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Mr. Fallon: My hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) might be about to propose more serious penalties, which might involve the vendors never returning again.
Mr. Swayne: I am attracted by the idea of the Mafia being involved in purveying hamburgers. That is something that we should encourage. If the Mafia can be tied up in distributing hamburgers, society might be enhanced.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. This is wide of the debate on the amendments.
Mr. Fallon: There is an absence of rationale here, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If we are to criticise the Bill for overreacting to a problem, or coming up with a solution that is not based on a particular rationale, we must be honest and apply that same critique to amendments Nos. 17 and 1.
I have said that this is a difficult and agonising choice for those of us who wish to support either or both of my right hon. Friends. However, when they reply to this important debate, it is incumbent on them to demonstrate that their amendments are better rooted in evidence and based on a more reasoned framework than the Bill that they seek to amend.
Mr. Chope: It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) because I share some of his scepticism.
My right hon. Friends the Members for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) have done a great service to the House and the country by ensuring that we have an opportunity to debate this matter. When speaking to clause 2 in Committee, the Minister justified the clause in just a few words. He said:
- The current maximum penalty . . . carries a fine of £200. Magistrates courts generally impose much lower fines, but even the maximum fine of £200 is no deterrent. The courts need to have much higher penalties available to them.--[Official Report, Standing Committee G, 21 March 2000; c. 7.]
On Second Reading, the Minister said that those seeking to enforce the legislation in the royal parks were subject to strong-arm tactics and violence. In other words, offences were committed against them for which there are substantial penalties, including imprisonment. If the presence of those penalties on the statute book is not sufficient to deter this activity, why does the Minister think that a maximum fine of £1,000 might be?
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There is a real concern about this piecemeal legislation and the displacement effect. The Government argue that the Bill will equalise the royal parks with the City of Westminster, but those of us who, when we are in London, live on the south bank, as I do, in the London borough of Lambeth, will justifiably ask why the displacement should cause a proliferation of the illegal activity in our area. The Minister has not addressed that point.
Probably the best answer would be to have fixed penalties, decided by local authorities, just as they choose the level of parking fines. Fixed penalties and the certainty of conviction might be a much more effective deterrent than maximum penalties.
Mr. Fabricant: There is a powerful argument for fixed penalties. Does my hon. Friend agree that, in order to avoid displacement, they should apply equally to the royal parks and gardens as well as to places that do not come under the provisions of the 1872 Act?
Mr. Chope: That is a powerful point.
The Minister admitted in the Second Reading Committee that he had been
- advised that interviews by the immigration and social security authorities have elicited that many of those operating these food carts say that they are asylum seekers.--[Official Report, Second Reading Committee, 7 March 2000; c. 5.]
I do not know whether the Minister has consulted the new chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality on whether he thinks that the legislation is discriminatory, but if those people are indeed asylum seekers, that further demonstrates the knock-on effects of the Government's inadequate asylum policies. Is it not unthinkable that maximum fines of £1,000 should be imposed on asylum seekers, who will justifiably be able to say that they have no source of income? How will the courts be able to impose £1,000 fines on asylum seekers, and how will asylum seekers be deterred from this unlawful activity by the provisions in clause 2?
Mr. Swayne: I do not yet know whether I am in favour of, or against, the amendments. That depends to some extent on what the Minister will say. I want briefly to rehearse my dilemma and to crystallise what has emerged. One has to decide which side of the fence to come down on. I want to rehearse the argument that has erected that fence for me.
I think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) undermined the force of amendment No. 17 when he suggested that it might not be profitable to spend a great deal of time discussing the level of fines when those fines were unlikely to be enforced.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) dismissed that argument with powerful logic, but both he and my right hon. Friend relied on one piece of evidence: the four traders next to the London Eye to whom they referred. The key point is that we might be doing those traders a huge disservice, because no one has yet produced any evidence to persuade us that they are trading illegally, yet they were used as the example to prove that the fines would not be enforced. Without that evidence, no such issue can be decided.
The thrust of the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst and those who followed his logic was that the fine had to be proportionate to the offence. If I understood him and my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) correctly, they did not believe that these offences were quite as heinous as some might portray them to be--reference was made earlier to the offensive smells that might emerge--and my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst therefore wanted to reduce the fine in respect of the first offence.
I understand the force of those arguments. These vendors do not force their products on unwilling customers. They provide a service. If it constitutes a nuisance, we must be proportionate in our response. That is one side of the fence--the argument for the amendments.
The argument against the amendments is the argument for zero tolerance--that the fines should be severe and there should be no reduction for the first offence on the
grounds that, if we deal severely with the first offence, there will not be subsequent offences. The argument is that, if one takes these issues seriously, one deals with the problem rather than having a running sore.That might be countered by the proportionality argument--that it is ridiculous to deal with such trivial offences in so draconian a way--but the benefits of the zero tolerance approach are felt not in respect of those particular offences but in respect of all offences. The experience in New York is that dealing with minor offences such as street begging or illegal trading in a severe way has a knock-on effect on much more serious crime throughout the city. That is a powerful argument that we should consider.
However, I have at the back of my mind a reservation, which sprang from a telephone call that I received last week from a constituent, complaining that he had reported a burglar alarm ringing next door to him to the police, only to be told that it was the policy of the police in Ringwood not to respond to burglar alarms. Here we are, discussing additional fines to pursue the purveyors of hamburgers, and I wonder whether we have lost our sense of proportion.
I refer again to the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale, who suggested that the hamburger trade had been sewn up by the Mafia. It may bear repeating that if we could confine gangsterism to the purveyance of hamburgers, we would be doing very well indeed.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr. Alan Howarth): I am happy to respond to the debate on the amendments. I am grateful to all who have participated. It is proper that we should debate the proposals in the spirit of satisfying Parliament that the legislation proposed by the Government is necessary, well framed, proportionate--that has been mentioned several times--and therefore fit to proceed speedily on to the statute book. I hope that right hon. and hon. Gentlemen are increasingly satisfied that that will be the case.
The Bill has been considered carefully by Opposition Front Benchers, and I place on record my appreciation of the responsible attitude of the hon. Members for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) and for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge). I assure those right hon. and hon. Gentlemen who have cast a scintilla of doubt on whether Parliament's scrutiny of the measure has so far been adequate that I have been subjected to a rigorous and searching interrogation--more importantly, so has the legislation--by the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Lady. None the less, it is appropriate to proceed as we are this afternoon, and I shall address myself to the amendments. In so doing, I shall deal more gently with the right hon. Members for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) than did the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon), who made some shrewd criticisms of the amendments--in the interests of opening up such issues for debate, I presume.
This straightforward measure is intended to deal with a pretty clear-cut problem--unauthorised, and therefore illegal--trading in the royal parks. Indeed, the Metropolitan police and the Royal Parks Constabulary have advised us that such illegal trading is very much a manifestation of organised crime of an unpleasant nature.
The right hon. and hon. Gentlemen, who are strongly committed to upholding good law and order, would certainly want the Government to deal with such crime.
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