Crime and Security Bill

The hon. Gentleman has considerable professional experience of the law, and he makes a very good point, which I take seriously. He is certainly right to raise this issue given how many offences have been introduced since 1997—and, indeed, some even before then—that it was perfectly possible to prosecute under existing legislation. I am happy to look at this in Committee if what the hon. Gentleman is suggesting is indeed the case, although I am absolutely convinced that we need to do more to tackle domestic violence. I suspect that we will achieve a lot in that regard by persuading more police forces to adopt the best practice of some, which is to go ahead with prosecutions even when the victim is unwilling to give evidence, such as by using circumstantial or medical evidence about what has happened. That appears to be an effective way of tackling domestic violence. However, having been out with my local police force and seen cases of domestic violence, I really do think we need to deal with this as forcefully as we possibly can. Part 6 concerns gang injunctions for under-18s. We are less happy about this area of the Bill, since it appears to be another case of legislating on the hoof. These clauses amend the recent Policing and Crime Act 2009, and they are baffling since the Minister told the Joint Committee on Human Rights in March last year that the Government had no intention of covering children and young people explicitly. My party has long argued that antisocial behaviour orders, or ASBOs, should be a last resort. If overused—there are parallels here with the so-called "gangbos"—they become ineffective and costly and potentially criminalise a generation of young people. These gang injunctions seem to me to repeat many of the same mistakes. They again blur the line between criminal and civil law. They criminalise young people without any thought as to how or why they find themselves caught up in the dark world of gang-related violence, and they simply mimic many powers that are already on the statute book. Furthermore, they give the courts powers to impose draconian orders on young people who breach these injunctions. As Liberty has so aptly put it, we are, in essence, talking about""a mixture of control orders and ASBOs"." It is staggering that the Government are intent on expanding these types of orders for children, and we shall certainly seek to amend these provisions in Committee. Part 7 makes the issuing of a parenting order mandatory upon the breach by a child of an ASBO. Parenting orders, in themselves, are often beneficial, but we are concerned that these provisions may result in such orders being used as a last resort, at the point when a child has already been criminalised by breaching a discredited and overused ASBO; ideally, parenting orders should be used well ahead in this process. These measures do nothing to address the root causes of antisocial behaviour before they get out of hand. We need to catch children early, create schemes that divert them away from crime and antisocial behaviour, and get them to take responsibility for their actions when they stray, particularly through restorative justice schemes and neighbourhood justice panels. On part 8, we thoroughly dislike the licensing regime for wheel-clamping businesses operating on private land. I see no justification for yet another licensing regime, so let us instead opt for a simple Scottish-style solution and declare such clamping illegal entirely, as it is tantamount to extortion. We should not be attempting to clean up this industry's act by providing a licensing regime. Finally, I turn to parts 2 to 4, which concern the DNA database. To say that the Government's proposals are a disappointment is an understatement—they are a scandal. They have roundly failed to address any of the concerns outlined in the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the case of S and Marper about the "blanket and indiscriminate nature" of the database. The UK has the largest DNA database in the world; it is far larger than its American counterpart, despite the population of the United States being so much bigger. Our database contains records from more than 5.5 million people, almost 1 million of whom are innocent—they have no record on the police national computer—and almost one in two of all black men are on the database. This is little more than a random accretion of profiles from anybody who happens to run into the police. We have heard in great detail, particularly from the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, how difficult it can be, depending on where one lives in the country, to get one's details removed from this database, even when one wants to do so. As I briefly mentioned, in December 2008 the ECHR ruled that the retention of the DNA samples of two men who had not been convicted of any crime—S and Marper—was illegal and violated their right to a private life. The Court ruled that""the retention in question constituted a disproportionate interference with the applicants' right to respect for private life and could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society"." Its ruling that this was not necessary in a democratic society is a staggering criticism—it said that the UK Government have collected the most personal information from innocent people in a database that is not fit for a democratic society. Yet, rather than be humbled or chastened by that, the Government are presenting proposals that fly in the face of the ruling. It seems that they would rather continue their dangerous obsession with creating massive and illegal databases of any information they can get their hands on than accept that they were wrong and that they have gone beyond the law. The effectiveness of the DNA database for innocents as a tool for fighting crime is itself highly questionable. Figures have shown that despite the huge increase in the number of profiles on the database from 2.1 million in 2002 to 5.6 million at the last count, the number of detected crimes for which a DNA match was available—we are not even talking about it being crucial to the conviction—has fallen from 21,098 to 17,614 last year. That does not surprise me because, as I said, the database is random. It includes 1 million innocents and excludes more than 2 million people who were convicted before the database began. One sensible aspect of these proposals is to collect the DNA of such convicts. We will support that. There seems to be an absolutely clear basis for ensuring that that goes ahead.