Counter-Terrorism (Statutory Instruments)

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Monday 16th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

rose—

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

rose—

[James Brokenshire]

I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert).

Immigration Bill

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Poole (Mr Syms), who has struck the right tone for debating immigration policy. I am glad that Labour Front Benchers will support the Government while tabling vigorous and robust amendments in Committee. That is how the House should discuss immigration policy. I am very much against the arms race that seems to have developed in the past few years, in which political parties compete with one another to show that they are tougher on foreigners. If the House of Commons can demonstrate in the debate and the vote the belief that we need to tackle illegal migration but that we need a fair and just system, we will send out a powerful message.

I first served on a Bill Committee 26 years ago, with my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). We have made journeys to the Front Bench, but have ended up on the Back Benches again—she more recently than I. We have therefore heard some of this discussion before, because with every immigration Bill Governments always say that they want to be tough but fair. We still end up with an immigration Bill before us every two years. Although Governments are willing to do something about immigration, especially illegal immigration, that is not borne out by what actually happens.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the number of immigration Bills. Does he share my concern about the lack of pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill—or indeed of previous ones—and does he think that the Home Affairs Committee could have done that well? Would it not be good if some of our previous recommendations had been included?

[Keith Vaz]

As a member of the Committee—there are four Committee members in their places this afternoon—I am not going to offer to take on more work, given our work load. As the hon. Gentleman knows, every quarter we look at the work of the Home Office on immigration, and I am certain that some aspects of the Bill will be included in the work that we do. We will therefore scrutinise some aspects of the Bill but not its entirety.

In pursuing an immigration policy that is fair and just, we need to be very careful with our enforcement methods. We also need to welcome decisions taken by the Government when they move in the right direction. The Home Secretary was right to shelve the ad vans, and I congratulate her on doing so. As the shadow Home Secretary and others have said, those vans caused enormous concern in the communities. We do not have a figure for how many people got into the vans and asked for a lift back to the airport, but the vans cost £10,000 and were out for six days in inner-city London. As yet, we do not know how many people have gone back. When the pilot is over, we will need those figures. Meanwhile, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) for his superb Adjournment debate. It gives us all heart to know that we can call for an Adjournment debate to advocate the abolition of an aspect of Government policy and for it to happen two weeks later. It gives us comfort to know that we have some powers as Back Benchers.

2014 JHA Opt-out Decision

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Monday 15th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

I will put that view to members of the Home Affairs Committee when we meet tomorrow. I will quote the hon. Gentleman and give them his e-mail address so that they can communicate with him directly.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Keith Vaz]

And here is one of them.

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for giving way. Just to show that we are indeed doing the work, perhaps he could put that point to us on Wednesday, as we are also meeting then. We are meeting twice a week at the moment, and we can continue to do so.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is one of the most assiduous attenders of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and yes, we are meeting twice this week. Tomorrow, we are taking evidence from the Home Secretary. The perfect time for us to begin our inquiry would have been the point at which she gave evidence to the Committee, but before having this vote. I can give her notice that we will be asking her about these matters tomorrow, although I am sure that she knows that already, bearing in mind the composition of the Committee. That is the approach we should have taken. There is no need for this mad rush or for instant decisions. Why do we need to rush this through the House and get it all over with before the summer recess? I see no reason to do that, given that we have until 1 December 2014 to vote on the matter.

Drugs

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Thursday 6th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bayley, and to follow the Chair of the Select Committee, especially after his kind words. I am not sure that they were entirely accurate. I think that he was referring to the draft Communications Data Bill, which he and I and various others have discussed in the past.

I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee on having the courage to ensure that the Committee considered this issue, because it is so sensitive and can lead to a huge amount of concern in some parts of the press. I also congratulate him on his leadership and on his speech, which took much of the content out of what I was planning to say, so I will only focus on a few key issues. There is a huge amount in this very thick and detailed report, and I support it completely.

I want to begin with the basic principles of how we start to work. First and fairly obviously, drugs are harmful. They are harmful whether they are legal or illegal; whether they are cocaine, marijuana, paracetamol or one of the new legal highs. They all have harms, and many of them also have benefits. As we say in one of the key parts of the report, the question is how we deal with those harms. Paragraph 14 of the report states:

“Drug use can lead to harm in a variety of ways: to the individual who is consuming the drug; to other people who are close to the user; through acquisitive and organised crime, and wider harm to society at large. The drugs trade is the most lucrative form of crime, affecting most countries, if not every country in the world.”

The principal aim of the Government drugs policy should be first and foremost to minimise those harms, but how do we go about doing that? How do we reduce the harms from alcohol and heroin and the harms from prescription drugs, which can be abused? For more than 40 years now, the answer has principally been to separate drugs into a category of legal or illegal—I use the term loosely of course because the drug itself cannot be legal or illegal, but possession can be. For the illegal ones, we have focused principally on the criminal justice approach—policing, courts, prisons and all the sanctions of the Home Office.

When the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was passed—interestingly, it has never been reviewed since 1971—the debate was all about how it would lead to the end of the use of illegal drugs. That was the Act’s aim. It certainly has not worked in that respect. If we were in a world now where no one had any of the drugs for which possession was illegal, we would be having a very different debate.

The Act simply has not worked, and that has been very expensive. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has estimated that 0.48% of the UK’s GDP is spent on our overall drugs strategy. I think that that is the highest rate of expenditure in Europe, and yet for many drugs, we have among the highest rates of use in Europe. We are spending lots of money, but there is lots of drug use—the Act is just not working.

In the process, we have hit many people’s lives. We have left people to languish in jail for a long time. Also, we have made people who possess small amounts of drugs go to jail, and many of them suffer problems trying to live and work afterwards. Even a caution for the most minor offences can still affect people’s ability to live and work. So we need to change things.

I have heard it said—there is some basis for saying it—that drug use is currently down. However, that is only true when looking at the drugs that we have made illegal. What we know—as the Chair of the Select Committee highlighted—is that there are now many other new psychoactive substances that people are moving to because of the pressure that we are putting on for legal reasons. We have no idea whether encouraging people to stop taking marijuana and to start taking one of the new things that they can find legally online somewhere is better or worse for them. We have no idea whether the harms caused by the other drugs will be better or worse. So we may well be pushing people to things that are far worse than the things that we are trying to clamp down on.

We also have to look at this issue in the round. We have to look at the pressures of alcohol. I asked one of the police officers who gave evidence if his officers would rather face, at the end of an evening, a group of four men who were drunk or a group of four men who were stoned. Most police officers would far rather deal with the people who had used marijuana. We have to look at the impacts of some of these other issues.

As the Chairman of the Select Committee quite rightly said, one of the key things that we say is that we need to look again at this issue. These days, we do not allow legislation to sit by for 40 years without looking at it; we try to have post-legislative scrutiny to see whether a law is working and doing what it is supposed to do. That is why the Select Committee has called for a royal commission to look at the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. That is what our report says, and we are not the only people saying it by any stretch of the imagination.

The UK Drug Policy Consortium has done six years of work on the issue and it has called for many of the same things that we have called for; I commend all its detailed publications. Huge numbers of organisations say what our report says; I could mention many of them, such as Transform and Release. Also, we are increasingly getting senior people who have had experience of this fight, including senior people from MI5, MI6 and the police, who say, “No. We’re not doing it the right way. We have to change.” In Cambridgeshire, Tom Lloyd, the former chief constable, who has huge experience of dealing with the criminal justice approach to drugs, is very clear—indeed, categorical—that we need to change.

Our Committee has not gone as far as some suggest. The Chair of our Committee referred to the article in The Mail on Sunday, which suggested that we support full legalisation, but that is not what we recommended. However, we supported a proposal that was made more than 10 years ago by the Home Affairs Committee and supported by the Prime Minister, as he is now. That proposal was very clear, and the Prime Minister voted in favour of a proposal that we also endorse. It is that

“we recommend that the Government initiate a discussion within the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways—including the possibility of legalisation and regulation—to tackle the global drugs dilemma.”

That is what the Prime Minister said 10 years ago. The key thing in that recommendation is that not only legalisation should at least be considered; we also have to regulate. That may or may not be the right answer, which is why we need a royal commission.

Our Committee called for a royal commission and we published this detailed, thick report. I was impressed that, within only an hour or so of its being published, the Home Secretary was able to say no, nothing in the report was new and that people did not need to learn from it. That was an impressively fast response. I commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for the work that he has been doing on this issue. There have been some positive things, and the full Government response was rather more positive than the initial comment that came out from the Home Office.

The Chair of our Committee described the Government response as supporting about half of our recommendations. In a number of cases, the suggestion from the Government was that what we were recommending was already being done. We could argue about the extent to which that is true, but my summary is that the Government response was largely saying no to most of our new suggestions.

However, I strongly welcome two things in the Government response to our report, because I think that they will make the difference. Again, I strongly commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for his work to get them into the Government response. One of them is set out at the top of page 15, where an interesting sentence says:

“High quality drug treatment is the most effective way of reducing drug misuse and reducing drug related mortality.”

I agree completely with that. To start off by putting treatment as the principal aim rather than the criminal justice focus is exactly what many of us have been arguing for. We now need the Government to follow through on their own statement that we need to focus on the “high quality drug treatment” and not on the policing or the criminal justice. That fits with our recommendation that we need to get the Department of Health far more involved.

With the greatest of respect to my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister, having a Drugs Minister based in the Home Office means that the starting point will always be the criminal justice-led approach. There is co-operation and working with the Department of Health, but many other countries have the lead for drugs policy based in their departments of health—or their equivalent—because the focus needs to be on treatment, as the Government here have now accepted.

The other key thing that came out of the Government response was the international comparators study. I was very pleased to see that. During our evidence sessions, it was clear that although there was a stated commitment, in the words of the Drugs Strategy 2010,

“to review new evidence on what works in other countries and what we can learn from it”,

that commitment was being honoured—certainly at ministerial level—in a slightly more relaxed way than perhaps some of us might have liked. It is absolutely right that we should proactively look at other countries to see what they achieve.

My hon. Friend the Minister has been to Portugal already, and I am sure that he will talk a bit later about what he saw there. When our Committee went to Portugal, we saw a few things that were really striking. The Portuguese model is often misdescribed. In Portugal, it is still an offence to possess large amounts of any drug and it is still a criminal offence to supply drugs. The key difference is that possession of a relatively small amount of any drug—up to 10 days’ personal supply, and there are estimated figures for what that amount is—is treated outside the criminal justice system. There are dissuasion commissions that deal with those cases in a non-judicial way; there is no criminal sanction and the focus is on treatment. The aim is to have individualised care, to make sure that people can get out of using drugs.

We were impressed by how fast people could be set up with treatment in Portugal. There are often delays in the UK in trying to find appropriate treatment facilities. In Portugal, people said that it was very frustrating that sometimes they would have to wait for two days, which would be amazingly fast for many of the people in my constituency who I have spoken to. So Portugal has this process whereby people who are addicts are pushed towards treatment. There are other ways that they can be dealt with, but none of them involves dealing with the criminal justice process and none of them affects people’s ability to work, except in a very few special circumstances.

The Portuguese approach was controversial when it was established but it seems to have worked, and there are a number of ways to look at it. According to the official Portuguese figures, the number of long-term addicts has declined from more than 100,000 people before the new policy was enacted, which was about 10 years ago, to half that number today. The Portuguese have also found less drug use in prison.

What was striking when we went to Portugal and spoke to politicians from across the political range—from the Christian democrats on the right to the communists on the far left—was that none of them disagreed with the policy. With the Christian democrats, we had an interesting meeting with a very impressive woman from the party who had opposed the policy when it was introduced. The Christian democrats had made all sorts of dire predictions about what would happen—the sort of thing that we can read in The Daily Mail—but they said, “We were wrong. We didn’t see increased drug use, which we were concerned about; we didn’t see drug tourism; we didn’t see any of the problems.”

The live debate in Portugal around drugs policy is whether treatment should be funded on a national or regional basis. That was the debate across the political spectrum. Nobody was questioning whether the decriminalisation of possession of small amounts was the right thing or wrong thing to do. The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), who was leading us on that occasion, made a point of asking everybody whether they agreed in principle with the policy. Not a single person disagreed; we could not find anybody who did so. We spoke to the police, who had originally opposed it, and they said, “Actually, this has been better for us for policing. We don’t have to spend so much time on people who are addicts, who are small users. Instead, they can help us to deal with the people who are dealing, who are causing the higher-level problems with gangs and organised crime.” Nobody opposed the policy.

We met a gentleman who leads a non-governmental organisation that is staunchly anti liberalising the drugs policy—it was the closest we came to meeting somebody who disagreed—and he said that 10 days’ supply was too much and that it should be more like two or three days’ supply. I explained that that would be seen as phenomenally liberal in this country, and he was shocked. They all agree that that is not the right way to go. I hope the Minister found things much the same in Portugal—I am sure he will speak for himself—and that there was a strong sense that the policy worked well.

The principle of focusing on not criminalising people in possession has already been accepted by the Government in a different context: temporary class drug orders, brought in a couple of years ago to allow the temporary ban on drugs while we are trying to find all the evidence. The Government have made it an offence to supply large amounts of such drugs, but not an offence to possess small amounts. All I am suggesting is that we apply the same principle to other drugs, because it has been found to work in Portugal, to be publicly accepted and to have good outcomes.

I am keen on an evidence base. There is a fantastic piece of evidence from the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic used to have no criminal sanction on possession of small amounts, but in 2001 it changed the law and criminalised possession, and there was a big debate. The sort of arguments were made that might be expected, with people saying that if possession were criminalised fewer people would use drugs, people would be healthier and better, and there would be less drug use—all of that sort of thing. The Government there did something that Governments rarely do and set out their hypotheses, worked out how to measure and test them, and published a proper impact analysis, internationally verified, of their predictions. They found that they did not get what they expected from criminalising possession.

The implementation of a penalty for possession of illicit drugs for personal use did not meet any of the tested objectives, was loss-making from an economic point of view and brought about avoidable social costs. It was found that criminalisation made things worse. That suggests that decriminalisation—not an absolute parallel, but as close as one can get—would not be likely to make things bad.

The summary of results in the Czech impact analysis states that

“from the perspective of social costs, enforcement of penalizing of possession of illicit drugs for personal use is disadvantageous”.

The hypothesis that availability of illicit drugs would decrease was rejected, as was the one suggesting that the number of illicit drug users would decrease; and rather than the number of new cases of illicit drug use decreasing after criminalisation, incidence in the general population increased. Rather than finding no negative health indicators relating to illicit drug use, there were more fatal overdoses from illicit drugs after criminalisation, and the hypothesis that social costs would not increase was rejected. Having done this study, the Czech Republic went back and decriminalised possession, because it found that it was better for its society and was cheaper and more effective at dealing with drugs. We can do this in this country.

Of course, no country is a perfect model, but we know that in Portugal decriminalisation of possession of small amounts works and has societal benefits and is well accepted, and that in the Czech Republic it is better to decriminalise possession than not to. We can try that here. We would need a royal commission to work out the exact details of how to do the work here. We can make a difference.

Although I would love to talk about other domestic issues, I do not have time to go through them in perfect detail. The focus on treatment is right. I am alarmed that there is a push to suggest that abstinence is the only form of treatment that really counts. Where people are having treatment, we want to move them from high usage to lower usage. For some people that will mean abstinence and for others it will mean maintenance. We want to offer them the choice of whatever will get them to the lowest level we can. The Chair of our Committee was right in what he said about prisons and the need to get smaller providers involved in drugs treatment.

I want to pick up on an issue, drug-driving, that plays into Home Office discussions. It is right to have a criminal offence for drug-driving, just as there is for drink-driving, and the threshold for harm should be the same. We allow drivers to drink up to 0.08 mg per ml, and we should allow the same equivalent harm from drug use. For someone whose drug use has taken them to that risk level, that should be the key test. We make that recommendation in our report in paragraph 2:

“the equivalent effect on safety as the legal alcohol limit, currently 0.08 mg/ml.”

We must ensure that we get health further involved.

Let me finish by mentioning supply, because drugs are not just a UK problem but a huge international problem. Although we have had 50 years of criminalisation, illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world, after food and oil. That is incredibly damaging. We tracked the routes for cocaine, as our Committee Chair said. We went to Colombia to see where it was grown; to Florida, where we saw how the US military tried to combat it; and we saw the customs’ efforts to try to stop it flooding into the US. I spoke to parliamentarians from west Africa, looking at that stage of the process. In Portugal, cocaine is coming into Europe. The message at every stage was clear: supply cannot be stopped. It can be squeezed in various ways. For example, massive military efforts can be made in Colombia to reduce the amount of coca plantation, but it moves to a neighbouring country. Interdiction can used and the navy can block one side of central America, but it goes to the other side or takes an air route.

It was astonishing to see the mini-submarines now being created by the Colombian drugs lords, which cost about $1 million and have a range that allows them to reach London. The cocaine loaded on to those can be sold for about $500,000. The US navy was clear: with the best will in the world, it cannot spot a small submarine somewhere in the Atlantic. Supply cannot be controlled.

[Keith Vaz]

It is more astonishing that it was cost-effective for the drugs barons to sink the submarine when it arrived in Africa, because their profits were so enormous that they could just buy another one.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. I was flabbergasted to find out just how much money was involved. I was even more surprised to discover that, in Portugal, where there has been a problem for a while with people flying drugs in from west Africa—they have tried to combat that—drugs are now being flown back from Portugal into west Africa. On asking, we were told, “We think it is because the drugs are returned to the sender if they are not of good enough quality.” If people think it is safe enough to transfer drugs internationally that they can have a returns policy, we are nowhere near stopping supply, and in the process we are losing control of country after country to the drugs cartels. The profits are huge, and criminal gangs and cartels across the world thrive on them. The banks have a huge part to play, as the right hon. Gentleman was right to highlight. This is wrecking many countries. We did not look at the situation with heroin and marijuana, but the same damaging effects apply in different countries.

President Santos has been taking a strong stance, saying that his country will try to control this problem; but we cannot expect countries to be torn apart for ever in an effort to control a problem that cannot be controlled. I am delighted that, in 2016, the United Nations General Assembly will have a special session to look again at its international drugs policy. I hope that, whatever flavour of Government we have then, we will be working with people like President Santos and with the reformers to try to solve this global problem.

We have worked for 40 years with a criminalisation process that has not delivered what we said it should deliver in 1971. It has not worked for the users of drugs, for society at large or for the Treasury. There are much better ways.

Police

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Wednesday 13th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Because of his profession, he knows about these issues. I am sure he is an assiduous Member who works tirelessly on behalf of his constituents. One of the public’s first concerns is whether they can see their local police officer—the bobby on the beat—walking around, and whether they can go to the local police station and report crimes and feel safe as a result. Not all of us can have a Dr Who-type TARDIS—I certainly do not—but it is important that we give that visibility in respect of both the physical building and police officers.

Where responsibility for counter-terrorism will lie is not yet settled. The Government are ring-fencing its £563 million budget, and I support that, but there is to be a new landscape of policing, and a decision needs to be made soon as to whether it will stay with the Metropolitan police or move to the National Crime Agency. My distinguished colleague from the Home Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), will correct me if I am wrong, but I think we recommended in one of our reports that it should go to the National Crime Agency, as counter-terrorism is a national issue.

[Dr Huppert]

indicated assent.

[Keith Vaz]

Another Select Committee member, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) is also present, and he is nodding in agreement. We suggested that in part because we were worried the NCA might not have enough to do, which is, indeed, the case at present. It has very few staff and it is not yet established to the satisfaction of the Government and the Select Committee. We need to have a decision on this matter soon, and we were promised a decision after the Olympics. I do not know whether the Minister wants to answer that question now, but if not, I am happy to wait until the winding-up speeches.

I am also concerned about the huge amount of money currently being spent on historical investigations. The Select Committee has asked witnesses about that on many occasions. At present we have Operations Alice, Elveden, Weeting. Tuleta, Pallial, Yewtree and Herne. We heard only yesterday from the Home Secretary that Herne—which has been under way for the past year, with a number of police officers involved, and at a cost to the taxpayer of £1.2 million—will now be taken over by the chief constable of Derbyshire. That operation deals with important issues involving undercover agents and the recent public revelations, and a lot of money is being spent on these matters. I calculate that £44.8 million is currently being spent on the police investigating other police officers who have failed to come up to scratch. A lot of money is going to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, too, to deal with past errors by certain police forces, such as at Hillsborough. In discussing the reduction of the grant to local police and crime and commissioners, we need to consider all the money currently being spent on all these operations.

The hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds is the spokesman on good procurement in this House, and we have had many discussions about the matter. I welcome the decision of the deputy mayor of London, Stephen Greenhalgh, to take a careful look at how the Metropolitan police have spent their procurement budget. He took evidence from Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe on the issue. When we commission companies to act if the public sector cannot act, we must choose only companies with a good track record. Only yesterday it was announced that G4S was going to have to hand back to the taxpayer about £70 million. We should take into account the expenditure from the police budget that goes on companies such as G4S. The Select Committee was very clear that, as a result of the big mistakes G4S made, it ought to have handed back all its management fee of £57 million plus all the other money it ought to have spent. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North became an internet hit with his famous “humiliating shambles” soundbite. He will always be remembered for uttering those words on the Select Committee—and for many other words uttered, too, of course—because it was, indeed, a humiliating shambles. As the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds has said, we ought to be very careful about dispensing public money to private companies that do not come up to scratch.

Finally, I want to say a few words about the need to carry people with us. The Minister, who has responsibility for security matters, is an avuncular type who seeks consensus. We will see that when he comes to the Dispatch Box. I will not say he is the most courteous of the Home Office Ministers as the others might get upset if I were to do so, but he does not pick a fight. The current Home Office policy is, in effect, picking a fight with the people who have to implement the changes, however. Now is not the best time to be cutting police officers’ pensions, forcing them out under rule A19 and cutting their pay retrospectively—although I perfectly understand why we might need to make changes for new recruits.

I remember my last conversation with Paul McKeever on this subject. He passionately supported treating police officers with the respect, courtesy and dignity they deserve. My only real row with the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), was about police pay. He was quite robust with me when he asked me not to go on a demonstration under the last Labour Government in support of the police who were having their pay cut. I said to him then—and I say to the Home Secretary and Home Office Ministers now—that we must carry the work force with us. If we say we have the best police service in the world, the only way to express our admiration for what the police have done is to treat them with proper respect—to have a dialogue with them, to stop cutting their pay and conditions, to speak to them because they know best day in, day out. As we have seen recently in Manchester and other parts of the country, they lay down their lives for us. They go out in the morning and they do not know whether they are coming back at night, unlike all of us in this Chamber today. If we do not carry them with us, the world-class brand reputation that we currently have will be damaged for ever.

Crime and Courts Bill [Lords]

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Monday 14th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara). He has obviously campaigned hard on that issue and I commend him for his efforts. I am glad that the measure will be contained in this legislation.

Earlier today, the Home Affairs Committee held a conference to launch our new inquiry into leadership and standards in the police. I am pleased to see three members of the Committee here this evening: my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) and the hon. Members for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless). We listened carefully to some of the leaders of our police service, including Hugh Orde, Bernard Hogan-Howe and the new chief executive of the college of policing, as well as leaders from abroad, such as the commissioner who heads the Royal Canadian mounted police and the former president of Interpol. It is clear that in order to get effective leadership, there must be effective structures. I am therefore glad that, with the creation of the National Crime Agency, we at last have a body for the head of the NCA, who was appointed 15 months ago.

At that conference, it was interesting to hear the acceptance from all sides of the police service of the need for the Government, the Opposition and those in the police service to sit together and talk about the future of policing. With the Bill, we have an opportunity to streamline a number of the structures that have operated in policing for a number of years. The Labour Government can be praised for the resources that they gave the police, but we would be the first to admit that we did not really spend the necessary time examining the structures and ensuring they were fit for purpose.

What the Government have proposed is a revolution in policing—the abolition of SOCA and the National Policing Improvement Agency, the creation of the College of Policing and police and crime commissioners, and the abolition of police authorities. When on taking office the Home Secretary announced the changes, she talked about uncluttering the landscape. We will probably have more organisations rather than fewer at the end of the process, but I would be the first to accept them if they were fit for purpose, acted upon Parliament wanted and did the job effectively.

My first concern about the new landscape is that it is not complete. We thought that by now we would have a Constable—perhaps “Dedham Vale”—but instead we have the tail-end of a “Guernica”. The good intentions are there, but it is not complete. I thought that after two years, we would have the end of the landscape and the jigsaw would have been completed, but it has not. I urge Ministers to come rapidly to a conclusion about how the landscape will look in the end. The Home Affairs Committee, including its members who are in their places, has scrutinised and monitored what the Government have been doing, but we cannot decide on the structures. That has to be up to the Government. All that the House and the Committee can do is scrutinise and monitor what the Government are doing and give our recommendations on whether the system will work.

We need a conclusion on whether responsibility for counter-terrorism will remain with the Met or form part of the National Crime Agency. Why? Because we were promised a review of that at the end of the Olympics. The Home Secretary specifically said that she would not make a decision until the Olympics were over. I urge the Government to make progress, because it is not in the Met’s interests, and certainly not in the interests of Keith Bristow and his new colleagues at the NCA, that they should delay.

Like the former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), I would probably be minded to move responsibility for counter-terrorism into the NCA. It would fit well there, as the NCA will be a national organisation dealing with national and international issues. However, I know that there is resistance to that from the Met. I have discussed it with a number of officers, who feel strongly that responsibility should stay with the Met, because it has within it the expertise needed to deal with the matter.

It is also important that we know the name of the new chair of the College of Policing. Perhaps the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice will tell us that. It has a chief executive, and we heard from him today. He has ambitious plans for what he hopes will eventually be a royal college of policing. Professionalism is vital to the future of our police service, but it is also important that the Government get on and appoint the chair. I know that someone was recently nominated, but that person has not been appointed, for a variety of reasons. If there is a shortlist of additional candidates, I urge the Minister to interview them, as I think he will be doing this week, and then let the Home Affairs Committee have the name of whoever is going to be in charge of the organisation, which is vital for the future of this country’s police service.

It is also important that we deal with the issue of appeals. I do not know whether the Minister will remember this, but when he was Minister for Immigration, he promised in a debate in the House a meeting with myself and colleagues who had an interest in immigration. Actually, I think I put it to the Home Secretary that she should meet us, but she passed it on to him. He, of course, has now left the post, and I hope he will pass the message on to the current Minister for Immigration.

Those of us who deal with a lot of immigration cases want the issue of appeals dealt with. That is not just Opposition Members—I see the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) in his place, and I reckon that he has many immigration cases at his surgery on a Friday evening. The last thing he wants is for us to be in limbo, having to ask people to apply again because there is no right of appeal for family visitors.

I put to Ministers a simple solution. I know that things have to change. I do not accept that there is abuse in the system, but it is a lengthy system and I know that they want to save money. I and others have suggested in the past that we have an administrative review of the decisions made by entry clearance officers. New evidence necessary to ensure that a case can be dealt with satisfactorily could go to somebody in a hub in London—it is quite possible for cases to be reviewed in London. I say to Ministers that the change will affect the settled British community, the diasporas that the Prime Minister and other Ministers feel strongly about bringing on-side. Unless we do something about the problem, British citizens trying to get relatives over for weddings and other family events will suffer.

[Dr Huppert]

It is always a pleasure to speak to the right hon. Gentleman about these issues. There is a problem when more information is required in a case, and I understand the Government’s advice that people should reapply. Would not an alternative approach be for entry clearance officers to be able to specify what extra information they would like and make a decision once they have received it? I have seen a number of cases in which they asked to see specific documents part-way through the process.

[Keith Vaz]

I agree, and my biggest regret from when I was the Minister responsible for entry clearance 10 years ago is that I did not introduce that approach. I left it to the system, and I was wrong to do so. If we had a system that allowed new information to be accepted, we would be able to save the taxpayer a huge amount of money and save those who are seeking to bring people into this country a lot of anguish.

Policing

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Thursday 12th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The House will know, Mr Brady, that over the past 10 years, you and I have had the honour of co-chairing the Westminster kids club Christmas party, but this is the first time that I have served under your chairmanship, and it is an enormous privilege to do so.

I welcome this opportunity to discuss the report by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, “New Landscape of Policing”, which we published on 23 September 2011. A new Government always want to put their imprint on an important area of policy, but in my 25 years in the House, I have not seen the kinds of changes to policing and the policing landscape that this Government initiated when they took office. The Government propose abolishing the National Policing Improvement Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency; creating a new National Crime Agency, a professional body for policing and a police-led information technology company; centralising non-IT procurement; supporting collaboration; and ending unnecessary bureaucracy.

Our report was a response to those fundamental and far-reaching proposals for policing reform. Given the significance of the changes to this £997.3 million budget, the Committee decided to examine the proposals in great detail. I am pleased to see that three members of the Committee are present—my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael), and the hon. Members for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert)—as well as the official spokesmen from various parties.

We have received more than 50 pieces of written evidence and heard from 29 witnesses, including the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). We have also held an informal meeting with the Police Federation, attended by its chairman, Paul McKeever, and Derek Barnett, who represented the Police Superintendents Association. At the invitation of the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, we have also held two public meetings—in Sheringham in Norfolk and in Cardiff in Wales. We put the public at the centre of our deliberations; after all, the police exist to protect the public and uphold the rule of law. To increase that involvement still further, we ran a nationwide polling exercise on our website, asking people what they wanted the police to prioritise. In total, 2,000 votes were cast, and the highest public priority for the police was dealing with murder and serious violence.

Despite the Government’s desire to unclutter the landscape, we concluded that it seems likely that the new landscape of policing will contain more bodies than the current landscape’s six. It is possible that the Government’s changes will lead to a more logical and better functioning police landscape and ultimately make the police more successful at achieving their basic mission of reducing crime and disorder, even though we will end up with more bodies. We believe that as the scale of the change is unprecedented, the possibility for mistakes may be large and with us for some time. That is why, at the point of publication, the Committee had particular reservations about the timetable for the changes, including the transfer of functions from the National Policing Improvement Agency by spring 2012 and the setting up of the National Crime Agency by December 2013.

It has taken the Government more than a year to announce where the functions of the NPIA will go. As the NPIA has an annual budget of £447.6 million, it is extremely important that we know those facts. The continuing uncertainty was damaging to the morale of the 2,000 people who work for the agency, and to the efficiency and effectiveness of the police service as a whole. I am therefore glad that the gap or loophole was rectified by the Government’s acceptance of our recommendation that the phasing out of the NPIA be delayed until December 2012, and by the announcement on the future location of some of the agency’s functions. It is not immediately clear whether further functions from the NPIA will transfer to the NCA, and how some of the functions already earmarked for transfer to the NCA will relate directly to operational responses to organised crime.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who chairs the Committee, for giving way. Does he agree that, while it has certainly not been perfect, the NPIA has done a very good job, and that there is some concern that an impression has been given that it has not been valued by the House? It has had many disparate functions, many of which have been developed very well. It is important that we put on record our appreciation for the NPIA’s work during its existence.

[Keith Vaz]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for, and agree with, his intervention. It is important that we put on record the achievements of the NPIA in certain areas. The fact that organisations are being abolished does not mean that we do not recognise the work done. I will come on to some of those organisations later.

The fact that the location of all the NPIA functions has not been announced remains a concern. I hope that, during his winding-up speech, the Minister will finally give us the list of all the outstanding functions and tell us where they will go. Many of the NPIA functions bound for the NCA will have to move to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which itself is due to be abolished and co-opted into the NCA by December 2013. This shifting of resources between agencies due for closure, before finally shifting them to the NCA, makes heavy weather of the Government’s important principle of uncluttering the landscape.

SOCA was set up by the previous Government, of which the shadow Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), was an active member—one of his roles was that of Policing Minister—and our Committee has been concerned about it for a number of years. In our most recent report on the agency in 2009, we found that its budget of £476 million was used to hire 3,800 members of staff; that it was spending £15 of public money for every pound it seized from criminal gangs; and that it lacked transparency in the way that it operated. Despite improvement in its performance, it is essential that the Government’s new crime-fighting agency be set the correct targets and can use its resources cost-effectively, so that it does not become another SOCA. It is also not clear whether SOCA will be given extra resources to help it manage the NPIA functions during the short-lived transition. I hope that the Minister will offer clarification on that point.

The lack of detail regarding the creation of the NCA was one of the central concerns of the Committee, and that remains the case. We were concerned about the delay in appointing a head of the agency, and the lack of detail on the objectives and—most importantly—the budget of this new policing agency. We welcome the appointment of Keith Bristow as the head of the NCA since the publication of our report. We felt, however, that someone occupying a position of that importance ought to have appeared before the Committee before taking up his formal appointment. We also remain concerned about the lack of detail on his role and objectives. Will he be a civil servant, or the head of the No. 1 crime-busting agency in the country? Will he be Sir Humphrey or Eliot Ness? Perhaps we will find out when he appears before the Committee on Tuesday to answer some important questions.

The Committee still awaits the figures on the agency’s budget. When the Minister first appeared before the Committee on 28 June, I asked his director of finance whether he knew the budget. He replied that it would be a little higher than SOCA’s, which is £476 million. Luckily, he had the Minister next to him, who told the Committee that although the budget for the NCA had not yet been set, the lion’s share of it would come from SOCA. The Minister came before us again on 20 December 2011, following the announcement that the destination of some of the NPIA functions would be the NCA, and he could still not inform us of the budget. This is not a game of “Play Your Cards Right”—a little higher here, a little lower there. We want the figures. Parliament needs to know exactly what the budget of this new agency will be, particularly as it is the flagship of the Government’s new policy.

There remain many areas where the agenda for the future of policing is unclear. One such area is police IT. Despite costing the public £1.2 billion annually, we concluded that

“IT across the police service as a whole is not fit for purpose,”

and that that affected the

“police’s ability to fulfil their basic mission of preventing crime and disorder.”

The Home Office has made rectifying that, through changes to police IT, a top priority.

It was an error of judgment on the part of the Home Office to prevent Lord Wasserman from giving oral evidence to our inquiry. As the author of the police IT review that preceded the Home Secretary’s announcement of the creation of a police-led information and communications technology company, and as chairman of the board setting up that new IT company, he is central to any future plans. He hosts seminars on behalf of Ministers, he speaks on behalf of Ministers, and he advises Ministers. I have received many invitations to seminars that the Minister for Policing was unable to attend, and Lord Wasserman is sent in his place. It appears that Lord Wasserman is, in fact, acting as a Minister, so it is very odd that he has refused to appear before the Committee. I hope that the Minister will have some good news for the Committee, in terms of agreeing to allow him to attend. The Committee unanimously wrote to the Home Secretary again on 20 October 2011 asking Lord Wasserman to come before us and give us answers on the development of the new company. That request was turned down.

One of the areas that the Committee has been focusing on with regard to policing has been the policing protocol.

Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Tuesday 11th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

We will talk about this later. What the hon. Gentleman did as a wee lad sounds like a fascinating story.

Back to the point. Let us have a proper debate about this. Let us not let down our constituents, who want to see proper mechanisms for dealing with crime, but let us have in place a proper code that will be looked at carefully, and an organisation or individual to monitor what is going on.

[Dr Huppert]

I will try to be brief as we do not have much time left. It is a great pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, particularly after he so politely managed to demolish the argument made by the shadow Minister. I congratulate him on the elegance with which he did that. The right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), at least as he described it, seems to live in a slightly bizarre world where CCTV is either all a good thing or all a bad thing, and that people should either support all of it or none of it. He talked having no obstacles to more CCTV. That is the kind of thinking that has led to us having a huge number of CCTV cameras. I hesitate to admit that I have slightly different figures from my Chair. I have seen the figure of something like 4 million CCTV cameras. However, it is a huge proportion.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman’s figures are probably much more up to date. I was quoting the figures in the Home Affairs Committee report from three years ago.

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the correction.

That is one camera for every 14 people in this country. Let us compare that with other countries that also have interests in law enforcement. Chicago, with a population of 3 million, has something like 10,000 cameras. That is a 20th of what we have. Do we know something that they do not? Across the United States, they use fewer cameras.

The truth about CCTV is that it is not an all-or-none issue. It has its uses and its abuses, which is why we need this code of practice. It has its costs for running and monitoring the systems and it has privacy implications, which is why I absolutely support the Government’s proposals. I hope that the right hon. Member for Delyn will withdraw the new clause.

Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Monday 5th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the shadow Minister for his comments and apologise again for any criticism I might have made earlier about his seating. I do trust the Minister on this one. I am sure he would not have told the House something that the Metropolitan police had not told him was the case. I am sure he will be able to confirm that. I do have faith that the Metropolitan police have said this, if the Minister says they did.

I see amendments 8 and 20 as an attempt to keep control orders going for that last gasp. The gasp is not very long; it might not be a full five or 10-year gasp, but it is still a gasp and one gasp too many. I shall not support those amendments.

I believe we have made progress. The Government amendments take us a stage further. I am delighted to support them and look forward to hearing other contributions to the debate.

[Keith Vaz]

It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and to wish him well in his ministerial career. I know that the hon. Member for South Ribble (Lorraine Fullbrook) and I, who are with him every Tuesday, will want that to happen as soon as possible—but not before tomorrow, when, as he knows, we start our inquiry into the London riots.

In four days’ time, on its 10th anniversary, we shall remember the events of 9/11. The weekend newspapers were full of terrible accounts of what happened that day and of the stories of the survivors. The House discusses terrorism and its prevention in a measured, careful and sober manner, and I hope we shall do so today as we consider amendments and debate important issues.

I was not a member of the Committee that considered the Bill, and—mea culpa on behalf of the Home Affairs Committee—I am afraid that our agenda has been so full over the past two years that we have not had an opportunity to scrutinise this aspect of policy properly. We hope to make up for that next Tuesday, when we begin our inquiry into the roots of radicalism. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) talked of the need to understand why people become radicals. Next week our Committee will take evidence from the chairman of the United States committee on homeland security, Congressman Peter King. We hope to be able to present to the House in six months’ time—this will be a long and weighty inquiry—our views on what constitute the causes of terrorism, and on how we can deal with them.

Legal Aid

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. He is right. I am not an expert on the position in London, but I know the Cambridge area and I realise that there is a shortage of good people. I see that with my constituents time and again.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I pay tribute to him for the work that he does as chair of the all-party group on refugees and as a member of the Select Committee.

Further to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), if that specialism disappears—and immigration cases are dealt with by specialist legal aid lawyers—vulnerable constituents may go to unscrupulous immigration advisers, be charged huge sums, and, at the end of the day, be left with no recourse except to go to Members of Parliament, who are not really qualified to give them that advice.

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments. I am astonished at how many constituents I see who have been poorly advised. The most extreme example was a lady who applied for asylum through a lawyer and got leave to remain, but when she went to renew her passport she discovered that the whole thing was a forgery. We are still trying to resolve that case. We need decent, good quality lawyers, not the rather shabby and disreputable people whom we sometimes see in their place.

The main point that I want to make is about the approach taken by the UK Border Agency. Its attitude is a well-known sticking point. It rarely allows scope for negotiation or mediation. It seems to take the view that it will stick to its decision until a court tells it otherwise almost regardless of the evidence. In so many cases, applications for the right to work were ignored until the agency was ordered to deal with them by higher courts.

Many applications for refugee reunion that are refused are then overturned on appeal, and it seems that the appeal system is being used by the agency as a safety net. Under the Government’s proposals, those cases would no longer be in scope for legal aid, and there will be no opportunity to fix the agency’s errors. I urge the Government to listen to practitioners and the representatives of asylum seekers and refugees. The Government should ensure that asylum support remains in scope as a high priority. They should also ensure that applications for family reunion are treated as extensions to a claim for asylum and thus be within scope for legal aid purposes.

There are certainly cases in which applicants with a poor case abuse the system, looking for appeal after appeal in a fruitless quest for victory. However, those with a strong case are also forced to jump repeated hurdles to get justice. The key solution is for the agency to get more decisions right first time, as was accepted by the Minister for Immigration, when I raised the matter in the Chamber.

I could say more about that, but I want to give a brief example of the impact that the Government’s proposals may have on service providers, and I shall then allow others to speak. I have spoken to service providers about the possible impact of the proposals on various vulnerable groups. I have received comments from a range of organisations and individuals that provide support. I wish that I could have talked to all of them, but I shall focus on the role of Citizens Advice, as I suspect that all Members will appreciate the vital role that it plays in our constituencies, not least in preventing the flood of case work that we all receive from becoming even more torrential.

Citizens Advice has produced detailed briefings showing the unintended consequences of the Government’s proposals on social welfare law work. Its cost-benefit analysis makes a strong case for retaining and even strengthening its role. For instance, its research found that for every £1 of legal aid spent on housing advice, the state potentially saves £2.34; on debt advice, the state saves £2.98; on benefits, it saves £8.80; and on employment advice, it saves £7.13. With impressive understatement, Citizens Advice suggests that the Ministry of Justice

“gets a good return from expenditure on legal help in these areas.”

It estimates that if funding were no longer available for these categories of law, at least £172 million of additional costs would accrue for both state and society.

What effect would the proposals have on the Citizens Advice service more widely? More than half of the bureaux surveyed in December last year said that the changes to legal aid scope and the reduction in fees would pose a real risk to the continuation of their local advice service as a whole. Again, I do not need to remind Members of the havoc that that would wreak in our communities, or of the large amount of extra work that would almost certainly come our way as a result. In passing, I praise the excellent work done by Rachel Talbot and the staff of the Cambridge citizens advice bureau, who are always there to help me and my constituents. I also praise Cambridge city council, which last year provided it with a 25% increase in grant. I wish that all councils did that, rather than pulling resources from such a vital public service.

Time is running short, but I wish to raise two brief points. The first, raised earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George), is about the effect of combining the legal aid proposals with Lord Jackson’s proposals on clinical negligence cases. Lord Jackson was clear about it. He said:

“I stress the vital necessity of making no further cutbacks in legal aid availability or eligibility…the maintenance of legal aid at no less than the present levels makes sound economic sense and is in the public interest”.

Will the Government take account of that plea, and avoid a double whammy? Legal aid changes and the Jackson proposals together would mean that those who have suffered through error would not be able to continue with their cases.

Secondly, I flag up a concern raised with me by Andy McGowan, the access and funding officer of Cambridge university students union. He is one of those rare people on free school meals who got to Oxbridge—the Government would like to see more of them—and he wants to practise as a criminal legal aid solicitor; he is driven by a motivation that I am sure we would all endorse to help the most vulnerable in society. He asks how he can fund the legal practice course in the absence of the training contract grant scheme, knowing that he will be unlikely to be as well paid as those lawyers for whom money is the principle motivation. If we lose people like Andy from the profession and from public service, we will create a less fair future for many years to come.

It is not my intention to attack the Government’s proposals without offering an alternative. That is not a helpful or effective way of approaching such debates, and I am always disappointed when others do not say clearly what they would do differently. There is clearly much in the Government’s proposals that is sensible. I cannot claim to be an expert on legal aid, and I have relied heavily on the hard work of many other people in preparing this speech. I am grateful to them for all that they do to preserve what is good about the present system, and for their wider struggle to provide access to justice for all, especially for the most vulnerable. The case that I have attempted to build draws on the research and evidence of others. The same is true of the alternative that I offer the Government.

The Law Society, which for a long time was officially responsible for legal aid, has continued to play a major role in shaping the debate on this important subject. It has produced an alternative set of proposals that aim to go beyond the savings that the Government have set out. It projects savings of £384 million, which could even reach slightly more, yet at the same time it claims to be able to protect the vulnerable about whom I have said so much. The Government are duty bound to look seriously at those proposals and, if they are workable, to adopt them. If the Government are serious about access to justice, they must listen to those who know what is necessary to provide it.

I look forward to hearing what other hon. Members have to say, and to the Minister’s response. I hope that he will signal a willingness to modify the proposals in the light of the concerns that have been raised.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, although some may say that drinking Coca-Cola is almost as bad for young people as drinking alcohol.

My second point is about drugs. The Government are taking absolutely the right powers in the Bill to be able to ban legal highs. Mephedrone—commonly known as meow meow—has been a big problem. The Select Committee heard very eloquent evidence from the mother of a young girl who had died as a result of a legal high. It was clearly taking too long to ban such substances, so we warmly welcome putting into the hands of the Home Secretary the power to be able to bring a statutory instrument before the House to deal with these matters.

I also warmly welcome what has been proposed about Parliament square, especially after what happened last Thursday.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

On the subject of drugs, does the right hon. Gentleman share my concern that the Bill has some suggestion of weakening the role of scientific input? I am sure that that is not the Government’s intention, but does he agree that it might be helpful to secure that aspect and to ensure that in the case of any temporary bans, there are at least some scientific suggestions before the decision is made?

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman, who is the resident scientist on the Home Affairs Committee, is right to point to the need for evidence-based decisions and the role of science.

My final point concerns police commissioners. Two members of the Select Committee are here—my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert)—and other Members have spoken about this. There was no agreement in the Committee on whether elected police commissioners were a good idea, and we therefore put it to one side. We were more concerned with producing a report that would be helpful to the House before this debate and would enable Members to look at the implications and practicalities of elected commissioners.

The Committee asked the Government and the House to note three points, the first of which—it was mentioned by the hon. Member for Stroud—was whether it was desirable for a chief constable who was serving in a certain area subsequently to stand for the post of an elected commissioner. We thought that there should be a cooling-off period so that if the chief constable for Leicestershire, for example, wanted to be a commissioner he—it is a man at the moment—could not do so until his whole term of four years had expired. There was unanimity on these points. We hope that the Government will consider this and that others will do so if they are lucky enough to serve on the Bill Committee.

The Select Committee’s second point concerned the cost of commissioners. I noted the exchange between those on the Front Benches about special advisers. Of course, I accept what the Policing Minister has said. We need to be very careful about costs, especially those associated with the crime panels. I do not agree that those bodies should be elected, but they should be representative. As the Select Committee said, they should comprise those who have already been elected to represent district areas. It is important that they are as representative of the local community as possible, with the right to appoint independent members to deal with the issue of gender and ethnicity balance, which may be lacking in relation to elected representatives.

The final point relates to operational independence. The hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) is not here, but he is the Committee’s leading expert on operational independence. The Committee felt that the time had come for a clear definition of where the responsibilities of the commissioner begin, where those of the chief constable end, and where those of the Home Office impact on the new responsibilities. We suggested not a Magna Carta, but a charter or a memorandum to set out those powers and responsibilities. We think that this is an appropriate time for that so that there is clarity. I hope that when hon. Members discuss this matter in Committee, they will find a way forward on such a memorandum of understanding.

Every local authority is different: Leicestershire is different from Bedfordshire, Bedfordshire is different from Cambridgeshire, and Greater Manchester is different from Birmingham. This is not Gotham city—I am sure that you were a fan of Batman and Robin, Mr Deputy Speaker. Commissioner Gordon will not put the light up in the air so that Batman—the equivalent, I suppose, of the chief constable—comes rushing forward to solve the crime. If only it were as easy as that. I am sure that there would be mobile phones in any new series of Batman. The fact is that these are complicated issues.

If we take the party politics out of this matter and analyse the discussions that we have had today, including the contributions of my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and other hon. Members from both sides of the House, I am sure that we can make some progress. I hope that progress can be made in Committee on accountability and on the other important issues that have been mentioned today.

Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Bill [Lords]

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Monday 15th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman is not correct about that. There are cases where the Treasury designates and it is that act of designation that counts. The provisions could be changed simply—I will propose the wording later—so that the Treasury requests the courts to designate; there would be nothing amiss in so doing.

The present situation is that there is a freeze and then there is an appeal. One problem with that cycle—not to mention the problem of where the power lies—is that the onus is on the affected person to find a way to make an appeal. They will have to get legal advice first and get clearance to secure the funds in order to pay for such advice. I hope that we will have absolute clarity from the Minister on whether they will always be able to get access to the funds necessary to clear their name. They will then have to apply and have their case heard. As I will explain in more detail later, they may not even know the case against them.

That highlights the real questions over who should make these judgments. I think it should be a court that determines the freeze and that it should be done ex parte. I absolutely accept that the courts should be able to go through the process without warning the accused in advance, because if they can simply move the money or assets somewhere else, it will not work, but the courts need to be involved and the people accused must be given a chance to make their case fairly.

I would also like to deal with the issue of standards of proof. I have put the issue to both Front-Bench teams and I have asked a number of colleagues—legal and otherwise—what the standard of proof should be before we take an action like freezing someone’s assets. Should it be the criminal standard of proof or should it be the civil standard? I have been fascinated by the number of people who think that they are somewhat illiberal in believing that it should be a bit below the criminal level. I have heard that from a number of colleagues.

Should things be done separately? Should we require people to have been convicted, tried or just arrested before we apply the provisions? When I asked him earlier, the Minister referred to the problem of arresting non-UK people, and I accept his point, which was well made. I nevertheless seek an assurance that the people involved will at least have been through a process of arrest—for people in the UK, where that is appropriate—and that at least consideration will have been given to taking the person through the full legal processes of trial and conviction. Security Council resolution 1373, with which we are trying to comply, requires us to deal with those who

“commit or attempt to commit terrorist acts”.

It does not say anything about those we “suspect” of committing such acts, so the Bill goes beyond what is required by the Security Council.

I understand the argument for having a slightly lower standard for the interim powers, although I would ask why it was decided to go for 30 days and whether “reasonably suspect” is the appropriate provision. I am very concerned, however, about the idea of “reasonable belief” for a final designation. That means treating people below the civil standard, which is essentially a 50:50. We are saying that it is just as likely to be one way as the other. That is the civil test. The Government are seeking to freeze people’s assets in circumstances where they believe that it is more likely than not that those people were not involved in terrorist activities. I find that alarming. If we think people were probably not involved, we should not freeze their assets. In the Government’s defence, I have to say that the Opposition seem to think that the degree of involvement in terrorist activities could be even less before these provisions are applied, which I find significantly worse.

These are draconian powers and we should be sure, to a reasonably high standard of proof—I could even accept a balance of probabilities—that the people are likely to have been involved with terrorist offences. I am also concerned about what is meant by a “terrorist offence”. Many concerns have arisen over a number of years where actions have been described inappropriately as terrorist offences. I am sure that Members are aware of the figures relating to section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2009. According to the latest figure that I have seen, 101,248 people were stopped and searched and none was arrested for terrorism-related offences. Does that constitute involvement in terrorism? How do we define the term?

[Keith Vaz]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern about the amount of money that has been seized—about £290,000, although the figure varies according to the fluctuations of currencies? According to a note attached to the Minister’s speech, the amount could actually be less than £290,000, as it depends on the value of the pound. That is approximately the cost of a one-bedroom flat in Westminster North.

[Dr Huppert]

I am not entirely sure how that is relevant to what I was saying, but I do indeed find it astonishing. I suspect that the public, if they thought about the matter, would imagine very large sums, although that might be a result of their having watched too many James Bond films. I certainly find it surprising that we are concerned with the net sum of roughly a quarter of a million pounds.

Alternatives to Child Detention

Debate between Julian Huppert and Keith Vaz

Thursday 17th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

Thank you, Mr Weir, for calling me to speak for the first time in Westminster Hall. It is a great honour to follow the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), who spoke as powerfully as ever on the issue in question. It was a great pleasure to hear her speak at the Liberty annual general meeting on Saturday; she spoke movingly about many issues, and I wish her the best of luck with her forthcoming selection process. I shall not say that I support her, as that might do her more damage than anything else.

I am delighted that the debate has been obtained, because the issue is very important. I have always felt that a good test of the underlying morals and values of a country is the way it treats people who cannot defend or look after themselves, and the most vulnerable people in society. That description applies to all sorts of groups, and child detainees are one of them. We fail the test incredibly badly in relation to them; we can talk another time about how well we do in other respects. It is a matter of great shame to this country that we treat people so badly.

The topic of the debate is alternatives to child detention. The main alternative that I can think of to detaining 1,000 children a year is not to detain them. That, above all, is what I want to say. We simply should not detain them. The suggestion that we should detain the family but not the children is at least as bad. We should not even consider something that tears families apart at what is often a difficult time for them. That leaves the question of what we can do with the children in the case in question, and before I discuss that I want to explain why I am concerned about the issue.

Cambridge has a great history as somewhere that is very multicultural and tolerant, with people from various backgrounds, and a number of people there have been involved in various ways with detainees. I might mention, in relation to the remarks of the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell), that the Conservative candidate in Cambridge was one of the Conservatives who signed the sanctuary pledge; ours was one of very few constituencies where every candidate did so. I am delighted that we did, and I wish it had happened elsewhere.

We are also very near the Oakington detention centre, which has a sad and sorry history. Children are not the main focus there, but recently it hit the news because of the death of one gentleman in detention in April. I am currently dealing with a case of serious assault there. The hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington has been there to look around. I spoke to her earlier about my request to do so too: that visit was scheduled, but has now been delayed. I fear that my speaking here today means that it will be delayed further, but I look forward to the chance to see it.

[Keith Vaz]

On that point—I know the hon. Gentleman was not here for some of the earlier speeches—when the Select Committee asked to make a visit it took a long time to get that sorted out. When we got there, I think 10 Home Office officials attended, and only about three from Serco. There was a total of about 15; the room was full. Is it the hon. Gentleman’s wish, as it is my hope, that the new Government will perhaps let us in more often, if we ask?

[Dr Huppert]

It is indeed a problem getting in; my predecessor, David Howarth, tried to get in and was told that it was not possible for him to do that. It is somewhat worrying if there are institutions in this country in a state such that MPs cannot be allowed in to have a look.