Crime and Policing Bill (Second sitting)

Alex Barros-Curtis Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Bishop]

Q I have a question for Ms Maciver. How will the measures on child criminal exploitation help to ensure that there is a more effective and consistent response to it?

Sharon Maciver: Having a clearly defined offence will offer the police increased powers to disrupt and sanction these individuals, and will shift the focus on to what these individuals are doing. We know from our work that children often idolise these people who are exploiters; they do not see them as exploiters but as people with status and reputation. These people certainly do not see themselves as child abusers, and would not want to go to prison for abusing children. We hope that in itself will be a suitable deterrent for them to avoid the use of children in their activity.

Just yesterday, one of the members of staff contacted us to say that he had received a text message from a child who was missing, and had been for three days. The child felt that he could not go home because his house would be targeted. His house had previously had the windows smashed in on two occasions, and he had been stabbed several times on the street a few months ago by a gang. The text message said, “I will be murdered if I’m seen on the street. It’s me against a hundred people.” I feel that we do not have the option not to do something about this, given these harms are being caused to children every single day. That child did not feel that he could trust the system enough to support him, so he was trying to manage his own exploitation in that situation.

[Mr Alex Barros-Curtis (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Q Mr Sexton, I want to go back to what you were saying about the administrators and moderators aspect, and needing to look at people in the chain. Could you talk a bit more about that? Is that people who host websites? I have another question for both of you—not to pre-empt what you are about to say—but presumably that will be not just domestic but international, so what could the Bill do, if anything, through partnerships and cross-agency working, both here and abroad, to target that issue?

Dan Sexton: On the clear web, in order to get a website, you need to have an IP address and a domain name, which will come from a registry. In the UK, we have .co.uk, run by Nominet. It is about just removing the registrars, for instance. There needs to be some liability for them enabling a site that is hosting child sexual abuse material.

We work with those companies every day to say, “There’s child sexual abuse material here.” Some of them are very good and some of them are less good: “It is really not our problem; we don’t deal with the content.” So it is about anything that encourages them to act proactively rather than reactively—but even reactively, if you take away the domain name, there is no website and it disappears.

A lot of those sites are hosted on public clouds, so they might be on Cloudflare, Amazon or Google. There are lots of parts to the chain. Most of them are content agnostic—“We’re just offering a service”—but really it takes a lot of people to collude to create a website of any type. If that website is hosting criminal content or child sexual abuse material, all those parts of the chain should be taking more responsibility.

We hear a lot of, “This is not our fault; it’s the people downstream,” or, “It’s the people upstream.” Obviously, the administrators are the ones who are running that stuff, but there are lots of other people who had to be part of it for the sites to work. I would like to see more reason for those sites to take action. That would be extremely helpful for our work of finding and removing that content, and getting it down as quickly as possible.

[The Chair]

Any further questions? No. In that case, Ms Maciver and Mr Sexton, thank you for your evidence—the Committee is indebted to you.

Examination of Witnesses

Councillor Sara Conway and Councillor Neil Garratt AM gave evidence.

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[David Taylor]

Q Councillor Conway, my ears pricked up when you talked about Clear, Hold, Build and the successes that you had had. That is a project that the police in my area, Hemel Hempstead, have been implementing in a particular neighbourhood called Grovehill. We are currently in the clear and hold phase. Given that you are ahead of us, I wonder whether you can share with the Committee some reflections on the build phase and some of the successes that you have had. Will you also reflect on how the Bill will help with the neighbourhood policing that is so central to these projects?

Councillor Conway: The success of Clear, Hold, Build in our area is thanks to everybody. That is really important: it is everyone together—the residents, who need to be part of it too; the community organisations; the police; the council. It very much is everybody. There is also ongoing clearing; Clear, Hold, Build is not a linear process, and we have certainly learned that.

As I have touched on, some of the provisions in the Bill would have been very welcome. We have not talked about the new provision on the exploitation of young people either, but there is that, the cuckooing measures, some of the respect order stuff, the CPNs and the public spaces protection orders. We have been able to use bits of those things locally, but the Bill provides a framework that I think will enable councils to deliver more, as long as there is the funding to do some of it.

Also, the collaborative approach needs to be across councils and across areas. We all learn from each other. That is a major strength of the LGA, and one that we are very happy to share with the Government. As you know yourselves, that learning across, with the need to support each other and to really deliver for all our residents, is vital.

[Mr Barros-Curtis]

Returning briefly to mandatory reporting, as I understand it, the reference in clause 45(2) to

“a relevant police force or a relevant local authority”

is directly from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse set of investigations. I believe that that is because of the typical provision of children’s social services in practice in England and Wales. It can be either/or, but obviously we need to ensure that there is a linkage between the two and that there is cross-reporting. I just want to check that that is not out of the norm—that, if a referral or reference was made at the moment, it would come into the local authority—and so, from your respective positions, putting this into law does not add an excessive burden on local authorities.

Councillor Garratt: When I expressed my concern earlier, it was not so much about a burden on the local authority as about wanting to expedite the process that, ultimately, that disclosure is setting in motion. If the way to get there faster is by going directly to the police, that would seem to make sense, but I would not argue to remove the ability to report to the council. If someone does that, you would imagine that the council would be able to pass it on to the police.

Councillor Conway: Again, we can send more detail on this and look into it to see how councils do it. The way it is structured in my area is that we have a community safety team and a family services team, a relationship with the police, and so on, so we are structured in a way that means that we have very natural conversations and share trust. Again, I note that a collaborative, proactive approach on the ground is vital to enabling that.

[The Chair]

Councillor Garratt and Councillor Conway, thank you very much indeed for your time. The Committee is indebted to you.

Examination of Witnesses

Emily Spurrell, Matthew Barber and Roger Hirst gave evidence.

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[David Burton-Sampson]

Q This is obviously a meaty Bill. There is a lot of really good stuff in here, and much of it will give new powers to existing police officers, to people across the force and to local authorities. As PFCCs or PCCs, you will have a key role in helping to ensure that the Bill is implemented, assuming it passes through Parliament. How confident do you feel about making sure that happens? It is pointless passing laws if they are not implemented on the ground.

Roger Hirst: This goes back to the point that was raised earlier about whether we have the resources. I welcome the Government’s commitment to the 13,000 additional people in neighbourhood policing, but the vital thing is that we have the funding to both sustain the current workforce and build the workforce in the way you would like us to. There is a real challenge there, because the police force has expanded by 20,000 over the last six years. Those police officers will all be going through the police contractual incremental pay scales. The big jump is when they hit five and six years, so there will be a big boost to police pay at that point without us recruiting any more people.

To be able to do what we need to do with the Bill, we will need the resources that we have and the resources that are heading down the track towards us, we believe, which we are very grateful for. But funding the existing workforce is the real challenge, and that in itself is probably going to cost some £300 million a year.

Matthew Barber: I completely agree: a lot of it comes down to the money. The only additional point that I would make is about the reliance on other partners in this area. As we awaited our session, there was a conversation about fly-tipping, which is certainly an issue that exercises the police, but at the moment the responsibility for it lies with local authorities. The Bill proposes only some guidance, rather than any duties on local authorities to clear up the waste or to investigate; currently, they have powers but they are not obliged to use them.

On some of the wider antisocial behaviour provisions, as I said in response to the Minister, there is a huge reliance on local authorities to play their part, both in sharing information around reporting and in the exercise of powers. Many of the solutions to antisocial behaviour issues in our communities do not lie within the police remit. They are to do with the provision of housing from social landlords, and to do with the powers that local authorities have, so we need to work collectively.

I am confident that policing, given the right resources, can deliver the things that are in this Bill, but what is key is making sure that all those other partners are able to assist in that. Many of these provisions cannot be delivered by the police on their own.

Emily Spurrell: To add to that, it is not just about policing and the partners that Matthew has outlined, but about criminal justice. We know that having more officers and more PCSOs going through the system will create even more pressure on an already struggling courts and prison system. We need to be very mindful of the whole criminal justice approach.

[Mr Barros-Curtis]

Q Returning briefly to police accountability, you already expressed support for what the Minister said about amending some of the restrictions, in terms of the thresholds for referral and for whether a final investigation has been completed. On placing the IOPC victims’ right to review scheme on a statutory footing, presumably you would support that to build public confidence in the IOPC and what it exists to do for the accountability of police forces in our country.

Emily Spurrell: The system does not work very well for victims at all at the minute. The language used and the way that we approach it is very bureaucratic. Anything that can empower victims and ensure that they feel like they are being heard and that they have a right to have their concerns addressed is very welcome.

Roger Hirst: I absolutely agree with that. Making it more accessible would involve, as Emily said, using better language. Also, having shorter timeframes is really important.

Matthew Barber: I completely agree.

[The Chair]

Gentlemen, lady, thank you very much indeed for your time and for your expertise, which are greatly appreciated.

Examination of Witness

Dr Lawrence Newport gave evidence.

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[Harriet Cross]

Q With respect, a delivery driver would be delivering such products as well.

Dame Diana Johnson: What we have said is that we are very conscious that we want to look at this. Again, it goes back to poor data. Because at the moment assaults on retail workers are treated just as assaults and not separated out, we are very keen to get the data to see what is actually happening with retail workers. I am very happy to look at suggestions that the Committee might have, but our proposal at the moment is to be very clear: we want to bring this particular measure in for assaults on retail workers because of what I have just described—the public service duty that they have. But I did hear the evidence earlier, and I heard what was said about Scotland as well. I am very happy to consider that and to look at it.

[Mr Barros-Curtis]

Q I want to follow on from that point about assault on a retail worker. In relation to what you said, Minister Davies-Jones, and what we heard in evidence about equivalence with the emergency worker assault provision when that was introduced, I used to serve on the Justice Committee, and because of the shocking court backlog—one of the inheritances from the last Government—the chance of getting a prosecution for that and getting through to a conviction at the Crown court was very, very slim. What cross-Government working will the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and so on be doing to try to tackle that so that the equivalent does not happen with the provision for assault on a retail worker?

On police accountability, we have had some very public examples of PCCs and chief constables falling out, and the fall-out affects confidence in policing and has a pecuniary impact on the taxpayer. What confidence do you have, Minister Johnson, that these measures will not cement that but will help to restore confidence and ensure that there is adequate confidence in our policing, and that they will not lead to further fracturing in that relationship?

Alex Davies-Jones: Shall I take the courts point first? Of course, conversations have been happening incredibly closely—hence why we have two Departments represented on the Bill Committee—on the court impact from this. As I said, all the impact assessments have been published on the gov.uk website, but we have also taken measures to free up capacity in the Crown court system by allowing magistrates bigger sentencing powers. We also have the independent review being done by Sir Brian Leveson to look at what other steps we could take to address the issue in our court system. We have also funded, in the next financial year, the Crown courts to sit to their highest ever capacity, in terms of what we can give as a Department. We are making sure that for the court sitting days that are available, we fund them to the highest level that they have ever been at.

Dame Diana Johnson: On the point about PCCs, chief constables and restoring confidence in the police, one reason why we have a White Paper coming down the track later in the spring is that we do need to do some work around the relationships between PCCs and chief constables. We think that there is work to do there. We also think there is still more work to do around vetting. We said, as one of our manifesto commitments, that we would bring in mandatory vetting standards for police officers—for when they come into police forces. There is a whole range of things we need to do alongside the restoring of police officers in all our communities. We have those 13,000 officers in our high streets, villages and communities because, again, that visible presence is how you start to restore confidence generally.

[The Chair]

I call Joe Robertson for a 15-second question, to be followed by a 15-second answer.