Fraud Bill [Lords]

I apologise for having missed the speech by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), although when I asked him whether he had said anything that I would not have expected him to say, he said no, so I did not miss very much. In recent years, it seems to have become a law of Parliament that the significance of a piece of legislation to ordinary people’s lives is inversely proportional to the number of hon. Members in the Chamber. This Bill is very important for our constituents, not least because the law on fraud has been a hotch-potch until now, with different bits and pieces of legislation being knitted together to cover what many would consider to be an important offence. Since the introduction of the Theft Act 1968 and its subsequent amendments, the nature of fraud has changed dramatically. The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright) has referred to the fact that much fraud is now conducted electronically, which is a specific issue for those trying to secure successful prosecutions. The law must keep up with technology, which it has failed to do in that area in recent years. I know from my constituency surgeries and from letters from my constituents that a significant number of people are affected by identity fraud, the theft of credit card details and other scams. Such scams often involve relatively small sums of money, so people do not necessarily go to the police, who may find such matters too complicated to proceed with. I suspect that a large amount of fraud is barely considered by the criminal justice system, because people shrug their shoulders and say, ““Ah well””. In welcoming the Bill, I want to press the Solicitor-General on implementation and enforcement. He has referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, the Serious Fraud Office and additional funds for the police, particularly in central London. Around the country, however, police forces sometimes feel incapable of dealing with the complexity of the IT, of the fraud itself or of the law, and I hope that training will take place in all the police forces in the United Kingdom to make sure that everybody has equal access to justice. Fraud is more than a national matter. Frauds that have been brought to my attention through my constituency casework include the Spanish lottery fraud, which is well known and has been well attested on television. In order to pursue justice in such cases, one needs a degree of Europe-wide intervention. Similarly, I am sure that all hon. Members have received e-mails from people across the continent of Africa offering them large amounts of money to set up some kind of business. Again, none of us ever refers those e-mails on to any part of the legal system—yet perhaps we should, because others who are perhaps less cynical and sceptical than us fall into those traps. All hon. Members who have spoken have discussed whether we should abolish the common-law offence of conspiracy to defraud. I agree with the Government that fraud cases can be amazingly complex and that statutory conspiracy law may not suffice. In most major credit card fraud cases, one person does the phishing by sending out e-mails—again, I am sure that all hon. Members have received such e-mails—that make it look as if one’s bank has managed to lose one’s details and is asking for them to be restated. Another person may use a ““Trojan horse””—the practice of sending random e-mails that attach themselves to the recipient’s internet explorer and manage to inveigle them into visiting a website that they would not otherwise have visited, so that in the process, or in trying to extricate themselves from the website, they end up inadvertently giving further details about themselves. Such a fraudster may be separate from the first type. Then, if money is to be taken out of the United Kingdom, a money mule will be required. The entire process of complex credit card fraud can involve a series of different people, each of whom is committing a fraud, but one does not get the full sense of the criminality that has been engaged in without seeing the whole package of the fraud. Indeed, individual members of the gang may not know that the others are engaged in it. In those circumstances, I understand that there may be reasons why we should want to keep the common law offence of conspiracy to defraud. Moreover, the fact that, as the British Retail Consortium points out, many new forms of fraud are coming online as a result of new internet IT may mean that we would want to keep a stop-gap clause of some kind. However, as other hon. Members have said, some more hotly than others, it is pretty difficult to advance the argument that we should keep stop-gap legislation just in case we need it. Despite the comments of the Solicitor-General, the law says that an act committed by an individual is not an offence against the criminal law, whereas it may be an offence when it is committed by two people. That puts us in danger of bringing the law into disrepute. I realise that the Solicitor-General has moved considerably further on this issue than the Attorney-General did in the House of Lords, but I would welcome a clear indication that if we do not feel that the common law provision is still necessary, we will see a specific end date. I question whether 10 years is a sufficient sentence. Some of this fraud is very significant. It does not always involve one person being defrauded out of a small amount of money; sometimes millions of pounds is defrauded from lots of people. I also question, as did the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, whether aspects of corruption should be included in the Bill. I note in particular that we have not revised for many years the legislation on the suborning of a police officer. There is some debate about precisely what that offence now is. However, many newspapers acknowledge that they pay police officers for information that would otherwise be secret and private, and should probably remain so, so that the police can perform their legitimate duties as regards a secure prosecution. Perhaps by now the Government should be advancing legislation to reform the law on suborning a police officer. I think that what the shadow Solicitor-General said about magicians and the Magic Circle was wholly erroneous. It is clear that under clause 6, which deals with carrying articles for use in connection with a fraud, the fraud would have to involve the person making a gain for himself or another, causing loss to another, or exposing another to a risk of loss. I cannot see why magicians would be caught by that in any sense. The clause that they are most likely to be caught by is clause 2, which covers fraud by false representation, but they would probably not be dishonestly making a false representation, but honestly making a false representation.