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Mrs. Fiona Jones: I am interested in the proposed legislation because the international antiques fair is held in my constituency. The legislation applies only to dealers and businesses from Kent. That is why it is unfair and unenforceable. That is the point made by representatives of the antiques fair in Newark. The hon. Gentleman must
address the fact that dealers from the Kent area will be disadvantaged when they come to the international antiques fair. How does he propose to address that?
Mr. Fallon: I have heard some special pleading in my time. I am not bothered about whether those who attend the Newark antiques fair will be disadvantaged. I am sure that there are reputable antique fairs in Newark. It is odd that this is the only group of antique fairs that seems worried about the Bill. I am concerned about the pleading over the erosion of civil rights. I do not believe that fences and dodgy dealers have civil rights.
I want to tell the House about another burglary that took place in my constituency just before Christmas. Commander Davidson, who lives in Seal, is a retired naval officer. He gave years of service to his country but burglars took almost everything dear to him. They took all his mementoes and naval objects, including his barograph, which had been collected over a lifetime of service to his country. What have we done for him? Police officers have called on him and he has received his letter from Victim Support. I have written on his behalf to the chief constable but he knows, as do we, that there is no chance of him recovering all the property that was stolen--an entire collection of a lifetime's service.
As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said, if we will the end of reducing burglary, we must be prepared to will the means. The Bill is a means, although it is only one, and the promoters have done enough to convince me that it should be supported.
8.34 pm
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Faversham and Mid-Kent): The war against crime is a war not of the great gesture but of the constant little step here and there, trying to catch up with or to keep a step ahead of the burglary fraternity.
Many of the anxieties sparked by the Bill are misplaced. I understand that any respectable business that knows that what it does is wholly honest and scrupulous naturally feels that any further record keeping or opening of its books to outside inspectors is a further threat, but it is interesting to hear from the Medway towns that those respectable businesses that have signed up to the voluntary code of conduct have not found the paperwork particularly onerous. They have been pleased to think that they have done all that they can to ensure that when people buy something from them it cannot later be expropriated because it has to be given back to the person from whom it was stolen. Instead of being open to a series of bad debts, they have done as much as they can to ensure that what they sell is above board.
Dealers who refuse to join the voluntary scheme open themselves to having the provenance of their merchandise questioned. If they cannot answer the question, it clearly opens the possibility that the stuff that they are dealing in is dodgy. That is important. The fact that the police and the county council enforcement officers are likely to be understaffed provides a much greater security against oppression, because they will concentrate only on those dealers whom they have reason to suppose are in the dodgy trade.
The most difficult thing for the police in the fight against crime--and we all know it--is when they know virtually for certain that certain shops or individuals are
crooked but cannot enforce any action against them. That drives them crazy. It drives my constituents crazy. A group of my constituents came to me and named a whole host of shops and dealers in my constituency that they know not only receive stolen goods but, in some cases, commission their stealing.I went to the police, thunderstruck by that information, and asked whether it could really be true or whether my constituents were romancing. They said that it was absolutely true but that they found it almost impossible to get any evidence on which to proceed against the dodgy dealers. I believe that the Bill will do a small amount to make it harder for such people to continue in business.
There are plenty of highly sophisticated criminals around who, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) said, can tell a genuine picture from a fake and can distinguish between George III silver and electro-plated nickel silver at the drop of a hat, and who know exactly where to go, how to steal the goods and how to get them out of the country. In Kent, that is only too easy: they can get across the channel in hours and may well be stealing to the order of some Dutch or Belgian fence. They are very hard to proceed against, and the Bill will do little to stop them.
The police and the criminal statistics tell us all the time that a vast proportion of the burglaries that cause so much distress to our constituents are carried out by a very small number of repeat burglars. They offend repeatedly because they have no difficulty whatever in travelling five miles down the road to flog off what they have stolen. They are not like the burglars who travel from York to Leeds or into the Metropolitan police area. They reckon that someone round the corner--in Deal, Dover, Folkestone or Canterbury--will take their stuff. The police often have a good idea who receives such goods, but boy is it difficult to pin that down!
The Bill will play a small but convincing part in making such people's lives a little more difficult. If a petty burglar who causes huge distress to many people in a lifetime of crime can be discouraged because his market has been taken from him, it is well worth supporting.
8.40 pm
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury): As a number of colleagues on both sides of the House have put the case so strongly, I shall be extremely brief.
To take us back to first principles, I refer to intelligence-led policing, of which David Phillips, our splendid chief constable of Kent, was a pioneer. It involves a shift, which is fundamental to both Bills, from targeting crime to targeting criminals, and from solving a crime after the event to identifying and following known criminals until they can be caught on the job and convicted. Most burglaries are carried out by a relatively small number of extremely active people, a growing proportion of whom are drug addicts, and the logic of the measure is to duplicate that searchlight by focusing on fences in the same way that intelligence-led policing focuses on burglars.
We need the Bill to target fences: although it is relatively easy to discover who they are, it is extraordinarily difficult to prove that somebody has deliberately and knowingly handled stolen goods. Incidentally, there is some misunderstanding in the House as the hon. Member for Newark (Mrs. Jones) referred to
criminalisation. We are dealing with a civil offence. A relatively modest civil fine of up to £2,000 will be available, and repeatedly so, for those who do not adhere to a code that is voluntary at present and underpinned by many organisations, but which will become compulsory. The police will have a way to hit back at known fences. Intelligence-led policing has already led to a staggering 70 per cent. reduction in burglaries in Kent over the past few years, and we shall be able to harvest even more of its fruits.I want to focus on the measure's local nature as there is a danger of us becoming confused. I would support its introduction nationally, but that option is not before the House and we can introduce it only for the county of Kent and the Medway area.
Mr. Rowe: My hon. Friend is an historian. He will no doubt recall that the civil servants of Charles V, who tried to administer his far-flung empire, remarked to one another, "If death came from Spain, we should live for ever." Does he not think that there is a similar likelihood of obtaining national legislation on this issue?
Mr. Brazier: Indeed. My hon. Friend is learned in these matters. He anticipates unconsciously the point that I was about to make. One of the differences between British local government when it was set up in the Victorian era, and its competitors in many continental countries was precisely that it was locally based and volunteer led, rather than centrally administered and bureaucratic. However, essentially the point is that we do not have an option to introduce the scheme nationally, but we do have an option to introduce it for Kent and for Medway.
I strongly support those colleagues, including my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), who I am so pleased has joined us--the only Home Secretary in the past 50 years to achieve a substantial reduction in crime--who have said that it is worth having local initiatives. The whole point of a diverse system of local government is that local people's locally elected representatives should be able to experiment in such areas. I ask the House to give Kent and Medway that opportunity.
Still on the issue of the local nature of the measure, we should put to bed the red herring about displacing crime. When I became co-ordinator of one of the first neighbourhood watch schemes in London, people said, "All you are doing is displacing crime," but we hugely reduced the level of crime in our area. There is some anecdotal evidence that some of it was displaced, but that has not stopped successive Governments embracing neighbourhood watch as a successful concept.
Such a case with regard to the Bill, however, is much weaker than that on neighbourhood watch because we are not displacing burglaries. All we are displacing, in theory anyway, is the ability to fence goods, but if we compel every burglar to put his goods into a motor vehicle--and not every drug addict feeding his habit has access to a motor vehicle all the time--and to drive them a long way across a county boundary, that will give the police another opportunity, with the intelligence-led approach, if they are watching that chap to catch up with him, so I welcome the measure. It obviously does much to cut his margin.
For all those reasons, like many colleagues on both sides of the House I urge the House to support the measures.
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