Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I shall come on to the question of itinerants in due course. It is something addressed by Amendment 157H in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner. I will deal with it in some detail because it is important, as there has been a degree of misunderstanding about that point. We are bringing forward these three changes under the Bill, and they are just a first step in taking forward a coherent package of measures to tackle all stages of the illegal trading of stolen scrap metal. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, I can give an assurance—although I cannot give a timescale for this—that we shall bring forward further measures in due course. We believe that going cashless, which is the crucial part of this amendment, will remove the ““no questions asked”” culture that allows low-risk criminal enterprise for metal thieves and unscrupulous dealers. That is something that we want to deal with. I turn to Amendment 157H, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, as an amendment to government Amendment 157G. It removes the exemption for itinerant collectors—and I make it clear that it is purely itinerant collectors whom we are dealing with—who have an order in place under Section 3(1) amending the record requirements that apply to them. Let me make clear that this is not a blanket exemption. Only itinerant collectors who are subject to an order under Section 3(1) of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964—an Act that I described as being past its sell-by date, but it is still what we have—coming from their local authority and approved by the local chief officer of police will be exempted. This will be a modest number of individuals who will be known to both the police and their local authority. They will also be bound by environmental regulations with the need to have a waste carrier's licence under the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011. Most importantly, no itinerant collector will receive cash from the scrap metal industry on which they are reliant for selling scrap to. Travelling around the streets picking up scrap, they will, when they take it on to the scrap yard, have to have that payment made not in cash but by some other means. Their transactions will be traceable for the first time, with the scrap metal industry recording details of the transaction and the payment method and to whom that payment is made. I hope that that assurance will be sufficient to allow the noble Lord to understand that I do not think his amendment is necessary. It might be that we will have to come back to this at Third Reading, but I hope that on this occasion he will accept that we have got it more or less right and that some of the reporting of the exemption for the so-called itinerants is not exactly what he thought it was.