Scrap Metal Dealers Bill

Lord Barwell Excerpts

Friday 13th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point and she might well be right. Time will tell. I have no doubt that my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South will be successful with his Bill and we will see, but I am not necessarily as confident as my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) that that will happen. The criminals who are engaged in such illegal activity are clearly making a lot of money from it, and I do not believe that on the back of this Bill—my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South made it clear that he did not see it as a silver bullet—those people will pack up their equipment and say, “It was nice while it lasted, but now we’ll all move on to knitting,” or to some other activity of which we would all approve. I suspect that they will continue with their criminal activity and will merely pursue it in a different way. It will probably go underground and through illegitimate businesses rather than legitimate scrap metal dealerships.

We should be wary of the idea that regulating businesses will solve the problem. I have always taken what might be deemed an old-fashioned view of such matters and if someone is going out and committing the crime of stealing metal, we should be clamping down on the people who are going out and stealing the metal. The Bill seems to be chiefly aimed at clamping down on the metal dealers further down the line. The people going out and stealing the metal are not being targeted as much as the dealers.

[Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend that we should be clamping down on the people who are stealing the plaques, the memorials and the cabling, but in the case of my own dad’s plaque, the dealer who bought it had bought tens of thousands of plaques and war memorials from across south London. Does my hon. Friend not agree that as well as going after the people who are stealing the items, we should come down like a ton of bricks on the people who know what they are buying and should not let them continue to operate in the industry? That is what the Bill would achieve.

[Philip Davies]

I have a great deal of sympathy for what my hon. Friend says and I think the whole House will have sympathy for what happened and for the distress it must have caused him. Of course, we all want to clamp down on not only the people who steal but on the people who knowingly trade in such metal. I do not think that anybody would deny that, but the proposals in the Bill do not just clamp down on the people involved in the theft or in the trading of stolen metal. The Bill is clamping down on everybody. In effect, it states that everybody involved in the trade is a criminal, that we will treat them all as criminals and that we will clamp down on them all. My point is that it is rather unfair to categorise a whole industry as involved in illegality. In every industry, there are good people and bad people and the Bill imposes extra costs and burdens on the good as well as the bad.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in support of the private Member’s Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) has introduced. He referred to a number of ways in which this problem affects our home towns and constituencies across the country, including through attacks on community facilities and buildings. He referred to Croydon minster, which sits in my constituency. He also referred to the theft of telephone cables. Residents in Forestdale in my constituency have suffered from that problem on numerous occasions.

My hon. Friend also referred to my personal experience. I want to take a couple of minutes of the House’s time to talk about that, not because what my family have been through is any worse than what thousands of other families across the countries have experienced, but because it is important to put on the record the effect that this crime has on people. In the case of my family, my father suffered with Alzheimer’s for a number of years. During that time my mother cared for him at home in increasingly difficult circumstances, until he had to go into a hospice for the last few months of his life. It was an incredibly difficult time for the whole family, but particularly for my mother, who struggled with seeing someone she loved being stripped away from her day by day over a number of years. She gave a great deal of thought to the message that she wrote on the plaque to be placed where my father’s ashes were interred. Beyond my personal anger at the theft of that plaque was my anger as a son that my mother should have to go through further pain after what she had already experienced.

As I said, I mention that not because what we have been through is any worse than what thousands of other families have been through, but to show the type of crime this is. It is one thing for someone to have their car broken into and a stereo or iPod stolen, but when they lose something that is close to them on an emotional level, that is a much more devastating blow. It is a serious offence.

The one thing that perhaps goes beyond even the theft of plaques from people’s graves is the theft of war memorials. Let us think of the incredible sacrifices that generations before mine had to make for this country, to defend the freedoms that we now all enjoy. I have language to describe people who conduct such crimes, but I suspect that you would regard it as unparliamentary, Mr Deputy Speaker.

My hon. Friend rightly said that the Bill on its own would not be the silver bullet that solved the problem, but it contains a number of key ingredients that will help to do that. My hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who is no longer in her place, talked about cashless payments and the need to ensure a level playing field across the industry.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who has also had to leave the Chamber, said, the licensing system is a key ingredient. Before I came into the House I was a councillor for 12 years in the London borough of Croydon, and in the last year and a half crime and community safety were my responsibilities. On one of the most interesting evenings that I spent in that job, I went out with the police licensing team. Croydon had a large night-time economy, and they showed me a range of institutions, from those that were highly professionally run to those where I feared for the physical safety of the people in them.

That licensing system, which is a pretty good parallel to what the Bill proposes for the scrap mental industry, was hugely welcomed by the good operators, because they objected to rogue operators who did not invest sufficiently in maintaining the safety of those using their institutions and were undercutting them. To respond to a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) made, let me say that the reputable establishments did not object to the bureaucracy of having a licensing system but thought it was essential to try to drive out the rogue operators, which would be to their benefit.

My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South mentioned the importance of being able to establish where material has been sourced. He mentioned what Operation Tornado was achieving in the north of the country, and I hope that it will be spread nationwide quickly. The Bill also provides for unlimited fines for those who breach their licences.

I want to end my speech by responding to some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley. We come from different traditions within the Conservative party, but I have a very high regard for him. It is hugely to the benefit of the House that when there are proposals to introduce new legislation, there is a voice that questions the need for doing so and makes arguments about whether that is the right solution to the problem. He is right that in politics, when there is a public concern there is an instinct to do something to respond. Sometimes, that can lead to disproportionate legislation that places a cost on businesses or overly restricts individuals’ freedom. It is important that a different voice is heard when we have debates such as this. I suspect that my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) may still hope to speak and will make similar points.

I felt that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley presented the House with a binary choice—either taking a tougher approach to punishing those responsible for offences under the existing law, or changing the law and introducing new regulations. My strong conviction is that we should do both those things. It is not a choice of one or the other. In the two years I have been in the House, I have often found that the polarisation in the Chamber has presented such a choice. On the wider issue of crime, we are presented with the choice of either introducing tougher sentencing or reforming our prison system to try to reduce reoffending. I never quite understand why we cannot do both at the same time.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we should go after people who steal metal, make greater efforts to catch them and punish them more severely. He is also right that there are laws to deal with those who trade in stolen goods. However, there is good evidence that the industry sees a need for a licensing system to protect the good operators. He is right that we should not send the message that the whole industry is full of criminals, because there are legitimate, proper operators who are law-abiding people, but they themselves are asking us to examine the issue.

In my own case, the scrap metal dealer who bought the plaques—there were thousands of them, not just my father’s—knew exactly what he was doing. I absolutely agree that we should try to bring him to justice and punish him, and that there should be stronger punishment for trading in stolen goods. However, I also profoundly believe that he should not be able to go back into the industry after he has served that punishment and start operating again. That is why we need legislation on a licensing system.

I say with huge regard and affection for the role that my hon. Friend plays in the Chamber that I believe he has made a strong case for not only stronger punishment and more enforcement effort but changes in the law that will strengthen the hand of police and local authorities to deal with a crime that has been a scourge of many communities up and down the country. With that thought in mind, I am proud to support my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South in his efforts to deal with the problem.