Policing and Crime Bill — House of Lords, 2016-07-18
Topic: Law and Crime
John Attlee (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am grateful to my noble and learned friend the Minister for his explanation of the Bill. There appear to be many desirable components in it, some of which may help to address my concerns. The first one is that I am extremely unhappy with how the police exercise their powers, especially in some of the very high profile cases that have arisen in recent years. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, went into greater detail on those. I understand the need for the operational independence of the police, and in particular that there should be no political interference, but it is not clear how the police are held to account for operations, especially in cases of misjudgment rather than criminality or serious misconduct. Further, I am not clear on what useful role the courts or the judiciary have in issuing warrants. In some of the high profile cases that were referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, a warrant would have been issued. I would like to explore in Committee exactly what the role of the judiciary is Closely linked to the issue of the conduct of the police in investigations is leadership in the police. My noble friend Lord Wasserman touched on integrity in the police, which is a closely related issue. So far as I am aware, the police do not objectively measure leadership. They might measure integrity, management and the ability to command a situation, but they do not objectively measure leadership, by which I mean the art of getting people to do things they do not really want to do: unlike in the Armed Forces, where no matter how clever or charismatic you are—although I accept that charisma is slightly linked to leadership—if you do not have innate leadership qualities, you are not going to get a commission I intend to raise these two matters in Committee in great detail. However, I may be pleasantly surprised by some of the provisions in the Bill when we look at it closely. There is certainly plenty of scope for amendments to address my issues What I want to spend most of my time addressing is Clause 114 dealing with deactivated firearms. I declare an interest as I inherited my grandfather’s Webley .455 First World War revolver. I took the decision to have it deactivated in order to be absolutely certain that it could not cause a tragedy and so that it could not fall into the wrong hands and create a problem. Originally I had a firearms certificate which said that the weapon was not to be fired, but there was always the possibility of a child acquiring just one round and that one round causing a complete disaster. However, it did cost me money to have the pistol deactivated and I must have significantly lowered its value, because collectors with the right type of firearms certificate will pay a lot more money for a serviceable firearm than a deactivated one, but it was worth it for the reassurance The Prime Minister has always said that Brexit means Brexit, but she said it after this Bill had been drafted. I have not got fully to the root of this issue, but it appears that Clause 114 seeks to include any EU regulation or directive in the UK regime for firearm deactivation. Clause 114 is to be found on page 131. It introduces the concept of a defectively deactivated firearm. My grandfather’s Webley 455 would fall into that category. Thus I can keep it, I do not need a firearms certificate or any record of its deactivation, although the proof house would have a record of its deactivation inspection. However, I cannot sell or transfer it. In Committee I will suggest redrafting Clause 114(4) so that either a UK-spec or an EU-spec deactivation is okay, but I suspect that the Minister will violently resist that suggestion because he cannot possibly accept such an amendment, the reason being that an EU-spec deactivation is far below the standard of a UK-spec deactivation. I would suggest that the standard to be achieved needs to make it more difficult to reactivate a deactivated firearm than to make a new one. That is what the UK spec achieves. Of course, I am making the assumption that an engineering workshop is available with the necessary machines I am a little unclear why the EU deactivation spec is so poor. I understand that it involves changing the material in the steel plug in the barrel. In other words, it is necessary to temporarily reactivate the UK deactivated firearm and then put in the plug to EU specifications. However, we should remember that the EU specification for deactivation is not good enough for UK standards. That perhaps accounts for the rather odd drafting of Clause 114 Does this matter? The UK has many collectors of deactivated firearms. They cause no problem, and that is why the Bill does not restrict ownership of deactivated firearms. If they are used to cause distress to other citizens, there are very serious offences already in the Firearms Act. There will be plenty of collectors who have collections worth tens of thousands of pounds. Such collections could be made worthless. My grandfather’s Webley 455 is considerably reduced in value. It may be worthless, because it would not be worth the cost of having it deactivated to EU specifications. It would not particularly be a problem for me if my grandfather’s Webley had no value. But for collectors, and there are lots of them, this is a very big problem If Brexit does mean Brexit, surely we can just delete Clause 114. Failing that, I hope I can have a meeting with the relevant Home Office experts and the appropriate Lords Minister—I understand that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, will be taking the Bill through. Obviously, any such meeting would need to be before we reach Committee stage. In conclusion, I look forward to the subsequent stages of the Bill and to supporting the Minister, while not neglecting my concerns, particularly about police leadership and Clause 114.