Criminal Records (Public Access) Bill

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Friday 13th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be read a Second Time.

This Bill is similar to my previous Bill in that it comprises just one substantive clause, but it also has a financial provision and it would need to have a money resolution. The Bill arises from what has been accepted for a long time as a big anomaly in public access to court records, particularly magistrates court records. It is most effectively summarised in the Information Tribunal decision EA/2009/0037 in the case of John Carleton and the Information Commissioner on 24 August 2009.

The tribunal looked at the issue of somebody who wished to get access to the record of a conviction in a magistrates court. Because that person was not present at the court hearing, and because the press did not cover the matter and report it, it was not possible for that person to get information from the magistrates court without getting specific permission from the court. In order to do that, they needed to write to the court manager detailing the request and asking for an appointment at court to make a formal request to a justice of the peace. They were able to get that application granted only if they could show that it was in the public interest for them to be able to access that information. The court decided that, although the conviction was on the public record, it was not publicly accessible because of data protection legislation. The relevant paragraphs of the decision read as follows:

“34. The Tribunal notes that there are apparently anomalies created by the current Freedom of Information and Data Protection legislation in this area and which are mentioned briefly below.

35. If the Appellant, as a member of the public, had attended the court on the relevant date there is no reason to suppose that he would not have been able to hear all the information that he was requesting because it would have been part of the normal, public court proceedings.

36. If the Appellant had found out that the press or the media had covered the case and was able to get a copy of the newspaper report or media broadcast then – although the personal data in question would have been processed by becoming part of those reports – the Appellant would have had legitimate access to the information and the personal data he was seeking.

37. If the local newspaper or media outlet put the court report within a webpage on the internet or as a ‘podcast’ to be downloaded by the Appellant – whether there was a ‘search’ facility on the site allowing specific names or topics to be highlighted and retrieved or not - and then viewed, printed out, played or stored, then all of that is legitimate processing of personal data within the current statutory legislation.

38. However he did not attend the Magistrates Court on the day in question and he was seeking the personal data in relation to the individual – from the court itself - after the event.

39. That situation is not permitted in the Magistrates’ Court by the current Statutory regimes save through the filtering situation incorporating permission to inspect the Court Register made in person on application to a Justice of the Peace.

40. It may well be that the Ministry of Justice wish to draw this appeal, the Good Practice highlighted by the Information Commissioner – and these remarks – to the attention of HMCS’s Justices’ Clerks and Legal Managers because it is unlikely that this Appellant’s request is the only one of its kind received by the Magistrates’ Courts throughout England and Wales.”

Only yesterday, Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, was reported in the newspapers as saying:

“I believe that transparency and visibility help the public understand how the criminal justice system works, and shining a light on the workings of the courtroom can only serve to boost its efficiency and effectiveness.”

He was actually speaking in support of a proposal to allow cameras into courts across the country, which is far beyond what I am talking about in this Bill.

This Bill would mean that if somebody was convicted in a magistrates court and that conviction was recorded by that court, as it has to be under a statutory duty, it should be possible for anybody to get access to that information because it is public information and it should be publicly available. At the moment, the only way somebody can get access to that information is by carrying out a criminal records office check. They can do that only if they know a police officer who is prepared to carry out the check, unofficially, on their behalf, with or without a fee, or if they belong to an organisation that can get access to the criminal records office’s information.

The trouble is that the criminal records office’s information goes far beyond just the details of convictions. It includes a lot of prejudicial information, such as details of who has been arrested and not charged, who has been charged and then acquitted in court, and even who has been the subject of suspicion. Such information is all included in the records of the criminal records office. I am not suggesting that people should be able to get easy access to that information, but I am suggesting that they should be able to find out much more easily whether somebody has been convicted in a magistrates court of drinking and driving.

I give that example because if the Government insist on reversing the House of Lords amendment to the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, it will not be long before this House is enabling people to be elected as police and crime commissioners and that Bill says that it will not be possible for anyone to stand for election to that post if they have a previous conviction, which could include a conviction for a drink-drive offence. Why, therefore, should this information in the magistrates courts not be available? It is already available, but it is not available to everyone and it is not available easily. That is why this Bill is described as a means to facilitate public access to court registers.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Can my hon. Friend confirm that it would be very easy and, indeed, desirable to ensure that this information contained the record of convictions in not only magistrates courts but the Crown courts?

[Mr Chope]

Yes, it would. Of course there are far fewer Crown court convictions and far fewer Crown courts, so it is much easier to get access to that information. As my hon. Friend will have noticed, the Bill states that

“‘a criminal records office’ means the Criminal Records Bureau or any successor body with similar statutory functions to the Criminal Records Bureau”.

It also states:

“A criminal records office must keep, in electronic form, copies of all Magistrates’ Courts Registers, and any other registers produced by a court listing convictions”.

Obviously, that could include Crown court registers.

In drafting this Bill, I have tried to make the regulation and the demands placed on the criminal records office as light as possible. I have done so by, among other things, saying that none of this would have to be retrospective, and so only after the Bill was enacted would the magistrates courts’ registers have to be communicated in electronic form to the criminal records office. There would be no burden on the criminal records office to collate the information on all those records. All that would happen would be that the records would be available in electronic form and could be investigated on the internet by members of the public.

I expect what would happen—this has already been happening in the US—is that people who were interested in providing a public service would start to collate the records themselves, thereby producing a combined database that would be accessible, perhaps for a fee, by members of the public. It would set up almost a private sector alternative to the Criminal Records Bureau.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Many people will be quite astonished that records of convictions are not as publicly available as they should be, I would argue, in a free society such as ours. Does my hon. Friend think that this provision would make the Criminal Records Bureau a little more efficient? If people had direct information about those who have been convicted, it might free up some of the bureaucratic burden for which that organisation is, unfortunately, somewhat infamous.

[Mr Chope]

I hear what my hon. Friend says. I have not recently had any constituency cases relating to the Criminal Records Bureau, but there is a real problem with the time it takes to get information out of it, particularly if one wants to check records for potential volunteers or members of staff.

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

A moment ago, my hon. Friend suggested that the electronic record the Bill seeks to create would be capable of being investigated by the public on the internet. Can he direct the House to the clause that mandates that to be the case?

[Mr Chope]

Clause 1(1) of the Bill states

“and must make them accessible to the public”.

As they are going to be in electronic form, I had assumed that that would be the means by which they would be made accessible to the public. If my hon. and learned Friend is suggesting that he does not think that that is spelt out clearly enough, I would obviously be happy to consider those representations. The idea behind the Bill is that such information would be accessible without someone having physically to go along to the criminal records office. Ultimately, it would be for the criminal records office to decide under the terms of the Bill in what way it would make the records accessible to the public.

The point is quite short and simple. It comes down to the basic principle that if somebody is convicted in a court, that knowledge should be publicly available and easily accessed by the public. At the moment, much to the surprise of many of us, unless one is actually in the court and hears what is happening or reads about it in the newspapers, it might go undetected and might be hard to detect in the future.

To pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith), a number of employers might in due course want to see whether somebody who is applying for a job has a conviction from the local magistrates court. The Bill would facilitate their being able to do that without their having to engineer a situation in which they could get a CRB check on that individual.

The significance of the Bill will become greater as we find that fewer and fewer proceedings in the magistrates courts are covered by local newspapers. I am fortunate to have the New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times, which take delight in printing at length reports from the magistrates courts. That is relatively unusual in local newspapers these days, so if people cannot find out what is happening through their local newspapers there must be an alternative way of enabling them to get that knowledge. That is what the Bill is all about.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I shall be as brief as the Bill, which contains only a few clauses. The hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has pointed out the anomaly that if someone is present in a court or reads a court report, its decisions are a matter of public record but that as time passes the case becomes subject to freedom of information provisions. He made it clear that the intention of the Bill is that such information should be available online. I was wondering about that, because it occurred to me that if we wanted to find out about an individual, we would have to happen across the particular magistrates court that held their record. However, he suggests that he would amend the Bill to clarify that point.

I am not sure that the Bill is consistent with our debates in Committee on the Protection of Freedoms Bill. The hon. Gentleman may not be aware that there was considerable debate about returning information supplied for Criminal Records Bureau checks to the individual so that they could check its accuracy before it was passed to a potential employer or a voluntary organisation. The hon. Gentleman’s Bill does not seem consistent with the Government’s direction of travel in that regard.

[Mr Chope]

Unlike the Criminal Records Bureau, the Bill would not rely on gossip, hearsay or information about cautions or about people who are arrested on suspicion but not charged. It would deal only with written registers from magistrates courts.

[Clive Efford]

I accept that point, and I shall speak briefly about accuracy of information in a moment.

Before the debate I checked the internet, as I was concerned about some of the fee-charging organisations that purport to provide information about criminal record checks. There seemed to be no way to check the background of such organisations to find out whether they were sound and operated reliable processes. A job applicant might find that an employer uses such services and that the information is inaccurate. That is a matter of concern, and is something that the hon. Gentleman has highlighted—yet, the Bill would not deal with it.

There have been cases when information from magistrates courts has been called into question. Between 1980 and 2006, there was a substantial incident in Leeds when more than 2,000 cases were not recorded accurately at a magistrates court and a number of people avoided sentences and fines. It was thus not possible to check their records at a later date. One of the reasons given for that failure was the amount of bureaucracy and the burden it placed on magistrates courts, so we should want to consider the implications of the Bill for magistrates courts before we might support it.

We have no objection in principle to the hon. Gentleman’s desire to share information that is already in the public domain. The force of the logic in his argument is on record, but at this stage he has failed to convince us that the Bill would solve the problems and that it would not have unintended consequences. We will be interested to hear the Government’s response to his contribution.

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[Mr Chope]

I accept my hon. and learned Friend’s point about the rehabilitation of offenders, but does not the Criminal Records Bureau keep a record of spent convictions, so that a conviction does not disappear once it is spent?

[Stephen Phillips]

My hon. Friend is right, but access to a spent conviction can be gained only where Parliament believes that there should continue to be access to spent convictions to prevent harm that might arise were the convictions not to be apparent to those making criminal records checks. The Bill would go much further and make generally available to the public the entire criminal record of those who might well have mended their ways many years before. That is the first problem with the Bill.

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[Mr Chope]

What solution does my hon. and learned Friend propose to this acknowledged problem?

[Stephen Phillips]

My hon. Friend asks an interesting question. The short answer—I will be completely honest with him—is that I do not know, because I have not thought about it. I am seeking to point out the Bill’s defects and why it will therefore not secure my support on Second Reading. The solution can no doubt be taken up by Ministers in due course. I none the less consider the points I have made to be valid, so I urge the House not to give the Bill a Second Reading.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Lynne Featherstone)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for giving me this opportunity to talk about his private Member’s Bill. I will, if I may, set out how the current system works and our concerns about the Bill as drafted.

The Bill seeks to set up a system under which details of all court convictions will be held by the Criminal Records Bureau, and access to those records will then be available to the general public. This involves several issues, which I will tackle one at a time. First, the Bill would require court conviction details to by held by the CRB. The CRB was established in 2002 and acts as a one-stop shop for organisations checking police records and, in relevant cases, information held by the Independent Safeguarding Authority. It is important to understand the purpose of the criminal records checking system and why there are so many careful considerations about what information the CRB may hold and issue compared with the proposed system, which would be open and accessible in every detail to everyone in this country.

At the moment, two levels of CRB check are available: standard and enhanced disclosures. Both contain conviction information taken from the police national computer, with enhanced disclosure also involving a check of local police records for relevant and proportionate information —local police intelligence is sometimes termed “soft” information. A standard certificate can be obtained if two criteria are fulfilled: first, that the position under consideration falls within the exceptions order to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974; and, secondly, that it has been prescribed under Police Act 1997 regulations as a “prescribed purpose”. That is why I intervened on my hon. Friend to question whether there was an inconsistency between the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act and the laudable desires expressed in his Bill, which perhaps cannot be translated into reality by these means.

An enhanced certificate with barred list information can be obtained if three criteria are fulfilled: that the application falls within the exceptions order; that it is for a prescribed purpose; and that it relates to a position for which suitability information, including barred list information, can be obtained, as also set out in Police Act regulations. At the moment, there are several positions for which barred list information can be given on an enhanced CRB disclosure, including, for children’s barred list information, positions relating to regulated activity in relation to children, other care and supervision for children, fostering and child minding; and, for adults’ barred list information, positions relating to regulated activity in relation to vulnerable adults, registered social care agencies and the Commissioner for Older People in Wales. I am sure my hon. Friend is aware that the Protection of Freedoms Bill is in Committee, where changes to these arrangements are being discussed. There is a further level of check—basic—that has yet to be introduced in England and Wales.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch mentioned the timeliness of CRB checks. In April 2011, consequent on changes to the recording and holding of information by the police, the CRB issued 95.1% of enhanced certificates within 28 days; the figure for March was 95.4%. That is a vast improvement on which it is to be congratulated. Demand for CRB checks has increased year on year and they are now in the millions each year. That improvement is an impressive result.

CRB checks are mainly used for those working with children or vulnerable adults, but they are undertaken for a wide range of other purposes, such as licensing and in respect of people in positions of trust. In addition to the certificates, individuals can make a subject access request if they wish to find out what information is held about them by individual police forces.

The CRB operates under the provisions of part V of the Police Act. To achieve what my hon. Friend suggests in the Bill would require amendments to the legislation. The Bill therefore would not work as it stands.

The Bill would allow anyone to access court records from any court in England or Wales. We rightly have open justice whereby anyone can go into any court to observe what is happening, with a few exceptions involving families and children. The Bill proposes a fundamental change to that access.

[Mr Chope]

The hon. Lady is pouring a lot of cold water on my Bill, but does she accept that an anomaly needs to be addressed, or does she not think that there is an anomaly at all?

[Lynne Featherstone]

I think that there is differential access; information can be obtained by someone who is present on the day of proceedings or if they read about it in the newspapers. The anomaly, as I see it, is about how much information is available to whom, when and in what fashion. What monitor is available to protect those on whom information is held from people who are not acting in the public interest? That is the test at the moment. Anyone can seek information from a court: the test is whether it is in the public interest. That is a matter for a further debate.

What is being suggested would add to the functions of the CRB by requiring it to keep a central database of all court outcomes, or results as they are known in the trade. We have never had such a database. Under the current system, people can visit their local court or any other court and read the results of court hearings in the local and national press. Newspapers and other media outlets can obtain free of charge copies of court registers containing the outcomes of criminal cases and the details of upcoming cases. As I have said, we do have an open system of justice.

If we went down the road proposed in the Bill, where would it lead? First, there is the question of cost. I need hardly explain to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch that the Government are reducing the deficit. All Departments are working hard to reduce their costs, and introducing a new system such as this would incur substantial costs.

Further, what real mischief is the Bill designed to remedy? What benefit would be achieved from setting up such a system? How would it benefit our communities? It appears to us that the aim is to make the justice process more transparent, by allowing anyone, anywhere in England and Wales, to find out about convictions in any court, but why would we need to do that when we already have an open justice system? The Criminal Procedure Rules 2010 state, in paragraph (15) of rule 5.4, that every court register

“shall be open to inspection during reasonable hours by any justice of the peace, or any person authorised in that behalf by a justice of the peace or the Lord Chancellor.”

As court registers contain personal information that would not be made available in court or elsewhere, the change that my hon. Friend suggests would not simply be a matter of transferring the information to the Criminal Records Bureau. Magistrates courts registers are held not by the CRB but by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. Recordable offences—not all offences—are passed electronically from HMCTS to the police national computer, from which the CRB accesses them. Making magistrates courts’ registers available to the CRB would therefore require a process to transfer and store them, with the associated costs.

There is considerable information kept on magistrates courts registers that is not in the public domain. It includes, among many other things, details of individuals’ driving licence numbers, personal details of the recipients of compensation and details of vulnerable victims and witnesses, including those in sexual and domestic violence cases. Court registers also contain much information on people found not guilty or acquitted. Does my hon. Friend think that should be in the public domain, too? If not, as I assume, we would need to find a way of removing that information—again, at considerable cost and contrary to the provisions of the Bill.

Magistrates courts registers also include cases on which there are reporting restrictions in place to stop the naming of individuals—offenders, witnesses, victims or others. Those cases would need to be identified—another costly process, as they are recorded only at first hearing so a linking process would have be identified—and removed from the public register. The Bill does not allow for that, either.

Magistrates courts also hear some civil and family cases, details of which are recorded in the register. Those cases would need to be filtered out before publication, but the Bill does not allow for that. Proceedings on more serious crimes are concluded in the Crown court, and from reading the Bill it seems that they, too, are to be included in its provisions. Clause 1(1) refers to

“any other registers produced by a court listing convictions”,

not just those from magistrates courts. Crown court registers are not currently held electronically. The official record is on paper, and making it available would require extra investment.

It is difficult to see what access to court records would provide for the public unless there were some search facility. My hon. Friend said that there would be, but that is not specified in the Bill. Such a facility would be very costly to develop, as literally millions of records a year would need to be sorted through. Someone could find the result they were looking for only if they knew the exact person, court or hearing involved. Effectively, the public would have access to endless data but get very little useful information—a costly exercise for very little public value.

We are also concerned that the Bill could work against rehabilitating those convicted by the courts. Let me explain why I say that. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 sets out various times after which a conviction becomes spent—when it does not have to be disclosed. My hon. Friend said that it would be done in real time, or within relatively real time, and that an electronic system could be devised incorporating a natural lapse of spent convictions. The aim of current legislation is to allow individuals to move on with their lives, particularly those whose offence was at the lower end of the scale. In order to safeguard the more vulnerable elements of our society, such as children and the old or infirm, certain professions are exempted from the Act, and all convictions, whether spent or not, have to be disclosed.

That is where the Criminal Records Bureau comes in. That is why we have an expert body doing the criminal records work. It does the necessary checks, and passes the information on to a prospective employer when relevant. I think that most people would consider that to be perfectly reasonable. It strikes a balance between open access to the criminal records system and the rights of those who have transgressed to move on with their lives. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) made a point about people who change their names in order to get away from a criminal record. The Bill does not address that point. However, the CRB has in place a thorough system of identity checking. The registered body, which must countersign any application to the CRB, is under a statutory duty to carry out thorough identity checks. The proposed online system would not put in place anything to cover that loophole.

Hon. Members on both sides of the House will know that we are changing how the system operates through the provisions in the Protection of Freedoms Bill that is before the House, as I mentioned briefly before. Furthermore, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act was itself the subject of a recent Green Paper, and the results of that consultation process are still under review by the Ministry of Justice. We would not want to take any action that could prejudge or impact in any way upon that review. However, if we put in place the system proposed in the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, there would be considerable potential for anyone to circumvent the provisions of the 1974 Act and find out about matters that have become spent.

To avoid that we would need to put in place a series of checks to weed out such spent offences, which would add to the cost overall. However, if court registers were made available online or in some other electronic form by the CRB, there would be no guarantee that removing the spent conviction from the records would achieve much.

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[Mr Chope]

That comes as a great surprise to me. I thank the Minister, however, for her response. All the mischiefs she said would arise were my Bill to be enacted are the very mischiefs that can arise at the moment when information is gleaned at the time of the court case by the media. That takes me back to the point I made at the outset, which was that if

“the press or the media had covered the case and was able to get a copy of the newspaper report or media broadcast then”—

at that time—

“although the personal data in question would have been processed by becoming part of those reports—the Appellant would have had legitimate access to the information and the personal data he was seeking…If the local newspaper or media outlet put the court report within a webpage on the internet or as a ‘podcast’ to be downloaded by the Appellant—whether there was a ‘search’ facility on the site allowing specific names or topics to be highlighted and retrieved or not—and then viewed, printed out, played or stored, then all of that is legitimate processing of personal data within the current statutory legislation.”

I am grateful to those who participated in the debate. I think that everybody, except the Minister perhaps, recognises that there is an anomaly. It is inconsistent that court cases can be dealt with differently as regards public access to information about those cases depending on whether they are covered by the media, whether an individual is present in court and so on.

If the Minister reconsiders the issue, I hope that she will recognise that there is an anomaly. If she accepts that there is one, I hope that she will feel that it is incumbent on her Department to try to find a solution. Although my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) poured quite a lot of cold water on my Bill, he accepted that there was an anomaly and that this was an attempt to address it. When the Director of Public Prosecutions talks about the possibility of introducing cameras into courts and reasserting the importance of public access to the criminal justice system, it seems anomalous that we have this problem. One thing that has come out of the debate is that I have accepted that my Bill is probably not the right solution to the problem at this time, but I hope that the pressure of the debate on the Minister will be such that she will try to get her officials to work on coming up with a proper solution—perhaps one that could be brought forward as an amendment to the Protection of Freedoms Bill on Report, as all the issues relating to the criminal records office are being dealt with in that Bill.

Finally, I am very concerned about the inaccuracies on the registers, which must cause everybody great concern. The Criminal Records Bureau is producing inaccurate material. I had a constituent who was a wing commander who wanted to do some voluntary work somewhere. He found that somebody had stolen his identity and that his records had been linked with the criminal records of another person. That caused enormous embarrassment and, in the end, it was only after we went to see the then Minister in the Home Office that things were put right. My constituent was the victim of fraud, but there seem to be a lot of victims of mistake.

[Lynne Featherstone]

On the point that the Criminal Records Bureau might be holding incorrect information, I am sure my hon. Friend will be glad to know that one of the new provisions in the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill means that the certificate will now go only to the individual applicant and not to the employer, giving them the chance to dispute the information before it causes any harm to their employment.

[Mr Chope]

That is helpful, but my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham was making the point that inaccurate information is being recorded in courts. We must have a system to put that right. My Bill relates only to prospective court registers, not historical ones. Even so, I hope we can have a system whereby from now on magistrates court records of convictions are 100% accurate, rather than containing anomalies and inaccuracies. That is my hope—perhaps it is an aspiration—but having said that, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Proposed Directive (Information Systems)

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

The Minister refers to the Council of Europe convention, which covers 47 countries plus the United States and other countries, but what added value does the directive have when compared with that convention? If the directive is inadequately drafted, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) says it is, why do we not wait to see whether it can be correctly drafted before we sign up to it?

[James Brokenshire]

The directive builds on the convention and deals with certain additional issues, such as the response that other EU countries provide to requests for information on cyber-related attacks and cybercrimes, so we think that it has important benefits. It is precisely because of those practical benefits that we think it appropriate to opt in at this point and to negotiate on and change the drafting where it requires further work. We believe that, because of the directive’s practical and direct benefits, it is important to be there and do that.

Alcohol (Minimum Pricing)

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Griffiths]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. However, there are those who say, “Why should we penalise someone who wants to buy a 24-pack of strong lager and take it home and drink one can a night for 24 days? Why should we penalise that?” The reality, however, is different. The clients at the Burton addiction centre in my constituency will talk about the impact that cheap booze has on fuelling people’s drinking consumption.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

My hon. Friend seems to be against these loss-leaders. Would he outlaw loss-leaders for chocolate, salt, butter and other things that are not good for us if we take them in excess?

[Andrew Griffiths]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. However, I cannot remember the last time I was on Burton high street and saw two guys knocking seven bells out of each other over a Toblerone. I also cannot remember the last time I was in Queen’s hospital A and E and doctors were pumping somebody’s stomach because they had overdosed on too much butter. The reality is that alcohol is a very different beast from things such as chocolate.

[Mr Chope]

Surely the issue is not whether alcohol is distinct from other products, but the use made of it by the people who consume it. Is my hon. Friend not in danger of victimising people, particularly poor families, who benefit from these loss-leaders? He is trying to put forward the argument that, by penalising those poor families, he will tackle the problem of binge drinking, which I do not think he will.

[Andrew Griffiths]

I recognise my hon. Friend’s concern, but the people we are penalising are the taxpayers, who have to pay for the consequences of binge drinking through the costs of extra policing and the impacts on A and E departments. Furthermore, if I am being brutally honest it is those poor families who suffer most as a result of cheap alcohol. Young people and poor families are much more price-sensitive to alcohol than others.

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be present in a debate under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan, and to follow the hon. Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths), who made an eloquent and thoughtful speech.

I think that this is going to be a great debate. It will also provide a lot of information for political diarists. We have already heard this morning about butter-related crime, or the possibility of butter-related crime, from the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope); we have heard the hon. Member for Burton offer the working men in his constituency the prospect of welcoming my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman) with open arms, and we have also heard about the Minister’s various meetings with beer groups, of which I am sure there are many, although some will think that the Minister, with his youthful good looks, might not even be old enough to drink.

Having said that, this is a very serious issue and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) for choosing it for a debate. It has attracted so many right hon. and hon. Members to Westminster Hall on a Wednesday morning, each one of whom has a constituency interest and a desire to ensure that we continue to move in the right direction.

Other Members here will be able to talk about the health aspects of the issue, for example, the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who has vast experience in the NHS. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent and the hon. Member for Burton both mentioned the cost of binge drinking to our health service and the health of the nation.

In the next few minutes, I want to concentrate on alcohol-related crime and the report of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, “Policing in the 21st Century”, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent referred. That report was published last year and it addressed the cost to the taxpayer and to the public of alcohol-related crime. When our Committee began the inquiry that led to that report, we were looking at what a police officer did with his or her time; we never intended to look at alcohol-related crime. It was only after we had visited a number of town centres, including Colchester, that we did so. The hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell), who was then a member of the Committee, invited the Committee to visit Colchester and hear from local police officers there about the amount of time that they spent on alcohol-related crime, especially on a Friday or Saturday evening. The latest estimate is that 70% of police officers feel that they are distracted from other aspects of policing because they are dealing with alcohol-related crime.

A statistic was sent to the Committee from the Cabinet Office showing that it costs £59 extra to process someone in a police station who has been arrested because of alcohol-related crime. In the current climate, the Government want to save money on policing, and there is no better way of doing that than to have responsible laws that reduce the time that police officers spend on this issue.

[Mr Chope]

I do not think that anyone will disagree with the right hon. Gentleman about the problem, but how will limiting the price at which supermarkets sell alcohol be the solution? We know from our constituencies that it is alleged that small shops, where alcohol is sold at a much higher price than at the supermarkets, enable young people under the legal age to access booze.

[Keith Vaz]

I have huge respect for the hon. Gentleman because he was my Greater London councillor when I was in Richmond many years ago. I have always had a great deal of time for what he says, but I think that he is wrong on this issue. It is not the little shops or the pubs, but the supermarkets, that cause the problem. The evidence is clear, and it is in our report. As the hon. Member for Burton has pointed out, people get tanked up before they go out on a Saturday night, because of supermarkets’ special offers, which make beer cheaper than bottled water, even the cheapest water—I am not saying that we should not drink tap water.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. She tries to tempt me down Leicester high street, especially the Melton road, where we are currently fighting an application by Tesco to build one of its supermarkets in the middle of one of my main shopping areas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent mentioned the cost to the health service, but the cost to the taxpayer as far as crime is concerned is £7.3 billion a year—a huge amount. What do we do about that? It is in the hands of the Minister. At the last Home Office questions, I got up to praise the Home Secretary for moving in the right direction. We could not get the previous Government to do this; I do not know why. It is not that they were not concerned about the matter—I think that they were worried about alcohol-related crime and the pressure on the health service—but that the debate perhaps got distracted by claims that somehow the extension of licensing hours meant that people were drinking more alcohol. I do not think that that is correct, but as someone who does not drink alcohol, and has no constituency interest—no distilleries or production units—I feel that the previous Government should have taken up the Select Committee’s recommendations. This Government are moving in the right direction, but not far enough, as I think we will find from the contributions of most Members here this morning.

Some would say that the hon. Member for Burton has the most to lose because of the production in his town. I have visited Burton and been to the Coors headquarters there. It is a remarkable town, and the world centre of beer making, but down the high street there is an alcohol addiction centre—how very convenient. The people I visited made the case for minimum pricing, so if they can do that, we can look at the issue very seriously. There is something of a practical nature that the Minister can do, picking up on what the hon. Member for Gainsborough said.

[Mr Chope]

I represent Christchurch.

[Keith Vaz]

Oh, I am so sorry: Christchurch, of course. How could I confuse the hon. Gentleman with the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh)?

What the Minister needs to do is to get the chairmen and chief executives of the five biggest supermarkets around the table for an alcohol-free sandwich lunch with both him and the Home Secretary, to discuss the issues. It is in their hands; they can do this.

DNA and CCTV (Crime Prevention)

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to this debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) on securing it. This is the second time in a week that we have appeared together on the same side, so we are in strange times in terms of alliances. What unites us today is the argument about the balance between respecting individual freedoms and liberties and recognising that the people we represent want the freedom to live and work safely in their communities, free from crime as much as possible.

We all know that crime has gone down, but the reality is that often people’s perception is that it has not. We politicians in the previous Government tackled that and tried to do so further. I am sure that the present Government will find that they face the same problem. CCTV has contributed to people’s sense of personal safety. In Doncaster, CCTV cameras at the taxi cab ranks in the town centre have undoubtedly helped to solve crimes. I know of one case where some young men waiting in a queue for a taxi were attacked by some other young men. Before the victims had rung the police to inform them of the attack, the police had already seen it on camera and, by tracking the offenders by camera through Doncaster, they picked up the culprits before the victims got to the police station. That is a good example, showing how effectively CCTV can work.

CCTV has also been a tool in respect of antisocial behaviour. I was pleased that we in the previous Government had started to talk more about how communities could have more say in where cameras would be positioned. Undoubtedly, mobile CCTV units have been effective when placed in hotspots for antisocial behaviour that may lead to crime.

Today we should be talking not about restrictions, but about how we can improve the quality of the technology that is available. Let me tell an anecdote. Before I was a Member of Parliament, my husband and I were involved in helping stop an armed bank robbery in a local bank on a Saturday. Unfortunately for us, as part of the solution in solving that crime, it was the early days of CCTV and the Saturday staff who came in from another branch forgot to turn on the camera inside the bank. We have moved on a long way since then. It is important to ensure that the equipment is of the highest quality.

The hon. Gentleman cited a number of important cases. I should like to mention that CCTV was used in pursuing Steven Wright, who was responsible for the murder of five women in Ipswich. As I have said, CCTV is also used in multiple cases of drunk and disorderly behaviour, antisocial behaviour, graffiti and vandalism. I appreciate the points that have been made by hon. Members about other organisations, including local authorities. Again, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. I do not advocate putting cameras into people’s refuse bins. But when tackling fraud, for example, CCTV cameras can be useful, whether they are used by the Department for Work and Pensions or the local authority, where people say one thing about their inability to work, although the reality, which is caught on camera, is that they are working at or are seen leaving local sites regularly each day. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world with enough police officers and benefit fraud inspectors out there on every street—and I do not think that that would be a good use either of public money or their time.

It is vital that we equip the police with the technology that they need. I am proud, as a former Home Office Minister, to have been in charge of this area of work. Automatic number plate recognition is a fantastic tool. I recommend that all right hon. and hon. Members sit in a police car and see how it works, connecting up to the cameras. It is amazing. Undoubtedly, despite police complaints about bureaucracy, they welcome that technology wholeheartedly, as do the people that they work with in the community.

We have to ensure that CCTV can be used and that it is not stopped. It needs to be made more effective. I am pleased that under the previous Government an interim CCTV regulator was appointed to look at that. I hope that in all the rhetoric that is used we do not lose sight of the important job that CCTV does.

It has been suggested that we should reduce the amount of time that DNA is retained in the database. By 2012 we will have six years’ worth of statistics. I urge the Minister to be cautious about doing anything to destabilise that information, which can then be looked at, allowing us to make a more considered choice. This is a good example of devolution politics. Although there is a three-year limit in Scotland, with a caveat on its being extended, we need to be clear about what we are talking about. Despite the three-year headline, in Scotland they are still mindful that the period for which information is kept might want to be extended. I understand that the Scottish police would like a system that is more like the one in England. Why not have something more like English policy once in a while?

The DNA database has been transforming. It has been used, for example, in south Yorkshire to resolve a case involving rape some decades old. The culprit was found because his sister was picked up years later on a drink driving charge. Her DNA was taken and matched in the system, making a connection with her brother, who had been responsible for a huge number of rapes many years ago. Without doubt, the DNA database has contributed to solving thousands of crimes.

Between March 1998 and March 2009, DNA evidence helped solve more than 304,000 crimes. In 2008-09, there were 252 homicides and 580 rapes with a DNA scene-subject match. It is also important to recognise that DNA also picks up people who have not been convicted of a former crime. In 2008-09, 79 rape, murder or manslaughter charges in England and Wales were matched to the DNA database from DNA profiles that belonged to individuals who had been arrested but not convicted of any crime. The evidence shows—this is not easy to come to terms with—that there is a justification for retaining the DNA of people who have been arrested but not convicted because their risk of offending, as measured by the risk of re-arrest, is higher than that of the general population. This risk is higher than the general population for six years following the first arrest, at which point their DNA would be removed.

We should also not forget the potential deterrent effect of DNA. People are less likely to commit crime if they know that there is a good chance they could get caught. There are many ways of deterring people from committing crime. We can look at our neighbourhoods and create designs to make them safer, but we should embrace and deal with technology and not be luddite about it. If people know that DNA can play a significant role in securing convictions, they will be less likely to commit crime in the first place.

The head of the National Policing Improvement Agency, which hosts the DNA database, has said that it has been the

“most effective tool for the prevention and detection of crime since the development of fingerprint analysis more than a century ago.”

As the hon. Gentleman said, DNA does not only find those who are guilty; it can ensure that those who were thought to be guilty, or who were sent to jail as a result of a court conviction, can be proved innocent. I urge the Minister to be cautious in proceeding in this area in a way that could undermine some tools that are effective in fighting crime in the 21st century.

[Mr Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. Before calling the next speaker, can I say that it would be sensible to have the wind-ups starting at 10 minutes past 12 to allow more time for Back-Bench participation?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. There are four hon. Members still trying to catch my eye and 12 minutes to go before the winding-up speeches. I call Mr Keith Vaz.