Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 175: 175: Clause 191, page 134, line 34, leave out ““presumption”” and insert ““discretion”” The noble Lord said: I am pleased to see that the Bill retains the interest of your Lordships, even though we are in the eighth day of Committee. We move to the part of the Bill—Clause 191—that relates to the disclosure of information about convictions of child sex offenders to members of the public. Noble Lords will recall that as long ago as 2000 there was a campaign to introduce Sarah’s law, as it was called, into this country to mirror, or perhaps to follow, Megan’s law in the United States. It is interesting that the report commissioned in 2006 by the NSPCC on the impact of Megan’s law in the United States found that there was no one single version of Megan’s law but that there were many different variations of community notification. The laws were given legitimacy by assumptions about the nature of sexual offending, but there was little empirical evidence that community notification had had a positive effect on preventing reoffending and protecting children. It was found that the level of registration of sex offenders in the United States had fallen since the implementation of Megan’s law. In this country, the level of notification of sex offenders under the Act is 97 per cent. In the United States, only 80 per cent of sex offenders comply with registration requirements and, in some areas, since Megan’s law was introduced the registration is as low as 50 per cent. Furthermore, in the United States, efforts to locate offenders again after they have gone missing are limited and ineffectual. That gives rise to the concern that we share on these Benches that compliance with the registration requirements in England and Wales will also fall if offenders are constantly moving and hiding themselves to avoid their details being accessed. There are other problems. In this country, 80 per cent of children subjected to sexual assault will know their attacker, and in a high proportion of the cases it is a family member or a friend. Wider disclosure of the details of sex offenders would, we argue, lead to the identification of a previous victim where that victim is their child. There is also evidence that victims of intra-familial abuse may be deterred from reporting crimes because of fears related to community notification. In this country, the Sex Offenders Act 1997 created notification obligations for persons convicted of certain offences to inform the police of their address and their changes of address. The current position is that there is multi-agency involvement in sex offender notification concerning offenders who present a risk to children. If information is received by the agencies concerned that an offender represents a significant risk, for example, to a specific school, further notification may take place, but it is a matter for discretion. Following a risk assessment review, it may currently be felt necessary to inform the head teacher of the risk. Such disclosure takes place only with the authority of the local multi-agency public protection panel. That is the current system. Clause 191 introduces measures concerning the disclosure of information that create a presumption of disclosure about the conviction of sex offenders to members of the public. The notification scheme clearly goes far beyond that envisaged and created by the Sex Offenders Act 1997. The responsible authority under the clause must consider whether to disclose information about the conviction of sex offenders to particular members of the public. As I have said, there is a presumption of disclosure: if the responsible authority has reasonable cause to believe that the sex offender poses a risk, disclosure is necessary to protect a child or children from harm. The presumption exists whether the person to whom the information is conveyed asks for it or not. It is also subject to conditions, which are not spelt out in the Bill. It may be a condition that you would not be able to tell your neighbour. It would be a very odd way of protecting children if information is passed to person A in order to protect the children of person A but they are prevented from passing it on to person B next door in order to protect their children. The conditions potentially impose at least a moral responsibility on the person to whom the information is disclosed to convey that information to others. In any event, how are these conditions imposed on disclosure to be enforced? Let us suppose that a person who receives the information breaks the conditions under which it has been given. Does that create some form of criminal offence, civil liability, or what? It is not at all clear. It may be that the Government envisage passing on to a parent details of a sex offender’s convictions, saying, ““You may not pass it on to anybody else, act on it or do anything against the individual with the convictions. We are just telling you””. That does not seem to be a very useful provision. We propose in our amendments to replace the presumption of disclosure with a discretion on the part of the authority concerned to pass on information. We also propose that the presumption in new Section 327A(4) as inserted by Clause 191 should not arise, "““whether or not the person to whom the information is disclosed requests the disclosure””." If there is to be disclosure to an individual, the very first condition should be that that person seeks it because they have fears for their child in relation to a person. Those are the proposals in our amendments. I beg to move.