Clause 37 - Certain orders made on
Anti-social Behaviour Bill
10:15 am
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
First, let my say that I think that the debate that we have just had was extremely useful. Dealing with these amendments is linked to that. I wanted personally to compliment the Minister and the Government. That is not something that I do every day, but the Minister will be aware that in a previous debate in which he and I were involved in Committee, I proposed amendments to enable courts to publicise the names of juveniles who had been made the subject of an antisocial behaviour order. The Minister gave a sympathetic reply, as he often does. He said that he would continue to keep the matter under review. He was under pressure from his own Back Bench, specifically the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Ms Munn), who did not agree with him. However, he said that he agreed more with me than with her, which caused some amusement.
I was delighted to see subsection (9)(c) in this clause, because it is the Government's response to the points not only that I made in Committee, but that my local authority had made. I am looking at a letter sent by the chief executive of Surrey Heath borough council, Mr. Barry Catchpole, to Louise Casey who, I believe, is still the head of the antisocial behaviour unit at the Home Office. The Minister is looking puzzled. I will draw his attention to the Official Report when we break at 11.25 am. I remember this vividly and I am not being tongue-in-cheek. This is a genuine thank you to the Minister and to all those people in the Home Office who put subsection (9)(c) into the Bill, because it reflects precisely a weakness that had occurred in my own constituency where the police and the local authority—the crime and disorder reduction partnership—had done a huge amount of work to bring two brothers finally before the courts and to issue an ASBO. The local Camberley newspaper desperately wanted to publicise that as part of the deterrent effect—to make an ASBO work and to make local people aware that an ASBO had been granted. However, because the two brothers were under the relevant age, the press were refused permission to publicise the case, and the police and chief executive of the local authority wrote to me to say that that defeated the object of the exercise and weakened the ASBO. The newspaper group took the matter to appeal to obtain permission to publicise it and were refused because of the state of the law. That should not happen now, so it is a pleasure to be able to compliment the Minister on this occasion.
I know that we will return to the issue of publicity on a second group of amendments, so I do not wish to say too much now, but it is no surprise that when the Government finally do something right and listen to us, the Liberal Democrats then oppose it. I have no hesitation in drawing attention to the fact that when the Government and the Opposition are doing something sensible together, the Liberal Democrats are against it. We shall return to that.
We are seeking in these amendments to make a further improvement in flexibility. We wish to query with these probing amendments whether it is necessary to have new subsection (3B) in each of subsections (2) and (5). At the moment the Government have inserted:
''It is immaterial whether evidence led in pursuance of subsection (3A) would have been admissible in the proceedings in which the offender was convicted.''
We simply wish to probe whether that is necessary. No doubt the Minister will explain precisely his thoughts on subsections (3B). Does one need to say in such terms that something is immaterial? I am not convinced that those words have to be in the Bill. We will listen to the Minister with interest.