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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I was beginning to detect threads of a Third Reading speech in the right hon. Gentleman's remarks, but I am now beginning to think that they have moved beyond that. May we please return to the new clause?
10.45 am
Mr. Maclean: My sincere apologies, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The report in the new clause may identify trends among paedophiles and child abusers. Hon. Members will know that those who abuse children are not thugs or mindless morons; some of them are very clever and very skilful at covering their tracks.
Mr. Forth: My problem with the new clause is that it would not show trends, as there would be only one report. My right hon. Friend must square up to that. If he supports the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond), he must find a way around the problem that a one-off report will not show trends.
Mr. Maclean: My right hon. Friend, with his customary logic, is right. I am sympathetic to the new clause, which would be a step in the right direction. I could not bear to oppose it, but I also agree with the hon. Member for Stourbridge that, in this world of joined-up government, it would be beneficial if the provision did more than place an obligation on the Secretary of State for Health under clauses 1 to 4. If the new clause cannot go further, perhaps the Government can do so non-statutorily and produce a joined-up report, taking into account aspects in the new clause and some of the loopholes that it has missed that I should like to mention.
I listened carefully to what my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge said about his new clause and I shall not repeat his arguments. However, it is important that the House should be informed in a coherent and sensible way about the operation of the legislation. Like others, I am not sure that a one-off report in 18 months' time is sufficient. I would have preferred my hon. Friend to amend his new clause to provide for an annual report. I shall discuss later whether it should be statutory; it may not have to be.
If the Minister accepts the spirit of the new clause and other proposals that I shall make on how it can be improved, an annual report from the various Departments concerned--presumably it would have to be produced by the Cabinet Office, as it would involve joined-up government--including chapters from all of them on how they saw the system working, could be produced, providing a more comprehensive overview of those who were placed on the list and what they were up to. We should be able to get an idea of that from the way in which they bring appeals and the arguments that they use.
We know that, as people start appearing before tribunals, there will be work for double the number of lawyers, although I am not criticising the lawyers who will run behind the ambulance of the Bill. I am not criticising the Minister of State, Home Office, who can be forgiven for having been a lawyer in his past life. I am glad to see that he now has decent employment. It is inevitable that some lawyers will specialise in defending those who have been put on the list. A body of argument will develop quickly and there will be a trend of justification and the best legal excuses for justifying what has happened. I hope that most of those excuses will not get past the sensible people who will be appointed to the tribunal under clause 9, but inevitably some people will get off--the House may think wrongly--because a body of law has grown up or certain excuses have come to be accepted that are not covered by the law.
That is not a criticism of the Bill. I do not want an annual report so as to be able to point the finger at the hon. Member for Stourbridge, my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge or others in the House and say, "Clause 4 is faulty; you didn't make clause 6 tight enough." In my opinion, the purpose is to examine the measures both in the Bill and in other legislation.
I do not want to have to table a series of questions to the Minister to find out how many people have been placed on the list kept under section 1, including those placed on it provisionally, or how many people initiated appeal procedures, the average time taken to confirm the inclusion of an individual or the time elapsing between the commencement of appeal proceedings and their determination by the tribunal.
I have tabled a few questions this Session; if one tables too many, the immediate criticism by some Departments is that one is wasting £400 per question, simply by asking them. It may be cheaper in the end for the Government to produce a comprehensive report, rather than depending on hon. Members asking questions.
Moreover, if in the absence of the new clause I ask those questions, I will get only a little part of the picture. What concerns me more, and what the new clause does not deal with sufficiently, is clause 9 and the tribunal. The tribunal is connected with clauses 1 to 4, which the new clause is about, and represents an important part of the Bill. There is a schedule to deal with setting it up, although I shall not talk about its detailed operation now, as that might be out of order.
Under clause 9, the Secretary of State has the power to make regulations relating to all aspects of the functioning of the tribunal--who may have leave to appeal, obtaining medical reports on people who appear before it, the rules governing who may appear on behalf of the parties, whether lawyers, Queen's Counsel or friends of individuals may appear, and the awarding of costs or expenses.
The Minister may say, "Don't worry about the fact that the new clause does not have anything about getting an annual report on the generality of cases before the tribunal. You may not know this, but the Council on Tribunals"--or some tribunal Act, of which I am unaware--"insists that all tribunals produce an annual report on their activities." That may be so, and it may be good and sufficient to give hon. Members, if we find the report, an overview of the final results of the Bill.
I am not simply asking for information on how many people the Secretary of State has placed on the list, or how long it has taken the Secretary of State to come to a determination; I am asking for information on the ultimate conclusion of cases, who has appealed and how long it has taken to do so, the verdict at the end, and also for an overview of the arguments that are presented to the tribunal--which ones the tribunal finds persuasive, and which it finds are a load of tosh, used by people who are trying it on. We need to know those outcomes.
We often have to pass legislation not because we have found that a previous Act is wrong or full of technical errors, but because the courts are doing things that we did not expect. The interpretation of legislation by courts and tribunals often catches Governments by surprise. It is fair for me, as a former Home Office Minister, to make that point. The Minister of State, Home Office, who is sitting on the Government Front Bench at the moment, would confirm, in a totally non-political way, that, even with the best legislation that any Government pass, whether it comes from the Home Office or from other Departments, one can suddenly find that the courts have not interpreted it exactly as Ministers or the rest of the House thought they would. In Committee, we heard references to Pepper v. Hart, and those may be valid, but the courts will often conclude that, irrespective of what Members of Parliament have said, the legislation is clear--and clearly different from what we expected.
The new clause is an important step in the right direction, but it would not give us that complete overview. Even if the Lord Chancellor publishes a separate report on what the tribunals do, we also need information about the regulations that the Secretary of State makes under clause 9, and why he has made them.
The Minister may say that it is up to alert Members of Parliament to spot the legislation that the House is voting through. No doubt, over the next few months, regulations will be laid under the Bill and we shall have a chance to spot them on the Order Paper, and therefore we should know what is going on. However, I make a plea to the Minister to think again, because, as we can see from the Bill, the protection of children is a highly complex matter.
I have had to reread the Hansard reports of our proceedings in Committee several times just to grasp what was going on at the time, because the details were very complicated. I pay tribute to all the members of the Committee not just for the important changes that they made to the Bill, but for understanding the arguments that were advanced and the effects that the changes would have on the Bill.
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