Serious Crime Bill [HL]

The noble Baroness gave the example of vehicles with false bottoms. The proposal to report orders to SOCA may not sound too serious but would result in the destruction of a person’s business. Given the choice of buying from someone and having your order reported to the police, or buying from someone else and having no such reporting, all their customers will naturally choose to move to an alternative supplier so that they do not have SOCA crawling all over them to see whether they are involved in people trafficking. Given a reasonable level of commercial sense in reporting, which seems to me commonplace, I reckon that it would take about three months for the company to die under those circumstances. The same would be true of many of the examples discussed last night. As I understand it, facilitating can be entirely innocent. If you are supplying a substance that is used if not widely at least alternatively and which happens to have been used in a particular case for cutting drugs, and you are subject to the order whereby you have to tell the police every time you supply a customer with these materials, your legitimate business will disappear and you will be left entirely reliant on what you may not have known or understood at the time to be a criminal transaction. Effectively, these orders will destroy ordinary, legitimate businesses although they seem in themselves entirely reasonable. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, that while courts may initially be prepared to act like a couple of kings chasing each other round a chessboard, always trying to occupy the last square that the criminal was involved in, very soon they will find that it is reasonable to impose orders with some teeth that have some hope of anticipating the criminal’s next move. They are very likely to take the form of restricting someone’s movements or the time that they spend out of their house, which is a very easy, convenient and monitorable system. There is absolutely nothing in the Bill to prevent orders evolving in that direction.