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9.6 pm
Mr. Piers Merchant (Beckenham): The interesting contributions to this debate and to that of last November, which I had the pleasure of attending, do not in any sense convey an impression of unanimity, because different views and shades of opinion exist in the House. The fine balance of arguments is illustrated by the excellent Select Committee report.
The House has often rightly been condemned for rushing too quickly into legislation without proper thought--and if we acted on the speech of the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), we would be doing that. Although the hon. Gentleman hid behind the Select Committee report, he failed to make a convincing argument for regulation. He rightly referred to statistics indicating problems in the industry, which are not denied. Nor do I deny the need to address those problems. However, the hon. Member for Blackburn failed to make a strong case for tackling them solely by regulation. He was extremely thin on detail, failing to address any of the anomalies among the possibilities for regulation.
There are two distinct parts to the argument for dealing with the problems that exist in the private security industry. One part relies on non-statutory methods to improve standards; the other relies on some degree of statutory or state regulation. I have no difficulty with the former. There is a way of considerably improving standards, by enhancing the ability of employers to consult national criminal records. It is entirely right that the law should be amended so that employers in the security industry can check on employees and prospective employees, to vet them far more thoroughly and ensure that persons with unsatisfactory criminal records are not employed.
I was pleased to hear the Minister hint that there may be some hope of extending the law in this regard after the White Paper is published. The Government closely studied this issue following the Green Paper, and it would fit in very nicely with some of the recommendations in the Select Committee's report. All the examples that the hon. Member for Blackburn quoted referred to employees who have criminal records, and that issue could be dealt with via this mechanism. It would also deal with the majority of examples in the Select Committee's report.
If employers are given access to Phoenix when it is fully on stream and to national records it would, to a large extent, deal with the problem of people with criminal
records being employed. I should like to find a way to deal with employers who have criminal records--an issue that the hon. Member for Blackburn was correct to raise.
I wonder whether a mechanism could be found to allow those who sign contracts with manned guard companies either to examine the records of the employer or directors of the company or to find an alternative means to assure themselves that not only those who represent the contract company but those who run it have clean records.
I support the extension of the exemptions under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 to this area of employment. The correct extension of exemptions in other forms of sensitive employment would rightly rest with an extension to this area as well.
Another area of non-statutory regulation is self-regulation. The hon. Member for Blackburn was far too ready to dismiss self-regulation as a useful tool. He made a distinction between self-regulation and external regulation, but there is a role for both, as both have good track records in many other industries. For example, I refer to the advertising industry and to the security alarm sector of the security industry. The National Approved Council for Security Systems, the trade organisation involved, has worked to regulate that sector.
I encourage further steps to achieve higher training standards and other standards within the industry. However, it must be borne in mind that this industry is diverse. For example, the following activities are quite different: guarding gold bullion; guarding a shop--a small newsagent, for example--against shoplifting, normally via presence; and guarding materials on a small building site.
It would be virtually impossible to define in statute standards that should apply in all those cases. The simple solution would be to allow the industry, in its various forms, to promote high standards and internal regulation. That can be an effective way of dealing with potential problems.
I am not against statutory regulation as such--it has a role in many industries--but I am simply lukewarm about it for this industry. There are always arguments in favour of it--although those arguments can be applied to almost every industry. One could make a very good case for statutory regulation of window cleaners as they enter private premises and have unparalleled opportunities to commit crime if they so wish. Other issues have been used as an argument for regulation, such as low wages. However, that does not mean that as a matter of course regulation is a good thing.
Sir Ivan Lawrence:
Can my hon. Friend think of any other industry that wants more regulation and is prepared to pay for it?
Mr. Merchant:
The House should not make a decision purely on the basis of what an industry wants or argues for. Of course, it is not the whole industry that wants statutory regulation; for that matter, there is no consensus on where the borderline should be drawn. As my hon. and learned Friend will know, one of the major trade organisations--it is mentioned in the Select Committee report--has criticised the recommendation in the report and has said that licensing should be put into effect right across the manned guarding sector, not just the contract part of the industry. In other words, it should apply to direct employment as well. There is thus no clear consensus on the exact form that regulation should take.
It is possible to argue in favour of regulation in an industry, but the arguments do not end there. We have to decide exactly what we intend to regulate, how to regulate it and where to draw the line. There is no consensus on that, either. No clear argument to explain where the line should be drawn has been advanced.
The fact is that this is a very large industry. To be sure, it should behave properly and it should have high standards, but I am not convinced that introducing statutory regulations would achieve them. Would regulation automatically improve the industry? Would it avoid the possibility of criminals subverting parts of the industry? Would it stop crime altogether? I think not.
Unfortunately, regulation is no guarantee that an employee will not use his position to commit a crime. After all, the police are heavily regulated. They are part of the state system, yet there are, unfortunately, quite a number of policemen and women who commit crimes. Regulation is therefore by no means a panacea.
I am not at all clear where the manned guarding contract sector begins and ends. Should we, for instance, include commissionaires? They are employed to guard and are often part of a contract arrangement. Quite often, however, their sole duty is to sit at the entrance of a building and issue people with permits to enter or leave. Should we include caretakers? A major part of the role of some caretakers is to guard buildings. When other staff leave, they are responsible for ensuring security. All these problems must be dealt with.
It is no use people like the hon. Member for Blackburn saying that the problem can be easily solved by producing regulations and by stipulating who can be employed. We must also define exactly which activities we are talking about. I fear that new Labour sees regulation not as a way of dealing with abuse in an industry but as a way of controlling it. It sees regulation as a way of reintroducing the state to an industry. Once Labour had opened the door to regulation of this sector, it would wish to use the opportunity to push the door completely open and control every aspect of the industry. The industry is certainly not calling for that, yet a number of speeches today seemed to show that that is what the Opposition want.
Mr. John Hutton (Barrow and Furness):
Only thehon. Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant) has argued in favour of continued self-regulation of the private security industry. I am sure that he would want, in normal circumstances, to place proper emphasis on the views of the Police Federation and the Association of Chief Police Officers when forming his views, so I respectfullyask him to look once again at the evidence that the Select Committee took on self-regulation. The evidence against it is convincing.
The Police Federation, for example, told the Committee that the whole system had broken down. There is little support across the industry for continued reliance on
self-regulation, which would not restore or maintain public confidence in the industry. Nor would it address some of the wider concerns that were argued before the Committee.
The hon. Gentleman also made a rather unfortunate mistake in suggesting that the Committee's report was a Trojan horse that was engineered by Labour Members of Parliament, and that it was designed somehow to re-regulate whole sectors of the industry. I remind him that the Committee has a majority of Conservative Members and that its report was unanimous. The report was compelling because the arguments in favour of statutory regulation are overwhelming. Everyone who gave evidence supported the arguments in favour of regulation. To summarise for the hon. Gentleman's benefit, they included the police, the industry itself and all the main consumers of security services.
When the Minister of State gave evidence to the Committee in December 1994, he told us that he was coming to the Committee with an open mind. He used that expression again tonight. I was rather disappointed with his speech tonight because I did not see any evidence of an open mind on statutory regulation--far from it;he tried to parody the arguments in the Committee's report and present them as some back-door red tape and bureaucracy that would stifle an important industry. All the members of the Committee were conscious of that argument. We do not want to adopt a system that would in any way act as a brake on the industry or bury it in red tape. We have had enough red tape from the Government in many other sectors--the health service and elsewhere--to know the problems. We do not want those problems to recur in the private security industry.
That was not the model that we presented in our report, and the Minister did the Committee a disservice--and gave the game away to a large extent--by trying to pretend that it was. We are conscious of those arguments. We do not want to repeat the mistakes. We want an effective system of statutory regulation, as called for by the industry and the police, which will address some of the concerns that we heard about the operation of the industry.
There are three specific arguments in favour of regulation of the industry. First, we want to deal with standards. Secondly, we want to deal with the chronic abuses in the industry: low pay, appalling working practices and conditions, and poor training. It is an abusive industry in many respects. Many of the small employers--the cowboy employers--abuse their staff and require them to work long hours. There is no holiday provision. It is a disgrace. That is not an argument for old-style regulation. The Committee examined the matter and felt that the evidence of abuse and of low standards was sufficiently compelling to warrant consideration by the agency that we propose to regulate the industry.
Thirdly, we are extremely concerned about criminality in the industry. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) and others some pretty grim examples. I do not want to repeat the arguments--anyone who wants to see the catalogue of miserable events should simply read the evidence that we published at the same time as our report. It is important to deal with some of the arguments raised by thehon. Member for Beckenham, and by the Minister of State, who suggested that the issue of criminality in the
industry could be dealt with solely by improving access to criminal records. I do not believe that to be the case, and nor, I believe, do my colleagues on the Committee, because there are well-documented examples of one-person businesses being set up by people with serious convictions for offences that make them unsuitable to provide private security services. We would not deal with the issue by disclosing or requiring greater access to criminal records.
The evidence of criminality that was presented to the Select Committee came in part from the Lancashire constabulary, which undertook some research of its own. It revealed that criminality in the private security industry was 21 times higher than we would expect in the police service. That is the important comparison that we should be making. It is false to compare levels of criminality in the private security industry with those in the general population. The private security industry is moving into territory that has hitherto been the sole responsibility of the police, which have their own legal, ethical and moral code, backed by statutory force.
I know that there are some methodological difficulties with the research undertaken by the Lancashire constabulary, but the results give us a pretty good background against which we can measure the performance of the private security industry. There is plenty of evidence that should give rise to real concern. Unlike the hon. Member for Beckenham, I do not believe that we can rely on self-regulation to deal with the problems.
Perhaps there is a wider issue of public confidence that we should consider. The Association of Chief Police Officers, for example, was extremely articulate in presenting evidence to the Select Committee. It drew attention to the fact that there has been a shift in some of the roles and relationships between the private industry and the police.
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