Clause 5 - Controls on trade in controlled goods
Export Control
12:30 pm
Mr Gerald Howarth (Aldershot, Conservative)
I wish to support the reservations that my hon. Friend expressed. I also want to reassert the point that the Committee must be under no illusions: however tightly the Government try to draw legislation to encompass those who traffic in illegal weapons and so on, there is a grave risk that the people caught and hampered will be engaged in legitimate activity, and that those who are the targets of such measures will still get away with impunity. As the hon. Member for Richmond Park suggested, they will be beyond the reach of UK law.
The Minister accepted that such people would not be touchable until they came back to UK soil. He is right, and I do not think that there is another way around it. Look how long Ronnie Biggs was capable of sweating it out in Brazil after the great train robbery. We have a limited opportunity to deal with the criminals, and I am concerned that the controls on trade in controlled goods will impose considerable burdens on industry.
The dummy orders, which were delivered to us at the end of last week, are relevant as they set out the controlled goods. To be perfectly candid, having glanced through them, I have no clue what azidomethylmethyloxetane is and nor, I suspect, does 99.99 per cent. recurring of the population of the UK. We are simply incapable of interpreting the documents. Do Ministers feel that they have covered the ground comprehensively? I am sure that some wretched chemical has been omitted, probably because someone cannot spell it. The documents are extremely extensive.
Like my hon. Friend, I have spoken to the Defence Manufacturers Association, which has not had the chance to go through the dummy orders. It did not even know that they had been published. Throughout our proceedings on the Bill, we have criticised the Government about the fact that we have debated controls on the trade in controlled goods without having a definition of what controlled goods were. We now have those definitions, but only at the end of the summer recess, and no one has had a chance to go through them.
I am disappointed that the Government have failed to produce the dummy orders—that is probably a good description of them—until now, and that they do not appear to have made them available to industry in time for it to comment. The Committee has not had time to receive such comments, so we have not been able to feed them in and hold Ministers accountable for the orders on the concerns that are certain to be raised by industry.
I hope that you will agree, Mr. Benton, that it is entirely appropriate that my criticisms of the Government should be levelled now, and that Ministers should make themselves available to answer them. They cannot make themselves available to the Committee now because of the 12-week consultation process. In my view, that is constitutionally improper.
The dummy orders came out on Friday. They are an integral part of the legislation. The Committee has had an opportunity to assess the dummy orders, yet they are couched in language that most of us will fail to comprehend; and the industries to which the orders will apply, and against which substantial and draconian penalties will be imposed if they transgress the orders, have been unable to comment or to let us have their views. We are therefore about to give the Government a blank cheque on the control of trade in controlled goods provided under clause 5.
Mr. Ian Pearson (Dudley, South) indicated dissent.