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Mr. Gerrard: That is absolutely right. I understand the logic of the argument that we cannot retrospectively remove an offence. If somebody committed an act that was illegal, the conviction cannot be wiped off the slate. However, it is clear that if somebody is not a danger, it is pointless to include them on a register that will be used to check whether a person is a danger.
The other point about the sex offenders register that concerns me somewhat is that it is possible that somebody's name could be put on the register when they have merely been cautioned for an offence. If the police did not regard what was happening as serious enough to merit a charge, there is a question mark over whether that person should appear on the register.
Ms Debra Shipley (Stourbridge): I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, particularly as I was unable to attend earlier. As he knows, because he took part in that debate, I was responsible for the Protection of Children Act 1999. So-called soft information was to be put on to the register because otherwise young people would be at risk and because it gave the opportunity to check for more information. The reason for keeping somebody who has been a convicted offender on the register for ever is that if they had made a serious sexual attack on a child, say, 20 years ago, they may well offend again, and the law should not permit them to do so.
Mr. Gerrard: I have no difference of view about somebody who has attacked a child—that person is on the register and should stay there. Rather, I am concerned about a relatively small number of cases involving particularly people who, as a result of the change in the age of consent, would not now be regarded as having committed an offence.
Clauses 121 to 127, which were mentioned by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), could have wide implications. The police can apply for a risk of sexual harm order on the grounds that the defendant has, on at least two occasions, committed one of a number of acts. One of those acts is to give a child anything that relates to sexual activity, which, as the notes to the Bill state, could include a condom. We should remember that a child is defined in this context as someone who is under 16. I can imagine that in a number of situations a person might feel that it was in the best interests of a child of that age to give them a condom. This part of the Bill allows orders to be issued against someone who has not been convicted of anything. When it becomes known that a person has had a risk of sexual harm order placed
on them, they will find it almost as bad as having had a conviction, because they will still be seen as a paedophile. One of the arguments about anonymity in rape cases is that people say that there is no smoke without fire—that if a person has been charged, there must be something to it. That argument applies at least equally strongly in this case.It might be argued that the police and courts will not apply for orders on trivial grounds—although I can think of one or two ex-chief constables whom I would not have trusted not to do so—but we should not afford them that opportunity. I hope that when we reach this part of the Bill in Committee we can debate an amendment or, at the very least, ensure that the guidance that goes to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service makes it absolutely clear what sorts of cases the provision should be used for. It has the potential to catch a very wide range of activities, at least some of which most people would not regard as problematic.
Overall, the Bill makes considerable progress. It reforms the law on some difficult subjects in a way that receives broad consent. That is an achievement and I hope that we can sort out the problems in Committee and end with a measure that will work.
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Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley): It is interesting to follow the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard). If he serves on the Committee, I hope that he will accept an offer that I have already extended from Detective Chief Inspector Sarti of the paedophile unit at Scotland Yard to attend a brief teach-in. I have spoken to a Home Office Minister about the subject and she believes that it is a good idea.
The hon. Member for Walthamstow is right that there are problems, but we need to know where the taskforce came from to understand how it reached its current position, so that if the Committee wants to improve on its suggestions, it does not lose sight of the objective.
The Bill is unusual for several reasons. First, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said, most people who examine the measure—including some of my constituents who knew that I aimed to speak about it—become squeamish and are horrified. The attendance in the Chamber suggests that everybody supports the Bill and wants something to be done, but no one wants to read about it in the newspapers or get too close to the issues.
The second rarity is the considerable co-operation between members of all parties who show an interest in the Bill. When the White Paper was announced, the Home Secretary asked for co-operation, and I asked for it to be two-way. To a great extent, that has happened in the other place and I hope that that continues in Committee and on Report here.
We have a rare opportunity that we must not miss. It has taken a long time to introduce such a Bill and I suspect that there will be no similar measure for a long time. We have an opportunity to take pre-emptive action in the Bill. The police have been considering some of the changes, especially those in IT, for a long time. Whatever we think of paedophiles, they are not thick. I
watched an interview of a paedophile under treatment who was a rocket scientist. His understanding of IT and opportunities to use it to confound the police were considerable.I shall restrict my comments to the provisions that deal with sexual offences against children and with those commonly known as paedophiles. Like the hon. Member for Walthamstow, I did the police parliamentary course in 1999–2000. I was lucky enough to do it with the Metropolitan Police Authority, which covered everything, such as fast cars, guns, criminal intelligence, kidnapping and police dogs. That was all immensely instructive. However, I was scarred by the day I visited the paedophile unit. I did not know that individuals with such incredible desires existed. I did not have the benefit—if that is the right word—of being a barrister and of having practised in the courts. I am surrounded by members of the legal profession again today. I was stunned by the information on the internet, the links through it and paedophiles' use of it to stimulate their activities. I was shocked that the paedophile information exchange used it to stimulate other activities and that members of such organisations frequently required "fresh", as they put it, photographs. That meant the abuse of yet another child or children to produce them. I could barely imagine the harm that was done to children. Some photographs and films are of children who are young enough to wear nappies.
The police's conservative estimate is that there are approximately 230,000 active paedophiles in the country—one for every street. They also estimate that one in nine are female. Rose West and Myra Hindley are the best known examples. Public interest was stimulated by three brave programmes that BBC 2 broadcast. Those who cared to watch or could stand watching them found that the practice had gone on for many years. I remember some of the interviewees saying that, as children—they were now grandparents—they could remember seeing men with cameras at the swimming pool photographing the kids. This has been going on for years. The first two programmes focused on one particular group of paedophiles who had been grooming—engaging in "the hobby", as they put it—since 1957. That gives us an idea of how many children those four or five men must have damaged.
The other thing that stood out in the programmes was the fact that many paedophiles need to record their activities. They do so—for their own use—using the written word, photographs, tape recordings, videos, computers, CD-ROMs and, latterly, DVDs. Of course, what they are recording is the abuse of children, and if anyone has any doubt about that, they should watch the third programme that the BBC put out, which was quite startling and really thumped home what these people were recording. I will not go into details, because there is no watershed here and we must remember that there are people in the Strangers Gallery.
My reaction was to ask the police why, if they knew about all these individuals, more of them were not put away. They said that they needed changes in the law, and that they had been told that such changes were coming. I decided, along with an American researcher, Michael Hansen, who is now a law student in the US, to get stuck into seeing what was being done here and in the
rest of the world. We used the internet and talked to people in a large number of places including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.Under the aegis of the Conservative Front Bench, I then introduced a number of new clauses when the Criminal Justice and Court Services Bill was being considered on Report. I was delighted that the right hon. Member for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng), who was then a Minister of State at the Home Office, was very positive about my proposals. That was not really a surprise, as he is a family man and a Methodist. I thought that his reaction was quite normal. Some of the proposals that were put forward in another place were accepted, but there was also an acceptance that these matters would be looked at in this Bill. Many of them have been. It is vitally important—we need to remember this in Committee—that it was recognised that we should be proactive rather than reactive in these matters, as I mentioned in an earlier intervention. If we are reactive, a child—if not more than one—has already been damaged.
I also had the pleasure of being put on the taskforce, on which some really imaginative proactive thinking took place. The core legal changes on internet grooming are down to that group, which contained everyone across the range including the police, the NSPCC and many other organisations that are deeply concerned with freedoms and rights. What came out of those deliberations was an amalgam, and we need to remember that when we consider the Bill in Committee.
I have been talking recently to some Americans who were over here for a case led by Valeria Spencer, an assistant attorney at the United States Department of Justice. They are watching what we are doing in the Bill with considerable interest. This morning, the "Today" programme took a shot—as is its wont—at the Bill, suggesting that it is all very well us doing this here, but that the internet is international. I was sorry that I could not ring up and intervene. The Bill is being considered right across the world, and many other countries that are looking into these matters are watching to see what happens here. If this legislation works—and I think it will—they will adopt such measures themselves. Equally, there are one or two things being done in other countries that we ought to seize the opportunity to consider in Committee.
I say that because I believe that this is a one-off chance. In Committee and on Report, we shall discuss a number of difficulties that my hon. Friends and Labour Members have already touched on. For a change, that will be done in the right atmosphere. Our deliberations will not be aggressive, and they will provide an opportunity to make a real change, bearing in mind that it will be our last chance to do so for a number of years.
The issue that I really want to touch on in Committee is encryption. The taskforce and the Home Secretary know that I have an interest in this. Technology is moving very fast, and the paedophile internet exchange group had a ringleader who dodged prosecution because the police could not break the encryption on his disk. It was a fairly simple form of encryption bought for about $50 in the United States, but it could not be broken by the police or the security forces. An approach was made in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to change that. Unfortunately, that aspect of the legislation was not implemented and it would be
inappropriate, sadly, to apply it to paedophiles or abuses against children. I hope that we can now start to examine the problem further.In the United States a considerable amount of child porn is sold encrypted on DVDs and CD-ROMs. Much of it comes from Russia, but the police cannot break into it. If it is bought by individuals and put on their computer files—the material may appear from the outside to be about Robin Hood and his merry men—until the encryption code is obtained, access to it cannot be gained. Paedophiles previously recorded their activities on video, but they now use DVDs and CD-ROMs in encrypted form. Often the opportunity for the police to nail individuals for some absolutely horrendous crimes—they could do it before, because videos could not be encrypted—is no longer there. We will find it very difficult indeed to deal with that obstacle.
The Home Secretary said that much could be done beyond the Bill, and he is absolutely right. Much has already been done—by the Home Office taskforce, organisations such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and others, and by the Metropolitan police, in conjunction with Crimestoppers. An effective interactive programme has been developed to take into schools for the appropriate age groups, and it will be polished up and developed. It engages the children in internet activities, explains their importance, but also brings in warnings. The children are brought into what they believe is a chat room, but next door there is really a large and ugly policeman who is typing in the name of Alice or some other name. The children react to it; they give their telephone numbers and addresses; a meet is arranged. The children all fall into that, but of course the mobile telephone of one of the children in the room then rings, the door opens, and the biggest, ugliest, tallest, largest Metropolitan policeman who can be found enters the room declaring that he is Alice. It brings the message home to the children.
We will have to follow this matter up and reflect further on it, but what often happens is that the children start to talk to their teachers or the police about their experiences. Many children have already had them, though their parents do not know it and the children have often not told anyone else. If this form of education can continue and develop, we can move on through Crimestoppers to the police, who can then take action. I suspect that the public and perhaps even the police are unaware of the extent to which such internet grooming goes on.
I welcome the Bill; I welcome the fact that it is non-partisan, and I hope that we can keep it that way. I also hope that we do not do what The Economist did in a recent article on child porn—forget that for every single photograph of a child, a child has been abused. I hope that the author of that article thinks a little further. How would he have felt if a photograph of him or his mother, son or daughter had been put on the internet for ever? I welcome the fact that the Bill will be dealt with in Committee with an open mind. I hope that we make the most of our limited opportunity, and that we are proactive and think forward—particularly in respect of the internet and information technology.
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