Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Lord Lucas

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 4th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, we are not missing the point: we are trying to get a balance between people selling products which can be used for perfectly legitimate purposes and those seeking to abuse these products in order to do harm to people. One of the attacks at the weekend took place round the corner from me. I fully have in mind the danger that knives can cause but we are trying to get the balance right.

[Lord Lucas]

I appreciate the difficulties the Government are having in trying to get this clause right. I go back to the first amendment we debated today and the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and I that we are disadvantaging British sellers relative to overseas sellers for no advantage to the peace of the realm. If someone wants to get a knife, all they have to do is order it from Holland and then it can be delivered to their house. It really matters whether we focus this prohibition on British sellers widely or narrowly, and the way the clause is drawn at the moment is capable of wide interpretation.

The guidance will have to be good and clear. I agree that it will not have the force of the law but it will have an effect on police officers, I hope, in deciding whether to launch a complaint or a prosecution. It will have an effect on the CPS, and it will certainly have an effect if it is reported in a newspaper that there has been a prosecution. It will be the prosecution that is laughed at, rather than the retailer condemned, if the guidance makes it clear that something should be allowed. It matters in relation to large items such as food processors; if they and all the rest of one’s wedding gifts cannot be delivered to one’s home address, people will go somewhere else, which would be abroad. It is a big enough item to make such a decision about and it is not obvious why it should be prohibited, whereas we can all accept that we should have to jump through a few hoops when obtaining a knife because they are dangerous and we must behave ourselves. I hope that the Government will draft the guidance with the interests of British traders at heart.

I am grateful for my noble friend’s reply and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for his intervention. I was not making a glib comment about a trawl; regarding the examples of card companies and delivery companies, we are taking action where we can, but I acknowledge, as I have all the way through the Bill, that we are trying to find the right balance. It is not absolutely perfect, but we are using everything in our armoury to help us guard against the sale of knives to those aged under 18.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I entirely accept the strictures that the Minister has discussed concerning the wording and theme of my amendment but, as has been shown in this discussion, its substance remains. If we allow the Bill through as it is, it will quickly become known that there are one or two sites, not far away, across a little bit of water, to which anyone with criminal intent can go in complete safety, buy any knife they want, and have it delivered to them at home. Therefore, anyone intent on getting a knife for criminal purposes will be able to do so with total disregard for the rest of the Bill. All we will have succeeded in doing is disadvantaging British sellers; the Bill will have no other effect.

We do not need to achieve perfection; we just need to make dangerous the process of illegally ordering a knife overseas, or of ordering a knife overseas and having it delivered to someone underage. We need to make it something that might well go wrong: either the knife might be confiscated, or the people involved in selling it—who presumably have a lot of legitimate business as well as supplying to criminals—might lose everything through being put on the Home Office blacklist. As has been suggested by several noble Lords, this is proving an effective system in pornography. Those we allow to dominate the market in the UK, because they do proper age-verification, want to keep others out, so they become an effective police force that we do not have to pay for. There are other routes to getting there, which make the whole business of buying from an overseas supplier more difficult and chancy.

If we want an effective Bill—I join the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, in saying that we absolutely do—we must urge the Government to use the time between Report and Third Reading to talk to their colleagues in DCMS and look again at whether this is a loophole they can close. Without that, we will have a Bill that is much less effective at achieving what we want it to achieve. But I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Lord Lucas

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I have provided the detail on the test purchase failures. To return to my noble friend the Duke of Montrose on how many persons or companies who sold knives to under-18s have actually been prosecuted, I understand that there have been 71 prosecutions between 2013 and 2017 under Section 141A of the Criminal Justice Act. If I have any further information for the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, I will certainly put it in writing. I hope I have given a general overview of some of the failures within the system of the online sale.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am still at a loss as to why we have two systems in this Bill—Clause 4 and Clause 17 —applying to products which the Government say are equally dangerous. If we need Clause 17—prohibition of delivery to residential premises for knives—why are we not asking for that with corrosive products? What is the difference?

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[Lord Lucas]

I am clearly reading Clause 4 wrong. It appears to permit delivery to residential premises. I am sure the noble Lord has read the clause better than me. It just appears to ask for age verification when it is delivered.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, is right. I am very grateful to him because now I do not have to explain it.

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[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, as usual, I need educating. How is even a British business to know that a particular address is residential? What source of information do the Government expect a seller of knives to use to establish whether, for instance, 1 Lavender Hill SW11 is a residential or business address, particularly when in such a location there is probably a shop on the ground floor and flats above? What source of information will be reliable and satisfactory in a prosecution for someone to demonstrate that they believed reasonably that it was not a residential premises?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

We had that debate on Monday, but I am happy to go over it again. On my noble and learned friend’s point about labelling bladed products, it would be very good practice if foreign sellers did that, but we do not have the legal jurisdiction to make them do it.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord will know that the last thing this Government want to do is to make things difficult for British companies, but we want to clamp down on some of the terrible effects of knife crime.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the Government have certain contradictions in the way they are approaching this. Suppose a Dutch company sells a knife to a residential address. It drops it into the post, nicely wrapped as a parcel with nothing on the outside to indicate what the contents are. Who puts the contents of a parcel on the outside? I cannot recall when a package came to me containing something I had ordered over the internet which said obviously on the outside what was on the inside. The Royal Mail, which looked at this, has no ability to know that the parcel contains a bladed product. The only point at which it becomes possible to know that is at the point of importation.

I know the Government have systems—and I know what they are, but I am not going to describe them in public—for preventing the importation of weapons, firearms in particular, which would apply very nicely to the importation of knives. That is the point at which we as a country know that there is a knife, and since the Government have oversight of the process through which it is being imported, that is the point at which they can establish whether the address is likely to be residential premises. If we want this to be an effective prohibition against a company abroad sending a knife to a residential address here, we need to give those authorities the power to confiscate the knife at that point. I propose one way of doing that, and there are surely many others, but we absolutely need to do it.

The other way in which an overseas sale can get into residential premises is if I apparently order from a website abroad. That website abroad telegraphs its fulfilment house here and someone in that fulfilment house takes the knife out of a box, puts it in a package, addresses it and pops it into the post. There we have someone absolutely within our jurisdiction who knows that it is a knife and who should know that the premises are residential, but we are not catching them. We cannot expect the poor old postman to know what is in the package. We have two very good opportunities to intercept knives and other bladed products coming in from abroad. I do not mind how the Government achieve that, but it is so easy to get knives from abroad. If someone really wants to get a knife delivered to residential premises all they have to do is order it from overseas and it will happen without interruption because sellers will organise themselves so they do not get their delivery agents into trouble. They will just use the Royal Mail. These are small items that do not require special delivery and fit through postboxes.

The amendments show that there are good, easy, efficient and effective ways in which the Government can get a bite on the main streams of supply from overseas agents. As my noble friend said, overseas agents will respond by sticking a label on the outside. If that is what they are asked to do, and if that is what it takes to get it through customs, that is fine—in supplying all over the world, they are used to customs regulations. This is not hard or expensive for us to do; it is easy, and it is the only thing that makes sense of the Government’s interest in stopping the ordering of knives over the internet. If we stop only UK sellers and leave the door wide open to overseas sellers, we are not achieving anything other than obstructing UK business.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lucas for outlining his amendments. Amendments 45 and 46 are intended to bring weapons such as stilettos and—as he mentioned—knitting needles within the definition of “bladed product”. We have deliberately not defined the word “cutting” in the Bill. It will carry its normal meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “to cut” as, among other things, to,

“make an opening, incision, or wound in (something) with a sharp-edged tool or object”,

and to,

“trim or reduce the length of (grass, hair, etc) by using a sharp implement”.

The normal meaning is therefore capable of capturing a wide range of items with which cutting, in all its ordinary meanings, can be done, including knives, scissors, axes, machetes and the like. It follows, therefore, that items such as stilettos, knives or daggers are already caught by the definition of “bladed product” in the Bill because they have a blade and are capable of cutting the skin.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, perhaps I may address that particular point in relation to Section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, which refers to,

“any article which has a blade or is sharply pointed”.

Clearly the drafters of that clause felt the need to define “or … sharply pointed”. In other words, something that is sharply pointed does not have, and is not, a blade. It is essential that in Clause 19(1) the object we are talking about is, or has, a blade, whereas Section 139 clearly differentiates between an object that has a blade and an object that is sharply pointed. I do not see how we can have at the same time in legislation one clause that says these two things are separate and another which maintains that they are the same.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I hope that I will get some inspiration from behind me in the course of what I am going to say. I started by saying that items such as stiletto knives or daggers are already caught by the definition of “bladed product” in the Bill, because they have a blade and are capable of cutting the skin. There is, therefore, no need to add a further reference to piercing the skin, which would be the effect of my noble friend’s amendment. I note that he has clarified that his concern is to ensure that the definition covers “weapons such as stilettos”. I hope he will accept that the definition in the Bill is already sufficient to capture stiletto knives. I do not think that he has in mind stiletto heels—or does he?

[Lord Lucas]

No.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

That is good. These would not fall within the definition in the Bill as they do not generally have a blade. It is our intention that the definition of “bladed product” excludes those articles with a blade that are unlikely to cause serious injury if used as a weapon. They might include cutlery, fans and lawnmowers—which he mentioned—among other things. We believe that it is unlikely that such items will be procured by persons under 18 to be used as weapons. We also want to exclude articles that can cause serious injury only other than by cutting, for instance when used as a blunt object. Ultimately, it will up to the courts to determine whether an item is or has a blade and is capable of causing serious injury by way of cutting the skin. However, we will issue guidance in consultation with the police and business to provide further clarity on this and other provisions in the Bill.

Perhaps I might add that Amendment 46 highlights the risk of including an indicative list of examples in legislation, which brings complications of its own. For example, one might ask why the list includes screwdrivers but not chisels, or lawn mowers but not hedging shears and so forth. It is better, I suggest, to leave it to the police, prosecutors and the courts, supported by the guidance to which I have referred, to determine relevance in the circumstances of each situation.

This leads me to Amendments 44, 47, 55 and 56, which would change the types of articles to which Clause 20 applies from “bladed articles” to “bladed products”. My noble friend Lord Lucas has rightly asked why, in Clause 20, the term “bladed articles” is used rather than “bladed products”. A bladed product is defined in Clause 19 as,

“an article which … is or has a blade, and … is capable of causing a serious injury to a person which involves cutting that person’s skin”.

“Bladed article” is defined by Clause 20(11), in the case of England and Wales, as an article,

“to which section 141A of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 applies”.

My noble friend referred to this.

Section 141A applies to: any knife, except a folding pocket knife with a blade of three inches or less; any knife blade; any razor blade, except those permanently enclosed in cartridges; any axe; and any other article which has a blade or which is sharply pointed and which is made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person. “Bladed article” therefore captures a wide range of articles with a blade from kitchen knives to cutlery knives, scissors, and so on. This is the language used in the Criminal Justice Act 1988 in relation to the sales of knives and possession offences. “Bladed product” refers to a smaller set of items with a blade: those which can cause serious injury by cutting the skin, as defined in Clause 19. The effect of Amendments 44, 47, 55 and 56 would therefore be that the range of articles to which Clause 20 applies would be smaller than is currently the case in the Bill.

I hope that my noble friend is reassured by the provisions in Clauses 17 to 20. If a bladed article is delivered on behalf of a seller based abroad, the delivery company has the responsibility to ensure that the item is not handed over to a person aged under 18, whether the seller uses a marketplace platform or sells direct, or whether the item is delivered to a private address or a collection point. As I said earlier, we cannot enforce legislation against a seller who is based abroad but, in this instance, we have the ability to place the onus on the person who delivers the merchandise here to ensure that they do not deliver a bladed article into the hands of a person aged under 18.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, asked about the business impact. I concur with him that we should be concerned about the impact on British businesses. We have published an impact assessment alongside the Bill, which can be found on the Bill’s page on GOV.UK.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Baroness for outlining her amendment. I understand that its purpose is to probe the meaning of Clause 20(3). Obviously, we will have a discussion before Report and I am happy to discuss the unwillingness of companies, but I go back to the first group of amendments, where I outlined the failing in the system of test purchases.

Clause 20(3) sets out when a seller, other than an individual seller, is to be regarded as outside the UK. Where an overseas seller is an individual, it is relatively easy to establish that they are based overseas, but where a seller is a company it might not be so obvious where they are based. For example, the company might operate mainly from China, where its headquarters are based, but might also have offices and shops in the UK.

The provision is constructed so that a company selling bladed articles is considered to be based outside the UK only when the business is not conducted from premises in any part of the UK—that is, where the company is based solely overseas and does not sell articles in this country. If the seller conducts the business in any part of the UK, it would be subject to the provisions in Clause 17 and prohibited from dispatching bladed articles to a residential premises or locker. I hope that that explanation helps the noble Baroness.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I hear what the Minister says, but this would not cover Amazon, because at the moment the selling is done from abroad.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I do not agree with the noble Lord on that point.

[Lord Lucas]

Well, my Lords, perhaps we could enter into some correspondence about that. What Amazon does in this country is the fulfilment; the selling is done from Ireland or Liechtenstein, but certainly not from within this country. We need to be clear that these activities can get split, particularly in the case of big companies. The whole action of selling the knife, preparing it for delivery and delivering it is what should be considered as selling it, not just the technical act of selling.

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[Lord Lucas]

I am grateful to my noble friend—

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

Sorry, may I intervene? I have been referring to the noble Baroness but I meant my noble friend.

[Lord Lucas]

I am very grateful—whoever I may be —to receive that answer, which, in respect of Amendment 61, was all the comfort I could have asked for. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, I have the greatest difficulty in understanding how a person with one hand can open a modern milk bottle. There are greater tests than opening a pocket knife. I understand what my noble friend says about folding knives that can be locked open, but one very much relies on the police to take a sensible attitude to the necessary prevalence of these items among people who use knives for a purpose. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Lord Lucas

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 28th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I think that the noble Lord was referring to the taking and retention of photographs, which is slightly different, and we need to acknowledge the distinction.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for saying that there will be guidance. Perhaps we might drop that into the Bill on Report, just to make sure. I think that guidance would be enough, but we should recognise that we have chosen to put into the Bill the words “all due diligence” and “all reasonable precautions”. That is a very high test. If we had meant the current systems to apply, we should have left out the word “all”. Nobody gets killed by being sold a lottery ticket—or at least not just one—but we are looking here at things that might quite quickly turn into serious criminal incidents. If in court someone says, “I looked at his passport”, but the police prove that the person in question has no passport, the poor delivery driver or shop worker is sunk. Noble Lords might remember a rather amusing TV ad from when we watched such things, “We’re with the Woolwich”, where somebody showed their Woolwich passbook to get out of East Germany. This passport or driving licence can presumably be of any nationality. How is a relatively untrained shop worker or delivery driver supposed to know that this is a Polish passport, not a Polish bankbook? We are asking people for whom there is no structured training to act as if they are trained. Under such circumstances we have to—

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, that is where the guidance comes in. All roads are leading back to the guidance. I hope I can leave it there.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, it was those sorts of concerns that led to me think of taking photographs, because taking a photograph of a document is a reasonable precaution. If you have not done it, you have not taken all reasonable precautions. Yet if you take a photograph you get into all sorts of complications because it is not required, so you are into GDPR in all sorts of interesting ways. Guidance therefore becomes very important and we ought to drop the requirement for guidance into the Bill. I am very grateful to my noble friend for her help on this and I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

Yes, I am.

[Lord Lucas]

That seems a bit odd. If you can get the corrosive stuff only from overseas sellers, you will get the rest of your stuff from an overseas seller too because it is that much more convenient. If there is no positive effect—because people can still get the corrosive substances from an overseas seller—why ban getting them from a UK seller? It is really very easy. A lot of sellers that you think are in the UK are overseas.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

Can I be absolutely clear? Are we saying that you cannot buy it from a UK seller but you can buy it from an overseas seller?

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Lord Lucas

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, there is a lot that demands careful reading and careful thought. I have three questions which I can raise now. First, in the examples which the Minister gave it struck us on these Benches that she was talking about things which are, in fact, criminal offences being dealt with under Part 3, which is the law enforcement part of the Bill.

Secondly, how is all this applied in practice? How does the controller know about the purposes? I am finding it quite difficult to envisage how this might work in real life. Thirdly, the Minister referred to the lawfulness of processing. I wonder whether this is not circular because paragraph 4, in disapplying listed provisions—by the way, I think those listed provisions include many which are very important indeed—makes it lawful, so I have a bit of a problem around that. Of course, I and others will carefully read what the Minister said, but I am sure we will want to return to this at the next stage.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I felt entirely comfortable with my noble friend’s examples, but they do not fit with what the Home Office has been doing. What it has done with the national pupil database is not to ask targeted questions when it has a problem with an individual but to collect the whole lot so that it has the ability to trawl, look at, match and use the whole of the dataset. That is a much more dangerous thing because of the consequences it has for the integrity of the data and for the way in which the lawfulness of gathering it is questioned. It is that sort of practice that troubles me. I had not read this clause in the narrow way in which my noble friend described it. I will obviously go away and read it again carefully, but if she would add a letter to her noble friend’s letter enlarging on why this is a narrow provision and giving us comfort, that would be worth while for me.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank my noble friend for that. In the meantime, I think my words should be reread, particularly my point about it not being a wholesale carve-out but quite a narrow exemption. I will write to noble Lords. I thought I might home in on one question that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, asked about relying on this in the investigation, detection and prevention of crime. Of course, that is not always the correct and proportionate response to persons who are in the UK without lawful authority and may not be the correct remedy. I will write to noble Lords, and I hope that the noble Lord will feel happy to withdraw the amendment.