Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has referred to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, which I chair. It is currently undertaking an inquiry into the use of new technology—I stress new, by which I mean artificial intelligence—and the application of law. I do not wish to pre-empt whatever the committee may recommend. We will certainly look at issues of so-called hard or soft regulation. We will also look at procurement standards, transparency—by which I mean intelligibility both to those who use AI and to those who are the subject of it—and accountability. The list of issues seems to increase with every evidence session. At a recent session, a witness said

“certain things with AI will always be the same. We will always have a data issue, a bias issue and an explainability issue”.

I do not think it appropriate to go into any detail this evening, other than to say, “Watch this space”.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we support the principle of the amendment the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has tabled. Picking up a theme here, facial recognition technology is an example of where officials are concerned. For example, the guy who is responsible for the regulation of CCTV has very serious concerns that the technology is running ahead of the regulations and that this needs to be addressed. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, the use of artificial intelligence is another new and developing area where Parliament should at least consider whether these new technologies need to be subject to debate in Parliament and regulation.

However, I am not sure about the example of drones, which are sort of a replacement for police helicopters. I left the police in 2007; 14 years ago, with something not very imaginatively called “heli-tele”, police helicopters could pick out people’s faces from however many thousand feet they were up in the air and transmit those images to officers on the ground who had television monitors in front of them. It was extremely useful to see where crowds were moving in a fast-moving demonstration situation. Clearly, you can have a lot more drones than you can have helicopters, because they are a lot cheaper and so forth. The increased use of drones may be of concern, but the way in which they are being used is no different from what huge helicopters have been doing for years, whether members of the public were aware of it or not.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, talked about the Mayor of London and water cannon. Again, I think it was Theresa May as Home Secretary who refused to allow their deployment. Unfortunately, if the Mayor of London had actually listened to experts in public order policing, they would have told him that they are more or less useless for the sort of things he was hoping to use them for. I think he felt that water cannon would be useful following the widespread riots across the country. In fact, in that scenario they are completely useless. They are lumbering giants of things that cannot possibly keep up with marauding gangs going round and looting and so forth.

I think my noble friend Lady Hamwee has hit the nail on the head—it is new technology that needs to be considered and regulated, or at least debated in Parliament to see whether it needs to be regulated. To that extent, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, for that. There is ample criminal law and ample tort law for nuisance. There are ample laws to protect people from burglary, nuisance and so on. This measure, however, is targeted. The euphemism is so thin: “without permission, with vehicles”. I wonder who we are talking about there. The euphemism makes this racial discrimination even more obscene.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we strongly support all these amendments. As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville said, the crucial point here is that if legal sites were provided it is unlikely that these provisions would even be in the Bill. Having adequate sites is likely to be cheaper than the cost of taking legal action against those who have no option other than to trespass. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, said, the Bill’s provisions, whether by accident or design, will very clearly disproportionately impact an already vulnerable minority: the Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities. What would happen if the Government and local authorities made it a criminal offence for motorists to park their cars illegally and then did not provide enough spaces for motorists to park legally? There would be uproar.

My noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Bakewell told the Committee from their extensive experience about hostility towards Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. I have to say to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that when he reads back what he said in Hansard it will be open to interpretation that, for every crime he described where he could not say who the perpetrator was, he implied that all those crimes were committed by Travellers, without any evidence that they were responsible for those particular crimes. That is why there is so much hostility towards these communities because speeches such as that can be misinterpreted as, “The noble Earl is saying that those communities are responsible for all these crimes, even the ones where we do not know who committed them.”

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

The only difficulty, of course, is that it is the countryside police offer who tells the victims that it was the Travellers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Earl is far more responsible than a police officer because I can take him to police officers in London who will say that all crimes in London are committed by black people.

My noble friend Lady Brinton also reminded the Committee that there are existing laws to deal with these situations. That goes to the point that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, raised. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has said that existing laws are adequate. The police say that more laws are not needed for this sort of offence. If the police are saying that, why are the Government bringing forward this legislation?

Rather than go through all these amendments, all I will say is that I agree with what my noble friends and other noble Lords have said. Part 4 should be removed from the Bill in its entirety because existing legislation is more than adequate.

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Whitaker on her powerful and persuasive speech introducing her amendments and opening this debate, as we expected it would be. As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said, my noble friend has been a determined campaigner on behalf of the Gypsy and Traveller communities.

As has been said, Part 4 relates to unauthorised encampments, which it criminalises, creating an offence if someone resides or intends to reside on land without consent in or with a vehicle. The Bill also gives landowners a role in criminalising a person who is trespassing, strengthens police powers to deal with unauthorised encampments, prohibits a person re-entering land without a reasonable excuse within 12 months and gives the police the right to seize property, including people’s caravans, which could be a family’s primary residence. The Bill also amends police powers associated with unauthorised encampments in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act to lower the threshold at which they can be used, allow the police to remove unauthorised encampments on or partly on highways and prohibit unauthorised encampments that are moved from a site returning within 12 months.