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Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North): I thank the Minister for his helpful reply, which meets the points that I made earlier.
Hilary Benn: In the light of my hon. Friend's comment, I believe that I have dealt with everything that he wanted to tease out of me in respect of the amendments. I will resist them for the reasons I have given, but as I said, we propose to pick up a number of the helpful points that were made in the debate.
Mr. Malins: I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Cran.
The Minister spoke kindly and persuasively, but I am disappointed that he will not accept amendment No. 3, in particular, as it would mean that the authorised person would be required to carry evidence of identity and to produce it to the occupier. It is specified in statute that when a policeman who is not in uniform comes to the door, he is obliged, whether asked to do so or not, to identify himself to the occupier, to show documentary evidence
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that he is a constable, to produce a warrant and to supply a copy of it. Clearly, the authorised person will not be in uniform, but we are often told—it is always on the television—not to let people into our house if we do not know who they are. That is good advice, especially for old people. People must produce their identification or they cannot come in.
I worry about the following situation: an officer who is not in uniform calls at the door and says, ''My name is Officer So-and-so and I have come to execute a search warrant. Here is my warrant card.'' The resident says, ''Okay, but who is that with you?'' The officer replies, ''That's nothing to do with you,'' or, ''I'm not obliged to tell you,'' or ''It's Mr. John Smith, an accountant, who is here to assist me with certain technical matters.'' Under the Bill as drafted, the officer is not obliged to say the last of those three sentences. I want to be sure that under the code he will be obliged to do so. Can the Minister help me in that respect?
Hilary Benn: With the greatest of pleasure, as it was what I thought I had told the Committee already. The officer is in charge and it is right that he—or she—should identify himself. It will be written into the code of practice that all those participating should be identified to the individual whose home is being searched, all other things being equal—leaving aside circumstances in which those involved have to ram down the door to get in.
Mr. Malins: In that case, the Minister has gone a long way to help us, and I am grateful for his observations. We have had a good debate and I am largely reassured, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Simon Hughes: These are important issues and we did not have a stand part debate on clause 1.
This term has seen the beginning of citizenship on the national curriculum. It is important for citizens, young and adult, to know about what powers are vested and in whom, when an officer wants to search the home, for example. It should be part of the code that people know about when they leave school. I appreciate that it is not principally a Home Office responsibility, but it is indirectly, and the Home Secretary has said publicly that he is interested in such matters. Rights and responsibilities should be part of what is taught at school. When people know the score, it will cause much less aggravation than when they do not know their rights and someone wants to stop them or search their home.
Hilary Benn: I will gladly undertake to pass on the hon. Gentleman's comments to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 2 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
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Clause 3
Bail elsewhere than at police station
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome): I beg to move amendment No. 85, in
clause 3, page 2, line 13, after 'practicable', insert 'and within 2 hours'.
The Chairman: With this we may take the following amendments: Government amendment No. 35
No. 75, in
clause 3, page 2, line 22, leave out 'the constable is satisfied'.
No. 10, in
clause 3, page 2, line 29, leave out 'necessary' and insert 'essential'.
No. 11, in
clause 3, page 2, line 31, after 'delay', insert 'which shall not exceed two hours'.
No. 79, in
(9) He may be bailed for no longer than four weeks from the day of arrest.'.
No. 90, in
schedule 1, page 151, line 6, leave out paragraph 2.
Mr. Heath: I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Cran.
The clause deals with what is commonly known as street bail. We all understand the clear operational benefits of allowing the police some flexibility, but we must ensure that the same delimitations and safeguards that apply at a police station also apply elsewhere. The process requires clarity, so that everyone knows what is happening, why and what the consequences might be.
Two of the amendments in the group were tabled by the Liberal Democrats and we have happily subscribed to the Conservative amendments.
Amendment No. 85 is a corollary to a later amendment tabled to deal with the potential delay factor—unquantified at present, but limited to two hours under the amendment. It deals with the original wording of the 1984 Act, particularly the vagueness in the phrase ''as soon as practicable'' after the arrest. It would be qualified by the changes in new section 30A. We can easily add clarity to the original wording by limiting ''as soon as practicable'' to a maximum of two hours. In operational terms, it is unlikely to have a significant effect. It simply avoids an unpardonable delay in taking a person to a police station after arresting him. That seems a sensible explanation of what the term may mean.
Amendment No. 90 is a probing amendment. Paragraph 2 to schedule 1 deals with entry and search after arrest. We are not sure what the Minister has in mind in here and we hope that he can elucidate it for us. We assume that we are talking about entry and search of premises rather than a person in this instance. It would be helpful if he could set out not only how he construes the meaning of that paragraph, but under which circumstances he intends
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it to be used. There is at least a strong supposition that it reduces the requirements for obtaining an authorisation. He can tell me if that supposition is wrong. If so, we would need to be persuaded that there is a case for reducing the conditions for authorisation, because of particular circumstances that are not immediately apparent.
I should like to deal briefly with the other amendments in the group, although I do not wish to steal anyone else's thunder. I welcome Government amendment No. 35. Clearly it would be silly to put the requirement on a named constable, rather than a constable in generality, for determining that a person no longer needs to be detained. That seems a sensible drafting change. We look forward to the explanations of amendments Nos. 75 and 10. I have briefly touched on amendment No. 11. No doubt the hon. Member for Beaconsfield will wish to expand on that. We will certainly support him.
Finally, I should like to make a broad point in this context. There is a concern about what a local police station is. It will mean different things in different places. There is an underlying assumption in this part of the Bill that every person being arrested will be in the vicinity of a police station that is staffed, available, has a custody suite and is within a reasonable distance from his normal abode. In many of our constituencies that is simply not the case. Many of our police stations are closed for a lot of the time. If the duty sergeant or constable is called away, the station may be closed without notice. Many of our police stations are some considerable distance from where the arrested person lives.
If a designated police station in this context is a police station with a custody suite that is capable of providing custody within the meaning of the current legislation, my constituency does not contain a single such station. We do not have a police station with operational cells in which a person who has been arrested could be held. There needs to be a little amplification from the Minister about what would happen if, under those circumstances, someone was arrested, given bail and required to report to a police station that was not available at the requisite moment. That seems to place an additional burden on the person arrested, which does not help them to comply with the conditions that have been set out for them.
Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield): I, too, welcome you to the Chair this afternoon, Mr. Cran.
The concerns raised by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) are broadly shared by the Conservative party. It is interesting that we have come to roughly the same conclusion, albeit using a slightly different approach. He made points that we believe should be considered in the context of bail elsewhere than at a police station.
I fully accept that, although our amendments Nos. 10 and 11 would not amend anything that the Minister is adding to the 1984 Act, they would amend the existing Act in several important ways. This might be a good opportunity to revisit the Act and its working,
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and to consider some of the areas that, in my experience, can give cause for concern.
As the Minister will have seen, amendment No. 10 is about the circumstances in which a person may not be taken immediately to a police station. I am aware from my professional practice that there will be circumstances in which it is essential—rather than simply necessary—not to take someone who has been arrested immediately to a police station.
In amendment No. 11, I suggest a limit of two hours. I am the first to acknowledge that there may be circumstances in which two hours is too short. I hope that the Minister will regard the amendments as probing. We tabled them to try to simulate debate in Committee on an important issue.
As a general principle, I have no doubt that when someone is arrested, the best place for him to be as soon as possible, from his point of view as well as for the proper administration of the justice system, is in a police station. That is where he will get access to legal representation, where a proper assessment will be made of his condition, where a proper search of his documentation can be carried out, where a doctor can be called if necessary, and where the process of investigation can take place in an environment that is controlled and properly regulated by PACE.
Anywhere else falls outside that. That said, I can think of at least one case in which I was involved in which a man approached a police officer and informed him that he had just stabbed a man and believed that he had killed him, although he did not know where that person was in relation to the domestic premises in which the stabbing had taken place. The police spent some time with the man trying to find out where he had committed the offence. Eventually, they found a corpse. One can well understand that, in those circumstances, the priority was not to get the individual to the police station, but to try to see whether it would be possible to identify the place where the victim lay, with the help of the man who was expressing some contrition about what he had done. That must be a perfect example of circumstances in which getting someone to a police station is a lower priority.
Even if I can concede that the two-hour limit in amendment No. 11 may be too fixed in this context, I wonder about the use of ''essential'' as opposed to ''necessary'', because there should be a rigorous test to decide not to take a person to a police station, for the purposes of the police carrying out the investigation. I see no reason why it would not have been possible, in the circumstances and with the offence that I have just described, even with the word ''essential'', not to take that person to the police station. It would have been possible for the police to keep him, while they went in search of the victim. There will be other similar instances.
Having been prompted by those amendments, will the Minister tell the Committee how the Home Office views that issue? Will he also tell us how PACE has been operating in that respect, and whether there have been complaints about people being detained for too long without being taken to a police station?
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