Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Lord Lucas

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

But if one weapon were not to hand, do people not tend to use whatever is to hand? I suspect that we will find that people who own guns are rather less likely to murder people than those who do not.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, we are in danger of having a slightly false debate on this subject. Let us start from the simple fact that firearms and shotguns are, very easily, potentially lethal weapons. What is more, they are lethal weapons that can operate at some distance. They are therefore dangerous items. It has been decided by Parliament, quite properly, that there should be a licensing regime—that checks should be applied to individuals who hold them.

The amendment is not about comparing the population of those who are licensed firearms holders with those who are not; it is about a very specific sub-category. This is not an amendment that will stop, or is intended to stop, armed robbers. It is not about people who start off with malign intent. It is about the nature of the checks, and how they should be used, in very restricted circumstances. It is about people who would set out to acquire a firearm not because they want to rob a bank, but probably for sporting purposes; that is, I assume, the reason why the noble Lords who hold such licences apply for them, and use firearms.

The amendment suggests that, as part of the checks, if there is a history of the individual concerned having been involved in incidents of,

“violent conduct, domestic violence, or drug or alcohol abuse”,

the presumption should be that that person will be denied a licence. This is not about the application of open discretion by police officers. It says that the presumption will be that that individual will not be allowed a weapon.

This is nothing to do with people who acquire weapons illegally, and nothing to do with people who are trying to acquire weapons for other purposes; it simply says that if people with that particular sort of history apply to legally hold a lethal firearm, the presumption should be that they will not be allowed to do that. I would have thought that was eminently sensible. I find it almost unthinkable that that is not the starting point that will be adopted in your Lordships’ House.

What is being proposed by this very carefully worded amendment is that, in those cases where there are prima facie reasons that people may lose control and not use the weapons for the purposes for which they have sought a firearms licence—for example, they may murder or attack their partner or be so inebriated or under the influence of drugs that they would use a firearm against another person—the presumption should be that they are not allowed a licence.

No doubt the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and others will say, “Hang on, the chiefs of police have discretion in those cases”. However, the point that my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon made was that, given that there is discretion and given the way in which it operates, that is not sufficient. By passing this amendment, we would give those chief police officers not just a discretion, as we would be saying, “The presumption is that you do not put a lethal firearm in the hands of somebody who has committed domestic violence or has a history of alcohol abuse or drug abuse”. Surely, that provision is sensible, is a safeguard and is something on which we can all agree.

Procedure of the House (Proposal 3)

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Lord Lucas

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, since we cannot even squeeze the name of the person speaking in Grand Committee onto the television screen, I doubt if we can fit 25 words on it.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, a simple arrangement would be to have a surtitle over the Throne so that anyone could look at it up there.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Lord Lucas

Monday 7th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, an apology is not, of itself, an admission of liability. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, for allowing me to put that into English law, if I can update the noble Lord, Lord Marks, on it.

I come at this question from a slightly different angle. My familiarity is with doctors who have blown the whistle and had their careers destroyed as a result. That, too, has its roots in a lack of internal candour. I want to see the health service become more constructively self-critical, and for the mistakes and wrong judgments that have been made to be the subject of ordinary conversations within a hospital or other medical organisations, so that better care is provided in the future. This is the way it is in schools. Teachers are generally pretty open about things that have gone wrong and look to find ways of doing things better, but they do not tell parents about it. You can look at schools that have improved from 20 per cent to 80 per cent of students achieving five GCSE grades of between A and C. The kids are the same and the intake is the same. That school has failed thousands of children but no one has ever admitted that to the parents, which is very hard to do. In fact, it would tend to freeze any kind of internal self-critical attitude, particularly if the duty was drawn as widely as it would be in this amendment.

I therefore find myself siding with the noble Lord, Lord Winston, in this, although I am very committed to candour. Candour needs to be there, particularly in something as dangerous as medicine, where you are skiing down the edge of a precipice for half the time. You cannot be blamed when things go wrong because mistakes are bound to happen under those circumstances. Downhill skiers crash; they do not intend to do that and are well trained not to—but it happens. This spreading of blame for every slight mistake or wrong judgment taken in the circumstances of surgery or something with a longer timescale, such as pharmacology, is not the right way to approach the issue. We need to find ways of being open and of encouraging professionals, in particular, to be open with each other in a culture of self-improvement. To expose all this to litigation and in effect to encourage patients to go to law whenever something goes wrong, under circumstances where it is inevitable that a large number of things will go wrong, would be a mistake.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

The experience within the NHS is that people go to law only because they feel that that is the only way in which they are going to get some clarity into what has actually happened.