Someone else once said in this place that when he and a colleague undertook a charm offensive, he was the charm and our colleague was the offensive. I should probably leave it at that, but I take the procedural point about the need to provide Committee members, and indeed Members of both Houses, with at least a framework or outline of any regulation, guidance and elements of legislation following Royal Assent as early as possible.
Lords amendments Nos. 39 to 47, 61 to 65 and 77 all deal with the issue of imitation firearms and air weapons. I am happy to support Lords amendments Nos. 39 to 47 and 62 to 65, which relate to controls on firearms. Let me briefly explain the most significant controls.
Lords amendment No. 40 removes a clause providing for controls on the sale of ammunition loading presses—devices that perform the full range of mechanical operations required to reload cartridges. The Government have accepted arguments that such operations can be carried out without specialist equipment through the use of simple tools that are available from any DIY shop. We have already included controls on the sale of primers, and given that it is not possible to reload ammunition without primers, we accept that clause 31 is no longer necessary.
Lords amendments Nos. 41 and 47 give Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs powers to seize imitation firearms imported in contravention of the controls in the Bill. Although clause 32 makes it an offence to bring a realistic imitation firearm into Great Britain, it does not specifically contain a prohibition against their importation. Amendments Nos. 41 and 47 address that situation by establishing that the goods are liable to forfeiture under the customs and excise Acts. A case in which that was appropriate might concern youngsters returning from a school trip abroad with banned items.
Amendments Nos. 42 to 44 relate to defences to the ban on sale, manufacture and importation of realistic imitation firearms. Defences are provided for museums and galleries, both public and private, in relation to sales and so on to Crown servants, and for businesses to import realistic imitations solely for the purpose of modifying them to make them non-realistic—for example, for race-starting or dog training.
Amendments Nos. 48 and 66 increase the maximum penalty for having a blade or a point in a public place or a school without good reason from two years’ imprisonment or a fine, or both, to four years’ imprisonment or a fine, or both. That forms part of our wider package of measures to reduce knife crime, in line with our manifesto commitment"““to introduce tougher sentences for those involved in serious knife crime””."
Amendments Nos. 49 to 60, 75 and 76 amend in various ways the power to search individuals for weapons in schools, further education institutions and attendance centres. They prevent a head teacher from requiring a member of school staff to carry out such a search unless they are security staff and provide transparent definitions of school staff for the purposes of this Bill. They require that the other person present when a search is conducted is another member of staff of the school, FE college or attendance centre respectively. We propose that because it is better for the second person present to be someone with a formal duty of care towards those being searched, which increases safeguards for both those being searched and the staff. They change the grounds for a search from ““reasonable grounds for believing”” to ““reasonable grounds for suspecting””. That will enable the scope for searches to include a wider range of people. A head teacher who suspects a knife is in their school, but whose information is not strong enough for believing a particular pupil has it, will still be able to search. However, it is important to note that, before searching any pupil, they must always have a suspicion that the pupil may have a knife.
The amendments enable the National Assembly for Wales to order when powers for FE colleges in Wales come into force. They also reduce the threshold for a constable to exercise his or her powers of entry to a school and search for weapons in section 139B of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. By revising that threshold to one of reasonable grounds for suspecting, we ensure that the police power to search in schools is consistent with that of school staff. That will also apply in Northern Ireland.
I commend the amendments to the House, because by accepting them we will improve the Bill’s efficacy and effectiveness.
Violent Crime Reduction Bill
Proceeding contribution from
Tony McNulty
(Labour)
in the House of Commons on Monday, 30 October 2006.
It occurred during Debate on bills on Violent Crime Reduction Bill.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
451 c50-2 
Session
2005-06
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
Subjects
Librarians' tools
Timestamp
2024-04-21 20:37:54 +0100
URI
http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_356153
In Indexing
http://indexing.parliament.uk/Content/Edit/1?uri=http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_356153
In Solr
https://search.parliament.uk/claw/solr/?id=http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_356153