Offensive Weapons Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Stephen Timms and Louise Haigh

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Timms]

The Minister pointed out to us last Tuesday that under section 141 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, the sale and import of disguised knives is illegal, yet these dangerous weapons are freely available, certainly on eBay, but also on other platforms. Anyone in the UK wishing to buy one simply needs to click on that item and enter their credit card or PayPal account details, and the weapon will arrive in the post. The Bill will change nothing. My new clause 12 is intended to address that, and I am grateful to the Clerk for helping me to draft it. It makes it an offence

“to advertise, list or otherwise facilitate the sale of an offensive weapon capable of being disguised as something else.”

In other words, it would make it illegal to do what eBay and all the other platforms are freely doing.

It is extraordinary to me that a reputable company such as eBay has on sale in the UK products that it is illegal to purchase in the UK. I was dumbfounded to discover that that is the case. I have not had a discussion with eBay or any of the other platforms about it, but I cannot see how it is possible to defend having these things on sale when it is illegal to purchase them in the UK.

In our debate on new clause 9 last Tuesday, I referred to the availability on eBay of an “Ultralight Self Defense Tactical Defense Pen Outdoor Glass Breaker Writing Pen”. It is rather a long name. The tags are all required, which is why words like “pen” occur a couple of times. It is available on eBay for £2.84, and it looks like a pen but is actually a dangerous weapon. It was drawn to my attention my Mr Raheel Butt, whom I have mentioned on a number of occasions in Committee. I am pleased to inform the Committee that that particular product is no longer there, which shows that at least somebody is paying attention to what we say in Committee.

Unfortunately, all the other items that Mr Butt pointed out to me but which I have not previously mentioned are there: “Tactical pen Tungsten steel head Self Defense Woman anti wolf weapons” are available for £5.99 from a Chinese supplier. There is also a “Six inch Tactical Pen Glass Breaker Self Defense” tool, which is described as a “Tactical Pen Great for Self Defense!” and is available for £3.38 from a different Chinese firm. There are a great many more. I looked on gov.uk to find which other weapons it would be an offence to import. The Minister told us that it was an offence to import disguised knives, and there is a long list of other things it is an offence to import, including butterfly knives, flick knives, gravity knives, stealth knives, zombie knives, swords, sword-sticks, push daggers, blowpipes, telescopic truncheons and batons. I looked to see which of them I could buy on eBay, and each one was there. A butterfly knife is on eBay for £4.95. Flick knives are there. Gravity knives are apparently available from a UK firm, which is clearly committing an offence by selling these things in the UK. Telescopic truncheons are available for £11.69 on eBay from a Chinese supplier.

I did not go through the whole list, but it looks as if the great majority of these things—which it is illegal to import into the UK—are being sold on eBay, not to mention other places as well. I am astonished at how this can have been allowed to happen. I am pretty sure that I cannot buy hard drugs or child pornography on eBay, which makes sure that those things are kept off its platform, so why does it allow on weapons that are illegal in the UK? I do not know the answer to that question and have not had the opportunity to discuss it with eBay. Is it because the rules for ebay.co.uk are taken not from UK law but from US law? No doubt it is not illegal in the US to purchase any of these weapons, but it is in the UK.

It has been widely accepted that it is illegal to purchase these things in the UK and nobody has seriously argued that it should be lawful to purchase them, so surely it cannot be disputed that it ought to be illegal to advertise, list or otherwise facilitate their sale in the UK. The new clause deals only with disguised knives, not the other things on the gov.uk list, but its effect would be to make it illegal to advertise, list or otherwise facilitate for sale disguised knives. This is a difficult area to get right technically, and there are lots of reasons to be cautious about increasing regulation on the internet, but the case seems to be very strong. That would be the effect of new clause 12; I hope the Minister will be sympathetic to it.

[Louise Haigh]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham on bringing forward such an important amendment and on his forensic examination of the legislation and his detailed research—although I recommend that he deletes his internet search history once the Bill Committee has concluded.

New clauses 12 and 31 get to the heart of our debate about overseas sellers and platform liability. We have received multiple pieces of evidence—we just heard about some from my right hon. Friend—about weapons that are already illegal under UK law being freely available on platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Facebook Marketplace. I have seen examples on the app Wish, which is free to download for anybody of any age. It makes available for as little as 99p knives that are disguised as credit cards, bracelets and knuckle dusters. My understanding is that the Bill will do nothing to prevent under-18s from accessing these things, because they are already accessible, even though their sale is currently illegal.

Unless we take action on platforms and platform liability, the other measures in the Bill, however well-intentioned, will be next to useless, because under-18s will still be able to access these very offensive weapons on these platforms. My right hon. Friend is right that the debate about platforms is complex for many reasons. There are many reasons why we have not managed to crack down properly on child protection issues and online pornography issues, although the Minister was right to highlight the Home Secretary’s important speech last week. Because the problems are complex, we have not yet got to the point where we can deliver legislation. There is an understandable difficulty in labelling a platform as liable in law, as it cannot be held responsible for all the content because it is not the owner of the content, it is merely a host. However, whether a platform is a publisher needs to be clarified in law.

The debate is further complicated by issues of free speech and the boundary with hate speech, and even by the regulation of online pornography—we keep making the comparison with the Digital Economy Act 2017. When we ask platforms to take responsibility in these areas, we are asking them to make judgment calls, which is inappropriate. The Government and the courts need to make those judgment calls, not private companies. However, none of those sorts of arguments are applicable in this case. There are no issues of free speech, liability or judgment calls. These weapons are offensive and we want to ban their being made available to under-18s. We want to ban some of them being available to anybody in the UK.

We have banned, or are now banning, the sale of bladed articles and corrosive substances to under-18s. There should be absolutely no need and we should be making sure that there is no way for under-18s to access these substances or articles for sale online. We are asking the platforms to take a relatively straightforward measure: to develop algorithms that restrict to over-18s the viewing of all adverts, whether on eBay, Amazon or Facebook, that contain these offensive weapons or articles.

I genuinely believe that the Government are serious in their intention to limit access of these weapons to under-18s, but they will never be successful unless they are prepared to take on the platforms. I find it bizarre that they are putting so many burdens on small businesses and online retailers while leaving this gaping hole in the market and failing to take on the tech giants that are profiting from the sale of such horrendous weapons to children. I appreciate that the Minister has said that the Government are looking at wider internet safety and will come forward with proposals in the near future. However, if this legislation is to be at all meaningful, they must consider extending it to explicitly cover platform liability.

Offensive Weapons Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Stephen Timms and Louise Haigh

Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 6th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)]

Welcome back, Mr Gray. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

Clause 12 deals with the age verification systems needed to enforce the measures, it. We will discuss again the standards that will be required by the Home Office if the legislation is to have effect. I hope the Minister can give details of what she considers will meet the requirements of subsection 4(a), which refers to sellers operating

“a system for checking that persons who bought articles to which section 141A applied by the same or a similar method of purchase to that used by the buyer were not under the age of 18.”

What would be a reasonable system? Requiring a person to check a box to say they are over 18? Referring to the electoral roll? Requiring use of a credit or debit card owned by someone over 18, though that would not prove that the individual buying was the owner of the card? What kind of standards will the Home Office require?

Concerns have been raised about the work of trading standards with regard to online test purchases, which is frequently found to be unsuccessful. Can the Minister provide us with statistics on the online test purchases conducted, on the basis for bringing forward the clause, and on prosecutions brought by trading standards over the last year against retailers that have failed to comply with existing legislation on the sale of bladed articles to under-18s?

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Gray.

The clause is the first of the Bill to deal with knives. I report to the Committee with a heavy heart that there were 702 knife crimes in my borough of Newham last year—the second-highest number in London and a 15% increase on the previous year. Of those, 214 involved injury. In London as a whole, there were 80 fatal stabbings in 2017, including of 20 teenagers. I need not elaborate to underline the horror of those figures, and particularly of the fact that so many young people lost their lives as a result of being stabbed.

That was in 2017. In the first three months of 2018, there were 30 fatal stabbings in London. The fatality rate for those three months was 50% higher than in 2017. Of the 30 people who died, six were teenagers. It was reported in April, I think, that in the first couple months of this calendar year, London had a higher murder rate than New York, which is extremely troubling and chilling for all of us.

I looked this morning at the website of my local paper, the Newham Recorder. There are three headlines there at the moment: “Guilty: Three teenagers convicted for stabbing 14-year-old boy in Manor Park”; “Police appeal to find Fatjon Koka following stabbing in Stratford”; and “Man to appear in court following Romford Road stabbing”. Those are three separate and entirely unrelated items in the current issue of my local newspaper. The changes to the law in the Bill to bear down on this scourge are extremely welcome. There is clearly a pressing need to get a grip on what is going on, to change things, and to stop this seemingly rapidly escalating problem affecting so many people, particularly the young.

To get on top of this problem, we will have to increase police resources. For a number of years, the Government cut police resources and police numbers, and crime did not rise, but an increase in crime was utterly inevitable given the scale of the reduction in police numbers. The crime surge was delayed, but it is now very much with us. It is hitting us extremely hard. I very much hope that the clause and the other measures in the Bill will help, but we will need significant additional police resources.

On Tuesday, the Committee discussed how the Bill would affect sellers of corrosive products outside the UK. The same issues arise in the case of sellers of knives who are outside the UK; as I understand it, the Bill deals with them in the same way as sellers of corrosive products. We had a debate on Tuesday about my new clause 9, and as I indicated in the context of corrosive products, I am not convinced that the way the Bill deals with this problem is altogether satisfactory. The concern is greater here, because as I informed the Committee on Tuesday, Mr Raheel Butt has pointed out to me that it seems to be the norm for online purchases of appalling knives to be made from suppliers outside the UK, on platforms such as eBay. The Minister pointed out on Tuesday that the purchase of knives disguised to look like something else is clearly illegal in the UK, but there is no shortage of online platforms offering those products in the UK. They are freely available to purchasers here, even though their purchase is illegal, and in the particular case I mentioned, the suppliers were all located outside the UK.

Will the clause not have effect if a seller is outside the UK, as was the case with corrosive products, which we discussed on Tuesday? Will we therefore need to depend on separate measures—set out, I think, in clause 18, in which a responsibility is placed on delivery companies—to address the problem of sales from outside the UK? If so, can the Minister can clarify the position in cases where sellers are located elsewhere in the EU? As I have pointed out previously, eBay offers some pretty ghastly weapons supplied by firms in Germany, which is a member of the European Union, as are we, at the moment. Will clause 12 have no effect on sellers located elsewhere in the EU, as I think the Minister indicated was the case in the parallel discussion we had on Tuesday? If so, I am a little bit puzzled as to why. If a seller in Germany sells a weapon that is illegal in the UK to somebody in the UK, or a knife to a 16-year-old in the UK, how is it not possible to prosecute that company somewhere else in the European Union for having committed an offence?

We had a debate on Tuesday about amendment 53, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley, which proposed that the age threshold for knife purchases be raised from 18 to 21, and the Minister quite properly explained some of the difficulties with that. However, I hope that we will not leave this issue here. There is a compelling case for saying that some of those very unpleasant weapons, the only purpose of which can be to do damage to others, should not be freely available, as they are at the moment, to 19 and 20-year-olds. I take the point that there is not an amendment that would have that effect on the amendment paper at the moment, but I hope that we will not let this matter pass. We have to change the way the age restrictions work and find ways to limit the supply of weapons that are inflicting appalling injuries—and indeed death—on far too many people in our country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to the Minister for that response, which she set out clearly. I am interested to hear that officials considered the approach based on a registered business address. In my mind, given the importance of restricting access to dangerous weapons, it might not be a bad thing to say to people that, if they want to buy what can be used as a dangerous weapon, they will have to register their address as a business address. However, I take the point that that is perhaps not the appropriate step to take for now. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

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

[Louise Haigh]

I fully understand and appreciate why my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham tabled his amendments, and that was an interesting discussion. However, I believe that the clause is fraught with potential consequences that could result from its application.

I think I am right in saying that the clause’s sole purpose is to ensure that the clause around sale to under-18s is absolutely safeguarded; as the Minister just described, the Bill, as it goes through, step by step, enforces previous clauses. However, it does not seem that other options presented to the Government, the Home Office and the Committee that would equally enforce those clauses have been properly considered by the Home Office, and I am confused about why they have not been added to the Bill.

One potential solution lies within the Bill itself. As we have discussed, clause 18 sets out the provisions by which an international seller can use a delivery company to deliver a bladed article, and the obligations on that delivery company to ensure that it is delivered into the hands of an adult. Could we not mirror that clause for UK sales, so that delivery companies for all UK sellers required age verification to prove that a buyer was over 18? Alternatively, the Minister could consider section 151 of the Licensing Act 2003, which covers the delivery of alcohol to children and when a seller is liable to a fine if a delivery is made to a person under the age of 18.

As the Committee has established, the clause’s potential consequences are extremely far-reaching; we have heard one example already, but others abound. I am sure that many Committee members will have received representations from businesses in their constituencies. As someone from Sheffield, I have obviously heard from plenty of knife manufacturers from the great steel city. I will come on to their concerns shortly.

I am concerned that an outright prohibition on sales to residential addresses, and all the unintended consequences that would follow, would not be necessary if the Government were clear on measures for online age verification. Surely, if we are prescriptive enough on age verification standards, these clauses would be unnecessary. However, the Bill makes no provision for such standards. We still do not know what the guidance, which the Government intend to issue, will say, when it will be issued or whether it will be statutory. It would be helpful if the Minister provided the Committee with the draft guidance that the Government intend to issue to online retailers on age verification. The Digital Economy Bill Committee, which passed verification measures, received draft guidance to help us scrutinise that Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend has drawn the Committee’s attention to an interesting alternative approach suggested by industry. If I have understood correctly what she has said, the real problem is stopping knives from getting to under-18s. I am more sympathetic to what I understand the Government’s aim to be—stopping dangerous weapons getting to anybody, however old they are, and being delivered to them at home, but my hon. Friend raised some interesting and telling points.

When I read clauses 15 to 17, I did wonder whether the Government intend to stop the delivery of cutlery to people’s homes. The Minister is indicating that that is not the Government’s intention, but it is not clear to me where that is carved out in the wording of the Bill. As my hon. Friend pointed out, clause 17 tells us what a bladed product is, and I cannot see there where cutlery is carved out. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that.

[Louise Haigh]

My understanding is that a bladed product must be able to provide serious injury. I do not believe that that would include cutlery, although steak knives would be covered.

[Stephen Timms]

I am sure my hon. Friend is right. The real question I wanted to raise here is different: the position of sellers from overseas. As we have now discussed on a number of occasions, there is a real difficulty in stopping overseas sellers who are contacted online from doing things that the Bill does not want them to do.

In the case of clause 12, which is about the sale of bladed articles to under-18s, clause 18, which puts an onus on the delivery company where the seller is outside the UK, had to be alongside it. In clause 15, as far as I can see, there is not another parallel clause placing responsibility on the delivery company.

I hope I am wrong—if I am, I am sure the Minister will point it out—but it looks to me as though sellers outside the UK will be entirely exempted from the requirement set out in clause 15, because there is no way for them to be penalised for sending a dangerous weapon to residential premises somewhere. If that is the case, the clause will simply force everybody who wants these things delivered to their homes to buy them from overseas suppliers instead of UK suppliers, such as those based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley. That would be a pretty damaging outcome.

If clause 15 is going to be made to work, something must be done to address the problem of overseas sellers simply carrying on sending dangerous weapons to people’s homes, which the Bill as it stands makes no effort to address. The clause will be pointless because people will get round it in a very straightforward way.

Offensive Weapons Bill (Eighth sitting)

Debate between Stephen Timms and Louise Haigh

Committee Debate: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 6th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Louise Haigh]

At the risk of replicating the discussion, I will repeat some of the points I made earlier, because I do not think the Minister responded to the alternative proposal of expanding the clause to cover sales made internally in the UK, rather than just sales outside the United Kingdom.

We believe it could be possible to mirror this clause to cover internal UK sales, so someone would be entitled to purchase a bladed article online from a retailer outside of the UK and all they would have to do is prove that they were over 18 when it was delivered. Much of that would circumvent the issues that we discussed regarding clause 15.

Although the term “article” has, as we discussed, a different definition, it is clear that many bladed articles will be captured by the definition of “bladed products” in clause 18. Therefore a delivery to a residential address for an adult would be possible under clause 18, but not under clause 15. Will the Minister explain why there is not a similar provision to that in clause 18 for internal UK deliveries?

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

As my hon. Friend has pointed out, clause 18 deals with sales of knives by sellers outside the UK. The Minister has already rightly pointed out to us on a number of occasions that the British Government, or our laws, can impose very little control outside the UK.

The difficulty was illustrated by this morning’s discussion, in which it emerged that if in future I buy kitchen scissors from a British supplier I will have to go to the post office to pick them up. If, on the other hand, I buy them online from an overseas seller they can be posted direct to my home. That is quite problematic, and I imagine there will be more discussion of that as the Bill progresses through this House and the other place. It highlights the real difficulty of dealing with sellers located outside the UK. I have no idea what proportion of the dangerous weapons purchased in the UK are bought from sellers outside the UK, but my sense from looking at places such as eBay is that quite a large proportion of them are.

Offensive Weapons Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Stephen Timms and Louise Haigh

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 4th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Timms]

I rise to speak to new clause 9. It arises from a number of conversations that I had with a man called Mr Raheel Butt, whom I would briefly like to tell the Committee about. He grew up in West Ham, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), rather than in East Ham, and as he would freely acknowledge, he went wrong for several years and served a term in prison. I think he left prison in 2012, and since then he has made it his mission to try to ensure that other young people do not make the same mistakes he made. He set up a community interest company called Community & Rehabilitation Solutions, which works with the Metropolitan police in a number of ways, and he is very concerned about the ease with which people can get hold of very unpleasant weapons and corrosive substances—the new clause covers both corrosive substances and bladed weapons.

I arranged to meet Mr Butt a couple of weeks ago, and he came to Portcullis House to have a conversation with me about this issue. About five minutes after he was due to turn up, I realised that he had not arrived, so I gave him a call on his mobile. He said, “Well, the problem is I don’t know how to get past security with my offensive weapons.” I had not realised that he was planning to bring his offensive weapons with him, but that was indeed his intention. It caused a significant security alert; I actually never got to see the offensive weapons, because they were taken off him before he managed to get through Portcullis House security. I suppose that was reassuring.

The point he wanted to make, however, was that it is extremely easy to buy the most dreadful weapons online extremely cheaply. For example, I am just looking at a product that he pointed out to me—the ones he showed me are all readily available on eBay, and I know there are other websites where they are available as well. “Ultralight Self Defense Tactical Defense Pen Outdoor Glass Breaker Writing Pen” is the name of a product that costs £2.84 on eBay. It is designed to look like a pen, and it does look like a pen, but it is actually a lethal weapon. My worry, which I am sure is also the Minister’s worry, is how to stop these things getting into the hands of people who want to do harm with them, of whom there are sadly far too many at the moment.

Clause 4 covers the delivery of corrosive products to people under 18, and clause 15 covers the delivery of bladed products to residential premises. In both cases, the Bill places requirements on the suppliers. My worry is what happens in a case such as one Mr Butt drew my attention to. That ultra-light product on ebay.co.uk is supplied by a Chinese company called vastfire-luz. My worry is whether this legislation will cover companies such as that one in China, or companies elsewhere, that are sending these very damaging and unpleasant items to people in the UK.

I know that clause 15, on the delivery of bladed products to residential premises, puts in place arrangements to cover the situation where the supplier is outside the UK. An onus is placed on the delivery company; we will no doubt come to that in due course, but it is not clear to me how effective that will be. If a Chinese company posts an item, which could be in a perfectly innocuous small package, to somebody in the UK, will the arrangements in the Bill help us pick up that it is, in fact, a lethal weapon that is being delivered? It might be delivered by the Royal Mail through the post or by a delivery company of some kind. It is difficult to see how the measures in the Bill, although clearly intended to stop that kind of delivery being made, will in practice have that effect for suppliers determined to get around the impediments being put in their way.

That is the reason I have tabled new clause 9, which I accept looks like a rather odd proposition on the face of it, to move that a person

“commits an offence if they knowingly purchase an offensive weapon from a seller located in a country that is not a member of the European Union.”

The Bill is intended to manage sellers and delivery agencies, but I am sceptical whether that will work in practice. Through my new clause, I instead place an onus on the purchaser and, indeed, on people such as eBay who are facilitating these sales, and say to them: “If you are an individual purchasing an offensive weapon from a seller outside the EU, that is an offence.” That would be one way of shifting the onus on to the purchaser. Clearly, it would still be possible for businesses to import items into the UK in the ordinary way. What I am worried about is individuals buying the dreadful implements that are freely on sale at the moment, on eBay and elsewhere and that, as far as I can see, the well-intentioned measures in the Bill will not capture. This proposal would be another way of trying to stop those very damaging things getting into the country.

[Louise Haigh]

I rise briefly to congratulate my right hon. Friend on the ingenious way he has brought forward the new clause to tackle the thorny issue of websites outside the UK and the difficulties that the Government will have in prosecuting those who attempt to sell corrosive substances and, indeed, bladed articles, which are dealt with later in the Bill.

I want particularly to address the issue of platforms. As my right hon. Friend said, platforms such as Wish, eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Amazon proliferate the use of horrendous weapons. In 2016, a teenager killed a young man called Bailey Gwynne in a school in Aberdeen. He was cleared of murder, but convicted of culpable homicide. He had paid £40 on Amazon for a folding knife with an 8.5 cm blade. It is illegal even under the current law—prior to the Bill—to sell a folding knife to a buyer aged under 18 if the blade is more than 3 inches long, but that 16-year-old had been able to get around Amazon’s age-verification checks by pinning a note to his front door rather than accepting delivery in person.

I am sure that large retailers and online providers such as Amazon will comply with this new legislation, but individual sellers who sell through Amazon, Facebook Marketplace, eBay and so on are unlikely to comply, so there has to be a way, if we do not use the exact wording that my right hon. Friend has proposed, for us to crack down on platforms; otherwise, we will leave a gaping hole that will render essentially meaningless the worthy principles that the Bill is designed to implement.

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East and the right hon. Member for East Ham for the amendments and the new clause. If I may, I will deal with amendments 43 and 44 first and then move on to new clause 9.

I start by saying that, sadly, it is of course not just in the context of the use of offensive weapons that there are people who do not have the scruples that we do when it comes to crimes and harms; they use online platforms to sell their wares. Indeed, only yesterday my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary gave a powerful speech on his expectations of all members of the tech industry when it comes to addressing the horrific prevalence of child sexual exploitation online. We are discussing here a different form of criminality, but of course we have to work to ensure that criminals do not have a gaping hole open on the internet to sell these horrific weapons.

Section 141 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 prohibits the sale, importation and other things of disguised knives. The Bill extends that to cover their possession, so I hope that that addresses the point made about the disguised weapon that Mr Butt—

--- Later in debate ---

[Louise Haigh]

I am very grateful that the Minister is willing to consider the amendment. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Amendment made: 20, in clause 5, page 7, line 4, after “See” insert “—

(a) section (Presumptions in proceedings in Scotland for offence under section 5) for provisions about presumptions as to the content of containers in proceedings in Scotland;

(b) ”—(Victoria Atkins.)

See the explanatory statement for Amendment 14.

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

[Stephen Timms]

I very much welcome the inclusion of clause 5 in the Bill. It is a very important step forward to make an offence of having a corrosive substance in a public place, in exactly the same way as having a knife in a public place is an offence. I am hopeful that the Bill will address some of the problems we have seen in areas such as mine.

I just want to ask the Minister one question. Subsection (2) makes the point that it is a defence for somebody if they can prove that

“they had good reason or lawful authority for having the corrosive substance with them in a public place”.

Subsection (3) goes on to say that it is a defence if the person has the corrosive substance with them for work. Will the Minister set out what the courts should expect to regard as a good reason for carrying a corrosive substance in a public place? I think that all of us would rightly accept having it for work to be a perfectly defensible reason. I wonder whether there is a risk of getting into some difficult areas where people come up with a raft of potential excuses for carrying acid in a Lucozade bottle. Has there been any thought about what would count as a good reason or lawful authority for having this substance, to give some guidance to magistrates courts and others who might themselves quite quickly having to make these judgments when cases come before them?

[Louise Haigh]

May I request a couple of clarifications from the Minister? She mentioned testing kits earlier. Are they to be made available to every constable in every police force in the country? If not, to whom will they be made available to enable testing while on the beat, so to speak?

With regard to the definition in clause 5 about not burning human skin. We discussed bleach earlier; household bleach does not corrode skin, so would that not fall under the definition in clause 5, since it does not in schedule 1? Will the Minister give us some examples of products that would match the definition in clause 5 but not come under schedule 1, if that makes sense?

Offensive Weapons Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Stephen Timms and Louise Haigh

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Timms]

I am grateful for that way of communicating that information. That does sound helpful.

The Minister mentioned vinegar and, presumably, possessing vinegar in a public place will not be an offence. Surely we are talking about things which will do serious damage, which, it seems to me, takes us back to the attractions of the schedule 1 approach.

I made it clear at the start that I am not planning to push this to a vote, but I think there is a danger here that police officers will be given a rather unclear duty and have an unclear obligation imposed on them by this part of the Bill. As we have debated it, the view I suggested at the start has been strengthened. The clarity schedule 1 brings would be helpful in clause 5, as well as in clauses 1 to 4, but I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Louise Haigh]

I beg to move amendment 49, in clause 1, page 2, line 21, at end insert—

“(c) all substances listed under Schedule 1A of the Poisons Act 1972”.

This amendment would list all of the substances listed under Section 1A of the Poisons Act 1972 “corrosive products”, making it illegal to sell them to a person under the age of eighteen.