Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

38: Clause 147, page 133, leave out lines 34 to 39

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, Amendment 38 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Berkeley. The Minister will recall that in the debate on Report on the exemption of itinerant collectors, exactly one week ago almost to the minute, he said:

“It might be that we will have to come back to this at Third Reading”.—[Official Report, 20/3/12; col. 878.]

This amendment gives the Government the further opportunity to think again about the exemption.

I need not repeat how pleased I am that the Government accepted the principle of cashless transactions and agreed with me that the LASPO Bill offered the means to implement it. Having got that right, however, why are they running the risk of undermining their own policy by creating this huge potential loophole?

The Minister will be aware that the exemption caused a mixture of bafflement and dismay—not just in the House, where the only noble Lord to speak in its favour on Report last Tuesday was the Minister, but throughout the scrap metal industry. Operators are almost unanimously of the view that the Government’s proposal to mandate cashless payment for the purchase of scrap metal must apply to all dealers, with no exemptions. They pointed out to me—and I suspect to many other noble Lords—that this view is strongly endorsed by sectors that are especially hard hit by metal theft: transport, the energy industry, local government, the Church of England, the War Memorials Trust and law enforcement agencies.

I shall not go over the same ground that noble Lords covered in last Tuesday’s debate but will confine myself to one or two observations. First, the exemption is unfair and discriminatory. It grants special privileges to those members of the industry who are most responsible for the problems of metal theft. The itinerant collectors do not all sell on what they have collected to reputable scrap metal dealers; some of the material is shipped abroad in containers. Others will launder the scrap metal they take to registered dealers, and there will be no way of knowing where it came from or whether it was stolen.

Ian Hetherington, the director-general of the British Metals Recycling Association, wrote in the latest issue of the trade magazine, Materials Recycling Week, that,

“the bill sends out a message that itinerant operators can operate outside the law. It provides a loophole for other unscrupulous operators and serves to undermine a legitimate industry that has spent hundreds of millions of pounds complying with environmental legislation”.

I shall ask the Minister three questions. First, is he able to give us any news tonight on the Government’s plans for replacing the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964 and will we see a Bill to do that in the next Session? Secondly, how will the five-year review of the offence of buying scrap metal for cash, as contained in Clause 148, work? Thirdly, can he give an assurance that applications for itinerant trader status will be monitored and, if there is an upsurge in them in order to get around the cashless provisions, that the Government will do something about it? If we do not get satisfactory answers, the Government are in danger of losing much of the good will that their welcome policy on cashless transactions has created by granting an exemption that pleases almost nobody and perpetuates the no-questions-asked philosophy. I ask the Minister to think again. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Henley]

I did deal with that—I said that the exemption goes back to that Act and there is proper regulation of those itinerant traders. It is one that we can look at in future, but we do not think that it is right to increase the burden on them, particularly as there is not the opportunity that my noble friend implied for a mad rush of traders to become itinerant traders, because there is a process by which they are regulated by local authorities and the police. I do not believe that there is the problem that he sees, but it is one that we can look at in future.

I felt that I had answered the question and made it clear that, if the amendment went through and those people were removed, it would create problems in dealing with them—as I said to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

I am not going to apologise for bringing the subject back at Third Reading, because we have learnt a great deal this evening from the Minister in his very interesting speech.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, and my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for their quite excellent contributions. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, has taken the trouble to look at the issue in some detail and has come forward with a series of questions, some of which he has had answers to —although, with one or two of them, he may feel that the answer was a little bit opaque. My noble friend was a bit feistier than the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, but he too made some powerful points. Again, I was interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Henley, said in reply.

One benefit of having this debate this evening is that the officials in the Home Office will be aware that there is great interest in this House about the legislation as a whole and particularly about whether the exemption is going to work. If the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, is right and there is a large increase in the number of applicants for exemptions, it will be evident that the loophole has become unacceptable and will do great damage to the much wider and laudable aim that the Government have of eliminating cash from the sale of scrap metal. I hope that we at least see that the Home Office reviews this carefully, and I assure the Minister that we will come back to this on future occasions to ask questions on how it has gone.

I am a little unclear about the five-year review to which my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours referred, which is in Clause 148. It might be more satisfactory if the review took place more quickly than that. However, I express my appreciation to the Minister for the thoughtful way in which he responded to the debate. I am not satisfied on all the points that he has made, but it is not my intention at this time of night to have a vote—although I must apologise to my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, who would like to have a vote. The message from the debate to the Minister is that we want to watch how this legislation develops and, if it goes wrong, I hope that remedies will be offered to us very quickly. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 38 withdrawn.