Clause 56 - Disclosure notices
Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill
9:30 am
Mr Tony McWalter (Hemel Hempstead, Labour/Co-operative)
I hope that the Committee will resist the amendment. The Liberal party is dealing with the issue in an extraordinary way. When serious offences are being committed, quite often the first thing that the police come across is a rather trivial offence.
I have just been on the parliamentary police scheme. One of the cases that we looked at was that of a builder who had dumped some rubble in front of the house of somebody who had not paid for their driveway. However, underlying that trivial matter—although it was not so trivial for the people who could not get into their house—was a sophisticated network of people knocking off driveway materials and cheating the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise on a huge scale. It was only because an apparently trivial offence was seen as the tip of an iceberg and referred to those capable of dealing with interwoven networks that that network of serious offences was picked up.
It is sometimes necessary to get information by requiring people to say in the first place, for example, exactly where they got their driveway materials. I hope that the Minister will resist the extraordinary idea that serious offences should come with a big sign on their foreheads saying, ''This is a serious offence.''