Business of the House

Debate between Clive Efford and Tom Brake

Thursday 24th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

Clearly that is a significant issue that I am sure presents a real financial challenge to some people. I would like to think that GPs would be careful about levying such charges when it is clear that the person might not be able to afford them.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

May I challenge the Deputy Leader of the House to come back to the House some time in the near future and explain exactly how the Government are devising policy? Yesterday’s announcement by the Prime Minister on green measures and fuel prices caught everyone unawares. Today the Deputy Minister is making a speech about education and suggesting that we should regulate with regard to qualified teachers in our schools, but only last week the Minister for Schools signed off on cuts that could deregulate the oversight of qualified teachers. The Government’s approach, and not least that of the Liberal Democrats, seems to be inconsistent, so could we have an explanation of exactly what is going on?

[Tom Brake]

I will give the hon. Gentleman an explanation immediately. The Deputy Prime Minister has said that parents want and expect their children to be taught a core body of knowledge by good, qualified teachers or teachers seeking qualification—the quality of their teaching is checked by Ofsted—and to get a healthy meal every day. The Government believe that every child should have access to a good choice of excellent local schools. The hon. Gentleman may know that three quarters of free schools provide good or outstanding education, compared with just 64% in the public sector.

Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Clive Efford and Tom Brake

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who made a sensible and measured contribution, as have other hon. Members. The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) made a fair assessment of what the previous Government had done. They improved some aspects of civil liberties through the Freedom of Information Act, but he also recognised that some measures had been extremely counter-productive. In any scenario in which a Government, over the course of their lifetime, introduce an extra 3,500 offences, there will inevitably be problems with how the police interpret and apply the rules.

Let me give just one example of how some of the powers introduced by the previous Government have been used in an unfortunate way. The example was given to me by a very good friend of mine who now sits in the other place, and whose son-in-law, who is black and from America, has stopped coming to the UK with his son, because every time he went out in London, irrespective of where he was going, he was guaranteed to be stopped by the police under stop-and-search powers. He did not want to have to explain to his son why his dad was being stopped every time they went out.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman explain why the coalition has taken away the requirement on police officers to record the ethnicity of people whom they stop on the street?

[Tom Brake]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will be aware that many police forces intend to continue to seize that information. It appears that they are exercising discretion in that respect. He should reflect on the fact that his Government introduced those stop-and-search powers, which were applied in a blanket way across London and allowed the action that I have described to take place.

Although I welcome the announcement by the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) that the Opposition will not vote against the Second Reading of the Bill, I think that the tone of her comments in relation to the Home Secretary were a touch patronising. I am sure that our Home Secretary fully appreciates the need to balance security with liberty and freedom. That is what the coalition Government are doing by presenting a Bill to restore personal freedoms that were threatened by the last Government, and to end excessive surveillance of individuals.

The right hon. Member for Blackburn seemed to acknowledge that some of the policies implemented by the last Government were—if not draconian—an infringement of the rights of the individual, expensive, and in many cases ineffective. The Deputy Prime Minister was right to describe the Bill as a rolling back of the state. However, although I will not over-hype it, because I trust that many of the measures referred to by the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh), who is no longer in the Chamber—[Interruption.] He is, in fact, present. I trust that many of the measures that he mentioned will be subject to a protection of freedoms (No. 2) Bill, because I do not see this as the endgame when it comes to protecting our freedoms. I believe that we cannot place too high a value on liberty and freedom.

The Bill has received support from a number of quarters. The Law Society, for instance, has described the destruction of DNA profiles of innocent people as “an improvement”, welcomes the reduction in the maximum pre-charge detention time, and believes that the new stop-and-search powers are “far more proportional”. It has listed a number of other proposals that it supports, including the changes in the vetting and barring system.

The Bill proposes regulation of biometric data, and I am pleased that we are adopting the protections of the Scottish model in regard to retention of DNA and fingerprints. Although the Bill will not ensure that all innocent people are removed from the DNA database, it will ensure that hundreds of thousands of those who are currently on it are removed from it. In Committee, those who have received a briefing from the Forensic Science Society will want to examine aspects of the deletion process to establish what deleting a DNA profile means and what constitutes the totality of such a profile.