Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the House for giving me this opportunity to speak in the gap. I am very keen on the Bill and would have been very sorry not to have been able to record my support for it at this early stage. I am also very grateful to my noble friend Lord Blencathra for taking on the more or less thankless task of steering it through your Lordships’ House and on to our statute books. I congratulate him on the clarity, comprehensiveness and persuasiveness—and his usual good humour—of the way he explained the Bill to us.

As I said in a recent debate on a group of amendments to the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, it has long been accepted that the first responsibility of government is to keep us all safe. I went on to say that if we judge this Government and their predecessors stretching back to May 2010 by the objective standard of the crime statistics, I do not think there can be any doubt that they have carried out this vital responsibility pretty successfully.

Most people think that community safety refers mainly to safety from assault and other forms of physical harm. Of course, our main concern is to keep ourselves and our families free from physical harm; that is why our media tend to focus mainly on violence and abuse. But a safe community is much more than that. It is also a community where those who work and live in it feel that their property is safe from theft and damage. Sadly, this aspect of community safety is too often neglected by the media and, hence, too often short-changed when it comes to resources and government action.

The Bill gives us a rare chance to redress that balance—and just as its responsibility for keeping us free from physical harm is one that the Government cannot carry out entirely on their own, so is the responsibility for keeping our property safe. What I mean is that community safety in both senses requires more than an efficient and effective professional police service. It requires that all of us play an active part; and by all of us, I include businesses of all kinds which make up our national economy.

One might have thought that businesses would be prepared to do this without the need for active encouragement. I wish that this were true. But the truth is that successful companies are always on the lookout for ways of cutting costs so as to increase their profitability. They have come to recognise that product features aimed primarily at reducing crime are not the features that are most attractive to customers. On the whole, therefore, such features as immobilisers and forensic marking are seen mainly as optional extras and, as we all know from personal experience, optional extras are features that customers tend to decline when times are tough, as they have been for our farmers in recent years. That is why the Government, if they are really determined to keep communities safe, sometimes have to force the private sector to play its role in fighting crime by introducing legislation of the kind we have been considering today.

My noble friend Lord Blencathra has already explained the Bill to us. I will not say any more about it, except that, based on my long career of working with police forces both here and abroad, I strongly believe that the provisions of the Bill would make the work of our police forces much easier and more effective and, for this reason, would make the lives of those of us who live and work in our rural communities very significantly safer.

I want to make one further point: because of the close links between criminals who operate in rural areas and those who operate in our major cities, I am sure that your Lordships will see that the effects of the Bill will extend far beyond our rural communities. In short, the Bill will make us all much safer. For this reason, I enthusiastically welcome it. I urge noble Lords to give it a Second Reading and a swift passage on to our statute books.