors of social services who are not trained as social workers. If judges can be trained—and they are—so senior social workers, up to and including directors, can perfectly well be trained too, particularly when they come from the education field. All this will be needed to meet the increasingly demanding work of the family court.
The Magistrates’ Association has a certain concern that, with the reorganisation of the family court, there will be a lesser role for the family proceedings court. I hope that the Minister will give the much needed reassurance when he responds, as they are a crucial part of the family justice system. There is also the requirement for a limitation on the number of days that a family magistrate is allowed to sit in the family proceedings court. I recommend, as indeed the Norgrove report does, that that inhibition be removed, as it inhibits not only flexibility but the continuity of the magistrates’ panel hearing repeat hearings from the same family.
I am delighted by the repeal of media access in the 2010 Act. That is really good news. As far as I could see, it was absolutely incomprehensible. Even the press thought it was not going to work. I recommend that any future legislation on publicity in family courts should have in mind that children have views and ought to be consulted. Older children have already expressed considerable concern that they might have to give evidence—or their parents might have to give evidence—in particularly emotionally charged cases with the public listening.
I support the flexibility of part-time working for judges. It will undoubtedly help women to come back into the judicial process when they have had families. In 1970, when I was first appointed as a district judge—in those days, a registrar—such a thing was inconceivable. However, I wonder a trifle how the listing officer will deal with a long, complicated care case or a long criminal trial if the judge sits only three days a week. The jury may want to sit four or five days a week. Therefore, there will be certain problems for listing officers, but in principle the idea is excellent.
I strongly support diversity when—and only when—it equals merit. It will be very important that women—particularly those from ethnic minorities—who may not be able to bear the strain of the judicial process are not placed in a position where they may find themselves failing because there has been too much enthusiasm for diversity and not enough for merit. This is very important. I have a vivid recollection of a woman judge many years ago who was a very fine pianist. She should have remained a pianist.
I find it slightly difficult to understand the advantages of a single county court. I hope that when the Bill reaches Committee I will learn a bit more about them.
I turn now to Part 1 and the National Crime Agency, which I welcome in principle. However, as the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking and as a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation, I have several concerns. In responding to a question after the Queen’s Speech, the Prime Minister talked about repelling modern slavery. It is not quite so simple, although I commend him for wishing to do so. He may not be aware that 80% of those who are trafficked in this country come here legally and do not know that they are being trafficked until they are caught up in labour exploitation, debt bondage or prostitution. For instance, there was a case in Newton Abbot or Totnes in the West Country of a girl who came in entirely legitimately expecting to be a masseuse, having been trained by her mother. She did not understand that “masseuse” in some areas of this country does not mean what it meant in eastern Europe. She found herself in a brothel in Totnes, from which she was brave enough to escape. Therefore, we cannot repel them all at the border. I hope that the National Crime Agency will be able to bring to bear a very much more sophisticated approach to deal with traffickers in this shocking but extremely lucrative trade.
I am glad that the Minister referred to trafficking. I share the concerns of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Smith, about CEOP. It has just written a letter dated 25 May, which typically I have left behind in my room here in the building. My recollection is that it sets out in some detail all the work that CEOP thinks that it is going to do. There is not a single word about the trafficking of children, which is crucial. I am very concerned about it not being in this two-page letter. Children who are trafficked must be part of CEOP’s remit. I understood that they were, so I was very surprised by this omission.
I also want to ask the Minister about the UK Human Trafficking Centre in Birmingham. Will it be in the National Crime Agency? If not, who is going to gather the data? If the data are not going to be gathered there, what work will the centre be doing? I visited there and it is doing excellent work so I hope that it will be encouraged and not just disappear. If it is not going to be continued, then a national rapporteur or an effective equivalent mechanism is crucial. I suggest to the Government that the current equivalent mechanism is by no means an effective one, by any objective view. The restructuring of the National Crime Agency needs to include a dedicated unit with centralised focus on human trafficking, particularly on the trafficking of children.
Lastly, I have had some dealings with SOCA personnel embedded in various British embassies, particularly in different parts of Europe, and have been very impressed with the work that it is doing, including work on human trafficking. I hope it will continue this admirable work under its new title of the NCA but I would like to be assured of that. Overall, I welcome Parts 1 and 2 of this Bill.
Lord Dear
My Lords, I am very conscious that we are now four and a half hours into Second Reading and, batting as late as I am, pretty well everything that one wanted to say has been said. I will try to keep my remarks very brief and perhaps put a change of emphasis on some of the points that have been made. I want to address the National Crime Agency—no surprise, perhaps—and say just a little about community sentencing and drug-driving. I had quite a lot written down about courts but I will leave that to the succeeding stages in your Lordships’ House.
I declare an interest in that I served in the police service in England for many years. With particular regard to what I want to say tonight, I had a lot to do years back with the regional crime squads, then the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service—all of which were rolled forward one way or another into SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency—and for a while I worked very closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I want to mention that agency very briefly as well.
As we know, the NCA has four major commands: organised crime, border policing, economic crime and CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, quite rightly made great play of the seriousness of people trafficking, particularly child trafficking within that insidious, growing, serious and very lucrative trade. There is nothing amiss about that not being mentioned in the Bill; I hope that, in winding, the Minister will reassure me that it will be encompassed by the new National Crime Agency. Of course, there is no specific mention either of cybercrime, the trafficking of drugs, arms or antiques and valuable works of art or the moving of high-value mechanical plant and motor vehicles, all of which cause immense distress, are highly lucrative to criminal organisations—
Baroness Butler-Sloss
Forgive me for interrupting the noble Lord but I was not criticising the Bill, I was criticising CEOP’s letter, which did not refer to trafficking as part of the job it had to do.
Lord Dear
Thank you for making that point clear.
All those crimes are not in the Bill. I would expect to find them addressed within the rubric of the National Crime Agency and will look for reassurance on that. The one thing that I raised an eyebrow over was the apparent lack of corporate management or governance procedures in the Bill, and I think we might explore that in Committee. It seems odd that an agency as potentially powerful as this one should be able to operate directly under the Home Secretary without some sort of non-executive agency—can I put it in those terms?—to oversee it.
The press are already labelling the NCA as the FBI. Those of us who know anything at all about the FBI realise that it is a very different body, both constitutionally and organisationally, from what is proposed for the NCA. Yet there is an article, already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, who is not in his place at the moment, in today’s Daily Telegraph, headed: “A British FBI won’t make us any safer”. It is an interesting article, written by John Yates who until recently was head of counterterrorism for the country and indeed a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police. It is a strange article that I commend to your Lordships although they might find, as I did, that it is something of a curate’s egg. What made me really concerned was that it seems to be some sort of plea for the Metropolitan Police to retain the counterterrorism lead in the country.
I should say immediately—having served in the Metropolitan Police and dealt with counterterrorism from a provincial force looking to the Met—that I have the highest regard for everything the Metropolitan Police has done in the past and continues to do in counterterrorism. It has a worldwide reputation for protecting us from terrorists and, if the protection fails, for then dealing with terrorism offences very well and successfully. I hope that this article is not the beginning of a turf war between police forces—some sort of demarcation dispute and parochialism—because we have seen from time to time, not necessarily with the Met but throughout the police landscape over the years, occasional examples of that: “It’s my ground and I am going to defend it”. If in the future, and it may be a long time away, the evidence was there to move the counterterrorism command away from the Met and into another agency, the ability to move it into the NCA might be a very sensible view.
There is a huge threat, and we have talked about it before: cross-border crime in the United Kingdom, cross-border internationally—you could almost call it pan-global and that would be accurate. The threat, as the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, has already said, is far too big for individual forces to deal with, no matter how big some of those forces are. We have seen before, and I think this should go on to the record, examples of police forces that have denied the will for successful operations to crime squads, preferring to look at their own problems on their own ground and not to co-operate across borders for the greater good, although that is not true all of forces. That is rare but it does happen and could in future. The threat will continue to grow, make no mistake about it, and the NCA will grow over the years. There is plenty of scope in the Bill for co-operation between forces and between forces and the NCA. There is a raft of operational powers available but the director-general, as we have seen, has to be able to direct in extremis. The point was made in the Minister’s opening remarks that the powers to direct will be used sparingly but they have to be there, and I would defend that posture very fiercely indeed.
We have heard a lot in your Lordships’ House about the tensions that undoubtedly will exist between the police and crime commissioners and the chief constables on the one hand and the National Crime Agency on the other—localism. I said just a year ago when we were discussing the Bill that launched the concept of PCCs that a constructive tension between the PCC and the chief constable was a good idea; there has to be balance. There also has to be a constructive tension also between the localism of police forces—PCC and chief constable together—and the NCA. I do not see any way around it. It surprises me that nobody else in your Lordships' House has mentioned that every single western democracy—at least to my knowledge—has a two-tier policing system. I cannot think of one that does not have a national organisation of some sort and a local web of organisations as well. How they relate varies, but they still have the two. If one tries to knock down the concept of the NCA, the two alternatives that are left seem equally undesirable. One is to have a purely local police service, taking no account whatever of national and international pressures; the other is a national police force, which I do not necessarily espouse. Scotland will have a national police force shortly, but Scotland is smaller and, if I may say with the greatest respect to Scotland, the range of problems there is probably smaller than it is in England and Wales. If you recognise that there has to be a national entity of some sort, you are three-quarters of the way towards accepting the necessity for the NCA.
We did not mention Clause 23 in the early part of this Second Reading, but several of your Lordships have since done so. The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, gave us a compelling argument for everything around Clause 23. The Bill is of course very light on detail—we are waiting for that to come; there is nothing in the explanatory document to help us on that. I sincerely hope that when we get down to the detail of Clause 23 we will see an enhanced role for the probation service working in conjunction with voluntary organisations. I am sometimes asked by people who believe that I know far more about policing than I really do, “What would you do to really help the police?”. I tend to say, “If you really want to help the police, stiffen up and make really efficient the probation service, because in doing so you will stop the revolving door or slow it down. You will drastically cut recidivism; you will stop repeat offending; and that at a stroke would help policing and society no end”. Out of Clause 23, I hope to see emerge a discussion that takes us somewhere along that line.
I know that the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, is going to say quite a lot about drug-driving. I shall not try to steal any of his thunder other than to say that this matter is long overdue for addressing. It is exactly two years since the publication of Sir Peter North’s report, identifying that the problem was perhaps even more serious than we first thought; pointing out, as we already knew, that it was very difficult to prosecute drug-driving under the existing law; and recommending the creation of the offence of driving with a controlled drug above a specified limit. We should look at the specified limit in Committee, because, in December 2010, the Transport Select Committee put that to one side and recommended zero tolerance. The difference between specified limits and zero tolerance is considerable. It seems to me rather odd that drink-driving, using a legal substance illegally in a car, should be very different from drug-driving, where you are using ab initio an illegal substance before you get into it. We will need to keep our options open on zero tolerance.
I have spoken for too long. I commend the thrust of the Bill, I support the concept of the NCA and I look forward to being involved both in Committee and on Report.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Lord Neill of Bladen
My Lords, we should take this opportunity, which follows the vote on a previous occasion when the House by a majority voted in favour of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford. We now have a revised and better version of his amendment. But it has not been treated with enormous respect in the other place, which had a debate but no vote. We have had a letter from the noble Lord, Lord Henley, dated 27 March. The letter says that the amendment is “well intentioned” —so the majority of the House had good intentions when it came forward with this little bright idea. The letter states that these proposals, if legislated for,
“could hinder rather than help … Our issue with the amendments is not with their underlying aim, but with the blanket approach they adopt”.
It is about time that something is done. There could be a two-year inquiry—that could be doubled or quadrupled —and no pending Bill in front of the House. We have a Bill. Let us take some action, follow the amendment, repeat what happened last time and send it back again to the other place.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Neill. With this very convenient amendment at this late stage, it seems to me that the time has come for the Government, if necessary, to come forward with a sensible amendment that could be produced extremely quickly. They absolutely do not need two or four years, as the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, said, to come up with a situation that is obviously not sensible.
I have come from a meeting of the Select Committee on the Merits of Statutory Instruments where we discussed an order on green bananas, which has a provision to deal with the rights of entry. As it happens, it does not deal with the criminal part of that but Regulation 6 says that there may be an application to a magistrate for a warrant. It does not refer to the circumstances but I assume that they are those in which force is required. At the moment, I cannot see why you have to have a right of entry for green bananas when you can perfectly well get a magistrate’s warrant if it is absolutely necessary. What I am telling your Lordships’ House is that it is going on now and that it is time to stop it.
Lord Elton
My noble friend is probably old enough —I certainly am—to remember the days when an Englishman’s home was always referred to as his castle. Castles are besieged by mice. What worries me about this is that the officers who will have powers to enter my castle and your Lordships’ castles—mine is a very small place—vastly outnumber the number of mice who are able to do so. The mice are undercontrolled and so, in present legislation, are very large numbers of these officials. I do not think that they should be and noble Lords probably do not think that they should be either.
My noble friend has suggested a simple and elegant way to control the situation. The noble Lord, Lord Borrie, who shakes his head, happens to be a fellow honorary vice-president of the Trading Standards Institute. I was hearted by what he said, although he may not have intended that. He said that the removal of the powers suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, does not go far enough. I join others who think that the provision could be further improved with consideration by the other place. Some of us have been Ministers and have had legislation that we wanted passed. It is ludicrous to leave this legislation as it and to entrust the matter to a departmental inquiry, of all things, in the expectation that it will sort it out within a time limit or achieve something worth while.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Heyhoe Flint
My Lords, I regret that I was not able to be present for the debate on Report, and I am therefore glad to have this opportunity to make brief comments on the progress that has been made on this part of the Bill. In the long innings of the Bill, I started off as an attacking batsman working with the sports and recreation sector in seeking to knock certain aspects of it out of the ground. I am now sufficiently reassured to play a steady, forward-defensive, strong and resolute stroke against the proposed amendment.
In previous debates, my sporting colleagues and I, including my noble friend Lord Addington, highlighted the concerns voiced by the sport and recreation sector, which has more volunteers than any other sector in the United Kingdom—no fewer than 2 million. The central concern was that the term “day-to-day supervision” was not workable for organisations that safeguard children in a wide range of specialised and unique environments. However, I very much welcome the clarity provided by the amended qualitative description of supervision, and was greatly encouraged by the assurance given by the Minister on Report that sports organisations would have precisely the discretion that they need in determining the appropriate level of checking for voluntary roles.
In counteracting the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, I am grateful to the Government for having listened and responded in this way. My sentiments are echoed by the England and Wales Cricket Board, the Football Association and other members of the Sport and Recreation Alliance, which represents more than 300 governing bodies. The Government have struck the right balance and arrived at a proportionate place, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister will say today.
The governing bodies of sport are keen for this receptive dialogue to continue, and I welcome the Minister’s other assurances on Report that his department will work alongside the sport and recreation sector to develop guidance and implement the new safeguarding framework, including in the further education sector. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, spoke about that. Organisations that administer sport and recreation will need to plan well in advance of changes to ensure that the new system is implemented effectively. Therefore, anything that the Minister can say to reassure the hard-working staff of these governing bodies about the timeline and the process of the consultation will be greatly appreciated.
In conclusion, my key point, having had several in-depth meetings with the Minister and his team, and consulted very widely with national governing bodies of sport, is that we have been assured that safeguarding children will always be a priority of this Government. Safeguarding is the responsibility of everyone—the Government, employers, voluntary organisations and communities. The Government can ensure proper eligibility for criminal record disclosures for those working with vulnerable groups. However, it is also the responsibility of employers and voluntary organisations to ensure that they have in place proper, risk-based safeguarding mechanisms that protect children, and that they do not rely solely on a criminal record or barred-list check. Additionally, taking some supervised work out of regulated activity will give employers and administrators scope to make the appropriate judgment, and will reduce the burden on employers and encourage volunteering.
We in the sector that I represent have been assured that statutory guidance on supervision will be provided. The Bill makes it clear that supervision must be reasonable in all circumstances for protecting the children concerned. People working closely with children but not within regulated activities will be eligible for enhanced criminal record certificates. It is not right to provide barred-list information on enhanced criminal record certificates that does not relate to regulated activity. The information is not relevant to employers who are not providing regulated activities, and could lead to too many people being barred from work in which barring is not relevant. This action could significantly expand the scope of the scheme, possibly to greater numbers than proposed by the old scheme. With this proportionate and balanced understanding and government assurances, I feel it would be unwise to support Amendment 5 because it would take the regime back to something that would be disproportionate and would discourage volunteering across all sectors of life.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I very much support what the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said from her enormous experience. I suggest that the House and particularly the Minister should take very careful account of it. Saying that means that I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said about his amendment, which I also support. I do not at the moment think that I support what the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, said. The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, is the one that matters.
The important point is regular and close contact with children. I listened with some dismay to the noble Baroness, Lady Heyhoe Flint, because I am not sure that she is talking about what we are talking about. I do not believe that what she said is really what we are concerned with on this amendment. I am a school governor—I am going to a governors’ meeting tomorrow—and I have been CRB checked, but I cannot see for what reason I should be CRB checked because I never see a child without someone else there. Even when I go around the school, I am always accompanied. That is not what this amendment is about. It is about regular and close contact with children, as I said, and that is the point on which noble Lords should concentrate.
Baroness Randerson
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, for putting forward this amendment. His huge experience and understanding of this issue give this amendment strength across the Chamber. Noble Lords will be aware that in the earlier stages of the Bill I put down amendments in relation to further education in particular. From the start, I have been very concerned that the Government’s vision of the world of education is just too neat and tidy and has clear demarcation lines. In practice, life is not like that. The Association of Colleges, which represents the colleges, shares those concerns. It suggested that further education and sixth-form colleges should be placed in the same category as schools. The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, uses a form of words that takes a different, but appropriate, approach. It is a subtle, flexible approach that is suitable across a variety of settings, not just in further education or the world of education as a whole but in the church, voluntary organisations, leisure activities and so on.
In practice, young people develop relationships of trust with people to whom they can directly relate and who are helpful to them. Indeed, they often fight shy of relating to, liaising with or trusting the people who are formally in charge of a situation. Very vulnerable young people will instinctively shy away from figures of authority, so very often they develop a bond of trust with the lady in the canteen who gives them a extra-large helping, the IT technician who helps them sort out their computer, the lady in the library who does not give them a fine when they bring a book back late, or even the groundsman who has found them smoking secretly in a corner and has not told people in authority. Therefore, it is not easy to define that situation.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, as the Minister has explained, my Amendment 50B seeks to understand precisely what is meant by his Amendment 50A. I welcome the direction in which the Government are moving, and I hope that I will welcome the guidance as well. As he said, this issue caused some unease among noble Lords in previous debates, and there were some very powerful and very knowledgeable contributions on the last occasion.
My amendment would take out the words “in all the circumstances”. There has been reference not only to unease but many times to balance, which in a number of places in this Bill has been the approach taken. However, concern has been expressed that balance in this context may be more dangerous than we would like to think. I am not clear what is meant by “the circumstances” here. Is it a balance between what is required for the protection of children and the burden on those who are supervising?
The Minister has said that it means more than simply “reasonable”, and qualifies it—of course, “reasonable” is a qualification in itself. My concern, as he has anticipated, is that to add “in all the circumstances” would reduce the degree or quality of supervision required. It must mean something, otherwise it would simply say “reasonable”. I do not think it adds; I fear it may detract. He has explained that it requires local managers on the ground to judge the risk—I think I am right in saying—in the circumstances of the particular activity. It still seems to me that “reasonable” alone would do the job. My amendment looks for confirmation that “in all the circumstances” is not a reference to the burden on those who supervise or who might supervise.
I started by saying that I welcome the direction in which the Government are moving, and I would hate this phraseology to take us backwards from that. I beg to move.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I have put my name to this amendment to the amendment. First, I apologise to the House and the Minister for not having been here at the beginning of his explanation. I share the concern of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, about the use of the words “in all the circumstances”. Either it is reasonable or it is not reasonable. People will wonder whether “in all the circumstances” adds something to “reasonable” that might not be entirely clear.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that short and welcome intervention, but my real tribute must go to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for his tireless efforts on this issue and his splendid introduction to the amendment. It is said that a society should be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable members, and the children who have entered our shores to work in modern-day slavery are truly some of the most vulnerable in our society. The noble Lord, Lord McColl, has been an extraordinary advocate for all those who have been trafficked, but especially children. We all must have found the ages of the children mentioned this evening deeply shocking.
As the noble Lord said in the debate held earlier this month, the UK should be striving to be a beacon of good practice in this area, not simply doing the minimum to toe the line. When children are trafficked into this country, they often arrive alone and without any trace of where they have come from, with no way to communicate and without anyone who cares for their best interest. The lucky children will be picked up at the border, but others become known to the authorities only many months and sometimes years after entering the country, having been forced into prostitution or slave labour by their traffickers. Those children who are identified will come into contact with scores of extremely dedicated professionals—border agency staff, the police, social services, foster carers and lawyers—all of whom will have partial responsibility for their care, yet no single adult will have responsibility for providing advocacy for a child in all those situations.
The purpose of a guardian or a legal advocate is, as termed in this amendment, to mediate between all the different agencies on behalf of the child and to provide the continuous oversight and physical presence that they need while navigating the process. As the noble Lord said, between 2005 and 2009 32 per cent of child trafficking victims went missing from care. As a citizen, I am ashamed of that. Child victims of human trafficking need highly specialised protection because of the nature of the criminal world that we are dealing with. Human trafficking has a net value of $36 billion a year, with human lives as its commodity, and organised criminal groups will go to terrible lengths to abduct a child from care. Articles 14 and 16 of the EU directive require member states to implement measures that are tailored to the specific vulnerabilities of these children. The appointment of a guardian or legal advocate as described in the amendment would ensure that the UK was fully compliant with both the letter and the spirit of the directive in providing the child with a legal advocate who will provide advocacy for that child from the moment they are identified both in dealings with authorities and in court.
I hear what the Minister says and I am glad that the Government are now going to pursue these issues further with the Children’s Commissioner, because I can think of no better person who can really push these issues forward. I hope that the Minister will be able to keep us informed of progress as the discussions take place, and of course I trust him to do that. However, I have to say that I am absolutely certain that the noble Lord, Lord McColl, will pursue these issues doggedly until he is satisfied that every child who is trafficked into this country has a legal advocate. I am confident that the issue will be pursued to its successful conclusion.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, I, too, have put my name to this amendment. I declare an interest as the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking and a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation. I am also extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for this amendment and for the dedication with which he has pursued both through his own Bill and during the passage of this Bill what is so needed for these children.
The amendment looks to one element of the needs of the most disadvantaged group of children in the world: those who have been trafficked, removed from their families, however inadequate the family situation may have been, and brought here, to a foreign country, where they probably do not speak the language, to become sex slaves, domestic slaves, thieves or minders of cannabis farms. As the noble Lord has told us, they have no family life, no chance to go to school or to lead the life of an ordinary child. This is modern child slavery, and how do we treat those who escape? The signing of the EU directive and the excellent strategy against human trafficking have put the Government on the right track. The issue is the extent to which the good intentions are actually carried out. I suggest that the United Kingdom is only semi-compliant with the directive, but we are all on the same side in trying to achieve the best possible outcomes for these children. I was delighted to hear the preliminary and most helpful comments from the Minister; none the less I would like to continue to make the speech I have prepared.
Article 14 of the directive was set out by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, but how do we deal with it in England and Wales? As the noble Lord said, the care and protection of these children is covered by the Children Acts of 1989 and 2004. Local authorities have a statutory duty of care, protection and accommodation to children at risk. However, I agree with the noble Lord that the present set-up within social work care does not meet the needs of the trafficked child. At present, no one in this country has parental responsibility for such a child. Mothers and fathers have parental responsibility, and local authorities share parental responsibility if they have a care order, but under Part III of the Children Act 1989, not Part IV, parental responsibility remains with the parents, who may be anywhere in the world and may themselves have been the traffickers; so the child is in a sort of administrative limbo.
We know, as the noble Lord pointed out so graphically, that traffickers get in touch with children who go missing—and no one actually knows how many children do go missing. The figures on missing children generally, those within the UK as well as trafficked children, are seriously inaccurate. There is no effective trafficking database, but the figures given today, although I would be surprised if they are the total, are indeed shocking. Those children who remain with a local authority have no consistent person to whom to turn. They are exposed and subjected to a bewildering variety of processes over which they have no control with no consistent individual to help them surmount the hurdles set before them.
I also remind noble Lords that these are foreign children who do not necessarily speak English and have no one in this country with parental responsibility or whom they know. One only has to contrast such a child with a child living in this country who comes to the threshold of care proceedings as being “at serious risk of harm”. That child is always allocated a guardian for care proceedings, usually from CAFCASS. The amendment seeks to ameliorate this sad and most unsatisfactory situation.
I have to say, however, that the wording of the amendment is not perfect. The phrase “legal advocate”, which I am afraid I suggested, may not be the best phrase. It is difficult to work out the best description of a person who should carry out the tasks, but the tasks themselves are much clearer. The person needs to be a mentor, a next friend and adviser to the child, and we have to find the best title for the individual carrying out this role. What we need for the trafficked child is someone who will be around at the end of the phone, will meet the child, will know when the child goes missing and will alert the agencies to find them. The person would help to arrange all the services needed by the child—medical, psychological, educational and interpretation into the child’s own language—and assist in the child’s access to legal and other representation. The person would advise the child and help to promote their best interests, and make long-term plans for their future. Ideally, the person identified should have parental responsibility for the child or at least some statutory authority, so that the agencies with which that person will deal would be obliged to pay attention to his or her intervention. As the noble Lord, Lord McColl, quite rightly said, some training will be necessary. The untrained amateur is not the person for this job.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, said about this being organised crime, it is urgent that the legislation is in place for the police to be able to go out there and act effectively. As I understand it, they do not have effective means at this stage. Whatever may be done holistically at some future date, now is when we need to have something for the police to deal with this business.
The Minister of State Home Office (Lord Henley)
My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. I will start by referring to the remarks from my noble friend Lady Browning. It is no secret that, only two days before she left the Home Office, I went to visit her, along with other Ministers, to discuss the whole question of metal theft, because she had identified this as a problem and wanted to get action throughout the whole of government. I suggested then, as a Minister in Defra, that I might be able to help by offering some assistance through the work of the Environment Agency. Two days later I found myself in the Home Office and was very nearly in the position of writing a letter from myself to myself. In the end, the letter came from my successor the noble Lord, Lord Taylor.
I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for setting out what exactly is the problem. I think that we all understand what it is. I am grateful to him for starting off by emphasising that this is driven by second-hand metal prices. If he cares to look at the way that metal prices have gone over the last few years—sometimes up, sometimes down—he will find that the crime rate for metal theft has more or less exactly followed that line, and that it is on a distinctly upward curve. For that reason I was interested in his new figure for the possible cost of this whole problem to the country, which he put at about £1 billion. I have seen other figures which count the cost to the country and to business, one of about £220 million, another of around £700 million, and I would be interested to know where his figures have come from.
The important point to remember is that very often the actual value of what is stolen is relatively small; the issue is the knock-on effect of that particular crime. For example, when the lead is taken off a church roof, the lead has a value, and a value that is going up, but the real damage then comes from water leaking in and damaging the church. If you remove the wiring that deals with signalling from the railway line, you will have hundreds of hours of delays and major disruption caused to a large number of people—and as someone who spends an awful lot of time on the west coast main line I understand that as well.
We have examples of hospitals which have had to cancel operations as a result of power cuts caused by metal theft. I could give examples relating to the police and others, who have had their communications disrupted as a result of metal theft. Then on top of that we have the further elements of heritage crime. Not only war memorials are being taken; the example that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, gave of the Barbara Hepworth statue being stolen and melted down is an example of something that went in the opposite direction. Here was something that was of very great value, should one have been able to put it on the market at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, but which when it went into the scrap metal yard suddenly became worth relatively very little indeed, and in fact would very quickly be ground up into bronze granules to be smelted.
The important point to remember about that particular theft is that it indicates just where the problem is. It is obvious that the first person to handle the statue—the first scrap yard owner who took it in—must have known that it was, as they say, hot. You do not often get Barbara Hepworth or Barbara Hepworth-like statues legitimately coming into scrap metal yards. Someone knew that it was stolen property and that they would be able to convert it into cash, while removing most of its value. On a number of occasions I have made the point that we believe that the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964 is—how should I put it?—beyond its sell-by date. We wish to see a reform to that Act as soon as is possible, and we will make sure that we do it.
I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling this amendment and allowing us to have a debate on the damage that this practice is doing to our infrastructure. I am also grateful to him for highlighting the fact that there have been a number of deaths as a result of this. Although the noble Lord says that it was the perpetrator being killed, we should have some sympathy. For example, a 16 year-old was recently killed taking copper cabling from a power substation. He only did so because it was easy for him to take that copper wire and convert it into cash; and, in the process, someone who did not understand these things killed himself. Moreover, not only are some of the perpetrators being killed; it is likely that, fairly soon, innocent individuals could be killed as they try to sort out the mess caused by these problems.
The House will be aware—the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, referred to it—of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary’s Statement on 26 January, when she announced that we will be bringing forward amendments to the LASPO Bill to strengthen the law in this area. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, that we hope to do this on Report rather than tomorrow or on Thursday, which are the other days when we will debate these matters. This is specifically to deal with the problem of cash. As I say, the real problem is the ease with which people can convert stolen metal into cash, with no questions being asked and no traceability whatever.
In that Statement my right honourable friend indicated that the amendments would create a new criminal offence to prohibit cash payments to purchase scrap metal and to significantly increase the fines for all offences under the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964, which regulates the scrap recycling industry. In effect, once the amendments to the LASPO Bill have been agreed and the Bill has been passed, rather than having a maximum fine of £1,000 for offences under the Scrap Metal Dealers Act, the fine will be unlimited. We will go from an average fine of the order of £350 to a more realistic figure which might encourage some scrap metal dealers to act in a responsible manner.