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Mr. Browne: The hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) has spoken only on amendment No. 233, which is fair, but he is seeking to make a point on proportionality, and I will address that.
Mr. Malins indicated assent.
Mr. Browne: However, I want to put it on the record that I resist all three amendments. I will give the hon. Gentleman an answer that is short and to the point, and that shows to him the point of proportionality from which others are drawing.
Ten years is a significant penalty; I think that the hon. Gentleman, who has had cause in another aspect of his life to impose penalties on people, would accept that. Any change to the penalty would put the offence out of step with similar offences in the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981; that is the answer that he seeks. Section 5 of that Act makes it an offence for a person to have in his possession an instrument that he knows or believes to be false with the intention of inducing someone to accept it as genuine and, by reason of so accepting, to do or not do some act to his or another person's prejudice, and the maximum penalty for that is 10 years' imprisonment. If the hon. Gentleman were to indicate to me by his body language that that sets the matter in the appropriate context, I would rest my case.
Mr. Malins: That has been a helpful response. The Minister has put the matter in context. That was all I
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wanted, and I thank him for doing that. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 27 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 28
Identity documents for the purposes of s. 27
Mr. Malins: I beg to move amendment No. 197, in clause 28, page 24, line 29, leave out ''or purports to be''.
I am certain that one or two of my hon. Friends have contributions to make on this amendment, and I look forward to hearing them. Suffice it to say that this is a probing amendment asking the Government a little more about the phrase ''or purports to be''. Something either is, or is not.
Mr. Browne: I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman has been disappointed by the failure of his hon. Friends to come to his aid. In the spirit of his approach to the amendment, I think that I can respond briefly.
The term ''purports to be'' is a standard form of words already used in forgery and counterfeiting legislation, and the Government do not believe that it should be removed from the clause. Without it, documents that were forgeries and that were being used in the way that clause 27 criminalises would not attract criminal penalties.
Mr. Malins: I find that helpful, and I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Mr. Malins: I beg to move amendment No. 232, in clause 28, page 24, line 41, leave out from 'licence' to end of line 43.
I have something constructive to say on this amendment. By way of background, I should say that the clause lists and defines the identity documents. It relates back to clause 27, which deals with being in possession of false documents with an intention to commit an offence. If someone is in possession of a document that is not properly theirs, and has the intention of using it to identify themselves, that is an offence.
I am slightly concerned about driving licences issued outside the country. The issue comes down to culpability, at the end of the day. Many people from various places who are lawfully present in this country drive cars. They can do so for one year—that is the maximum time for which one can drive on a licence from another country. After that, one is obliged to take an English test, apply for a provisional licence and so on.
The police regularly stop a driver and, on discovering that he is not a British citizen with a British driving licence, ask to see his driving licence. In response, a foreign driving licence is produced, and that is valid for one year. But one needs to look at the purposes of the production. The purpose of producing even a doctored, not genuine foreign driving licence is
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to persuade the police that one is driving lawfully; it is no more than that.
There is a culpability difference here; Someone may seek to establish their identity by the production of an unlawful document when in fact they are here lawfully, and their only purpose in so doing may be to avoid the allegation of driving otherwise than in accordance with a licence. That kind of offence would be dealt with at a very low level in magistrates courts, and is vastly different from an offence at the top end of the scale. I have my concerns about the fact that we are dealing with such a huge range. I hope that the Minister can distinguish, both in his mind and for me, between the person whose intent is to cause serious mischief and the person whose intent is simply to identify himself, for the purposes of the driving issue only. I am sure that the Minister understands the point that I am rather laboriously making.
Mr. Allan: The hon. Member for Woking made an important point and I am sure that the Minister will deal with it in summing up. However, I am keen to understand the precise relationship between clauses 28 and 27 in the hon. Gentleman's example, where an individual presents a forged driving licence to establish with a police officer, for example, that they are allowed to drive when they are not. Does that count as a clause 27 offence of seeking to demonstrate registrable facts, when it is separate from where I imagine the clause kicks in, which is when someone presents such a driving licence to get an identity card?
Do clauses 27 and 28 distinguish between the presentation of such information for another purpose, which is illegal but quite distinct from the precise purpose that I thought we were trying to tackle—in other words, somebody using a forged foreign driving licence to get on to the ID register with inaccurate and deliberately fraudulent details?
Mr. Browne: I need to make it clear that clause 27, which is the fundamental clause in this part of the Bill, is designed to tackle the misuse of identity documents, full stop, not just identity documents as ID cards. It is not intended to tackle the circumstances where a person may, for example, under our road traffic regulations, have used a foreign driving licence for longer than they were entitled to drive with it as proof of their ability to drive in the United Kingdom. The clause is intended to deal with people who are in possession of documents that are routinely used as identity documents when they know that they are not entitled to be in possession of them because they belong to other people or are false documents. That is clear. I thought that hon. Members understood that, because we passed over clause 27 with so little debate.
Clauses 27 and 28 have not only to be seen in the context of the identity card scheme; they are about criminalising the unlawful possession of identity documents. Consequently, there needs to be a definition of such documents. As driving licences are routinely used as identity documents, they are included in clause 28. The hon. Member for Woking seeks to delete the reference to foreign driving licences to make his point, but that deletion would leave in British driving licences and remove foreign ones. We have to resist the hon. Gentleman's amendment for that
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reason, if no other. I resist it in principle in any event, because the Government's position is that driving licences, whether foreign or British, are routinely used as identity documents and their unlawful possession—whether they are forged or belong to other people—ought to be criminalised.
Mr. Malins: The Minister's answer was helpful. I shall pose this question, although I should probably know the answer. If a person, on being stopped by a police officer, is asked to identify himself, or asked some other question that would lead him to do so—such as, ''Are you driving lawfully?''—and produces a UK or foreign driving licence that is fraudulent, or made up and invented for the purpose of satisfying the officer about the driver, such a matter is currently triable in the magistrates court. I think that I am right in saying that such an offence under the Bill would not be indictable only; if it were, the magistrates courts would be brought to an absolute halt, because such offences are so regular.
Is the Minister able at this stage to confirm whether the defendant in such a case will be caught by subsections (1) and (3)? If that is so, he will be charged on an indictable offence only.
Mr. Browne: For those circumstances, the hon. Gentleman might want to look at subsection (5) or clause 27.
Mr. Malins: Yes, I suppose the question boils down to what the prosecuting authorities decide to charge. I would not want the magistrate's courts to find themselves swamped with cases which immediately, because of the sentencing powers, have to be transferred by way of clause 6 to committal.
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Mr. Browne: It is envisaged that those who make decisions about prosecution will take into account all of the relevant circumstances as to whether or not to prosecute. Proportionality—whether it is appropriate to prosecute—is a circumstance that prosecuting authorities should take into account. As for penalties in the circumstances that the hon. Gentleman figures—a distinction that the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam might benefit from as well—there are proportionate penalties in subsection (7).
Mr. Malins: The Minister is right. The point was worth laying before him. I am satisfied with his reply. As far as amendment No. 232 is concerned, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: I beg to move amendment No. 223, in page 24, line 43, at end insert—
'(i) an official Birth Certificate.'.
I welcome you to the Chair, Ms Anderson.
The clause seeks to make obtaining by forgery any number of important documents an offence. In order to obtain a passport, one of the official documents that has to be produced is a birth certificate. The clause will be particularly important in the initial issue of an identity card and, while one would not ordinarily carry a birth certificate around to prove identity, we need to ensure that the whole system is robust. If it is not
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robust, it will be brought into disrepute. I imagine that for those who do not have passports, a birth certificate is one of the documents that they will be required to produce when the identity card is initially issued.
Anecdotally, a number of people are able to obtain false passports by first forging or obtaining a birth certificate that is not properly and lawfully issued. There is a case, at least, for including a birth certificate within the clause. If the Minister thinks I am wrong, I will be interested to hear his explanation why.
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