Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Keith Vaz and Gareth Johnson

Tuesday 11th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

May I begin by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) on assuming the position of shadow police Minister? We remember his many contributions over the past few years as the police Minister in the Labour Government. May I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) on joining our home affairs Front-Bench team? I had the pleasure of interviewing her when she came before the national executive committee of the Labour party as a candidate. Although I thought that she was an outstanding candidate and that she would have a glittering career, not even I could have predicted that within 18 months of her election she would be sitting on the Front Bench speaking on behalf of the Opposition on home affairs.

I do not think that there is a lot that divides the two Front-Bench teams on this issue. Although my right hon. Friend is trying to make a great divide between the Government and the Opposition, I heard nothing in the Minister’s speech to suggest that there is going to be a bonfire of cameras. Members on both sides of the House accept that there will always be circumstances in which cameras are necessary and desirable.

This country has 1.85 million of these cameras, one for every 32 citizens. When the Select Committee on Home Affairs in the previous Parliament produced a weighty report on the surveillance society, we were concerned that the country was, in the words of the commissioner,

“sleepwalking into a surveillance society”.

When considering this subject it is important that we balance what our constituents want with the general civil liberties issues. Cases of this kind always involve a balance. When we ask constituents, they say that they want more and more CCTV cameras. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about his constituents in Northern Ireland. The shadow Minister talked about Mr Hayes and his balaclava, and he will obviously be one of the great features of this debate. I can talk about my constituents in the Northfields estate, as every time I go to a public meeting in that estate they want cameras put up because they feel that that is the only way to reduce crime. That must apply to every Member of this House: local residents feel that one of the best ways of catching criminals is for CCTV cameras to be put up in the neighbourhood.

The problem for local authorities and the police is to ensure that there is a balance. There cannot be a CCTV camera everywhere that people want one. They must be fit for purpose and they must contain film because, as we heard from the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), in some cases the cameras do not work. Criminals will not necessarily be put off when they see a camera that does not move. In this Chamber, every time somebody moves from one position to another, the cameras move their little heads and follow the Members as they speak. It is very important that cameras are fit for purpose. When they are put up—especially when new cameras are erected—they must pass a test: do they benefit the local community and will they result in criminals being caught? If they are merely being put up for the sake of it, are they necessary? That is the test that we must all follow.

I was glad to hear from the Minister that he is interested in regulation and that there is a desire for a code of practice. I was also glad to hear that from the shadow Minister, although I was concerned by his proposal that the body that monitors the code should be HMIC. In his modest and boyish way, he said that he did not write the amendment, so he was not necessarily 100% clear as to why that body was the HMIC, but there is a danger in placing too much on the shoulders of the HMIC and poor old Sir Denis O’Connor and his fellow inspectors. I think there are only about a dozen of them in total, with one vacancy now that Mr Hogan-Howe is the new commissioner. We should be wary of placing more responsibilities on organisations. The decision was made before my right hon. Friend took office, so to speak, and we do not know why the HMIC is given that role, but I take his point that an organisation needs to monitor what is going on.

We must be very clear that we have probably reached our limit as far as cameras are concerned. With millions of cameras in this country and a large amount of personal information being gathered about individuals, we should be cautious.

[Gareth Johnson]

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that an additional challenge is the fact that technology in this area will not stand still? In the future, we will potentially see various technologies such as face recognition systems and even CCTV that can listen in on private conversations. If we want CCTV systems to maintain public confidence, we need a code of practice and some regulation that will ensure that they are not misused by public services.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Of course, we all have our own technology—I see that the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) is in his place and he is the Committee’s expert in tweeting and new technologies, whereas I am still a dinosaur—and within seconds of an event taking place, people will capture it on their cameras, they will e-mail it and it will be on YouTube. Such technology is available all around us and it might not be as necessary to have a fixed camera to capture what is happening locally as it was 10 years ago. Mr Hayes and his balaclava could have been caught by somebody else walking around at that time. We should not necessarily rely on fixed cameras.

The report by the Home Affairs Committee in the previous Parliament was concerned with the need for a report to be placed annually before the House by the Information Commissioner. We did not necessarily feel that local police forces were incapable of producing reports to their local police authorities or to their police commissioner if and when they are elected next November, but the fact remains that we felt that a report should be placed before the House and properly debated so that we know the precise situation. That is very important.

There seems to be an attempt by those on the Front Bench to pick a bit of a fight on this issue, but I think this is just the shadow Minister getting back into the groove in the Home Office team. There really is not very much between those on the two Front Benches on this issue. Probably we are all saying, “We’ve got enough cameras. We probably don’t need any more in vast numbers. But those that are there need to be monitored carefully.”

I talked about the cameras in this Chamber. Your office, Mr Deputy Speaker, is in the House. My office is in Norman Shaw North, and since 1 January this year, 25 laptops have been taken from the desks of right hon. and hon. Members there. I would be delighted, as I am sure would fellow Members who reside there, if we had CCTV cameras in the corridors so that we could find out who it is who has security clearance, with a pass, who can get into a building that was the old Scotland Yard, walk through the offices of 25 Members and take their laptops away. My first reaction, as someone who is concerned about the surveillance society, was “When can we get some cameras?” I was astonished that we do not even have sufficient cameras in the car park at Norman Shaw North. If we had a residents meeting in Norman Shaw North, or our own neighbourhood watch meeting there, we would be demanding these things. If we demand them, others would too, but we must be careful and cautious, because they must be fit for purpose and serve the purpose for which they were intended.