Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Disclosure of Information by SOCA) Order 2010

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a number of points. The reason that we have the arrangement of SOCA being willing to provide information to an NDPB is because the sporting community is extremely unwilling to see an extensive criminalisation of the control of doping in sporting activity and wants to try to pursue a policy where best practice, peer pressure and effective action by the sports’ regulatory bodies are the way by which it is controlled. That accounts for doing it this way. Clearly, if it was concluded that that was not effective, one would have to look again at the arrangements, but the doping that goes on at the moment is not so excessive that it is thought necessary to bring in SOCA in a big way.

On the number of people needed, unless I am mistaken, I think that the eight extra staff will not be employed by SOCA but will be acquired by UKAD, because it has to set up a unit to process the information that it gets from SOCA and to decide the action that needs to be taken. Those individuals need some security clearance, so there is a reason for needing a specialised staff. For SOCA, it is true that the information that it is able to supply is in many respects a by-product of other investigations, but it is extremely useful to the sporting regulatory agencies.

As for the question of drugs cheats, one reason why it will be increasingly necessary to go down that road is that the testing procedures have been shown to be only partially adequate, because practices have developed where either substances are used which are extraordinarily difficult to detect in tests, or they are being dosed in such small amounts that they do not show up in a test, such that one has to go to a more forensic approach to dealing with those cheats. That is why, in the end, one has to bring in an agency which might have information about suppliers. It is, in the end, the suppliers whom we need to try to choke off so that the substances never reach the performers. We are witnessing a change in the nature of the doping culture that, in turn, leads to new investigative techniques having to be employed.

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, first, I apologise to the Minister for rising before she had had an opportunity to respond to the speech of the noble Baroness.

Your Lordships will be relieved to know that my contribution to our proceedings this afternoon will be very brief—in fact, less than three minutes. I hope that that does not diminish the impact of what I say on this most important subject. Illegal drugs have become the scourge of modern society throughout the world. Thousands of deaths are recorded annually, and national and international organised crime thrives on that disgraceful trade worldwide. In some areas of the globe, sport has been wholly corrupted by the poison of performance-improving drugs. No longer, when we see an outstanding sporting performance, can we cheer unreservedly without thinking the unthinkable: was he or she using a performance-enhancing drug? That cynicism among spectators is grossly unfair to those athletes and sportsmen and women who are honest and cast aside the temptation to cheat by the use of such substances.

I believe that, fortunately, the honest athletes and sportspeople are still in the majority, but we must be vigilant. Only by law-abiding individuals and organisations sharing intelligence about the trafficking, sale and use of illegal or performance-enhancing drugs can action be taken to prevent or reduce this evil and destructive business.