Policing and Crime Bill
10:30 am
David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)
Your strictures are taken into account, Sir Nicholas. I shall move on to say that part 1 contains police reform provisions, which need adequate time for debate; where the Bill deals with police reform, in a way that does not involve reform of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, the provisions partly contentious. The clauses on the senior appointments panel and on collaboration—a hugely important issue—will require the Committee’s time, although not to oppose the principle of the reform of arrangements to facilitate collaboration. With your permission, Sir Nicholas, I stress that while some of the issues in part 1 and other provisions are, in principle, not inimical to the Conservative position—some of the principles are sound—the manner in which the clauses have been drafted prompt many questions. I am sure, Sir Nicholas, that you would not want us just to rubber-stamp things that look okay on the face of it. That is not the case in relation to collaboration or the senior appointments panel in part 1, nor is it the case in relation to part 2, which deals with sex offences and has some important aims. However, as we shall hear from witnesses, and as we shall tease out in future sittings, the drafting of part 2 is incredibly contentious both for support groups that want to help vulnerable sex workers and victims in the sex industry, and for the bodies responsible for clamping down on trafficking. Those important issues are not contentious in principle, but their implementation under the Bill is contentious.
The same can be said of alcohol misuse and the proceeds of crime in part 4. The Opposition are tough on serious organised crime, and tough on terrorism, so the reform of the proceeds or assets from crime regime has our general support. The way in which those provisions will be implemented, however, is quite another question, and it must be teased out in full, not truncated, debate. Finally, aviation security, about which we shall hear more in our evidence-taking session, raises all kinds of questions for industry at a time at which the recession is biting. We certainly want to see what the balance is between better security arrangements, if that is what the clauses deliver, and the cost of implementing them. On the face of it, the programme motion appears to provide adequate time for hon. Members to debate important clauses in an important Bill, but I, for one, am not keen to truncate or cut short any of our sittings, and I expect that they will all be needed adequately to scrutinise the Bill.