Commons Chamber

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House Of Commons

Friday 29 April 1983

The House met at half-past Nine o'clock

Prayers

[MR. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Orders Of The Day

Copyright (Amendment) Bill

As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.

Clause 1

Amendments Of Section 21 Of Copyright Act 1956

9.35 am

I beg to move amendment No. 1, in page 2, line 1 leave out from 'on' to 'or' in line 2 and insert

'conviction to a fine not exceeding £2,000'.

The amendment doubles the maximum fine that can be imposed on those who are convicted of what are described in the Bill as lesser offences—although they are grave offences—of selling or letting the articles described in the Bill for hire or by way of trade, exhibiting or possessing them. The maximum fines in the Bill for these offences are too low. I appreciate that the cross-referencing shows that a maximum fine of £1,000 is allowed per copy found, per offence. The hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) suggested during the earlier stages of the Bill that that might not be enough, and on looking at the problem in more detail I came to the conclusion that those who are selling, letting or in any way trading or exhibiting such articles can make a large amount of money. Therefore, the fine of £1,000 per copy will quickly prove inadequate to stop this practice.

On Second Reading I made the point that with an investment of about £60,000 a pirate video could make a huge income in a year. The same applies to the smaller-scale offender, who, with merely two video machines, a suitable connection and a supply of tape, can make many copies that might be taken in under this heading. We must remember the background to this Bill. At present, there are about 2 million video cassette recorders in private hands in the United Kingdom alone. There is a huge domestic market for any potential pirate and every pirate tape takes away jobs from the legitimate industry. Over the past four or five years, 2,000 people have been legitimately employed in the video cassette industry in this country, but it is believed that this figure could easily have been doubled if the pirates had not taken such a hold. London is the centre for illicit copying all around the world, and we lose about £120 million each year in revenue. The need for stiffer penalties has not been denied by any hon. Member.

We must have firm discouragement of pirates, and penalties must be on a par with those of other countries such as the United States of America and France. While I am satisfied with the further provisions of the Bill of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden) for unlimited fines for the graver offences, I hope that my right hon. Friend can see his way to agreeing to my amendment today and thus doubling the maximum fine on the so-called lesser offences. It is well known that many magistrates have a habit of not imposing maximum fines. Sometimes the penalties that one reads about appear ludicrous to many members of the public. If the maximum fine for this offence were £2,000, the average fine that would have to be paid by these grave offenders will be more realistic.

I do not see how my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir. J. Eden) can accede to the plea that my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend (Mr. Brinton) has just made, despite the fact that all hon. Members would adhere to its sentiment and spirit. We have considered it right that a certain tariff of fines should be leviable in the magistrates' court and the tariff of fines that is leviable for this offence is the maximum that a magistrates' court can now impose —a maximum fine of £1.000. It would not be desirable, even if it were sensible, to tinker with a framework that Parliament and successive Governments have tried to stabilise so that the law should be more readily understood, more certain, and more fairly applied throughout the land.

In addition to that technical objection there does not seem to be a strong reason for the amendment. It seeks substantial punishment for those who offend in the way that is laid down in the Bill and the measures upon which it is based but that provision exists because the Bill enables the prosecution to apply to the magistrates' court, not for summary trial but for trial in the Crown court or before a jury. In those circumstances the fine is unlimited and the sentence of imprisonment that may be imposed is two years. Therefore, if a case is of such seriousness as to be outside the category of the ordinary small-time retailer who is doing no great harm, albeit at profit to himself, there is ample provision in the Bill for it to be taken to a higher court where the sentence would be much greater than the maximum fine of £2,000 that my hon. Friend proposes.

Let me explain in a little more detail what I have in mind. A small-time crook—these people are crooks—who has an illicit copy in his possession can hire it out at £10 one hundred times. One can begin to see how the money mounts up on that one copy. Moreover, a popular film could be hired out many more than one hundred times, thus paying any fine that may be imposed for that offence. That is why the fine should be heavy.

I agree completely. I merely point: out that as my hon. Friend's case grows stronger so does the case for leaving the Bill as it is because there is a provision for imposing a fine in excess of £2,000 and for a sentence of imprisonment far in excess of that which is available to the magistrates court. Therefore, the more enormous is the offence that is committed by the small retailer the worse becomes the case that my hon. Friend is propounding. There is more scope for proper punishment in the Bill than there would be if it were amended, as it were putting a temptation in the way of any magistrate to say than an offence is summary and that therefore his powers are limited to an imposition of a £2,000 fine. The Bill has more scope for substantial sentencing in a proper case than there would be if my hon. Friend were to extend the limit of the magistrates court's powers which might, in some cases, prevent a person going to a higher court where the sentences would be more substantial.

There is the additional advantage that there is more likely to be publicity in the Crown court. The press are more likely to report proceedings in the Crown court than in the magistrates' court. Therefore, the effect of a substantial sentence in the Crown court will reach a wider public, thereby perhaps effecting a more substantial deterrent than if the matter were trundled away quickly with the speeding and traffic offences in the magistrates' court when nowadays few members of the press gather.

For those reasons I am doubtful about my hon. Friend's amendment although I, and I should think nearly all hon. Members here, if not all, would support the spirit in which it is advanced. I shall be interested to hear what my hon. Friend the Minister says in reply.

9.45 am

Like my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), I have much sympathy with the amendment that has been moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend (Mr. Brinton). I am sure that it would find an echo in every part of the House because no hon. Member can now be unaware of the magnitude of the crime that is being perpetrated against the legitimate manufacturer and retailer of video cassettes and other copied material.

The size of that illegal trade has been well illustrated by my hon. Friend. There are other aspects of that illegal traffic with which I would dearly love to be able to deal in the Bill, but that cannot be. There are those who engage in the making of pornographic films and cassettes, the video nasties and all the other associated material portraying acts of extreme violence in the most offensive manner. The making and selling of such films in cassette form represents a major onslaught against society. It is an unscrupulous and callous attack on impressionable minds but it is not possible to deal with the matter within the compass of the Bill which claims only to be an interim measure with limited objectives.

The Bill seeks to increase the penalties for those who seize other people's property and who, by copying that property, seek to make profit for themselves at the legitimate owner's expense. They comprise the manufacturer, the large-scale operator, and the retailer. It is the retailer who comes within the compass of my hon. Friend's amendment.

I am the first to recognise that some illegal retailing activity is on a large scale. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton stated that the large-scale operators would be caught by the option given to magistrates' courts to determine whether cases should be committed to a Crown court, where the operators would be liable to higher or unlimited penalties. The run-of-the-mill illegal retailer who makes back-to-back copies and then lets them out or sells them would not come within the description of a large-scale operator but he is causing quite unacceptable damage to the legal owner of the material. In that case, he would be subject to the maximum penalty in the Bill although there is a sliding scale. The sliding scale is capable of adjustment and has built into it the safeguard of inflation-proofing. The advantage of the sliding scale penalty in respect of the small-time operator is that it will not remain fixed. The present maximum level on the sliding scale is £1,000.

My right hon. Friend referred to the small-timer. Will he give the House a clearer definition of what is meant by "the small-timer"? How big is a small-timer?

I cannot do so. In many respects the term is relative. Comparisons must be drawn between the operations of a retail outlet with the operations of a manufacturing or production unit. My evidence confirms that in the retailing operations there are instances of substantial illegal trafficking, which would be subject to the large-scale penalties. The magistrates would have the discretion to consider how the operation should be tried.

It is important and worthwhile to keep the two-tier structure and to maintain the first level and relate it to the standard scale, which has provision for an increase. I trust that my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend will not press the amendment. He will appreciate that there is considerable international and national sympathy with his objectives. Countries throughout the civilised world have been doing their best to deal with the problem and they have approached it in many ways. The formula devised in the Bill is reasonably balanced. I trust that my hon. Friend considers that that is the way the Bill should proceed.

The arguments are evenly balanced. It is important-I speak in favour of the amendment—that not only should there be heavy penalties for piracy but also that justice should be swift. If a well-known film is being pirated and prosecutions are taking place, it should be known early in the life of that film that heavy penalties are being imposed. I am worried about the interval, especially in London, between the charge or the issue of the summons for the offence and the date of the ultimate conviction, which could well be three months. As people are unlikely to be kept in custody for this type of offence, six to nine months could pass before the matter comes before a Crown court. Such delays can be disastrous. If the Under-Secretary of State for Trade will consider that point, I will abide by the advice he gives to the House. Although penalties should be heavy, they should be administered swiftly and relate to the current state of the market. Offenders should not have to endure long delays.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) said that he was looking forward to my speech. He will hear an extremely interesting speech in a moment, as he says they always are, but this one is a humdinger. He will learn much from it.

As always.

Before I deal with the legal intricacies of the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend (Mr. Brinton), I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden) on pursuing this matter so vigorously and, so far, successfully. All hon. Members hope that the Bill has a speedy passage in the House, and, as soon as may be, in the other place. My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend pointed out that London has become the video centre of the world. That must never be forgotten. It is especially important that my right hon. Friend's Bill becomes law for that reason. We are discussing not a country with a peripheral interest in this activity but the very hub of this crime — and crime it is. The word "pirate" gives these activities a spurious glamour. The Government must do their best to ensure that any such glamour that lingers is shorn from a crime that deprives a legitimate industry of the greater part of its profit.

My hon. Friend said that the illegitimate industry totals about £120 million a year. That means that about 65 per cent. of all video cassettes in Britain are illegitimate. That is the majority of the industry. This crime has the gravest effect upon the legitimate part of the industry, which is why the Bill must have a speedy passage. My hon. Friend said that, as the crime is serious, the punishment must fit the crime. The heart of his argument is that the punishment does not fit the crime. I wish to persuade him that the punishment does fit the crime, although perhaps he hardly needs convincing.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton put the matter succinctly, forcefully and correctly when he said that it would be rash to tinker with the legal framework of a Bill of this type. He rightly said, as I wish to convince my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend, that there is ample provision in the Bill for most of the more serious crimes that are referred to. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West, who has fought hard and successfully in this matter, has made it clear that, were he Ivan the Terrible, he would make amendments to the Bill, but that he cannot do so. He sees vast areas of things that need to be set up. Incidentally, I must immediately apologise to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton. My remarks were no reflection whatever on his Christian name. I was merely picking up a phrase that one of my officials used the other day in another context.

Particular mention was made of viciously violent video films, which are often known as "nasties". The Bill does not deal with them. It is an important area, but we all know that the opportunities to deal with such things in private Member's Bills are very limited. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West has extremely wisely chosen to focus on perhaps the most important single aspect—the £120 million worth a year of illegitimate video films that are sold in this country. As he said, this is an interim measure of limited objective, and that limited objective is extremely well achieved in the Bill.

10 am

The hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) made an important point about the law's delays. We all know that, ever since Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet", such delays have been making life a misery for all those who are tempted to seek legal redress. That does not make the matter any less important, but there is not much that we can do in the Bill about those delays. However, I do not deny the force of the hon. Gentleman's comments and the difficulties that are often caused because of the length of time between the offence being committed, arrest and trial.

I have responded to some of the peripheral points and should like to turn to the substance of the amendment, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton is so looking forward to that. However, I must tell him that I shall learn more from this speech than he will, but perhaps the House will find a grain or two of wheat amongst the chaff. Although the Government cannot advise acceptance of the amendment—for the reasons that I am about to give—I would not like my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend to think that we are out of sympathy with the main thrust of his arguments. Indeed, we are not. It is, of course, important that maximum penalties of sufficient severity should be available to deter would-be offenders against copyright law, and to punish the guilty I am sure that we are all at one on that point.

The only difference between my hon. Friend's amendment and the proposals in the Bill, which the Government so strongly support, is one of approach. I shall now seek to persuade my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend that the Government's approach — backing my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West—is the more appropriate one. The amendment is concerned solely with the maximum fine available for the less serious offences covered by section 21 of the Copyright Act 1956, but it may help the House if I give an explanation of the increases in penalties achieved by clause 1(3) as a whole in order to set that maximum in its proper context.

The broad pattern is that the film and record-related offences are divided into two categories of more and less serious offences, with penalty structures applicable to each category. The more serious offences are those involving the source of pirate material: the manufacturers, distributors and importers. The less serious offences are those concerned mainly with the retail end of the chain. The more serious offences are made triable either way —that is, summarily in the magistrates' courts, or on indictment in the Crown court, depending on the gravity of the offence as presented by the prosecution and assessed by the magistrates' court, with the defendant having the overriding right to elect trial by jury.

The maximum penalty on summary conviction is a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum, which currently stands at £1,000, and on indictment two years' imprisonment, or a fine, or both. The Crown court has complete discretion over the financial penalties it may impose. That is an extremely important point and I was sorry to see that some sections of the media did not pick it up at an earlier stage. It is an unlimited fine in the Crown court.

The introduction of these heavy penalties, with, the consequent changes to the mode of trial, is, of course, the main purpose of the Bill. They are intended to bite, and to bite hard on the principal offenders, who are concerned with the manufacture, distribution and import of pirate films and sound recordings. They bring the penalties for the offences concerned into line with those already available under the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 in respect of counterfeiting

That leaves the lesser offences, with which this amendment is specifically concerned, of selling or letting for hire, or by way of trade offering or exposing for sale or hire, by way of trade exhibiting in public or possessing by way of trade infringing copies of films or records knowing them to be such. For these offences, summary trial only is retained, together with the existing two months' imprisonment, but the maximum fine is increased to level 5 which, like the statutory maximum to which I have referred, now stands at £1,000. The parity between the statutory maximum for offences triable either way dealt with summarily and level 5 — the maximum applicable to purely summary offences — will become more significant in what I shall have to say in a moment. The retention for purely summary trial of this group of offences, concerned mainly with the retail end of the pirate market, has the Government's full support. The offenders involved are not generally the major culprits, and it is consistent with that assessment that they should not be subject to the penalties available in the Crown court for those who manufacture and provide pirate material to them.

It is important, too, in view of the very large numbers of retail and rental outlets throughout the country, and the heavy pressures on the Crown court, that there should be no prospect of numerous prosecutions for relatively minor offences being undertaken there. As I have said, the right to choose is ultimately in the hands of the defendant, where the offence is triable either way.

That leads me to the first problem posed by this interesting amendment. Its form — I refer to the amendment as opposed to the exegesis given by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend—leaves the mode of trial unspecified. If that is intentional, it is wholly contrary to the provisions of the Criminal Law Act 1977, which established three types of offence by reference to their mode of trial—indictment only; either way —that is, summarily or on indictment; and summary only. It is essential both for the proper distribution of the court's business and in the interests of individual defendants to know, in each case, what mode of trial is available. Therefore, every offence on the statute book now has assigned to it a mode of trial.

As I have said, we firmly believe that the offences concerned here are suitable for summary trial only, as they have been since the 1956 Act, and the prescription in the Bill — "liable on summary conviction" — secures that position. But the main point of substance in the amendment is the proposal that the maximum fine should be £2,000 instead of level 5 on the standard scale. The majority of hon. Members will probably need no reminding of the intricacies of part III of the Criminal Justice Act 1982 in its treatment of maximum fines for summary offences, but for those few—very few—whose memories may need refreshing on the technicalities it may be important that I should say a word or two about them.

Section 37 of the Criminal Justice Act 1982 established a standard scale for summary offences consisting of five levels. Level 1 has a value of £25; level 2 has a value of £50; level 3 has a value of £200; level 4 has a value of £500; and level 5—which we have been discussing this morning—has a value of £1,000. The purpose of scale was twofold—first, to provide a basis for assimilating all maxima into a rational penalty structure; secondly, to enable all maxima to be altered from time to time by order of the Home Secretary to enable them to keep pace with the change in the value of money without the need for primary legislation, which, because of the pressures on parliamentary time, of which we are all acutely aware, is inevitably a piecemeal process itself creating inconsistencies.

The present values on the scale are those employed in the Criminal Law Act 1977. The top value of £1,000 is equal to the value of the statutory maximum applicable to either-way offences tried summarily because the most serious summary offences are generally on a par with those tried on the summary limb of the either-way procedure. Therefore, £1,000 represents the current dividing line between the powers of the magistrates court and those of the Crown court, and thus the jurisdiction applicable to each.

There is a handful of exceptions to this approach, justifiable on particular policy grounds, for dealing with the offences concerned. Some fisheries, shipping and oil pollution offences carry high maxima on summary conviction to deal speedily with the masters of foreign vessels before they leave our jurisdiction. The law relating to sex establishments provides maxima above the norm for the summary offences against the licensing system in order to deal effectively with the widespread public annoyance and disruption of normal commerce that such places may cause to the great financial benefit of their organisers. But unless there are wholly exceptional reasons for departing from the approach I have described, we must stick to the dividing line; otherwise its integrity will go and all the gains made in the Criminal Law Act 1977 and more significantly in the Criminal Justice Act 1982 will be lost, with maximum fines returning to their previous chaotic state.

There are no such reasons in this instance, and I must therefore advise my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend and the House that the present prescription of

"liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale"

is the correct course. In giving my hon. Friend that advice, I should add two further points. The formulation of new subsection (7A) introduced by clause 1(3) means that if more than one offence is involved the maximum applies to each. This covers my hon. Friend's important question, when is a business a big business, which was well illustrated by his example of £10 for a cassette —the cassette might cost less than £10 to rent but it could be rented more than 100 times.

However, I take my hon. Friend's point that a so-called small business can turn over a large amount of money. A retailer facing a number of charges relating to different pirate titles would therefore be liable to maximum fines totalling many thousands of pounds. The first order made by the Home Secretary to increase all summary maxima will take into account inflation since July 1977. That means that if an order is made this year, as is presently contemplated, it will double existing maxima, which in turn means that my hon. Friend's objective will soon be achieved in a way which is consistent with the general approach to penalties in the criminal law.

With that deeply satisfying answer, I hope that my hon. Friend will withdraw his amendment.

10.15 am

In briefly responding to the debate, I thank my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for a humdinger of a reply and the good news kept to the end. Hon. Members who have spoken have been most sympathetic to the target in my amendment. I very much appreciated their sympathy and understood the persuasive arguments which clearly make my humble amendment not possible because of the other problems faced in the legal apparatus, in which I am unqualified.

I appreciate that my right hon. Friend's Bill tries to do the simple thing and does not get involved in minutiae. It will be urgent soon to identify exactly who is a small-timer and how small he really is. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 2

Search Warrants Etc

I beg to move amendment No. 2, in page 2, line 36 after 'constable', insert 'or Trading Standards Officer'.

With this it will be convenient to take the following amendments: No. 3, in page 3, line 3 after 'constable', insert 'or Trading Standards Officer'.

No. 4, in page 3, line 7 after 'constable', insert 'or Trading Standards Officer'.

No. 5, in page 3, line 11 after 'constable', insert 'or Trading Standards Officer'.

I shall be brief, for two reasons. First, I wish to see the Bill have a swift passage to the statute book and, secondly, I should think that the House is anxious to reach the fourth item of business on the Order Paper.

The purpose of the amendment is to extend the powers of search and entry to enable them to be exercised by trading standards officers as well as by constables. Powers already exist under the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 which enable trading standards officers to enter commercial premises to obtain material for prosecution if offences have been committed under that Act. Very often offences committed by retail video pirates constitute offences not only under the Copyright Acts but under the Trade Descriptions Act. If a trading standards officer regularly visits retail establishments, it would be ludicrous if he had powers of entry for one purpose but then, upon discovery of offences under the Copyright Acts, had no power to act.

It is right, therefore, to enable the efforts of the police to be supplemented—the efforts of the police may be exceeded — by those who work for trading standards departments. If we are to stamp out video piracy it is important to put pressure on the retail end. If there are no customers for counterfeit video and audio cassettes there will be no trade in them in this country, although I imagine there will be a lucrative export trade. Therefore, I think it right to encourage trading standards officers to supplement the work of the police, not to restrict their efforts of investigation at the retail end under the Trade Descriptions Act and to give them parallel powers through the provisions of the Bill.

I am not convinced that the police, especially in London, will have enough time and men to take on this additional task. The case load of a detective for burglaries is probably heavier now than even two or three years ago, despite the increase of police manpower in the metropolis. It will be a worthwhile step if the work of the police can be supplemented by those experienced in dealing with the retail trade.

Laws that are not adequately enforced are dead letters. If a law is not adequately enforced, it falls into disrepute. Another reason for ensuring that the law is enforced by as many people as can be legitimately engaged so to do—the Committee and the House are unanimous about this — is that piracy and plagiarism of someone else's intellectual property must be stamped out. Immense damage is being done to the great commercial integrity of our country. In this case the boot is on the other foot but generally speaking this country, which has strong trade mark and copyright laws, has a deep interest in the preservation of intellectual property. Britain is a publishing centre for the world and thus has a huge interest in stamping out counterfeiting in other parts of the world, which is damaging to our trade. That would assist us in maintaining our commercial integrity.

Unfortunately, London has become the centre of this trade. London is to piracy what Chicago used to be to gangsterism. As a commercial centre, it does us no good to have this reputation. The wider the power to enforce the law and the wider the integrity of our enforcement, the better.

Video piracy is in a sense analogous to robbery with violence. The robbery is the stealing of the intellectual property, the fruit of the labour of artists, producers, writers and performers, and is no less than the stealing of cash from someone making his way to the bank. The violence is that done to the immediate piece of property that is stolen and to the medium that is the victim of the act of dishonesty. There is a great danger that our film industry and others, which currently enjoy such a high reputation, will be enormously damaged by the continuation of this illegal trade. There is the danger also that Britain's commercial reputation will be damaged.

The amendments are designed to ensure that we lay down a principle and that that principle is rigorously enforced by those experienced in commercial activity. They are designed to extend the powers of search and enforcement to trading standards officers as well as to police officers.

I cannot advise acceptance of the amendment of the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser), but I am grateful to him for having tabled and moved it as it gives us an opportunity to give closer attention to an issue that we raised briefly in Committee.

First, I pay tribute to the work of the trading standards officers. I know that in the context of the Bill, concerned as it is with the pirating of film material and audio material, all those engaged legitimately in manufacturing and trading in these products will also wish to pay tribute to the work of the trading standards officers. I understand that their authority and powers are derived from the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 and are mainly concerned with the retail trade. The way in which their duties are carried out is dependent, to some extent, upon the attitude of the local authorities to which they ate directly accountable.

The principal involvement of the trading standards officers in video piracy is to identify counterfeiting, which is probably reasonably well described as what appears to be, and is clearly intended to appear to be, a legitimate copy but in fact is a pirated copy. A counterfeit product is one that someone has made to look like the real thing in the hope that the purchaser, or the hirer, will believe that it is the real thing.

Examples of counterfeiting of well-known films are abundant and they include, for example, "Friday 13th", "Blue Lagoon", "Kramer v. Kramer", "Escape to Victory"—nothing to do with the timing of the general election, I think—and "Endless Love"—that could be, I suppose. There are others.

Incidentally, and interestingly enough, counterfeiting would not have encompassed the notorious case of "ET—The Extra-Terrestrial". The counterfeiting would not have been caught within the powers of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 that are available to the trading standards officers. The illegal copying of "ET" originated from a film that had not, at the time when the illicit copying was made, even been released to the British cinema. It was carried out before any legitimate video cassette recording had been made of it.

In addition to the illicit copying and counterfeiting, there is back-to-back copying. This can be carried out by retailers making copies of cassettes that have been purchased by linking two recorders together. A prime example of this practice were copies of "The Postman always Rings Twice".

I am glad to be able to assure the House that the industry will continue to exercise to the full its own responsibilities to safeguard the legitimate manufacturer and trader. The civil Anton Piller procedure will still be used. The efforts of trading standards officers in support of this work are of the greatest possible value, and always will be. Their powers can properly be said to be complementary to the search and seizure powers that will be given to the police under the Bill. The Bill is not the proper measure by which to seek to extend those powers, and I hope that the hon. Member for Norwood will feel able to withdraw the amendment.

First, I shall deal with one or two important peripheral aspects that bear upon the remarks of the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden). On this occasion my reply will not be as impressive as that which followed the debate on amendment No. 1. This is the dull part of the debate.

I welcome the support that the hon. Member for Norwood has given once again to the Bill's general concept. It is extremely important that the House is seen to be united on the need for the Bill, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman's expressions of support, joined with those of my right hon. and hon. Friends, will be valuable in persuading those outside the House of the seriousness with which we take these matters.

I welcome the reference of the hon. Member for Norwood to Britain's commercial integrity. In Britain illegitimate sound recordings run at about 5 per cent. That is 5 per cent. too much, but it is very much less than in other countries. In some countries 80 per cent. of sound recordings are illegitimate. Even in other parts of the Common Market there is not a 1 to 5 per cent. scale but a 5 to 10 per cent. scale. In Italy and Greece the percentages are very much higher. Britain's commercial integrity is a metaphysical commodity which we must do everything in our power to preserve.

I am sure that the House will wish to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister for Consumer Affairs for his initiative in setting up an anti-counterfeiting unit in the Department of Trade to pull together evidence of all the different counterfeiting and copyright offences with which the Department comes into contact. In setting up the unit my hon. Friend has carried out an important job of work. The comments of the hon. Member for Norwood reinforce the action that my hon. Friend has taken.

I remember when this matter of the extension of the role of trading standards officers was raised in Committee the look of ferocious alarm which passed across the face of my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Mr. Fox). He was horrified at the notion that the Government—dedicated to the principle that an Englishman's home is his castle—should, by this measure, extend the right to a whole new range of persons to knock on doors at midnight and kick them in if no answer was forthcoming. That is perhaps an aspect of what the hon. Member for Norwood has in mind in this series of amendments which I think would not receive general acceptance in the House.

10.30 am

I enjoy the speeches of the hon. Member for Norwood because he invariably says something fresh that makes one think. In our earlier debates he compared Cecil B. de Mille to Rembrandt and likened Daryl F. Zanuck to Rubens de nos jours. This time he compared London with Chicago and video piracy with robbery with violence. I take the crime extremely seriously but I suggest that there is some difference between video piracy and beating up old ladies in the street.

I do not know whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West remembers a television series starring Robert Stack as Elliot Ness, the man who wiped out the Capone gangsters in Chicago in the 1930s. The vision of my right hon. Friend as the Elliot Ness of today is attractive.

I am loth to interrupt my hon. Friend's interesting and splendid speech and I do so only to suggest that there is a more serious side to the matter, the one to which the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) was referring, and that is the amount of criminal money that is going into video piracy. There may be at the back of it all considerable violence and other deep crime which should be considered.

That is an important point. Violence is associated with it. In Committee I read an extract from an Evening Standard article written by a colleague in the House pointing out how big-time crime was moving into the whole sphere we are discussing. I was merely saying that citing Al Capone and Chicago was perhaps hyping it up even more than the media and show business do generally. However, I take the point my hon. Friend makes.

As the Minister referred to the Evening Standard, he might have quoted from yesterday's Evening Standard an account of traders being held up at gunpoint so that cassette recorders could be seized. The recorders were loaded into vans along with guns and ammunition. Happily the criminals were apprehended, but for a time there was a grotesque example of extreme violence. It was robbery with violence to obtain cassettes to use for illegal copying.

I did not read that story in yesterday's Evening Standard but, as a result of my right hon. Friend's intervention, I shall certainly do so. It is no part of my purpose to minimise the criminal element. In saying that video piracy was on a par with, as opposed to leading to, robbery with violence, I thought that the hon. Member for Norwood had exaggerated a little. Nevertheless, he has clearly made us all think and I have been pointed in the direction of new evidence, so I am grateful to him, even if that was not the end he originally had in mind.

Does my hon. Friend acknowledge that the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) is correct in that, once criminal money becomes involved and the criminals decide that they will maintain their illegitimate business, they use strong-arm tactics reminiscent of the past in Chicago? It is that which must be worrying the hon. Gentleman, as indeed it worries many of us.

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. I read in the earlier Evening Standard article to which I referred that the criminals were driving a white Rolls-Royce—I do not know what such a vehicle costs these days; perhaps £70,000 if it is a modern one—so we are certainly talking about a very big and violent business.

I am sorry to make my hon. Friend jump up and down like a yo-yo, but I must remind him of the war between video pirates in the not too distant past resulting in a car being blown up or set on fire in the east end of London. That is precisely the sort of serious violence which could escalate into a Chicago style situation.

Yes indeed. That case gave rise to the vivid and graphic description given by a Labour Member in an earlier debate. I agree that in that way we are into an "Untouchables" situation; that was the title of the television series to which I referred earlier. Perhaps, rashly, I was attempting to draw a metaphysical distinction between the parallel which the hon. Member for Norwood was seeking to draw and London as the Chicago of modern times.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West rightly said that we should welcome the tabling of this series of amendments, even though I shall be asking the hon. Member for Norwood to withdraw the amendment. His proposals give us an opportunity at this appropriate moment to look more closely at the whole area and consider whether we want to extend the powers which are being given to the police under the Bill.

My right hon. Friend referred to the film "ET". I do not know what has been or will be the loss of money to the legitimate manufacturers of that film, but it must be substantial. We are certainly not talking about a small business; wherever the cut-off point of small business is, it does not include those who are making money out of the pirating of "ET" or, for example, "Gandhi", and I should be interested to know how much money the manufacturers of "Gandhi" consider they have lost as a result of the piracy of that film.

I assured my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) that we had reached the dull part of the debate.

Before my hon. Friend depresses us by moving from the exciting to the less exciting part, perhaps he will answer a question that has been bothering me since his first remarks about the predominance of revenue lost to the legitimate industry by piracy. Has any estimate been made of the amount of money that video piracy costs the Exchequer—the taxpayer?

I do not have a calculator with me, but if the retail value of illegitimate video cassettes is £120 million, that multiplied by 15 per cent., the VAT lost, would provide a starting figure. In addition, the non-payment of income tax by those engaged in the manufacture of illegitimate films would result in a substantial figure. If he added to that the social security payments to those who claim to be unemployed but who are making a great deal of money by manufacturing illegitimate cassettes, that would provide a very large sum. I will not detain the House on that, but my hon. and learned Friend makes an important point. Not only is there the criminal side of it but there is the tremendous loss to the Revenue and the payout from the Revenue to people engaged in this criminal activity.

As I said, the Government see great difficulties if this series of amendments were accepted. The effect would be to give trading standards officers of local authorities the same powers of entry, search and seizure as the police. I have already referred to the old adage about an Englishman's home being his castle. However, that should also apply to a Scotsman's home, a Welshman's home and an Ulsterman's home. In fact, there are more castles in Aberdeenshire than anywhere else in the country, so perhaps we could rewrite the adage. We should not dismiss that adage lightly. In some circumstances, for the effective enforcement of the law and the prevention of serious risk to health, we must countenance some derogation from our right to such privacy, but as a general principle that right must be jealously guarded and exceptions might be made only in the most compelling circumstances and after the most careful Government review.

It may help hon. Members to see the difficulties if I explain what trading officers are and what they can do in the area that we are discussing. "Trading standards officer" is a generic name, not found in the statute, used to describe the officers of certain local authorities—that is the county councils in England and Wales, the regional and island councils in Scotland and London borough councils — who enforce a wide range of legislation designed to protect consumers and maintain standards in trading.

The list of legislation that trading standards officers enforce is pretty lengthly. It includes the Weights and Measures Acts 1963–79, the Trades Descriptions Acts 1968 and 1972, the Food and Drugs Act 1955, the Consumer Safety Act 1978, the Consumer Credit Act 1974, the Hallmarking Act 1973, the Poisons Act 1972, the Medicines Act 1978, and a host of others. In addition to the long list of Acts of Parliament, as some of my hon. Friends may learn to their dismay, 600 statutory instruments fall within their ambit.

Trading standards officers began life merely as weights and measures inspectors, but over the years Parliament has seen fit to devolve to local weights and measures authorities the responsibility for enforcing the long list of Acts and regulations to which I have referred. Those responsibilities have inevitably landed on the shoulders of trading standards officers. I join my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West in paying tribute to the work they do. It is to their great credit that the trading standards officers have always risen to the challenge, and have developed their skills and expertise to cope with this new work.

However, the number of officers has not risen commensurately. There are only about 1,500 trading standards officers for the whole United Kingdom and this number has remained fairly static for several years. It must be the case that a limited number of officers cannot be given more and more to do without it having an adverse effect upon what they do already.

I recognise that there is no duty on local authorities to enforce the provisions of the Copyright Act and that the addition of these powers would not give them a duty. I also recognise that, while some local authorities are prepared to take prosecutions under the Copyright Act, many have refrained from doing so. It could be argued that the giving of these additional powers to trading standards officers would merely enable local authorities that have chosen to be active in this field to do the job more effectively, but my view — and, I think, the view of my right hon. Friend—is that, if these amendments were accepted, every local authority would come under extreme pressure to exercise the powers and take prosecutions whenever there is an allegation that pirate video films or sound recordings are being sold or made.

It would be quite understandable if many local authorities continued to be unwilling to allocate their trading standards resources for this purpose and, even if all local authorities were prepared to exercise the powers, the limited number of trading standards officers available would probably mean that the demand could not be met. I particularly draw this to the attention of the House. I suspect that this is the reason why the Association of County Councils is opposed to the hon. Member for Norwood's amendments. They realise that giving such powers to the trading standards officers would raise expectations in the minds of the film and recording industries, but that these expectations could not be met by the local authorities with their present resources.

10.45 am

Apart from the implications for local authority resources, another aspect to the proposed amendments needs to be considered. The new powers in clause 2 have been drafted very much with a view to their being exercised by the police. They are of course exercisable only by warrant but, when a warrant is granted, the powers are both wide and severe. They would enable a constable to enter and search any premises — including private dwellings — and to use such reasonable force as is necesssary.

If such powers were given also to trading standards officers that would represent a significant extension of their current powers. None of the Acts that they enforce at present provides for the issue of search warrants to trading standards officers. Although certain other statutes, such as the Trade Descriptions Act, provide for warrants to be issued in certain circumstances, they give powers only to enter premises and not to search.

It is in the public interest that search warrant powers should be restricted to as few, readily identifiable, bodies as possible. These powers should be considered against the background that there would be no statutory control at all over which persons a local authority may appoint to exercise them.

That is not of course to suggest that the local authorities or the trading standards officers might exercise such powers in an irresponsible way — certainly not — but there is, of course, provision in clause 2 for a warrant to authorise other persons to accompany a constable who is exercising the powers. That should be sufficient to enable the expertise of the trading standards officers in these matters to be used when it is needed.

I am sure that the House will see that these apparently harmless amendments would change considerably the nature of this splendid Bill, mislead the film and recording industries and cause unnecessary problems for many local authorities. In the light of those persuasive arguments, I very much hope that the hon. Member for Norwood will now, after a few interesting words, withdraw his amendment.

The Opposition do not feel sufficiently strongly about the matter to press the amendment to a Division. Under the circumstances I am prepared to accept the Minister's advice.

However, I ask the Minister to consider one thing seriously, which is whether there will be sufficient police officers and sufficiently good organisation for the exercise of the powers conferred by the Bill. Recently there has been great difficulty about search warrants in my constituency, but that is a matter to be discussed elsewhere.

The Minister may recall that some of the gravest problems that have afflicted the Metropolitan police force in the past have been about officers concerned with search and enforcement of the pornography laws. I do not need to develop that further except to say that there have been great difficulties when a small number of police officers have been concerned with law enforcement in a highly lucrative area of illicit trade. I very much hope that these problems will not recur, but I ask the Minister to consider carefully the way in which enforcement is carried out by the Metropolitan police and the amount of co-operation that can usefully take place between professional crime enforcement officers and those on the commercial fringes, such as trading standards officers. With those remarks, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

10.49 am

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

The new penalties and additional powers of search and seizure in the Bill will be an important deterrent against what has become a major criminal activity that damages the interests of the law-abiding business man and Britain's trade reputation. The international aspects of the traffic are its most serious feature.

Many films are made in the United States of America, so it is not surprising that American interests are carefully watching the progress of this Bill. As the House will know, last year the United States took action under the Piracy and Counterfeiting Amendments Act 1982 to increase the penalties for all cases of counterfeiting and for most cases of piracy. The penalties are now a possible prison sentence of five years and a fine of $250,000. The American ambassador told me that he hoped that the Bill will help to stem an international trade that causes considerable damage to those who make films and the other material that are being copied.

Is it not surprising that in a debate on such an important national and international matter neither the Liberal party nor the Social Democratic party is represented in the House? Their only alliance in this matter has been to stay away and to take no interest in the Bill.

I note my hon. and learned Friend's observation, as will every hon. Member present. I am sure that if Members of those parties were here today they would support the Bill. Perhaps the fact that they are not here shows that they wish the Bill a speedy passage. I hope that I have interpreted their views correctly, although they must speak on their own behalf.

This brief Third Reading debate enables me to draw attention to the importance of public responsibility for the extent of the criminal activity that is going on. The Bill seeks to increase penalties and to provide additional powers for the search and seizure of material that will be used as evidence to achieve conviction. However, the fact that the trade is carried on is largely due to the extent of public demand. I understand what happens. People are, naturally, interested in obtaining copies of highly topical audio or visual material that may give them an advantage over their neighbours. They may claim that they have achieved something that others wish to achieve, but British people should not encourage the practice. I understand the temptation of being able to buy a copy of a video cassette at a price cheaper than a legitimate copy but it is wrong that, wittingly or unwittingly, people should encourage illegal activities.

By going into a shop and asking the assistant whether he has a copy of a film that is likely to be kept under the counter and that is not on display, people are aiding and abetting a criminal activity—they are helping someone else to steal property from a rightful owner. The general public should understand their responsibility to help the police and law-abiding traders to stop such criminal activity. I hope that this Bill will reinforce the efforts of all those concerned to stop such crimes, and I hope that it will help to emphasise to the general public that they should have no part of it.

The Bill is a simple step to deal with an urgent matter, but it is only an interim measure. We must await the outcome of the Government's comprehensive review of copyright law. I hope that soon we can consider new copyright legislation that will deal with all aspects of the infringement of copyright, not just of video cassettes and audio material, but of books—in which I declare an interest—where the international breach of copyright is equally grotesque and on a massive scale.

This short Bill will meet effectively an urgent need, and I hope that the House will give it a Third Reading.

10.56 am

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden) on his Bill and wish it a speedy passage into law. I agree with his remarks about the importance of remembering that the Bill is only first aid. It is an important interim measure, but, because of the wider spectrum of copyright problems that emerge more frequently each month, especially as we are moving into satellite and cable television, there must be a major new copyright Bill in the near future.

Apart from catching people with criminal intent, which all but the criminals would agree is a laudable objective, one of the most important aspects of the Bill is that when it has proved effective and has stamped out the illicit trade, there may be a significant improvement in legitimate jobs in the industry. Already 20,000 new jobs have been created in the legitimate video cassette industry. It is worth noting that that is about 5,000 more new jobs than have been created in the ITV companies during the past 26 years. That is an example of the speed of development of video cassette production, which, if it is kept legal and continues at the same rate, may provide proper openings for hard-pressed and well-qualified people in the industry.

The loss to the Treasury must run into many millions of pounds. It is impossible to calculate the loss in income tax. Moreover, as my hon. Friend the Minister has said, people may be claiming unemployment benefit while working in this illicit trade. There would be great benefit in stopping that. There is also the expense to the industry itself in its attempts, against a background of inadequate penalties, to stamp out this illicit trade. Legal and investigation fees of nearly £600,000 have been incurred and huge quantities of counterfeit inlay sleeves have been seized in civil action.

The industry needs urgent help. I believe that the Bill will give that help. I greatly welcome the good news given by the Minister that the scale of fines to which my amendment related may be reviewed and the maximum fine on summary conviction that I proposed may become a reality if the Government's review takes place this year without further difficulty. With the prospect of a maximum fine of £2,000 for each illicit copy offered for sale or hire, small-time traders are likely to consider it worth while to get out of this illicit business very quickly.

Such penalties would compare more realistically with those in other countries. I am told that in France the maximum fine for a first offender is 30,000 francs—about £3,000—and there is provision for imprisonment for up to two years. In the United States, the maximum penalties are fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment for up to five years. In this country, where London is the centre of this illicit trade, we are now beginning to fight back in a suitable way and to persuade the pirates that their operations have ceased to be worthwhile.

I warmly welcome the Bill and I wish it well. I hope that all those individual members of the public who have so far felt that there is nothing wrong in buying, hiring or copying a film will now realise that in essence they, too, are robbing others of jobs and committing a criminal act.

11.2 am

It says much for the calibre and astuteness of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden)—he will be a great loss not just to the constituents whom he has represented so long and well but to his party and to the House when he leaves us at the next general election—that he has identified as appropriate for a private Members' Bill a measure that is so urgent and important and so uncontentious that it is certain to reach the statute book. He will leave on a wave of achievement and with the congratulations and thanks of many people in this country following this, the last of his great services.

It would be a cause for great shame if this Parliament did not deal as urgently as other countries with the problems of video and audio piracy, for the reason, so strongly stated, that London is the centre of the piracy trade and, as my hon. Friend the Minister said, its tentacles reach out all over the world. It will be to our shame if we do nothing about that, not just because the domestic market is saturated with these articles but because a large part of the export market comes from this illicit source. As the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) has said, unless urgent action is taken the integrity and reputation of this country will be greatly damaged.

It would also be very stupid if we did no more to stop the growth of this evil because it is strangling the British film industry. I can tell the House that the film "Gandhi" was immediately pirated abroad, as were "Tootsie", "10 to Midnight", "Wicked Lady", "Return of the Soldier" and "Local Hero". All those films have been produced and released since this legislation was first considered back in the days when we were discussing the effects of "ET". As "Gandhi" has shown, the great harm to the British film industry is far from diminishing. Not everyone agrees that it is a good film, although I certainly enjoyed it, but it is certainly a very popular film. If that great inspiration to the British film industry is a sign of the resurgence of the industry, this measure is timely indeed.

It would also be stupid not to take steps to protect the legal video industry. At present, its revenue is less than that from piracy. Legitimate high street traders who show honesty and integrity are losing business because they refuse to stock pirated tapes. The Exchequer—and thus the taxpayer—is also losing a great deal of money, and I am grateful for the Minister's reply on that.

Finally, it would be stupid not to act because the situation could escalate to serious violence even in our streets. As the hon. Member for Norwood has said, the effects of yo-yo interventions may be extremely serious. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister was not seeking to play that down but rather to make a more verbal point—"metaphysical" was the word that he used, showing once again the dangers of importing metaphysics into discussions of this kind.

It would be a disgrace if serious theft of this kind, involving enormous sums of money and causing great damage, were allowed to go unpunished. We in this place stand for a civilised society. That means a lawful as well as a democratic society, and a lawful society is one that protects the lawful rights of its citizens. The rights of people going about their lawful business in the British film, video and audio industries must therefore be protected. A lawful society also ensures that those who offend against its laws suffer when caught and that the punishment is sufficient to deter others.

The Bill will protect the lawful rights of the legitimate industry, not just by increasing the penalties but by making the enforcement of the law more effective through the search and seizure procedures. The present fine of £200 is laughable. This legislation will remove the laugh from the faces of the pirates.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West is to be congratulated on taking this opportunity to end the present ludicrous and highly unsatisfactory state of affairs by providing for a maximum fine of £1,000 in the magistrates court and, to satisfy my hon. Friend the Member of Gravesend (Mr. Brinton), a far more serious penalty in a higher court.

The Bill will be welcomed by the film industry. It will be welcomed by the legitimate video industry, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the taxpayer and by all who wish law and order to prevail in our society. The Government should be thanked, not only for giving the Bill a fair wind, but for helping it on its way, making the pirate walk the gangplank and once again showing that this Conservative Government are prepared to strike a blow for the maintenance of law and order.

11.10 am

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden) on introducing this important Bill. The House and the country have reason to be thankful that he sought leave to bring it in. It is one thing to bring in a Bill but it is another to steer it through all its parliamentary stages. It is difficult to predict what impact the Bill will have if it becomes law. We all hope that it will produce the desired benefits and that the international implications will be beneficial.

We must face the fact that the standards of commercial integrity that we accept as the norm for the United Kingdom, I am sad to say, are not the norm for all other countries. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West referred to that and, like him, I believe that the Bill must be seen for what it is—an interim measure.

As the scale of illicit trade grows, it will inflict severe damage on legitimate traders. As the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) said, the opportunities for the gangster to organise the illicit trade, with all the ghastly practices that become part and parcel of underworld trade, must be removed. I wonder whether we are a little late, because some such practices already exist. Perhaps we are locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The Bill deals with manufacturers, importers and wholesale merchants who are already involved on a colossal scale in the video pirate trade. Only time will tell whether the penalties will drive out the underworld. Only time will tell whether the police and the forces of law and order have sufficient resources to apprehend and charge those involved in the distribution, manufacturing and retailing of pirate video material.

There is no doubt that the level of retail sales of pirate video material has grown alarmingly. It has seriously damaged the prospects for all involved in the legitimate video trade and put at risk Britain's reputation as a lawful society and a world leader in the protection of copyright. We must protect commercial integrity in the United Kingdom. Bearing in mind the much lower standards in other countries, we should recognise that we maintain our standards only by constant vigilance and by ensuring that the law provides adequate safeguards against piracy and sufficient deterrents that are enforced with determination. I make no apology for being a believer in deterrence in all its different forms. The finest and most effective way to prevent villains from exploiting opportunities is to deter them. We cannot talk them out of it.

The difficulty is that the video market has mushroomed. Many families have obtained video equipment and are looking for cassettes at the lowest prices. They are prepared to shop around to obtain the most recent films at what they believe to be bargain prices. Often, innocently, they encourage the criminal element in the pirate trade.

The real villains are the retailers who knowingly obtain pirate material and offer it for hire or for sale. They are the pushers of the pirate trade. Knowingly, for commercial reasons and to make a profit, they set out to break the legitimate market and to exploit an opportunity. I hope that they will be penalised in such a way that they will no longer believe it to be a viable activity. That is what I mean by deterrence. We must ensure that it is no longer profitable and viable to be involved in the pirate trade.

I hope that we can kill off the evil of pirate manufacturing and distribution by destroying the vendors; by making the vendors go out of business. Unless we can stop the vendors, manufacturers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere will not stop manufacturing and distributing. They will stop only when there is no longer a retail outlet and when they no longer have access to the general public. The public will continue, I am sorry to say, to purchase whatever is available in the retail market if it is available at prices that they deem to be worthwhile.

The Bill distinguishes between manufacturers and distributors, and retailers. I believe that to be sound, but I wonder whether the penalties are adequate. Only time will tell. Penalising a retailer to the tune of £1,000 for every piece of illicit equipment should deter, but I wonder whether it will because £1,000 is not lot of money today. White Rolls-Royces have been mentioned and there is no doubt that enormous profits are being made.

I hope that the Bill will change the balance and make it easier for the legitimate trade to continue. More important, I hope that it will stop the British public from encouraging this ghastly trade which is damaging the reputation and integrity of the United Kingdom and encouraging the gangster element in a frightening and horrendous way.

11.18 am

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden). He is a doughty campaigner, who has served the House long and well and held high office. He started his parliamentary life in Hampshire and intends after the general election, whenever that is, to end it in Dorset. My hon. Friends who represent Dorset constituencies appreciate the leadership and help that he has given his colleagues. We may be a long way from a general election, but I am prepared to bet that this is the last private Member's Bill that my right hon. Friend will introduce. It is appropriate that it should deal with trade because he has in front of him an important and successful career in commerce. We all wish him well.

I am a practitioner and have an interest in establishing copyright. I have also been involved in the film and record industries. I regard the Bill's progress as important and it has my full support. The film and record industries are in considerable peril as a result of the theft and malpractices involved in video piracy. The Bill goes a few steps in the direction of checking these abuses, but only a few steps. I was glad to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend (Mr. Brinton) say that the law relating to copyright was badly in need of being brought up to date. I much regret the Government's slowness in implementing the provisions of the Whitford report.

I am heartened that we have a Minister of the character of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, South (Mr. Sproat). When I was at university, he was the chairman of its foremost literary society. No one will need me to explain that it was the P. G. Wodehouse society. From that beginning, my hon. Friend has gone on to a considerable literary career. In view of that, he must have a personal interest and, more importantly, he must be aware of the out-of-date nature of our copyright protection for literature and recorded works, both visual and sound. I am sure that he will want to move much more quickly in future to protect the copyright of original work. Copyright is the creation of statute and businesses depend upon it. As technology changes, the law has to keep pace.

I am pleased to see that the Bill contains up-to-date powers to deal with up-to-date crimes. I refer to clause 2 and search warrants. Anton Piller orders may be obtained to try to deal with video piracy and the bootlegging of records, but in theory an order is obtainable only in exceptional circumstances, although the grounds for obtaining it have been extended a little. The much wider powers in clause 2 will be an important means of checking crime.

I am concerned about the state of the film industry and the damage that is being done to the international trade. The British market for foreign films, which is part of our trade, is being hit hard, but so, too, is the British film industry. Our feature film industry's fortunes have gone up and down over the years. Prescriptions have been applied from many sources about what should be done to put our film industry right. There is no shortage of talent, as we know from such films as "Chariots of Fire" and "Gandhi". About the latter I say only that, as a concept —an attempt to see matters from Mr. Gandhi's point of view—it is a good film, although as a piece of history it is not. However, these films are evidence of an abundance of talent.

I want the television companies to make a contribution. But for the television companies, the television film industry and the feature film industry to be combined into one would be to take a step backwards, and I hope that it does not happen.

What the Government can do is limited to supporting a Bill of this kind and encouraging investment. At present, investment is not being encouraged.

The Bill is an important check on crime. I hope that it will help the British film industry to develop.

The record industry is extremely important. Assessments of the advantages to our balance of payments that I have seen show that the good the industry does is underestimated in the House and in the country. Today, it is in a frightening state. Few, if any, major record companies are trading profitably, partly for market reasons but partly for home taping reasons. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will want to introduce legislation fairly soon, and perhaps he will consider the case for a royalty on blank tapes. That apart, the industry is being damaged considerably by the bootlegging activities that have been described.

I summarise my view about the Bill and my support for it. There are violent gales blowing through the rigging in the ship to which I would liken the film and record industries— industries which depend on copyright law and statutory protection. The Bill will do important repairs to the damage caused by the pirates. But the gales blow still, and much important work has to be done to our copyright law superstructure if the ship is to survive in the future.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West and I wish the Bill well.

11.26 am

I want to add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden) and to say how pleased I am to be associated with his Bill. It is an interim measure of limited objective simply because the abuses with which it tries to deal are widespread and we need to look at the issues involved in a much wider context.

These forms of piracy have grown up in a very short time, and it is important that we respond quickly to the threat. The industry has mushroomed in less than three years. As usual, the British sense of justice and fair play has tended to inhibit a prompt response, as in so many other matters. As we have heard, vast fortunes are being made on the back of the legitimate video industry, and that means that drastic action has to be taken quickly. With 3 million cassette recorders already in private hands, those who go into this market are presented with a vast opportunity. The proposal in my right hon. Friend's Bill for the imposition of an unlimited fine, or imprisonment for two years—penalties which my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State pointed out had not been taken fully on board by the press—will be a major deterrent.

London is the pirate video capital of the world, and that can give no one in the House any pleasure. It has been said that the reason is America's use of the English language, which gives rise to another major outlet for the art of that country too and that it is appropriate that it should be copied in Britain. We have learnt that two thirds of the British market is already subject to video piracy and the £120 million of revenue which should be going back into the industry and giving strength to its creative roots is being lost. The film industry is a high-cost, high-risk business. We all realise and appreciate this, and know that those involved in other forms of art go to considerable lengths to get sponsorship. The Government have done everything that they can to encourage the art world to look elsewhere for its sponsorship than directly to the Government. Therefore, it is right and proper that the House should do everything that it can to make sure that the rightful income from the arts should go directly back to that source and not be filtered off elsewhere, as has been the case in recent months.

My hon. Friend the Minister spoke of the penalties and considered whether they were adequate. He has shown that the legislation that allows for updating may now be so. I know that since 1945 the value of money has tended to halve every seven years and I hope that it will take due account of that fact. Since the Government came to power, the progress of inflation has been slowed down, but that has been true up until now. Therefore, a fine of £100 21 years ago is worth only £25 in today's terms. That is an inadequate sum for a penalty. I trust that the penalties will be triggered in such a way to make a continuous penalty of sufficient magnitude to deter those who are likely to be pirates in this or any other industry.

We are not of course only talking about video piracy but we are trying to show that Parliament responds quickly in these matters and that, if the need should arise in future and someone else climbs on some other bandwagon, we can rely on another hon. Member to take up the issue—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West has done in this legislation — and introduce appropriate legislation quickly. I hope that this will discourage those who think of moving into a new sphere from doing so because they know that the fruits of their labours will not last long.

The hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) mentioned the role he proposed for the trading standards officers in this legislation. I am pleased that he withdrew his amendments, because the trading standards officers have an important role to play in retailing, and they already have enough on their plates. I hope that the powers given in the Bill will make it really worth while for the police to pursue these issues to a satisfactory conclusion. A major problem in all these matters, as, for example, the Sunday trading laws, is that those who are given responsibility for implementing an Act are disheartened if they find that the penalties are inadequate in relation to the effort involved. Trading standards officers have plenty to cope with already. The police are the right people to deal with this matter. I am sure that the penalties that are being introduced will provide what is required.

Before allowing the Bill to speed on its successful way, I should mention a connection with the publishing industry. The United Kingdom suffers considerably from the effects of piracy in publishing, particularly in school textbooks and similar books. We must be very strict about the way in which we apply video piracy laws so that we can encourage those elsewhere who face the major effects of publishing piracy. There are places, in the far east in particular, where this is being done with medical and other textbooks, whose legitimate publishers and authors —many of whom come from this country—are deprived of their rightful revenues.

The publishing industry has suffered extremely badly. How we manage to stop this piracy overseas is a difficult problem. I know that there are black lists for sporting contacts in some parts of the world. Whether or not one agrees with such an approach, we must look for some way to put pressure on Governments overseas to ensure that they take similar and prompt action where piracy is taking place in publishing, as it is so disadvantageous to us.

I have great pleasure in supporting my right hon. Friend's Bill, and I hope that in the near future it will get a speedy passage through the other place on its way to the statute book.

11.36 am

I add my congratulations to those of other hon. Members to the right hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden) on the speed and ability with which he has taken the Bill through the House. Although I normally regard the Under-Secretary of State for Trade as the driller-killer of the Government, the Prime Minister's Mr. Nasty, on this occasion alone he has added his personal weight to what is a small but extremely important reform of the law. I wish to press on him, as did the hon. Member for Dorset, North (Mr. Baker), the opinion that our copyright law is in a shambles, as is our support for the film industry. It is not good enough to leave these matters to private Members' amending Bills in each Session.

There must be a major initiative by the Government to respond to the needs of the film industry. I know that the Under-Secretary has given that matter his attention, but the Government must respond to the main recommendations of the Whitford committee report. Technology is moving at an amazing rate. If the law fails to move at the same rate, Governments, and Parliament, fall into disrepute.

I hope that the Minister will take those points on board.

11.37 am

The hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) took me by surprise. With all those compliments flying about, I thought that we were in for a long speech.

I assure the hon. Member for Norwood and my hon. Friends the Members for Gravesend (Mr. Brinton) and Dorset, North (Mr. Baker) that the Government are strongly seized of the importance of new copyright law. A major problem was referred to by the hon. Member for Norwood when he talked about the amazing speed of technological change. It is difficult to draft a law that makes sense today and ensure that it is not outdistanced by technology tomorrow. However, my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Department of Trade are determined to introduce legislation as soon as possible. The House will know of the Green Paper that was recently published and of the consideration that is now being given to it by the Department.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend spoke of the importance of copyright law, and he has been a staunch ally of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir J. Eden) in the process of the Bill. Back Benchers often ask questions of Ministers, but I should like my hon. Friend to answer a question for me. He said that 20,000 jobs had been created in the video business over three years and over 26 years the ITV companies had created 15,000 jobs, if I got him right. Could he ask his advisers to tell me whether the 20,000 figure that he quoted for the video business was the legitimate industry or the illegitimate video industry?

I have been advised that the 20,000 was created in the legitimate video industry. I hope that answers my hon. Friend's question.

Yes, I am grateful. My hon. Friend phrased that extremely neatly. That is the sort of figure that sticks in the public's mind and helps to bring home to us the job and revenue potential that video offers to Britain and its entrepreneurs.

It is wholly appropriate for me to pay a genuine and marked tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West on the Bill. The unanimity of view in the House today on all but a few matters may make the bringing forward of such a Bill appear easy but it was not so. It was only my right hon. Friend's determination and hard work in bringing together some of the varied parts of the legitimate film and video industry—the makers, the distributors and the retailers—that has enabled us to consider the Bill today. The Bill has had widespread support and that is a great tribute to my right hon. Friend who has contributed so much to the House over the years that he has been a Member.

Video piracy has grown, together with the whole fledgling video industry, at an extraordinary rate in Britain over a very few years. That is the heart of the problem. However, while the growth of the legitimate industry, with its scope for increased employment and business opportunities, is to be welcomed, the growth of the pirate sector is to be deplored. The Government are determined to cut out the cancer of piracy that is eating away at the living heart of the British film industry. Nobody can doubt that that heart is living. The quality of British films has rarely been higher or more widely acclaimed. Although we may have grave doubts about the accuracy of the history of the film "Gandhi", few people have doubts about it as an entertaining piece of film-making.

The scale of video piracy in Britain has often been discussed in recent months, but perhaps on this last occasion on which the House will deal with the matter for some time it may be helpful to repeat the figures to underline, particularly to the public, the staggering size of the criminal industry that we are discussing. Perhaps two thirds of the videograms—pre-recorded video cassettes—on the market in the United Kingdom are pirate copies, made without the authority of the copyright owners. The film producers and the creators of the work involved in the film—for example, the music and the screenplay—have the right to expect recompense for the commercial exploitation by video of their creativity. Without such recompense the incentive and the essential funds needed for further production will dry up. Yet piracy is draining away some £120 million a year that should be returning to the industry.

It is a clear sign of the Government's determination to defeat the pirates that we have given support not only to the present Bill but also to the Copyright Act 1956 (Amendment) Act 1982 which was so skilfully piloted through the House by my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Shersby).

Copyright in general is a matter for the civil courts. This matter was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Dorset, North. It is in the main concerned with the private rights of individual creators of original works, although many important industries base a major part of their commercial dealings on those rights. The publishing, recording and film industries are obvious examples of that. Given the essentially private nature of those rights, it is proper that the normal processes of law that arise when copyright is in dispute should take place in the civil courts with individual rights owners suing infringers and obtaining such remedies as damages and injunctions.

The now familiar Anton Piller orders are an important part of the civil process. They have been evolved by the courts to deal with the situation where a plaintiff—the copyright owner—has good grounds for believing that if he obtains an order in open court in the normal way—for example, for the delivery up from the defendant of various documents and other evidence of infringement—the defendant is likely to hide or destroy that evidence. In short, they deal with the fly-by-night defendant. In those circumstances a plaintiff is able to go to the High Court ex parte and in camera — without the defendant's presence or knowledge—to seek an order. The first that the defendant knows of it is when the plaintiff's representatives knock on his door seeking entry so that he has no time to organise the removal of the offending material, perhaps through the back door.

Those civil provisions can be effective if pursued strenuously. That is clear from the fact that the United Kingdom recording industry has been able to keep record piracy in Britain down to less than 5 per cent. of the total market, whereas in the United States the band is between 11 and 20 per cent.; in Italy 21 to 40 per cent.; in Portugal and Greece 61 to 80 per cent.; and in much of north Africa, the middle east and south-east Asia over 80 per cent. As I said earlier, in supporting the hon. Member for Norwood, we must do everything possible to maintain Britain's commercial integrity.

My hon. Friend has given the figure of 5 per cent. twice but I must tell him that my contacts in the record industry believe that the figure is much higher than that. Will my hon. Friend ask his advisers to see whether they can obtain some up-to-date figures?

I should gladly do that but it may save my advisers a little time if my hon. Friend were to send to them what evidence he has from his contacts in the record industry. I shall be extremely happy to consider it.

The Bill's most important effect is to increase the penalties which, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) rightly said earlier, are ridiculously low. It also gives the police powers of search and seizure in the ways that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West has explained to the House on many occasions and on which I shall not detain the House further, except to underline what was rather curously missed by some elements of the media during the earlier stages of our deliberations—that the maximum penalties under the Bill are very heavy indeed. They are unlimited and the Government warmly support my right hon. Friend's proposals, which reflect the seriousness with which the offences are viewed.

It will no longer be possible for a large-scale manufacturer of pirate video tapes to scoff at the prospect of facing a small fine, which he would be able to write off immediately with the profits from his next batch of pirate copies. Instead, he will have to think twice—and more than twice—before risking a huge fine or even a spell of up to two years in prison, either of which could effectively put him out of business.

The remaining record and video copyright offences are treated rather less severely under the Bill, although the maximum penalties available are still considerably increased compared with their present value. The offences concerned are those of selling, letting for hire, and exhibiting or possessing by way of trade. The essential difference is that those offences will remain as purely summary, triable only in a magistrates' court. The maximum fine will, however, increase to the highest level that such a court may in general impose—at present f1,000—and there will be the additional option of up to two months' imprisonment. In addition, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend so well brought out in his amendment and the discussion that followed, that fine of £1,000 maximum is likely to be increased to £2,000 later this year and, of course, the fine can be attached to each cassette that is sold by an individual retail outlet. Therefore, there will not be just a fine of £1,000 for a series of activities by a retailer but a £1,000 fine for each offence of which he may be found guilty.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West brought out well the serious criminal nature of what we are dealing with. As has been rightly emphasised, there is heavy criminal involvement and serious crime in this sphere. This Bill will go a long way to solving the problems that all hon. Members agree exist.

This is a short but important Bill. Britain, and apparently London, has acquired in a short time the unenviable and unwelcome reputation of being the video piracy centre of the world. Whatever that says for British initiative and enterprise, it is a reputation that is at odds with our traditional and long standing status as a respected and leading nation in the world of copyright. We must quickly repair the position. Our international standing and the well-being of all branches of our home film and video industries are at stake. Public confidence in the rule of law is bound to suffer when such blatant and widespread criminal activity operates so visibly in our high streets.

Consequently, I am pleased to give the Government's support to the Bill and to express the confident hope that it will proceed rapidly through its remaining stages to become law. Thanks to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West, the days of the video pirate are numbered.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

Corners' Juries Bill

Considered in Committee

[MR. ERNEST ARMSTRONG in the Chair]

Clause 1

Qualifications Of Jurors

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

11.53 am

I was pleased that the Bill last week was given a Second Reading so that the House has a chance to discuss this important issue.

Clause 1 is the nub of the Bill. I wish to mention some of the disturbing events which have increased the need for the Bill. The Bill springs from the Brodrick report which in 1971–12 years ago—made several recommendations involving coroners' courts which have been gathering dust ever since. Last year I managed to tack on a reform to the Administration of Justice Bill [Lords] which ensured that in future all inquests should be heard by juries where the death took place in custody. The Brodrick report recommended that coroners' juries should be seleced in exactly the same way as jurors are in the High Court of Justice. Clause 1 gives effect to that proposal.

I wish to speak briefly about the history of juries in the High Court of Justice since 1971 when the Brodrick committee reported. Throughout the 1970s there was increasing anxiety about the selection of juries and of the many issues surrounding juries in the courts. The anxiety began when during the Shrewsbury picket trial the Lord Chancellor issued a direction ex cathedra—I am not a lawyer so I do not quite understansd how he issues the directions—that jurors' occupations should no longer be made public. Many people considered that that would inhibit the defence in a trial of this type. That gave added interest to many issues connected with juries, especially jury vetting and jury selection.

Hon. Members may remember that in the middle of the ABC trial, which involved a privilege case in which I was involved, the then Attorney-General, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Dulwich (Mr. Silkin), issued new rules about jury vetting that were made public for the first time.

After the 1979 general election, the Attorney-General presented new rules for the selection of juries in the High Court which were based on a scheme presented by the Royal Statistical Society so that there could be no question in the future that juries were being rigged. I welcomed the statement of the Attorney-General when those rules were introduced and I pay tribute to the Government, which, I do not do very often, in moving the position forward because there were real worries.

Hon. Members may remember a famous case which took place in Wales in the 1970s. Some Welsh nationalists were on trial in Aberystwyth and although many people in that town are called "Jones" and "Evans", which are names characteristic of Wales, the jury appeared to have English surnames and accents. There was a great worry that the jury had not been picked on a random basis, that it had been fixed so that no Welsh nationalists would be on the jury.

I passionately believe in trial by jury. I am passionately interested in Parliament arranging a system whereby nobody can interfere with a jury. I am pleased that convictions were recently obtained in the High Court following incidents in which outsiders, when trying to pervert the course of justice, had tried to interfere with the jury process. During the past few years the Labour party has been worried that the enthusiasm by Governments of both colours for jury vetting—by running the names of potential jurors through a police computer to establish whether or not they have convictions—should not also have the same effect of perverting the course of justice. The English jury is a sacred institution and nothing should be done by the authorities to "clean it up" so that it ceases to represent a reasonable and average cross-section of the population. I have various reservations about jury vetting, but I shall not mention them now, because I do not think that they really apply to coroners' juries.

12 noon

Following all the row about juries, the Home Affairs Committee—one of whose distinguished members, the hon. Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler), I see entering the Chamber—produced a report about deaths in custody. I should like to say something later about coroners' juries and deaths in custody, but the report was very good. It shows how useful Select Committees can be. It picked up a forgotten report, the Brodrick report, and restored it to the Government's attention. The Select Committee recommended that coroners' juries should be selected in exactly the same way as juries are selected in a Crown court. Incidentally, the Select Committee made many other sensible recommendations, such as legal aid for relatives and the disclosure of police reports.

However, I have one criticism of the Minister. I am sorry to say that, after leading a delegation to him recently, I received a long and exceedingly depressing — and characteristically Home Office — memorandum, which turned down everything except the reform that we are now instituting. However, one must be grateful for small mercies. There is some uncertainty about how long this Parliament will last, and I have always believed that half a loaf is better than none. That is why I am particularly keen that clause 1 should be accepted.

The Brodrick committee and the Home Affairs Committee are behind the clause. I understand that we also have the benign support of the Home Office. I am pleased to see the Under-Secretary—I do not think that he is a Minister of State yet, but I am sure that he will be soon —and I hope that he will welcome the clause. I also welcome the fact that the Government have chosen—for some reason that I do not quite understand — to strengthen the Home Office with an extra Minister, who can now concentrate on coroners' courts and deaths in custody. Concern about them is much more widespread than many people realise.

Clause 1 inserts a new section 3A into the Coroners Act 1887 and its purpose is to apply to coroners' jurors the same qualifications and disqualifications as apply to jurors in other courts. That will enable them to be selected at random from the electoral roll, in exactly the same way and by exactly the same means as jurors in other courts. That means that we shall never again see a practice that I am told sometimes happens. Apparently, on occasion, a coroner suddenly finds that he needs a jury and he sends someone into the street to scoop up half a dozen random shoppers who happen to be walking by, and who may—for all the coroner knows—be personal friends, and on their way to a National Front or Communist party meeting. Such a selection would not be random.

Subsection (1) provides that a person shall be qualified to serve as a juror at a coroner's inquest only if he is also qualified to serve as a juror in other courts in accordance with section 1 of the Juries Act 1974; that is, if he is registered for the time being as a parliamentary or local government elector between the ages of 18 and 65 and has been ordinarily resident m the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man for any period of at least five years since attaining the age of 13, unless he is for the time being ineligible or disqualified for jury service, as shown in parts I and II of schedule 1 to the Juries Act 1974.

Subsection (2) makes it an offence, punishable on summary conviction by a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale as defined by section 75 of the Criminal Justice Act 1982—at present £200—knowingly to serve on a coroner's jury while ineligible under group A, B or C in part I of schedule 1 to the 1974 Act. The offence and the fine are exactly in line with those that apply to jurors in other courts.

Subsection (3) makes it an offence, punishable on summary conviction by a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale—at present £1,000—for a person to serve on a coroner's jury knowing that he is disqualified under part II of schedule 1 to the 1974 Act. Again, the offence and the fine are in line.

Subsection (4) empowers the appropriate officer to question, or have questioned, any person summoned to serve on a coroner's jury under section 3 of the 1887 Act to establish whether he is qualified. Subsection (5) makes it an offence, punishable on summary conviction by a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale, to refuse without reasonable excuse to answer a question put under subsection (4), or knowingly or recklessly to give an answer that

"is false in a material particular".

The offence and the fine, again, are in line. I hope that subsection (5) will not catch those who are summoned and who make an honest mistake about their eligibility. It should catch only those who are deliberately trying to evade the law, when they know perfectly well what the law is.

Subsection (6) makes it an offence, punishable on summary conviction by a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale, for any person who is summoned as a juror, or any other person on his behalf, to make, or cause or permit to be made any false representation to the coroner or to the appropriate officer with the intention of evading jury service. The offences and the fine follow those that apply to jurors in other courts.

Subsection (7) empowers the coroner to authorise someone to act as "the appropriate officer", and that will normally be the coroner's officer. The Select Committee sensibly recommended that coroners' courts should be "civilianised" so that it might become clear that the policeman in attendance on the coroner was not in cahoots with the police who might be giving evidence about how someone died in police custody. That was a difficulty at the inquest on the New Cross fire in the borough of Lewisham. I think that everyone now agrees that it was conducted in a highly unsatisfactory manner, and in a way that should not be repeated.

I suspect that the Minister may have time to comment on how the Home Office is getting on with its negotiations with local authorities about the "civilianisation" of coroners' officers. Indeed, I suspect that the Minister may be scratching around for something to say. The Bill is designed to enhance the status of coroners' inquests as wholly impartial inquiries. Therefore, the necessary linchpin is to "civilianise" coroners' courts. I know that the Home Office wants to do that and I hope that it will not be deterred because of the tiny element needed in the rate support grant in order to reassure local authorities that an extra burden is not being imposed on them.

Clause 1(8) defines "the standard scale" for fines.

Clause 1 is the crucial clause of the Bill. It puts jury selection for the coroners' courts, although not jury size, on all fours with that of the Crown court. I commend the clause to the House.

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price). I agree almost without exception with the comments he made about the Bill. As he rightly suggests, the Select Committee on Home Affairs, of which I am glad to be a member, reported to the House in June 1980 on the subject of deaths in police custody. On that occasion, the Select Committee made a number of recommendations to the House and to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. We recommended that there should be a statutory obligation on the officer in charge of a police station to report to a coroner the death of a person in police custody. Following on that recommendation, we suggested that the coroner should be obliged to open an inquest when he is informed of the death of any person in legal custody, including persons who are compulsorily detained in hospitals. The Select Committee further recommended that such an inquest should be held before a jury. The importance of the Bill is that it takes up the proposal that when a coroner decides to sit with a jury it should be summoned in accordance with the same rules used by the high sheriff in summoning juries for other courts.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman's description of the curious and somewhat 19th century manner of summoning a coroners' jury, where a coroner's officer goes out on to the streets and highways of our towns scouring for the unsuspecting who might be persuaded to spend an hour or so in the coroners' court adjudicating on matters of considerable importance.

The debate is not the appropriate occasion for me to present to the House in more detail some of the many important recommendations of the Select Committee on the coroners' court or, indeed, on the role of the police or prison service in dealing with deaths in custody. It is important that a more detailed debate on those matters should be held on another occasion but there will undoubtedly be a dramatic advance in the way the coroners' court operates and the way the jury is involved in examining matters of great concern. There can be no greater issue than to inquire into the death of a fellow citizen and for the public to be reassured that, following such an inquiry, a verdict is delivered in which the public may have confidence.

The Bill enjoys my wholehearted support. I am glad to see my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department in his place because I know that I can look to him for equally enthusiastic support of the Bill. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham, West on having the good fortune to be able to present the Bill in the knowledge that it enjoys the support of the Home Department and is supported also by the report of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which made recommendations that perhaps encouraged the introduction of the Bill. I am glad, therefore, to endorse everything the hon. Gentleman said in his speech.

12.15 pm

I support clause 1. I do not think that the Dickensian description of coroners' courts put forward by the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price) and by my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler) necessarily applies to all coroners' courts every time a jury is summoned. I know for a fact that, in the majority of cases, the electoral register, which is the basis of the selection of juries in the Crown courts, is used for the summoning of coroners' juries.

I support clause 1 because there is an element of the Dickensian, an element of the arbitrary and an element of the suspicious in a handful of cases, where objection might be taken. If we can remove a grievance or a cause for objection we should take the opportunity to do so, although I notice that the Brodrick committee was set up in 1969 and did not report until 1971. So we have been a long time correcting this difficulty.

It is important to take this step because there is nothing as important as public confidence in our system of law and order. The public can be satisfied that justice is done and that fairness is observed only when the rules are laid down and are clear for everyone to see, as they are with regard to the selection of juries in the Crown court. It is a matter of great importance that the proper procedures should be seen to be applied by everyone in every case.

I have a doubt about the extension of the jury system to coroners' courts. It is perhaps a slightly insubstantial matter but in practice I regret — although in logic I cannot see how it could have been avoided — the reduction of the age of juries to an age at which school leavers, who have no knowledge or experience of life and no wisdom in the ways of the world, are expected to make monumental judgments about the future of their fellow citizens.

I know that is a criticism but I am sure that the hon. and learned Gentleman will admit that some people over the age of 21 have little judgment and little experience of the ways of the world. If one accepts the jury system one must accept also that, more than occasionally, members of the jury will be among the group he described, who do not have much judgment and knowledge of the ways of the world.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. We sometimes see examples of that in the House, perhaps more often on the Labour Benches than on the Conservative Benches. Nevertheless, it is always to be hoped that someone who has spent some time away from school, or some time away from the places of higher and lower learning, will have gained experience and wisdom in the ways of the world and life. If we know for certain that those whom we are taking on to juries may be still at school, have at that moment left school or are still engaged in some form of education, we know for certain that their knowledge and experience of the ways of the world must be, almost by definition, especially narrow.

The effect of the clause will be to call in 18-year-olds. It will give them the right to sit on coroners' juries, which perhaps coroners now may not—it is a matter for their discretion—desire. The coroner's officer—unfortunately in most instances it has to be a police officer—in going into the street to call in members of the public may bring in someone who looks very young. A coroner may now say "Thank you very much for coming, but I think that we have enough jurymen", or whatever his explanation may be. Under the rule that will apply when clause 1 fixes itself on to the established system for the Crown courts, that will no longer he possible.

Another matter that is even more difficult to explain in logical terms, although one recognises it when practising in the courts, is the significance that can be attached to the fact that the qualification for being a juryman no longer requires the status of being a householder. I understand how Labour Members justifiably considered that that distinction was one of privilege. They were right to take that view and it was a valid criticism. However, the effect of removing the householder qualification is to remove from many juries those who have a stake in society. I can only explain some of the almost unbelievable verdicts of which I have had experience by saying that some members of the juries were either irresponsible or had such little knowledge or wisdom of the world that they saw nothing wrong in setting free those who were guilty of serious and important offences upon the most overwhelming evidence.

The explanation does not lie with jury-nobbling because that could not have taken place in the cases that I have in mind. The answer might lie in the age of the jurors, or in the fact that they have no stake in society and consequently do not care much about society. This is a fault that we have developed in our jury system and we are extending it to the coroners' courts by the clause.

Weighing the matter in the balance, I think that the overwhelming factor of importance is the confidence of the public. I am sure that the confidence of the public will be greater through having proper, modernised and efficient rules for the selection of jurors rather than the somewhat antiquated and Dickensian system that some may have thought led to arbitrary selections by officialdom and that gave very little confidence to those who had an interest in the outcome of the proceedings.

It is my pleasure briefly to comment on the interesting debate on clause 1. In the spirit of ecumenism that now prevails, I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price) on bringing the Bill forward. It is a useful measure, and I hope to have the opportunity of saying more about its usefulness, if it is the will of the Committee that we reach Third Reading today. We shall be making an important change in a system that has prevailed for many hundreds of years. It would be wrong, given that we did not have a Second Reading debate, that the moment should pass without a clear explanation of why the measure was thought necessary.

I am happy to be able to say that I warmly endorse all that the hon. Member for Lewisham, West has said about clause 1. There is no point of difference between us about the value of the Bill. It is fair to say, as I was glad to hear the hon. Gentleman say in an agreeably muted form, that I do not agree with all his thoughts about coroners' courts. However, apart from the contents of clause 1 there are other areas of agreement. I do not think that it would be to stray too far outside the bounds of what is properly within the Bill if we were to comment on other matters on Third Reading, especially if the hon. Gentleman is able to dilate on one or two of the issues that trouble him.

The effect of clause 1 is to insert section 3A into the 1887 Act, which remains the fundamental statutory basis for coroners' jurisdiction, even though we know that that jurisdiction is much older than that. As the hon. Member for Lewisham, West said, the purpose of the clause is a simple one—to apply to coroners' jurors exactly the same qualifications and disqualifications as apply to jurors in other courts. This will enable coroners' jurors to be selected at random from the electoral roll in the same way and by precisely the same means as jurors in other courts.

I listened with great interest to what my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) had to say about the effect of the clause. He is realistic enough to understand that if we are to make a change to bring coroners' juries on all fours with other juries it w ill not be possible to insert in the Bill any distinctions of the sort to which he referred, even if that were thought to be desirable.

Opinions vary on the ability of individuals to serve as jurors. As the hon. Member for Lewisham, West said, there are some who doubt the ability of 18-year-olds to serve as jurymen, but, equally, there can be doubts about others of any age. I see no reason to be pessimistic about this. We have determined in society for some years that 18 is the age when people take upon themselves the responsibilities of being adult. I find it difficult to display any lack of confidence in the ability of those of 18 to discharge their duties on coroners' juries, if the Bill is enacted, any more than there is reason to doubt the ability of an 18-year-old to pass judgment in elections. The system of allowing 18-year-olds to vote in elections has prevailed for some time. We are all citizens and must do our best when called on by society to bring our best judgment to bear on important issues, of which, as he rightly says, the issue of the cause of death is one of the most important and difficult.

12.30 pm

I assure the hon. Gentleman that the question of the civilianisation of coroners' officers is not a point of difference between us. The question is how it can best be implemented. We are sometimes accused of being insensitive to the feelings of local authorities. On this occasion we think it right to seek to reach agreement with local authorities, and on this important aspect of the coroner's jurisdiction a steering committee has been set up. A report by the organisation and methods branch of the Home Office on the functions of coroners' officers outside the Metropolitan police district will be circulated to the members of that committee in the next few weeks and we hope that that will be a good basis for the kind of agreement that both of us hope to see being reached.

We understand that local authorities generally are opposed to civilianisation primarily because—it is not an unworthy thought by any stretch of the imagination—it will, they fear, result in additional expenditure. However, there are signs of progress. At least one county, Nottinghamshire, has recently civilianised its coroners' officers and is well pleased with the result, and one hopes that that will provide a useful example for others to follow.

The welcome news that my hon. Friend gives that the Home Office is looking into the recommendation of the Select Committee gradually to phase out—to use the words of the report—the use of the police officer as the coroner's officer has an additional advantage, on which he touched, in relation to expenditure. A police officer in London is today costing about £24,000 a year, a little less outside the Metropolitan police area. There would be considerable savings to the public purse if civilians were employed in the coroner's office, with the added advantage of returning professionally trained police officers to street duty, where they are greatly needed.

My hon. Friend understands the issues well and, like the hon. Member for Lewisham, West, has done enormously useful work on the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which has worked well and produced a substantial report on this issue. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend on the point he makes. We understand that the police are equally pleased with what has happened in Nottinghamshire and wish to see more of that happening in the country because many senior police officers regard the duties of coroners' officers as unsuitable for trained police officers.

The Government, as well as providing the police with the manpower and resources that they need to tackle crime, have been alive to the necessity of making sure that police officers are not carrying out duties over a wide range of matters. Some of us have a picture of "Dixon of Dock Green", the police officer sitting at the back of the station typing a report with one finger. That would be far better done by civilians.

While resources are the largest problem that the local authorities see to moving generally in this direction, there is overhanging the whole issue the problem of the accountability of the coroner to the local authority, which is replete with a number of grey areas. That was made clear in the Helen Smith inquest when the coroner seemed — indeed, still seems —unwilling to tell the west Yorkshire county council how much Sir David Napley's Rolls-Royce cost the public purse. During these negotiations, any administrative tidying-up of things like the disclosure of costs and so on might oil the wheels and help people like John Gunnell, and folk in the local authorities who have begun to take an interest, probably for the first time in a thousand years, in the coroners' courts, to be favourable to the sort of reforms that we all want to see.

I have considerable sympathy with the hon. Gentleman's point about the difficult issue of the appointment of coroners and to whom they should be accountable. I would not agree with him that coroners should be accountable in the sense of having to report to, or somehow having to subordinate their judgment to, local authorities. To be fair to Mr. Gunnell, I had a useful hour and a half long discussion with him the other day and that revealed a larger measure of agreement than some tendentious accounts of the meeting might have led one to think existed.

One of the things that I am content to tell the hon. Gentleman is that there are other areas where I do not think he and I would necessarily be far apart, any more than I thought that Mr. Gunnell and I were that far apart in our meeting. I refer to the Brodrick report and the recommendations about the appointment and qualifications of coroners. We have by no means finished our consideration of the Brodrick report. While it would be premature to announce a conclusion, or to say when time could be found for legislation to be brought forward, we have considerable sympathy with what Brodrick said about the appointment of coroners, that it should be brought much more within the confines of the judicial system and should be a matter for the Lord Chancellor At the moment local authorities appoint coroners. There is no underlying common qualification for being a coroner. The coroner has powers to appoint deputies. That does not always work as well as it might. If someone appoints a coroner, should the county council have control over him? That would be root and branch against the way in which justice is administered because the coroner's court is like any other and in the end politicians do well to keep out of what is said in court. It is for the court of appeal, the divisional court and other parts of the judicial system to put coroners right. We know that there are ways in which people dissatisfied with the outcome of inquests can go up the judicial ladder to achieve satisfaction. That was done in the Helen Smith case. We are all grateful for the clarification of the law on the death of British citizens overseas by the court of appeal, which has been very helpful.

We understand why a number of people of good will, whatever else they may disagree with, find more favour with Brodrick than anything that has found its place in the law, although it is right, as my hon. and learned Friend said, that the Brodrick report has been around for 12 years. We think that it was a worthwhile report and are looking at other parts of it because we do not feel that we have finished yet with desirable changes that might be necessary in the coroner's jurisdiction.

I hope that the Government will be around for the next 12 years. I hope that the Government regard it is a matter of urgency to implement the good recommendations of the Brodrick committee, which have been lying around for 12 years and which ought to get on to the statute book as soon as possible.

There is an impetus. The Select Committee of which my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler) was a member had useful thoughts on that. As I have already said, I cannot give a time scale, but, having taken an interest in the coroners' jurisdiction before I took up my present responsibilities, that matter weighs heavily on me and I would like progress to be made, although the progress and content of legislation do not lie entirely with either me or my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. All that I can say is that within the Home Office there is a willingness to embark on a dialogue with all those concerned about the future of the coroners' jurisdiction. We have received great help from the Coroners Society. I should be disappointed if that did not lead to progress in the lifetime of another Parliament, although that does not lie in my hands and I cannot be seen to give a commitment on it.

Having dealt with one or two matters of detail about the coroner's jurisdiction, and while we hear a great deal of criticism about it, I have to say that in my dealings with the Coroners Society I am enormously impressed by the sense of commitment, the calibre of the men who serve that society, and their awareness that the jurisdiction should command public confidence, which is every bit as great as that of every hon. Member.

I know why there have been some complaints, and I acknowledge that complaint is sometimes inevitable because of the antiquity of some arrangements in the coroner's court. However, much of the criticism is unjustified and arises largely from a misunderstanding of the coroner's role. His role is to investigate impartially the medical and circumstantial causes of deaths, without attributing blame, and to establish the particulars necessary to enable those deaths to be registered. More than 174,000 deaths were reported to coroners in 1980 — that is an enormous work load — about 23,000 of which resulted in inquests. That is a considerable task, and I am sure that the Committee will agree that, generally speaking, it is a pretty thankless task. As well as knocking some aspects of the coroner's jurisdiction, we should pay tribute to the devoted work of those who perform a necessary and thankless task.

On the civilianisation of the coroner's office, I must mention the metropolis, which is of concern to the hon. Member for Lewisham, West and to me as a Member of Parliament from the greater London area.

And to me.

My hon. Friend rightly says, "And to me." The Government have been trying to reach an agreement on this matter with the GLC. It is one of the reluctant authorities, and I believe that the reason for that reluctance is the additional cost. However, we have agreed to have further discussions on civilianisation in the Metropolitan police district when discussions on the report of the steering committee have concluded. I hope that we shall make progress. I do not wish to denounce the GLC on the one occasion when it appears to be worried about additional costs. We would be grateful if it were worried about costs in some of its more expensive responsibilities, and there are better examples where its cost-consciousness should come to the fore. As the hon. Member for Lewisham, West probably has more influence with the present regime at the GLC than I do, perhaps we could call his good offices into service to help us to make progress.

What will the cost be for the greater London area? The GLC has shown no reluctance since May 1981 to increase the number of people employed at County Hall, especially those who receive salaries of more than £15,000 a year. We cannot talk about its other spending in detail now.

I cannot tell my hon. Friend what the cost will be, but compared with those parts of the GLC's budget that have, in my view — if the recent opinion polls are to be believed, in the view of the people of London as well—expanded beyond all reason, the cost would be de minimis.

I warmly welcome clause 1, which achieves fully in the minutiae of its wording the desirable aims of the hon.

Member for Lewisham, West. I do not disagree with his explanation of the eight subsections, and I commend the clause to the Committee.

Briefly, I thank the Minister for his useful speech which, thanks to you, Mr. Armstrong, and your predecessor, went very slightly wider than the exact terms of the Bill. It was extremely helpful to all concerned in giving us an idea of the Home Office's views in this area. I disagreed only with the strictures of the Minister and his hon. Friends about the Greater London council, which, as we all know, is performing a wonderful job in London, working for the citizens of London and for peace in the world.

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I disagree fundamentally with the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) about 18-year-olds and non-householders. The basic characteristic of a jury system, if there is to be such a system, is that it covers the whole spectrum of the population—the good and the bad, the weak-minded and the strong-minded, those with experience of the world and those with less experience of the world. Any move by Parliament to legislate for a jury system based on a smaller spectrum would be to legislate for a form of jury-rigging of the kind for which certain people have recently been prosecuted and convicted. I hope that we shall regard the democratic base of the jury system in exactly the same way as we regard the democratic base of the electoral register as a result of which we all come to the House. I am sure that that analogy is correct.

I welcome the Minister's comments and I commend the clause to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 2

Extension Of Rule-Making Power Under Section 26 Of The Act Of 1926

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

I shall be brief, as a number of us will wish to speak on Third Reading and some matters are perhaps best dealt with then.

Clause 2 is necessary because to make rules governing exceptions excusing people from jury service requites an extension of the rule-making power in section 26 of the Coroners (Amendment) Act 1926 which gives the Lord Chancellor power to make procedural rules. The clause extends that power to allow rules to be made to excuse persons from service in circumstances specified in the rules.

I understand that it is intended that the rules should enable a person summoned for service to make representations to the appropriate officer to the effect that he is not qualified for service or is entitled to be excused. They will confer a right of excusal for persons listed in part III of schedule 1 to the Juries Act 1974 and a discretion for the appropriate officer and the coroner to excuse persons summoned who can show good reason for excusal. They will also allow the coroner to discharge the person summoned if there is doubt about that person's capacity to act as a juror by reason of physical disability or insufficient understanding of English or to withdraw or alter the summons if the juror's attendance is unnecessary or can be dispensed with on any particular day.

The rules will come into effect with the Bill. Again, this will put the coroner's jury system on all fours with that of the courts. This is very much a technical clause and I commend it to the House.

I am not at all happy about the clause and I am not convinced that it is necessary. The Coroners Act 1887, the Juries Act 1870 and, for all I know, more modern statutes lay down the grounds on which a person may be excused from jury service. The clause invites the Lord Chancellor to make provisional rules in such circumstances as he specifies.

I am unhappy about the clause because I, like all right hon. and hon. Members, think that the current Lord Chancellor is a great and substantial ornament of the judicial system. Long may he remain so. The history of his office will be remembered with great pride in the annals of our law and order system. Nevertheless, a recent example of the Lord Chancellor's rule-making powers is not a happy one. It looks as though, by one recent rule, solicitors will be in two minds about whether to send someone who knows something about a criminal case, a secretary or the tea girl to sit behind counsel in the Crown court to advise him on the intricacies of the case because of the need for cheeseparing on expenses for solicitors' representatives. The Law Society, the Bar Council and everyone else with a close association with the conduct of criminal trials feel strongly about that. If that is an example of a Lord Chancellor's rule that we can expect to be made, I question the need for the clause.

It is better for the present system to be used. Today a judge exercises his common sense about whether a juryman should be excused service. If a juryman is about to be engaged in a long trial or a long inquest he will be asked whether he has a business interest which is more urgent so that he does not suffer personal loss on a substantial scale. That happens in the Central Criminal Court every day. Potential jurors are asked by the judge whether they will suffer if they sit on the jury on a case lasting four or five weeks. A business man who has no one to look after his shop, for instance, will be excused by the judge, using his common sense.

Once, a potential member of a jury asked the judge whether he could be excused from jury service. The judge asked, "Upon what ground?" The man said, "My wife is about to conceive." The learned judge replied, "I think that you mean that your wife is about to be confined. But whether you are right or I am right I do think you should be there." The judge exercised his common sense when deciding whether the excuse should be accepted. We should be careful before we approve clauses which encourage the Lord Chancellor to make more cheeseparing rules which may not be acceptable.

I share the feelings of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) about the clause because I also spotted the words and the purpose of subsection (2), and I wondered why it was necessary for the Lord Chancellor, eminent, distinguished and well-regarded though he is, to be responsible for issuing rules to excuse service as juror. Like my hon. and learned Friend, I pondered on how extensive such rules would be.

In the nature of human life and experience, it is difficult to write into rules every situation which common sense may suggest should be a reason for excusing a person from service on a coroner's jury. In the last 25 years, the House and Ministers of the Crown have persisted in creating hundreds if not thousands more criminal offences by extending the criminal law and by extending rules and regulations under statutes which the House has approved. As a result, we have also created a sort of subsidiary publishing and printing industry in books of law to explain it all to the legal profession and other related bodies—to such an extent that no one now knows where he stands in regard to the criminal law.

In this eminently desirable Bill, we are proposing to create yet more rules to try to deal with a subject which ought to be at the discretion of the coroner as a matter of common sense. I look forward to hearing the views of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State. It may be that he will say that the Lord Chancellor does not have it in mind to publish rules and will leave clause 2(2) in abeyance.

I move on to subsection (4), which contains a hint about the historic nature of the office of coroner, since the coroner of the Queen's household—

On a point of order, Mr. Dean. I have no wish to inhibit the hon. Gentleman's flow, but there will probably be a debate on clause 3, of which subsection (4) is part.

Perhaps I can help the hon. Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler). He was addressing his remarks to clause 2, which is correct. He referred to subsection (4), and I understood him to mean subsection (2). In any event, we are discussing clause 2 at the moment, and not clause 3.

I am indebted to you, Mr. Dean. I was straying over into clause 3. My eyes had failed to read the figure accurately. I shall make my comments on clause 3(4) in due course.

I endorse what the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price) said about clause 2. It has exactly the effect that he suggested, and my Department agrees entirely with the way that it is drafted.

Let me deal with the objections of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) and my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler). I understand their arguments, and I hope to be in a position to reassure them.

Both my hon. Friends warmly endorsed the exercise of discretion by judges in the normal court system about a wide range of issues concerning juries, but a number of those powers derive specifically from the Juries Act 1974. If certain provisions of that Act are to become part of the system of coroners' juries, it is essential that there should be rules under clause 2. All that we are trying to do here is to make coroners' juries subject to the conditions that apply in other courts.

I should also say, to defend my noble Friend the Lord Chancellor, that he makes the rules in name only. If the rules are defective, that is the fault of the Home Office, because we advise him on the rules and take responsibility for them. That happy fact enables me further to reassure the Committee by explaining the points that we wish to cover in the rules.

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We envisage that the rules will enable a person summoned to make representations to the appropriate officer if he is not qualified for jury service or wishes or is entitled to be excused, and will confer a right of excusal on persons listed in part III of schedule 1 to the Juries Act 1974. As my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Stanbrook) knows, that is the Act that is applied in Crown courts and elsewhere and that would not otherwise apply in this jurisdiction unless we were able to incorporate it through the rules. The rules will confer a statutory based discretion on the appropriate officer to excuse persons summoned who can show good reasons for excusal, power for the coroner to discharge the summons if there is doubt about the capacity of the person summoned to act as juror by reason of physical disability or insufficient understanding of English, and power to withdraw or alter the summons if the juror's attendance is unnecessary or can be dispensed with on any particular day.

I hope that that explanation will allow my hon. Friend to feel that that is a necessary part of the Bill, not an unreasonable addition to our law.

After this legislation, will the position of coroners' juries be the same as for other juries? If a juryman is seriously inconvenienced or there is substantial hardship caused to him if he serves on the jury, even though he is not otherwise disqualified, will it be within the discretion of the coroner to accept that reason and dismiss the jurer?

That is what the rules would achieve.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 2 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 3

Citation, Commencement Etc

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

I am sure that the hon. Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler) will want to add his comments on this clause.

Clause 3 has five subsections, all of which are self-explanatory, except for subsection (4). Had I been in one of my less than royalist moods, I might have been moved to try to exclude subsection (4) and to make a speech such as those sometimes made by my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton). Subsection (4) refers to a quaint little nook of our constitution which it would be fun to sweep away, but perhaps the dying days of a Parliament are not the right time to do so.

Subsection (4) provides that the Bill shall not apply to any inquest that is begun before the Bill comes into force, which is acceptable, or to any inquest heard by the coroner of the Queen's household. When I started preparing the Bill, it was the first time that I had realised that there was anyone who was called the coroner of the Queen's household. Even today I have never met the coroner of the Queen's household and I doubt whether the Minister has either.

The coroner of the Queen's household is governed by section 29 of the Coroners Act 1877. He, or perhaps she —I am certain that it is a he as there is only one female coroner in Britain and she is about to retire — has jurisdiction exclusively within the limits of any of the Queen's palaces or any other house where Her Majesty is residing.

The jurors on an inquest held by the coroner of the Queen's household must consist of officers of that household. I can only say that that breaches' my principle of a jury which is a clean spectrum of the British populace. Although I understand that officers of the Queen's household include what one might describe as downstairs as well as upstairs people, I suspect that most of them are upstairs rather than downstairs people. Such a coroner's jury would not be one of which I should approve. Nevertheless, I cannot say that it is any purpose of the Bill to interfere with Her Majesty, her household or even her coroner and I am content to commend the clause to the House.

I may row address myself to clause 3. Like the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price), my comments are in respect of subsection (4).

I welcome clause 3 in its entirety and I hope that it will remain a part of the Bill. I am delighted to hear that the hon. Member for Lewisham, West is in a magnanimous mood today and does not feel disposed to probe too deeply and disturb a part of the Bill which has its origins in the mists of time, if not the middle ages.

I think that I am correct: in saying that we in this House have some modest interest: in the exemption from the Bill of the Queen's household inasmuch as none of us is able to die in this royal palace and that, too, is associated with the historic nature of subsection (4). I suppose that it relates historically to the origins of the office of coroner, since in the middle ages the coroner was the king's or queen's man with the prime duty to inquire into the findings of treasure which was then defined as gold or silver. The monarch always had a vested interest in laying his hands upon anything of value in the kingdom in order to sustain the treasury. The office of coroner has that additional role still laid upon it.

It is also true to say that in the middle ages what happened in the royal palace was sometimes of a political nature—for example, should a prince of the blood royal have the misfortune to fall into a butt of wine and not survive. Therefore, we bow to the mists of time and history in acknowledging in this small subsection a the Bill the special relationship with the monarch and the royal palaces. I for one believe that there is an occasion for turning a blind eye and not pressing too far into the cause or reason.

The hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price) has drafted this clause to assist what can best be called the maintenance of the courtesy properly due to Her Majesty and Her Majesty's household. We agree with him and believe that the limited exemption does not in any way reduce the effectiveness of the measure and that it should therefore be granted.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 3 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

1.10 pm

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

It is a great pleasure to me that hon. Members have seen fit, in a comparatively short time, to go through the Bill line by line and to report it to the House. The Minister said on clause 1, and I agree with him, that the Bill could make a great difference to the conduct of coroners' courts, and that is extremely important.

I wish to quote what the Brodrick report said about coroners' juries, and what led Brodrick to recommend the change. In paragraph 16.48 he said:

"Several of our witnesses suggested, and we accept, that the role of a coroner's jury today is no more than symbolic. Despite the habitual care of coroners in explaining to their juries the procedure of an inquest, we believe that jurors often approach their task with a sense of bewilderment as they realise the extemely limited nature of the role they have to play. Unless they have some expert knowledge upon which to base pertinent questions to witnesses as, for instance, in an industrial accident case—and it is rare for jurors to be selected with this sort of consideration in mind—they can claim no effective part in the proceedings until the time comes for the verdict to be given and a rider, if any, attached. The range of verdicts is limited and in many cases the final verdict is effectively, and of necessity, dictated to them by the coroner. Where juries have returned a verdict contrary to the guidance of the coroner—most notably a verdict of 'manslaughter' in road traffic cases—subsequent proceedings have usually shown that their judgment was in error.

So long as it has remained one function of an inquest to determine the responsibilty of an individual for the death of another person, it has been difficult to consider the abolition of a coroner's jury. But this situation will be changed by our recommendations, which should alter the whole character of a coroner's inquest. In this new situation, we see no reason why it should continue to be mandatory for a coroner to summon a jury to deal with any particular category of death."

That was one of its recommendations.

"At the same time, we can see that occasionally a coroner may feel the need for a jury to assist him, or he may feel that the finding might be more acceptable if given by a jury than by himself. We recommend that the mandatory requirement to summon a jury for inquests in certain categories of death should be abolished, but that the coroner should retain the power to summon a jury where he considers that there are special reasons for doing so.

If in these exceptional cases a jury is summoned, care should be taken to ensure that those who are summoned are fully representative of the local community. In particular, we think that women, who are rarely, if ever, called for service on a coroner's jury, should in future be given the opportunity to perform this service. When a coroner decides to sit with a jury, we recommend that it should be summoned in accordance with the same rules as are used by the High Sheriff in summoning juries for other courts."

Brodrick used those three paragraphs to introduce his recommendations. I am not totally in sympathy with the tone of those recommendations, because events have moved on a great deal. Brodrick was subjected to pressure completely to abolish the coroner's jury. Brodrick wanted to retain the jury and made recommendations along the lines of the Bill, because he had an inkling, which is found throughout Brodrick, that it is rather dangerous to let one person have the enormous jurisdiction to decide the cause of death in a public inquiry.

If there is an allegation that a serious crime has been committed, or that a death has occurred in suspicious circumstances — particularly if it has occurred in the custody of the police, prison service or other authority —it would be extremely dangerous to allow the coroner to give a verdict without assistance from anyone else. That is particularly true, as the coroner is relatively unaccountable to anyone, for the reasons that the Minister has given. That is why I welcome the strengthening of the provisions with regard to the circumstances in which a coroner must summon a jury.

I am also glad that the jury will now, as far as possible, be selected completely randomly, so that there is no suggestion that the coroner has deliberately selected those whom he thinks will return the verdict he wants, or that the selection is done so inefficiently that the jury is not a proper jury. Brodrick said that if his other recommendations were introduced, a proper jury in a coroner's court would be fully able to understand what was going on. As was rightly said, at the time of the report—not long ago — in most cases juries did not understand what was going on. They were merely decorative and did exactly what coroners told them.

We cannot simply achieve our aims by changing the rules for selecting juries. If juries are to be taken seriously they must receive guidance not only from the coroner, but from others. That is what makes the Select Committee's and Brodrick's recommendations about legal aid so important. I am trying to remain in order, but if a properly selected jury simply obtains guidance from the coroner, who will often ask a succession of leading questions based on police reports, it will be unable to do its job properly.

It behoves us to ensure that a jury can do its job properly, just as a Crown court jury can do. A Crown court jury can perform its task properly not only because it receives directions from the judge, but also because counsel represent the various parties, cross-examine the witnesses and make closing speeches that are addressed to the jury. No one could imagine a Crown court jury operating properly if it simply listened to what the judge had to say.

The coroner's inquest is not adversarial but inquisitorial. I fully accept that. Although coroners' juries will be selected on exactly the same basis as Crown court juries, we can never expect the procedure with which they have to deal to be on all fours with the procedure in the Crown court. But I do not believe that that necessarily means we must leave the matter as it stands. The juries, which will now be selected in a different way, would do their jobs immensely better if they had the benefit of listening to counsel, particularly in cases where extreme distress has been caused and where the conduct of the police or the prison service is in question.

The hon. Gentleman is in slight danger of misleading his listeners into believing that counsel never appear at inquests. Counsel and solicitors often appear at inquests, although not under the legal aid system. That does not necessarily mean that a great injustice is caused. Sometimes it is possible for people of quite low means to be able to gather enough money together to be able properly to instruct their solicitor and learned counsel to a reasonably high standard. The position is not as bad as the hon. Gentleman says, although I see some merit in his argument.

I am grateful to the hon. and learned Gentleman, who is a sponsor of my Bill, for leading me in this direction. I was choosing my words carefully as on Third Reading one must consider the Bill as it is and not the Bill as one would like it to be. I am most conscious of that point, which is why I approached this obstacle along the path in the way that I did. The hon. and learned Gentleman is correct. At many inquests, particularly in well-known cases such as the Blair Peach inquest, the New Cross fire inquest and the Helen Smith inquest, the relatives and the authorities have been represented by the most eminent Queen's counsel. The money for those Queen's counsel has been raised by a variety of means. The Queen's counsel representing the police get their money from what the Prime Minister would call "handouts", if that is the right phrase—I do not know what the right phrase is—but I know that we pay, not them.

I fully accept that relatives are often represented and that the money is raised in one way or another, sometimes with extreme difficulty, by relatives who are in great distress at the time. That cannot be right. If I continue on the subject of legal aid, I will be ruled out of order, but I have made the point about the context in which the juries will operate.

I should like to make a further point about that context, and I hope at the same time to remain wholly in order. If, as the Bill seeks, we are to modernise our jury service, it is important that we treat the members of the jury as intelligent human beings and not as characters swept in off the street to be given instructions by someone who calls himself a coroner. The jurors are an integral part of the court and the system of justice. They are not, as Brodrick calls them, a simple decoration in the system, to make it look better than it really is. If we are to treat them like that, they deserve to be treated as intelligent human beings and to receive as much information about the death as it is proper to give them.

As the Brodrick report states, coroners' juries are restricted in the number of verdicts that they can give. Coroners' juries would often like to say far more about a death than the coroner tells them they are allowed to say. They can say that the death was an accident, that the person was deliberately killed or that there was lack of care. The latter verdict was recently returned by a brave jury in Surrey following a death in Ashford remand centre, which I hope will be taken into account by the Home Office.

The Home Office is responsible for remand centres as well as juries, and that is why it is right to say that it has great responsibility in these matters. The number of verdicts is limited in a coroner's court, but is for the jury and not for the coroner to decide whether the verdict shall be misadventure, unlawful killing, lack of care or perhaps suicide, in which case the blame lies with the individual. It is the jury's job to return a verdict, but in case after case recently coroners pushed juries as hard as they could to come to one particular verdict.

If anyone reads the last stages of Mr. Gill's summing up in the Helen Smith inquest, he will come to the conclusion that Mr. Gill wanted the jury to bring in a verdict which it did not return. The jury returned an open verdict, as in the New Cross incident. It was an intelligent jury and it stated, in effect, that it could not make up its mind how the death took place. Coroners love certainty. They love to be able to say, "This is how it took place." There was considerable pressure during the Helen Smith inquest to say that the accident took place because of a story that turned out to have much less relationship to the truth than was first thought. The story was that the two persons concerned had fallen off a balcony, which almost certainly Helen Smith never did.

If coroner's juries are to be treated as intelligent bodies with a proper role to play in the process of justice, they need to he allowed access to all the information that is available. The situation now in the coroners' courts is that counsel for the police and the coroner read all the police reports on how an individual died, but counsel for the relatives and the jury are normally denied any access to those reports. The new and intelligent juries that will be empanelled in coroners' courts when the Bill is enacted will see that counsel for the police have briefcases that are stuffed with papers. They will know that the briefcases contain information that would help them to reach a verdict. They will know also that the coroner has read all the police reports and that that information has been denied to counsel for the relatives and to them. That cannot be right.

If we are to go as far as the Bill seeks in initiating reform, one day Parliament must go a good deal further and allow proper and full disclosure. I agree that the degree of disclosure to the jury is in the coroner's hands, but it is a matter of convention that he will never allow police reports to be read by the jury. An important implication of the Bill is that we must not allow the new juries to become frustrated by being treated as though they are less important than they really are.

Although it is called the Coroners' Juries Bill and prescribes the way in which coroners' juries should be selected, the Bill puts on coroners a new responsibility to take their juries seriously; to give them, as they have the right to do, as much information as they can; to allow, as they have the right to do, as much legal representation as possible to the parties involved who want to be represented; and, most important, not to push juries so hard and fast towards one verdict that they devalue the whole point of having a jury in the first place.

It is in the nature of a coroner's job that he reads the evidence first and, probably a week or two before the inquest, makes up his mind as to the verdict he will reach, because that is inherent in the inquisitorial nature of the process. I do not object to that. But when the inquest takes place it should be the role of the coroner who has a jury before him not so to lead evidence from police reports and not so to make clear his view of what the verdict should be that, unconsciously or in many cases deliberately, he pushes the jury in a particular direction.

The organisation Inquest, with which I have been working and which has put a great deal of work into the Bill, has recently raised the subject of deaths which have occurred in recent years in custody, so demanding a jury, where the characteristics to which I have referred have been present. I need not list them all, but they have included Blair Peach, the New Cross fire, Paul Worrell, Terry Smerdon, the case of Simeon Collins in south London, James Ruddock in London and Oliver Clairemont in Maidstone. There was recently a worrying programme on Television South about some deaths in Canterbury prison and a death in a police station in Canterbury.

The organisation Inquest is, in my view rightly, trying to get far greater public awareness of the dissatisfaction which people feel after inquests. That dissatisfaction will be allayed and public confidence in the system restored only if we have properly selected juries serving on inquests with the jurors being given a responsible job to do by a properly trained coroner.

It would be wrong of me to go into the whole business of the accountability of coroners, legal aid, the disclosure of documents and the training of coroners as well a; their appointment and dismissal. The job of reforming a part of our legal system that is nearly 1,000 years old and which has hardly been touched during that time will not be complete until all the other issues I have mentioned, but which are not dealt with in the Bill, have been tackled. I I have strayed just marginally from Third Reading rules, I ask you to forgive me, Mr. Deputy Sepaker, but it has enabled me to put in a wider context the way in which this narrow Bill should properly be seen.

I have deliberately allowed the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price) a good deal of licence, as the promoter of the Bill. However, I remind the House that on Third Reading it is in order to discuss only the contents of the Bill.

1.36 pm

In view of your advice to the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and of the passing of time, I shall seek to be brief and to the point.

Following the speech of the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price), I should simply like to say that the Bill that we propose to pass makes an important contribution to the coroners' system, which is many centuries old. I believe that public confidence both in the office of coroner and in the way in which inquests are conducted will have been advanced today by the proposal to call juries in accordance with the normal Crown court rules. The Select Committee on Home Affairs took up the question of deaths in police custody because, between 1970 and 1979, 274 people died while in police custody. It must be a fundamental principle of our judicial system that when inquiries are made into matters of great concern both to the public and to the Crown, they should be made in circumstances that engender maximum public confidence and respect. The Bill is a significant step in the direction of providing that public confidence.

I hope that on a future occasion the Home Department will extend the professionalism of the coroner's court requiring that appointments of all coroners and deputy coroners to full-time posts are made by the Lord Chancellor after appropriate consultation with the local authorities and that only banisters or solicitors of at least five years' standing in their profession should be eligible for such appointments.

It follows very much the thinking of the hon. Member for Lewisham, West that if the coroner's court is to be made more professional, in the sense of drawing its juries in the way that is proposed, the office of coroner should be strengthened and improved to ensure that the person who presides over an inquest and advises the jury is of the highest professional competence and standing.

I give my unreserved welcome to the progress of the Bill, which I hope will soon be on the statute book. It will do much to further public confidence in the jury system.

1.39 pm

I begin my speech on Third Reading as I began my speech in Committee by thanking the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Price) for introducing this measure and for the way in which he set it before the House. This most useful Bill will enable coroners' juries to be selected by the same machinery as is used for the selection of jurors in other courts, and it is none the worse for being a modest measure that lies within a narrow compass. I know that the hon. Gentleman would wish more progress, but I hope that in Committee I showed him that the Government do not believe that we have reached the end of the road in changes in the coroner's system.

The hon. Gentleman would not expect me to endorse every word that he said on the matter, but I pay genuine tribute to him for his distinguished record of interest in such matters for many years, which one can respect and admire even if one disagrees with some of his points. It is fitting that if, as we hope, the Bill succeeds in another place and becomes law, his name will be attached to it as concrete recognition of the interest that he has taken in such matters, on which he has become an expert, and of his influence across the party divide.

I am glad that we had a generous amount of time today to get to grips with an important area of our judicial system, upon which not as much light is thrown as it should be, to reveal the problems and the extent of the business that coroners' courts must transact. We are very much in the debt of the many good coroners for the way in which they carry out their duties.

The hon. Gentleman began his Third Reading speech appropriately by mentioning the Brodrick committee. It recommended that care should be taken to ensure that coroners' juries were fully representative of the local community. To do that, the Brodrick report recommended that the jury should be summoned in accordance with the rules that are used by high sheriffs in summoning juries for other courts.

Since that report, the Juries' Act 1974 has come into force, and the Lord Chancellor has become responsible for summoning juries in other courts. However, because the function of the coroner's jury differed so widely from that of juries in other courts, it was decided that the 1974 Act should exclude coroners' courts. At that time it was thought that the Brodrick recommendations might be implemented in one Bill. However, that did not happen, and in 1980 the Select Committee on Home Affairs, of which my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Wheeler) is a distinguished member, dealt with some of those matters in its report on deaths in police custody. It recommended that the Brodrick proposal to secure

"a more random selection of jury members than has sometimes been achieved by current methods"

should be brought into law. That is what the hon. Member for Lewisham, West, with the leave of the House, will do in a few moments.

However, it is no longer possible to implement the Brodrick recommendation as it stands, because events have moved on during the 12 years since it was published. Under the Juries Act 1974, the Lord Chancellor became responsible for summoning juries in other courts, and it has not been possible to lay down detailed rules about the way in which that should be undertaken. Therefore, it seemed best to ensure that the selection of coroners' juries should be made by the same process as is used in other courts.

In a statement in the House on 11 November 1980, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary responded to the Select Committee's report and accepted, among other recommendations, the principle that coroners' juries should be selected by the process used for juries in other courts. That has been our view for some years, and that is why we warmly welcome the hon. Gentleman's initiative.

The Brodrick committee recommended that the mandatory jury should be abolished. That important recommendation was brought into law with the Criminal Law Act 1977, which abolished the mandatory jury in cases of homicide and deaths in road traffic accidents.

Mainly as a result of that change, especially the provision about road traffic accidents, the number of inquests with juries fell dramatically from 40 per cent. of all inquests in 1976 to 4 per cent. in 1982. Nevertheless, even though today fewer than 1,000 inquests per year are held with a jury, it is important—for many reasons, including some raised by the hon. Gentleman such as the real and proper public interest in some inquests—that there should be impartial selection.

At present, the coroner issues his warrant under section 3 of the Coroners Act 1887 to the coroner's officer, commanding him to summon a specified number, not being less than seven or more than 11 "good and lawful" men. The selection of the jurors is left to the coroner's officer under the general supervision of the coroner. If the inquest is into the death of a prisoner who died in prison, an officer of the prison, a prisoner in it or a person engaged in any sort of trade or dealing with the prison is prohibited by the 1887 Act from serving as a juror on the inquest. A similar prohibition exists where the death is that of a sailor in a naval prison. For the rest, the matter is left to the common law, which considers it undesirable that a person having any personal knowledge of the facts, or such strong prejudices as to render him biased, should be summoned as a juror. The qualification "lawful" is held to imply that the juror must not be an outlaw, but that ceased to have more than historical interest since outlawry was abolished by the Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1938.

If the Bill becomes law, all that will be a thing of the past because the qualifications that will then apply will be those laid down in section 1 of the 1974 Act—that the person concerned must be registered as a parliamentary or local government elector, be not less than 18 or more than 65 years of age and have been ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man for a period of at least five years since attaining the age of 13. The person must also not be for the time being ineligible or disqualified for jury service as shown in parts I and II of the schedule to the 1974 Act.

Persons ineligible for jury service under that Act include the judiciary, others concerned with the administration of justice — including governors, chaplains, medical officers and other officers of penal establishments and members of any police force—the clergy and the mentally ill.

Persons disqualified for jury service are those who have at any time been sentenced in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man to imprisonment for life or for a term of five years or more or to be detained during Her Majesty's pleasure, during the pleasure of the Secretary of State or during the pleasure of the governor of Northern Ireland, or who have at any time in the last 10 years in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man served any part of a sentence of imprisonment or detention, being a sentence for a term of three months or more, or been detained in a borstal institution.

I have mentioned all that because the Bill incorporates those provisions of the 1974 Act, but they are not themselves free from controversy. Much dissatisfaction has been expressed—rightly, in my view—about some of the present disqualifications. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, who is anxious above all else to protect the integrity of the jury system, announced last year the Government's intention at the earliest suitable opportunity to widen the present criteria for disqualification, because we believe that they no longer adequately cover all those who, by their way of life as evidenced in their convictions, are not fitted to sit in judgment upon their fellow citizens. In part that is a consequence of the greater availability nowadays of non-custodial disposals, such as suspended sentences and community service orders, for offences which would previously have carried a prison sentence and the use of which, in appropriate cases, we fully support. Whereas in such cases it may be possible as well as desirable to avoid the use of imprisonment, it does not follow that such people should continue to be eligible to serve on juries.

In order to ensure that people with previous convictions who, nevertheless, have not served a period of imprisonment are disqualified from jury service, my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest (Mr. McNair-Wilson) has introduced a Bill which received its Second Reading on 25 February. As hon. Members may be aware, the Bill extends disqualification for jury service to all those who, within the last 10 years, have been convicted of an imprisonable offence unless they received only an absolute or conditional discharge or an order for bind-over. This exemption recognises that, for offenders in respect of whose conduct the court was able to take a lenient view, disqualification is not appropriate unless and until another conviction carrying a more severe penalty ensues. The Committee stage of that Bill is expected soon. I very much hope that it will receive a favourable hearing and, ultimately, succeed in strengthening the present provisions for disqualification. The relevance today is that if that Bill is successful, the disqualifications which it seeks to impose will also apply to coroners' jurors. I think that that meets the point so eloquently made in Committee by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence).

I shall deal briefly with the reason why it is thought right to apply to coroners' jurors the qualifications and disqualifications which apply to jurors in other courts. The selection will be from the electoral roll. Nothing about this selection appears in the Bill, because it will be effected by administrative means. The court staff who select juries for other courts at random from the electoral roll will provide the coroner's officer with a list of names, selected in the same way, of persons within the coroner's district and these will be summoned in strict rotation.

Hitherto, although Home Office guidance to coroners has suggested that jurors should be selected at random from the electoral roll, practice has varied between different coroners' districts. That has been commented on today. About 50 years ago, in 1936, the Wright committee produced its report on coroners. It said:

"As to the personnel of the jury we have heard from several quarters very striking evidence, which seems to be worthy of credence, that the class of jurors is often of a most unsuitable character… The Courts have condemned the practice of employing the same persons again and again as jurors at inquests, and have insisted on the importance of having proper persons to act as jurors … The evidence given before us establishes that in various places the coroner's officer in practice still has a regular body of men who are summoned from time to time to act as jurors. We were also informed of a town where the coroner's jury was regularly constituted of the inmates of a workhouse."

The committee recommended that it should be provided by law that coroners' juries should be chosen from the jury list, and that coroners should take steps to ensure that service on a coroner's jury was a duty more evenly borne by all classes of society.

In cases which involved difficult industrial and other investigations, the Wright committee considered it particularly important, if inquests were to command any respect, that fit and proper persons should form the jury. The committee also noted that many coroners appeared never to summon women as jurors—that was the subject of comment by the hon. Member for Lewisham, West today — which shows how little change occurs sometimes in this long established jurisdiction. The committee recommended that, as a matter of practice, in an inquest on a deceased woman, child or infant, at least two women should serve on the jury if one were summoned.

The House will note that, far from advocating the random selection of jurors, the Wright committee envisaged a kind of enlightened selection process that perhaps would be out of keeping with the way that we think of these matters today.

The proposal that women should form part of a coroner's jury in circumstances which the committee considered suitable may be noted because, traditionally, women did not form part of a coroner's jury. In the past, the property qualification meant that few women were qualified to serve. After it was abolished, the feeling that the often unpleasant medical details and evidence concerning violent or unnatural deaths would be too shocking to members of the gentle sex was prevalent among coroners.

The Home Office issued some advice in 1974. It said that there should be no discrimination between the sexes in selecting juries for inquests; but, relevant to what the hon. Member for Lewisham, West said, it is right to point out that as recently as December 1981, in the case of Richard Campbell, a coroner's officer deposed:

"I do not generally ask women to serve as it has always been my practice and habit to call at a house and ask for the husband."

The aim of the Bill is to enable random selection from the electoral roll. That will mean that men and women are equally likely to be selected. I hope that we all agree that that is the right way to proceed.

The reason given by Brodrick for summoning juries in a different way from the ordinary rules is that coroners' juries often have to be called together quickly. That seems to be the only dissenting view about the need for the rules to be changed. Will my hon. Friend deal with that? In his otherwise thorough, careful and distinguished speech, he has not yet dealt with it.

On occasions, coroners' juries need to be brought together quickly, but we see no reason why the normal mechanism that is applied in the Crown courts—which, after all, are summoning juries on a daily basis for the time ahead—should not be applied. However, it will make even more important the right of people on reasonable grounds to be exempted from jury service.

I do not know that it is necessary for me to go through any of the detailed provisions of the Bill. It creates some new offences, but I think that the House has been satisfied in Committee that it is necessary for that to happen. The Bill will come into force, if it is passed in the other place, on a day to be appointed by the Secretary of State. The reason is to allow time for the new rules to be made to give coroners proper discretion over those issues which were rightly of concern to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton.

It only remains for me to give the Government's warm welcome to and support for the Bill and to hope that it will commend itself to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

Rating (Caravan Sites) (Scotland) (Amendment) Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

1.58

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I want first to place on record my thanks to the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, my hon. Friend the Member for Renfrewshire, East (Mr. Stewart), for the time that he has given me and for the time that he and his officials have given to the National Federation of Site Operators and the National Caravan Council in studying the impact of rates on caravan sites in Scotland. I want that on the record because my hon. Friend has been very generous with his time.

The aim of the Bill is to amend the Rating (Caravan Sites) Act 1976 to give Scottish caravan sites parity with those in England and Wales. My reason for introducing the Bill is that I believe that, for a country that depends so vitally on tourism, it is absurd that the mean rateable value per caravan in Scotland should be in excess of £100 when in England and Wales it is under £50. The cash value paid in rates in many instances can be up to three times higher in Scotland. I realise that some Scots claim that one Scot is worth any three Englishmen or Welshmen, but I doubt whether many would be prepared to pay for that claim.

Tourism is now Scotland's largest industry, earns as a whole over £700 million each year and provides employment for 90,000 people. The Government spend substantial sums of public money to bolster the trade. Over the years there has been a substantial expansion in the number of caravan sites as the result of this policy. The caravan park sector provides 36 per cent. of the total holiday bed spaces, creating approximately 10,000 jobs and contributing about £80 million to the Scottish economy. Within the self-catering sector, which includes chalets and holiday houses, caravan sites provide 82 per cent. of the holiday bed spaces.

It is with that in mind that I bring to the attention of the House a letter written almost a year ago on 26 May 1982 by the chairman of the Scottish Tourist Board to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland. I shall not quote the letter in full, but some parts of it are worth quoting. The board was concerned, so it commissioned a detailed professional evaluation, including cross-border comparisons. The letter says:

"The report shows an alarming difference in the rate burden between Scotland and south of the border. The available evidence shows that, on a per room basis, the rates paid by Scottish hotels are two and a half times greater than their English counterparts. On the caravans the gap is even wider, with a ratio of 2·85. And this, of course, against a background of a shorter season, lower turnover and higher overheads related to transport costs is the pattern in most areas of Scotland.

The Board are well aware of the different valuation system that operates in England, the different levels of rate poundage and the fact that the last revaluation in England was in 1973. Some anomalies and some marginal difference in the rate burden are to be expected but if Scottish hotels and caravan parks are paying more than twice the rates paid in the rest of the country, they are put at a severe trading disadvantage.

The assessors, whom we have already approached, say that there is nothing they can do to remedy the situation, nor can they take account of the English figures in the revaluation programme that is now underway. This position has been largely confirmed in discussions with your own officials. The Board's Chief Executive will however be writing again to the assessors on the results of our investigation.

My Board cannot however, as national tourism agency, accept the position and I feel bound therefore to bring the matter to your notice in the hope that you can initiate action which would allow the Scottish tourism industry to compete at least on an equal basis with more favourably located competitors in England and Wales."

The letter is signed by the chairman of the Scottish Tourist Board. It was written almost 12 months ago, and since then the situation has, if anything, deteriorated.

The tourists who come to Scotland and occupy caravans are a vital source of income to local communities. As an example, in Blairgowrie in Perthshire, the small community from which I come, male unemployment is running at about 20 per cent. This was brought about by the closure of a canning factory, Smedleys, and Thompsons spinning mills. These sad happenings occurred before the Conservative Government came into office, so had nothing to do with Conservative policy. However, we still have 20 per cent. male unemployment and the area is more than ever vitally dependent on tourist trade. In the past two years, we have witnessed a substantial reduction in this vital trade and in the use of the local caravan sites.

I use that illustration to show the problem that exists throughout Scotland. Sadly, during the past three years, occupancy of the self-catering accommodation has dropped by 20 per cent. at peak periods. The combination of changes brought about by the Rating (Caravan Sites) Act 1976 and the general revaluation of all properties in Scotland in 1978 has led to an increase in caravan assessments of four to six times the original assessment. The revaluation has created a situation in which caravan assessments have risen considerably more than other domestic dwellings, which rose on average two and a half to three times, while most caravan assessments increased four to six times. Consequently, caravans have been doubly penalised. That is why we must act now to reduce the penal level of rates on caravan sites in Scotland.

Before the 1976 Act all static leisure caravans were separately assessed and entered in the valuation roll, with the individual caravan owner having a right of appeal and direct responsibility to the local authority. That meant that for a large caravan park with about 500 caravans the local authority would issue 500 demands to 500 individuals, most of whom lived in other parts of the country, many in England and Wales. Therefore, those individuals were either living outside Scotland or under other local authorities and the cost of collecting and chasing up late payments was substantial to the local authority. There were also many hundreds of appeals to be heard and processed. Each person could appeal separately and have that appeal dealt with separately.

Under the 1976 Act static leasure caravans were no longer separately rated but were combined into one global assessment for the whole caravan park on which they were sited. The site operator became directly responsible to the rating authority for the total rate payment and he also became responsible for the apportionment and collection of rates from the individual caravans. One does not have to be terribly clever to realise that that was a great relief for the local authorities. It removed a substantial burden from them.

Parallel provisions in England, Wales and Scotland implemented that fundamental change in the rating law and put caravan site operators in the unique and unenviable position of being responsible for rates on property not in their own occupation. It was intended that the 1976 Act should benefit the caravan industry and ensure lower rate payments on caravans both north and south of the border. If that is said to anyone connected with caravans in Scotland it produces a rather hollow laugh.

On Second Reading the right hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. Oakes), the then Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, said:

"A side effect of the Bill which will be of considerable interest to caravan owners is that the total ratable value of the combined caravans and site will be less than if they were valued separately. In other words, the owners of leisure caravans will in most cases be paying less than if their caravans were to continue to be separately rated."—[Official Report, 3 March 1976; Vol. 906, c. 1327–8.]

Has anyone ever told that to the assessors in Scotland? They do not seem to know. They operate in a most unorthodox and unique manner. Lower rating in Scotland has not happened and in every instance Scottish caravan owners and site operators are worse off. In simple language, they are paying much more.

Scotland has a different method of making assessments from that which exists in England and Wales. It is not my purpose today to spend much but time talking about these differences but the ghastly rate problem that faces Scotland can in some measure be put at the door of the different method of making assessments. We must face up to that. The regional assessors who are responsible in Scotland for assessments are not accountable to the same body as the assessors in England and Wales. Is it any wonder that we get differences?

The position can be illustrated by the fact that in addition to this Bill I have another private Member's Bill which I shall, with the leave of the House, be introducing to remove reed cultivation from rates. I shall be doing so with the approval of the House next Wednesday. I have drawn attention to that fact because the Tayside regional assessor has deemed that rates should be levied on this activity, thereby making reed cultivation on the river Tay the only activity of this type in Europe on which rates are to be levied. Similar activities in England are not subject to rates. Is it any wonder that Scotsmen are beginning to look sideways at the regional assessors, wondering who they are, what they are and why they are doing what they are?

I do not overstate the position when I tell my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary that caravan site owners and occupiers cannot face another summer like the previous two. The crippling burden of rates linked to the massive downturn in the use of caravans has produced serious cash flow problems. The viability of many sites has become highly doubtful and could lead to insolvency and bankruptcy. I draw attention to the problems of Blairgowrie. As the local Member of Parliament, I am deeply worried about the knock-on effect in Blairgowrie. The town is a typical example of the position facing tourist areas throughout Scotland. I mention Blairgowrie because I understand in great depth the problems of that area. Those problems apply equally to other parts of my constituency where tourism is the major provider of jobs. Those jobs are at risk. I am worried not just about jobs that are directly associated with tourism, but about the knock-on effect on small shopkeepers, on garages and on every activity that provides any type of service to that tourist area. The tourist industry throughout Scotland will be severely damaged by the anomalies in our rating system. Parliament is responsible for the position.

I listened and took part in the previous debates. As I consider that this Parliament is a United Kingdom Parliament, I have every intention of seeing that it remains so. North of the border, some people take a different view and they regard the anomalies in legislation as a weakness in our Parliament. They say, "That is what happens in London. They don't care." The House does care. When United Kingdom legislation is passed, Parliament must ensure that the unique Scottish legal position is fully and adequately taken into account. It is obvious to me, as it must be to other hon. Members, that that did not occur when the 1976 Act was passed. The unique Scottish position has in this instance penalised Scottish caravan sites and damaged the tourist industry. The site owners are a splendid example of small business men providing jobs in parts of the country where they are in short supply. They are also a fine example of small business men, a group that the Government wish to encourage. We cannot, therefore, stand back and regard this as an unfortunate quirk in legislation. We must and should act to rectify the anomaly. That is what I wish to achieve by the Bill. My Bill seeks to rectify the quirk.

After the introduction of the 1976 Act, rateable values in England and Wales were reduced in some cases by 40 per cent. No similar reductions were made in Scotland. I believe that was contrary to Parliament's intentions. I look to Parliament to put the matter right. My Bill seeks to give Scottish sites and Scottish leisure caravan owners parity with the position in England and Wales.

I should have thought that every United Kingdom Member of Parliament would be in favour of that. I cannot see any Scottish Member objecting to what I judge to be a proper and just attempt to put one of Scotland's tourist facilities on an equal footing with its competitors south of the border. Indeed, I should like to thank Scottish colleagues of all parties who have supported my Bill. I refer to the hon. Members for Inverness (Mr. Johnston) and Dundee, East (Mr. Wilson), the right hon. Member for Greenock and Port Glasgow (Dr. Mabon), the hon. Members for Dunbartonshire, West (Mr. Campbell), and Coatbridge and Airdrie (Mr. Clarke), my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries (Sir H. Monro) and, of course, my hon. Friend the Member for Bute and North Ayrshire (Mr. Come), whom I am delighted to see is in the Chamber. He too recognises the problems involved.

I trust that no English or Welsh Member will object to my Bill. Clearly, in its present form, the 1976 Act as it applies to Scotland has failed to implement Parliament's original intentions and that is why I am glad that I have had the opportunity to place on record the problems as we see them. I look forward to hearing the reply of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, and I hope that he will give us some idea of the Government's view of this ghastly situation and of how they think it can be rectified.

2.15 pm

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire (Mr. Walker) on introducing the Bill and on the way that he has presented it. It is of immense interest not only to him and his constituents but to the whole of Scotland. It has the interests of thousands of families at heart. I stress that, because families tend to go on caravan holidays. The frightening figures that my hon. Friend gave for rates in his area are much the same as the figures in my area.

It is strange, but in such situations one tends to receive thousands of letters from people who are not constituents. Caravanners may visit an area to see its sights and to admire its beauty and then write to the Member of Parliament who represents that area. Things have reached crisis point. Most of the letters that I have received in the past few weeks contain sentences such as, "I am sorry, but this will be our last season in Scotland. We are returning to our old site in England, where the rates are cheaper." They may say, "I am glad that my lease runs out and that we can give up and go back south, where we can afford to have a caravan site." Such comments are sad.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire said, it will be nothing short of disaster if Scotland loses its tourists. We need them to provide an income during the summer months. The tourist board and the local authorities are making every effort to encourage people to holiday in Scotland. The local authorities are making planning easier for those who want to establish well protected caravan sites with good facilities. Grants are available not only from local authorities, but from the tourist board and the Highlands and Islands Development Board. In the past few years many new sites have been built. A mass exodus would involve not only the man who had to return to England because he could not afford to remain in Scotland or the site owner who lost the caravan, but local authorities, because they would lose the rates from the caravans, and the regions, because they would lose their tourists. In addition, Scotland would suffer, because fewer people would spend their money in Scotland. Everyone would be affected.

As my hon. Friend said, the small shopkeeper depends on tourists spending their money if he is to keep going through the winter months. Local craft industries, which have built up because of the tourist trade, may also suffer. Therefore, there is a knock-on effect, particularly in my area, which includes islands such as Arran, Bute and Cumbrae. It is particularly expensive to travel on the ferries. They represent an added cost. I know that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary is not responsible for road-equivalent tariff, but I hope that we can move even faster towards road-equivalent tariff. It is needed as soon as possible to reduce the cost of ferry services.

Holidays in Britain are, sadly, costly. Many people find it cheaper to fly to the sun. The high costs are due to the fact that hotels find the rate burden enormous. The other day local hoteliers gave me some figures. It was said that the rateable value of a bedroom in England was about £165, while in Scotland it was nearly £400. Almost weekly, hotels close in my area because of the burden. There is a beautiful, large hotel in Largs—the Marine and Curling Hall. The owner, Mr. Logan, told me only this week that he must close it, because the rate burden has increased to more than £26,000 per year. A similar hotel in England pays rates of only £4,000. That is unfair.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said only last night that high rates drive away small and large businesses from a region. They do more than that. High rates kill off the hotel trade and damage the caravan parks. We accept that, if rates for caravan sites are reduced, someone else must pay higher rates. The difference must be collected from another area.

We live in difficult times. Many people are out of work. Some people can afford a holiday only by going to a caravan site with their families.

I sincerely hope that the Minister has taken to heart what has been said today. I accept that he will not be able to say much in the time left for him to reply, but I ask him to give hope for the near future. I hope that the Government will not just exude sympathy, but will do something as soon as possible to iron out the anomalies, as my hon. Friend's Bill seeks to do. I fully support everything my hon. Friend said.

2.21 pm

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire (Mr. Walker) on his initiative in introducing the Bill. I listened carefully to my hon. Friend's speech when he sought leave to introduce his Bill. He expanded on that speech today. He put forward a well-researched case on the problem of the higher rate burdens borne by the occupiers of static leisure caravans in Scotland compared to similar ratepayers in England

I should also like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bute and North Ayrshire (Mr. Corrie) on his speech and on the detailed information he gave to the House. Both my hon. Friends have made it clear that this is an important subject. It is important to their constituents, it is important to the tourist industry and it is important in the context of the Scottish rating system as a whole. It is therefore astonishing that the Opposition have chosen not to attend the debate.

There are few subjects on which we in the Scottish Office have received more representations than the anomalies in the rating system. A large number of representations have been passed on by Opposition Members on behalf of their constituents. We know that Opposition Members are concerned about being engulfed in the Tory tide in Scotland at the next general election, whenever it comes, but it is outrageous that the Opposition should be so indifferent to this important Scottish subject that not one Scottish Labour Member, not one Scottish nationalist Member and not one Scottish alliance Member has chosen to attend the debate. I hope that that will be noted by their constituents. It will certainly be noted by the National Caravan Council and by the National Federation of Site Operators and by their joint liaison committee, which has co-ordinated efforts on behalf of owners to secure a satisfactory resolution to their complaints about the rates burden.

I wish to pay tribute to the joint liaison committee, in particular to its professional adviser, Mr. Alan McLaren, for all his work in obtaining and making available the great range of facts and figures on this problem. My hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire mentioned the letter to me from the chairman of the Scottish Tourist Board, Mr. Alan Devereux. Both those gentlemen have played an important part in this matter—they are both constituents of mine and therefore very important people.

The Government are sympathetic to the aims of the Bill. We recognise that there is a problem and we are working hard to overcome it. The problem has been referred to the Scottish Valuation Advisory Council along with representations that the Government have received on a number of other apparent anomalies in the Scottish rating system. It is our intention to reach conclusions as soon as possible and then to bring forward an overall package for consideration.

As my hon. Friends have recognised, this is a complex problem. Rating systems north and south of the border have always been different. There is difficulty in differentiating between valuation practices and the rating burden because of differences in rate poundages. As my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire has said, an additional complexity stems from the Scottish revaluation in 1978. In the light of what I said earlier, I should report that the hon. Member for Dunbartonshire, Central (Mr. McCartney) is now in the Chamber.

The term "static leisure caravans" means caravans that are kept on a caravan site with some permanence but not licensed for year-round occupation. They are not touring caravans and they are not permanently sited caravans. Until 1966 in England and Wales, and until 1972 in Scotland, static leisure caravans were treated like touring caravans as moveable property and so were not liable to be rated. However, the value attributable to the individual pitches on which such caravans were sited was included in the rateable value for the whole site. That is still the position for touring caravans.

As a result of a series of court cases north and south of the border, it was held that caravans should be separately valued if they were, broadly speaking, left on a site for not too transient a period. Where the caravan was valued, rates automatically became payable and were levied on the usual occupiers. The same cases also confirmed that the value attributable to such static leisure caravans had to include an element in respect of the pitches on which they stood, the degree of permanence being such that the two elements could not be considered separately.

The effect of the judicial decisions was to bring into valuation a large number of static leisure caravans. Where these caravans were the property of the individual users as opposed to the site operator, assessors had to make inquiries about the identity of caravan occupiers and the length of time that the caravans were left on site, while the rating authority had difficulty in collecting rates from an occupier whose usual residence was often in another area. Valuation and collection of rates were both difficult and imposed disproportionate administrative burdens. The rating authorities naturally made representations to the Government.

Secondly, the occupiers of static leisure caravans complained that the separate rating of their caravans increased the cost of this leisure activity. However, the Government took the view that they should not reverse the decisions which had been made by the courts that static leisure caravans were rateable. Accordingly, the Government introduced a Bill, which was later enacted as the Rating (Caravan Sites) Act 1976, the principal object of which was to lessen the administrative burden by requiring that sites for static holiday caravans be assessed on a unitary basis. Separate provisions in the same Act were made for England and Wales and for Scotland. This is the nub of the problem that my hon. Friends have put to the House.

The separate provisions were substantially the same but they were required because of the separate legislation, valuation systems and the separate body of judicial decisions which have accrued over the years. But I must emphasise that the main provision—that is, valuation of the caravan site as a whole and not valuation of each caraven separately—was common to the legislation as it applied in England and Wales and in Scotland. I emphasise that the valuation system in Scotland and the system in England and Wales—

It being half-past Two o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.

Debate to be resumed upon Friday next.

Leasehold Flats Reform Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

Object.

Second Reading what day? No day named.

Televising Of Select Committees Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

Object.

Second Reading deferred till Friday 6 May.

Passenger Vehicles (Experimental Areas) Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

Object.

Second Reading what day? No day named.

Generic Substitution (National Health Service) Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

Object.

Second Reading deferred till Friday 8 July.

Young Persons' Rights Bill

Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading. [22 April].

Object.

Second Reading what day? No day named.

Pet Animals Act 1951 (Amendment) Bill Lords

Ordered,

That Standing Committee C be discharged from considering the Pet Animals Act 1951 (Amendment) Bill [Lords] and that the Bill be committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr Wheeler.]

Committee upon Friday 6 May.

Appledore Shipyard

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.— [Mr. Brooke.]

2.32 pm

It is always sad to have the Adjournment debate at the end of a damp Friday preceding a bank holiday. I wish at the outset to set the record straight from the debate we had last week on shipbuilding. In that debate I mentioned my regret that neither my hon. Friend the Member for Devon, West (Sir P. Mills) nor I had been able to see Sir Robert Atkinson, chairman of British Shipbuilders. In some of our local press—but not the Bideford Gazette, which is the local paper for Appledore shipyard—it was indicated that my hon. Friend thought that Sir Robert was away "on holiday". I am glad to set the record straight by saying, first, that he was not on holiday; secondly, because of his work load, he did not go away at all; and, thirdly, following the shipbuilding debate, I am happy to say that he saw us at British Shipbuilders' headquarters last Tuesday.

That completed the circle for the two local Members of Parliament, the shop stewards representing the work force and the chairman of British Shipbuilders, who was accompanied at our meeting last Tuesday by an old friend of Appledore and of North Devon, Mr. Jim Venus, now head of the small shipbuilding division and previously managing director of Appledore Shipbuilders. Therefore, there are no issues dividing the board from the work force. It is heartening that both the board and the work force express themselves in near identical terms. Both seek jobs and prosperity for our most efficient and hard-working yard.

Appledore shipyard is a covered yard, so wind and weather have little effect on work. Its record is second to none in productivity and in the absence of absenteeism. The spirit of Appledore is the spirit of all those along the rivers Torridge and Taw. The work ethos is strong, and pride in the quality of work is shown by the way son follows father working in the yard.

British Shipbuilders has shown its faith in the future. For example computervision was installed at Appledore before anywhere else in the British shipbuilders group. It provides—for those not familiar with such matters—a three-dimensional model of the ship in the computer data base, and it can reduce man-hours in building a ship by 25 per cent. How is that for productivity?

In addition, IBM/CADCAM—for those ignorant of such matters, that stands for computer-aided drafting—has been installed. I notice that nearly all the illustrations in the booklet "Productivity Improvement in Ship Design and Construction", a copy of which I have given the Minister, feature Appledore, making it one of the leaders in technology and productivity.

The work force has accepted not only the new modern aids, which are labour saving — unfortunately, labour saving may mean job losses—but a revolutionary new Chirillo concept, named after the United States expert. It can best be described as a form of modular building, which requires multi-skills, so the restrictive practice element has virtually disappeard from Appledore shipyard. That absence of restrictive practice is yet another reason why Appledore deserves the success that it has worked so hard to achieve.

We all think that we know the basic problem. We think that there is not enough work or, just as drastic, that there are too many shipyards for the work available, but that is only the start of the problem. Not only are British ships built abroad but foreign ship work seldom comes here. The reason is not quality, capacity or outmoded habits—all the things that are said to damn British industry. The key is finance—the credit package that tells the buyer how to pay the seller and also how big the hidden subsidy will be.

Appledore has done wonderful work for firms such as Wimpey in the past, but how can we match the terms that they may get elsewhere? Britain is literally transparent in its attempts to help this ailing industry. Anyone can tell when we seek to bend the rules, but who stops France from doing just that? What aid is being given to Japanese shipyards, not just by their Government, but by their steel industry, so that they have about 50 ships to build in their home yards at present?

I am here to plead the case of Appledore the excellent, but I plead also the cause of British Shipbuilders—a business with no fixed equity capital at all. It has asked for emergency action. Is the Minister prepared to say whether the Government will take action on ships similar to the action taken by our right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food on other products, such as sheepmeat, when there has been a vast structural surplus in the EC?

I understand that help can be provided for Appledore and the rest if we invoke articles 4 and 6 of the European Council directive on aid for shipbuilding, dated 28 April 1981. Article 6, subtitled "Crisis aid", states:

"Production aid in favour of shipbuilding may be considered compatible with the common market if it is granted to deal with the effects of a crisis characterisd by a poor order situation leading to substantial under-utilisation of the means of production."

That covers our problem—poor orders, with under-utilisation of the means of production.

Together with my neighbour and good friend my hon. Friend the Member for Devon, West who, alas, is unable to be present today, I have approached our friends at the Ministry of Defence in search of work from that side. We have consulted the chairman of British Shipbuilders and the chairman of our shop stewards. I pay my respects to all those in manufacturing who are genuinely the best of British.

Too many of us in the House are wholly town or wholly country Members. I am proud of the shipyard in my constituency. I am proud of the modern forward-looking industry, set in a green field site, which, in appearance, seems to be millions of miles away from Tyneside, Teesside or our standard industrial heartland. I live at Instow, looking across the Torridge estuary. From my front window I see Appledore shipyard and from my back window I see north Devon sheep farms. That is the joy of having a green field site, where initiative and enterprise must be made to pay and where in future we will produce the industry of which we have only dreamt for the past 20 years.

When shipbuilding demand perks up, we must have healthy, profitable yards to build from and upon. Appledore shipyard is one of those. It will be profitable, even in this hard year. I ask my good friend the Minister to reassure me so that I may in turn reassure my friends who are also my constituents.

2.39 pm

I greatly admire the enthusiasm with which my hon. Friend the Member for Devon, North (Mr. Speller) put his case, and I liked his phrase "Appledore the excellent". The yard deserves that description, just as it deserves my hon. Friend's tremendous enthusiasm for it.

The problems facing our shipbuilding industry have received much attention in the House during the past few weeks. Recently, we had a half-day Supply debate on shipbuilding, but my hon. Friend is right to focus attention on the yard in which he is interested. Our debates cover the entire industry, and often the problems of individual yards are not fully debated and explored.

My hon. Friend asked for assurances, and I hope that the tone of my remarks will give him some assurance. I understand his anxiety which arises out of the announcement by British Shipbuilders on 19 March of the jobs that would be at risk if the current market position continued. The statement identified about 8,800 jobs at risk, of which about 200 were at Appledore. My hon. Friend will understand it if I say that those 200 jobs are only a small percentage of total jobs at risk, although of course they are very much his concern. Appledore has been lucky to escape some of the consequences of restructuring, because 24,000 jobs have been lost in British Shipbuilders since vesting day. I appreciate my hon. Friend's anxiety about the fact that no fewer than one in every four jobs in British Shipbuilders is believed to be at risk today. That is bound to cause anxiety to hon. Members with shipbuilding constituencies.

British Shipbuilders will review the position and will meet union representatives in the middle of next month. The outcome of that meeting will depend upon its assessment of the market. That meeting goes side by side with the Government's examination of the propositions put to us by the chairman of British Shipbuilders, Sir Robert Atkinson. My hon. Friend will recall that I told the House during the previous debate on shipbuilding that Sir Robert advanced some ideas to help British Shipbuilders to weather the severe crisis that it, in common with foreign shipbuilding industries, faces. I assure the House that nothing would be excluded from our consideration, and that we shall examine those ideas carefully and sympathetically because we recognise the extent of the crisis.

My hon. Friend referred to article 6 of the European Community shipbuilding directive, which was entitled "Crisis aid", and implied that that aid was available. Although we operate within the framework of the directive, member states have not yet agreed on the action to be taken under that article. We cannot give aid without having an agreement within Europe, so I cannot promise early action through the directive. However, we are considering it to see what other European countries are doing.

My hon. Friend in his speech today, and in his speech during the previous debate on shipbuilding, drew an analogy with agriculture on two grounds. The first was the extent of the support given to agriculture compared with that given to shipbuilding. Secondly, he asked why we could not take action similar to that taken on lamb by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

The two situations are, however, rather different. First, the British shipping industry, which is the equivalent of the consumers of lamb, is international. Ships operate under the British flag in many parts of the world and many British shipping interests relate to cross-port traffic. In such an international industry, ship owners and managers attach great importance to the freedom to place orders for shipbuilding wherever they wish. Of course, they would prefer to buy British but they must buy in such a way that their own competitiveness is not undermined.

Secondly, shipbuilding is a highly subsidised industry both in this country and world wide. Whatever the arguments in agriculture—I hesitate even to put my toe into those waters—I cannot see that it would be in the interests of the customers of shipbuilding—that is, the shipping industry — for there to be more and more subsidies when those subsidies have created a large part of the problem. The problem in shipbuilding is vast overcapacity worldwide and huge amounts of tonnage laid up all over the world, which are helping to drive freight rates lower still. That merely adds to the problems of shipowners and more subsidies would exacerbate the problem.

We cannot isolate ourselves from the international problem. It is not susceptible to instant solution, nor to solution by one nation or even by Europe alone. Even Japan, one of the most competitive and aggressive shipbuilding nations in the world, is not immune to the crisis and has suffered a substantial contraction in its shipbuilding industry. Therefore, we should not think—I do not suggest that my hon. Friend believes that we should—that we can somehow wish the problem away.

Our industry has been heavily supported through the intervention fund and the home credit scheme. My hon. Friend said that credit and finance were the key to the problem. We believe that our credit arrangements, combined with direct production subsidies through the intervention fund, make aid to the British shipbuilding industry equal to that of our major competitors.

My hon. Friend described British Shipbuilders as a firm without capital, but I am sure that he is aware that it has received large amounts of public dividend capital. Since 1979, we have put more than £600 million worth of aid into British Shipbuilders. Since vesting day, more than £250 million has been put into British Shipbuilders through the intervention fund, which is a direct production subsidy. My hon. Friend will be interested to know that in the same period £9 million worth of intervention money has been committed to Appledore. It is therefore clear that we support shipbuilding heavily.

My hon. Friend said that when we do something the whole world sees it. That is perhaps a fallacy, as we see only that which we can see so how can we know that everything that we do in this country can be seen? I assure my hon. Friend that we are determined to support the British shipbuilding industry strongly. I hope that he will forgive me for making those few minor points about the general scene to put his remarks into context.

I very much agree with my hon. Friend's comments about Appledore and the merits of that yard, which is such an important employer in his constituency. An enormous amount can be said in favour of the yard. It has some of the most modern facilities, including covered building berths. It is one of the first yards within British Shipbuilders to benefit from an advanced system of computer-aided design. It also has the advantage, although the industry faces serious problems, of not having to face savage international competition because it is at the small end of the market. It has outstanding records for productivity, restrictive practices, delivery dates and facilities. In every way it is an excellent yard.

My hon. Friend voiced the fear that British Shipbuilders might direct orders away from Appledore to give business to other yards with a shortage of orders. British Shipbuilders' policy is to reinforce success and to encourage high productivity. It does not allocate orders. It expects its subsidiaries to do their own selling and to offer prices that reflect their strength. My hon. Friend need not worry that in British Shipbuilders' overall policy the strength and advantages of Appledore will be neglected or lost.

My hon. Friend must be anxious about redundancies throughout the industry. That is a matter for the management of British Shipbuilders which has to make the decisions. Appledore's record speaks for itself. It is outstanding, and I should think that British Shipbuilders will be anxious to maintain Appledore's outstanding performance.

My hon. Friend said that there were few orders from abroad. I was not sure whether he was talking of British Shipbuilders or Appledore. British Shipbuilders has done well in orders from Hong Kong, Brazil and other countries, but not many orders have been placed with Appledore. I think that that is because it is at the small end of the market and is able to get business because of the loyalty of smaller owners who want small vessels and are loyal to their country.

Appledore is well served by public sector orders for ships. It has just completed a dredger for the Mersey docks and harbour board and has on hand a substantial and important contract for the Natural Environment Research Council vessel Charles Darwin. It also has a tradition of naval work. Currently it has a support contract for two naval auxiliaries, RMAS Kinterbury and HMAV St. George, both of which were built at Appledore and delivered in 1981. I understand that the yard also undertakes minor refit work for smaller marine and army craft which operate in that part of England.

The yard has tendered, and no doubt will be tendering, for other larger scale MOD work in prospect. It tendered unsuccessfully for the first four fleet minesweepers for the Royal Naval Reserve, the tender for which was awarded to Richards of Lowestoft last September. A further batch is in prospect and Appledore is among those yards which have tendered. Tenders have also been received from Appledore, among other yards, for various other naval support craft, and other tenders for such craft may be invited. Those tenders which have already been received are being examined and orders will be placed over the coming months.

My hon. Friend has seen the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, who is aware of the importance of ensuring that Appledore is given every fair opportunity to tender for suitable contracts. I am sure that that will be so. Appledore needs new orders, but its present order book is still better than other similar British Shipbuilders' yards. It stretches into 1984 and there are reasonable hopes of adding to it. Its management is chasing all possible orders with vigour, at home and abroad.

It is an inescapable fact that British Shipbuilders has already emphasised that the level of employment that can be maintained in British Shipbuilders depends upon the intake of new orders.

The ability of yards such as Appledore to compete for orders of the kind for which it is suited depends ultimately on fundamental improvements in productivity. I am quite sure that, because of the excellent background to which my hon. Friend referred, Appledore is well positioned, and it may be that exhortations and strictures have less application in Appledore than in other parts of British Shipbuilders.s I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising this matter and putting his case with such vigour. I cannot make firm promises, but I think that Appledore's prospects must be relatively favourable. I know that my hon. Friend's determined efforts on behalf of his yard will also serve the interests of his constituents.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at five minutes to Three o'clock.

Volume 41: debated on Friday 29 April 1983

House Of Commons

Prayers

Orders Of The Day

Copyright (Amendment) Bill

Clause 1

Amendments Of Section 21 Of Copyright Act 1956

Clause 2

Search Warrants Etc

Corners' Juries Bill

Clause 1

Qualifications Of Jurors

Clause 2

Extension Of Rule-Making Power Under Section 26 Of The Act Of 1926

Clause 3

Citation, Commencement Etc

Rating (Caravan Sites) (Scotland) (Amendment) Bill

Leasehold Flats Reform Bill

Televising Of Select Committees Bill

Passenger Vehicles (Experimental Areas) Bill

Generic Substitution (National Health Service) Bill

Young Persons' Rights Bill

Pet Animals Act 1951 (Amendment) Bill Lords

Appledore Shipyard