Serious Crime Bill [Lords]

I am grateful for a final opportunity to speak on the Bill. As is customary, I shall begin by thanking the many people involved in its inception. In the other place, where the Bill kicked off, my noble Friends Lords Dholakia, Goodhart, Burnett and Livsey all made substantial contributions to its progress. There were many Committee sittings, and the Conservatives even changed their spokesman. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who got the ball rolling, and to the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) who spoke wisely and at length this evening. I thank the Under-Secretary not only for the way in which he has approached the substance of the Bill but for his general courtesy and willingness to engage with Opposition Members, as well as his readiness to make officials available to add clarity to our conversations. He has made a genuine effort, and other Ministers could learn from his etiquette and decency. The Bill has some merits. Like many Bills emanating from the Department, it is not an unequivocally good or bad Bill. There are things on which we agreed in Committee, and things on which we agreed this evening—most importantly, on stop- and-search powers. They are not the whole solution, as the Minister rightly said, but they are an important weapon against violent crime, as long as they are used with intelligence and discretion by the police. We regret that Lord Lloyd's amendment on intercept evidence was struck out by the Government without any willingness on their part to replace it with an amendment more to their liking. The crux of the Bill, on which we voted half an hour ago—regrettably, we lost that vote—is part 1, and I shall briefly detain the House by summing up its seven inherent flaws. First, the sanctions in the Bill are unrestricted in their scope. There are some restrictions, but they are not exhaustive. We must remember that we are talking about serious sanctions—virtually everything short of imprisoning the individual concerned—such as restrictions on internal travel in the United Kingdom, on the buildings they can visit, and on the places where they can work, so their day-to-day business may be severely curtailed. Those sanctions can last up to five years—we tried to reduce that period in Committee, but we failed—but that period is not a maximum. It can be extended indefinitely, so it is within the scope of the Bill for extremely draconian restrictions to be placed on someone's liberties, and for those restrictions to last their lifetime, without their having an opportunity to escape them, even if they are not convicted of a criminal offence. If they breach those restrictions, they could go to prison, despite their not having been convicted of a criminal offence. Secondly, serious crime prevention orders are too easy an alternative to prosecution. The underlying assumption in the mind of Government Ministers is that the enforcement agencies know who the perpetrators of many crimes are, but cannot find enough evidence to prosecute them. They have therefore decided to find a different way of penalising them, and we fear that it will be regarded as alternative to prosecution, although it is often in the public interest to pursue a prosecution. Thirdly, there is no definition in the Bill of what constitutes a serious offence. There is a list of serious offences, some of which were subject to ridicule throughout our debates. I have yet to find an official who can defend the serious offences relating to salmon fishing. I still have not heard a satisfactory explanation from the Minister as to why he regards salmon fishing as such an appalling offence. I do not wish to diminish the significance of the offence for any salmon fishermen who may be following our deliberations, but most of my constituents would not put that in the same category as the other items on the list. Moreover, further items can be added, so it is not a definitive list. Fourthly, a person need never have committed a crime in order to be subject to the punishments outlined in the Bill. Restrictions could legitimately be placed on a person who had been convicted of an offence, gone to prison, left prison and re-entered a criminal world—perhaps the same one that got them into prison in the first place—but there is a distinction between such a person and someone who is restricted but has not committed a criminal offence. Fifthly, there is no requirement for a person even to be aware that their actions could have facilitated a crime. In this respect, there is a lack of clarity in the Bill. The Minister constantly refers to the Mr. Bigs of the criminal underworld, whose efforts will be severely restricted by the Bill, but every time we ask for individual examples, they seem to come down to taxi companies run by inoffensive, or potentially offensive, small-time middle men and women in the criminal world, who certainly are not in the category of the 30 most prominent Mr. Bigs in Britain's underworld. A Bill which will almost certainly soon become an Act is not clear on that point. Sixthly, restrictions can be placed on a person who is not the subject of an order. Finally, a person is guilty until they prove themselves innocent. That will offend many in the House who are concerned that the burden of proof will be on the recipient of the serious crime prevention order, rather than on those who wish to penalise that person. We have made our views known throughout the passage of the Bill, including this evening. There is no point in our voting on Third Reading, as our views are clear to everybody who has followed the progress of our deliberations. The Government have been too cavalier with civil liberties, during the passage of the Bill and more generally. It was striking that this evening only one non-ministerial Labour MP chose to speak during the debate. Trial by jury and hundreds of years of slowly building up the liberties of the individual citizen should not be discarded lightly. The divide in British politics is less between left and right than between those of a libertarian disposition and those of an authoritarian disposition. In that debate, my party is in the former camp. I fear that the Government are far too often in the latter camp, and we will have to revisit these debates many more times in the future.