Baroness Coffey (Con)

It is the Government who have kept their Back-Benchers here at this time of night and kept the debate going. I am allowed to speak, am I not? The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, sprang up before me. But for all the Back-Benchers complaining about people debating this important issue, it was the Government’s decision to keep the debate going to this point, and some of that is to prevent a Division on the matter. I am trying to understand—a question that my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, put so eloquently—why the Government are not accepting this amendment. They have given every indication that they will not. I appreciate that losing a mobile phone may be inconvenient, but the number one issue is the impact on tourism in London. It is why Sadiq Khan has painted up and down Oxford Street the words, “Don’t stand here”—because you might be attacked for your phone. It is ridiculous that, in our capital, the Mayor of London is painting these signs. It is all over the Tube as well that you might get your phone pinched. Yet the Government, for some reason, do not seem prepared to get tough with the mobile phone companies and prevent, as a former Metropolitan Commissioner has pointed out, a pretty lucrative business model which could be addressed—not just the thefts but the physical incidents that are happening, principally, though not only, in our capital—by taking forward my noble friend’s amendment. It worries me that there is a risk of getting tribal on this, when we do not need to. Does the Minister want to intervene? I think she just said something from a sedentary position. I see she does not want to intervene. Does somebody else want to intervene? Was that the noble Lord, Lord Forbes? Does he want to intervene, with his experience of Newcastle? No, he does not want to intervene. This is affecting not only citizens but tourists, and that has a massive impact on the attraction of our capital. The Government should be taking this issue a lot more seriously than they seem to be and trying to stop a crime that is one of the principal causes, in crime survey statistics, of people being frightened to go out and about on the streets of our capital city. I am somewhat disappointed that this debate is happening close to midnight. I am conscious that Government Back-Benchers do not want to be here, and I can see that the Opposition Back-Benchers do not want to be here, but I do, because I care about people in our communities. I appreciate that my noble friend will not want to test the opinion of the House tonight, but we must find a way to tackle this issue for the sake of everybody. Parliament must listen to the concerns of people across this country, and those trying to visit this country, and tackle something that has become so pernicious that it is a genuine threat to the prosperity of the many businesses that rely on people coming to this country and going out to enjoy themselves.