Member

This solution is really about design; design has been mentioned an awful lot today with regard to various amendments. I am afraid that every Government for the last 20 years have done almost nothing to prevent crime by design. We have seen it work very well for fire—there are very few fires now. This place may not be a very good example, but you design things and places not to burn, and you design them to have great alarms. But who cared about the last time we designed cars—or, in this case, mobile phones—to stop them being valuable on sale or to stop them being stolen in the first place? I am afraid the bottom line is that they are not being designed in that way, but that is one of the most important strategic differences that we could make to ensure that this type of crime is reduced in future. I doubt we will ever stop it, but the design of phones at the moment and the reconnection to a mobile phone network mean that in fact they always will be valuable, and their size means that it is quite hard to discover them once stolen.