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Mr. Chris Mullin (Sunderland, South): The other day, I received a letter from a security guard who said he had been
- "turned down for a security job, during the interview."
The manager told him that it was not because he was not suited to the job, but because he
The manager told him that if he had had a family, he would be able to claim family credit and would therefore be worth employing.
Mr. Straw:
My hon. Friend is right. That is a perfect example of where the state and public are subsidising the worst firms with the lowest standards and lowest wages.
For all those reasons, the Select Committee recommended that there should be a statutory regulation system for both companies and their employees in the contract guarding sector. It accepted, as do we, that there would have to be transitional arrangements, with a phasing-in of the regulatory requirements. The Committee made it clear--I know that this was disappointing to some hon. Members--that, initially, the statutory scheme should be limited to the contract guarding sector alone, but that the statutory framework should be sufficiently adaptable to allow other sectors of the industry to be included at a later date should that become desirable.
Anyone who reads the Select Committee's report will be struck by the fact that its recommendations are sensible, based on the evidence and proportionate to the problem. So the question before the House is why, given the agreement on all sides to the recommendations, the Government continue to drag their feet and to stand back while unregulated cowboy firms run by criminals, employing criminals and using unacceptable methods, put the public at risk. Why are Ministers acting as those villains' friends?
We received our answer this morning. There are six Home Office Ministers. I am glad to see four of them on the Front Bench. None of them is exactly shy and retiring when it comes to seeking publicity--I say that as a compliment--but, astonishingly, no Home Office Minister was put up by the Government this morning to answer the case for the regulation of the private security industry. Instead, and most revealingly, it was left to a former Minister and failed Member of Parliament,Mr. Francis Maude, now special adviser on deregulation
to the Deputy Prime Minister. Mr. Maude confirmed what we have long suspected--that policy in this sector is led no longer by Home Office Ministers on the basis of public safety, but by that man, who is obsessed with deregulation to the point where he is ready to put the public's safety at risk, and I say that advisedly.
When Mr. Maude was Minister with responsibility for consumer affairs before the 1992 general election, he resisted for as long as he could all calls for effective regulation against unsafe inflammable foam mattresses.I do not know how many people were burnt to death or badly injured while he resisted what was plain common sense. I do know that it was only after a number of fatal fires and mounting adverse publicity that Mr. Maude was forced to perform a complete U-turn and to introduce better regulation.
This morning--Conservative Select Committee members may wish to bear this in mind--on the radioMr. Maude derided all the people who sought proper regulation of the private security industry as having a "knee jerk" reaction to the issue. He implied that the only part of the industry that was a problem involved door supervisors, when manifestly it is not. He suggested that much of the anxiety about the industry would be solved if there were better access to individuals' criminal records, when, as the Committee makes clear, doing that could create as many problems as it would solve.
There are hundreds of decent firms and thousands of decent employees in the private security industry. They want it to be regulated by statute, as do the police, the British Retail Consortium, local authorities and every Select Committee member. Against that weight of opinion and weight of evidence, the Government's failure to act to regulate the industry and their willingness to allow some villainous firms to continue their criminal ways is nothing short of irresponsible.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. David Maclean):
I beg to move, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
My right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for the Home Department explained to the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) that he was addressing a major conference today.
I had hoped that, in the hon. Gentleman's speech, we would receive an answer to the question that has been intriguing colleagues, especially Labour Members, since last Thursday: why on earth has he selected this subject for debate? We know that Oppositions value their Opposition days and that they normally use them to discuss the burning issues of the day. Law and order is of
course a key issue but, when I checked with the Library, I discovered that, of more than 50 subjects tabled for debate by the Opposition in the past two years, never once have they asked to debate law and order issues. This is the first Opposition day debate on law and order that they have requested and what have they selected--the private security industry. No wonder Opposition Members have been asking me: what on earth is going on and what is our Front-Bench team up to?
I have been defending the hon. Gentleman and have asked his colleagues to appreciate his predicament. [Interruption.] I would not dream of naming friends of mine in the Glasgow Labour party. I know that he really wanted to debate the issues that are at the forefront of our constituents' minds, but picture the scene with thehon. Gentleman and his advisers. They tell him that he must go on the attack against the Tories to recover his position. "Good idea," he says. "We will attack them on the police." "Oh, better keep off that," they say. "The Tories will remind people that, when Labour left office, we were 7,500 police short. With record funding for the police, that is not a strong issue."
Mr. Straw:
The Minister is not discussing the subject of the debate.
Mr. Maclean:
I shall come to that.
"Right," says the hon. Gentleman, "what about drugs? That is better surely." "Oh, keep off drugs too," say the advisers. [Interruption.] I have much to say, but it is interesting that the hon. Gentleman had little to say in the time he took. This subject is obviously the most important to Her Majesty's loyal Opposition in the law and order arena. By selecting it, they show their sense of priorities. The hon. Gentleman has not taken the chance to debate the subjects that are of concern to our constituents.
What about crime? The Opposition have not picked crime as the subject of the debate. We know why: crime has fallen by a record amount in the past two years--the biggest drop for 40 years. I understand that the hon. Gentleman is to make a big splash tomorrow about sentencing, and that he hopes to debate the subject with me on Radio Cumbria. I am intrigued by the publicity avenues that he chooses. Of course, Opposition Members do not want to discuss such topics on the Floor of the House because they are aware that they voted against all our major law and order measures.
The hon. Gentleman is clearly becoming desperate for a subject on which to attack the Government. His advisers point out that the Home Office is still thinking about the Select Committee report on the private security industry--"so you can talk tough on that one." I suspect that that is the reason for today's debate. As the Daily Mail put it so sadly last week,
It said that the hon. Gentleman's words were
The editorial went on to list all the measures against which the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends had voted, and the crucial issues on which they had refused to give an opinion. It ended by saying that, "without impugning his motives", the newspaper "remained unconvinced that" the hon. Gentleman
That is what we have seen today.
We are grateful to the Home Affairs Committee for its report. The Committee wanted more access to criminal records, and an exception from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 for a widely defined private security industry. It was particularly concerned about certain parts of the industry, and proposed a number of solutions. We replied yesterday to many of the report's points, and a copy of that reply is in the Library.
Today, the hon. Gentleman called for more regulation, more controls and more bureaucracy--I suspect that we shall hear a good deal more about that in the next two hours--but we have yet to hear a detailed and workable blueprint that identifies the benefits that would flow, at what cost and to whom. I do not want some vast bureaucracy to stifle a burgeoning industry, driving the smaller companies out of the market, and I question the need for it; but that is not to say that the Government have ruled out additional measures to tackle the alleged problems in the contract manned guarding sector.
"would not be able to live on the wage he was paying."
'recognises the valuable work done by the Home Affairs Committee in its First Report, Session 1994-95, on the private security industry (House of Commons Paper No. 17), welcomes the Government's plans to introduce the White Paper which will allow greater access to criminal records; and congratulates the Government on its firm and positive commitment to ensuring that standards throughout the industry are raised to the level of the best.'.
"few spectacles are more inherently improbable than that of the Shadow Home Secretary periodically pumping himself up to talk tough on crime".
"ludicrously out of sync with both his own political nature and the instincts of his party."
"or new Labour really believes that prison works and that more of the vicious criminals who plague society should spend longer behind bars. This Home Secretary is implementing the toughest anti-crime agenda in modern times. And his Shadow is--well, just shadow-boxing."
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