Clause 1
Fraud Bill [Lords]
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General & Shadow Spokesman On Community Cohesion, Law Officers (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
May I first of all apologise for removing my jacket without permission? I made an assumption of your benevolence that I should not have made, although I am delighted that having done so, I was not ticked off. I thank you for that. Broadly speaking, I welcome the new offence of fraud and have no doubt that the Solicitor-General is right in what he says about the necessity of having such an offence. I also welcome the manner in which the Law Commission put forward the proposals. The Government have followed those proposals inclause 1 and I have every reason to welcome what has been done.
If I was to flag up a concern, it would be one that will become clearer a little further on in the Bill, when we come to fraud by abuse of position. But it is also worth highlighting it as this stage. As the Solicitor-General rightly says, one of the consequences of what we are doing is dealing with the problem of the victimless crime.
Although little crime is victimless, my experience of fraud cases—in particular, one long fraud trial in which I was involved—was that, as the Solicitor-General has highlighted, the prosecution case collapsed precisely because it was unable to show upon whom the false representations had been operated. As I was appearing for the defence I suppose I was jolly glad about this.
The case was one of mortgage fraud. The nature of the crime was that fictitious applications were being made for mortgages in the names of all sorts of people who did not exist, or front individuals were being used to apply for mortgages. But the mortgages all related to real properties. As the case proceeded, it became quite clear that those operating in the building societies at a time when the market was entirely buoyant and was rising spectacularly could not have cared less where the applications for mortgages were coming from. As far as they were concerned, they knew that the lending was secure on the property; therefore, the fact that the circumstances in which this information was coming to them was totally bogus was of no interest to them.
A cynic might have said that they were rather pleased to get the work; as they were all on bonuses according to the amount of mortgages that they were handing out and they knew that the lending was secure, they may even have turned a blind eye to the fact that the person submitting this large number of mortgages was in fact concocting the names of the people making the applications.
That illustrates precisely the sort of point the Solicitor-General and the Law Commission have highlighted and which clause 1 is designed to deal with. The sort of activity I have just described would be caught by the clause because, by its very nature it was a case of false representation and failures to disclose information about what was taking place.
I make that point to the Solicitor-General because as we look at the Bill in its entirety, we will have to be careful to try to ensure that we draw a dividing line between activity we wish to criminalise and activity that we might regard as morally reprehensible but which I have some doubts as to whether we would wish to make criminal. That comes to light particularly when we consider abuse of position. I highlight that now because it may be advantageous to look at it in terms of the broadest framework of the Bill before we move on to the specifics. To summarise, we are completely satisfied with clause 1 and with the broad thrust of the Bill, which merits support.