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Mr. Fabricant: Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Howarth: No. I should like to carry on because we have a little business to transact before 7 pm and the hon. Gentleman has already spoken a certain amount.
Amendment No. 21 would restrict the class of person who may be considered to be an officer of a body corporate by excluding those who were purporting to act as a director, manager or secretary but did not have the authority to do so. The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst seeks to change the word "purporting" to "authorised". The amendment would achieve nothing positive. The persons authorised to act in the capacity of officer are already provided for in clause 3(2)(d). The amendment would preclude the possibility of prosecuting those who purport to act as an officer without the authority to do so. I cannot see why such individuals should escape liability.
Finally, amendment No. 31 would not improve or clarify the Bill. Persons acting in the capacity of officer are already provided for by clause 3(2)(d). Like amendment No. 21, it would preclude the possibility of prosecuting those who purport to act as an officer without the authority to do so. It is again unclear why such a category of individual should escape liability.
Having heard those explanations, I hope that the right hon. Gentlemen will not press their amendments.
Mr. Forth: When I looked at the clause and set about drafting my amendments, I suspected that I might get into difficulty because I was encroaching on a narrow, legalistic area. My right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) may have felt the same, although he has much more expertise in this area than I have, given his distinguished ministerial experience in a previous existence.
The Minister confirmed my suspicions in the most helpful and positive way. I tried to follow his arguments--he quite properly gave the House a carefully drafted reply of the kind with which some of us are very familiar. He reassured us that clause 3 has been carefully drafted; it is intended to cover all conceivable possibilities in this area. We may want to return subsequently to the Mafia point because I am not sure that the clause would cover it, but it was not intended to do so. The clause is intended to cover more organised operations, rather than sole practitioners or single-person enterprises. I accept the spirit in which that explanation was offered.
The Minister has gone a considerable way to reassure us that our unhappiness about the use of the term "secretary" was misplaced, because it is a term of art. My attempt to define it more accurately could have misfired and unduly narrowed the Bill or caused it to lose its focus. I did not quite follow the argument, but I gather that the same was true of the word "purporting", which appears also to be a term of art that I had not fully understood.
We can be reassured by what the Minister has said--that clause 3 strikes a reasonable balance, being broad enough to cover those who should properly be encompassed within the Bill and avoiding being too narrow to miss those whom we might wish to catch. I thank the Minister again for his care and courtesy in replying to the amendments. In the light of what he has said, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Mr. Maclean: I beg to move amendment No. 6, in page 2, line 4, leave out clauses 4 and 5.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Amendment No. 28, in clause 4, page 2, line 13, at end insert--
'(4) Where a park constable exercises his powers under subsection (1) above he shall--
(a) ensure that he provides facilities for the safe removal from the park of any perishable material by the person having possession or control;
(b) give to the person having possession or control a document, in an appropriate language, setting out the reasons for the seizure, itemising the things seized and informing the person of his rights and liabilities under section 5; and
(c) not remove any article until he has performed an assessment under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations that the removal of the thing or things would not create a hazard for his or others' health and safety.
(5) The document referred to in subsection (4)(b) above shall comply with the model in Schedule (Document relating to seizure of property).'.
Amendment No. 22, in clause 5, page 2, line 20, after "at", insert "or before".
Amendment No. 23, in page 2, line 26, at end insert--
'(3A) Proceedings arising from subsections (1) to (3) (including appeals) shall be concluded within a period of three months, after which the charges shall be withdrawn, or appeal deemed to have succeeded.'.
Amendment No. 24, in page 2, line 30, leave out from first "of" to second "of" and insert--
'60 days beginning with the date of the initiation'.
Amendment No. 25, in page 2, line 35, at end insert--
'(5A) If the Secretary of State has retained a thing under subsection (3)(b) for the period of 60 days from the initiation of proceedings relating to the offence (including any appeal), he shall return it to the person from whom it was seized.'.
Amendment No. 7, in clause 6, page 3, line 2, leave out from "anything" to end of line 8 and insert--
'which the court believes to have been used in commission of the offence to be forfeited and dealt with in a manner specified in the order.'.
'(1) Appropriate Language.
An appropriate language in section 4(4)(b) is one of the following:
English
French
Spanish
Albanian
Arabic
Armenian
Azeri
Belarussian
Bulgarian
Croatian (the western variant of Serbo-Croat--also called Croato-Serb)
Estonian
Georgian
Greek
Hungarian
Kurdish
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Romanian
Russian
Serbian (the eastern variant of Serbo-Croat)
Serbo-Croat
Slovak
Slovene
Turkish
Ukrainian.
(2) Reasons for Seizure.
The reasons for the seizure are that the person having possession or control has committed a Park Trading Offence, namely (insert offence).
(3) List of Items Seized.
(List the items seized)
(4) Rights and Liabilities.
The person having possession or control and from whom the thing or things were seized shall be informed that--
(a) the Secretary of State may retain the thing or things until the conclusion of court proceedings;
(b) the Secretary of State may sell the thing or things and use the proceeds to pay his costs if the person having possession or control is found guilty of an offence;
(c) the court may order the thing or things to be forfeited and destroyed if found guilty of an offence;
(d) the person having possession of the thing or things may make representations to the court about their disposal before the court makes an order.'.
Mr. Maclean: It is a pleasure to make such considerable progress on the Bill. We are now beginning to gallop. It is a pity that our proceedings have to be interrupted shortly, because we could polish the Bill off in another hour if only we had the time.
Mr. Maclean: Had it not been for the statement, we might now be concluding Third Reading.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and I have always been keen to ensure that we get the Bill on the statute book at the earliest opportunity, following proper parliamentary scrutiny. It is excellent to see the House operating properly, as the Parliament of this country has consistently operated over the years, giving excellent scrutiny to a Bill that will make a fundamental difference to the state of affairs in the royal parks, about which many hon. Members on both sides are concerned.
My first two amendments are considerable--No. 6 would delete clauses 4 and 5. They are exploratory amendments, although there are others in the group that I may wish to pursue more vigorously. I, too, pay tribute to the Minister for his courtesy and consistency and for the detail of his replies, which has enabled us not to press our amendments, having been persuaded of the merits of the case. However, if his reply to these amendments is less satisfactory than his replies have been so far, I shall unfortunately have to pursue them to a Division. I hope that we can avoid that.
I do not wish to pursue the first two amendments to a Division, because I do not wish to delete provisions that may be essential to the proper enforcement of the Act. However, it is right to explore, in the Minister's words, the other section of the panoply of legislative sledgehammers that he and his Department feel it necessary to take to those who sell hamburgers, hot dogs and other goods in stalls in the royal parks. We have already dealt properly with fines and explored how effective the Government's proposal of level 3 on the standard scale--a £1,000 fine--would be. We did not press our proposals for a £500 fine; we are happy with £1,000 and consider that reasonable and sensible. We must now turn our attention to whether the parks police should have the additional power to seize all the property of those committing the offences and to retain and dispose of that property--
It being Seven o'clock, and there being private business set down by direction of The Chairman of Ways and Means under Standing Order No.20 (Time for taking private business), further proceedings stood postponed.
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