I beg to move amendment No. 230, in

clause 47, page 24, line 27, at end insert—

'(5) Section 5 of the Protection of Children Act 1978 (c.37) shall be amended as follows—

(a) After subsection (6) shall be inserted—

''(6A) Where a person is convicted or cautioned in respect of an offence under section 1(1) of this Act, then any equipment that has been used to take, make, store or distribute indecent images of children shall be forfeited.

(6B) Section 14(1) of the Powers of Criminal Court (Sentencing) Act 2000 (c.6) shall not apply for the purposes of this section.

(6C) Where equipment has been the subject of forfeiture under section (6A) above, a person, other than the person convicted under section 1, shall be entitled to apply to the relevant magistrates' court for return of the equipment if—

(a) the equipment forfeited belonged not to the person convicted under section 1 but to the applicant, and

(b) the applicant did not have knowledge of the taking, making, storing or distributing of indecent images of children, nor could he be reasonably expected to have known.

(6D) The burden of proof for the purposes of section (6C) shall be on the applicant, and the standard of proof shall be the preponderence of probabilities.

(6E) Where the court is satisfied that the conditions set out in (6C) above are met, they may order the return of the equipment to the applicant so long as any indecent images that remain on the equipment can be permanently erased.''

(b) In the first line of subsection (7) the words '(2), (6) or (6A)' shall replace '(2) or (6)'.''.'.

You and the Committee, Mr. Griffiths, will be very aware from our discussions and the briefing that paedophiles collect all sorts of things. The Committee's predominant concern is pornographic photographs, prints, drawings and other images. In the past, those have been kept as hard copy, as we now call it, or on 8 mm film and videos. However, for the purposes of self-stimulation, distribution and membership of various paedophile groups, paedophiles are now using computers. They often store information on hard discs of computers, but, increasingly often we find that their computers do not have hard discs; they use floppy discs, storage pens, CD-ROMS, DVDs and, increasingly, remote storage. Crucially, stored material may be encrypted and the keys to the encryption, or at least some aspects of it, are probably on the computer.

The present situation is that if a paedophile is convicted, the police need to get a court order in respect of the equipment. To my regret, I find that that does not always happen—it should happen, but it is not automatic, and the police or the CPS may forget to ask. There is another aspect to my amendment. An individual who is cautioned can ask for the equipment

to be returned, as can those who have been pursued by court order and had equipment taken away. Generally, the police try not to give the equipment back. Frequently, the material on them can be deleted, but it is possible to retrieve material after a straightforward deletion. I understand that forms of overwriting can overcome that, but the police should not be put to that extra task. This may be apocryphal, but I understand that sometimes equipment ''suffers an accident''. Somewhere in the office a hard disc is broken or trodden on, a floppy disc is lost or a CD-ROM is broken or severely scratched and so on. However, many paedophiles are beginning to realise that they can ask for the stuff back. I suspect that the Committee would agree that forfeiture should be automatic.

A recent interesting case caused me to rethink my amendment to deal with a situation in which not all the equipment belongs to the convicted or cautioned individual. A House of Commons clerk had used House of Commons machinery. According to my original thoughts on the matter, in that case, the House of Commons would not have got its machinery back, which would be somewhat sad. I therefore added a bit to the amendment to allow an application for retrieval by the owner of the equipment, if the owner is not the perpetrator of the offence.

I shall not press the amendment. As I did not have a legal career before Parliament, putting amendments together can be rather difficult, particularly in my position, where the maximum number I can count to is about 32, for obvious reasons. I have to be somewhat careful. Even this morning, I found a potential flaw in the amendment. In a way, I have set the police an impossible task—increasingly, the computers that are being seized have no hard disc. They are booted with a floppy disc and put online to pick up material, particularly using servers that are in countries such as Nigeria, which is not very interested in the sort of stuff that is stored on computers. Such computers would be impossible to seize, so I probably should have included a provision in the amendment to specify any equipment taken by the police as part of their investigation, or some argument along that line.

However, I suspect that the Committee is au fait with what I am trying to do. I hope that Members will agree with the thrust of the amendment and that after a short discussion we can accept the intention and on Report have an amendment written by someone who is not from my professional background but who is legally qualified.