Policing and Crime Bill

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 16th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my support to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to which my noble friend Lord Rosser has added his name. She has hit eloquently on an important omission in our capacity to deal with young offenders.

When I and members of the Gypsy and Traveller communities first lobbied for an extension of the census categories to include Gypsies and Travellers, before the increase in our Roma population, we did so because important areas of discrimination, resulting in significantly poorer life chances, were undocumented and a minority ethnic population of very long standing was simply unrecognised in many sets of official statistics. When we eventually achieved this in 2011 we thought that at last the public services would begin to understand more about the significantly worse outcomes in health, education, employment, housing and experience of the criminal justice system endured by many from these communities.

It remains disappointing that the Youth Justice Board has not taken advantage of the opportunity of the 2011 census categories to map more accurately what happens to young Gypsy, Traveller and Roma people. I am grateful for useful meetings with the noble Lord, Lord McNally, as chair of the Youth Justice Board, and his officials on the subject. His acknowledgment that the current system is not robust was welcome and I appreciate his commitment to improvement in data gathering. However, the fact remains that records still do not consistently capture more of the reality of who the young people who go through our criminal justice system are.

There are, of course, some external obstacles. Many young people from the Gypsy and Traveller communities are fearful of admitting their ethnicity because of the bullying and exclusion which has been meted out to them in the past. But trust can be developed if the information is shown to be helpful.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, it would be very important to be able to correlate the probable overrepresentation of these young people with literacy levels and mental health status—also referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. Their experience of education and accommodation has often been deeply unsatisfactory, but we cannot begin to make these links and to do something about it until we have the data tools.

As has been said, we know that both HM Inspectorate of Prisons and the lead chief constable for Gypsy, Traveller and Roma issues have called for the change the amendment would provide. The excellent Irish Chaplaincy's Traveller Equality Project has really positive evidence of good practice to justify the use of up-to-date information in the adult prison estate.

I hope, therefore, that the Minister will see the point too and accept this amendment.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of Amendments 228A and 228B in the name of my noble friend Lady Brinton. The arguments for ethnic monitoring are well versed and I will touch upon them briefly. As has already been said, without ethnic monitoring it is very difficult for public services to identify, and therefore address, any inequalities which vulnerable groups may be experiencing. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has said, whenever there have been research or studies into the experiences of Gypsies, Travellers and Roma in custodial institutions—in either the youth or adult estates—these communities are almost always shown to have worse experiences and greater care needs.

Voices Unheard: A Study of Irish Travellers in Prison found that over 20% of Traveller young offenders were identified as having mental health issues. This is an alarming number and needs a co-ordinated effort in order to be addressed. However, as we know, without ethnic monitoring and consistent data it is unlikely that such an intervention would take place. As the report’s author, Dr Conn Mac Gabhann—I hope I have pronounced that correctly—said in an interview on this issue recently:

“While ethnic monitoring will not solve all the problems Gypsy and Traveller children face in the youth criminal justice system, it will be an important step in helping us to highlight the problems and issues they face and ensure these issues become a target to be tackled”.

I have little more to add to the very powerful speeches of my noble friend Lady Brinton, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. They have covered the ground extremely well. I hope the Government can support these amendments and ensure that the issues affecting young Gypsies and Travellers in the youth justice system can finally be addressed.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I have sympathy for the noble Baroness’s amendment regarding collection of ethnic minority data. I would like to pick up on the point about education. So long as we are not properly educating the Traveller community it will continue to be exceptionally difficult for it to engage exclusively in legitimate economic activity.

Policing and Crime Bill

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I should begin by declaring my interest as a vice-president of the LGA. I am delighted to be taking part in this debate today and following the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, but fear that my contribution is much more mundane. The Policing and Crime Bill is large and complex; my interest is very specific and contained within the first 21 pages—that is, Part 1, which deals with emergency services collaboration.

In my previous life, I served on both a police authority and a fire and rescue authority, and it is the latter which concerns me today. The new Prime Minister made it clear, in her previous role as Home Secretary, that her vision is to bring fire and rescue services under the auspices of police and crime commissioners. Greater collaboration between the emergency services is to be welcomed and is already taking place in many areas. In terms of efficiency, the duty to collaborate—if supported by additional Home Office funding—might enable cross-organisational working to flourish, as often there is a cost in identifying and piloting approaches before such initiatives are rolled out more widely. Joint innovation funding bids will reinforce the benefits of working together.

However, some important factors need to be taken into account before fire and rescue services are bundled under the control of police and crime commissioners. First, the boundaries of fire and rescue authorities are not coterminous with police commissioner areas. The answer has been given that the fire and rescue boundaries will be altered to fit those of the crime commissioner. This sounds a simple solution but is not easy to achieve without significant cost for some fire and rescue authorities, especially when merged fire services have to be demerged to fit existing police boundaries.

I was leader of Somerset County Council when the two FRAs of Devon and Somerset were merged after very detailed and often painful negotiations. This was a triumph for all those involved—both chief fire officers, leading elected members and other officers of both county councils. To try now to demerge the boundaries because they do not fit with PCC boundaries would be an extremely retrograde step and take no account of loyalty or good will. This is a service where trust in your fellow officers is paramount, and firefighters are fiercely loyal to their colleagues. They feel ownership of their service and identify strongly with the area to which they belong. This good will should be factored into the equation in much the same way as “good will” appears in any set of business accounts. I believe that fire and rescue authorities would be disaggregated and split up at our peril.

Secondly, a police and crime commissioner has a very specific role and remit, whereas the ethos of a fire and rescue service is very different. The role of the firefighter has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. When I was a child, their role was almost exclusively one of responding to and putting out fires. Now they fulfil a range of functions. With ever-increasing levels of traffic on our roads, they are called to innumerable road traffic accidents where they extract drivers and passengers from tangled metal crashes, saving lives in the process. They respond to severe and minor flooding incidents, travelling to all parts of the country to rescue and provide relief to those stranded by rising water and danger. Some have sniffer dogs which can detect not drugs, as in the case of many police dogs, but a human body. They have been sent to earthquake-hit regions, where their dogs are able to point rescuers to where a person may lie trapped and undetected beneath a pile of rubble. As well as their role in responding to emergencies and tragedies, fire and rescue services provide important fire awareness training to local communities and in elderly persons homes, homes for young people with learning difficulties, schools, colleges, businesses and a whole host of organisations within our communities.

Some FRAs are exploring how they might undertake wider activities which have historically been undertaken by the police, such as searching for missing persons, area-wide searches, concerns for welfare et cetera. While this will increase demand on an FRS, it probably sits better with it than perhaps with the police. It will free up police time, but there may be a cost to the FRS for taking on such work and this comes at a time when fire budgets are already stretched. There needs to be some recognition of the benefits to communities through organisations working differently together, and this may be best achieved through the public-facing inspection reports such as the PEEL inspection reports undertaken by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and any new fire service inspectorate that will emerge in the near future.

While the Bill is focused on police and fire, the modern FRS saves a significant number of lives through its emergency medical work. It is perhaps surprising that Devon and Somerset FRS now attends more medical emergencies than it does fires, and that trend is continuing. Therefore, recognition and central government support for continuation of this work is important in shaping local integrated risk management plans. This area could be strengthened in the Bill.

While I do not doubt that police and crime commissioners have a working knowledge of the areas they represent, I would like to put the case for the elected councillors who sit on fire and rescue authorities. They represent specific areas of the community covered by the FRS and they know their communities really well—otherwise they would not have got themselves elected, often on good turnouts. They know and care about their communities and are passionate about the fire and rescue service. Their passion for this blue-light service is shared by their communities, who all believe that firefighters do an amazing job and would wish to ensure that the service is delivered to the same high standard in their area.

I cannot finish without referring to the particular problem that exists in London with regard to the three blue-light services. On 30 June, the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry launched a report called Living on the Edge—Housing London’s Blue Light Emergency Services. This is an extremely interesting and worrying report. The findings of the LCCI were that, cumulatively, 54% of London’s blue-light emergency service frontline personnel now live outside London because they cannot afford to live closer to their place of work. Police officers, firefighters and paramedics generally earn between £22,000 and £38,000 in basic pay, plus between £3,000 and £5,000 in weighting and allowances. The chief executive of NHS Employers states:

“Our average earnings for our workforce have gone up by 3% or 4%. The average cost of travel with a zone 1-4 ticket has gone up by 25%. The cost of housing has gone up by in excess of a third”.

We all know in this Chamber that the salary for a first-time buyer in London needs to be in excess of £80,000. Our frontline emergency services can afford neither to buy nor to rent properties in London.

On 23 June—a date none of us is likely to forget—there was heavy rain and flooding. A large number of those who might have been available to alleviate the flooding but who live outside London were neither on hand to respond quickly nor able to travel into work, due to the disruption to travel. The response was therefore somewhat slower than would otherwise have been the case. This was not a disaster and caused only minor inconvenience, but it does indicate that, should London be the subject of a serious terrorist incident, our blue-light services, on which we have come to rely in time of emergency, would not be there in the numbers we would wish for them to respond, nor in the way they would wish themselves to respond.

There are many redundant fire stations in and around London. Some were sold off by the previous Mayor of London for business investment, but not all have gone under the hammer. These fire stations occupy large areas of land and are in key areas. With very little imagination, they could be converted into thriving businesses or retail opportunities and at the same time a section of the site could provide much needed key-worker housing for frontline blue-light personnel. That is common sense.

Finally, in the south-west we have established an emergency services forum where the most senior professional and political leaders of all three emergency services come together and explore what is working as well as driving forward collaboration improvements. This is already paying dividends and real progress is being made even before the new legislation is enacted, which further supports the strong collaboration approach that is already under way. If the Government are serious about collaboration between the emergency services, and I believe they rightly are, some of the issues I have raised will need to be addressed to ensure that the services are fit for the challenges of the next 10 years. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, on his excellent maiden speech, with which I agree. It is a great privilege to take part in today’s debate on the gracious Speech. Having just been re-elected to South Somerset District Council, local government continues to be very dear to my heart, and the provision of adequate, decent and affordable housing is a key role of local authorities. As has already been said, there is a chronic housing shortage in the country today. This has built up over a number of years and is now critical.

I understand the Prime Minister’s wish to increase home ownership and extend the right to buy to housing association tenants, but I fear his promise has serious flaws and will do nothing to alleviate the housing shortage. This view is shared by housing associations and a number of organisations concerned with the housing market.

The Chartered Institute of Housing believes that extending the right to buy to housing associations will not tackle the housing crisis and could make things worse for those on lower incomes already struggling to access a decent home at a price they can afford. It would have an impact on both housing associations and on local authorities, as councils would have to sell off their most valuable homes to fund replacements, as has already been said. The Government have said that replacements for both housing association and council homes sold under the extended scheme would be built in the same area, but this will be heavily dependent on land availability and will therefore be extremely challenging in some inner city and rural areas.

I represent a very rural area where providing affordable housing is particularly challenging. There are examples of communities working to provide affordable housing under the rural exception scheme, allowing green-belt land to be used and retained in perpetuity for people with local connections. The right-to-buy plan would seem to be entirely incompatible with this scheme. New occupants of rural exception schemes could be guaranteed a financial windfall and, at the same time, affordable homes would be lost to the community. Right to buy has seen many homes in rural and coastal communities sold and often not replaced.

In response to a letter from a constituent writing about affordable homes, the Prime Minister said:

“The fine details of this proposal have yet to be worked out but I have certainly taken on board your desire to ensure that affordable developments in rural communities of less than 3,000 people continue to be exempt from the Right to Buy”.

Right to acquire does not currently apply to rural communities with fewer than 3,000 homes. Right to buy is also currently not applied to sheltered, supported or adapted housing. Could the Minister give reassurances that rural communities will indeed be exempt from this extension to housing association tenants and provide clarity on the continuation of this practice? Similarly, the National Housing Federation has said:

“We fully support the aspiration of homeownership, but this policy does nothing for the 11 million private renters and three million adult children living at home with their parents. If there is £22.5 billion of public money available for housing, we should use it to build homes the next generation needs, not just gift it to the lucky few already housed in housing association homes”.

It goes on:

“An extension to the Right to Buy would mean that housing associations are working to keep pace with replacements rather than building homes for the millions stuck on waiting lists”.

These views are also shared by the Local Government Association.

Funding apart, it is a significant challenge to replace homes sold due to the constraints of acquiring land and planning consent. Historically, right to buy has led to the replacement of one home for every 10 sold. While the proposed Bill signals changes to freeing up brownfield sites and planning, there will always be a time delay in any replacement.

Many homes sold under right to buy are subsequently sold on, and often become private rentals at a higher rent than the previous affordable one. These properties are frequently poorly maintained and the additional rent often funded through housing benefit. This is a double whammy for the taxpayer, who is providing two subsidies, one through the discounted purchase price and the other through housing benefit. This cannot be right.

Violence against Women and Girls

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Again, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness’s commitment to making sure that professionals are properly oriented towards dealing with this. She rightly draws attention to an answer which I think that I gave to the noble Baroness, Lady Kingsmill, earlier, and I hope that she agrees that I recognise the important role of schools.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

Would the Minister agree that creating a safe atmosphere whereby women are encouraged to report to the police violence and rape within the home in the knowledge that they will be taken seriously and treated sympathetically is key to tackling the problem and reducing the incidence?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Yes, indeed. One feature of the current scene post-Savile is that women are much more confident now about going to the police and knowing that these things will be taken seriously. So I could not agree more with my noble friend.