Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, perhaps I may sum up the debate and address some of the points. Earlier I paid tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for all that he had done on the matter. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Browning, who was the Minister who dealt with this before me. Only a few days before she unfortunately resigned and I moved to the Home Office, she summoned me and a host of other Ministers to the Home Office to discuss what we could do government-wide to address the problem. As a Defra Minister with a considerable interest in recycling and associated matters, I went along and said that it was possible that we might be able to do something through the Environment Agency. Soon after I left the meeting, my noble friend moved on and I found myself moving to the Home Office and in effect writing a letter from myself to myself to try to address these problems. I am grateful for all that my noble friend did, and for the fact that she has now underlined some of the other problems that are beginning to appear in this matter. She referred to the problems with rare earths. I was recently in the north-west at a meeting dealing with truck theft. Truck theft is obviously very serious in terms of trucks and their contents being stolen, but certain bits of the trucks are also stolen to get the rare earths from, such as silencers, which can be of considerable value and whose theft can cause enormous problems. I pay tribute to everything that my noble friend has done to highlight these problems. Similarly, I pay tribute to what the right reverend Prelate had to say and thank him for coming to see me to highlight the serious problems that the church is facing, particularly with the theft of lead roofs and with getting insurance on a great many church properties because of what is going on. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, asked me to comment on House of Lords reform. At this time of night, that is beyond my pay grade and I am not going to deal with it, but no doubt we will have further opportunities to discuss it in due course. He talked about the need for consolidated reform. I agree with him; I would like that in due course. I have made it clear that what we are doing at this stage is bringing forward the first stage of a package to get coherent reform in this area. It would not be right to delay the first few steps of that, as the noble Lord is suggesting, purely because we cannot get on to the other bits; we will get to those other bits in due course. The noble Lord also said that the industry says that this will not work. Like the noble Lord, I have talked to the industry. I have addressed the BMRA; I have been to its annual parliamentary reception. The BMRA has made it quite clear to me that it welcomes virtually every aspect of reform. The only aspect that it is not terribly keen on is getting rid of cash. As someone else once said, ““They would say that, wouldn't they?””. I happen to think, as do most people in this House, that getting rid of cash from these transactions is a very useful thing to do and something that we ought to address. The noble Lord made two other points that ought to be addressed. He asked about itinerants. I made it quite clear in my opening remarks that only itinerant collectors who are subject to an order under Section 3(1) of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act from their local authority, approved by the local chief officer of police, will be exempted. If they are also a scrap dealer and they have a yard, they will no longer fall within that definition of being an itinerant trader and therefore they will not be exempt. We are only talking about a very small number of people, who will be covered by the regulations that are in place at the moment. They are regulated.