Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Rooker

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 31st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I say thank you, first, to the House for agreeing the amendment last Tuesday in such substantial numbers, because it sent a better message to the other place than the original vote, which was at 10 pm, and, secondly, to the Government.

The leaders of the FSA will say that these amendments are vital to its core mission and will make tangible benefits to the way that it can deal with food crime. I do not think that I ever claimed that my little amendment of 30 words would solve the problem; the proof of the pudding, of course, is that 1,300 words have come back from the Commons. I know the parliamentary draftsmen are good, but they did not do that last Wednesday. This shows the point: the Minister in the other place said, as the Minister has just said here, that there was no issue of principle between us. I notice, however, that Mr Malthouse spoke about the “unfortunate way” that we dealt with the matter in this place—well, I only know one way to deal with it, and that is within the rules, which is what we did.

It is worth saying that Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dem—who represents the second-best constituency in the UK, I might add—said

“It tells something about the attitude of the Home Office and this Government in general to Parliament and the other place that for something as prosaic as this it has taken two rounds of ping-pong before the Government have been prepared to accept what was surely to the rest of the world blindingly obvious.”—[Official Report, Commons, 28/3/22; col. 637.]


And it was something on which the Government agreed in principle anyway. The issue was parliamentary time. I know that there will be a consultation and that it will be several months, maybe even a year, before any of this comes into operation, but the fact is that parliamentary time is incredibly valuable. I know that, both as a troublesome Back-Bencher in opposition and as a Minister for 12 years: if you can get it, use it.

The Food Standards Agency issue in this Bill did not fit, but it fitted the Long Title. This is a classic example of where the use of that will save us enormous parliamentary time later on. It also makes the consultation that the FSA will do much more meaningful to the people who will be consulted, because Parliament has already done the primary legislation for it all. So I say thank you very much and I am very pleased with the outcome.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Motion B1. I thank the Minister for the way that she explained the Government’s view on this. Interestingly, we had a discussion in yesterday’s Cross-Bench weekly meeting about the diplomacy and constitutional sensitivity involved in ping-pong. There was a range of views; I will not say what they were but they were in fact quite moderate and very balanced, so we are conscious of the delicacy of pushing ping-pong too far. However, I think—I hope—that the Minister would accept that pushing this particular subject to the extent that we have has helped and provided some clarity, not only to those of us who have been pushing for it but to both Houses and, frankly, to the Minister and the ministerial team themselves, who I think were perhaps not fully aware of exactly what they had embarked upon when the commitment was made just over a year ago to make the police record this sort of data.

There were two objectives in going for yet another round of ping-pong. The first was to get reassurance that that commitment really was being followed through with vigour and a sense of direction and purpose. The second objective, which the Minister has just demonstrated, is for the Government to adopt a more open and frankly more honest explanation when they come across difficulties. We often promise to do things and then realise that they are slightly more complicated to carry out than we had imagined or realised at the beginning. But the best thing to do is to say so, because that builds trust, and one of the most important things in the dialogue about this is to do everything that we can to reinforce that trust and good will, particularly for women and girls at the moment who, all the evidence suggests, are not finding it easy to report crimes to anybody, let alone the police. It is incredibly important that we do everything possible to reinforce that trust and make them more willing to do so.

My contention is that the best way to do that is to be honest about what is going well and what is going less well, and what is working and what is not, rather than to pretend that this is all terribly important and one of our major priorities, while newspaper story after newspaper story and television documentary after television documentary tell us that it ain’t working in the way that the Government try to make us believe that it is.

So I welcome this new spirit of openness. I also welcome the fact that I landed the Minister and her Bill team with no fewer than 14 extremely detailed questions yesterday afternoon to consider. They come directly from the police forces that were earliest in starting to record this data, so they are informed by their experiences, good and bad, and their knowledge of some of the complications. I hope that she found those questions helpful because they get to the heart of some of the complexities that we are trying to deal with. The most important thing is that, when we get to the end of rolling this out, the data produced is reliable, accurate, and helpful to the police and to the Crown Prosecution Service, which is somewhat lagging behind in understanding how to use some of this data in informing prosecutions.

So I am grateful to the Minister and her team for responding positively. When the time comes, I will not test the opinion of the House, as I think we have achieved what we set out to do.

Domestic Abuse Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Rooker

Report stage
Monday 15th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to give maximum support to my noble friend Lady Royall, but in effect to all speakers, since I have not heard anything that I disagree with.

I have four short points to make. First, I was very struck that buried in the short but useful briefing from the London Assembly was a warning that carrying on on a more casual, non-statutory basis does not work. It points out that in London from January to November 2019, the current domestic abuse protection order was used in only 0.5% of domestic abuse offences recorded by the Metropolitan Police. So the warning is that we have these well-intentioned tools but they are not used by the police or magistrates. I was very struck by a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, in her powerful speech, and it is a warning to the Minister: saying “We’ll do it” but then not doing it makes the position far worse. It is a question of resources in finance and of course in will, and that is a crucial point that has to be made.

Secondly, I share the questions of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, having read the briefing from the Suzy Lamplugh Trust about domestic and non-domestic stalking. As the previous speaker, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said, Amendment 73 probably does not go far enough.

Thirdly, my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath made a point about the numbers affected each week, but we also have to remember not just what happened last week and what has happened since the Bill came into your Lordships’ House, but the fact that we know for certain that by the end of this week another two females will have been murdered.

Fourthly, regarding perpetrators, we have heard the range of examples that noble Lords and noble Baronesses have given. Now I know this might be classed as fanciful because it is not correct, but I ask the Minister to think of perpetrators as an organised perpetrators’ grouping. I know they are not and there would be very little evidence for it, but there is a pretty consistent pattern, not only over some cases but over many years, as if they were such a group. If they were treated as an organised perpetrators’ group by Parliament, the Home Office and law enforcement then by now we would be having strategic views, risk management and people’s names on registers in the same way as with existing registers. We would really be toughening it up. I would take that as a starting point for the debate today, not a finishing point.

As I said originally, I do not disagree with anything I have heard today and I give my full support to these two amendments, both verbally and if they are pushed to a vote.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

And so, my Lords, we come to tail-end Charlie. What is probably not obvious to those listening or watching today’s proceedings who are not around the Palace of Westminster is that they have been taking place with the sound of helicopters circling almost ceaselessly. I think that is because a group of people who feel strongly about what we are discussing, some of whom may even have been on Clapham Common on Saturday evening, have decided to come to Parliament Square today while we are having this discussion, and I suspect while another place is beginning to talk about the policing Bill, to voice their concern and—in a respectful way, I am sure—are trying to demonstrate how strongly they feel about this issue.

What an irony that we have a female Home Secretary and a female head of the Metropolitan Police, and that it was a female assistant commissioner who, under huge pressure, took a decision on Saturday evening that with the benefit of hindsight she may possibly regret. The evidence around the country of demonstrations taking place where the police decided to be judicious and hold back is that they seem to have gone off without event, while the two that I have heard of—one in London and one in Brighton—where the police decided to take a different decision have ended badly. I hope lessons have been learned from that.

UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Rooker

Thursday 10th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Rooker.

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

I am grateful to the Minister. To be honest, listening to him, I can hear that he is in an incredibly difficult situation with things moving outside the Chamber. I will confine myself to a single point. Northern Ireland will be treated differently—as it always has been—on the customs union and the single market, while it is out of the common agricultural policy, as the Statement says. My question is simple: what is the position of the rapid alert system for food and feed? Some eight to 10 notifications are issued per day around the European Union. How does Northern Ireland figure in RASFF? Is it out or will it be part of RASFF after 31 December, irrespective of whether there is a deal? Food production per head of population in Northern Ireland is far more significant than in England or, indeed, in Scotland, so it is an absolutely crucial issue for Northern Ireland industries. Will they be part of RASFF or not?

Town and Country Planning (Permitted Development and Miscellaneous Amendments) (England) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Rooker

Thursday 10th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, sitting in an office in London dreaming up flexibility to the planning laws to encourage more housing sounds a good use of time. I know; I have done it myself as Planning Minister. I just want to give a cautionary tale. It comes from my former constituency and concerns the Westminster Road area of west Handsworth in Birmingham.

Some 20 years ago, when I left the Commons, the private rented sector in Birmingham accounted for some 10% of households. By 2018, it was 33% and growing. An area that was saved in the 1970s and 1980s by the urban renewal programme of half a dozen streets in Handsworth, half a mile from the Commonwealth Games village has gone backwards to the 1960s, according to residents. The successor to the specially formed housing association in the 1970s, which did much to enhance and improve the housing, is pulling out. Midland Heart housing association has no heart in Handsworth. The door has been opened up for a new breed of landlords to buy up the larger properties, either for HMO use or the more lucrative supported housing.

Recently, a for sale notice by agents Bairstow Eves stated, “For sale: potential 17 bedrooms”—a clear signal for exploitation. Across the area, landlords are converting garages, outhouses and even sheds into what are cynically called bungalows. For example, signs appear on the front walls of houses stating “Bungalow 6A and 6B at rear”. At 61 Westminster Road, a house converted into an HMO some years ago, providing 11 units, the landlord recently converted four garages in the back yard into living accommodation, with a secure fence to hide what had happened. There is evidence that residents of these dwellings are told to dump their rubbish in black bags on the opposite side of the road.

No. 229 Church Hill Road was a large family house. Used as business premises, it is now applying to be an HMO by claiming it was a “hostel”. No. 22 Livingstone Road, a former family home, has been converted in three social rented flats. Midland Heart cleared the tenants out and sold it at auction in Liverpool for £260,000 on the basis that it would generate an income of £18,000 a year. The new owner maintains that it is still flats, but locals see it run as an HMO, and just two of the tenants are generating over £27,000 per annum.

The HMO Action Group in Handsworth describes it as a “community under siege”. This is a cautionary tale. It ought to be taken note of.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Since the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was unable to join us at the beginning of this debate, I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge.