Crime and Security Bill

Nevertheless, we should start from the premise of a forfeiture of any participation in the early release scheme for someone who does anything as serious as possessing contraband, not least mobile phones. I still feel, somewhere in my water, if I may put it in those terms, that we are dealing with very serious matters through the resource nexus, rather than deciding what we should be doing and working backwards towards resources. If that sounds harsh, I do not apologise, because the use of mobile phones and other such things by terrorists are serious matters. If I may say so, I think we have also wimped out on wheel-clamping. I have asked those who know far more than I whether there is anything under law, or unique to the English and Welsh system, that means we cannot say that wheel-clamping on private land, and the way it has been executed over the past number of years, is effectively licensed theft and extortion, as the Scottish law did some time ago. That is where we should start from. If we need to go back from that and allow some limited, albeit licensed, clamping for doctors' surgeries or other specific use, that is fine, but I do not think that a licensing regime will do what we want. That was brought sharply into focus in the past couple of weeks. Quite rightly, people stopped and parked because of the snow and the impassability of roads, only to come back the next day to find their car clamped, because some little man from the wheel-clamping organisation decided, regardless of the snow, that there was another £140 or £200 to be made for the company. Rather than this sequential law or proper law by accretion, we should go where we want to go: we should ban it as the Scots have done and work back from that. I hope that that proposal will be explored in Committee. I should say right now that I am not in any profound sense offering myself to serve on that Committee. Having done three and a half years in the Home Office, I have had my fine share of Home Office Bills and legislation, and I will sadly have to let this one go and let others serve far better than I would. This is why I do not like the tedium—it is repeated ad nauseam by the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne)—of saying how much new legislation there has been, and how many new crimes and offences have been created: it does not help us at all. We live in a complex world. Something like three quarters of the Bill reviews, revises and updates legislation, albeit very recent legislation, because of externalities and other factors that go to the complexities of the world. Ten, 12 or 15 years ago, as someone already suggested, we would not have thought about the perniciousness of mobile phones in prison, because they did not exist. Twenty or 30 years ago, or when I was at university, e-mails and computers did not exist. Occasionally, we might see such things on "Tomorrow's World", but we all laughed. Given the pace of change, we must keep on top of such sensitive matters.