Fraud Bill [Lords]

Thank you for calling me to speak last, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am the tail-end Charlie in this important debate. Given the closeness of the debate, I feel that I am among old friends. At its best attended point, there were 15 Members in the Chamber, and that included Madam Deputy Speaker. However, it has been a good debate, and it is getting better. Or it was until I stood up. Certain parts of it were fairly sterile, but the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) started to inject the subject of people into it and talked about how fraud impacts on the ordinary people—real people—who come through our surgeries every week. To use a well-worn cliché that I have heard on a few occasions this afternoon, fraud is not victimless. It is not some sterile concept. Fraud is theft. It is clear and simple theft, committed by very undesirable people. If I may use unparliamentary language, Mr. Deputy Speaker, fraud is, in the main, committed by absolute toe-rags—nasty, unpleasant, self-interested, self-motivated people. It is easy to talk about fraud as something that is large scale—something to do, perhaps, with Asil Nadir and Polly Peck, The Mirror pension fund or the BCCI scandal of many years ago. By and large, though, fraud is often small scale. As the hon. Member for Rhondda said, it is committed against ordinary people, who might suddenly find £3,000 taken out of their bank account, not only their £1,000 worth of savings but another £2,000 overdraft on top. It is frightening and, once one gets caught up in the fraud web, it is extremely difficult to unravel it. It can take months or years to get one’s life back on track. Fraudsters tend to be indiscriminate and opportunistic. In my constituency, there is a group of fraudsters who use fake ID to gain entrance to old people’s homes. Some come in the guise of police officers, others as council officers or workers for local utility—gas or electricity—companies. That is an obnoxious and obscene form of fraud, an absolute abuse of trust and a misrepresentation of the worst kind. I hope that, when the Bill becomes an Act, it will ensure that people who use fake ID or credentials to gain access to people’s homes feel the full force of the law. Ten years may not be long enough. I met a local vicar earlier today, a minister of Rosedale church, whose mother had someone on her doorstep claiming to be a police officer and gaining access to her home in that way. She is an extremely clued-up woman. She quickly realised that something was wrong, she led him into a room that happened to be her garage and she locked him in it. It was 8.30 at night, so she thought that the police would not be interested in coming to arrest him and left making the phone call until the following morning. She thought that she would let this young man contemplate the error of his ways in her garage. Unfortunately, when the police turned up the next morning, he had found a way out of the garage. That may sound like an amusing anecdote, but it was only her presence of mind that allowed her to navigate her way out of that unfortunate situation. Many elderly people find their trust being abused and pay a huge cost for it, not only financially, but in their mental well-being. As well as people who gain access fraudulently, there are the so-called rogue traders who use fake qualifications to gain people’s trust––““I am from the federation of master builders; I know what I am talking about.”” All of a sudden, the vulnerable find themselves paying out vast sums of money for work that did not need doing to complete crooks who have used fake qualifications to con their way into a position of trust in order to abuse it. Once again, I hope that the Bill will cover those sort of fraudulent acts. We must also understand that we have a responsibility and we need to be vigilant against fraud as well. That is the real meaning of responsibility. The hon. Member for Rhondda spoke about phishing schemes in which e-mails are sent claiming to be from the Halifax, advising people that they need to update their bank accounts. People are still falling for that con. I believe that it has been running for three or four years, yet I still find that some of my constituents are falling for it, giving out their financial details and losing vast sums of money in consequence. We, collectively as politicians, the Government, the financial services industry and local authorities need to educate people to be on their guard. Why are we still throwing out our bank and credit card statements in the general rubbish, providing a rich source of opportunity? Some of us have bought shredding machines, but then we hear about armies of people sitting in darkened backrooms, putting together what we have shredded so that they can still read our bank account numbers. That is happening—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda looks bemused, but I can assure him that this is absolutely the case. In fact, Frank Abagnale, one of the world’s top authorities on fraud, visited the country only a couple of weeks ago and said, ““For crying out loud, people, don’t just get something that shreds vertically. Get a proper criss-cross shredder, so there is absolutely no chance of the information being reconstituted and used to defraud people.””