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Mr. Clarke: I do not accept that. The amendment is one of the most clearly phrased that the House has had to deal with. I acknowledge that there are more complicated issues on other amendments that require close study, but we should also acknowledge that the amendment is clear in its phraseology.
Mr. Heald: Will the Minister amplify a little more what he would expect the report to contain? Will it simply be a list of the number of orders and detentions or will it give a wider view of the effect, for example, on the crime figures, which are rising extremely fast, with violent crime in particular up by a huge amount in the past year?
Mr. Clarke: I hesitate to embarrass the hon. Gentleman in front of the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), who has been so eloquent, but the wording is crystal clear when it says
- report about the working of this Act.
Mr. Clarke: That is a good idea.
The question is simple. It concerns how often the powers are used; how they have been used; what pressures they have put on the criminal justice and police systems; to what extent we believe that we have successfully apprehended individuals who would have been involved in violence abroad; how the legislation has taken effect; and to which football matches it has been applied. In short, it is a list of how the legislation has operated, how the various players have behaved and what problems and difficulties have arisen as a result of trying to implement it.
I hope that some of the concerns expressed by the Opposition will not be borne out by events. The report will allow us to assess the extent to which their concerns have been justified.
Mr. Christopher Chope (Christchurch): Will the report include the costs of implementing the legislation?
Mr. Clarke: I would certainly assume so. In the financial section of the explanatory notes, we have made an estimate of the costs, and it would be entirely appropriate for Parliament to know what the costs have in fact been.
I commend the amendment to the House.
Schedule 1
Mr. Charles Clarke: I beg to move amendment No. 4, in page 4, line 37, at end insert--
'but, for the purposes of paragraph (a), any football match included in the qualifying or pre-qualifying stages of the tournament is to be left out of account.'.
The amendment is intended to clarify, in response to the Second Reading debate elsewhere, the way in which the Secretary of State might use his or her powers to apply the legislation. We felt that it was important that the qualifying or pre-qualifying stages of a tournament be left out of account. For example, in considering the world cup finals or the Euro 2000 finals, we would not take into account all the qualifying games over two years, or whatever is the relevant period.
The amendment is sensible and responds to concerns that have been raised by hon. Members. I hope that the House will support it.
Miss Widdecombe: The amendment reflects what we sought in amendment No. 3. The Minister did not acknowledge that.
Mr. Straw: My hon. Friend and I meant to acknowledge that, and I did indeed acknowledge it earlier in our proceedings.
Miss Widdecombe: I am grateful to the Home Secretary for that acknowledgement, but why was amendment No. 3 not accepted? I am prepared to believe that there is a good reason for that, but how is amendment No. 4 better than amendment No. 3? The purpose of amendment No. 3 was to clarify the definition of the phrase "external tournament", which the Bill uses to define overseas tournaments such as Euro 2000. The amendment stated that that definition
- shall not include any . . . qualifying or pre-qualifying stages.
Mr. Simon Hughes: I have a practical question that relates to earlier interventions by the hon. Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks) and others. Will matches in the qualifying or pre-qualifying stages of the next world cup be excluded from the provisions of the Bill? I thought that the House was speeding the passage of the Bill in order to include games in the first stages of a competition. I understand that competitions such as Euro 2000 should be ring-fenced, but will England's first away game in the world cup qualification group be covered by the Bill?
Mr. Banks: I can help the hon. Gentleman. England's first away game in the qualifying stage for the 2002 world cup is against Finland on 11 October. On 28 March next year, the England team will travel to Albania. Crucially, the team will travel to Germany on 1 September next year, before finishing the programme with home games against Albania on 5 September, and against Greece on 6 October.
I assume that those matches--and especially the away match against Germany--would be covered by the Bill.
Mr. Hughes: There is agreement among hon. Members of all parties that those games must be covered by the Bill. However, the relevant control period may be not the one that governs the tournament, but a different control period that specifically ring-fences individual fixtures. The House needs to know the score about that, and exactly what powers we are being asked to approve.
How will the Bill affect the away games that England will play between now and the end of the qualifying period? I hope that the Minister will clarify that. If he cannot reassure the House that everything is fine, we may need to table another amendment.
Mr. Clarke: First, may I say that I in no way intended to snub or offend the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) by not acknowledging the critical contribution of amendment No. 3 to amendment No. 4? However, after discussions with the parliamentary draftsmen, the Government decided that the clarification
- for the purposes of paragraph (a)
The hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) asked about regulated football matches. He will see that schedule 1 states:
- 'Regulated football match' means an association football match . . . which is a prescribed match or match of a prescribed description.
Subsection (6) of proposed new section 14 relates to a tournament. We believed that it was important to restrict the period to the finals of the tournament, so that we did not have a much more general power. The changes have restricted the Home Secretary's freedom to do this in a way that is important and rational but does not remove the danger referred to by the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey--that particular games might be left out. The Home Secretary will make a judgment about whether a particular game, in any circumstances, poses risks of the type that we acknowledge, based on the information that he has. He will then decide whether to establish a control period and consider the various relevant issues.
Where we wish to deal with the finals of a tournament, as we have seen in Belgium and Holland, and saw in France last year, rather than citing a whole series of different games, we think it right to make it explicit that the provision deals only with the final stage of that tournament rather than with all the pre-qualifying stages as well.
Mr. Hughes: The Minister is clear; he is giving us the interpretation that careful reading--I was reading as he spoke--makes clear allowance for the two different types of prescription.
In practice, how will the fact that this law is applied--that the Home Secretary has made a decision to apply the law to a particular match or set of matches--be widely enough known in advance for everybody in the country to be aware that it applies to that particular fixture, and to club games as well as national games?
Mr. Clarke: That is one of the practical things that we will have to address in detail--how to communicate exactly when and where the Home Secretary will make his decisions. What the hon. Gentleman says is right--it is important that everybody should be quite clear what the situation is before the event. We will ensure that that is the case. It is straightforward to do that, as I think the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. Before I call the next amendment, I should like to tell the House that an up-to-date list of the amendments that we are discussing is now available in the Vote Office.
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