Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

I shall come on to the question of itinerants in due course. It is something addressed by Amendment 157H in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner. I will deal with it in some detail because it is important, as there has been a degree of misunderstanding about that point.

We are bringing forward these three changes under the Bill, and they are just a first step in taking forward a coherent package of measures to tackle all stages of the illegal trading of stolen scrap metal. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, I can give an assurance—although I cannot give a timescale for this—that we shall bring forward further measures in due course. We believe that going cashless, which is the crucial part of this amendment, will remove the “no questions asked” culture that allows low-risk criminal enterprise for metal thieves and unscrupulous dealers. That is something that we want to deal with.

I turn to Amendment 157H, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, as an amendment to government Amendment 157G. It removes the exemption for itinerant collectors—and I make it clear that it is purely itinerant collectors whom we are dealing with—who have an order in place under Section 3(1) amending the record requirements that apply to them. Let me make clear that this is not a blanket exemption. Only itinerant collectors who are subject to an order under Section 3(1) of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964—an Act that I described as being past its sell-by date, but it is still what we have—coming from their local authority and approved by the local chief officer of police will be exempted. This will be a modest number of individuals who will be known to both the police and their local authority. They will also be bound by environmental regulations with the need to have a waste carrier’s licence under the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011.

Most importantly, no itinerant collector will receive cash from the scrap-metal industry on which they are reliant for selling scrap to. Travelling around the streets picking up scrap, they will, when they take it on to the scrap yard, have to have that payment made not in cash but by some other means. Their transactions will be traceable for the first time, with the scrap-metal industry recording details of the transaction and the payment method and to whom that payment is made.

I hope that that assurance will be sufficient to allow the noble Lord to understand that I do not think his amendment is necessary. It might be that we will have to come back to this at Third Reading, but I hope that on this occasion he will accept that we have got it more or less right and that some of the reporting of the exemption for the so-called itinerants is not exactly what he thought it was.

[Lord Berkeley]

Can the Minister clarify Section 3(1)(a) of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964? It seems a bit odd that the only condition required of these people is that they,

“obtain from the purchaser a receipt showing the weight of … scrap metal comprised in the sale”.

We have all had receipts from people for getting things like that, probably without even a piece of carbon paper between the two. Why is it necessary to give such people an exemption when the only condition I see here is that they get a scrappy piece of paper as a receipt? It seems to be left wide open to shove things in a container and send them off to China without any paperwork at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I will not take the time of the House by sharing anecdotes and expressing gratitude; all that can be taken as read. It is late, but the House is a good deal fuller than it was earlier this evening. I share many concerns expressed about the licensing of sites and the separate licensing of dealers, and about the possibility that in a cashless system legal operators will not find sellers to sell to them. Mention was made of the fact that the offence will be purchasing rather than selling, although we heard about the Theft Act. Concern was expressed about whether the definition of scrap metal will extend to used domestic appliances, and about whether we will see an entirely new group of outlets.

Will the Minister say something about the timetable for implementation? Like others, I look forward to the wholesale reform of the system. However, clearly these provisions are designed to come into effect before that will happen. Will the government amendments that will find their way into the Bill come into effect immediately on enactment? I add to the point about the review and express concern about the speed with which we will see wider reform. If we are looking to review the provisions in five years, let us hope that they will have been overtaken long before then.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Faulkner on taking this matter forward with so much pressure and commitment. My concern is that we seem to be discussing a parallel universe. The people in the BMRA, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, do everything according to the book, and we are very grateful to them. However, I believe that there is the growing involvement of organised crime in this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, said.

I have heard quite a lot of evidence about the way in which containers can disappear overseas without anyone knowing what is in them. It is not very difficult, especially if you do not live in a leafy part of Surrey or Buckinghamshire, to hide containers, and itinerant scrap merchants can get the metal into containers without anyone knowing very much. Perhaps the money comes from overseas. As many noble Lords said, the problem will grow. In the short term, the only solution is to support my noble friend’s amendment to get rid of this major loophole.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, perhaps I may sum up the debate and address some of the points. Earlier I paid tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for all that he had done on the matter. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Browning, who was the Minister who dealt with this before me. Only a few days before she unfortunately resigned and I moved to the Home Office, she summoned me and a host of other Ministers to the Home Office to discuss what we could do government-wide to address the problem. As a Defra Minister with a considerable interest in recycling and associated matters, I went along and said that it was possible that we might be able to do something through the Environment Agency. Soon after I left the meeting, my noble friend moved on and I found myself moving to the Home Office and in effect writing a letter from myself to myself to try to address these problems.

I am grateful for all that my noble friend did, and for the fact that she has now underlined some of the other problems that are beginning to appear in this matter. She referred to the problems with rare earths. I was recently in the north-west at a meeting dealing with truck theft. Truck theft is obviously very serious in terms of trucks and their contents being stolen, but certain bits of the trucks are also stolen to get the rare earths from, such as silencers, which can be of considerable value and whose theft can cause enormous problems.

I pay tribute to everything that my noble friend has done to highlight these problems. Similarly, I pay tribute to what the right reverend Prelate had to say and thank him for coming to see me to highlight the serious problems that the church is facing, particularly with the theft of lead roofs and with getting insurance on a great many church properties because of what is going on.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, asked me to comment on House of Lords reform. At this time of night, that is beyond my pay grade and I am not going to deal with it, but no doubt we will have further opportunities to discuss it in due course. He talked about the need for consolidated reform. I agree with him; I would like that in due course. I have made it clear that what we are doing at this stage is bringing forward the first stage of a package to get coherent reform in this area. It would not be right to delay the first few steps of that, as the noble Lord is suggesting, purely because we cannot get on to the other bits; we will get to those other bits in due course.

The noble Lord also said that the industry says that this will not work. Like the noble Lord, I have talked to the industry. I have addressed the BMRA; I have been to its annual parliamentary reception. The BMRA has made it quite clear to me that it welcomes virtually every aspect of reform. The only aspect that it is not terribly keen on is getting rid of cash. As someone else once said, “They would say that, wouldn’t they?”. I happen to think, as do most people in this House, that getting rid of cash from these transactions is a very useful thing to do and something that we ought to address.

The noble Lord made two other points that ought to be addressed. He asked about itinerants. I made it quite clear in my opening remarks that only itinerant collectors who are subject to an order under Section 3(1) of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act from their local authority, approved by the local chief officer of police, will be exempted. If they are also a scrap dealer and they have a yard, they will no longer fall within that definition of being an itinerant trader and therefore they will not be exempt. We are only talking about a very small number of people, who will be covered by the regulations that are in place at the moment. They are regulated.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, we have made it quite clear that we are going to review it. We are going to keep this under control. The noble Lord is forgetting how few of these itinerant traders there are. They are not the people with the yards; they are people who are already regulated. The minute they have a yard they cease to qualify as an itinerant trader. It is as simple as that.

[Lord Berkeley]

Can the noble Lord say how many there are? He says that there are very few, but is it 10, 100 or 1,000? It would be very helpful if he could say.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I cannot give the noble Lord that figure without notice. I have no idea. I imagine that it might be possible, at disproportionate cost, to find out the number. All I am saying is that if they want to be an itinerant trader of that sort, they need a licence from their local authority and that has to be approved by the police. There is a very strict control on that particular aspect.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, rightly pointed to another problem—displacement. Could some of this go to Scotland? We are well aware of this problem. As the French discovered when they introduced a similar system, there was a danger that things would cross the border into Belgium and Germany. I have discussed this with colleagues in Northern Ireland and Scotland, although Scotland is more important, as there is a land border. Our colleagues in Scotland are well aware of what we are doing and are in full consultation with us. They will try to make sure that whatever they do keeps in line with what we wish to do.

The noble Lord is, for honourable reasons, merely seeking delay—delay that I am sure the BMRA would think was a worthy object to achieve. However, we do not think that it is right. We think that it is right to get rid of cash as soon as possible from this industry and that that will make a difference.

The last point that I want to address is that made by my noble friend Lady Hamwee about timing. I am afraid that I cannot give any categorical assurances to her about when and how we will get that further legislation. However, I make it clear, as my honourable friends in another place have done, that this is the first part of the package. We want to continue taking forward a coherent package to deal with all the other matters in the future, but I cannot give her any guarantee about timing.