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Earl Attlee: I hesitate to speak on this matter because I have been somewhat overexposed recently, particularly with the noble Baroness the Minister. I support the principles of the Bill. I was sad that the Bill was comprehensively wrecked at an early stage of the Committee.
Lord Carlisle of Bucklow: It was not wrecked.
Earl Attlee: I feel that it was and I am sorry about the damage. However, this issue is of great concern to
me for the reasons that have already been so ably set out by other noble Lords. I shall be particularly interested to hear how the Minister intends to justify the provision.
Lord Williams of Mostyn: I wish to raise a matter of detail in Clause 35(1). The court is given an extraordinarily wide power--ordering disqualification,
- "for such period as it thinks fit".
That is entirely different from the regime that sentencers and defendants know at the moment with regard to totting up and the speeder; and for driving with excess alcohol there is a minimum disqualification of one year and for a second offence within 10 years a minimum disqualification of three years. There is some sense to that structure. By and large, it works well. It seems an extraordinarily wide power to be given to a court to be able to order disqualification,
- "for such period as it thinks fit",
without any other qualification.
Earl Russell: We can agree at the moment that driving is a privilege and not a right. I do not think we have yet reached the American situation where they seem to think that a driving licence is handed out with a birth certificate. We all accept that if we are given charge of a potentially lethal weapon--which a car is--we must expect the privilege of driving that weapon to be taken away if we do it unsafely. But it is quite another thing to propose taking it away for an offence entirely unrelated to the conduct of the motor vehicle. It is a little like telling one's children that if they do not go to bed, they cannot have any sweets tomorrow. It is all right if one knows every circumstance of the daily life, as one does in that situation, and can make sure that there is a fit between the two things. However, we do not have that kind of knowledge about people whom we are sentencing.
Why, among all the things they could do, have the Government fixed on withdrawing the right to drive a car rather than something else? Why not, for example, the right to ride a horse or a bicycle? There are many other things they could have done. They might think about why they have not withdrawn from people the right to wear spectacles. If they think about that, they might begin to see why I have such grave misgivings about this clause.
The point has already been made that many people without a car cannot work. If this punishment were inflicted, for example, on a taxi driver, or on the man who came at nine o'clock this morning to repair our dryer, it would be a penalty of instant dismissal from a job. There is nothing in the clause which shows any recognition of whether the punishment is particularly severe in a particular occupation. There is no recognition of the basic principle of Magna Carta that no man shall be punished so as to take away his living. That is a good principle and an important one. I rise to back it up because I believe that there is a vitally important social security angle to this clause which no one has touched on.
There are a great many places, as my noble friend Lord Mar and Kellie, has mentioned, where it is, regrettably, simply impossible to work without the aid of motor transport and, since the stagecoach is an unreliable method of transport at the best of times, one must expect these places to become more numerous. I hear of cases of this kind from places like South Moulton, the North Yorks Moors or Henley-in-Arden where, if the job is some distance away, people simply cannot work unless they can afford to run a car. So if one suffers that penalty in one of those places one is being deprived of the right to work.
During the debate on the Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order during the dinner break, all three Front Benches were in agreement that what we should be looking for are ways of helping people to come off benefit and back into work and that we need that not only to give people genuine freedom of choice, but also for the vitally important task of reducing the biggest single item in government spending. But here we have the Home Office undoing all the good that all three Front Benches were agreed in trying to achieve. It does not seem to make very much sense. It is piling up a much bigger bill for a government--it does not matter which in this case--to pay. I do not see why.
I ask the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, to consult his noble friend, the noble Baroness Lady Hollis of Heigham, and ask what she has to say about the costs of this clause. He may find that it is very similar to what I have just said. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, about the need to think of other non-custodial sentences. I have thought that for many years. We are seeing why that has not been done before. It is something which is badly needed but extremely difficult. The Home Office might have stopped to think about some of the difficulties before tabling this clause.
Lord Hacking: Perhaps I may intervene for just a moment. I have been able to listen to the entirety of this debate although I confess I have not been in the Chamber. I was disappointed by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, because I felt that insufficient connection was being made between the offence and the punishment. Having heard the whole of the debate, and in particular the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, I believe that this is an unfortunate clause. It has to be recorded--and I say this with great respect--that the fundamental opposition to this Bill in this Chamber has come from the noble Lords who sit on the Social Democrat Benches and that is most welcome.
Lord Carlisle of Bucklow: Having made a very brief intervention in the course of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, perhaps I may try to make a more serious intervention on Clause 35 as a whole. What is it intended to achieve? Of course, one appreciates that removing a driving licence is a serious matter for many people and the threat of it is a major one. But what is this particular clause intended to achieve?
As I understand it, it relates to the power to disqualify from driving someone who, according to subsection (2), is convicted of an offence under Clauses 1(2), 2(2),
or 3(2) of the Bill. If I am right about that, what does that mean? Is it seriously to be said that if one is sentenced to life imprisonment, as Clause (1)(2) requires, say, for an offence of wounding with intent, that on top of being sentenced to life one should be then disqualified from driving for a certain period of years? And what is the purpose?If you are sending someone to prison for a minimum of seven years for trading in drugs and we take the sort of case about which we were talking earlier--not the major trafficker, but the very small-time drug addict who buys and then feeds his own addiction by passing on some of his drugs to friends--what is the suggested additional threat? He probably does not drive. He has probably never driven. He is going to prison for seven years anyway. Are we to say to him, "Incidentally, when you come out, you cannot drive for 10 years?" What is the object of it? I question why the clause is in the Bill at all and whether it is anything more than merely gesture sentencing.
Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank: I believe that I am the only noble Lord present who at one time had ministerial responsibility for driving licences. That is my reason for speaking on the subject of those who want to take them away.
I very much take the view on the clause which has been expressed on all sides of the Committee. I take also the point made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Carlisle, about the absence of consultation on the clause not being exceptional to the Bill as a whole. What I think is exceptional--although not exclusively exceptional, if I may put it that way--is that the clause was introduced as a new clause at the tenth sitting of the House of Commons Committee on the Bill. It would be of great advantage to the Committee if the Minister could explain where the clause comes from. If the clause was not included in the Bill as drafted--the Bill was in preparation for some time--why was it suddenly inserted into the Bill at a late stage? What were the motives, incentives or circumstances which made it urgent on 10th December but not when the Bill was being drafted?
Proper questions have been asked--not only on these Benches but on all sides of the Committee--about the consequences of taking away driving licences. I have a feeling that none of those points was considered due to the hasty way in which these provisions were prepared and introduced so late in the day.
As has been revealed by this debate on clause stand part, the more one thinks about it, the more one sees increasing objections which do not appear to have been foreseen. Someone who has a car has it in the expectation of being able to drive it. They may have newly acquired the car and the driving licence for that purpose. If that person loses his or her driving licence, the car serves no purpose for them. If their licence has been removed for a substantial period, not only is there no point in having a car licensed and on the road; there is no point in having a car at all. There are some who may lose their driving licence for whom the obvious next step is to sell a car lately acquired at a penalty which would approximate to a further fine.
Whatever the Minister's reply--and whether or not my noble friend finds it acceptable--I hope that the noble Baroness will consider carefully what purpose the clause really serves. It seems to me not only to involve a loss of liberty and a loss of mobility but to have much wider consequences for those who need a car for work, and for the family as a whole.
If the Bill, including this clause, proposes the removal of a driving licence, why not take away the television licence? The principle is exactly the same. If there is no link between the offence and the penalty of driving disqualification, there is no reason why we should not find that in some future Bill the removal of television licences is proposed as a further penalty. These questions need to be looked at with great care.
I do not know what the Minister will say in reply or what my noble friend may have in mind. I say in parenthesis, even at this late hour, that I am struck by one peculiar aspect of our procedures. We consider amendments to a clause and then decide whether or not we want the clause in the first place. It is almost as though one has conducted the Committee stage on a Bill before the Second Reading debate. Of course, this is not a matter for the Minister, who will forgive me for occupying the time of the Committee, but it is interesting that we had a short debate on the amendment--there was only one amendment to this clause--because we had not had the debate on stand part that has revealed aspects of the clause hitherto hidden from us. As we have no other way of proceeding with our business, I believe that if this remains part of the Bill at Report some noble Lords will want to consider seriously ways of amending it.
10 p.m.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: Perhaps I may quickly respond to the noble Lord's intervention on our procedures. Surely we do it the right way round. We try to get the best clause that we can and then decide whether or not it is good enough.
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