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Column Number: 995
Standing Committee B
Thursday 13 February 2003
(Morning)
[Mr. Eric Illsley in the Chair]
Clause 248
Increase in penalties for drug-related offences
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
9.10 am
Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey): On a point of order, Mr. Illsley. In fact, I have two points of order, the first of which is a matter of self-interest. You have understandably excluded amendments tabled yesterday from your provisional selection list, but I should be grateful if you would at least consider including them. To be honest, the only reason that I did not table my amendments the day before yesterday was that the House rose early and we were ''caught short''. I understand that it may not be possible to reconsider the issue now, and I am not labouring the point. Indeed, some of the amendments deal with matters that can be raised in the debate, and I make my request simply because you have the option to include them.
I turn now to the second point of order. In the light of the request that the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) and I made on Tuesday, can the Minister tell us whether any material is available for distribution to help us with the Government amendments that we are about to debate? Understandably, many will be small and incidental, but with lists as long as that in schedule 21, we must follow matters carefully, as we always do, to ensure that we do not miss anything. It would therefore be helpful to have something that explained the provisions.
The Chairman: The second point of order is not a matter for the Chair, but I am sure that the Minister is listening. If material is available, I am sure that the Government will make it available during this morning's proceedings.
The first point of order is a matter for me. As I explained to the Committee on 17 December, my co-Chairman and I will not, as a general rule, call starred amendments, including any that may be reached during an afternoon sitting of the Committee. I have considerable sympathy with the hon. Gentleman because the early Adjournment of the House on Tuesday precluded some hon. Members from tabling amendments and, indeed, parliamentary questions. However, the hon. Gentleman will have an opportunity in the debate to make the points that he wanted to raise in his amendments. Having reconsidered the issue, therefore, I am not prepared to accept the starred amendments.
Simon Hughes: Thank you for your courteous ruling on my points of order, Mr. Illsley.
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The clause is very straightforward and introduces schedule 20, which we shall debate next. It says that increases in penalties for certain drug-related offences ''shall have effect'', and those increases are set out in the schedule. It is right to raise general issues of principle now, rather than to wait for them to come up under the schedule, where it would be impossible logically to make the argument.
The clause relates to penalties for drugs offences and to the drugs policy that the Government have announced. The Committee has debated that policy substantially on one occasion and incidentally on others, prompted not least by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and others. That takes us back to one of the important secondary themes of the Bill: how we should deal with drugs matters.
First, I have a straightforward question, which the Minister might helpfully answer now, as he was unable to answer it when we debated drugs previously. Will he tell the Committee the date, accurate or approximate, when the Home Secretary proposes to change the classification of cannabis from a class B to a class C drug in line with his announcement last year and following the advice of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs? We know that that is in the pipeline. My understanding is that, whatever the date, the change will take effect immediately, once it has been agreed by Parliament. I am not aware that the decision can be deferred, but I am conscious that an order is necessary for the change to go ahead, so clarification of the process would be helpful.
In relation to the substance, schedule 20—I hope that you will excuse me for referring to it now, Mr. Illsley, but I shall not seek to have a debate on schedule 20 later—would amend schedule 4 to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 as follows. In relation to class C drugs, wherever the maximum term of imprisonment is five years the Government propose that it should be increased to 14 years. Paragraph 1(3) of schedule 20 sets out the offences to which the increased term will apply. It is only a short list, so I shall read it.
''(a) section 4(2) (production, or being concerned in the production, of a controlled drug),
(b) section 4(3) (supplying or offering to supply a controlled drug or being concerned in the doing of either activity by another),
(c) section 5(3) (having possession of a controlled drug with intent to supply it to another),
(d) section 8 (being the occupier, or concerned in the management, of premises and permitting or suffering certain activities to take place there),
(e) section 12(6) (contravention of direction prohibiting practitioner etc from possessing, supplying etc controlled drugs), and
(f) section 13(3) (contravention of direction prohibiting practitioner etc from prescribing, supplying etc controlled drugs).''
The proposal would affect just two other laws by increasing maximum punishments. The first is the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979. The offence is the offence in schedule 1 to that Act:
''controlled drugs: variation of punishments for certain offences under that Act''
and deals with
''punishment on conviction on indictment of offences under that Act committed in relation to Class C drugs''.
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So Customs legislation would be changed to make the maximum term of imprisonment 14, rather than five, years.
Lastly, the proposal will change section 19 of the Criminal Justice (International Co-operation) Act 1990, which relates to ships used for illicit traffic. Punishment on conviction on indictment of offences under that section committed in relation to class C drugs will be increased from five years to 14. That is five Misuse of Drugs Act offences and two others, for which the proposal would increase the maximum sentence from five years to 14 years.
My colleagues and I have made our views on the issue clear. Public policy should clearly differentiate between drugs in each of the three classes. Whether colleagues in Committee take an identical view to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) and me about whether it is right to imprison people for possession or not, there is a separate argument that we should be careful not to give the same signals with regard to penalties in relation to class C drugs as we give in relation to class A and B drugs.
On one hand, the Government are concerned to move and to be more realistic and progressive, which I welcome. The Home Secretary was willing to make that move, which was not made by the first Labour Administration. On the other hand, the Government do not want to appear soft, which I also understand. I understand the genesis of, and the thinking behind, the policy. However, a danger of the proposal that emanates from those considerations is that there will be a muddled policy that will muddy the water rather than give a straightforward message. Dealing in class A drugs, which include dangerous, addictive drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, is the most undesirable offence, for which one can expect the harshest treatment. Dealing in class B drugs is dangerous, but not as dangerous as class A drugs. Class C drugs are still dangerous but not nearly as dangerous as class B drugs. That is the basis of the classification system. If those are the messages that we want to get down to the streets, the maximum prison sentences should follow in gradated severity. It is nonsense to increase the maximum prison sentence—what the statute book says could be the punishment for an offence—so that it is comparable to a sentence for an offence relating to class A and class B drugs.
Another consideration is that the provisions are intended to deal with people who are dealing and trafficking in drugs as opposed to people who use them. I do not argue against provisions that might provide for severe punishment of people who traffic in class C drugs. Society should be careful to give a discipline to people who misuse their position as general practitioners—two of the offences detailed by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 are meant to deal with that—to people who prescribe improperly, and to people who not only turn a blind eye to, but become aiders and abetters to, a trade in drugs when they are running a hostel, which the provisions also cover. I appreciate that, so the argument is not about whether
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there should be no prospective penal response, but about the level of that response. I seek to persuade the Committee that the danger with the drafting of the clause and schedule 20, which would change the maximum period of imprisonment from five years to 14 years, is that people dealing in cannabis, benzodiazapine or anabolic steroids will prospectively be in the same league as those dealing in crack cocaine or heroin. The courts of course have discretion, but it should be across a narrower band of prospective punishments than one that takes people up to 14 years.
The amendments that, for understandable reasons, you said that you could not select, Mr. Illsley—although that does not preclude me from making my point—suggested that the right maximum period might be four years. That was a cockshy in one sense, but it was also an attempt to fix a maximum period that would be less than the present five years, while recognising that there might be an argument for punishing people who are not dealers, even in the least serious illegal drugs, with that lesser maximum punishment, which would, again, send out a signal.
I propose that the Committee would do better to remove clause 248 and schedule 20. We should replace the schedule with one setting a maximum of four years or a similar sentence. There is no theology about four years, and it would be a relatively appropriate maximum tariff, given that the maximum sentence for trafficking in class A drugs is 14 years.
I am also well aware of the controversy that arose over the section 8 offence of
''being the occupier, or concerned in the management, of premises and permitting or suffering certain activities''.
The people who became known as the Cambridge Two were tried and convicted of that offence. They managed a hostel for the homeless in Cambridge that dealt with people who, among other problems, had drug addictions. They were convicted because they knew what was going on at the hostel but failed to control it. I have not met the two people or been to the hostel, so I speak from what I have read rather than from direct experience. However, their conviction appeared to be a harsh response to something that, although not an unwitting risk, was inevitable if one manages such premises. The danger of a maximum penalty of 14 years is that the courts could send a message that would be entirely out of proportion to sentences for people dealing in class A or class B drugs.
It would be helpful if the Minister could answer the questions that I asked at the beginning of my intervention about the Government's plans to downgrade cannabis to class C. It would be helpful if he would confirm that if my colleagues and I, and Parliament as a whole, fail to persuade the Government that clause 248 and schedule 20 should only come into effect at the same time as the change in the classification of cannabis. They should be seen as a pair of propositions.
It would be even more helpful if the Minister could respond to concerns that the penalty appears to be a disproportionate response to those using class C drugs.
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I ask him to set out as fully as he can the justification for the penalty for class C drug offences. Cannabis will be included in that category in future. It is thought to be in the least serious category, so why should there be an almost threefold increase in the maximum punishment? Why should the maximum punishment therefore be as severe as that for the hardest drugs that are available?
I end by saying that I am aware that the Crown Prosecution Service will sometimes bring a charge for a lesser offence because it does not have the evidence for the more serious offence. People can often be prosecuted for possession when the prosecutors would like to prosecute them for dealing.
That raises the question of people who are caught in possession of an amount of drugs that it is illogical to suppose is an amount that they can have for personal use. The Minister has heard me say, and I assume that he remembers other hon. Members saying, that some of us believe that there is a strong case for creating a new offence of substantial possession. That is a proposition put by, among others, the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe). If a person was caught with more drugs than anyone could reasonably use himself, he should be able to be nicked for a more serious offence than possession for his own use.
The benefit would be that it would be possible to stop the games—not mischievous and awful games, but games none the less—that are played when people are charged with one offence and another is implied. The prosecution may try, in putting their case, to show that the person before the court on a possession charge is really there because the quantity of drugs that was found leads to an assumption that he is a dealer, but there is no evidence for that, so a charge has not been brought. An intermediate step could be made available.
If that were part of the Government's package, it would deal with some of the concerns that are answered, wrongly in our view, by the extraordinarily large increase in maximum penalties under clause 248 and schedule 20. I hope that before the Bill is passed the Government will rethink the matter. They should not give a message that cannabis use is less serious than heroin and cocaine use while setting the same maximum penalty for dealing in both. That is an inconsistent message.
9.30 am
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