Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill
9:25 am
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Shadow Minister, Economic Affairs; Sutton Coldfield, Conservative)
I join the Minister in welcoming you to the Chair, Dame Marion, and I welcome your co-Chairman, Mr. O'Brien.
We support the motion. The programme is tight, but I thank the usual channels for their extremely helpful negotiations on it. I am grateful to the Minister and the Government Whip for making it clear to the Committee that we have some flexibility on the times for which we sit each day and that, if we come to the buffers and have not yet reached the end of the Bill, we may have a little more time beyond that shown in the motion.
I hope that we can have a good length of time on Report, because the Bill raises a number of issues. It is not only about the Serious Organised Crime Agency; it deals with many other matters that are of concern across the House, and a decent time debating them on the Floor of the House would be extremely helpful.
It may help the Committee if I explain how the Opposition see the debates proceeding. We have a number of priorities. The Committee hopes to get through the whole of part 1 today. However, three debates on amendments to schedule 1 are of particular concern to the Opposition Front Bench. They are on amendments Nos. 64, 120 and 4, and the amendments grouped with them. They deal with the first of three big points about which we wish to probe the Minister.
The second big point comes in clauses 6, 9 and 10, which deal with the power of the Home Secretary and operational independence. The third big debate will be on clause 38, which deals with the terms and conditions of those who serve in SOCA and with the complaints procedure.
We then come to six much smaller points, on which we have a number of questions for the Minister. They are to be found in clause 3, on the duty to disseminate information to other agencies; in clause 5, which provides that criminal proceedings instituted under the Bill should take place only on serious crime; in clause 7, because we think it appropriate that Parliament should debate SOCA's annual report; in clause 23, which deals with what I would call hot pursuit in Scotland; in clause 27, which deals with equipment for SOCA; and in clause 48, which deals with the employment status of those who work for SOCA. Those are the points of concern for the main Opposition on part 1; we would like to get almost as far as that today.
There will then remain six sittings. We hope to cover disclosure notices and financial reporting orders on Thursday morning, and at the afternoon sitting we will deal with money laundering and probe the Government about why intercept evidence is not permitted. We aim to discuss issues relating to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the powers of police community support officers next Tuesday morning. On the currently scheduled final day, Thursday week, we will deal with the vexed issue of animal rights, on which my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) has much to say and has done much work. Finally, we will address religious hatred, which is of particular interest to my hon. Friend the Shadow Attorney-General, the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve).
As the Minister knows, we support much of the Bill, but in the case of the Serious Organised Crime Agency the devil is in the detail. As I said on Second Reading, and as many experts have said outside the House, if we get the structure of SOCA wrong, it will not contribute to the battle against organised crime, which we all support. Indeed, we could make matters worse. The Bill can be improved. We have a series of excellent amendments with which to tempt the Minister, and we are grateful to the wide range of outside bodies that have been so helpful in framing the amendments, some of which, as the Minister will have noticed, are multiple choice. We hope that they will find favour with her.
In general, we support both the central issues in the Bill and the things that have been bolted on to it. That support is not, of course, to be confused with our substantial criticism of the Government's record on law and order and the attempt to conceal the rise in recorded crime that has taken place across Britain. The following cannot be described as organised or serious, but at 2 o'clock this morning, as I was preparing for this sitting, an attempt to steal my bicycle from outside my house in London was thwarted only by the prompt action of Mrs. Mitchell, who chased off the three yobs who tried to do it.
On behalf of the Opposition, I support the motion.