Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I hope that my noble friend will stick hard to this, because one of the issues that most affected one in a very long life as a constituency Member of Parliament was the number of people whose lives had been made absolutely intolerable by activities of this kind. It is important that we stick to this in the way in which he has proposed.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I thank my noble friend for those encouraging words. I feel that we are right on this issue and I suspect that all noble Lords will know that, with discretion on this matter resting with the courts, there will be proper evaluation of the issues before any decision is made. I would expect any court to take full account of the nature of the behaviour before deciding whether to impose such a condition. I might add that the Home Affairs Select Committee considered this point during the pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill. In its report on the draft Bill, the HASC said,

“we are happy to leave the decision not to name a young person to the discretion of the judge”.

We agree that this is appropriately a matter for judicial discretion for all respondents under 18, whether older or younger than 16.

For these reasons, I am confident that the reporting of under-18s will be carefully considered and used only in circumstances where it is necessary. I hope that I have been able to put this particular issue into context and that my noble friend will withdraw her amendment.

Identity Cards

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

The noble Lord is very well briefed as a result of his previous involvement in the Home Office on this subject. He will know that the Home Office takes great interest in this area. The whole question of identity and how we can establish it lies at the core of an awful lot of policies. I accept what the noble Lord says; the work is actively under review. However, we do not believe that an identity card has a part to play in that.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I wonder whether my noble friend would be kind enough to look at this again, simply because the proposal here is for a voluntary card and it would help people. Could we not draw a line under the political arguments which preceded this and accept that many people would like to have access to such a card and that we should provide it at their cost? Surely there is no skin off anybody’s nose for doing so.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I assure my noble friend that a sufficient number of documents are already in circulation which will assist identity processes. There is no need to add a further identity card to the list of cards that people have to carry.

Police Integrity

Lord Deben Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

On the noble Lord’s latter point, if there is to be legislation, there will have to be a period during which Parliament and the wider public will be engaged in considering what might be in it. On resources, the Home Secretary will write to the IPCC, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, PCCs and the college itself to seek detailed proposals on how the transfer of resources might take place and over what period. I think that will help the noble Lord, Lord Condon, in his question to me. This is a matter of consensuality. I think that there is sufficient consensus within the police service to enable this to be done on a consensual basis, recognising that integrity in policing is holistic and not specific to one particular force.

[Lord Deben]

Can my noble friend confirm that there was a point at the turn of the century when in police education the phrase “leadership training” was changed to “management training”? If that is so, can he assure the House that that will be reversed and the lesson will be learnt that leadership is crucial in an effective police force?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My noble friend quite rightly recognises that we have been through a process where management has been seen as being the most important ingredient for success. Indeed, management is important, but in policing—and many other services—leadership is vital because of how those who command inspire those who work with them. The College of Policing is based on developing exactly that set of skills and indeed a professional ethos within the police force and reinforcing that professionalism.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

My Lords, as one would expect, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, made a cogent and well researched point in favour of effectively extending the timeframe not only beyond 15 years but perhaps indefinitely, so long as one can still claim British citizenship. Therein lie various practical problems, which I will come to in a moment.

My noble friend Lord Lipsey said that of the 5.6 million overseas voters only 23,000 currently take advantage of that, which suggests that the demand is not very great. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, made the point about the key principle in our country of representing a constituency and those who live within it. We await with interest the result of the determination of the European Court of Human Rights, but I recall discussing this problem with a representative from the country in the European Union which is probably the closest to us—that is, the Republic of Ireland. A friend who was a Senator from Ireland said, “Well, think of all the Irish people who are overseas, the Irish diaspora. If we were to give a vote to them all, there would probably be a Sinn Fein Government in Ireland”. That is the point he was making.

Clearly the intention is obvious—to extend the vote to as many overseas British citizens as possible. I shall be brief because there is an important debate to follow, but there are clearly technical problems and grounds of principle that make one feel very cautious about this proposal. The potential numbers have been mentioned, particularly as more people travel and work overseas. There may be British citizens in Australia, Pakistan, Canada, Bangladesh and of course in all the European Union countries. There is a great range of countries and it will be very difficult to check adequately the bona fides of those who claim citizenship and claim to be eligible to vote. How do we prevent fraud? Those problems will be formidable and there will be also be a great problem in checking whether people are still alive after their last declaration.

On the grounds of principle, I recall the debate in the other place in 1985 when there was a package of proposals. I concede that the length of time is arbitrary but there was a consensus result at that time. Now of course the numbers are very much greater and we have, as has been cited, the reverse of the Boston Tea Party—that is, representation without taxation. We cannot extend that totally because many of the British citizens living overseas will be eligible for British pensions and therefore they have some stake in this country. Perhaps it would be better to say “representation without a substantial stake in this country”? Everyone who is resident in the UK has that substantial stake and those who live for perhaps a very extended period overseas increasingly lose sight of this country and lose sight of any stake they may have in it. Therefore, their stakeholding in this country becomes less and less serious. I will not go any further save to say that in my judgment there are considerable technical problems in the proposal and there are also major obstacles of principle.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I intervene having heard the three previous speeches. First, to listen to a strong advocate of almost any electoral system except the first-past-the-post, single constituency arrangement, fight for this proposal was a surprise, particularly as the noble Lord will go on to support a misuse of the electoral system to ensure that we have an unfair electoral system for even longer. That is a peculiar case to put forward.

Then we heard the internationalist party explain how people who lived abroad might not understand what was happening in Britain. Sometimes I think that a number of people living abroad understand rather more clearly what is happening in Britain than some of those here who do not appear to follow the newspapers or the media very closely.

Then we heard the definition of how people voted. I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that those of us who have been elected to the Houses of Parliament know that the reasons why people in this country vote and the logic on which they make their decisions, people who have never travelled abroad, certainly would not meet the conditions which he put forward as reasonable conditions for anyone who is voting.

Then there was the argument that because we might find that people who are at the moment, in their view, penalised because pensions for which they have paid out of taxation and national insurance are, because of their particular place of residence, refused, that they might vote in a different way than that which the Government might like, that evidently is a reason to deny them the vote. That is the argument of totalitarian regimes down history. That is why people did not want the extension of the franchise in Britain. People said, “My goodness, if those who are at the moment misused are given the vote, they might object to that”. I find that an odd argument to come from any part of the House, but to hear it from the party opposite, which is about to say that some voters in this country are to have a bigger vote and more say for a longer time than would otherwise have been the case, seems to me to be an affront.

Although I have no particular view on this—I think that roughly speaking, what we have is perfectly reasonable—I hope that this House will take seriously the fact that we have now heard three speeches designed to say that people should not vote if by their voting they might do something which was inconvenient for noble Lords on either side and should therefore be refused the vote. That is precisely the debate that noble Lords are about to have, which is to say that because a particular reform proposed in this House today would give people a fairer vote but thereby might give a different result, we should not change the voting system to accommodate them. That is an attitude to democracy about which we should be ashamed. Our decision should be on what is fair, what is equal and what is reasonable. I happen to think that the present rules about 15 years more or less meet that, but the three speeches that we have heard show that some people are prepared to use the system to get a particular result rather than seeking to have a system in which the result is the decision of the public.

[Lord Wills]

I address myself briefly to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, with which I largely agree. I think that the criterion should be that it is fair and reasonable. Incidentally, I do not think that taxation is an issue here; taxation has never been a criterion for voting in this country and it is not now. It seems to me that what is, to use the noble Lord’s phrase, fair and reasonable, is that those who have chosen in a significant way to sever their relationship with this country should, after a certain period, lose their right to have a say in the affairs of this country. What that period of time should be is a matter for judgment. Like the noble Lord, Lord Deben, I think that 15 years is about right.

However, I want briefly to raise one significant issue that I would be grateful if the Minister would address in his response to the amendments. There is one important group of expatriates who deserve special consideration—those British citizens who have chosen to dedicate their lives to the service of large and small international organisations, such as the United Nations. There seems to be an anomaly there. These are people who have chosen to give their lives to public service which takes them all over the world, doing a job which serves this country and the rest of the world very well for the most part. It seems to me that there is a case for making a special exemption for those groups of people. There are lots of practical problems with that. Defining the kinds of international organisations which can be brought within the scope of such an exemption is difficult and problematic. In the past the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has championed the cause of such expatriates. However, there is a case for that group of British citizens to be considered separately, and I would be grateful if the Minister could address that in his response.

Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Lord Deben Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

The noble Lord, Lord Butler, is correcting something that I did not say. I said Labour Members of the Lords. There are no Labour Members of the Lords on this committee.

The information flow should be the subject of a much more substantive statement by the Minister when he responds than is normal on these occasions. I was interested in the remark made as an aside by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours on the fact that this question en principe has never been discussed in the past 14 years. I rather suspect that if we were setting up a constitution for a new member of the United Nations, we would be a little worried if that were the case. Although I am not saying that this amendment is the right thing, I will support it because I believe that it opens up a very important question. We know that the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, is a typical, reputable, outstanding and well respected member of the circle in which this sort of activity takes place. It used to be called the Establishment. I do not know whether that was a compliment or an insult; it was half way between. However, we do not need to be so scared of the idea that we are always playing into the hands of enemies of the country, whether it is al-Qaeda or anybody else, if we have a more adult approach to these matters. Political balance is needed by those who have been involved in the agencies—I see a couple on the Front Bench—where people find it perhaps difficult to understand the world where other people come from. It would be much better if the normal rules of political balance and openness were observed.

Finally, as regards the remark of the previous speaker, we had the example last week of members of the Treasury Select Committee not covering themselves in glory when asking questions about LIBOR because they did not really understand what they were talking about. I can see the objection that ordinary souls on a committee like this would be of no use because they would not know what they were talking about. Obviously, by definition, they would not know what they were talking about as they would not have been serving in one of the agencies or been on this intelligence committee for a number of years or been Secretary of State for Defence or whatever. I wonder whether that is going to inspire public confidence.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I intervene as somebody who has not been a member of this committee. I have now managed to get papers from the noble Lord who sits next to me. Unusually I find myself wishing to ask my noble friend to listen carefully to the words of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for the following reason. The issue is the confidence of the public in this committee. I have a difficulty of inventing a committee of a particular kind in order to meet that confidence requirement because it seems to start from a grave disadvantage of looking as if you have an artefact here. People complain about the fact that nobody seems to know too much about what goes on, so let us invent something that seems to meet their requirements. That is what it will look like if we make the alterations suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, although I am entirely in favour of them.

The advantage of a Select Committee is primarily that it is something that people know and it has, over the years, established a position, as a concept, of independence. It clearly is not the creature of the Prime Minister or of the political parties. It is manifestly, and increasingly, with the election of its chairman, an independent form of investigation. Therefore, prima facie, it would be much more sensible to use that mechanism and to make such changes as are necessary for the particularities of such a Select Committee so that at least when it is referred to as a Select Committee people immediately catch on—in so far as they know about anything in Parliament—that this is an independent, non-party parliamentary committee that is treated by its members as a place where they work in the national interest and not in their party-political interest.

I think there is an important advantage in using the Select Committee structure. My worry is that my noble friend will be led by all sorts of officials—I have been in this position and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, will excuse me when I try to describe it—of the “better not Minister”, “it would be safer to do something slightly different”, “you never know what might happen” kind. That attitude is endemic in the giving of advice because advisers would prefer not to have given advice that turned out not to be quite right, so it is better to give the most negative advice.

I hope my noble friend the Minister will be prepared to say that we can create a construct that is a Select Committee and sits naturally in the parliamentary structure but is specifically designed to deal with security matters and will be what everyone outside will recognise is different from a Select Committee on the environment or a Select Committee concerned with trade and industry. Is it not better to use the strength of the Select Committee process and procedure and, above all, of public understanding rather than to try to create something special?

I very much respect my noble friend Lord Lothian and I understand his fear that the Select Committee will be expected to have public hearings. I agree that a public hearing in which every answer is, “I am afraid I can’t answer that” will be an embarrassment and not helpful, but it seems to me not impossible that, before any such hearings are started, this Select Committee should publicly be said to be a Select Committee that does not have public hearings, except in unusual circumstances. You start off as you mean to go on. No one would misunderstand that. Indeed, I think if it were stated like that, it would be much easier for the committee to proceed, and I would like to see it. But to say that because it is different from other Select Committees in that sense, it ought to be set up in an entirely different way is a mistake because it is more similar to a Select Committee in every other manner. What people want to know is that it is independent and all-party, that its members take things seriously as parliamentarians and that its secrecy is only the secrecy that is necessary because of the nature of the things that it discusses.

I hope my noble friend will not be led astray by the siren voices of those for whom this is a step too far. We have been a long time discussing this issue. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, reminded us of how long and there was time before even he came on the scene in which this discussion was taking place. I hope we will not step back now. We ought to do the thing properly and set down the terms of the Select Committee in advance.

Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I would be the first to say to my noble friend that he is not an ordinary lawyer and nor is his wife—they are both very eminent lawyers. If they say it is a morass of unintelligible law obviously it must be. However, I am not sure it is as unintelligible as he claims. Obviously, we will look at this. As with all law, if consolidation can make matters simpler it is something that can be looked at. If it is a matter for departments—in this case the Home Office—we must look at it. As my noble friend will be aware, finding time for any legislative changes is always difficult.

[Lord Deben]

I hope that my noble friend will accept that it is not just a matter of making the law intelligible for lawyers. The people who suffer—if I may put it like that—under the immigration laws are people who ought to feel, at least as far as they can, that they have been dealt with fairly. We have had examples already this afternoon of situations that are so complex that it would be very hard to explain to one of these people that they have been dealt with fairly. If they leave this country I would be much happier if they said, “Of course, I ought to have got in but actually I was dealt with fairly”, than if they go away feeling, “I really don’t know why the blazes I wasn’t allowed in”. It seems to me hugely important that we get this formulation right.

[Lord Henley]

My noble friend is absolutely correct. It is always difficult to make sure that any law is understandable to the ordinary man or woman in the street or the ordinary man or woman on the Clapham omnibus. It is obviously, as our noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill put it, sometimes difficult to make the law intelligible to even the extraordinary lawyers let alone the ordinary ones. We try to make sure that it is as intelligible as possible but, as I think my noble friend Lord Lester is aware, even with some of the simplest laws one lawyer will take one view and another will take another view. These matters are often argued in the courts at some considerable length. We try to do what we can to make things as simple as possible. I hoped that this would be a very short amendment, and I hope that the reassurance that I offered to my noble kinsman will be sufficient for him to withdraw the amendment.

European Court of Justice: Jurisdiction

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, as I think I made clear, I do not want to go through all 133 measures at this stage. The House would not like it at Question Time and it would not be an appropriate use of the limited time I have. We will make appropriate decisions on some of them beforehand if it is appropriate but the larger number is a matter for 2014.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that there is more than one view on this side of the House and that the way in which we should discuss this should be as unemotional and as factual as possible, and that we do not help the argument by bringing what can only be called extreme views into the discussion?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, to put it very simply, I agree with my noble friend that there is more than one view on this side of the House. There is possibly more than one view on the other side of the House and more than one view in all corners of the House. I agree with every aspect of what my noble friend has said.

Identity Documents Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I share the disquiet of many who have already spoken. I urge the Government to think again about this.

[Lord Deben]

Perhaps I might concentrate on why people bought the card in the place. If they bought it, as it seems, for a purpose, and that purpose no longer obtains, there is no doubt that we are taking away something from them. Surely, therefore, the answer is not to recompense them but to enable them to continue for the period of the card’s validity to be able to do what it is they bought the card for in the first place. That is a sensible and proper way of doing it. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay—though I may express myself in less elevated language—I feel that the public have every reason to believe that, if they buy something from the Government for a period of time, they should be able to continue to use it in that way. Whereas recompense is an expensive and untidy way of doing it, I really do not see why they cannot go on using it for the time that they were supposed to use it for.

[Baroness Hamwee]

I must apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for interrupting him. I think that the technical term for what was going on around here is “kerfuffle”.

I will not pretend that I have not been troubled by this issue. I am not persuaded by arguments that members of the public should have read the manifestos, certainly not in the detail that might have been expected, nor that they could have predicted the outcome of the general election. I am being told that everybody should have been reading the manifestos, but we leave it to the press to summarise them. However, the debate in Committee was about fine detail in the manifestos, and I do not think that that should be used as the basis—certainly not the only basis—for the Government’s argument.

My view is that this issue is finely balanced between taxpayers and individual cardholders. It is not the same as a consumer situation where there are two parties, the supplier of goods and the purchaser of goods. There are three parties, and the third party is the taxpayer. I understand the point that this is a comparatively small sum of money, but comparatively small sums have more value than they did a year or two ago.

The point has been made about whether this would be expropriation. That point was not taken up by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. No doubt the Minister will say something about that. I hope, too, that she will say what would be required if the cards were to go on having a use. As I understand it, it would still be necessary to retain the register. Otherwise, the cards are pieces of plastic that do not relate to anything. Quite apart from our objection to the offensiveness of the register, the cost and perhaps the confusion of retaining the register would be issues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

The point I was answering before noble Lords intervened was the inference somehow that we are inflicting great hardship on cardholders. We do not believe this to be the case.

We do not believe that the statutory basis of the issue of ID cards creates a contract or anything akin to a contract in relations between the Secretary of State and the cardholder. Remedies that would be available in the courts if the contract were governed by the law of contract or consumer legislation—which I think is the point raised by the noble Lord—is not available for identity cards.

One or two noble Lords have raised the issue of compromise and of whether it would be a good idea to have one. Could we not, for instance, set the cost of this against the cost of the next passport or, indeed, use the lifetime for which the present card was available? There are associated problems. I do not want to detain the House extensively on this, but the fact of the matter is that the two databases—that is to say, the identity register and the passport database—are not the same. They contain different information, issued for different purposes; their legislative frameworks for what you pay are also different. We cannot therefore simply transfer the one across from the other.

That construction of two differently governed databases with different information on them was the construction of the legislation put through by our predecessors. Unfortunately, in addition to that we are going to destroy the database. We would otherwise have the continuing cost of maintaining it. That is why it cannot be regarded as a valid document for its lifetime; there is nothing behind it against which anybody needing to check your identity would validly be able so to do. There is a problem in that it simply is not a useful document any longer.

[Lord Deben]

I understand that there may be technical reasons why my proposal does not work, but surely they do not apply to the question of a passport. If you sent your form in, it would be quite clear from all the other documents that that little card was for the same person who sent in the form. You do not have to look it up on the two databases; you just know that that is one of the cases in which they could have £30 off. I do not see that that costs anything at all.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

I am sorry; I thought that the noble Lord was suggesting that this card should be available for use during its previously indicated lifetime. It is of course a separate issue as to whether you could ask for a refund. There are many problems about the refund issue, one of which is that we would have to verify whether the person presenting a card was actually entitled to that refund, which would mean referring to the database. We would have to notify everybody. The costs involved—

Drugs: Classification

Lord Deben Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, we believe that all drugs that are classified on the list are extremely harmful to society; we do not believe that alcohol taken in moderation is harmful to society. Clearly, there is alcohol abuse, but the Government already have a strategy—and we will add to it—on reducing the possibilities of that abuse. This Government are taking measures that are rather more stringent than those of the previous Administration.

[Lord Deben]

Will my noble friend take very great care before she takes seriously the recent report of this independent committee on drugs? Its judgment is based on a methodology that to most of us, when looked at carefully, is shown to be entirely flawed.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the Government have confidence in the independent advice given by their own statutory commission and we trust that advice. I am inclined to agree with the comments just made by my noble friend.