Offender Management Bill

I apologise to the House and to the Minister for being late and for missing the Minister’s opening remarks. He knows that, even though I did not serve on the Bill’s Committee, I have a deep interest in the subject of the protection of people from paedophiles and sex offenders. I welcome the piloting of polygraph testing, but I have a slight concern about the practicality of how the testing will work. I tabled a question to the Home Office some months ago, asking how many of the people on the sex offenders register who were registered with the police had gone missing, whereabouts unknown. The answer was very disturbing, and I know that the Minister was concerned about the reply that he had to give me. It was that the information is not held centrally. If we do not know where all the people on the sex offenders register are, how is the polygraph system going to work? Perhaps the Minister can clarify whether we now have a central database. I have to ask whether his trips round the world researching Megan’s law and so on will have been worth while if we are incapable of knowing where all these people are. My other concern has been raised by several senior policemen in my constituency, not least those who specialise in this subject. It concerns the ability of a paedophile who has been released from prison and placed on the sex offenders register to change his name by deed poll. This relates to our ability to contact these people and to get them to come in for a polygraph test. Surely we must be able to pass legislation to prevent paedophiles from changing their names. This is a matter of great concern. We all know that paedophiles do not think that they are doing anything wrong; they think that the standards and codes of the general public are wrong, and that what they are doing is perfectly acceptable. If they can change their names by deed poll—a practice that is becoming more and more common—how are we going to track them down to give them a polygraph test? With that last point in mind—I will not delay the House any more, because this is an important debate—if paedophiles do not believe that they are doing anything wrong, will the polygraph test indicate that they are telling an untruth or lying? If they intrinsically believe that what they are doing is legitimate and right, the questioning in the polygraph test has to be very careful; otherwise, we will just get false readings.