Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Morris of Yardley

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I wish to speak against this amendment, because on first reading it set off a number of alarm bells. But I say to the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, that I listened carefully to what he said, to try to understand his arguments. For me, there are consequences for trans people in the amendment that no other group of people with protected characteristics would have to face in our society.

Those who have laid and spoken to amendments to this Bill against transgender people have repeatedly said there is a data collection problem. But I do not understand why the data needs to be collected by the police, given that for most crimes—whether the victim or the person being arrested, as set out in this amendment—being a trans person is just not relevant.

A parallel example would be requiring a disabled person to register with the police. I have chosen this example deliberately because, four years ago, I was physically attacked in my wheelchair at Euston station. For that incident, the wonderful British Transport Police recorded the crime as a disability hate crime—the crime, note, not the victim or the perpetrator. I would be appalled if every time I reported a crime thereafter—online fraud, for example—I had to say, “By the way, I’m disabled and I’m on your disability register.”

Rape offences are probably the only offences where the police need to know the sex of the offender because the legislation is dependent on the person’s genitals. It is otherwise not relevant information because the police do not need to know it. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, says that it is easy to add one section to the crime reporting information system—CRIS—but is it so easy? Adding just one extra category will take time and, for an existing reporting system, is usually very much more expensive than expected. Just ask the Government about the costs of adding the booster jab details to the Covid app, when they have thrown millions at IT during the pandemic.

I note that the amendment says that the above

“does not constitute an offence under section 22 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004”,

which prevents the disclosure of this protected information. On what grounds, then, is it acceptable to share people’s protected characteristics when the GRA says that is private information? In the context of personal information, can the noble Lord confirm whether the amendment complies with GDPR? I am not sure that it does, as it is not personal information that is essential to record.

I return to why the amendment was laid. Can the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, answer some questions to try to explain the aims of his amendment? I will give a hypothetical example: a trans individual is subject to house burglary or to a street mugging unrelated to their gender. This amendment requires them, if they report that crime, to out themselves to the police. Why should they suffer that loss of privacy and human rights, and to what end? Why should trans people face such a disincentive to report crimes perpetrated against them? Why is this the one group of people being singled out as victims?

I have a second example. A trans person is arrested for being drunk and disorderly but they have been assaulted and in fact are suffering from concussion, which can give the same appearance. That would be a defence to any charge but they are required to out themselves upon arrest. Why? A key tenet of our law is that accused persons are presumed innocent and mostly have the same right to privacy and liberty as all citizens. That is different for criminals. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, referred two or three times to crimes and criminals but that is not what this amendment says. It concerns anyone who is arrested. What is the position of an accused person who refuses to provide the relevant information? The amendment does not make this clear. Would they be obstructing a police officer in the execution of their duty under Section 89(2) of the Police Act 1996?

A further real concern about this amendment, if enacted, is that it would prevent trans people coming forward to report being victims of crime as they would have to out themselves. Many would not be comfortable with disclosing that sort of information. It also implies that a gender recognition certificate is what defines gender, whereas many trans people do not have or want one of them.

The fundamental problem for me, though, is the labelling and targeting of trans people, either as victims or those arrested by the police, alone of any group in our society. While this amendment may not be being instructing them at this stage to wear a pink triangle on their jackets at all times, there would be a data pink triangle. It would set them apart from every other grouping in society. It sets a dangerous and unacceptable precedent. I hope the noble Lord will withdraw the amendment.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have put my name to this amendment and I shall speak in support of it. I very much welcome the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, presented the argument. He gave a lot of detail, and at this time of night I will not go over it again, but I want to emphasise one or two points.

To begin with, I say that I sort of understand the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and I take them seriously, because anybody who thinks that any proposed legislation will discriminate against one group deserves to be heard and to have those questions explored. But at the core of this is the collection of data; we are an immensely data-rich society at the moment. Sitting here, throughout the debates this evening, there have been so many times when the argument that has been put forward has depended on the collection of data. Whichever public service you look at, whether it be education, health, the criminal law or whatever, much of the progress that we have made over previous decades has been because we have had the ability to collect data.

I am a woman, and I think that my sex has made many advances over the past decades because people arguing for legislation that has protected women, men, people with disabilities and people who are transgender have been able to make the case only because they have been able to collect the data. Unless you have the data, you are arguing vaguely about some impression about something that might happen, so I am deeply wedded to the idea of collecting data in the formation of public policy and the advancement of political ideas.

I think that is defensible, but I do not take for granted the fact that we do not give something up in the collection of that data. I will be honest. I am trustee of a number of charities, as I think everybody in this Chamber is. Every year, when I am asked to fill in the data declaration, I see another bit of data there. Sometimes, I think “Why do they want to know that about me?”, and the one I am saying that about at the moment is sexuality. I sit there, I tick the box that says “heterosexual”, and I think “What’s that got to do with me being a trustee of this body?” But I sign it, because I think that, on the whole, that declaration of bits of information about ourselves can be put to the common public good. If we were to look at charities, without declaring that information, how do we ever get to make the argument that women, or people who are black or from ethnic minorities, or from the gay community, are not represented on charities? Whether we like it or not—and I accept that it is difficult to come to terms with it sometimes—it is about the protection, rights and freedoms of individuals. But I would never say that we do not pay a price for the collection of this data, or that we must not continuously and constantly make sure that the data we are asking to be collected is in the public policy interest.

That is why I have come to this amendment and why I very much support the arguments that have been made. What the amendment asks is simply that we collect two bits of data, among others. One is the sex at birth and the other is any gender acquired during the lifetime of the person. Without that, I do not know how we can go on to develop public policy in the pursuit of those who have committed crime and of the public duty to protect those who have been victims of crime. Unless we have the data about how many of which groups there are, they will be ignored.

I have sat through a long and very interesting debate today. My noble friend on the Front Bench said that one of the most important things about the Bill before the Committee is that it is a Bill about protecting women and girls. I do not know how you do that unless you collect the data. We have heard about county lines and knife crime. Unless we collect the data to know that many of the people who are drawn in and persuaded to commit those crimes are young men, we cannot develop a suite of policies that support them. When we collect data about sex, it is entirely proper to ask about acquired gender as well. We must not conflate the two.

The problem at the moment is that different police forces are collecting data about sex at birth and about gender acquired at some other point and then conflating the two. We do not have the sequencing of data and information across police forces in this country that can enable us to make public policy. That is what this amendment is asking. It wants to disaggregate those, as the mover of the amendment has said.

Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Morris of Yardley

Monday 28th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I support Amendment 81 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I believe that it chimes well with my Amendment 74 that we discussed earlier, as well as some interventions in the group dealing with health conditions last week.

I want to pick up the case study that I quoted last week of a young lady who had cancer who talked to me quite specifically about the problems that she had, during her year off school, with the three types of education that she was offered and the lack of communication between them. As she became ill, she had one teacher in her school who was prepared to support her, her maths teacher. That was extremely helpful, but unfortunately other teachers did not seem to have time to give her work to do before she went into hospital. She was provided with some home tuition by the local authority, but it was not co-ordinated with the school and the local authority had virtually no level of understanding of her assessment in school. Then, when she was in hospital for an extended stay, the hospital school—again—had no links back to her school to get any idea about where she was. Given that this young lady was in year 8 at the time, it was very important, as she was coming up to choosing her options for GCSE, that the work was appropriate for how much she could manage but also at an appropriate level for when she could manage it.

The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Countess, Lady Mar, on blended learning and virtual education go some way to addressing the holes that these children often fall through. Alternative provision, simply by its nature, has to be bespoke for these children, and often they work in very small groups. There has to be better communication between the alternative providers, these children’s schools and local authorities. Small teaching groups require proper funding for children that recognises their special problems and incentivises their schools to release the funding as appropriate, linked with the school communicating with the alternative provider and, hopefully, levels being reported back to the school when the child re-enters. That is why I particularly support the idea of online distance learning combined with face-to-face support, which can provide outstanding methods of blended learning engagement for young people, but particularly those who are out of school.

I saw this a few years ago with some apprentice chefs in very rural areas of the fens in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. They were having their lessons with the college online in the hotels that they were working with, and it was the combination of their apprentice tutors within the firms, the chef tutors in their college, online learning and some face-to-face support that really made all the difference, because those young people could not travel to the necessary location.

If further education and higher education are moving much more to this type of blended education using this range of techniques, surely it is time that our school system found a mechanism to ring-fence this type of learning for children who have needs that are best met through blended learning. It might then become a pathfinder for the future for mainstream schools.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

I, too, support the two amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Countess, Lady Mar, and I do so for one reason in particular. There is a real danger in the whole Bill that, by necessity—and I have no problem with this; it is what the Bill is about—we will be talking about structures, obligations and demands on people, and about trying to get the system right. We have always failed to do that in the past through successive pieces of legislation. The system does not quite work. There is a danger of forgetting that what will ultimately make a difference is the teaching once the system does work.

In terms of mainstream schools, I have always been a big advocate of talking more about pedagogy than about structures, because that is what will make the difference. We never quite get to that with special needs children because we always revisit the structures, the obligations and the legal framework. What I like about both the amendments is that they are about what happens when the structure works in terms of the quality of teaching and the learning experiences of the children who would access their education through these provisions.

I do not like the phrase “blended learning”. I am not familiar with it and it took me a long time to work out what it was. I had a few ideas, none of which was anywhere near the truth. Therefore, perhaps the wording is not quite right but the kernel and the elements of it are right—it is about what happens in the classroom once the system is working. It would be a shame to let this bit of the legislation go by without having a good debate on that to ensure that we give really clear signals that what we care about for children with special needs is not just that the structure works for them but that the quality of the teaching is appropriate and meets their needs.

On blended learning and online learning, we have not yet gained what we could regarding advances in technology and education. We have done so in higher education and further education but in schools we are lagging behind. For a long time, I have thought that the group that can most benefit from this are children with special educational needs, because of the technology and because of the need that there sometimes is to learn in more than one place.

These are two really good amendments. They put us into a different place when we come to talk about the education of special educational needs children. I hope that the Minister will reflect on them and perhaps discuss how the Government might take them forward.

Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Morris of Yardley

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I am not sure that I shall be able to add too much that is new to the debate, but this is an important issue and I am hoping that weight of numbers will affect the way that the Government respond to it. There will be a bit of repetition on my part but perhaps also one or two new points.

I genuinely think that this is one of the most important debates that we have had so far on the Bill. I have a feeling that, if this measure goes ahead, the tide will be turned back and it will be very difficult to reclaim the progress that has been made. The subject was excellently introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and no one is more experienced than him in understanding co-operation. In some ways, the education service has been on a long journey in getting to this point, having put into law a duty of co-operation. I wonder how far the Minister and his department have reflected on that journey. If he had done so, I do not think that he would have come to the conclusion that he has. First, there is a litany of children’s cases where, if only we had known the background, we could have made a difference.

Going back in time, it was clear that the education system did not need to co-operate with everything else. Children were born into and brought up in communities where there was natural communication. There were no social workers, health workers or even classroom assistants and so on; the people in the community looked after the needs of the children. Back then, children very often flourished because their lives were not separated into the needs of many professionals. However, we do not live like that any more. The education and school service is a specialised service in many ways, and long may that be the case because it performs at a far higher level. To be honest, I think that we have spent the past 30 years trying to remake connections that used to be there naturally, and that has been a real problem for schools. They are being asked to focus on education. I look back to the early days of the previous Government, when schools were under a lot of pressure not to act as social workers or counsellors and not to make excuses but to focus on education, and that was right as well.

Over the past 15 years, we have been on a long journey in which schools have focused on educational standards for everybody. I think that teachers have always known it but government came to realise that you cannot deliver on standards unless you look at the development of the rest of the child. When I started teaching in the 1970s, those of us in the education system were too much like social workers and standards came off the agenda. Then, at the end of the 1990s, we focused only on standards, and children fell through the cracks because their wider well-being was not catered for. This proposed new clause has again found the right connection.

I am not saying that it worked brilliantly in the past but it is a very clear statement in law that our society understands that, for children to achieve and flourish, adults have to talk to each other, because children’s lives are not compartmentalised. It is as simple as that. Sometimes we cannot structure services for children in a way that reflects the people whom they are. It might sound bureaucratic, but I genuinely think that this amendment is an honest chance and an honest wish to reconnect bureaucracies—in the best sense of the word—to meet the lives of children.

Would the Minister ever tolerate or approve of schools not co-operating with local authorities or other organisations? Can it ever be right that a school says, “I am exercising my right not to co-operate with someone else who affects the life of a child whom I teach”? I cannot see that it is. It is obvious that everyone will do things without being told to, but we are not there yet. A Minister in 50 years’ time might be able to say that such co-operation happened naturally and was so much embedded in the way schools worked that we no longer needed to have this in the Bill, but honestly we are not there yet.

The sad thing is that some schools that have the most difficult of times, because they have really challenging children with so many barriers to learning, given half the chance will not comply because they have other things to do. It will not be because they are lazy or do not care or think that is it is unimportant but because, in the words of the Government, it is a burden lifted from their backs. In a way, it is those people who have the most need to co-operate.

There are simple reasons why this is the right thing to do. It is good practice. Secondly, it is not yet embedded good practice. Thirdly, I sense in much that has been said over the past year that teachers need to focus on education and standards. Even if that is the reason, they need to talk to other people and help remove the barriers to children's learning. I very much hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to explain the thinking but then to take time to see whether this problem that he is creating can be avoided.

[Baroness Brinton]

I also support the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Laming. I confess that in the mid to late 1990s, I was chair of education in an authority where we had such an incident before the Act came in and there was a duty to co-operate. I remember at the time the deep shock as a fairly new councillor and certainly as a new Cabinet member at understanding that we had completely failed. The system had failed. I welcomed the Act when it came in.

I also echo the points that the noble Lord and others made—the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, in particular—about a number of cases that have been reviewed since. I would say to my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury that I do not think you need to take a school to court. All you need to do is look at the serious case reviews where recommendations have been made to schools that have failed to ensure that follow-up happens.

I am sure that the many schools that want to co-operate will continue to do so. The problem is with the small number that do not believe it is in their interests. I am sorry to go back in time, but I remember some grant-maintained schools in the 1990s feeling that it was an absolute liberation to be free of the local authority and doing everything that they could not to co-operate with it. I fear that we might end up with that sort of encouragement again among academies and free schools were we to lose the duty to co-operate now. It is vital that we retain it.

I have one further point that is not about safeguarding in the sense that much of this debate has focused on. In many other areas local authorities, not just upper-tier authorities with responsibility for education and social services but district and borough councils, should have a duty to co-operate for services that children receive across the board. That has to include library resources, playgrounds and provision of school places at a strategic level. Where more schools can do their own thing and there is no longer a need for an admissions forum, a duty to co-operate at the highest strategic level to ensure that there is the right provision for children in an area is absolutely vital.