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Mr. Mark Oaten (Winchester) (LD):
The shadow Secretary of State will have heard me ask the Home Secretary during Home Office questions what he thought about the establishment of a national border
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force to manage those problems. Does the shadow Home Secretary share my view that such a body should be put in place?
David Davis: I have a great deal of sympathy with that idea. The hon. Gentleman will hear that my speech and questions to the Home Secretary resonate with that suggestion.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. David Blunkett): I want to pursue the question of Afghanistan because it is important and we face a major challenge. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree with many people in the United States who want to undertake a policy of mass bombing to eradicate the poppy fields as a solution to the problem? We are engaged in a struggle to find a sensible way of providing an alternative viable crop.
David Davis: The Home Secretary is right that the task is not easy, but the Government accepted it and took it on. If they could not do the task, they should not have accepted it. The situation has a material effect on our country and every other country in the world. As the American said, Afghan heroin will flood not only the British market, but the world market.
Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath) (Con): My right hon. Friend made a point about the Government's failure to deal with our country's porous borders. Does he agree that one of the main worries about the link between the drugs trade and violent gun crime is the number of Albanians who were involved in serious crime in their homeland and have been able to take over both the vice and drugs trade in our major cities? Does he accept that the heads of the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service are worried that such people have been able to enter the country by claiming to come from other eastern European countries? Is not the fact that they found that so easy yet another indictment of the Government?
David Davis: To be fair to the Home Secretary, he has identified the fact that the issues are linked, but my hon. Friend is right that senior police are worried about the problem.
It is not impossible to defeat the scourge of drugs. The Americans have cut addiction among teenagers by 11 per cent. in two years. I am told that that was achieved through a strategy of attacking both supply and demand at the same time. The Home Secretary's policy on controlling demand for drugs was so confused that it led to the resignation of his drugs tsar. The Government's failure to eradicate the supply of drugs and to close porous borders means that there is more availability, lower prices and more demand, and thus more addicts, more drug gangs and more guns, which means that there will probably eventually be more deaths.
Sadly, if a town or city has a drug problem, it is likely to have a gang problem and eventually a gun problem. The Home Secretary said in an interview last year:
"We will not tolerate an escalation of the number of guns on our streets."
Unfortunately, it is not too hard to get a gun. On the streets of Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester and London, it is too easy: £100 or £200 for a pistol, and
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£1,000 for a sub-machine-gun. Where do they come from? There are essentially three sources for weapons: conversions, smuggled weapons and internet purchases. The first of these is conversions of replica weapons and air guns that enable them to shoot real bullets. Certain air guns, self-contained gas cartridge guns and the so-called Brococks are particularly easy to convert to fire real bullets.
To be fair, the Government recognised that some time ago. Unfortunately, they then made a complete hash of the policy. They properly acted to make it illegal to own, buy or sell such convertible firearms without a firearms certificate. However, at the time, the chairman of the Home Office's Firearms Consultative Committee told the Home Secretary:
"Compensation should be paid. Otherwise we are concerned that these proposals will have less effect than they might on persuading those owners to give up these arms".
I agree with him, but the Government refused, and because of that false economy, there are probably 50,000 convertible firearms at large. If only a tiny percentage are converted and get into criminal hands, the consequences will be disastrous. Action is necessary to stop that happening.
Mr. Bill Wiggin (Leominster) (Con): When my right hon. Friend correctly identified the three sources of illegal firearms, he put his finger on the problem for legitimate gun owners, whom he rightly did not include in that group. The Government's treatment of Brocock owners has created a pool of people who did not break the law when they purchased a gun but now find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Does he deplore that as well?
David Davis: I understand my hon. Friend's point, but I would not encourage those people to do anything other than hand in their guns. It is important that they do that. Sadly, at the moment, many have not, and that is what we need to deal with.
Nine out of 10 real weapons used in crimes in the UK are smuggled in from abroad. The end of the Balkan wars is thought to have led to a massive rise in the sale of illegal weapons. The Home Secretary himself said that the Balkans were
"the gateway to Europe for organised criminals"
"Criminal gangs are behind a multi-million pound business smuggling people, drugs and guns"—
the point made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins). Yet firearms continue to be smuggled into the UK. Again, our porous borders are to blame.
There is also the problem of postal and internet supply of weapons, either real or convertible. The Intelligence and Security Committee raised serious concerns about the number of weapons coming into the country via post from overseas suppliers, the weakness of the screening and the criminal and terrorist dangers. It first raised those concerns two years ago, and in the last debate on this matter, one of its members complained that nothing had been done. Indeed, I believe that he accused the Home Office of being
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"complacent". The screening of materials entering Britain via postal and courier services is erratic at best and useless at worst. As a result, it is too easy to bring real or convertible weapons into this country. It is long past time that the Home Office took a proper grip on the availability of illegal weapons in this country.
The increase in drugs, gangs and violent crime has left many police forces overwhelmed. The only way to curb the increase in crime is to provide more policemen. In recent years in Nottingham, violent crime has increased by 37 per cent., but since 1997 the city has been given only 7 per cent. more police—who have largely been paid for by the council tax. For some time, the chief constable in Nottingham has been asking for 1,000 extra police officers, but the Home Office has ignored him. It is by no means the only force in that situation. For example, Manchester, which faces similar problems, needs 3,000 extra police, according to its chief constable.
This weekend, we discovered that not only has Nottingham been denied extra local police, but that attempts by the National Crime Squad to help it break its gang problem have been stopped, apparently because of a lack of funds or targeting, against the advice of officers on the ground. Action that could have either prevented recent and future attacks or, at the very least, caught their perpetrators has thus been thwarted.
The Home Secretary must now recognise that a number of our cities are in danger of being overwhelmed by guns and drugs and that the police are finding it difficult to cope. I cite the example of Nottingham not because what has happened there happens everywhere; it does not. I cite it because in a society in which drugs and guns are freely available, it could happen anywhere. We are witnessing a formula for disaster: drug use is getting out of control, drug barons are steadily increasing in strength, and all too often the outcome is violence and gun crime.
Mr. Stephen McCabe (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
David Davis: Not at this point in my speech.
For some victims, it is too late. Now, the Government must act to stop the outbreaks of violence turning into an epidemic.
I have six questions to ask the Home Secretary. First, will he act to increase the physical security of our borders to stop the import of both drugs and guns? Secondly, when will the British Government curb the exploding supply of heroin from Afghanistan? Thirdly, will the right hon. Gentleman now agree to pay compensation to those who dispose of convertible weapons, or find some other way of taking the 50,000 convertible guns out of circulation? Fourthly, will he tell the House whether he intends to introduce measures to stop the postal and internet supply of guns? Fifthly, after the recent spate of dreadful gun crimes, will he listen to the chief constables and give at least the hardest-pressed forces the police that they need? Finally, will he ensure that the National Crime Squad is properly resourced and targeted to attack the drug gangs wherever they are in the country and break their insidious assault on our cities?
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Parts of our cities are spiralling out of control. Whole communities live in fear of whatever the next day may bring. It is time—and more than time—for the Home Secretary to act. If he does, we shall support him. If he does not, it will be more than the Conservatives who condemn him: it will be the entire British people.
5.41 pm
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