Clause 17 - Register of registration plate suppliers
Vehicles (Crime) Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Charles Clarke (Minister of State, Home Office; Norwich South, Labour)
I shall address that shortly when I come to the end of my remarks. The hon. Gentleman is quite right to raise that issue. We discussed those points when dealing with the amendments.
It is important to ensure that any business connected with number plate supply can determine whether a supplier is registered, as it will be an offence to trade with an unregistered supplier. A certified copy of the register, or an extract from it, will be conclusive evidence of a supplier's authenticity, and information may be disclosed to the police either in bulk or case by case. Access to the information will provide an audit trail, and will enable the police to trace and investigate suppliers that are believed to have supplied false plates.
I shall now deal with the intervention of the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). We addressed the issue of the description of information that might not be supplied under subsection (6)(b) when debating the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Eastleigh and the intervention made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller). We intend, when drafting the regulations, to discuss carefully with the industry whether everything in the register should be disclosed to everybody, or whether there are particular categories of information that it might not be appropriate to disclose. I emphasise the word ``might''. Such categories might include personal addresses or telephone numbers rather than addresses of businesses. There are many examples of such categories, but we have not come to a firm view, so we are including the provision that the Secretary of State may, after consultation with the industry, specify information that is not to be made public. Should the Secretary of State do so, it will be set out in regulation for the House to consider in whatever way it thinks appropriate.