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Policing and Crime Bill

I generally welcome the Bill and commend much of it, including parts 2 and 3. It is perhaps a shame that Opposition Members have spoken against the clauses on prostitution and, indeed, some of the clauses relating to the control of binge drinking and alcohol abuse. Like my hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) and for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho), I am going to concentrate in the brief time I have available on the proposals relating to lap dancing in clause 25, as the number of such clubs has mushroomed in recent years and caused difficulties for a great number of hon. Members in their constituencies. The reclassification of lap-dancing or pole-dancing clubs as sex encounter venues is a very welcome step. Since the Licensing Act 2003, the number of such clubs is estimated to have doubled approximately to about 300. It is fair to say that that was an unintended consequence of the legislation, which effectively disenfranchised local communities and made it extremely difficult for licences to be withheld from those establishments. That was brought home to me very keenly towards the end of last year in respect of an application for such a club in the west Kensington area—an area that I represented for about 20 years as a councillor and hope, following boundary changes at the next election, to represent again as an MP. It is an issue that has affected many areas in London and, indeed, outside it. In this case, a notorious establishment called the Fox tavern was bought by a company rather luridly called Passion Nights, which had no previous experience of running such places. It sought to open it as a lap-dancing club for up to 600 people with a large number of private booths and other insalubrious trappings that go along with such institutions. Needless to say, like many of these establishments, it was to be located in a densely populated residential area, with all that one expects to go with it in the way of schools, community facilities and so forth. It does not take much imagination to realise that that club would entirely change the character of that area. Despite that rather obvious fact, the experience of a number of my hon. Friends elsewhere has shown how difficult it is under existing legislation to challenge such licences. In those circumstances, one must try to prove a hypothesis: one must try to prove that something will happen for which there is clearly no current evidence, because the establishment is not currently there, and the criteria for refusal of licences are extremely narrow and not directed at the nuisances that residents usually expect such establishments to cause. Fortunately, things have gone reasonably well thus far in this case, but that is entirely due to the fact that within 10 days of its becoming common knowledge that the application was being submitted, more than 25 per cent. of all residents in the catchment area had signed petitions and presented the local authority with over 1,000 objections to the club's opening. Owing to the quality of those submissions and the organisation involved—I know that a great deal of organisation was involved, because I gave evidence at the licensing hearing—the authority refused the application. It was one of very few applications that were refused. However, the matter does not end there. Next month there will be an appeal in the magistrates court, and I strongly suspect that even if the residents win again, the matter will proceed to the High Court, because the people who have the estimated £2 million needed to develop such a project have deep enough pockets to exceed, in the legal process, whatever the residents can come up with. The clause is good news. I say that not only because of my own reading of it, but because organisations such as Object and the Fawcett Society—which have campaigned nationally on the subject—generally welcome it, and believe that it will do the trick when it comes to new licences. Some of my hon. Friends have already mentioned the caveats, so I will not go over the ground again. There is, however, an opportunity for temporary or occasional licences. Two matters concern me particularly, given my own experience. First, I want to know how transitional provisions will be dealt with. We understand that they will be dealt with by means of a statutory instrument, but it would be helpful if—perhaps not today, but certainly in Committee—the Minister could give some indication of how the Government expect existing licences, and the process of renewal and challenge of those licences, to be dealt with. Given the mushrooming of facilities of this kind over the last five years, the problem clearly does not relate only to new licences dating from the time of enactment. The second issue, which I think has already been covered by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham, is the issue of choice. There is an adopted rather than a mandatory provision here. Indeed, it is a double adopted provision, because it constitutes an amendment to schedule 3 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982. There will be a ““postcode lottery”” effect. There will, I suspect, be displacement between authorities, some being less robust and some being more robust, and there is likely to be a substantial delay while authorities take advice and decide whether to adopt the new legislation. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to look at that issue again, and to consider particularly the matter of transitional provision. Notwithstanding that caveat, however, the legislation is very welcome. I did not intend to say anything particularly partisan, but I am afraid that the door was opened by the newly appointed shadow Home Secretary, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). Perhaps it was his enthusiasm for his new job that gave him the temerity to claim credit for the Conservative party for coming up with these ideas. That, I think, is simply churlish. I think that credit should be given where it is due. The Conservative party's record on this issue is actually very bad, whether we view it at national or at local level. Because she is a very modest person, my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge did not mention the fact that she and my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham had conducted a co-ordinated campaign, including an early-day motion which, when I last saw it, had attracted 119 signatures in the last Session. Four were from Conservative Members. That is how much the Conservative party cared at that stage. Conservative Members' support in debates raising the issue, and their support for the 10-minute Bill, were singularly lacking. I am glad to note that residents' pressure has belatedly brought them to the table to support this recommendation, but I think it would be rather better for them to give credit to the people who have pursued the agenda over the last two to three years than to try, in a rather tawdry way, to claim the credit now. Last year the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe), wrote to all local authorities asking whether they had any concerns. My Conservative council wrote back, saying that the current restrictions"““appear to be working well and are therefore not a problem””." There is a degree of complacency in that statement. My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge made a good point, even though it was jeered by Opposition Members. There are lurid examples of Conservatives and their organisations not simply not opposing institutions of this kind, but giving support to them in a rather childish and schoolboyish way. I hope that the Conservative party has learned its lesson on this matter. I hope this provision will be toughened, and that it will not be subjected to the same sort of parsimonious comments that we have heard so far about the rest of the Bill. On that basis, I hope that the Bill will make progress and that the specific provision on lap-dancing clubs will be strengthened.