My Lords, I begin by declaring my interests. I advise Lockheed Martin and UK Broadband, which have interests in the policing sector. I chair the National Trading Standards Board and I co-chair the All-Party Group on Policing.
Following on from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Henley, while we have to look at this Bill, there is a danger—the noble Lord, Lord Henley, called it “legislation for legislation’s sake”—that some of the content of the Bills we receive in this Session is being rather oversold. The Bills are no doubt worthy, but they do not necessarily address the major issues that they purport to address.
I suppose that is symptomatic of this stage of a fixed-term Parliament, with an ill-matched coalition whose members loathe each other and can barely mask their disagreements—that is just the Lib Dems. On the Conservative side of the coalition of course, we know there is perfect harmony. Indeed, not a scintilla of difference can be detected between the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Education. Indeed, they are so united that they did not have to go through the charade, like Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, of having a pint together, which incidentally sets a very poor example for hard-working families of drinking during the working day. Mrs May and Mr Gove have none the less to go through a series of rituals: a ritual exchange of written apologies, the ritual firing of a special adviser or two—not that firing a special adviser does anything to solve the problems. One has only to look at the front page of today’s Times to realise that. Now all is sweetness and light between the two departments. The briefing campaign is apparently over. Or is it? I detect a guerrilla war going on between the advisers of the different government departments concerned. We have all seen the Home Office briefing on the Bill. It tells us that the purpose of the Bill is,
“to ensure we can continue to effectively and relentlessly pursue”.
Take that, Mr Gove: see how we have split the infinitive to show how pointless is your crusade for back-to-basics education. This is the level to which infighting in the Government has gone.
The Bill is the usual ragbag of Home Office measures: it must not contain anything that is too frightening for the Lib Dem portion of the coalition, but none the less everything within it has to be built up as more significant than perhaps it is. As usual, some of it sounds as though it has not been thought out as well as it might be. I was much taken by the briefing that we have no doubt all received from the Institute of Chartered Accountants, which says that the part targeting crooked lawyers and accountants will not make
prosecutions easier because it sets a higher standard of proof than Labour’s Proceeds of Crime Act. What is worse, it will have a series of unintended consequences and potentially choke off valuable intelligence to help the police target serious crime. These are no doubt important issues that we will need to look at in your Lordships’ House.
The Bill is designed to make it easier to recover criminal assets. That is welcome, although there seems to be an element of catch-up on Labour’s proposals to do the same. However, we need to be satisfied that the Bill will have the effect of closing the loopholes that allow criminals to hide their assets with family members or overseas. Is that going to be achieved by the changes before us?
There is another problem here. I refer to the extent to which the agencies involved feel it is appropriate to invest the sometimes quite substantial resources required to pursue POCA proceedings. For many of those agencies, too high a proportion of what is seized, often after quite a protracted legal process, is retained by the Treasury rather than being available for the agency concerned to reinvest in crime fighting. Will the Bill do anything to remedy that? I certainly hope that it is something that the Home Office will look at, perhaps with Treasury colleagues, to see whether more of those resources can be ploughed back to improve the quality of the work that is done in fighting serious and organised crime.
In that context, one of the groups that the National Trading Standards Board funds is the illegal money lending team for England, based in Birmingham. It works hard to recover POCA money from the loan sharks who prey on the vulnerable. It uses the receipts it obtains, after the Treasury has had its take, to plough back into local communities on programmes of education about money management and how to avoid loan sharks. That is a very useful and positive thing that can be done. A trading standards department in north Yorkshire puts great emphasis on working right the way through the prosecution process. It starts with obtaining material and evidence that can be used in Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings at a later stage and works right the way through the investigation. That enables it to plough some of the money it recovers back into further investigations of those who scam the public. I hope that the Minister will tell us what more is being done to try to ensure that more of the resources obtained from criminals can be invested in crime fighting.
Part 5 of the Bill deals with the protection of children and strengthens and clarifies the law on psychological suffering and abuse. I am pleased to see those measures. It follows the lead of my late right honourable friend Paul Goggins, who campaigned on this issue. The Bill also creates a new offence of possession of material on advice on grooming children. That is all well and good, but is that the most fundamental issue in terms of protecting children and young people on the internet? The noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, who is not in her place, has been doggedly pressing ahead with her Private Member’s Bill in successive Sessions of Parliament on precisely this issue and I find it surprising that the Government have not been more positive about its provisions.
Noble Lords who were present at Question Time today will know that I referred to the benefits of the Government doing more to sponsor proper identity assurance on the internet with robust age verification. That would not only protect children but would also do much to combat crime and fraud. Individuals would have the certainty of knowing who they were dealing with, young people would be prevented from accessing unsuitable material and older people would be prevented from accessing sites that were intended to be the exclusive domain of children.
Much of the Bill is about improving the effectiveness of the National Crime Agency, an organisation which is barely half a year old. It is interesting that perhaps some of these issues were not addressed when we first had the legislation which created the National Crime Agency. Some matters are still not being resolved. We still do not know how the work of the National Crime Agency can be extended to Northern Ireland. The issue of whether the National Crime Agency should take on board counterterrorism remains unresolved. My view is that that would be an unwise move to make, particularly given that the National Crime Agency is still so new. Why leave this hanging open? Would it not be better to put that to bed one way or the other, sooner rather than later?
There is also the question of the proper governance and accountability of the National Crime Agency. We have had the Home Secretary giving her instruction that the National Crime Agency, almost before it had started work, should investigate historic child abuse in north Wales. Where in the Bill are questions of accountability of the National Crime Agency being addressed?
Last week, the Daily Telegraph told us that a quarter of criminals tracked by the National Crime Agency and the Security Service have gone off the radar since the Snowden revelations and that hundreds of drug lords have gone to ground after being alerted to methods of surveillance. The noble Lord will recall that two years ago the Home Office warned of the need to address changes in communications data management by telecoms providers, but nothing has been done in the intervening period. This Bill could have provided an opportunity to address that very real problem. Communications data are vital for all sorts of investigations. They are used by trading standards in carrying out the consumer protection enforcement that I talked about, they were critical in the investigation of the Soham murders and they are often critical in many kidnap cases.
I accept that issues around the privacy of communications and metadata are not easy—they need a proper public debate. I have also been one of the first to acknowledge that the previous Government mishandled the public debate when the opportunity for it arose a few years ago. However, what we have had in the past four years has been a total absence of debate and a total absence of leadership from the Government in trying to resolve these issues. The consequence is that there is now a real danger that our ability to fight organised crime is being seriously corroded.
I started my speech by talking about coalition dysfunctionality, but the willy-waving of the Education
Secretary and the Home Secretary—I acknowledge that the term may be inappropriate for your Lordships’ House and certainly inappropriate in applying it to Mrs May—is a side-show compared with the failure of the two halves of the coalition over the five years of this Parliament to address the diminishing capacity of our police forces, including the NCA, to access the communications data that they need to fight crime effectively and to protect the public. Therefore, while the Bill contains many worthy elements, it frankly does not address some of the most serious problems that exist in dealing with organised crime.
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