HC Deb 28 October 1998 vol 318 cc358-9 4.33 pm
Ms Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make it an offence to place advertisements for prostitutes in public telephone boxes; and for connected purposes

The problem of carding is localised, but severe. Corners of central London in or bordering my constituency are awash with cards, as, I understand, are parts of Brighton, Southampton, Birmingham and some other cities. To give the House an idea of the scale of the problem, British Telecom removes an average of 14 million cards each year. Ten million cards were removed in Westminster during one monitoring period between August 1996 and January 1998. One thousand boxes are carded regularly. Some boxes can display 80 cards at one time. At the absolute minimum, the cards create an appalling litter problem. More seriously, cards are becoming increasingly graphic and sexually explicit, with photographic illustrations and descriptions of services offered that stretch the imaginations even of hon. Members, who are notoriously broad-minded.

I am not a prude; I find prudery tedious. I do not want to live in a sanitised, Disneyland-type city—however pleasant Disneyland may be to visit with one's children. But nor do I want to be confronted against my will with pornography. It is not fair effectively to prevent women and children from using telephone boxes because they feel threatened by the sleazy environment that the cards create. I do not see why a child calling home on his way from school should be confronted with advertisements for golden rain, bondage and foot fetishism.

There are two ways of dealing with such cards: a comprehensive call-barring scheme, and the introduction of a criminal offence of carding, as I propose. I would greatly welcome a comprehensive call-barring scheme. I congratulate BT on its voluntary scheme, and investment in cleaning up telephone boxes. Other telephone operating companies need to come on board quickly, and the Office of Telecommunications should move swiftly to permit outgoing call-barring, blocking calls from call boxes to the telephone numbers advertised on the cards.

My Bill creates a criminal offence of carding. That will help to reduce the number of carders, since penalties can be stiffer than the average fine of £200, which is little more to carders than an occupational hazard. A new criminal offence would replace the time-consuming, cumbersome and expensive process whereby the local authority or the police must take out injunctions—even then, only after five prosecutions—by using the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertising) Regulations 1992. Westminster council alone is spending £20,000 on serving 20 injunctions at the moment. A financial and administrative burden is being placed unfairly on certain police divisions in certain local authority areas.

I am aware of the difficulties of drafting legislation on this issue, but I urge the Home Office to move swiftly and to resist partial solutions, which rely on local authority enforcement powers and may simply move the problem, particularly in areas of central London such as those that I represent, across a local authority border, from one block of streets to another.

I am grateful for the sympathetic response that I have received from the Home Office and the Department of Trade and Industry on both call-barring and criminal offence issues. I hope that we can move forward. There is clear cross-party support on the issue. More than 80 Members of Parliament have written in support of firm action to deal with the problem. Doing so would be welcomed by Members of Parliament and business, as well as by residents of corners of our cities that are afflicted by the problem.

I am conscious of the argument that action against carding may result in prostitution being pushed back on to the streets. That is a serious and valid point. Out of concern for the safety of prostitutes—they are at risk—I do not want that to happen. Indeed, the problem of sleaze in the streets that I have described would be even greater were we to return to the situation of a few years ago, when prostitutes were working the streets.

But cards in telephone boxes are not the solution to that. They are messy and offensive, and allow no choice for members of the public who wish to make a telephone call from a public box but do not want to be confronted with such pornography. We must clamp down now on the carding nuisance, and recognise that advertising may move, and may have to move, into more targeted mediums, allowing people choice, and freeing up communities such as those that I represent from a palpable and serious nuisance.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Ms Karen Buck, Dr. Alan Whitehead, Mr. Alan Clark, Mr. Andrew Dismore and Mr. Tony McNulty.