Respect Orders and Anti-social Behaviour
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(3 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Having finished with off-road biking, I was moving on to the point about drones. The noble Lord makes an extremely valid point, and we will examine that issue and the use of drones as part of the legislation. It is not in the Statement today, but the point about the illegal use of drones and their use for criminality is certainly valid. I will take that away as part of the discussions prior to the introduction of legislation in this House.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
I welcome and support the Statement from the Government and the initiative they have taken. But, more particularly, I look forward to the legislation that is coming. In my area of Battersea, the Co-op does not display meat or fish because it is stolen regularly. A niece of mine works in a bank in the north of England where staff now have to wear body cameras because of the assaults or near- assaults they suffer. When I go to the vets, I see a statement that says, “Please respect our staff”. Everywhere we look, we see the loss of respect, so any steps that can be taken will be welcome.
However, we are all guilty of failing to see the pace at which change is taking place and of failing to respond with the techniques available to us. We need more police but, in particular, we need to make greater use of technology. We get very upset about facial recognition technology and other such things, on the civil rights front. We are all guilty of running away from the need for identification, using technology for that purpose.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for those points. These issues are consistently under examination by the Home Office. Going back to the potential legislation and the remit of the Statement, the two big issues in the Statement show that there is a real focus on shop theft, from a very low level through to a very high level. That should be put into policing plans on shop theft as a matter of urgency, with changes to the law made accordingly to reflect that.
On protection for shop workers, they are doing a job and should not be attacked in the course of their work for upholding legislation on sales or for resisting theft. I note the abuse they sometimes get, particularly from people who are undertaking anti-social behaviour in a more formal way. I declare an interest as a member of the shop workers union. That is the thrust of the two bits of legislation that are linked in the Statement, and I hope that will be welcomed by this House in due course.
Asylum Seekers: Hotel Accommodation
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I refer the noble Baroness to the answer I gave earlier to the noble Lord, Lord German. Those are issues I will take as a representation, but the prime focus of the Government currently is to increase the use of asylum cases being approved and we have done that—up from 1,000 a month to 10,000 in the last month. That has been a big focus. I repeat myself, but it is important, the focus is on the issue of small boats, the Border Security Command and the issue of trying in the long term to reduce the number of hotels and to scrap the Rwanda scheme. Those are initial proposals the Government have brought forward. We will look at other options in due course.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, are we not seen as a soft touch by those who want to get into this country and as having little control over the number of people coming in? According to reports, there may be close on a million people who are not registered as British citizens. Should we not be exploring again the use of a modern identity system? The abolition of the ID cards by the coalition Government was a serious error. Is it not the case that we will have to return to it, and the sooner we look at that, the better?
EU Borders: Hand and Face Scanning
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, considerable investment is going into the queues at Dover. Noble Lords may be aware that the Department for Transport has provisionally awarded £45 million of levelling-up fund money to Kent County Council for the Dover border improvement project, which aims to substantially reduce outbound queues at the port. Ferry operators have previously been very pragmatic about allowing vehicles on to ferries if crossings are missed due to disruption, but we recognise the impact of disruption. The Kent Resilience Forum has a package of well-tested traffic management plans to manage disruption to keep passengers and freight traffic flowing.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister will recall that I have raised with him the major mistake we made in abandoning the opportunity of having an identity facility. In fact, he said that I had a good point. Can he tell me whether he has taken it back to his department and whether they will act on it now and reverse the stupid decision taken by the coalition Government?
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I think I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord West, only last week, that that is a good point. I have taken it back to the department and have no answer for him.
Former Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration: Reports
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(9 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
To start with, the noble Lord is incorrect in saying that unaccompanied children will be sent to Rwanda; as he is well aware, that is prohibited under Article 3 of the treaty. On the review, the ICIBI started on the country-of-origin information but that has not yet been sent to the Home Secretary. That is one of the ongoing pieces of ICIBI work that cannot be finalised until a new or interim ICIBI has been appointed, and I cannot comment on that process yet.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
Do we not have thousands of people in this country who should not be here, but of whose whereabouts we have no knowledge? Had the Government and the Lib Dems not abolished the Labour Party’s plan to introduce an identity system, we would know where they were.
UK: Violence Against Women and Girls
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Drake for tabling this debate; I wish her well and hope that she is soon back with us. I thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for introducing it. So much has been said that I will not be able to add much, other than on alcohol and domestic violence, as noble Lords might expect.
All the statistics indicate that violence against women has been increasing since about 2008 or 2009, particularly domestic violence. In many areas, that is linked in part to alcohol, which has not been raised so far. It is high time that we had a look at the rules that my Government, the Labour Government, introduced in the 2003 Act, which greatly liberalised freedom to purchase and access to alcohol. A re-examination of what has been happening with pricing and freedom to access alcohol is long overdue, as well as of the consequential difficulties that have arisen from cheap booze being freely available and so easily accessible. In turn, it has the effect of many men attacking women, which has continued to increase in recent years. Covid made matters even worse in that respect, so I hope the Minister might be prepared to comment on how the Government feel about the impact of alcohol and drugs on women.
Secondly, on pornography, unfortunately, I did not participate in the Online Safety Bill debates, but I have been watching carefully and I am pleased with how things are going. However, we still have not gone anything like far enough. Interestingly, the British Board of Film Classification tells us that it would never permit the stuff it sees to be shown in films. It is freely and widely available, and increasingly so across the whole of the online system. We need a broader societal debate about pornography and its impact across the board, particularly on younger children, and we need it soon if we are to believe the Met Police, which is very concerned about how the metaverse will develop. When that technology becomes more freely and cheaply available, we will see extraordinary things that will have an impact on the whole of society, particularly children. The metaverse has not been disused today, and I wonder whether the Minister can explain to us the Government’s views on it and how it may impact violence between men and women. Indeed, there is increasing violence between men and men, which is an issue that has not been raised today.
I hope the Minister will be able to give a general response to those three points.
Police Uplift Programme
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
The picture that the noble Lord paints is obviously concerning. I will say that this is not a marginal uplift but a substantial uplift. As regards specific circumstances in Northern Ireland, I am afraid I cannot answer his question on the numbers, but I will investigate and come back to him.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I think there is general agreement that trust has declined since 2010. We need to restore that as best we can. Knowing the Minister, I was rather surprised by his throwaway line in response to some of the questions about trust. When he said that there will be “a few bad apples”, I found that rather complacent. The police inspectorate has said that, of the people being recruited into the police force, some hundreds have come in within the past three years who should not be there. We know the plan that has been set in place to try to avoid a repetition of this in the future, but what is happening to try to root out the 300 or so that are around?
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I am sorry if I sounded complacent to the noble Lord. It was really just a reflection on the statistics of this, as with any normal distribution—the noble Lord will know how normal distributions of population cohorts and so on work out. That is all that that comment was meant to reflect. As regards the numbers of police that have been recruited, I have commented extensively on the vetting processes. The dismissals review, which I referred to earlier, is concluding this month. I hope that we will have a lot more to say very soon on how that process will be strengthened.
Women’s Safety
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Janke (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that confidence on the part of women that sexual and violent crimes against them will be properly investigated is at an all-time low? If so, what will be done to make sure that the police focus on the crime and the offender rather than on shredding and undermining the reputation of the victim?
Net Migration
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I note what my noble friend says, but the level of provision of medical training is a matter for the Department of Health and the Department for Education.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, is it not true that one of the great attractions of this country is that people can come in and get employment without any real problem whatsoever, and that the major error that we have had is the abandonment of the policy we had in 2010 to have a form of identity for every individual in the country? This has now been exposed as a major failing of the then Tory and Lib Dem Government, and something needs to be done to address it.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
The Government do not agree that the answer is identity cards.
Police: Vetting, Misconduct and Misogyny
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I reassure my noble friend that I did say I would reflect on the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Dear, and I intend to do so.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
The Minister is very well regarded in the House. He is on a difficult one today, but would he express a personal view on what he believes should be done in regard to the question from my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti?
Violent Crime, Gang Activity and Burglaries
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I express my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Snape for introducing this very important debate. I also welcome the Minister to his new role. I think it is going to be rather a bed of nails for him. My noble friend and I last worked together on the Select Committee on Crossrail, which after long delays is finally with us. The Minister who is now the new Home Secretary supervised a long delay. Let us hope he will not take so long in dealing with many of the issues confronting us today.
We have had a very important debate, covering a wide front—perhaps there is something there for us to reflect on when we come to address some of these fundamental issues. One thing that came through very clearly is the requirement for more money to be spent in this area. It behoves us to see how we can raise the money. Invariably, it will mean that taxes have to be found in one way or another, but I also share the view of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that there ought to be more fundamental work done in shifting from dealing with the problems that arise in crime to looking at the fundamentals that cause crime in the first instance. That takes us back to really basic issues about the family and so on. Yes, poverty is a very big factor in dealing with this, but the other factor is the poverty of spirit that we now have in the country. We really ought to go back to some basics. Even though we were in poverty, people in my youth did not necessarily commit crime. Therefore, it is not solely an issue that stands on its own ground.
I am grateful to the Lords Library for providing us with an excellent, comprehensive briefing. I am also grateful to the Alcohol Health Alliance for the briefing it provided me on crime and alcohol. It will probably not surprise noble Lords that I will say a few words about the link between crime and alcohol. If I had more time, I could spend as much time on drugs as well, because these are two really major factors that cannot be ignored in the context of trying to find solutions.
Some 53% of police time on casework is spent on alcohol-related issues, in the widest possible sense. That is a very big amount of time. Serious violence is often linked in some way to alcohol. In more than a third of homicides, either the victim or the suspect has consumed alcohol prior to the incident. Alcohol-related violence accounts for two-fifths of all violence in England and Wales, and one in 10 people experiences alcohol-related anti-social behaviour every year. Evidence has demonstrated that the most deprived groups in our society bear this burden to the greatest extent.
Alcohol use can also increase the occurrence and severity of domestic violence, with approximately 1 in 3 victims reporting that the perpetrator was under the influence when they were attacked. Again, those in the lowest socioeconomic groups experience up to 14 times as many incidents of alcohol-related domestic violence, compared to the least deprived.
As my noble friend Lord Snape reported, alcohol is often used to exploit children in the context of county lines. He talked about the county lines problem, and you often do find that there is an alcohol factor. Alcohol-use disorders are significantly more numerous within the prison population. Despite this, the number of those in alcohol and drug treatment in prison has steadily dropped in recent years, again because of a shortage of cash. Volunteer organisations are finding that because of shortages of prison staff, it is very difficult indeed to help people with alcohol and drug problems because they cannot gain entry as they used to and so, in turn, the voluntary services they can offer are not being made available on quite the previous scale. That is no fault of the prison officers. There are just not enough of them to provide the facilities required to admit people from outside.
In England, alcohol-related crime is estimated to cost £11.4 billion per year. Cuts and freezes to alcohol duty since 2012 are estimated to have led to more than 111,000 additional crimes in England. There has also been a large loss of revenue because of the Government’s decision to freeze or cut those duties, although in fairness to the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, one good thing he has done is to reverse the previous Chancellor’s decision to freeze duty on alcohol in the mini-Budget, which is a very welcome change.
With the right package, we can reduce alcohol-related harm by limiting the affordability and availability of alcohol. Two measures were recommended by the World Health Organization as two of the most effective and cost-effective interventions to reduce alcohol consumption and tackle alcohol-fuelled crime. The first is reducing affordability, which is directly linked to consumption levels. As with petrol, if you increase the price, less of it is used. Increase the price of alcohol and there is less consumption. There is much evidence to indicate that this works. We have minimum unit pricing in Scotland, and the Welsh Government have adopted it too. It is high time that the Government turned their attention to this.
In the absence of MUP, Ipswich pioneered “reducing the strength” schemes, reducing the strength of alcohol in the area. There was a very substantial gain in reducing the incidence of street drinking—a 23% reduction by persuading people to move from high-alcohol to lower-alcohol drinks. Anti-social behaviour went down, crime fell in stores and crime overall fell in the Ipswich area.
The second initiative is to reduce availability of alcohol. Why are we able to purchase alcohol all through the night at petrol stations? That invariably will cause trouble. It is not of benefit to society, so we hope again to look at that wide availability.
If I had the time I could speak at length on drugs. There is a fundamental link between alcohol and drugs and violent crime, burglaries and gang activity. Importantly, we now have the Government’s 10-year drug strategy, which I welcome. It is time that they set up an inquiry to see whether we should have a similar strategy for alcohol, particularly in relation to crime and violence.