Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Lucas

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the amendments in this group are intended to ask a short trio of questions about how line 36, which is about the admissibility of evidence, will work. First, I want to be sure that it covers civil as well as criminal proceedings because an awful lot of surveillance camera evidence is used in, for instance, parking ticket or traffic enforcement, which are civil proceedings. It is important that if there are rules and regulations being passed about how these cameras should be used, they and the guidance should be equally effective in dealing with traffic enforcement as in dealing with a mugging.

Secondly, if one goes by not general, but certainly frequent, local authority practice, local authorities will rely in civil cases on the fact that most people do not appeal, so the case never comes to court. People pay their fines. Knowing that whenever a particular breach of the code comes to the tribunal the local authorities lose their case, they will none the less continue enforcing because they are losing only 1 or 2 per cent of revenue and the rest of the people are paying up as usual. What the guidance in the code is supposed to do is nullified by the fact that there is no mechanism for spreading the opinion of the tribunal more widely than the individual cases which reach it.

Amendment 104 is intended to propose such a mechanism so that a tribunal can say, “No, you have to stop this. We have seen this five times already and each time we have found for the appellant. You must cease enforcing until you have put this right. We will not allow you to issue any more tickets on the basis of something which we consider to be an unreasonable breach of the code”. The other end of it is that where a tribunal has found a local authority to be in frequent breach of the code and has on each occasion found for the appellant, none the less the local authority will have extracted a very large amount of money out of other people who have not appealed because there is a very substantial disincentive to appeal. If you lose an appeal, you double your fine. There is also a large amount of time taken up in the process of appeal.

I would like to see some mechanism where a tribunal can say to a local authority, in particular, or to other people who are seeking to use camera evidence as the basis of fines, that they must repay not only the appellant but all the other people on whom penalties have been imposed on the basis of the practice that the tribunal disapproves of. I beg to move.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for explaining and introducing his amendments. I recognise that he is focusing on the specific use of surveillance camera technology, particularly in its use for enforcement of parking and traffic regulations. It is probably worth me pointing out for the benefit of the Committee that the surveillance camera code of practice is not intended to include any speed camera technology. I know that my noble friend—

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am not talking at all about speed camera technology.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, I was just about to say to my noble friend that I know that he was not talking about speed camera technology at all. It was just for the benefit of the rest of the Committee. I thought it was an appropriate point for me to make that clear, in case anybody else might not be as clear as my noble friend is on this matter.

I refer first to my noble friend’s Amendment 103, which, as he has explained, seeks to clarify the drafting of Clause 33(3). I believe that the meaning of that subsection is already clear, as “such proceedings” unambiguously refers back to “criminal or civil proceedings” in subsection (2); we simply do not need to repeat those words in subsection (3).

My noble friend’s Amendment 104 suggests that this Bill takes away the right to seek redress where a court has ruled that the code of practice has been breached. We believe this would have significant implications for litigants. In the context of civil proceedings—just to be clear, for example, we might be talking here of someone seeking to enforce the payment of parking charges—a claimant should be able to present all relevant evidence in support of his or her case. Given that the surveillance code of practice will set out guidance rather than rigid requirements for the operation of surveillance camera systems, it would in our view be disproportionate to prevent, as a matter of course, CCTV evidence being presented where a court or tribunal has ruled that there has been a breach of the code.

Clause 33(4) makes it clear that the court should have discretion in taking into account a failure by a relevant authority to have regard to the surveillance camera code in determining a question in any such proceedings. In the context of criminal proceedings, the ramifications of the amendment in terms of the overall fairness of the process are potentially more significant. The effect of the amendment might be to exclude key prosecution evidence or evidence that might exonerate the accused. Our general approach, as I have already explained, should be to leave decisions about the admissibility of CCTV evidence to the court or tribunal in question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for that answer, particularly the sudden inspiration which struck her at the end and which gave me great comfort so far as Amendments 104 and 105 are concerned, which I agree were pushing it a bit. However, I still have concerns on Amendment 103.

I agree that Clause 33(3) refers back to Clause 33(2), but the latter refers to the acts of people who are running surveillance cameras, not to the acts of people who are caught on surveillance cameras. It is not clear to me that the inference that she suggested should be imported into Clause 33(3)—that the civil and criminal proceedings in Clause 33(2) apply—is justifiable, given that they refer to completely different sets of court cases. One is cases taken against people who are using cameras and the other is cases against people who are caught on camera. I should be very grateful if the Minister could write to me to answer that point in detail if she does not have an answer in front of her now.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, I would be very happy to take away the points that my noble friend has raised and will, of course, write to him in due course.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Lucas

Monday 4th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

It is right that we reach decisions based on responsibility and that the head teacher and the governing body should be able to decide what is right for their school. If they are clear, for very clear reasons that they believe in, about what they feel is the right future for that child, they should be able to decide that and put in place the necessary new arrangements for that child.

I concur with the remarks that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, made about piloting the new arrangements. Schools being responsible for the education of children whom they have decided they can no longer take care of in their own school is an important new provision, and one that I would certainly support.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Morris, I, too, am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As has been said several times today, the committee reviewed this part of the Bill carefully and reported on it in detail. It is worth me highlighting the fact that the committee divided on this matter. At that time, I abstained—I did not vote with the committee, because at the time I was not persuaded by the legal arguments one way or the other. After the committee, I looked again at the Bill when preparing for Second Reading, and the conclusion that I came to was that the reason why I had not been persuaded by the legal arguments either way was because this is an issue of principle. It is right that people in charge of schools—head teachers and governing bodies—should be able to make decisions for themselves. Obviously, there needs to be a review process, which this proposal provides for, but I want to see us having a system that is based on responsibility rather than people simply being able to exercise rights. For that reason, I do not support the amendments and I support the Bill as it is drafted.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am hopeful that my noble friend will answer the question that I asked him at Second Reading on the statistics behind this. I think that he quoted a figure of 600 pupils a year being reinstated. For the average secondary school, that is one every 10 years. What proportion of them are children who, it is accepted by everybody, have actually committed the sort of crimes that must mean their exclusion from school, such as serious bullying or drugs or bringing knives in? I am aware that a case was mentioned in the Sun a few years ago, but are there more than that? Why are we unbalancing the scales of justice to deal with such a tiny and infrequent problem?

My noble friend has already outlined the right approach, which is to make schools responsible for the future of the kids they choose to exclude, because most exclusions are due to problems with the school, not the kids. The example that I would choose is St George’s in Maida Vale. When I first got interested in schooling it was unbelievably awful, with children running around corridors and abusing and hitting teachers. There was a total paucity of education going on. It was the school, as noble Lords will remember, where the headmaster was murdered at the gates. Last year, it received grade 1 from Ofsted, with the same intake and no exclusions. Nothing has changed with the kids, but everything has changed with the school. That is what we should bear in mind when we think of exclusion as a punishment following something done by the kid, rather than as something caused by other people that is being demonstrated in what the kid is doing.