Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Bill

Alex Chalk Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 27th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

That is all very well in theory, and I am pretty sure that that would do the trick in an academic dissertation, but the problem is what we see in the real world time and again. I would be astonished if any Member could not think of an example of a criminal who had committed a serious offence being under-charged and prosecuted for a lesser offence. The reasons for that are numerous, but the biggest one is as follows.

This country supposedly does not have the American system of plea bargaining, but we do in reality. No matter how much the criminal justice system would deny it, we do have that system. The CPS will say that it is going to charge somebody with a serious offence, and the person will say, “I am going to plead not guilty to that.” The defence solicitor or barrister will no doubt then say, “I’ll tell you what, if you charge them with a lesser offence, my client will plead guilty.” So to avoid a trial or to save time or whatever, the CPS, which often feels overstretched, will say, “Oh, go on then. We will charge them for the lesser offence. It will not be the actual offence that they committed, but it will get them a criminal record and get us a guilty plea. It will tidy up our figures, and we will be able to say that we have brought somebody to justice.” The CPS will then consider that a great success. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the victim of the crime, who presumably is barely even considered in this box-ticking, target-driven agenda, sees the person who committed the offence against them being given a derisory sentence. That is what we see time after time. Anybody who thinks that we do not is not living in the real world, because it happens on a daily basis in the criminal justice system.

Although my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) is right that the responsibility clearly lies with the CPS to charge people appropriately for the offence they have committed—nobody disagrees with that principle—we know that that does not happen in practice. Therefore, even if the CPS does what it seems to do on a regular basis and charges people for a lesser offence, it is beholden upon us to ensure that the judge or magistrate has an appropriate sentence to give out when the most egregious cases come before the courts. In the example that I just gave, a police officer actually lost a finger but the defendant was charged with assaulting a police officer, and we cannot let it stand that the sentence can be just six months, or even just 12 months.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

In that example, my hon. Friend shines a light on the potential issue here. Under the circumstances that he has indicated, there is no doubt that the defendant should be charged with grievous bodily harm with intent, which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. If, under my hon. Friend’s new clause, a defendant is charged with the maximum penalty of 12 months and pleads guilty, they will be entitled to a third off the sentence and would serve only half. In any event, the penalty would therefore be far less than he desires. The real issue here is whether the proper charging decision is made, because that is what makes the material difference to the sentence. This is about the difference between whether someone spends two months or three months in custody.

[Philip Davies]

I am delighted that my hon. Friend seems to be agreeing with amendment 9 and that he thinks that the sentence in the Bill should be more than 12 months, perhaps 24 months. I will take that as support, but I am unsure whether I have accurately deciphered what he was trying to say. However, he is right that the CPS should charge people for the appropriate offence, but the point is that it does not, and I can assure the House that things will be the same after this Bill comes into effect. The CPS will still prosecute people for offences that it knows will get a conviction. When someone goes before the courts for a particular offence, we must ensure that the judge or magistrate has the appropriate sentencing powers to make sure that justice is done properly and is seen to be done properly. At the moment, however, that is not the case.

I wish that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) was right. I wish that the utopia he describes, in which the CPS accurately prosecutes people for the serious offences that they have committed every single time, was the reality. If that were the case, there would probably be no need for this Bill, but the fact is that the CPS does not do that. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. My hon. Friend has much more expertise in the criminal justice system than me—[Interruption.] On the right side of it, obviously. I respect my hon. Friend’s opinion, but debates in this House on justice issues can often resemble a lawyer’s dinner party. Things can be very interesting, but most people in the real world do not really give a stuff about that. They want to know about what is happening on the ground, rather than what the legal profession would like us to think is happening, which are two very different things.

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[Chris Bryant]

There are two aspects to the Bill. The first is the offence of common assault, which I think is now drawn in such a way that the courts will be able to circumvent some of the arguments that have thus far been used to prevent any kind of successful prosecution. The second aspect relates to the aggravated offence, and the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that we have not included every single offence in the world. If amendment 3 is accepted this morning, I think that we will have included all offences that could relate to emergency workers.

The Minister was right to say that it is important that we take cognisance of the fact that, with this Bill, we are saying that emergency workers are going to be treated slightly differently in law from the rest of the wider public. It is not that I want to create great hierarchies in society, with some people being more important than others; it is that emergency workers are suffering these attacks and assaults because they are emergency workers, and that places a greater onus on us to ensure that they have the protections that they need.

I return to amendment 2 and the question of whether spitting is common assault. The Sentencing Council has in recent years looked at whether spitting increases the culpability and seriousness of the offence, and it removed spitting from each of those categories in 2012. Quite a lot of magistrates and judges have now started to say that this is one of the primary reasons that there has been a deflation in the number of successful prosecutions and in the sentences that are handed down. I regret the fact that spitting was removed by the Sentencing Council and hope that it will revisit that decision in the near future. I hope that the Minister might also be able to say something about how we can ensure that the courts take spitting seriously as a part of common assault offences.

There is an argument that putting the words “including spitting” in the Bill could mean that there is a danger that the courts in other incidents of common assault might say, “Well, it doesn’t include those words, so Parliament intends that not to include spitting.” I am guessing that the Minister may make that argument. If so, I am quite happy to listen to his point. It may well be that we will not need to divide the House on this, but I want to ensure that the courts are clear that common assault could involve merely spitting.

[Alex Chalk]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech, in which he is rightly drawing attention to the heinous act of spitting, which is upsetting and completely unacceptable. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service already can and does charge people with spitting under the offence of common assault. I have prosecuted it myself, and I am aware that there is a case—not ancient—where someone was jailed for 21 weeks for exactly that. We should not gull ourselves into thinking that we do not have that scope already. The key thing is to ensure that this offence is properly prosecuted when it should be.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is always a delight to have a lawyer in the House, but not too many, eh? [Interruption.] I think I have carried the House with that one.

The hon. Gentleman does, however, make a serious point. I tabled the amendment simply so that we could have this debate and the message goes out completely unambiguously from the House that merely spitting—I use the word “merely” legalistically; in other words, spitting alone—can constitute a common assault. That is true of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, and spitting at an emergency worker of any kind should constitute an assault under this Bill.

My other amendment—amendment 3—relates to sexual assault. The major part of the Bill introduces an aggravated offence; that is to say that the Bill lists a series of different offences that, when perpetrated against an emergency worker, will be considered to be aggravated. When I drew up the Bill, I was primarily thinking of physical violence towards emergency workers. But the truth is that, since I have been working on the Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax and I have received lots of representations, particularly from health service workers, about the sexual assault of ambulance workers, nurses, mental health nurses, doctors and others. One difficulty, both for the Government and for us, has been that these statistics have never been gathered by NHS Protect, which no longer exists anyway. However, the numbers of such incidents reported by the trade unions working on this matter are quite dramatic, particularly given that the figures show increases.

Since 2012, such incidents are up 143% in the East of England ambulance service; up 40% in London; up 133% in the North West ambulance service; and up 1500% in Northern Ireland. Incidents have increased by 400% in South Central ambulance service since 2013; by 100% in the South East Coast ambulance service since 2015; by 400% in Yorkshire ambulance service since 2013; and by 500% in the West Midlands ambulance service since 2012. I wanted to say that it is true that these are not large numbers, but there have been 238 reported cases of sexual assaults on ambulance workers in the East of England ambulance service. Parliament has to take cognisance of such figures and we have to act.

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[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It gives me great pleasure to speak on the Report stage of this Bill. It is a particular pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson), who has been a friend of this campaign from the very start. He raised a number of interesting points, and I look forward to hearing Ministers’ response. We have greatly benefited from his legal expertise throughout this process, and I am grateful to him for that. I am grateful to Members across the House who have recognised the role that I have played in initiating this campaign, but it has been a tremendous team effort, and I will thank a number of people on Third Reading.

I rise specifically to speak in support of amendment 3, which would add sexual assault to the list of assault charges in clause 2, so that it would become an aggravating factor within sentencing if sexual assault were inflicted on an emergency service worker. Having started this campaign with the Police Federation following the experience I had with a single-crewed police officer—a tale I have shared in the Chamber on several occasions—one of the deciding factors in broadening the campaign to cover more emergency service workers was having met female paramedics who had been subject to sexual assaults while on duty. That is why I am so keen to see this addition made to the Bill.

A very clear pattern emerged of female paramedics having to deal with male patients who are often under the influence of drugs or alcohol, as we have heard, in towns and city centres and predominantly on Friday and Saturday nights. I am grateful to Stacey Booth, an organiser with GMB—which I must declare is my trade union—from West Yorkshire who introduced me to a number of paramedics who recounted their experiences, which were worryingly similar.

One of those women was Sarah Kelly, who I am delighted has joined us in Parliament this morning, after taking the brave decision to share her story in the hope that it would help us to fix the broken system that has let her down. On some occasions, it was a combination of the patient being under the influence of drugs, alcohol or both, with a diminished capacity to determine right from wrong, and they took advantage of the situation, sexually assaulting a lone female paramedic in the back of an ambulance. On other occasions it was even more sinister: sexual predators, who have fine-tuned this approach, engineer a situation where they are alone in an ambulance with a female paramedic, with the specific aim of sexually assaulting them.

The risk to ambulance staff is heightened because, unlike the police, who have access to a certain degree of information about a person’s previous criminal history prior to attending an incident, the ambulance service does not. I have met female paramedics who have been dispatched to the address of someone who has only recently sexually assaulted them, pending a court appearance, which must be against all safeguarding and legal advice.

Sarah has led the way in Yorkshire, seeking to work with her trade union and her employer, the Yorkshire ambulance service, to implement the necessary changes from a grassroots level—to accurately report and record such attacks, follow up with support and advice in order to secure a conviction and to build up the data required to put protections in place so that unnecessary risks do not have to be taken in future. I commend her efforts. As we have reflected on many times over the course of the Bill’s journey, the reason why we have to go that bit further on protections for emergency service workers is that we are the ones who ask them to run towards danger and persevere with individuals who seek to do them harm, because they simply cannot walk away.

Like other paramedics, Sarah, having been sexually assaulted by the perpetrator, had to continue to persevere with him in the back of the ambulance until they arrived at hospital, first and foremost because he needed medical attention, and she could not walk away or escape him. We owe it to Sarah to make this amendment a reality in law. She is not alone in her experience as a paramedic, nor are paramedics the only emergency service workers to be exposed to this particularly vile manifestation of assault, so I urge all colleagues to lend their support to amendment 3 and add it to the Bill.

I also support amendment 2, to which I have added my name, and I will return more specifically to the hideous act of spitting when I speak to amendments 4, 5 and 6. I am also sympathetic to a great deal of the work done by the hon. Member for Shipley, and I agree with a number of the points that he outlined in his new clauses. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the debate.

[Alex Chalk]

It is such a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch). She is a truly passionate defender of the interests of police officers, and she does that with great skill. I pay tribute to her and to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies).

I have a few observations, building on the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley. In his powerful submission he said that it is important that police officers—I know there are some in the Public Gallery—receive justice, and that that justice is not “a sick joke”. However, we must also ensure that we do not inadvertently replace one sick joke with another.

In my experience as a prosecutor, the biggest injustice for police officers was along the following lines. A police officer attends the scene of a serious robbery, for example, and he or she makes an arrest. During the course of that arrest, the defendant spits at the police officer, in an extremely upsetting and unpleasant incident. The defendant is taken to the police station, where he is subsequently charged with robbery and with assaulting a police constable in the execution of his duty. The case then comes to court, and the defendant says to the prosecutor, through his solicitor, “Alright. I will plead guilty to the robbery”—that is technically a more serious offence and punishable with life imprisonment—“but do me a favour and drop the offence of assaulting a PC.” A lazy prosecutor—this point was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley—might say, “Oh for goodness’ sake. Let us carve this up. He is going to get a custodial sentence of two to three years for this unpleasant robbery. Is it really worth proceeding with the charge of assaulting a PC?”

What should happen in those circumstances? A conscientious and decent prosecutor would speak to the officer and say, “This is what is being proposed. What are your thoughts about it?” If in those circumstances the officer says, “I want justice to be done. I want this individual to have on their record not just that they are a robber, but that they have assaulted a police officer”, it would be wrong for the prosecution not to proceed with that charge and for justice not to be done. A prosecutor should already take into account the feelings of the victims, and I suggest that it would be in breach of their duty as a prosecutor not to proceed in such circumstances, and it would be a failed assessment of the public interest. In my experience, where those decisions have gone wrong and a case has been dropped, police officers rightly feel that their interests have not been taken into account.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman is speaking specifically about police officers, but there is already an existing offence regarding police officers in the Offences Against the Person Act 1861—a rather elderly piece of legislation. However, there is no similar provision for other emergency workers.

[Alex Chalk]

That is absolutely right. I was using that example to make a point, but whether we are talking about a police officer or an emergency worker, if this Bill becomes an Act—I would entirely support that—the principal potential for injustice is not the absence of legislation used to arrest, prosecute and convict an individual; it is where a prosecutor might make the wrong decision to drop a charge because, in an erroneous assessment of the public interest, he or she decides that it is not worth the candle. That is critical.

The second potential area of injustice is wrongful or erroneous charging. The example given was of a police officer who attends the scene of an alleged crime and her finger is bitten off. An offence for that already exists—causing grievous bodily harm with intent—and the maximum penalty is life imprisonment. If the defendant was convicted, Sentencing Council guidelines suggest that he or she should receive between nine and 16 years’ imprisonment.

Why do I make that point? Let us suppose the defendant is inexplicably charged with assaulting a PC—maximum sentence six months. Under the current position, the defendant would plead guilty and those six months would be reduced to four, because a third of the sentence would be docked. He would then serve half that sentence, which is two months. That is the maximum penalty. It is vanishingly rare that anyone ever gets the maximum penalty, but let us suppose someone does in this case and receives two months. Under the new regime, he would have a maximum sentence of 12 months, but we take off four because of the guilty plea, so the sentence is down to eight months. He will then serve four months, which is a bit more.

The amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley would make the maximum sentence 24 months, but let us look at what would happen in practice. If the defendant pleads guilty, 24 months is reduced to 16 months, and he will then serve half of that. We must be careful about this. The net effect is simply that the sentence would go from a maximum of two months in custody to eight months, even with my hon. Friend’s amendment. The true area of injustice is not the absence of the offence; it is when a prosecutor makes the daft decision not to charge someone with the appropriate offence. Of course I support the Bill, but we must keep our eye on the real areas of injustice, which are upstream.

Finally, in my experience, police officers, and perhaps, in future, emergency workers, will take umbrage at the fact that if a defendant is convicted of , for example, a robbery, even if the court says, “Right. That’s it. Two years for the robbery and four months for assaulting a PC”, those sentences will invariably run concurrently, and a police officer could be left thinking, “What on earth was the point of that?”

[Chris Bryant]

That is another reason for structuring the Bill in this way. All too often, the courts might have borne in mind the fact that an offence was against an emergency worker when sentencing, but that might be completely unknown to the emergency worker. The mere fact that, because of the Bill that aggravating factor must be stated in court, will be of some comfort to the victims.

[Alex Chalk]

That is why I am prepared to support the Bill. It sends an important signal that I hope police and emergency workers will welcome. It is right that such an offence should be on that person’s record. My simple note of caution is that, in my experience, the areas of injustice come from wrong charging decisions and the wrongful exercise of discretion on the doorsteps of court.

[Michael Tomlinson]

At the start of his speech my hon. Friend mentioned the disgrace of sentencing, which he said was a joke or a scandal or whatever. I want to ask about honesty in sentencing—he is coming on to that point. Can we have honesty in sentencing without having ever more inflation in the sentences that are handed down? My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) might be right in saying that we should have honesty in sentencing, but the net result need not be that people are locked up for an ever longer time. We need better communication about what happens with the examples given of a third of a sentence being knocked off and then another half. If the public understood that, they might well get behind such a measure and support it.

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point, and we must ensure credibility, understanding of, and basic confidence in the criminal justice system. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley makes a pertinent point about what people feel if someone gets an eight-year sentence but are out in four years, and probably less. I accept that that causes concern, but it cannot seriously be suggested that we in this country are soft on imprisonment. In the United Kingdom we imprison around 95,000 people, but in Germany the figure is closer to 60,000, as it is in France. Of course there is an issue of perception, but it would be a great mistake for the message to go out from this debate that we are soft on imprisonment because nothing could be further from the truth. The UK imprisons more per capita than any other western European country.

The hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) raised a point about sexual offences, and it is appalling to think that an ambulance technician or paramedic who goes to a nightclub, for example, to try to give first-aid to somebody who has been assaulted on a dance floor, might be sexually assaulted. If she has been sexually assaulted—let us be honest, it is probably a “she”—there is an offence under section 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 that has a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment. It would be a very curious case if I, as a prosecutor, were faced with those facts—if a defendant put his hand up an ambulance worker’s skirt in a context where she is trying to provide first aid to an individual—and the CPS then said, “Do you know, we have this new offence, so we are not going to bother with the Sexual Offences Act, section 3, which carries the maximum penalty?” There is a risk that that ambulance worker would say, “What on earth is going on here? Why are they going for the easy option?”

[Chris Bryant]

However, the truth is that now, large numbers of ambulance workers never bother to report an incident because they feel that it will not be taken seriously. All too often, they have a sort of message from society, the law and prosecuting authorities that somehow or other, this is sort of part of their job. That is why it is important that we say, very firmly, “It is not part of their job and there should be prosecutions.”

[Alex Chalk]

We should say it firmly, and if I may say, no one can say it more firmly and eloquently than the hon. Gentleman. That is great, but we have to be chary of using legislation to send a message. I do not have any difficulty with doing it—we are doing that and it is absolutely fine—but there is a risk of one sick joke being replaced by another. I would feel very aggrieved if my daughter, say, was an ambulance worker, and a defendant was charged with what might be perceived to be an easier and lesser offence in circumstances where if the same thing happened, for the sake of argument, to one of the nightclub’s patrons who was not an emergency worker, the defendant might be charged under section 3 of the Sexual Offences Act. We rely on prosecutors using their judgment, and I am sure that they will continue to do so, but my simple point is that this has the greatest scope for injustice, and it should not be allowed to happen.

[Kevin Foster]

I am finding my hon. Friend’s speech very interesting and thought-provoking. Does he agree that Parliament can make its intentions clear on this subject by making this an aggravating factor in the offences that he refers to, and not by looking to incorporate it as such into this offence? Of course, the intention may well be common assault, but this is about making it an aggravating factor in existing sexual offences and not about saying to prosecutors, “You went for this offence when you should have gone for the offence under the 2003 legislation.”

[Alex Chalk]

I take that point entirely.

My final point is about the issue of grievous bodily harm with intent, which most right-thinking people would think is the appropriate offence to charge someone with who had bitten a police officer’s finger, but a middle ground exists between grievous bodily harm with intent and common assault, which currently has a maximum sentence of six months—that is, assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Why do I mention that? As has been intimated, common assault is for offences that leave no mark at all. If any offence leaves a mark that, in the language of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, is more than merely transient or trifling—in plain English, that is reddening of the skin—the defendant can be charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm, whether the victim is an emergency worker or not, with a maximum penalty of five years. That would mean, once the discount for an early guilty plea is taken off, that someone could be inside for 20 months maximum.

This is my central point: let us support this Bill and let us send out the message that attacks on our emergency workers are heinous, that they are not to be tolerated and that the law should come down like a ton of bricks. However, let us also not forget that getting justice means selecting the offence so that the punishment will fit the crime—

[Holly Lynch]

rose—

[Alex Chalk]

Just before I finish my peroration, I give way to the hon. Lady.

[Holly Lynch]

The hon. Gentleman is making an incredibly powerful speech and raising some really interesting issues. For me, when we are looking at how we can make a difference in this area, our role as legislators means that we are in some ways limited in how we intervene in the other areas of injustice that he has raised. My question to him, using his legal background and expertise, is this: once we have done our bit by amending the legislation—that will go some way to addressing this problem—how do we appropriately intervene to address the other areas of injustice that he also outlined?

[Alex Chalk]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point. It would be a very dark day indeed if Members of Parliament in this place were effectively directing independent prosecutors how to exercise their discretion—I know she is not suggesting that for a second—so we have to tread extremely carefully. Ultimately, when a prosecutor decides which charge to choose, they will have to weigh two things: first, sufficiency of evidence—is there sufficient evidence to make it more likely than not that a jury properly directed would convict?—and secondly, is it in the public interest? They have to weigh certain factors in considering the public interest, ranging from the likely sentence at the end of a conviction to protection of the public, and all sorts of things. What we say in this Chamber, however, is capable of forming part of that public interest. If we send the message out that we expect condign punishment, to use a faintly pretentious expression, to be visited on those who assault our emergency workers, that factor can properly be weighed into the mix when prosecutors decide—in the circumstances of the emergency worker who attends the nightclub or the police officer who has their finger bitten off—what offence to choose. The message will ring out from this Chamber that we expect our protectors to be protected.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

It is a great honour to speak in this important debate and it has been nice to hear legal experts making some very important points.

In March, I received a letter from the Bedfordshire police and crime commissioner explaining why the Bill is so important to protect our emergency workers. In Bedfordshire, a police officer who has been assaulted is contacted by a member of the senior team within 72 hours of the assault. Sadly, such calls are a weekly event. Some 24,000 police officers were assaulted in 2016-17, as were more than 70,000 NHS workers and staff in England alone. Assaults on emergency workers should not be viewed as an occupational hazard. While some judges will add an additional penalty if an assault on an officer is proven in court, that is not automatic. CPS judges have historically viewed an assault in the course of arrest as to some extent just part of the job. We must not tolerate that any longer.

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[Holly Lynch]

I agree entirely with that point, and I am reassured by what the Minister said about seeking to toughen up deterrence in respect of the language contained in an earlier provision in the Bill. In the event that spitting does not cease with immediate effect, we will still have to ensure that we offer those protections relating to dealing with those anxieties, and offering clarity and support. The right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) is quite right: that is what I am looking to see from Ministers today.

[Alex Chalk]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Holly Lynch]

I certainly will—I will return the favour.

[Alex Chalk]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, just at this last moment. What was striking about the point she made was that in the instance that she cited a police officer was given medical advice that there was a risk, yet that medical advice appears, statistically, to run entirely counter to the statistics that were provided by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). So part of resolving this, and giving clear protection and advice to officers, is about ensuring that consistent medical advice is given—does the hon. Lady agree?

[Holly Lynch]

I entirely agree. That goes back to the earlier point that we cannot fix everything through legislation. I agree entirely that where there are shortcomings with this legislative approach, even if we withdraw it, we will not fix the problem. So what alternatives—the hon. Gentleman has rightly reflected on those—do we need to put in place? I am open to any and all suggestions—but without that legislation I am looking for alternatives.