My Lords, I support broadly targeting those convicted of carrying knives, because it seems to follow the evidence we have. Repeat offenders, repeat locations and repeat victims often disproportionately contribute to the amount of crime, particularly with people who carry knives. Not everybody who is violent carries knives, but those who do repeatedly carry them, so it is not a bad idea to target them. In fact, the obverse of what is being said about without-cause stop/search is that this gives a reason to stop/search—namely, that the person has been convicted in a court of carrying a knife or being associated with somebody carrying a knife.
As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, mentioned, the Police Federation of England and Wales objected to this proposal, or at least made some arguments counter to it. I am quite surprised by that, because the arguments it makes are also against Section 60 stop/searches. Section 60 orders are put in place in a certain area to target repeat locations and allow stop/searches to be carried out without cause. A similar dilemma is that nobody knows where these areas are until a police officer stops you and says you are in one, which has always for me been a reason why we should have better ways of communicating those areas to people who may be stopped in them. However, the principle of without-cause stop/search has been there for a long time.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, that this is not the answer, but I think it is part of an answer. It seems reasonable to target those who repeatedly carry knives or are likely to carry knives, having been warned by a court that they should not. They have been given an order and told not to, so it is reasonable to check whether they are keeping to that order.
I am not in a position to comment on the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, or the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on whether a promise was made about how this power would be extended, but I imagine that one of the challenges will be with those areas adjacent to the four pilot areas—where the line is drawn on a map according to 1974 local government boundaries and often county boundaries. People who wander between villages across a county line cannot be policed on the other side of it if they have an order in place elsewhere, such as in the place where they live—let us say they are in a village just on the other side of a court boundary. It would be an odd conclusion that the adjacent forces to Sussex, West Midlands, Thames Valley and Merseyside would not be able to police these orders and that, in principle, people could wander over the border, carry a knife and not suffer the same consequences.
I agree that identification is important. Officers should be able to identify the people who have these orders. If they stop them and say, “Who are you?”, they indicate that they do not know the person has an order, but there are ways around that. Markers for ground vehicles can be put on the police national computer. Specific intelligence can be shared if people are wandering between, say, various nightclubs or areas, so that local officers know who they are. That can be managed.
My final point is that I was a little surprised by the selection of the pilot areas and that London was excluded. My experience, having policed in South Yorkshire, Merseyside and London, is that where stop/search has been a problem—and it has been—that has often been in London. Frankly, in the rest of the country, the volume is low and the problem is not of the same nature. If you talk to anybody in Merseyside or South Yorkshire, you just do not hear that this is a particular problem. I am not saying that it is not a problem, but it is not of the order that we see in London.
London has seen the sus laws of the 1960s and Section 44 of the Terrorism Act in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and now Section 60 carries its own problems. When I took over in 2011, we discovered that Section 60 orders had, I am afraid, been scattered like confetti around London and something needed to be done. London’s experience of stop/search has been of stop/search without cause, but it is completely different from the rest of the country, so I wonder how much we can take from the experiments in Merseyside, West Midlands, Thames Valley and Sussex that could carry over easily to the London environment. People may not be persuaded by that. That is something the Government might want to consider as the pilots progress; if London is excluded, the evidence may not be as powerful in future.