Clause 18 - Applications for registration.
Vehicles (Crime) Bill
5:45 pm
Mr John Bercow (Buckingham, Conservative)
I wish to speak to new clause 1. As members of the Committee will be aware, the Bill provides for three new offences. We can see the logic of what the Government have in mind. They wish to create offences of selling false registration plates, knowingly supplying registration plates to those sell fake plates and supplying plates or their components to unregistered persons. There is a lacuna in the Bill, however, which is the absence of a provision along the lines of new clause 1. It would specify that
Any person who knowingly makes a false application under section 18 shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale.
To put it simply, it is obviously wrong for a person to seek to register when he has no justification for so doing, or to submit false particulars on the standard form, the merits of which I was commending to the Committee earlier, or on some other form.
Misleading the central authority and thereby becoming an established and registered supplier cannot be justified. However, the Bill does not appear to contain an offence of knowingly making a false application.
In other respects, the Government have taken a robust line on the need for substantial fines. The Minister said, in an earlier reference to the courts, that there would be the normal discretion as regards fines, and that he wanted to give a signal that the Government regarded the matter seriously. I believe that I interpreted him correctly as saying that he expected the maximum fine to be imposed in many cases. After all, the Government have an ambitious target, courtesy of the vehicle crime reduction action team, of a 30 per cent. cut in vehicle crime by 2004. They have made relatively modest—one might almost say snail's pace—progress towards that target in the past year or so. Therefore, it would make sense to create an offence in the Bill that would send a clear signal that it is unacceptable to submit a false application. Such an offence, and the potential imposition of a level 5 fine on the standard scale, would be consistent with the seriousness of purpose that the Government have rightly attached to the Bill.
I said earlier that we were anxious to ensure the security and robustness of the new regulation. The Minister said that ultimate responsibility for the provision of false information would lie with the person who knowingly provided that information. However, he said that a residual responsibility would be conferred on the DVLA to use its best endeavours to hold, and provide to other interested parties on request, the correct information. Nevertheless, the Minister and I agreed—and I think that other members of the Committee will conclude—that the responsibility for false information should mainly lie with the person who provided it. The DVLA will do its best, but it cannot be expected to get it right in every particular. Therefore, someone who makes a false application should surely be considered guilty of an offence and liable to conviction and subject to a fine. It does not seem unreasonable to propose that that fine should not exceed level 5 on the standard scale.
I hope that the Minister is comfortable with that idea. I am not sure why such a provision is not in the Bill, and I do not intend to pursue the point any further, but we must be consistent about the Bill's purpose and intended effect. Some hon. Members who support the Bill have occasionally criticised the Opposition for not being as committed to its objective as they are. I utterly reject that, because there is an essential concurrence between us about its purpose—there is merely some disagreement or uncertainty about its effect. As the Opposition, we are entitled to propose ways in which the Bill might be made more effective and its deficiencies or lacunae filled. That is what the new clause would do.