Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall and Lord Garnier

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Lords Hansard - part one & Report stage
Monday 13th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will be participating remotely in this debate.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by explaining that I will not be pressing my amendment to a Division. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for prompting me—although she may not have realised this at the time—during the course of Committee, when we were debating other amendments in Part 4 dealing with unauthorised encampments. On that occasion, I explained that I thought there was an unfairness in the Bill in relation to the victims or respondents to criminal trespass—the tenant or landowning victims of trespass on the land; I know there are plenty of arguments about whether there should or should not be criminal trespass. I mentioned a particular example when I was a Member of Parliament some 25 years ago, in 1996 or 1997, when not only did a large group of travellers trespass on a constituent farmer’s land, but their dogs were troubling this farmer’s sheep. Some of them were killed by the dogs in question.

The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker—perfectly fairly, I think—made the point in that debate, in which I was seeking to place the burden of proof that an activity on a landowner’s or tenant’s land was being conducted unlawfully, on the trespasser who wished to assert that the occupier of the land was conducting an unlawful activity, which could have been any sort of activity. Essentially, I was seeking to persuade noble Lords that it was far more just for the invader of the land to demonstrate that what they were seeking to stop—for example, the growing of genetically modified crops—was unlawful, and that it should not be for the owner or occupier of the land who was carrying out a lawful farming activity to show that he was not conducting an unlawful activity.

That aspect of the debate in Committee is not particularly relevant to what we are doing now, save that it prompted the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, to draw my attention to her argument that, because local authorities have historically failed to provide any, or any adequate, official sites for travellers to park their vehicles and reside on, this problem of invading other people’s land will continue.