Serious Crime Bill [HL]

My Lords, the speeches that we have heard this afternoon illustrate a justification for the existence of the House of Lords in its present form. I shudder to think what would happen to this sort of legislation if this Chamber did not exist, given the expertise and depth of knowledge that we have heard today. I ask myself how it is that the Home Office produces this endless procession of ill conceived and ill thought-out law and order Bills. I conclude that it is because it lacks three things: judgment, practicality and focus. One of the great problems we in the UK have is persuading the European Union to underline proportionality in its proposals. That is also a real problem for the Home Office. Like most noble Lords who have spoken, I am astonished by the Bill’s schedule of offences. I believe that trout tickling has been mentioned. The Bill refers to offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act and to offences concerning the treatment of waste under the Environmental Protection Act. If the Home Office regards those as serious crimes, quite apart from the fact that there is a let-out clause to include everything else, all I can say is that the RSPB has missed a trick. It had better get in touch with the Home Office and have the offence of egg collecting included. The RSPCA should get in touch about hunting, which is a perfect offence to include from its point of view. The Open Spaces Society should have a go at the abuse of footpaths. There is plenty of scope for more offences to be added. However, I hope that these Benches will remove such provisions in Committee. I share the anxieties about Part 1. For me, it is too Stalinist. I refer to the concept of arranging for courts to classify unconvicted persons almost as if they were what were referred to in Soviet days as ““enemies of the people””. That is a step away from the light of democracy towards the shadow of totalitarianism and it is quite unacceptable. I hope that it will be removed from the Bill, as other bad things have been from other Bills. The Government are not doing things that should be done in the Bill. For example, we can make it a great deal more risky for criminals to carry guns in the streets. I shall, therefore, be reintroducing an amendment that I tabled previously to give the police powers to search for firearms. That would be in Part 3, which is entitled: "““Other measures to prevent or disrupt serious and other crime””." I shall propose a new clause after Clause 75. I very much hope that the Government will recognise that what has happened on our streets since I made the proposal in October has reinforced the case. Those parliamentary colleagues with whom I have discussed this agree with that. There are other opportunities to improve Part 3. There are proposals to extend data sharing that are not acceptable in their present form. We really need to make sure that we collect the data that we need—that the state collects the data that it needs. As the Minister knows, I have tabled a number of Written Questions, and I thank the Home Office for replying to them much more rapidly than it has in the past; that is a bouquet, at least. As the Minister may know, Sub-Committee F of the European Union Select Committee, of which I am a member, has been studying the implications of the second generation of the Schengen information system. This is an EU-wide system for the collection and exchange of information relating to immigration, policing and criminal law for the purposes of law enforcement and immigration control. The UK has not, rightly in my view, signed up to the Schengen agreement. We continue to control our own borders. That means that there are limits to the amount of Schengen information that we can share. In my view, any modern state needs to know with certainty who its citizens are and who is residing in the state. The problem is that our present manner of identifying citizens and residents of the UK has been found wanting. I will give some examples. First, believe it or not, anyone in the UK may lawfully change their name without any notification to the authorities that may need to deal with those persons. The Registrar-General for England and Wales set this out extremely clearly in a letter to me dated 29 January, which was published in Hansard. It said: "““There is no government agency that is responsible for registering the change of name of individuals. There is no requirement to register a change of name for it to become lawful. An individual may choose to make a statutory declaration or deed poll in order to provide evidence of their change of name. There is no central record of all name changes. Individuals are responsible for notifying relevant agencies that they have changed their names””.—[Official Report, 29/1/07; col. WA 15.]" This reveals a system that is quite simply anarchic. It would not inspire any respect from any Schengen member state. Note that, although individuals are responsible for notifying agencies of their change of name, they are under no obligation to do so. The present system is one that enables and, indeed, incites those of evil intention to conceal their identities with full legal cover. I hope that perhaps we might introduce an amendment to correct that situation. Passports are supposed to enable the Government to control those who enter and leave the country. First, there is no official passport inspection by the immigration authorities of those leaving the country—only the airlines look at your passport, and that is not the same thing, nor is it an acceptable substitute. Secondly, there is only now starting to be an electronic record made of those arriving in the country. This facility is not, I understand, in full operation at all points of entry. If I am wrong about that, I hope that the Minister will correct me. Next, let us examine the security of a passport. On 31 January, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, kindly informed me in a Written Answer that, during 2006, the Identity and Passport Service processed 291,000 reports of lost or stolen passports. In the same year, it issued 298,000 replacement passports. How many of those were multiple replacements for the same person? How effective is the cancellation of a lost or stolen passport? How quickly does this information reach our frontiers? Of what use is it to prevent those using a stolen passport from leaving the country? I was also informed that no attempt is made to cancel the passport of someone who is serving a custodial sentence until he or she has been released. Nor is any attempt made to pass to the security authorities the passport details of British citizens who have been detained overseas, even though the British consular services, when they have dealings with such people, collect the data. That information is just not used. This ill conceived and ill thought-out Bill offers the opportunity for us to put into it things that need doing and I certainly hope that we will remove the things that should not be in it.