House of Commons
Friday 9 June 2000
The House met at half-past Nine o'clock
PRAYERS
[Madam Speaker in the Chair]
Orders of the Day
Licensing (Young Persons) Bill
Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Question [12 May], That the Bill be now read a Third time.
9.34 am
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. It was announced on the radio this morning that the inquiry chaired by Lord Burns, on which the Government have spent £1 million, will be delivered to the Home Secretary this morning. Despite the fact that the Home Secretary has not yet seen the inquiry, it was announced on the radio, last night and this morning, that he would make a statement to the House on Monday to announce the banning of fox hunting. Have you had notice of such a statement, Madam Speaker, and is it in order for the Home Secretary to make such an announcement on the radio before it has been announced to the House?
Madam Speaker: I was not aware of what was announced on the radio this morning--I had one or two other things to do. If the Home Secretary wants to make a statement, he will no doubt inform me at the usual time on Monday morning.
9.35 am
Mr. Paul Truswell (Pudsey): As I was saying when I was cut me off in my prime on 12 May, I am delighted that Members on both sides of the House have given my Bill such a fair wind. Indeed, I must congratulate the many Members who have been abundantly generous at times with the amount of wind that they have given it.
The fact that the Bill has acted as a vehicle for a much wider debate on the shortcomings of licensing legislation has given it even greater value. I did not mean my introductory remarks to sound churlish in any way--the measure has been properly served. However, there were times when I was reminded of a comment made by one of your distant predecessors, Madam Speaker. When Queen Elizabeth I asked what had passed in the House recently, the Speaker replied:
- If it please your Majesty, six weeks.
It is said that good wine improves with age. I am not sure whether a good Bill improves with verbiage, so I shall not take up much of the House's time in
continuing my Third Reading comments. I had already completed most of my remarks, but I repeat my thanks to the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien), and to Andrew Cunningham of the Home Office.However, it has been intimated to me that one or two hon. Members, although they are largely sympathetic to my Bill, still feel that I should expand some of the broader arguments in its support, so I shall do so. I think it is perfectly proper that hon. Members should have mentioned that to me before today's debate.
I suspect that most hon. Members are already aware of the background, but I shall summarise it briefly. In March 1997, my 14-year-old constituent, David Knowles, was walking home from school with a group of friends. They decided to stop off at an off-licence in the centre of Pudsey. At the request of his friends, David agreed to purchase alcohol and did so on two occasions within five minutes. The friends then set off for home. On the way, having drunk three cans of lager, David, quite inexplicably--apart from the effects of the alcohol that he had consumed--decided to run across a busy part of the Leeds ring road, the Stanningly bypass. As he did so, he was knocked down, and he died from his injuries shortly afterwards.
The police were quick to attend the scene and to take statements from witnesses. As a result, they went to the off-licence in the centre of Pudsey--the Drinks Cabin, owned and run by Thresher, a national chain--and interviewed staff. They also seized security videos that showed that David had been served alcohol on two occasions within five minutes.
On the basis of the police report, the Crown Prosecution Service launched a prosecution against the two members of staff who had sold David the alcohol. The case went before the magistrates and was adjourned twice. On the third occasion, the CPS, having discovered the enormous loophole in the law that my Bill addresses, decided that it must withdraw the prosecution. Those hon. Members who are students of the Bill and who attended most of the debates on it will know that the loophole means that people who are not directly employed by the person whose name appears on the licence are immune under the law.
The people who sold alcohol to David were employed not by their manager--the person whose name appeared on the licence--but by a national company, Thresher. They were thus immune from prosecution under the Licensing Act 1964. That is clearly an anomaly; it is an enormous loophole. Not only does it exercise me and everyone who hears about it, but it obviously came as a tremendous shock to the parents, family and neighbours of David Knowles, who learned that the small amount of justice that they believed that they could pursue through the courts would be denied them.
John Knowles--David's father--came to my surgery in November 1997 to tell me about the loophole. Like so many people, when I first heard about it, I did not believe it. Had John Knowles not come armed with a three-page letter from the CPS, describing the loophole, I should have taken a great deal of convincing. Anyone who was asked the question, "Is it an offence to sell alcohol to someone aged under 18?" would immediately and unequivocally say, "Yes, of course it must be; we all
know that to be true." However, it is not true, and my Bill closes that loophole. I hope that the circumstances of the case and the discussions that we have had over the past few months will convince everyone in the House of the need to pass my Bill to close that loophole.
Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire): Apart from the central theme of the Bill, which is to close the loophole, will the hon. Gentleman touch on the issue of proxy purchasing that was raised by several Conservative Members on Second Reading? The Bill has been improved by the acceptance of an amendment. Will the hon. Gentleman put that amendment into context?
Mr. Truswell: I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that issue, which I was shortly about to discuss. It is tempting not only to consider the immediate point that prompted one to examine the licensing laws, but to start to move out like the ripples caused by a stone thrown into a pond and to consider other issues. Clearly, one of the immediate issues was proxy purchasing.
It was tempting to consider several other issues. Indeed, on Second Reading and on Report, hon. Members succumbed to the temptation to consider many other matters. We had lengthy, informed and lucid debates on them. I am certain that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will have taken much of that discussion on board. He and his colleagues in the Home Office will consider several of the points made when the Government eventually bring a much broader licensing Bill to the House.
To return to the point made by the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), let me say that it was clear on Second Reading that Members were keen to address the issue of proxy purchasing. Following that debate, I felt sufficiently emboldened to take to Committee an amendment to cover that point. I am pleased that the Committee and the House have raised no objections to my Bill, but I have always been aware of the strictures from both sides of the House and from right hon. and hon. Members that to try to do too much with a private Member's Bill is a recipe for disaster. I have always been cautious and tried to focus my Bill in a way that avoided a lack of consensus. I hope that I have succeeded in doing that.
Proxy purchasing is an important issue. It has emerged in my constituency at the very off-licence from which David Knowles purchased the alcohol on that fateful evening.
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst): Proxy purchasing, as the hon. Gentleman calls it, and entrapment, as I call it, appears in the White Paper. It is a controversial matter and I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on deciding to proceed with his Bill without it. I know that we shall return to the issue, but I wish to flag up one point. Protecting the rights of the young person used in the proxy purchasing or entrapment is the most important issue. [Interruption.]
Mr. Truswell: I hear the comments from my hon. Friends. I am sure that it was just a slip of the tongue when the right hon. Gentleman used the term "proxy
purchasing". "Test purchasing" is the term used to describe the process that he described as "entrapment". However, he makes a valid point. I know from past experience that it is an extremely controversial issue, so I accordingly omitted reference to it from my Bill.I do not want to spend much longer considering the issues. I know that other hon. Members wish to contribute to the debate. Some of them were not involved in our previous debates and they want to bring their knowledge and expertise to bear. If the House will forgive me, I shall bring my comments to a conclusion.
I believe that this is a good private Member's Bill. It has grown organically from the grass roots of my constituency, but it could have emanated from any constituency, It has been nurtured by excellent and well intentioned discussion in the House and, thankfully, has so far escaped any grafting or--dare I say it--genetic modification. As a largely ingenuous Back Bencher, it has been a privilege and an education for me to have been in charge of the Bill and to hear the many excellent and lucid contributions from hon. Members--I genuinely mean that.
My Bill, if passed, will serve a number of purposes. It will close the loophole highlighted by the David Knowles case; it will close the increasingly worrying loophole associated with proxy purchasing; it will equalise before the law all those who work in licensed premises irrespective of who employs them; and it will send a message to the people of this country that the House takes seriously the issue of young people abusing alcohol and the responsibilities of those who sell alcohol. To me, my constituents and, in particular, the family of David Knowles, it will serve as a memorial to him and the lessons to be learned from his tragic death. I therefore hope that the House will now give it a fair and speedy passage to another place.
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