Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Lord Garnier

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, on tabling these important amendments, on working so hard on this clause over many years and on speaking so persuasively about it tonight. I have added my name to Amendment 413, as has his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, who unfortunately cannot be here today.

A sector that makes particular use of abnormal load road movements is that of our heritage railways. I remind the Committee of my interest as president of the Heritage Railway Association. The movement of most heritage rolling stock between railways, whether historic steam or diesel locomotives or vintage carriages, is undertaken by road on low-loaders. Most commonly, this takes place in connection with gala events featuring visiting locomotives, but it also occurs when items of rolling stock are transported for specialist maintenance or overhaul.

Such road movements, classified as abnormal loads, are undertaken by specialist haulage contractors, sometimes accompanied by an escort vehicle. A number of police forces, though not all, as the noble Earl explained, but particularly the Staffordshire, West Midlands and West Yorkshire forces, now make charges for escorting abnormal loads within their constabulary area. These are typically between £2,500 and £5,000 per trip, but they can be higher and exceed the haulier’s charges, with some charges in excess of £7,000. Charges are also levied in Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and parts of Scotland. This is seriously disrupting the business activities of heritage railways and adding significantly to their costs in an already challenging economic and business climate.

The reasons for the escort charges do not appear to have ever been explained and there is widespread inconsistency, with some forces making charges and others not. Most determine whether a police escort is required based on weight—say, a gross weight of 80 to 100-plus tonnes—though some determine it on length: for example, 28 metres from the front to the rear of a lorry. Crucially, no national policy or framework regulates how or when police forces may charge for escorting or authorising these essential movements. This inconsistency results in these arbitrary and often excessive fees in certain police force areas. In some cases, an escort is required only for a few miles to a county boundary, with the rest of the journey then being unescorted. To avoid charges, some hauliers are now having to take massive detours around a police force area, which of course adds mileage and cost, and increases the negative environmental impact.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has issued guidance that, while intended to provide consistency and clarification, still leaves decisions on the provision of escorts and charging to individual forces, as police forces are autonomous bodies. Several heritage railways and their haulage contractors have written to those police forces that make charges, but no changes to their charging regimes have been forthcoming. I could quote many examples but, given the lateness of the hour, I do not intend to mention more than one.

This is evidence from Noel Hartley, the operations manager of the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. He says:

“The KWVR is suffering significantly from movements out of Ingrow—


that is the intermediate station on the line—

“in West Yorkshire and is deciding not to run certain events or we are no longer able to make enthusiast events a gold standard because we simply can’t justify the charges … For a return movement of a visiting loco it’s nearly costing five and a half thousand pounds on top of the movement costs. For an event with gross revenue of £80 or £90,000 it just isn’t feasible to stand these sort of costs which can wipe out a significant amount of the profit … In addition to the facts of police charges, the hauliers are trying to mitigate the costs of charges by avoiding the routes where they are charging—

which I referred to a moment ago. He continues:

“This means that some lorries can be diverted up to 100 miles to avoid these areas. This means that the police charges are avoided but there is still an impact on costs due to additional fuel required”.

West Midlands Police, about which we have heard a lot from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee—and a force which is much in the news this week for other reasons—is the main culprit, which hauliers avoid, because it charges for escorts on so-called straight-line routes.

Mr Hartley points out that the areas particularly affected are railways in West Yorkshire and the Midlands —that includes Kidderminster, Burton, Ecclesbourne and Chesterfield—but south Wales and east Lancashire are also affected by having to make huge detours to avoid travelling within the territory of the least helpful and most expensive police forces.

The lengths to which hauliers are having to go to in order to avoid charges mean that there is an impact on the amount of emissions produced from road transport. This could be avoided; it amounts to thousands of additional and unnecessary miles per year.

At a time when the heritage railway sector is struggling with increases in costs, not only from general utility increases and staff costs—plus the tripling of the cost of coal—these police escort charges are compounding the problem and sometimes making it impossible for railways to provide that unique visitor experience for which our country is admired all over the world.

Overall, these excessive and inconsistent charges create uncertainty, delays and significant financial pressure for heritage railways, which, as I have said many times in your Lordships’ House, are a key part of the UK’s visitor economy and in many cases are the primary, anchor tourist attractions within their areas, generating significant economic and employment benefits for their regions. I congratulate the noble Earl, and I support his amendment.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I want to speak briefly to the amendment that my noble friend Lord Attlee spent about 15 seconds talking about; that is, his Amendment 414. At the outset of his remarks, I was worried that he might be positively going to support his own amendment, but he very quickly said that he hoped that the Minister would not accept it, and so do I.

If one looks at the draft of Amendment 414, one sees that it is designed to allow chief officers of police to set and vary any fee payable for shotguns and firearms. It is not quite clear from the draft of the proposed new clause whether this would, if enacted, cover just England and Wales, or whether it would cover England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. If the latter, that would be 45 separate chief officers of police who may well decide to set separate fees for each of the 45 police territorial areas; if it is only England and Wales, there would be 43, and that is bad enough.

I declare an interest as a holder of a shotgun certificate. While I admire, in every possible way, the chief constable of my own police area, I do not wish him to have the ability to set the level of the firearm certificate fee. It is a tax, and if it is not a tax, it is a fee that should be set by one person who is accountable to Parliament; namely, the Secretary of State. I think I need to say no more, not least because my noble friend Lord Attlee encouraged me greatly by saying precisely very little about the amendment himself.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, the only purpose of Amendment 414 is to stop the Minister saying it is an operational matter for the police. If police charges for abnormal load escorts are operational matters for the police, surely firearms licensing charges are. We have been screwing down the cost of a firearms certificate, which means that police forces are not able to do as good a job as they would like. The cost of a firearms certificate is less than the cost of the visit to the dentist.

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Lord Garnier

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Faulks. While I entirely understand the motivation behind the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, I am not entirely sure that it is necessary. As the noble Lord said, there is no limitation for the bringing of this particular Section 9 offence.

I do not wish to get into my anecdotage, but I remember that, as a law officer, one very often had to deal with historic offences whereby a mature person, in their 50s, 60s or 70s, was being indicted or prosecuted for an offence they committed many years ago against a minor. Had the problem existed that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, envisages through her amendment, that would have been a matter we would have had to consider. As the Minister will no doubt tell us from her experience as someone who worked at a senior level in the Crown Prosecution Service, you have to consider whether there is an adequacy of evidence and whether it is in the public interest to bring that person to trial. The age of the offence might be considered by the prosecutor, but there is no time bar, as I understand it. While I may well be corrected for being out of date and ignorant, I certainly do not think that there is a need for this amendment, although it is well motivated.

I have a suspicion that I have got this entirely wrong and that the Minister is going to tell me that it would have been better if I had kept to my place, but there we are. There are plenty of things that we could do with the Bill—make it shorter, for example—but I am not sure that this amendment is one that we need to add to it.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in strong support of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I do not know whether it is necessary. I declare an interest as a victim. My concern about the historic sex offences is the prison population. We have large numbers of historic sex offenders in prison. It creates great problems for the Prison Service. However, a custodial sentence is the only sensible disposal. We need to work out what to do with historic sex offenders within the prison system.

Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Lord Garnier

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 29th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, Amendment 20 in the group is in my name. The Committee has looked already at why journalism is vital so there is no need to repeat those arguments in detail. I accept that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, may be a better solution than mine, which would create an explicit exemption for journalists travelling to or remaining in a designated area.

Since the new offence does not require a person to have any harmful intent, it risks capturing those who mean no harm at all and are acting in the public interest, even if the Government of the day do not think so. Journalists travelling to an area to cover events and inform the public are one obvious such group. Following our debate on the first amendment, I accept that I will have to go away and consider carefully what I mean by journalism and journalistic purposes, but the same problem arises with the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson.

Ministers have stated that journalists are not the target of the offence and would qualify for the broad defence of reasonable excuse. I listened very carefully to what my noble friend Lord Howe said about that. However, the same problem that I described when speaking to my Amendment 6 arises, namely that journalists may be unjustly interfered with or arrested. It needs to be clear in the Bill that journalism is exempt. Amendments 21 and 22 would provide for prior authorisation from the Secretary of State. Although that may have its merits for certain sectors, it would be highly undesirable for press freedom as it would allow the Government to whitelist or blacklist journalists and could operate as a de facto licensing system which the press has, rightly, always resisted.

Although there are good reasons for an open-ended reasonable excuse defence, as my noble friend has outlined already, the amendment does not circumscribe it. Given the scope of the offence, the Bill should anticipate the most obvious scenarios where people will have good cause to travel to or remain in a designated country and provide certainty to those people. That is exactly what would be done by the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson.

The combination of the lack of an intent requirement and the vagueness of the reasonable excuse defence means that whether an offence is committed becomes a matter of prosecutorial discretion entirely. That is undesirable for legal certainty and the rule of law. In practical terms it would delay, even deter, correspondents from travelling to an area where events are unfolding. Civilians suffering humanitarian catastrophes will not be able to tell their stories to the wider world and the British public will not be able to hear them and do whatever they can to help.

Ministers and other noble Lords may push back against my arguments by pointing out how hard it is to define “journalist” or arguing that terrorists might try to pass themselves off as journalists. I argue that where there is doubt over an individual claiming to be a journalist, the police, prosecutors and the courts can test their bona fides. Some people will wrongly claim the defence; that does not mean that it should not exist. The same argument applies to Amendment 17, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson.

Amendment 17 may well meet my concerns but I am slightly worried about its proposed new subsection (2)(d), which would provide an exemption for a “registered charity”. It might be worth considering restricting the exemption to either a UK registered charity or one that is accredited by the United Nations in some way, because I have been aware of some charities in an operational area being rather less than pure.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I briefly return to our discussion to Amendment 17, moved so well by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich. He made no claims of infallibility. When we are discussing this sort of subject, he probably comes the closest in this Chamber to infallibility, at least for the moment. I understand his reasons for moving the amendment; I can see that the reasonable excuse provision in the Bill he seeks to amend is somewhat vague. None the less, I want to ask one or two questions relating to the amendment.

I can accept that the genesis of at least some of the new provision comes from other countries’ and jurisdictions’ legislation; the noble Lord mentioned Australia in particular. A few things about the amendment trouble me slightly. I can see that proposed new paragraphs (a) to (e) provide a reason for making a visit to the designated area, but I am a little troubled by the fact that proposed new paragraph (f) states simply that,

“visiting a dependent family member”,

may provide a reasonable excuse. The reason for the visit to the dependent family member needs to be explored fully. The amendment could lead us into difficulty. The purpose of the visit may be to see a bed-ridden grandparent, but it may be to see a rather ill-motivated teenager with terrorist sympathies. As long as that is not made clear, the problem I see in proposed new paragraph (f) remains.

To some extent, although not as greatly, I am troubled by proposed new paragraph (c), which gives the reason of,

“satisfying an obligation to appear before a court or other body exercising judicial power”.

I can see that in an organised state with an organised court system, complying with an obligation to appear in court to give evidence, or whatever it may be, provides one with a reasonable excuse. However, going to a designated area suggests that there may not be such an organised system there. Although one may be under some obligation to appear before it, I hesitate to suggest that in all circumstances one is likely to find in a designated area a recognisable court or other body exercising judicial power in a way that we would find acceptable in this country and this jurisdiction.

Perhaps these are quibbles. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, expressly stated that he did not claim his amendment to be perfect. I understand where the amendment comes from and where it intends to go. I simply ask my noble friend on the Front Bench not to dismiss the amendment out of hand but perhaps to go away and rewrite it in such a way that it would be acceptable as a government amendment that would pass muster in both this House and the other place.