Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I shall add a word or two to what the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, said. When the Minister addressed the House last Tuesday, he made it clear, and I certainly accepted, that the exception is very much smaller than had originally been assumed by many of those who read the clause in the Government's original amendment. It excepts a particular class of itinerant scrap dealer; namely, those who have been the subject of an order under Section 3 of the 1964 Act. I am sure that my noble friend is entirely right that that is a much smaller number of people than many had originally assumed. I made such inquiries as I could to find out how many of these people there are and whether there is any recent trend in people seeking to include themselves in the loophole—as it certainly is—in the injunction for cashless transactions only. A good many authorities that were questioned were quite unable to supply the answer. That does not suggest that at the moment there are very many people who are subject to this. However—and this seems to me to be important—since it has come out that there is this one exemption from the requirement that dealings should be made otherwise than for cash, the numbers are increasing. When the section that I referred to was originally enacted, it was with a view to exempting those who would be subject to an order under the Scrap Metal Dealers Act from the requirement to keep records of from whom they acquired the scrap metal and the nature of the metal. I remember that when I was first married, the children were fascinated because there was a man who went down the street with a horse and cart and used to shout out as he went down, which was imitated by the children. They thought he was saying, ““Hey, Tubby the Tuba””. Of course, it was not that, but I do not know what he was saying. With that kind of dealer, one can understand the intention that he should not have to keep records. All he was doing was collecting people's leaking kettles and other forms of waste metal from local householders. It is not like that now at all. It has developed in the 48 years since that Act was passed into an entirely different kind of trade. For instance, when the local authority in Birmingham was questioned, it said that in the course of a year it would normally see 10 or so new itinerant traders seeking inclusion in an order under the Act. In the past few days it has had no fewer than 12. They are already running into this loophole. They want to continue to be able to deal in cash. As the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, has said, this is knocking a very large hole in the measures that we are taking to deal with what has become a very mighty scourge of the community in all sorts of ways. The more widely this exemption is known, the greater the number of traders who will seek to bring themselves under it. That is what frightens me about this. The exemption does not allow them to go cashless; it is the exemption from other forms of control, leaving people able to continue to deal in cash for materials that will simply never be traceable. That has been defined as the heart of the problem. To their great credit, the Government have introduced a substantial measure, albeit short of the reform that I originally described some months ago as the amendment of the ““Steptoe and Son”” legislation of the last millennium. That will come, we have been promised that; but in the mean time, they are leaving themselves with a hole. In addition to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, I have two questions. First, can the Minister explain why the Government are making this exemption? Of course, you could not have expected what I have called the ““Hey, Tubby the Tuba”” chap with his horse and cart to maintain records and pay by cheque—of course, long before there was any plastic money in the form of cards—and that may have been perfectly reasonable. All sorts of market traders now are able to take payments with the electronic equipment that is available. There is no problem with people like that being able to pay for their products and services and so on in that way. So why are we left with an exemption for people who no longer exist in the form in which they did when the Act was originally passed? Secondly, how many of them will there be? What is the Government's estimate of how many are going to, as it were, pour through this loophole in an effort to maintain what has been right at the heart of this burgeoning crime of the stealing of metal of all sorts? The consequences of that crime have been described over and over again, some of them extremely serious in terms of the damage to people, the inconvenience, the cost and so on. Why are we leaving this loophole and how many people are going to be subject to this exemption? Like the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, I have not found anybody who is concerned with this who has not been deeply disturbed by what is otherwise an entirely welcome piece of legislation, which we are very glad to see even at this fairly late stage in the passage of this Bill. Why is this loophole being left? It is going to be serious. It will increase and we will have to wait for months before we can get the new legislation in place that the Government have promised. I add my words of considerable dismay that we have this now. It may well be that there is something else that I have not understood about the exemption. If so, my noble friend on the Front Bench will no doubt tell us what it is. But at the moment there is not anybody concerned with the trade who for the life of them can see why.