Clause 2 - Directions etc. by the Secretary of State
Private Security Industry Bill [Lords]
11:45 am
Mr Bruce George (Walsall South, Labour)
I am not speaking for the Home Office. There may be exceptional cases when such action will be necessary. If I had sensitive information that had been derived from the United States, for example, about an individual, it would not be necessary for me to drag into my office the chairman of the SIA and say, ``You will not grant a licence to that individual because I have information from X intelligence agency in the United States that he is funded by the Russian or Italian mafia. He is an undesirable person. Although I am not telling you not to issue a licence, I shall leave you to look at the file to make your own judgment.'' In some circumstances, such action would not only be desirable, but absolutely necessary.
I do not believe that such provisions will be abused. As the Minister of State said, the industry is evolving. In 20 years from now, the number of man guards will be far less because, regrettably or otherwise, technology will have supplanted them. The Home Office and other Government Departments must be able to change gear without coming back to Parliament to ask for new legislation and I believe that the Bill is sufficiently flexible to allow them to do that.
We will have the Home Affairs Committee, the Defence Committee, the statutory instrument process, parliamentary questions, private briefings with the Home Secretary, meetings with the chief executive or the chairman of the SIA and an annual report. There will be many opportunities for Members of Parliament to express their views without necessarily thinking that somewhere in the Home Office is a malevolent individual who is hell-bent on denying them the necessary information.
The Minister would be capable of providing more detail on many occasions, and that information could, quite legitimately, swiftly be made public. However, there must be many circumstances in the murky world of policing, national crime and international private security in which it is necessary for information that is transmitted not to find its way into the public domain. If the chief constable of any police authority were asked if he would be prepared for all communications to his officers or to the police authority to appear in the local newspaper, he would think that we were bonkers.