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Mr. Stunell: I very much appreciate the remarks—
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. The hon. Gentleman needs to ask the leave of the House.
Mr. Stunell: With the leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I wish to thank all hon. Members who spoke in support of the Bill on Third Reading.
I see the Bill as the start, not the end, of a process. The Minister was kind enough to suggest that it is a substantial part of the jigsaw, but it is certainly not the complete picture. I have already given notice to him and his officials that if the Bill proceeds successfully I will haunt him by coming back to ensure that we get the results that we want. I therefore hope that it completes its passage now.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.
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Criminal Justice (Justifiable Conduct) Bill
Order for Second reading read.
12 pm
Mr. Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
As you would expect, Mr. Deputy Speaker, the main body of my remarks will be addressed to the content and structure of the Bill, but it might help the House if, before I embark upon that fairly detailed analysis, I spend a few moments dealing with its pedigree.
I shall start by quoting from The Times of 2 January this year. At the beginning of the year of our Lord 2004, "The Thunderer" announced, in measured terms, "Radio 4 listeners want right to kill intruders". Under the byline of one Mr. Greg Hurst, it continued:
"It began as a quirky idea to pad out the Today programme over the quiet Christmas holiday period: ask listeners to nominate a change in the law and then vote for it. Stephen Pound, a pliant Labour MP with an appetite for publicity, stood by ready to introduce a Bill in the Commons.
By yesterday morning, however, the Radio 4 programme had a potential disaster on its hands. The winning Bill, it announced, would allow homeowners to use any means to defend their property. Any means? Not reasonable force, as the law currently allows? Using deadly force? Shooting people? Apparently so."
The "Today" programme had auditioned its listeners to come forward with ideas for legislation. The "Today" editorial team of which I was a minor member some years ago would probably have listened to the suggestion of a no doubt bright, able and creative researcher, congratulated the author of the concept on a most valuable contribution to broadcasting, then put the matter quietly on the spike. The current team appears to be rather different. The wheels were set in motion and there was, I suppose, an awful predictability about the outcome. Having taken the "Pop Idol" approach to politics, Radio 4 trailed the fact with the words, "Our friendly MP is going to introduce your Bill."
As you know better than most, Mr. Deputy Speaker, it is the courtesy in this House that, if one Member intends to attack another, it is customary to give him notice beforehand. I have not found it necessary to give such notice to the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound) because I do not intend to attack him at all. I will now damage his reputation still further: he is a personal friend. He would say that, if The Times describes him as having an appetite for publicity, it is only equal and commensurate with my appetite for the same. I can say that in all fairness because he and I used to share a Sunday morning broadcast programme together. It was so successful that we decided that we would be better off staying in bed and ringing up the listeners. I believe that that was the point at which we made the right decision. However, he appears to have gone one step further and sought the fame of the Radio 4 "Today" programme.
In The Times on 2 January, Mr. Simon Jenkins wrote:
"Where would we be without the BBC? Not content with usurping the scrutiny function of the House of Commons, it now purports to legislate. Yesterday, it presented Parliament with a Bill to allow homeowners to shoot all burglars on sight. This was justified by something called a 'listeners' poll' which a tame Labour MP . . . had agreed to present to the House of Commons, sight unseen."
Mr. Jenkins is known to this House as a capable journalist, but I fear that he was profoundly wrong on many counts in his opening paragraph. However, he was right in one specific regard, namely his attack on the public service broadcaster for its endeavour to interfere in the course of legislation in a manner that many of us on both sides of the House regard as wholly unacceptable.
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): I give notice, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that if I catch your eye, I would like to say a few uncongenial words about the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Pound). Does my hon. Friend agree that many Bills that arise in the House, particularly on Fridays, are originated by unpleasant single-interest pressure groups? The distinction between an unpleasant single-interest pressure group and the mighty BBC is a difficult one to make.
Mr. Gale: My right hon. Friend will no doubt go further down that road if he catches your eye later, Mr. Deputy Speaker. For the moment, however, it is not my intention to do so.
I took the matter of this process up with the editor of the "Today" programme on Radio 4, Mr. Kevin Marsh. Mr. Marsh took exception to my criticism of his vehicle and wrote to me to say that even
"as we speak, we are working on drafting a piece of legislation."
Now, the BBC has many admirable qualities. It produces hours and hours of fine televisual and radio broadcasting, but I do not believe that it is the business of the public service broadcaster of this country to engage in the drafting of a piece of legislation. I took this up in a letter to the then editor-in-chief and director-general of the BBC on 13 January. Mr. Dyke and I did not agree—as we have not on other occasions—on this issue.
Let the House not misunderstand me. I believe that the purpose behind the BBC's exercise was founded in good faith. It is a sadness to us all that the public take far too little interest in our proceedings and in the democratic process, and that they believe that they have no voice and no effect. That is demonstrated much too frequently in local and national polls at election time.
Had the BBC wanted to pursue the process of following a private Member's Bill through both Houses of Parliament, it would have been remarkably easy for it so to do. It could have taken the Sustainable and Secure Buildings Bill, which had its Report stage and Third Reading here this morning, and tracked it right the way through Second Reading, Committee, this morning's proceedings and onwards into the House of Lords. That would probably have served the useful purpose of telling people outside this place how vulnerable private Members' Bills are, and how difficult it is to get something on to the statute book even if the cause is of the most just. However, the BBC chose not to do that. It went down the route of finding the "listeners' law", and the result was inevitable. It came up with a shortlist of many worthy subjects, but the overwhelming vote of the listeners to the programme that describes itself as the nation's flagship current affairs programme was for a
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subject dear to the listeners' heart. It was a subject trailed widely in the popular press—the householder's Bill, as it was called.
Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe) (Lab): To clarify the matter, as the hon. Gentleman describes the vote as overwhelming, is he aware that it was in fact 37 per cent.?
Mr. Gale: It was 37 per cent. of a vote in which there were about another eight candidate subjects, if I remember rightly; the hon. Gentleman probably remembers precisely. That was an overwhelming vote. Tens of thousands of listeners apparently voted for this subject.
The reaction of the production team was equally predictable—sheer horror. The friendly MP regarded the subject as too reactionary and the listeners' law hit the buffers. I have made it plain that I do not believe in that manner of approaching the process. The BBC made a profound mistake, and I hope and believe, and think that I know, that at least behind the scenes it has been agreed that that kind of stunt will not be tried again. To take the point made by the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer), given that many thousands of people voted in the belief that their view was going to be brought before Parliament, my hon. Friends and I decided that we would have a go at wiping a little of the egg off Auntie's face, and see whether we could achieve something in the direction of the change to the criminal justice law that was required.
To return to the point made by the hon. Member for Broxtowe, there were reports that the gun lobby rigged the vote. If that is false, it demonstrates a desire on the part of the public service broadcasters to ignore the voice of their listeners, and if it is true—I have no way of knowing—it must demonstrate the dangers, and highly undesirable vulnerability, of phone-in polls of this kind.
Why are we here today and why did so many people vote for this subject? The bottom line is that they did. Their motivation, and the motivation of many represented by those who are here today and those who are not, lies in widely reported and possibly sensationalised descriptions of high-profile cases. One in particular, many people believe, represented a gross miscarriage of justice. I am not here to present that case. This is not, as it has been described in shorthand terms by the popular press, the Tony Martin Bill, any more than it is the listeners' law. What my right hon. and hon. Friends and I have done is to seek to construct an amendment to the criminal justice legislation that reflects the concerns of the people. Our approach is not a knee-jerk reaction to one hard case out of which we are seeking to extrapolate bad law, because hard cases do make bad law. We are seeking to address the underlying perception that the criminal justice system has moved towards the criminal as the victim and away from the interests of the real victim of the crime—in this case, the householder, be that person tenant or house owner. I will return to that point later.
Let me now turn, perhaps not before time, to the substance of the Bill. If the Bill's pedigree could be described as part thoroughbred and part mongrel, its provenance is sound. It was drafted by an expert parliamentary draftsman. Members on both sides of the
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House may quarrel with some of the content, but I defy them to say that the Bill is technically unsound. Sadly, that cannot be said of some private Members' Bills. For that we owe a great debt of gratitude to the draftsman, Francis Bennion.
The Bill's provisions are confined to dwellings because it concentrates on defence of the home. Article 8.1 of the European convention on human rights, which is enforced by the Human Rights Act 1998, states that every person has a right to respect for his or her home and that that requires the state to give special protection to people in their homes, in addition to the protection given to individual citizens by the law generally.
The sanctity of the home has long been recognised by common law. Justifying the strict laws against burglary, which was designated by law as a crime committed by breaking and entering a dwelling house during the hours of darkness at the time, Sir William Blackstone said famously, "An Englishman's home is his castle". What is less famous but equally relevant is the rest of that statement:
"Burglary is done at the dead of night, when all the creation, except beasts of prey, are at rest; when sleep has disarmed the owner, and rendered his castle defenceless".
That goes to the heart of the Bill.
In relation to criminal offences, the Bill provides a special defence for the householder in clause 1, and requires Crown prosecutors to pause and consider before prosecuting that householder. In relation to civil liability, clause 3 repeats much of what is said in clause 1. That is necessary simply because of the different standards of proof applying in civil and criminal cases.
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