Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Baroness Doocey

Committee stage
Monday 10th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, of course I support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, opposing the increases in these fines, but I think we need to go further and for a variety of reasons abolish these on-the-spot penalties per se, which is why I have tabled this clause stand part notice.

You cannot overestimate how much public space protection orders and community protection notices trivialise what we understand to be dealing with anti-social behaviour. We have just had a long discussion about what anti-social behaviour is. These orders are part of the toolkit to deal with anti-social behaviour and they end up targeting individuals for the most anodyne and mundane activities, and banning everyday freedoms.

The use of fines has, in a way, led us to not take seriously what real anti-social behaviour is, because these fines are given out for such arbitrary, eccentric reasons. PSPOs and CPNs can be issued on a very low threshold, are entirely subject to misuse—there is lots of evidence showing that—and often criminalise, as I said, everyday activities. For example, PSPOs are often used to ban young people gathering in groups—which seems to me to be a dangerous attack on our right to assembly—despite the fact that the statutory guidance states that PSPOs should target only activities that cause a nuisance and should not criminalise

“everyday sociability, such as standing in groups”.

That is what it says, yet they are constantly used in that way and seem to be unaccountably doled out.

There are now over 2,000 PSPOs in England and Wales, and each of them contains up to 35 separate restrictions. That means that tens of thousands of new controls are being issued on public spaces all the time. As we heard earlier, they are imposed in different geographic areas, making prohibitions on different types of activities for different citizens from one place to another. You can be in one town where an activity is legal and then go to the next town and the same activity is illegal. We discussed some of that earlier.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, pointed out and as Justice has drawn our attention to, the inconsistent use of PSPOs creates a “postcode lottery” for victims but also for perpetrators. Justice says that this

“undermines the rule of law by making enforcement dependent on the victim’s location rather than the circumstances”.

I hope we can send the Minister the research done by Justice and by the Manifesto Club that has already been referred to so that he can see from the freedom of information requests to local authorities just what kind of activities are being issued with PSPOs and CPNs, and therefore what these fines are being used to tackle. I assure the Committee that it is innocuous activities, not anti-social behaviour. There are councils that are banning kite-flying, wild swimming, as we have heard, and using camping stoves.

I thought it was interesting that, recently, the Free Speech Union forced Thanet District Council to scrap its imposition of a sweeping public spaces protection order that would have banned the use of foul or abusive language in a public space in the Thanet area, so you would have been able to swear in one area but not in another. I understand that it might have raised a lot of money, but that is not necessarily the same as dealing with anti-social behaviour.

Actually, the councils themselves do not do the dirty work of enforcement. Instead, they outsource that to private companies, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has explained so well the dangers of using these private firms. We have a geographic breakdown of the national way of dealing with anti-social behaviour, and now we have an almost feudal way of collecting fines from it. These kinds of fines mean that orders might well be issued for all the wrong reasons—for income-generating, commercial purposes to meet targets that are about raising money rather than tackling anti-social behaviour—and increasing the fines will surely only incentivise that practice further.

I urge the Minister to consider that the noble cause that the Government are associated with here is dealing with anti-social behaviour, but using private companies to fine people in such a cavalier way discredits the whole cause. It is damaging the reputation of that noble cause. There is no transparency or oversight mechanism for these companies. There is one ban that I would like to bring in, and that is fining for profit. I hope the Minister will consider at least reviewing this and looking at it closely.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I do not intend to rehearse the arguments already put so effectively by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. Suffice to say that we on these Benches fully support Amendment 23, as £500 is an extortionate amount of money for the type of behaviour that fines are designed to address and will simply result in private companies making even greater profits than they do at the moment while pushing those already struggling further into debt. For these reasons, we have serious reservations about the implications of the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra.

The orders create a postcode lottery for victims. Charities warn that, in some parts of the country, orders are handed out like confetti. This undermines public trust by making enforcement dependent on the victim’s location.

Overall, the use of these powers needs to be subject to much stricter safeguards. The Government must ensure that there is proper oversight of their use and that the law is applied equally, openly and proportionately.