Serious Crime Bill [HL]

I, too, strongly support the inclusion of armed robbery. I entirely understand why my noble friend has said that. I return to environmental issues. I had a similar experience to that of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, in my own garden. I handed a plastic rod with some paste or something attached to the end of what was little more than a piece of string to the small son of a distinguished general and told him to go and keep quiet. He sat on the bridge over the stream that runs around my garden in Wales. Suddenly he came running back in great distress because the local bailiff had grabbed him and told him that he was committing an offence. I have a more serious point about the environment. As a former chairman of the National Rivers Authority, I understand that, given the nature and seriousness of the crime, one might be puzzled as to why we are including it in the Bill because currently there are a whole string of perfectly good laws that can deal with these offences. The problem we had at the Environment Agency was not that there were no laws to prevent offences of this kind or, indeed, the very serious offences involving the deposit, treatment or disposal of waste; there are very effective laws. One of the first things we succeeded in doing a few weeks after the National Rivers Authority was set up was to have the Shell oil company fined £1 million for an offence in the Mersey. There are penalties. The difficulty usually is that the magistrates will not impose adequate penalties when people are brought to court. It is not because the penalties are not available. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, is absolutely right: there was a trawl around government departments and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs put in a bid. It had to put in something, so it included a number of offences that have been perfectly successfully dealt with by existing laws for many years. Yet armed robbery has been left out, when most of us would have thought it should be included in any list. I entirely understand and support the whole purpose of the Bill. I was the chairman of an IT company dealing with complicated IT systems; therefore, I am familiar with the whole business of modern crime. I understand why we should have a Bill of this kind; its purpose is spelt out on page 1. However, bearing in mind the serious consequences of imposing these orders, we should be pretty selective about how we use the legislation. If we use it where necessary, Ministers will have my total support, but we should be very cautious about applying it to cases where there are perfectly good existing laws and where there is no evidence that the kind of criminal activity with which we are concerned is part of the problem covered by the environment clauses, among others. I hope that the Government will give careful thought to whether the list is right. If they want of both Parliament and the public—and that is rather important—in pursuing this whole business and doing so in the courts, an offence’s inclusion must be really necessary; it must not be an add-on, which would merely cause aggravation.