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10.16 am
Mr. John McWilliam (Blaydon): On 21 March 1993, Police Sergeant Bill Forth was in his panda car on the Clover Hill estate in Sunniside in my constituency. He was dragged from that car, he was clubbed with fence posts, and he was stabbed to death with a sheath knife. The assailants, Paul Weddle and Philip English, were convicted of murder. Their defence counsel pleaded in mitigation the fact that they were high on a mixture of alcohol, solvents and temazepan. It was not, however, the alcohol, solvents and temazepan that killed Sergeant Forth; it was a knife.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Provan (Mr. Wray) on introducing the Bill; it is an important and overdue measure. We should have had this legislation a long time ago. I also congratulate my hon. Friend on the measured way in which he moved the Bill's Second Reading, and on the thoughtful way in which he has constructed it; it will be effective.
Sergeant Forth was 35; he left a widow, Gill, and two children: Christopher, who was 10 at the time, and Rebecca, who was seven. Weddle and English beat Sergeant Forth with fence posts, and Weddle then stabbed him while English ran off. The police were doing their duty by protecting a family on the estate who were being
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The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. David Maclean):
It might be helpful for me to inform the House at a reasonably early stage in our proceedings that the Government support the Bill. I sincerely congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, Provan (Mr. Wray) on the way he presented the Bill to the House and his full explanation of it. I also thank him for his kindness and courtesy in thanking us for the small amount of assistance that we gave him.
I welcome the hon. Gentleman's decision to introduce a Bill on knives. His speech and the two other excellent speeches this morning show that, whenever we can put in place another piece of the jigsaw in helping to destroy the knife sub-culture that involves too many young people by making it difficult for them to carry or use knives, we are doing our duty to society.
We are all united in our objective of tackling the menace of knife-related crime. We have heard a good historical coverage of the changes to the relevant legislation since the 1940s. Over the years, a great deal of work has been done, but I suspect that in future, as in other areas of crime such as those involving drugs or pornography, whenever we think that we have the problem bolted down, the culture, technology and attitudes change and that we have to return to the problem every two or three years to tighten up the legislation.
More can and should be done, and the hon. Gentleman's Bill gives us such an opportunity. Before I turn to it in detail, let me remind the House of some of the measures that we have already taken that set the Bill in context.
Section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 made it an offence for a person to possess a bladed or sharply pointed article in a public place without good reason. The Act places the onus on the person carrying the knife to show that he has a good reason for possessing it in public. There is no need to prove intent to use the knife. That legislation was designed to deal with a weakness in previous legislation, whereby there had to be proof of such an intention. If the prosecution could show such an intention, there were heavy penalties, but the 1988 Act made simple possession without a lawful excuse an offence.
We continually return to the issue. In 1995, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Lady Olga Maitland) sponsored her Offensive Weapons Bill, which
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First, the Act raised the maximum penalty for carrying a knife in public without good reason from a fine of £1,000 to two years' imprisonment or an unlimited fine or both. The maximum penalty for the more serious offence of carrying a knife with intent to cause injury was raised from two to four years' imprisonment.
Secondly, the Act gave the police the terribly important power to arrest people on the spot for those offences. Thirdly, the law as it stood meant that an offence of carrying a knife or offensive weapon could only take place in public. The Act extended the scope of the offence to carrying a knife on school premises, together with the necessary police powers of search and entry. Many of us had assumed that school premises were public property, but we discovered that they were not, so the Bill sensibly extended provisions to them.
Fourthly, the Act created a new offence of selling knives or other bladed articles to people under 16. The prohibition on selling knives to under-16s will come into force on 1 January 1997.
We have also used powers under section 141 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 to prohibit the manufacture, sale, importation, giving, hiring or lending of certain specified weapons. An order was made in 1988 prohibiting 14 different weapons that can be defined by their essential features. They include knuckledusters, sword sticks, butterfly knives, hand claws, belt buckle knives and push daggers. Many of those weapons are marketed in foreign magazines although in Britain it is illegal to sell them, buy them or acquire them. The Bill tackles the mere fact of them being described or published, and will do a lot to tackle the knife-carrying sub-culture.
No one should be in any doubt how seriously the law treats illicit knife carrying, but it is clear that, despite the heavy penalties, too many people do not realise that it is an offence to carry a knife in public without good reason, or if they do they are clearly prepared to take the risk.
In 1995, there were almost 3,500 prosecutions for the offence of illicit knife carrying. On 27 November, my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary launched a publicity campaign involving the distribution of posters and other material to schools, colleges, local newspapers and radio stations.
During the passage of the Offensive Weapons Act, concern was expressed on both sides of the House about the way in which some knives are advertised. The Advertising Standards Authority conducted a wide- ranging survey of printed advertisements in February. It found that of 259 adverts for weapons and knives, 15 were questionable when judged against the code of advertising practice, which provides that adverts should not contain anything that condones or is likely to provoke violence or antisocial behaviour. As a result of the concern expressed about advertising and marketing, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-East (Mr. Kirkhope) agreed to keep the position under review and study what was happening in the advertising and marketing world.
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On 26 June, my hon. Friend met Mrs. Alderton, the Director General of the Advertising Standards Authority. My right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary had a further meeting with the ASA on 9 November.Mrs. Alderton told him that the authority had been successful in getting 13 out of the 15 unacceptable adverts withdrawn or changed. The other two advertisers could not be contacted, but their adverts had not been published again. Mrs. Alderton agreed that the authority should conduct further surveys frequently and without notice.
Against the background of promising my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam that we would monitor advertising and marketing, we have continued to consider what further steps we can take to deal with the knife-carrying culture. We have made it clear that, if it were possible to define in a satisfactory way knives that had no legitimate purpose, we would not hesitate to use the powers under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 to ban such knives and their marketing in the same way as we have used them to ban 14 other weapons, including knuckledusters, butterfly knives and flick knives.
All the knives that have been banned under the 1988 Act have features that enable them to be defined clearly and easily in the law. So far, we have concluded that we cannot define combat knives satisfactorily and distinguish them from other knives in order to ban them. I understand that the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) shares that view. We have therefore considered other approaches. We have given a great deal of thought to how we might produce workable legislation to address the way in which knives are marketed.
That is why we came forward with a proposal that it should be an offence for anyone to market a knife in a way that suggests that it is suitable for combat or otherwise likely to encourage violent behaviour involving the use of a knife. I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Provan has gone down the route of tackling the marketing of knives that in any way suggests that they are suitable for combat. The Bill's proposals will make a significant contribution towards stamping out some of the unpleasant and unacceptable ways in which combat knives are sold and marketed.
I am not 100 per cent. confident that the drafting of clause 1 is quite right. A couple of technical amendments may be required, but we shall look at that closely. If drafting amendments are required, we shall certainly assist the hon. Gentleman in dealing with them quickly in Committee. Apart from that little technical quibble, I welcome the proposals' substance, which we of course support.
I should like briefly to mention the proposals made last week by the Police Superintendents Association of England and Wales. It suggested that it should be an offence to sell or market any knife that is
I am grateful to the supers for giving thought to that difficult question and working on it over some considerable time, but I regret that I do not think that their proposal would work. It would require the courts to make very subjective judgments about the apparent design of a knife and it would not be difficult for someone to show that even a vicious combat knife could be used for a legitimate purpose such as chopping food. I think that
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The Bill also contains provisions that deal with police powers to stop and search. Here again, the hon. Member for Provan and I share the same objective. For the problem of knife carrying to be tackled effectively, it is essential that the police have adequate powers to stop and search when they have reliable information that people are carrying knives in a particular area. The Bill sensibly contains provisions on stop-and-search powers, which are a fundamental step in the right direction. They extend section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order 1994 Act to Scotland, which the Scottish police associations have supported.
The Bill would also amend section 60 to allow stop-and-search powers to be authorised where a police officer reasonably believes that persons are carrying knives or offensive weapons in any locality in the police area without good reason. Again, I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on that; it is all heading in the right direction.
The Bill would limit the exercise of the new stop-and-search powers by requiring authorisation by an officer of superintendent rank or above, and by limiting the period for which that authorisation can be given. I say to some of those organisations, such as Liberty and others, which have said that such a provision would give police constables willy-nilly power to do anything that they liked, that they clearly have not read the Bill. It sensibly extends stop-and-search powers that have three major constraints on them: they cannot be used all over the police area and must be used in a locality; they have to be authorised by a senior officer; and they are limited by time. Those constraints mean that police constables will have their normal stop-and-search powers--and their common law powers in Scotland--but will not be able of their own volition to use the powers unless they are authorised to do so for a defined period by a senior officer.
Before suggesting to the hon. Member for Provan that he may want to consider putting powers in the Bill, I sought the views of the police associations, all of which supported the proposals. The chairman of the Police Federation wrote to me on 2 December and said:
"apparently designed or made to injure",
and that it would be a defence to prove that the knife had "an accepted usage".
"your specific proposal in relation to section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 regarding the authority level reduced to inspector and the extension from 24 hours to 48 hours are good ones. They will enable the powers under section 60 to be effective and more quickly react to local problems".
The Association of Chief Police Officers similarly expressed unreserved support for the proposals. The views of professionals command respect; they understand the realities of policing. I want to return to the point about authorisation briefly in Committee because I think that further discussion is necessary, but I do not need to go into it on the Floor of the House today.
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