London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Greg Knight Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that that would be the consequence and that it indicates the shoddy drafting. One has to ask why the provision is so broad brush. That is why I tabled amendment 5. It is only a small amendment; it does not address all that I think is wrong with clause 3, but it would at least remove part of the wide ambit and prevent people who have not been the subject of penalty charges from being served with penalty charge notices. One might ask whether it really matters if penalty notices are served on people who should not be served with them. It does if we also look at clause 4. If the person being served with a penalty charge notice to which he should not be subject, as he has been wrongly accused of having liability for it, is asked to give his name and address and refuses to do so, he then becomes under clause 4 a criminal and is liable to a summary fine on strict liability of up to £1,000.

[Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me for saying this, but could it not be argued that his amendment, too, is guilty of sloppy drafting? What would happen if his amendment were accepted and the responsibility belonged to a body corporate? Surely it would mean that the person serving the notice could not hand it to a director, but would have to post it or deliver it to the company’s registered office. That is what would happen if my hon. Friend’s amendment were accepted.

[Mr Chope]

If a body corporate were liable for the penalty charge, it could be served on its director. My right hon. Friend, who will have looked assiduously at the Bill, will know that there are references in clause 20 to the liability of directors for offences committed by a body corporate. I am not sure, therefore, that my amendment would be out of order in that sense. I think it would improve the Bill, given that the issue of corporate liability is covered by clause 20. Although I say it myself, I believe that amendment 5 will bring about a modest improvement in the drafting.

Amendment 6 is the second in the group; it would leave out subsection (2) of clause 3. That subsection talks about giving these powers, to which I have already referred, not just to the police or police community support officers, but to an “accredited person”. It proposes to make these significant powers available to anybody who is an accredited person. My amendment would leave out the provision to enable those accredited people to have the powers given to PCSOs.

Amendment 7 would likewise leave out subsection (3), which is consequential, as it states:

“An accreditation may only specify that subsection (2) applies to an accredited person”

and so forth. That will be taken out, so that clause 3 would not apply to accredited persons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

That is a very good question, but it is probable that only the promoters of the Bill can answer it definitively. It seems to be a rather murky area. I do not think that we should build up a bureaucracy in this country in which a lot of officials are going around with powers to ask people for their names and addresses and to ensure, if they refuse to give them, that they are subject to criminal penalties including fines of up to £1,000, when it is not known who those officials are. There will be plenty of opportunities for bluff and bluster. Who will do the accrediting, how will those who do the accrediting be made accountable, and who will know who they are? I trust that my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), will be able to respond to those and other questions, because I understand that there is a fair amount of support among the Bill’s supporters for an extension of the powers to accredited people.

I think that the answer to my hon. Friend’s specific question can be found in the schedule to the Police Reform Act 2002 that contains definitions relating to accredited persons. However, I must admit that the interaction between those definitions and what is in the Bill is not exactly as plain as a pikestaff to me.

[Mr Knight]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way to me again. He is being very generous.

We all know that a police officer who is involved in the issuing of a fixed penalty ticket will have been trained in the rules of evidence, and will know that the starting point should be a presumption of innocence. What assurances does the Bill give us that an accredited person will have been given similar training in our law? Does it contain any provision to prevent a local authority from putting an accredited person on a pay scale enabling that person to receive a bonus based on the number of tickets that he or she issues? In other words, might the accredited person have a vested interest in giving out tickets willy-nilly, even when no offence has been committed?

[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend has made a powerful point. There is evidence that local authorities have given just such financial incentives to their officials, based on the number of people to whom they can issue tickets for offences, or alleged offences. The Bill would give those same officials an additional power to issue penalty notices.

One of the weakest parts of the “accredited person” concept, which does not apply under the present law, is that someone who declined to give his name and address to an accredited person would be guilty prima facie of an offence, but the accredited person himself would have no power of arrest. What would he do then? Would he just wait there? If he were a police community support officer, he would be able to ask the person to wait for up to half an hour for a police officer to arrive, and the police officer could exercise his own power to arrest the person concerned for not having given his name and address. However, no such power extends to accredited persons. This provision would not work in practice, and I do not think that it has been thought through by the promoters.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is on to a really important point: if we are to change the balance between officialdom and civil liberties, it should be done nationally rather than on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, which could lead to laws in London being different from those in Shipley—different, indeed, from those anywhere else outside London.

It should be for Home Office Ministers to come forward with these proposals, if they think it reasonable to extend such powers to councils in the way suggested in the Bill, but they manifestly have not done so; there have been extensions, but nothing in this area, despite the fact that the Bill was printed back in 2007. The Government have not chosen to extend these powers to police community support officer and others, or to extend officials’ ability to require names and addresses nationally. Implicit in that is that the Government would not support such an extension of restrictions on civil liberties. If they do not support such restrictions on civil liberties nationally, why should they support them in London?

[Mr Knight]

Is the following statement an accurate précis of the situation: my hon. Friend’s amendments are an attempt to thwart the promoters of the Bill who are seeking to decriminalise a number of offences and to replace them with a far more draconian council-operated system?

[Mr Chope]

Yes. Over time, offences have been decriminalised, and when I was a Transport Minister I supported the decriminalising of offences, but I never had in mind that that would be coupled with extending the powers of the police to deal with people such as those who do not give their name and address, and there are not as strong safeguards in respect of officials as there are for police officers.

The income or yield from decriminalised offences goes straight into the coffers of the local authorities, and local authorities cannot expect to have it both ways. They cannot expect both to receive all that money and to have the powers of the police given to their officials. My right hon. Friend therefore highlights a key issue.

We must remember that over time the Cities of London and Westminster and the London local authorities have salami-sliced the powers and rights of individual citizens in favour of bureaucratic local government. If this Bill is passed unamended, it will be argued that that trend should be extended, yet this Bill will not have been subjected to the same degree of parliamentary scrutiny as a public Bill.

[Mr Knight]

Is there any popular support for this measure? A number of colleagues representing London constituencies are present, but not a single Opposition Back Bencher is in the Chamber. It does not seem to me that there is popular demand for this measure. I can understand why money-grubbing council officers might want this matter to proceed, but do the public?

[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. It certainly appears that the public’s representatives are not keen on this matter. Although I have not checked the No. 10 website to see whether there is an online petition with hundreds or thousands of signatures in support of this Bill, I suspect not, and I think we would have been told about it if there was. The Bill’s passage through this House has not yet concluded, however, so it is still open to somebody to start an online petition in support of it, and against today’s amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is doing a great job in defending his local authorities, and I hope that as a result he will in due course be granted the freedom of his boroughs, if that has not already happened. I accept what he says about localism and about London, especially parts of central London, being different in character from other parts of the country, but I do not believe that we should have one regime of civil liberties in London and another elsewhere. If that were the case, we could, for instance, introduce much more draconian laws for people causing trouble or holding demonstrations in London. Nobody has yet suggested we should have a different criminal law according to where an offence takes place, yet that is what we are building up to under this decriminalised regime of law. It will result in alternative sets of laws applying to London as opposed to the rest of the country.

I argued that point when we were discussing various Bills concerning pedlars. Pedlars travelling across the country want the certainty of knowing what the law is; they do not want different laws in different parts of the country. That argument applies even more strongly in the context of whether someone has the right to ask for our name and address and whether we will be subject to a criminal penalty if we refuse to give that information.

Clauses 3 and 4 address important matters of principle, and amendment 10 seeks to alter clause 4 as follows:

“leave out ‘a community support officer or an accredited person’ and insert ‘or a community support officer’.”

Amendments 11, 12 and 13 address the same theme, and seek to remove from clause 4 powers relating to accredited persons and to confine them to police community support officers. The reasoning behind that is the same as the reasoning I articulated in respect of the amendments to clause 3.

[Mr Knight]

As ignorance of the law is not a defence, if these amendments are not accepted by the Bill’s promoters, is there not a case for requiring details of this different regime to be included in every tourist guide to London?

[Mr Chope]

I do not want to advertise, but I agree that readers of tourist guides such as those produced by Lonely Planet and Rough Guides might find it useful to know about such penalty regimes. I am sure that if this legislation is put on to the statute book in its current form the editors of those books will want to ensure they are up to date in respect of the fact that there are fewer civil liberties in London than in other parts of the country, as visitors may wish to steer clear of London in order to enjoy the full range of English freedoms outside London. Those are important points.