Civil Contingencies Bill
2:45 pm
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley, Conservative)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for leading me to broaden my point. A cracker might get into the commercial sector. We have talked about money and the problems that could be caused to the financial sector. On a much wider scale, businesses in general could be affected: food supplies might in part be affected, as might the running of commerce. If that were the case, we would face a real problem.
The hon. Gentleman is raising a relevant point: the word ''emergency'' is used in a general sense in the Bill. Since the draft Bill was produced, the Government have redefined it to try to ensure that it is not too broad, but because of the very essence of what we are talking about it has to be somewhat broad or else we would not be able to cover some of the eventualities that we cannot predict. That leads on to some of the international terrorism that has occurred: we all joined together to ensure that we can counter the terrorism that exists throughout the world and address every eventuality. I hope that we can address serious crime as well as terrorism.
I shall move away from e-commerce to food and, specifically, to medicines, which are outside the scope of the legislation. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman is old enough to remember the problem that arose in the United States of America with the tampering with a medicine called Tylenol. That was done for financial reasons, so it was a crime rather than terrorism. Someone tampered with bottles of Tylenol and put them back on the shelves of chemists somewhere in the USA.