| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Maclean: Does my hon. Friend accept that the police and the person involved can discuss it until they are blue in the face and pick the best police station, but that that will not help if he is sent by his work to the north of Scotland for two weeks or told that his job will take him around the country? The work force are more mobile than ever before. How does the Bill tackle that?
Mr. Burns: I appreciate that. The individual can ask for further consideration to be given to genuinely changing circumstances. However, my right hon. Friend will also have come across individuals who seek to avoid their responsibilities. The Child Support Agency is an example of some people having become highly skilled at abusing the law and the requirements imposed on them to the nth degree. If one is not careful, under this measure, individuals would abuse that position and would try to bring the law into disrepute and make it less effective than Parliament wants it to be. On those grounds, I ask my right hon. Friend to reconsider the matter and to withdraw the amendment.
Mr. Forth: I am now rather confused. Normally, our little debates help to clarify matters--as did the previous debate--but I am somewhat confused by the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns). To say--as has been said--that we should not worry too much about the measure, as it is not intended to be penal, and that we do not intend to make it difficult or inconvenient for the individual, but rather to make it as easy as possible, strikes me as slightly bizarre in the context of our debate.
All morning, we have been told about individuals who have committed the most ghastly and heinous acts and are a threat to society. Now, we are told that we are trying to find the most convenient outcome for such people. That strikes me as somewhat odd. Perhaps it is typical of the court leniency that has been mentioned during the debate. However, that matter is for another day. The more I consider it, the more I am tempted by the suggestion of my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean): that were I--God forbid--ever to come high enough in the ballot for private Members' Bills, that subject might merit my attention.
Be that as it may, I am not clear about the object of the exercise. I guess that it is to prevent certain persons from going to football grounds--that is the most obvious object--but I am distressed to hear that there is no intention to subject them to any penal element. I am even more confused by my hon. Friend the Member for West Chelmsford saying, in effect, "Don't worry, because the individual will be able to discuss the matter and make representations about it during the court proceedings". Of course, he will--or, at least, I hope so--because that is what judicial proceedings are all about. If the matter were so simple, we should never need the right of appeal in any case.
According to what my hon. Friend said, we need only tell the accused individual that, during the court proceedings, he and his legal representative would be able
to make all the points they wanted; they could ask the court to take this or that into consideration and should trust the court because it would all turn out all right.
Mr. Burns:
I obviously made my point inadequately and it caused confusion. What is important is that a police station is designated to which an individual has to report. That individual will be able to ask the court to take certain factors into consideration in determining a police station at which attendance would not cause an undue penalty. On the other side of the coin, if a court convicts and sentences someone to a prison sentence, I am sure that my right hon. Friend would not expect the court to start discussing with the prisoner at which prison it would be convenient for him to serve his sentence.
Mr. Forth:
I thought that was not part of the penalty. We cannot have it both ways. If it is to be part of the penalty, I should build a large police station in Stornoway and insist that everyone reported there. That would have the required effect. However, that, apparently, is not what we are saying. We are saying, "Don't worry. You will be asked to report to a police station, but it will be very convenient and probably warm; you might even get a cup of tea when you go there." The way things are going, I should not even be surprised by that. It must be one thing or the other--either it is part of the penalty or it is not. If it is not part of the penalty, that is a different matter.
If the idea is simply to make sure that individuals are where we want them to be at a particular time, to prevent them from going anywhere near a football match--although why anyone would want to go near a football match is quite beyond my comprehension, but apparently there are those who do--we are in different territory altogether.
Mr. Burns:
I hesitate to intervene as I do not want to delay the debate and talk out my Bill. However, I hope that my right hon. Friend realises that the measure refers to international football banning orders. If a court imposed such an order, an individual would have to turn up at a police station not less than five days before a match to hand in his passport, to prevent him from travelling overseas where he could cause problems at the football match or in the surrounding area. The provision merely states that the courts have to sort out a police station for the person to go to at a certain time. Of course the courts will try to find a police station that is convenient to the individual, so that it gives no further encouragement to the individual not to comply with the banning order.
Mr. Forth:
It is getting worse and worse--we have not got to the cup of tea yet, but I sense that it is imminent.
However, we need not fall out over this matter. I was persuaded by the arguments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border, whose knowledge of police stations is far greater than mine as a result of his having been in far more of them than I have, and I defer to him in this case. The more I hear from my hon. Friend the Member for West Chelmsford the more worried I become, however, because it all seems very soft and easy going; but I shall not prolong my comments on amendment No. 2 because I am anxious to reach the amendment dealing with the surrender of passports, which will be another debate altogether. I shall be guided on this
occasion, as on so many others, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border, but I am not entirely convinced.
Mr. Maclean:
I, too, am not convinced by the arguments of my hon. Friend the Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns). I am not convinced, although I am willing to be corrected by the Minister or anyone else, that handing in the passport is the sole purpose of specifying a police station. The court can impose any conditions it thinks fit, and I was under the impression that specifying the police station to which the person must report might involve more than a single visit to hand in a passport: for example, there could be a requirement that the person should report there regularly.
However, I see from head movements in the Chamber that I am wrong and my hon. Friend is right, but even if he is right and the purpose of specifying the police station is solely to do with the handing in of the passport, it makes sense to introduce a degree of flexibility to deal with a small number of cases. For example, say it is decided for a person who lives and works in Penrith that Penrith will be the reporting station where he must hand in his passport five days before a football match. Say that person then discovers that he is being sent to work on a contract in the Devon and Cornwall police area. Surely it should be fairly simple to specify a police station in Devon or Cornwall.
Such cases may constitute only a tiny minority, but I am not entirely convinced that there are powerful arguments against their being provided for. I am not in the business of diluting the Bill or making life inconvenient for the police; nor am I in the business of allowing people a right of appeal to change the police station where they must hand in their passport every other day and around every single police station in the country. I accept that there would be clever fly-boys who would try to make a mockery of the law by taking advantage of such flexibility.
However, as I said, we would be dealing with only a small number of people, all of whom would be on the NCIS computer and that of their local police force. With the police national network up and running and all the digital communications that were installed under the previous Government, on which the current Government are no doubt building, it should be quite possible for the police services of the UK, which are all now in touch with each other, simply to effect a change--for example, that the reporting station for an individual has been moved from Penrith to Penzance.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |