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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I have listened carefully to the right hon. Gentleman and, on occasions, he repeats his case. He makes his points effectively, but it is against the rules of the House to make the case twice in the same go.
Mr. Forth: I am grateful, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The argument has obviously lost its effectiveness, so I had better not pursue it any further. I want to hear a positive and comprehensive case made for these provisions, because if it is not, we should remove them.
Mr. Burns: As my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) said, this is a serious matter. His amendment would mean that the courts would not have the power to impose passport surrender as a condition of an international banning order. That goes to the heart of the purpose of this part of the Bill.
I urge my right hon. Friend to think again. The amendment would destroy the Bill's purpose of tightening up international banning orders. My right hon. Friend is right to say that taking away people's right to travel abroad is a serious step, but we must see it in context. The people involved will have been convicted of serious crimes. On the authority of a court, banning orders are imposed to prevent people from travelling abroad, during limited periods, when there is reason to believe that they might repeat the trouble overseas that brought about their conviction in the first place.
Current practice shows that there is no point in imposing a banning order if there is no effective way to enforce it. The only effective enforcement of international banning orders is the withdrawal of passports, albeit for a brief period. Although such orders may be imposed for a number of years, people are not prevented from going abroad on holiday or in pursuit of their personal business. The effect is simply that they are not allowed to have their passports for five days before a match is played abroad.
Mr. Forth:
Does my hon. Friend agree that the requirement to report to a police station is equally effective in preventing someone from travelling? In any
Mr. Burns:
On the first point, in theory my right hon. Friend may have a case. However, current practice does not work, as people do not turn up at police stations when football matches take place. That is why we must tighten the law.
On my right hon. Friend's second point--that genuine family or business reasons may exist that require travel abroad--my response is to say, "Tough." The decision to issue a person with an international banning order preventing him from going to a football match is not taken lightly, but follows a conviction in a court.
It is odd that my right hon. Friend should argue, in effect, that the system should fit in with an individual's personal arrangements. Taking away a passport is a punishment as well as a way of preventing a repetition abroad of acts of violence. We should not roll over like little dogs wanting their tummies tickled to fit in with the arrangements of a person who has committed an offence but who then wants the state to bend over backwards to make it easier for him to travel abroad, even if the purpose is not to attend a football match.
My right hon. Friend is, like me, a member of the party of law and order. I know that he has a genuine desire to protect the vast majority of people who are innocent. He has talked skilfully and reasonably about civil liberties, but I have heard nothing about the civil liberties of the vast majority of innocent people who go to football matches for an afternoon or evening of entertainment but who inadvertently get caught up in the behaviour of the mindless minority that causes so much misery.
We must stiffen our resolve and take the actions that all responsible people, in football and the law, are urging us to take. They want us to give the authorities more powers to prevent the activities of the violent minority.
Mr. Brooke:
I have one question to put to the Minister, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) omitted to ask. I share my right hon. Friend's pride in holding a British passport. My first passport said that Ernest Bevin, His Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, "requests and requires" in the name of His Majesty, et cetera, and I was able to go bravely abroad holding that passport. I am out of date on the statistics relating to the issuing of passports but one felt greater pride having acquired one's passport from Peterborough, from which it took 40 days to arrive, than one did if it had come from Belfast, where the process took only four days.
My question to the Minister is important. I do not wish to intrude on the Minister's private grief, but inner London Members have been communicating over the past
six months with the Home Office about the passports of constituents that the Home Office has lost. Some 80 per cent. of the passports of Thais--
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. The right hon. Gentleman is perhaps discussing business that might be more appropriately raised on another occasion. The loss of passports and difficulties with the Passport Agency are not entirely relevant to the amendment.
Mr. Brooke:
I hesitate to allow even a scintilla of controversy to enter into my relationship with you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as you have always been extremely kind to me. However, the amendment seeks to remove the provision that the passport
Kate Hoey:
I shall respond first to the point made by the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke). Clearly we will not be dealing with huge numbers of passports. The right hon. Gentleman may know that there have been only 150 international banning orders over the past two years. A small number of people will have to leave their passports at a police station, and I am confident that the police will not get themselves into the recent difficulties experienced by the Passport Agency.
I strongly oppose the amendment, as must anyone who has sat through the Second Reading and the Committee debates. It relates to the most crucial part of the Bill. The constituents of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) would be the first to tell him that if a court has ordered that someone should be prevented from travelling abroad, that person should be stopped from going. We have not been able to prevent people from travelling, and some of the disgraceful incidents that have occurred in Europe involved people who had been served with international restriction orders.
Prevention has not been possible because of the way in which the orders have operated. The Bill will toughen up the law so that people will have to attend a named police station and hand in their passport five days before a match. If they do not do so, the police will know that they will travel, and something can be done to prevent it. That is the point of the Bill.
Mr. Forth:
Can the Minister advise me whether it is possible for someone to travel to other European Union countries without a passport? I am fairly certain that it is possible to move freely in and out of the United Kingdom and among the other countries that are parties to the Schengen agreement without a passport, but with some other satisfactory means of identification. If that were so, it would seriously undermine the effectiveness of the measure that the Minister described.
Kate Hoey:
The right hon. Gentleman should be absolutely clear that such people would not be able to get
"should be returned . . . as soon as reasonably practicable after the match has taken place."
My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst did not ask the Minister for a guarantee that the Home Office--whether through the police or in its own right--will in fact be able to find a passport when its holder comes to ask for its return, and that is the assurance that I seek.
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