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Policing and Crime Bill

It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries), who always speaks good practical sense. That sense contrasted somewhat with the speech made by the Home Secretary in opening today's debate, in which she oozed complacency. The fact that the Bill is the 66th piece of police and justice legislation that we have had under this Government just shows how they confuse quantity with quality. As so many hon. Members have already said, we need to make existing laws work properly as they were intended to, and to make them work better, before we introduce yet more laws and regulations that, as we have just heard, might prove completely unworkable. I shall make a few brief and probably disjointed comments on various aspects of the Bill that are not to do with prostitution—the subject that has exercised most hon. Members' minds this evening. The selling of alcohol to children is a big problem, as we would all agree. It is particularly a problem in deprived areas. Some of the statistics have already been mentioned. A survey that appeared in The Lancet showed that 29 per cent. of disadvantaged children say that they drink to get drunk, 52 per cent. say that they get alcohol from the local shops and 42 per cent. start drinking before they are 13. Another survey produced last year by Liverpool John Moores university said that poor children were 45 per cent. more likely to be violent after drinking than children in affluent areas. The problem is very serious. I welcome measures that will genuinely tackle that problem, but, as I mentioned earlier, legislation and regulations alone will not solve every perceived social problem, and a large part of this problem is social. The fact that the Government are making new penalties when the existing penalties have not even been used in the extreme, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins), just shows that laws are not being allowed to work. I went out a little while ago on a test purchasing exercise with the local police. We went to pubs with two police cadets aged 15 and 16. One certainly did not look anything like 18, and the other was marginal. Four out of the five premises that we visited served those girls. In most cases they were served by the licensee himself or herself, not by some rookie 18-year-old barman. That is still happening, and it is happening because powers are not being used to ensure that those places are properly investigated and because the penalties are not sufficiently tough when people get caught. That is what we need to work on. I am not just complaining about the amounts of alcohol being drunk, worrying though those amounts are, but about the fact that we have a mentality in this country that says that people have to go out and get completely bladdered, and to binge drink, for it to be worth doing and effective. We have to change that mentality. The Government have not helped by the fact that they have cut education programmes on drinking, on which they should have put more emphasis. We need to get people to respect alcohol, not to grow up abusing it. The subject of mosquitoes is linked to alcohol and young people; it is not mentioned in the Bill, and it should be. For the benefit of those who do not know, I should explain that mosquitoes are high-pitched devices that can be heard only by children and young people, mostly under the age of 25. The devices are deeply insidious and discriminatory, and are produced by Compound Security Systems, a company whose managing director I met a little while ago. They have a range of 15 m and are attached to buildings, usually shops, to deter young people from congregating in an area. That is the wrong way to tackle the forms of antisocial behaviour that may or may not occur when young people congregate in groups. The device is highly discriminatory because it affects only young people. I tried it on a work experience student from one of the local schools who was working in my office. When the device was switched on, we could hear nothing, but that poor chap went berserk because it is very powerful. It is also dangerous; it has been shown that it can have adverse effects on people suffering from tinnitus or autism. What if we had invented a device that could be detected only by elderly people, or that affected only people with hearing aids or who used Zimmer frames? That would be terribly discriminatory and we would not stand for it, yet completely unregulated and unlicensed devices are available that can be targeted at young people, who in many cases are simply trying to get together to socialise.