Draft Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (Investigative Powers of Prosecutors: Code of Practice) Order 2024 Draft Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (Search, Recovery of Crypto Assets and Investigations: Codes of Practice) Regulations 2024 Draft Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and Terrorism Act 2000 (Certain Information Orders: Code of Practice) Regulations 2024 Draft Terrorism Act 2000 (Code of Practice for Authorised Officers) Orders 2024

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2024 General Committees

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dr Huq. All four of the instruments before us are about ensuring that the authorities have the tools they need to combat criminals and terrorists in a digital world by giving them the powers they need to investigate, search for and seize crypto assets. As the Minister says, we know that this is a growing, fast-moving and changing area of crime and criminality, and it is vital that the relevant authorities have the powers they need to keep pace.

I will refer to each set of regulations in turn, but let me say at the outset that the Opposition do not intend to oppose them. The principles underpinning the instruments were debated during the passage of the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, and I will not repeat arguments made than. It is important that the authorities have codes of practice in place to guide the use of the new powers, so that we can find the appropriate balance between individual liberty and collective security.

First, under the Proceeds Of Crime Act 2002, there are regulations concerning codes of practice on the investigative powers of prosecutors, the search and recovery of crypto assets, and investigations. The reforms will enable officers to seize crypto assets and other property during the course of an investigation without having first arrested someone for an offence. They will also enable officers to seize crypto asset-related items and enable the courts to better enforce unpaid confiscation orders against a defendant’s crypto assets, which is really important.

Can the Minister clarify whether non-fungible content is included in the phrase crypto asset, which is a well-established term? Non-fungible tokens were not something that interested me, so my position is not a universal one, but they were of some public interest. I know that they hold some value because they are bought and sold, although not in the way they were as recently as a year ago. I am interested to see if they are covered. I think they are, and rightly so. In general, these provisions are an important clarification of authorities’ powers, so that individuals who are subject to those authorities’ investigative powers will have clarity about what they can and cannot do, which must be right.

Secondly, in relation to the POCA 2002 and the Terrorism Act 2000, we have regulations concerning a code of practice for information orders. The regulations deal with new information order powers to support the NCA’s operational strategic analysis of information relevant to money laundering or suspected money laundering and/or terrorist financing or suspected terrorist financing. That seems clear and sensible to us. There are also regulations in relation to the Terrorism Act 2000 concerning a code of practice for authorised officers; again, the clarity there is to be welcomed. There are reforms to the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, again enabling officers to seize and detain crypto assets, so I hope that the Minister will also give clarity around the status of NFTs and non-fungible content in that context.

As we have said previously in debates on these matters, we welcome the Government bringing forward measures on crypto assets. The technology is changing and fast-paced, and so is the usage of criminals in that space. We must have a digital approach, not an analogue approach, to freezing and seizing assets, and this instrument has found the balance.

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. I want to come in on that particular point, because much attention has been given to terrorist and criminal organisations, but what about individuals? A number of individuals, including some of my constituents, have been defrauded of cryptocurrency, and I am intrigued to see what we can do to support them.

[Alex Norris]

My hon. Friend makes an important intervention. We know of individuals whose lives have been ruined. They may have lost their business or their house because of such transactions. Ensuring that the authorities have the relevant investigative powers to follow these new types of crime is really important. We can have a degree of confidence that these instruments move us forward in that direction.

I have a couple more questions to the Minister to get some reassurance; they follow on neatly from what my hon. Friend said. It is important that we ensure that the relevant authorities have the right powers, and the right capacity, resources, knowledge and experience. There has been a consultation on the codes of practice, but what consultation or conversations has the Minister or his right hon. Friend the Security Minister had with relevant authorities, such as the NCA, about their capacity to deal with this growing threat?

Similarly, on consultation more generally, each of the explanatory memorandums to the instruments has a section 10 on consultation. A consultation clearly has taken place, and it seems to have been a valuable one. It makes note of some of the changes that have happened as a result, which is always a positive, but was there anything in those consultations that the Government were not minded to accept? Can the Minister tell us any of those things? I will not say anything more than that, but hopefully he will be able to address those questions.

Draft Strikes (Minimum Service Levels: Fire and Rescue Services) (England) Regulations 2024

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 General Committees

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue. I am proud to declare at the outset that I am a lifelong trade unionist and a member of a number of unions, including the GMB and the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers.

Let me start by offering our thanks to our brave firefighters up and down the country. They do dangerous work, they do crucial work, and they help us in our darkest moments, tackling fires, but also the impact of climate change—now more than ever, flooding—as well as doing rescue work, when people are stuck in their cars, and much, much more. There are so many of life’s challenges to which the answer is to call our brave fire and rescue services.

As with any legislation, it is important to contrast the comfort and security in which we sit and do our important work today with, in this case, the dangerous situations that firefighters will be facing right now, whether they are on a motorway or tackling a blaze. We are talking about their terms and conditions and the nature of their work while we sit here, so we ought to have due regard for the different dangers we face at work.

The regulations are the end product of the Government’s failed approach to industrial relations. Under this Government, we have seen a wave of strike action—the most significant in decades. Yet at every stage, rather than seeking to work with our hard-working public sector staff, the Government have refused to get round the negotiating table, thrown in last-minute distractions or failed to show the leadership required to settle these disputes. The Government have failed on the economy and failed on public services, and they are failing on industrial relations.

The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 was billed as a silver bullet to solve all these problems; but there lies the rub. The regulations are not about solving the issues faced by millions of British workers, whether it is those who go into burning buildings, those who keep us safe at night or those who keep the health service functioning, as they did during the pandemic. The regulations are about solving the Government’s problem, such that they do not have to negotiate, because this is a Government more interested in dealing with their own issues than in the daily struggle of the British people. What image does that send to the public? The Government have gone, in a very short period, from clapping public sector workers to threatening to sack them.

The powers in the 2023 Act that allow the Government to bring forward these regulations are a sticking-plaster solution and a distraction from the real issue. The impact of these regulations will be a significant winnowing of the basic rights of tens of thousands of people who work in the most dangerous of environments; and today we are upstairs, out of plain sight. This is a poor set of affairs, designed not to tackle the problem but to solve the Government’s problem.

But the Government cannot legislate their way out of 14 years of failure. That is why Labour opposes attacks on working people’s freedoms. It is why we would repeal the 2023 Act and why we oppose the regulations before us today. No one wants to see the public disrupted by industrial action, least of all the staff themselves—I did not hear that mentioned in the Minister’s contribution. Those staff do not wish to be on strike; they want to be at work, protecting the public.

Also, we all want minimum service standards in our public services, but it is the Government, not our hard-working staff, who have failed us in that regard. That is clear in every aspect of British life. I know that the Minister seeks constructive solutions, but I say that because the failure here is not in the intricacies of trade union legislation: it is in 14 years of failure on the economy, which have left working people facing an economic emergency. It is in a Government who have ground down the resilience of household finances over a decade so that millions are now struggling to make ends meet, and it is the Government who have stretched public services to breaking point with a recruitment and retention crisis across the public sector. We know that is blindingly obvious to the public, but it seems the Government cannot see it. Instead, they choose today to attack the rights of working people, undermine their terms and conditions and devalue their contribution to the country. The regulations will have a practical impact, but they will not achieve what the Government seek.

[Chris Philp]

The hon. Gentleman says that there is a recruitment and retention crisis, yet we have record numbers of police officers—149,566 last March, as I may have mentioned previously. We also have record numbers of doctors and nurses; indeed, today the NHS has about 60,000 more staff than it did a year ago. We have record police, doctors and nurses. That is hardly a recruitment and retention crisis, is it?

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for that intervention, because therein lies the difference between the Government’s position and our position. We think that public sector services are distressed and morale is really poor in the police; I would be staggered if the Minister did not really know that. He knows the attrition rate, particularly among young officers. He knows the pressures in the health service. He knows the struggle that we have to hire social care staff.

[Chris Philp]

We are getting a bit off topic, so I do not want to stretch your patience, Ms Fovargue, but the hon. Gentleman mentioned the attrition rate, which is about 6% overall for the police. Half of that is to do with when people reach the 30-year retirement level. Only 3%, roughly, is early exit prior to the retirement date, which, in comparison with most sectors, is extremely low.

[Alex Norris]

The Minister and I are bound basically in one long-running, important conversation. The Minister’s proposition is that the public have never had it so good on policing and community safety. My position is that—

[The Chair]

Order. We need to stick within the scope of the regulations.

[Alex Norris]

I apologise, Ms Fovargue. I will get back to my argument.

The practical impact of this statutory instrument will be to poison relations between management and staff at a time when we need constructive working relationships. Indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston said, constructive working relationships have existed between fire and rescue services and trade unions for many years.

The FBU has always negotiated major incident agreements with employers before national strikes. That relationship works. The Strikes (Minimum Services Levels) Act 2023 was a response to an unprecedented—certainly in my adult memory—wave of industrial action. However, that has not happened in fire, because the collective bargaining process has worked. At a time when strikes are commonplace, that has been the one place where there have not been strikes. There has not been a strike on pay in fire and rescue services for 20 years. Why are the Government meddling with a set of arrangements that work well?

I will return to the regulations themselves. I appreciate the Minister’s detail on how the requirement for 73% of appliances to be deployable on a non-strike day, as formulated by the Government, was reached. He must understand, though, that there is deep concern about that proportion. Is there a commitment that it will be kept under review? The calculations as he explained them are one way of doing it, but they are in no way the definitive one.

Similarly, the Minister said that we are in a weaker position than before. I must say, I thought it was brave of him to say that the Government have so ridden down our armed forces that now they can no longer help us in contingency and emergency. That is a significant point, because we know that there have been times, particularly in the summer and around wildfires, where in parts of the country our fire and rescue services were right on the brink. In that situation, normally we would expect to fall back on support from the armed forces. Is the Minister now saying that, due to a lack of investment, that will not be available to us? That is a significant point indeed.

The Minister discussed the appliances in scope with regard to the 73%, but I did not hear whether that is a raw calculation per unit, such that any vehicle is considered the same and 73% of them must be on the road, or whether that is weighted in any way with regard to what the different vehicles and units can do. I suspect that the answer to that will be, “That is to be decided locally.” That is part of the problem for the Minister. He said at the outset that the consultation found that the majority of fire and rescue services wanted clarity. That does not surprise me—that is not an uncommon consultation response—but the problem is that the Government have failed on their own terms in that regard, because we have heard the Minister say on multiple occasions that this statutory instrument sets the environment, but what that means must be agreed locally.

For example, it is reasonable to say that the Government ought to take a view on the level of control room service they consider to be of the same standard as on a non-strike day, if they are going to legislate for that, but instead we are told that that will be decided locally. That is a failure on the Government’s own terms. To follow that through to its logical conclusion, is the Minister saying that any given fire and rescue service could say that they believe the acceptable level in their control room locally is 100% of what the level would have been on a non-strike day? The Minister says that this is not meant to be a ban on striking, but in that case it would be, and that would be decided not in this place but in local arrangements. That would have catastrophic impacts on relationships locally.

More than three quarters of the staff who work in control rooms are women. The equality impact assessment quickly brushes over that point, saying that that is not a material consideration; I am surprised and would like to hear from the Minister why he believes that.

On local negotiation and agreement, will the Minister confirm not only that there will not be an obligation—certainly not in law, because I do not believe this is on the face of the regulations—for fire and rescue services to issue work notices, but that nor will there be an attempt, certainly while he is in his role, to compel fire and rescue services to issue work notices, and that we would expect them to work locally first, in ways that have already shown to positive, rather than using what is clearly a blunt tool?

To conclude, we have a Government who are incapable of providing even the most minimal level of service to the public. They have wrecked the economy and hammered public services. They now want to compound those woes by taking basic rights at work away from a group of people who do the most dangerous job going—people who have shown time and again that they will negotiate constructively and in good faith. This legislation is their reward for that. It is dismal

It comes back to the basic debate between the Minister and me. The Government are asking the British people to take a side: are they with the Government and their analysis of the world, or do they stand with our firefighters, our doctors and our nurses? I know which side I am on, so I will vote against the regulations and I encourage all colleagues to do the same.

Draft South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (Election of Mayor and Transfer of Police and Crime Commissioner Functions) Order 2024

Alex Norris Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 General Committees

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Dowd. It is vital that we have an effective arrangement for the leadership of police and crime commissioners. The leaders are the voice of the local community and the link to the community. They are at the core of the important work ahead in restoring public confidence in policing. It is safe to say that police and crime commissioner roles are not always well understood or even to some degree valued, even perhaps by this place. That is wrong. They are crucial roles and we should give thanks to those who fill them and who stand for election.

What we encounter with this instrument, and in general in our regional policy, is an asymmetric devolved settlement: for every community, there seems to be a different configuration of the powers held locally. How leaders are selected to exercise those powers is different as well. That makes for a very complicated landscape that does not often serve the public’s engagement in the political process. Explaining our devolved settlement to a dispassionate observer is very difficult. Why would certain things be the case in the City of London, the Liverpool city region or, in my case, Nottingham? There are three very different models in three not so different places. However, we work with the world that we have rather than the one we might wish to have.

One way of creating greater simplicity and coherence in decision making is for elected Mayors to hold the powers and office of police and crime commissioner. Our belief is that such important governance decisions should be in the gift of local communities rather than Westminster. We have seen too much top-down imposition of local structures. That does not serve democracy or buy-in in local communities. The Minister said that there is local political consensus in South Yorkshire on the transfer of PCC powers to the South Yorkshire Mayor, so we do not oppose this instrument.

I led for the Opposition—in fact, my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East sat in the Whip’s seat then, as well—during the passage of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. The order is in line with section 33, which allows for the transfer of the powers of the police and crime commissioner to the elected Mayor provided that there is coterminosity of the two footprints.

It is interesting to hear the Minister talk of the Government’s belief that the combined model, with the powers of the PCC resting with the elected Mayor, is in and of itself an advantageous model. That case was clearly made and that is a problem for us going forward, as huge parts of England will be locked out of being able to do that. My own community is entering into an arrangement for what is called the East Midlands Mayor—in reality, one for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire—in May, and we cannot do the thing that the Minister says is most optimal. I am not sure that I wholly agree with him that it is, but in the Government’s eyes it is the most optimal arrangement. We cannot have that, because we do not have coterminosity. There is a challenge there, because we are essentially saying that we have baked into the system that some communities can have more effective arrangements than others.

[Alexander Stafford]

My understanding is that Labour supports the order and the transfer of police and crime commissioner powers to the Mayor. Can the hon. Gentleman explain why the West Midlands, with a Labour police and crime commissioner, is judicially reviewing the Government to try to stop the same powers being transferred to that Mayor? It does not make sense.

[Alex Norris]

It does make sense. I will make it very clear why I think that is different—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman can laugh, but he ought to at least hear me out—he is welcome to laugh afterwards.

As I said, I led for the Opposition on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which introduces these powers. I tried to amend the relevant clause and voted against it—the hon. Gentleman, of course, voted for the clause in the Commons, as did other South Yorkshire colleagues. We do not have that in common: I wanted to amend the Bill so that there was a lock on the provision and an elected Mayor could not, essentially, take out another political office for themselves without consent from anyone other than the Secretary of State. My amendment said that there ought to be unanimity among the constituent councils of the combined authority. That test is passed in South Yorkshire and not in the West Midlands. That is the reason for my party’s different approach.

As I say, the hon. Member for Rother Valley voted for these provisions. The moment he cast that vote, he must have known that they could operate in South Yorkshire. I find it difficult to see how he can say that this is in some way unacceptable.

[Alexander Stafford]

One of the reasons why I oppose the order is that, of the 3,000 people who responded to the public consultation, 65% of people were against. If we have learned nothing else from Brexit, it is that we should listen to the voice of the people. The people of South Yorkshire said no.

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman will have the chance to make that case. As I say, if he and enough of his colleagues had supported my proposal, there would have been a safeguard that protected local voices—[Interruption.] He is not listening to what I am saying, so I am not sure why I have replied.

I did not propose to amend the provision because I thought that Mayors could not exercise PCC functions effectively—in fact, we know that they can, and colleagues in West Yorkshire show that very well—but because I do not think that important decisions about local democracy should be in the gift of an individual. As I say, I do not think, in relation to the counterpart instrument governing the West Midlands, that politicians of one party ought to be able unilaterally to dissolve a political opponent’s role and absorb their powers. That issue was debated at length and sadly the Government did not agree.

A combined authority lock on the power would have put us in more satisfactory circumstances. The Government were not minded to accept it. The Minister might want to contradict me—of course I will accept that—but I fear that the Government’s approach to the provision in that Act that leads us here today was born of a preoccupation with the West Midlands. As a result, the system was designed around a particular case rather than the effectiveness of the legislation.

There is an eccentric typo in paragraph 7.2 of the explanatory memorandum that is perhaps a little revealing. It states:

“It is Government’s view that the exercise of PCC functions by the Mayor of the West Midlands has the potential to realise a more collaborative, holistic approach to public safety in South Yorkshire”.

That is a bold claim, but it possibly tells us where the Government’s mind really is. Nevertheless, that is not a reason to oppose this statutory instrument.

The instrument will end the stand-alone role of PCC for South Yorkshire. I want to put on the record our thanks to Commissioner Dr Alan Billings. He has served Sheffield and South Yorkshire for decades—as the police and crime commissioner and as deputy leader of Sheffield City Council, as well as by filling a huge range of non-elected roles for the Government, through the Department for Education, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, and outside Government, with the national lottery and much more. That has been a political career of extraordinary commitment to his community. We are very grateful for all he has done and we look forward to seeing the contribution that he makes in the future.

I will conclude by saying that there is much to be concerned about with regard to the Government’s approach to local democracy, and it is right that we in this place seek to hold high standards in this regard, but clearly there is local political support in South Yorkshire, and that is where the determination should be made. Therefore we do not oppose this order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

First of all, Mayors with a very high profile—particularly Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan—do exercise PCC powers. Andy Street has asked for the PCC powers in the West Midlands. He believes, I think rightly, that exercising those powers will enable him to do a better job. We agree with Andy Street.

[Alex Norris]

The Minister again makes the case that those structures are better in and of themselves. Our view is that that should be for local determination. However, if that is true in the Minister’s view, what does that mean for those communities that can never have that structure, and the calibre of their leadership and decision making?

[Chris Philp]

We are trying to implement those structures where there is coterminosity. That is not physically possible in all places. For example, the shadow Minister mentioned the proposed combined authority across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. At the moment, those are two separate police forces. Unless the police forces are merged, it is impossible to do that. We cannot have the same solution across the whole country unless we start merging police forces or changing police force boundaries. We can do the best possible given the current boundaries. If Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire want to come forward and propose a merger of their police forces, obviously they are free to do that.

[Alex Norris]

indicated dissent.

[Chris Philp]

The shadow Minister is shaking his head. I suspect there would be a lot of local opposition to doing that. It is impossible to have the combined Mayor of the east midlands exercising PCC powers, because there are two different police forces. We just physically cannot do it there, but we can do it in other places. Just because we cannot do it everywhere—

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Norris Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

With incidents up by 70% since 2015, the public are looking for leadership on knife crime. Earlier this month, the Government would not support our plan, which includes broadening the ban on zombie knives to include ninja swords; an end-to-end review of online sales; and criminal penalties for tech execs who allow their platform to be used for illicit sales. The Government rejected our plan, but what they have in place simply is not working, so we will push again during the remaining stages of the Criminal Justice Bill. Will they accept it then?

[Chris Philp]

The shadow Minister should be aware that according to the crime survey of England and Wales —the only reliable long-term indicator for volume crime trends, according to the Office for National Statistics—violent crime is down by 51% since 2010. He asked about online knife sales. He should be aware that when the Online Safety Act 2023 is fully in force, very strong action will be taken, for example against online marketplaces, and the illegal sale of knives online will become a priority offence under schedule 7. He will also know that we are bringing forward legislation to ban a range of machetes and zombie-style knives. We define them in relation to the features they have. For example, knives over 7 inches in length with two cutting edges and serrations will be banned. Those are just some of the measures we are taking, all of which have helped to bring down violent crime by 51% since 2010.

Unauthorised Entry to Football Matches Bill

Alex Norris Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 23rd February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak for the Opposition. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) on his Bill, which I support. He is a skilled parliamentarian, but he has demonstrated—as the hon. Member for Woking (Mr Lord) did, who is no longer in his place—that the best “skill” is to be drawn in the private Member’s ballot. It is also a skill to choose a Bill that has a chance of succeeding. Keeping it narrow, short and cheap is generally a good way to do that. My hon. Friend’s Bill has passed those tests.

Britain does sporting events really well. We have great infrastructure and stadiums, and volunteers flock to be part of those events. Who could forget that, having seen the Olympic games? Whether it is the Olympics, the champions league finals or games every weekend, we do them very well. We also do football better than any other place on the planet. A huge part of brand Britain is the global TV product, but the beauty is in the fact that every weekend—this weekend will be no exception—for the premier league alone, half a million people make journeys, short, long and in some cases very long, across the country to see their team, share allegiances, perhaps swear at other fans and sing songs with incredible creativity. There is a real beauty in that; it is very British and very special.

Those two things together—that success in holding major events, and that love of football done well—made what we saw in 2021 at the final of Euro 2020 even more shocking. We do not want to see 3,000 to 5,000 people jibbing in, as my hon. Friend said. It is dangerous. As we read in the independent report, it was very lucky that greater harm was not caused. What my hon. Friend proposes is a good, smart way of addressing that. I want to cover some of the points made by him and other hon. Members. What my hon. Friend said on the radio earlier about the deterrent effect is exactly right, and what he predicts is likely to be the case. It cannot be overstated that the maximum fine of £1,000 is a lot of money by anyone’s standards. The banning order in particular will get people’s attention, because that is a really serious sanction. For a fan, supporting their club becomes a big part of their identity. For a fan who goes to matches at home and away, that is a huge part of their lifestyle and involves their friendship groups. That gets people’s attention, so it is a good sanction.

Let me address a couple of points made by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). I share a lot of his views when it comes to sport; he knows what he is talking about. He is a match-going fan, and he talks a lot of sense on sport. His point about scrutiny on Fridays is important. We owe it to our constituents to perform that scrutiny as well as we can, whatever day of the week it is, because the intention is for these Bills to become the law of the land. We always have to keep in mind the test: hard cases make bad laws. I always think about that, particularly on Fridays, but I think the hon. Gentleman has passed the test today.

The hon. Gentleman made a point about un- intended consequences. Proposed new clause 1A(3) to the Football (Offences) Act 1991 should give quite a lot of comfort in that regard. The explanatory notes are very comprehensive about what the Bill is not intended to do, and certainly gave me comfort, particularly about proposed new subsection 3(b)(i). A 17-year-old using an under-16’s ticket is a breach of terms and conditions, and they probably should not do it, but the law should not criminalise that individual. The club can manage that with a sanction, which is likely to be a short internal ban. That is the right level, so I think that the right balance has been found.

I might disagree with the hon. Gentleman on the cheekiness point, though. These are big stadiums; as the hon. Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) said, we are talking about large concentrations of human beings in one place. The capacity at Wembley is 90,000. The hon. Member for Shipley and I may agree a lot on sport, but I suspect we disagree quite a lot on health and safety legislation—on its effectiveness and necessity. In this space, health and safety is exceptionally important, and for a stadium to be even one person over capacity is dangerous. I agree with his sentiment that someone just trying their luck should not have a criminal record and face a really significant sanction, but we should not encourage such behaviour in general. People need to know that it is dangerous, and that they should not do such things.

Turning to the hon. Member for Shipley’s point about breadth, my view is that the approach taken in the Bill is good and right for football; it follows that in those other examples he mentioned, it would be good and right, too. I understand and agree with the approach that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West has taken: keeping the Bill narrow and basing it on legislation that is already on the statute book is the best way to ensure that the Bill succeeds. Going broader may imperil the Bill as a venture, but it is incumbent on both the Government and the Opposition to look at what approach could be taken to broaden it. Of course, we will need to follow the evidence and consult relevant organisations, but the basic principle applies: people entering an event for which they have no ticket, which is a really dangerous health and safety breach, is bad, whether at the football or elsewhere. As the hon. Member for Shipley pointed out, football fans often get a rough ride; they should not be unduly singled out. I think everyone has said that, but we should make that point.

The contributions of the hon. Member for South Ribble again show the cultural hegemony of football, and its importance in British life. The first conversation that I had with her, near the doorway to the Chamber, was about football.

[Katherine Fletcher]

It was a very pleasant way to be welcomed into the behind-the-scenes bipartisanship that is not always visible to the public. I think it is important to get that on the record, even if the hon. Gentleman does support totally the wrong football team.

[Alex Norris]

I absolutely agree. My friendship with the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) came about because she goes to City, as I do—that is something we talk about—and as does the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan). In fact, I can name every City fan in Parliament with absolute certainty, and I reckon I could do pretty well at naming everybody’s teams, although not that of the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat).

[The Minister for Security (Tom Tugendhat)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Alex Norris]

I am looking forward to this.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I am absolutely shocked that the hon. Gentleman is not an avid follower of the Tonbridge Angels.

[Alex Norris]

There we go. I will resist the temptation to ask the right hon. Member who their left back is, because I think that could expose him.

[Katherine Fletcher]

I risk the wrath of my colleague on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), if I do not mention that he is a United fan.

[Alex Norris]

I can name similar miscreants on our Benches very well. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) is the first who springs to mind.

Football is part of our cultural life. It is part of the bonds that bring us together. That is why it is important that it is safeguarded, and done properly and safely. I think quite a lot about the point that the hon. Member for South Ribble made about security staff, and I will talk later about recent experiences at football that have really concerned me. Those staff, who are generally not permanent employees of the club—they are probably third-party contractors—and not necessarily well paid, are in dangerous circumstances. Frankly, I worry less about those near the pitch than those who have to steward near the toilets. Again, I will talk about that shortly.

The hon. Lady made important points about what the Bill is and is not designed to deter, and she used her own example. We can take comfort from the fact that she would have had a defence under proposed new section 1A(2) of the 1991 Act, as she had a ticket. As she said, that was not a desirable way for entry to happen, but she would not have committed an offence under the Bill, which speaks to the effectiveness of its drafting.

In closing, it is important that we do not demonise football fans. I am no match-going fan, though I was for a bit. I think we were all legacy fans, though I do not take kindly to that term. However, my love of Manchester City is a huge part of my life and personality. My wife might say it is a much bigger part of it than it ought to be. From the third tier to the champions league final, I have been there and seen it all. Every so often, on my social media feed—I apologise in advance to the hon. Member for South Ribble—the İlkay Gündoğan goal in last year’s FA cup final will pop up, and I cannot go past it; I am incapable of doing that. I will watch it at least half a dozen times, because it was just such a great moment.

Football fans are having a tougher time. They are messed around with kick-off times, and being asked to take long journeys. City fans will be at Bournemouth on Saturday for a game that will end at nearly 8 o’clock at night, and then have to get back to Manchester. That is very difficult. There is also still some stigmatisation, which is not good. Some of these challenges are present in other sports, too, so it is important that football fans are not singled out.

I think that we have found the right balance, but there is an issue coming down the line that either this Government or a future Government will have to address: some of the things that are happening at football matches. What happened at that Euros final did not happen in isolation. Social media can skew our perception of these things, but we see videos that show that behaviours are changing.

As I said, this year, I have witnessed some things in toilets, both away at Brentford and at home to Chelsea, that really shocked me—illegal acts, generally centred around drugs. Poor stewards are left to try to deal with that. There are behaviours at football matches that should not be condoned. People go to have fun, and we know that they are going to shout, swear and drink. All that is fine, but the laws of the land must still apply, whether in public or in the toilet of a football stadium. It behoves us to look at some of that, but what we do must be evidence-based, and we must work with the Football Supporters Association, which does such good work, to ensure that interventions are proportionate. The Bill is absolutely a proportionate intervention, and I give it my full support.

Off-road Biking

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Latham. I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on securing the debate, and all those who have contributed. The hon. Member was right to make a robust case in favour of the reforms he mentioned. This is a real and significant issue. All our constituencies are of a slightly different nature, as we have heard, but the issue is having an impact in all our communities in some way, and in many of our communities in a really serious way. The recklessness that the hon. Member talked about is having everyday consequences, which I will unpack in a little bit.

I was particularly struck by the point made by the hon. Member for Darlington about the merry-go-round of auctioned-off products then being re-entered and chased again. We have clearly not reached where we need to be in deciding what the final sanction ought to be for those who misuse this technology in the ways that they do. For me, the final destination is crushing: that is the ultimate sanction, which should provide some awareness of the consequences of misusing this technology.

This issue will be hugely important over the next few years. If, even as recently as the last general election, when we were returned to this place, we had said that by the end of the Parliament we would be talking about what are now seeing—millions of illegal journeys on our roads across the whole year, and that is before we get to what the hon. Gentleman says has happened off-road—I think we would have been surprised, but that is essentially what we have now. We have new technologies that mean that people are using roads and riding off-road in ways that we were not expecting, and in ways that they are not personally covered for and that those who fall victim to them might not be either.

In my community, I think in particular of a woman from just outside my constituency, Linda Davis, who was 71 years old when she was killed by a 14-year-old riding a privately owned e-scooter on the pavements. That is a shocking story, and it is obviously terrible for her family, but as the hon. Gentleman said, we are seeing those sorts of journeys on pavements throughout the country. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer) said, “off road” is perhaps not the most useful distinction, because it literally means anything that is not the road itself, yet we are seeing this across all aspects of our community, whether on the pavements, as in that case, or on the headland, as she mentioned. This place needs to catch up with that, because behaviour change and technology change are currently outpacing us.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made some important points about the legitimate uses for these technologies. Indeed, they are essential in rural communities and for those operating rural businesses, and we should recognise that those people have a long, established record of using the technology properly. He gave the example from his own family of passing it down across generations, and of responsible ownership and usage, and said that actually it can be good sport as well—he talked about an example from outside Newtownards. It should not be beyond us to promote a regime in which that is possible.

As the hon. Gentleman said, this is not just an urban-versus-rural issue. He talked about the damage that can be done to fields, crops or livestock, which would also frustrate those rural business owners who are doing the right thing. As I say, these two things do not have to be in competition; however, he also talked about disrespect, which is what I think sits at the root of this issue. I will come to this when I make some points of my own, but that brings us to what we do about antisocial behaviour in this country—how we measure it and match up against it.

The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) talked about how we could turn this into something positive and use it as a diversionary activity. I have to say that speeding around on a motorbike is not for me, but for millions of people it is, as he says, and we know that it can be attractive for young people. We can make that work for us. I think of the wonderful Crisp Vocational Provision in my constituency, which offers alternative provision to young people for whom mainstream education is not working by using this sort of industry, and particularly motor cars, as a way to connect with them, develop their interests and channel that energy into a positive place. We can do that too, so there could already be some positives from this debate.

Just to make a few points of my own, people who are going about their business, whatever it may be, should not have to contend with people riding off-road bikes, often without helmets and with face coverings, as we have heard, or perhaps without tax and insurance, churning up public and private land and creating other sorts of damage. We know that dangerous riding can put road users and pedestrians at risk of injury if they lose control of their vehicles, which, when we think of how they are sometimes ridden—wheelies down the middle of the road—is not unforeseeable.

Again, I think of an example from my own community —which happily we have been able to resolve to a significant degree—where residents of a care home for older people said that they did not want to leave and go into town, which was just down the road. Because the road has humps, bikes would come down the pavement instead, so as not to be restricted by the humps, and in many cases they had physically knocked people over. That was having a real quality-of-life impact on those residents, and of course the same thing can play out in a countryside setting or when people are walking their dogs.

I think this myself when I am walking the dog: when he is off the lead running around and I hear that buzz, which can be hard to place, it is a moment of panic. I would like to say that I have full control of the dog and he always listens to me, but he is still a dog, and we know that the riders often do not have full control, or may not see the dog. That is a moment of real risk when I think the dog is going to get hit, so I instantly charge around, get the dog on the lead and leave, and I see various other people do that, with parents and children scattering as well. There are real consequences to this behaviour, and it is really sad.

I am not going to do too much political analysis, but I know the Minister will; we have to do a little bit each. The sense of powerlessness in communities—that these things just happen to them now and that is the reality in their towns—is a sad thing. This is an issue of antisocial behaviour, but we are still learning from the impact and experience of having 10,000 fewer police officers on the beat. They are being added back, but we have seen 20,000 overall losses, which means there are now 10,000 fewer police officers and police community support officers on the frontline.

Police officers have a huge impact on creating a deterrent but—I know the Government are moving on this, and I am sure the Minister will say something about this—our police are not crime counters. Our police should be problem solvers, and this is one of those local problems that needs to be solved. Some of the solutions may involve the physical environment and how we can configure it to make sure that people are not recklessly travelling around, but other solutions will be more positive. As the hon. Members for North Antrim and for Strangford said, those solutions should involve channelling that energy elsewhere—that is what we want to see from proper neighbourhood and community policing.

At the moment we have a situation in which 50% of the population say that they no longer see police on their streets, and we know that 90% of crimes currently go unsolved. Our police are making the best of what is available to them, but they are stretched too thinly. We need the restoration of problem solving and hotspot policing so that communities are not defenceless and powerless, and so that they can start to take that power back.

I wonder whether the Minister will make some interesting points, because we have had the conversation about registration. The case for registration is strong, but my anxiety with it is that I fear it might fall on those who do the right thing, and that those who choose not to follow law—as they are not doing in this case—will try to work round it. That loop could be closed with detection. The Minister and I had significant conversations about that during the passage of the Criminal Justice Bill—indeed, with you in the Chair, Mrs Latham.

On the use of technology, this problem is fundamentally a new and novel challenge driven by technology, and the solutions may well be there too. I know that the Minister has a short, medium and very long version of his facial recognition speech, and I am not trying to bait that longer version out of him again. Facial recognition software would not always be useful because of mask wearing, but it could be useful in many cases. Has he considered it with regard to off-road biking?

I want to take this opportunity to talk about what I think is a limiting factor in how we can tackle this problem: our data collection on antisocial behaviour. There is significant variety across the country in how antisocial behaviour is reported and dealt with, so it would be very difficult to compare even Derbyshire with Nottinghamshire—never mind the rest of our communities—when considering prioritisation. What are the Minister’s thoughts on better data collection in respect of off-road biking? We all clearly face the same problem, but I do not think we are able to understand it, in either an aggregate or comparative sense. Getting a grip of it and adequate resourcing are likely to be challenges as well, as will be building public confidence. I hope we will come back to that in due course.

I shall finish by saying that we are legislators, so there is a temptation to fall on legislation as a solution to all our problems, but I am not sure that that would work in this case. This is a behaviour problem and a respect problem. The issue is the fact that we have not competed on our streets on the side of the vast majority who do the right thing. Better and more active community policing that solves problems and is based around hotspots is a better model than the one we have had over the past 14 years. I suspect we might hear something similar from the Minister—I hope so—but there remains a resourcing issue, because we are short by 10,000 important pairs of boots. I hope we hear more from the Minister on the Government’s commitment in that respect.

This is an issue that is not going away. We will keep coming back to it because every day as we open social media or our emails, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool did, there will be more evidence of this happening, time and again. People are rightly looking to us for action, and we need to ensure that we meet that expectation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

I am glad that my hon. Friend welcomes hotspot policing, which will provide an opportunity for officers patrolling on foot to report to their colleagues if they see off-road bikes being used.

Let me turn to the question of catching off-road bikers behaving antisocially, which has been raised by a number of Members. First, as I said, hotspot patrolling will help to identify those people so that help can be called in. Secondly, my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington made a point about 101 response times, which vary greatly by police force. Some are very good, and some are frankly terrible. From March this year—next month—we will be publishing tables of 101 response times, as we do already for 999 response times, to shine a light on which forces are doing well and which are not. I hope that that will include not just the answer time but the abandon rate—what percentage of incoming calls get abandoned. I hope that that will shine a light on the 101 issue and provide an opportunity for those forces that are doing badly to improve their performance dramatically.

We then come to the question of how we catch people after the incident has been reported or noticed. I know there are different policies in different police forces around pursuit and what is sometimes called tactical contact. That is an operational matter for police chiefs, but I would urge chief constables, within the law and the realms of a proper approach to safety, to pursue people on ATVs and off-road bikes. If we do not pursue them, the problem just escalates.

I am a London MP, and we do not really have this problem so much here, but we did have a slightly different version of it a few years ago. People were using mopeds to commit crimes such as stealing mobile phones and expensive handbags or stealing from a shop. They would flee on a moped because Metropolitan police policy at the time—this was about four or five years ago—was not to pursue if the person on the moped was not wearing a helmet. Word soon got around that this was the case, and so-called moped-enabled crime went through the roof because criminals knew that if they were on a moped with no helmet, they would not get chased—they would just get away.

I remember having meetings with the then commissioner of the Met and other London MPs about this, urging the then commissioner to change the policy and consider pursuing and on occasion even using tactical contact, which means physical contact to stop the person. Eventually, the problem got so bad that they did adopt a pursue policy and a carefully calibrated tactical contact policy, and the problem rapidly and dramatically reduced. I would ask all chief constables around the country to keep that example in mind. I understand that they do not want to cause an injury, but equally, if we do nothing and do not pursue, the problem snowballs and gets worse and worse.

There is more we can do on technology, which a number of Members, including the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Nottingham North, mentioned. Using drones to pursue and track off-road bikes and ATVs is really important. We need to work with the Civil Aviation Authority to ensure that we can fly these drones beyond the line of sight. There are currently some restrictions, so I will meet the Civil Aviation Authority soon to try to get those relaxed for the purpose of law enforcement. I have met a company from America with a very interesting solution that is used by many American police departments, including the New York police department. They have autonomous drones that can fly to a specified location automatically, with a system that avoids crashing into buildings, electricity pylons, people and so on. I think they can even lock on to a target and pursue it automatically. They can provide video feedback to the control room. That technology solution will help us a lot.

[Alex Norris]

I knew the Minister would love that.

[Chris Philp]

It is excellent; the hon. Gentleman should definitely look at it. Once we have got the Civil Aviation Authority regulations modified, this autonomous drone technology has enormous potential.

I am delighted that the shadow Minister mentioned facial recognition. If we can get a picture of the miscreants mounted on the ATV or the off-road bike, we can run that through the retrospective facial recognition database and hopefully get a match. Even if they flee the scene, at least we will know who they are. As I have explained previously, the quality of the AI algorithm is now much better than it was, so the chances of getting a match are really quite high. [Interruption.] By the way, I apologise for my hoarse voice, Mrs Latham. I have a slight cough, as you can probably tell, so I am sorry if I am a little bit croaky.

Some Members have mentioned the problems with balaclavas. We are about to make an amendment on Report to the Criminal Justice Bill to change and expand the existing police power under section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which concerns face coverings, including balaclavas. At the moment, the police can only ask someone to take off a balaclava or a face covering. They can make the request, but they must do that proactively, and then the person can drive off and put it back on. We will amend that so that it will be possible to require face coverings to not be used at all in particular areas, unless for medical or religious purposes. If there was a particular physical area, whether it was the top of a Welsh mountain or anywhere else, where face coverings were a problem, the police could potentially use the updated section 60AA power to say to people that they could not wear balaclavas or face coverings in that area. If a police officer then saw someone driving along, even if they were initially driving lawfully and safely and were registered, licensed and insured, and they had a face covering, perhaps because they intended to behave antisocially later on, the officer would have a basis on which to stop them. I hope that that is a change that colleagues will welcome at Report stage of the Criminal Justice Bill on the Floor of the House in a few weeks’ time.

I think I have covered a number of the points that have arisen during the debate. However, I will add one point around preventing these bikes from being stolen and then misused. I pay great tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) for his private Member’s Bill, which became the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 after receiving Royal Assent last July. Once we fully commence that Act, which we will do shortly, it will require all-terrain vehicles, among other things, to be forensically marked upon sale, with the forensic marking to be recorded in a register. It will also require an immobiliser to be fitted to such vehicles, which will make it much harder—I would not say impossible, but a lot harder—for these ATVs to be stolen and then misused for the purposes of antisocial behaviour. That would address this carousel issue, whereby ATVs or off-road bikes get stolen and then used antisocially, which the hon. Members for Strangford and for North Antrim, and my hon. Friends the Members for Hartlepool and for Darlington, all referred to.

Reference was also made to vehicle recovery charges, which are applied when a vehicle is taken off the road and seized by the police. Following a review, the Government made changes last year to increase those vehicle recovery fees by 28%, which will hopefully assist police forces in recovering the cost of taking such vehicles off the streets.

We now have record police officer numbers across England and Wales—more than we have ever had at any time in history. The numbers of officers allocated to particular local areas are also at a record level. The subset of that, which the shadow Minister likes to quote, is not 10,000 any more; it is a much, much lower figure, so he should update his figures. The number of officers allocated to local policing duties is at a record level, and we expect those officers not to be behind desks, because we are investing in technology to do a lot of the administration; we expect them to be on the street, visibly patrolling and catching criminals.

We consider all forms of crime to be serious, whether it is antisocial behaviour, criminal damage, reckless driving, as we have been discussing, or theft from shops. All of that needs to be taken seriously. The police need to patrol and make arrests for all those criminal offences. We have now given them the resources, combined with the over £900 million a year extra in the next financial year that will go to police and crime commissioners. The police have the resources and the officer numbers, and we are making sure that the law keeps up with these issues, so we expect robust action by the police on behalf of constituents.

I would like to conclude by thanking Members again for participating in the debate. There are some points to look at a little further, and I am very happy to do that. However, I conclude by again commending my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington for bringing this important issue to the attention of the House.

Police Grant Report

Alex Norris Excerpts

Wednesday 7th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

Our thanks go to police officers, police community support officers and police staff across the country for their work. It can be dangerous, but it is always important. Our communities value it greatly, and it is essential to British life. We are grateful and lucky to have them. I also thank police and crime commissioners. They are 85 days away from the next set of PCC elections. Some will not stand again, some might not be returned, and some will be re-elected. Again, our thanks go to them all for doing a very difficult job, often across huge geographies, representing and stepping up for their communities. As I said, we are lucky to have them.

Police forces across England and Wales are still living with the impact of 14 years of failure by the Government. Rates of serious violence are up, and charge rates are plummeting. I am amazed by what the Minister said about morale among rank and file officers, which we know is at low levels. The loss of staff has been significant in the last year, and it is very strange to hear that that is not a problem. We know that chief constables and police and crime commissioners are grappling with limited resources and trying to deal with the crisis in public confidence, which is frankly disconnected from what the Minister just said. All the while, the real, everyday problems that our constituents see in their communities are getting worse, not better.

We have witnessed a collapse in neighbourhood policing in recent years, with 10,000 fewer officers on the beat. Police forces are still reeling from the years of experience and expertise that were lost when the Government cut police officers by 20,000. Of the new recruits brought in when the Government realised that grave error, an estimated 6,000 officers are not on frontline duty but are instead covering roles that are traditionally done by vital civilian staff. Is it any wonder that 50% of people say that they no longer ever see police on the streets? I ask colleagues whose case better marries up with what their constituents say: the Minister’s or mine. I know the answer.

[Imran Hussain]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent case. He is right that during the last decade, due to austerity, there have been substantial cuts to neighbourhood policing. In West Yorkshire, we have lost 1,000 neighbourhood police officers. Does he agree that neighbourhood policing is the essential link between the police and our communities? Not only does it increase confidence in policing but it makes the role much easier by preventing antisocial behaviour and in many other ways, because of the bond between the community and the police.

[Alex Norris]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I absolutely share his view. Neighbourhood policing is the bedrock of policing. A lot of the problems that we are trying to deal with—I will speak about them in a second—have grown and festered because we have given up on neighbourhood policing for well over a decade and have lost control of our streets. Whether it is antisocial behaviour, shoplifting on high streets, the epidemic level of violence and abuse against our retail workers, communities where there is drug dealing in broad daylight, or the horrific levels of knife crime—up 77% since 2015—the experience of our constituents under this Government is that criminals get let off and victims get let down. After 14 years in government—the Minister did not use this in his statistical run-down—over 90% of crimes go unsolved, meaning that criminals are less than half as likely to be caught than they were when the Government took office in 2010. That is the Government’s record on law and order.

The Government and the Minister want us to believe that we have never had it so good, but everywhere we look there are serious problems, which are compounded to a degree by the settlement. This is an unamendable motion about more money for our policing, and of course we will support it, but the detail that sits beneath it deserves serious scrutiny. Colleagues will have seen the dismay across policing at the 6% cash increase, set below the level of the pay award. That is before on-costs, and before inflation. The settlement exacerbates rather than resolves some of the funding challenges. Particularly challenging—the Minister said this himself—is that a third of the settlement is based on the assumption that police and crime commissioners will increase council tax for local ratepayers to the maximum. Yet again we see a shift from central Government funding to local communities for vital everyday services.

As the Minister said, the Government have lifted the cap on the precept so that PCCs can raise it by £13 next year for band D properties. That in itself is a challenge for people’s finances, but it also creates differential challenges across the country, as the money is not then spread equitably. The most deprived areas of our country, which have the fewest higher-banded properties paying higher rates of council tax, get the least return from a local precept. Better-off areas will get more funding because their tax base is higher. That is not levelling up, which I suspect has long since been put in a drawer somewhere, but drives a wedge between different parts of our country when the safety and security of our constituents is at stake. That failure of leadership has consequences for less well-off areas—the parts of the country more likely to suffer from antisocial behaviour, violence, sexual offences or robbery.

[Chris Philp]

The shadow Minister said that the balance of funding is being shifted on to local areas. To be clear about the facts, the increase in the central Government grant going to police and crime commissioners is just over £600 million. The anticipated increase through the precept is about £300 million. The Government grant increase is about double the precept increase. The central Government finance line is bearing by far the lion’s share of the increase—about two thirds of it, in fact.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for that intervention. I do not think that it is revelatory—indeed, we will decades if not a century and a half’s worth of precedent—that central Government fund policing in this country. What I am saying is that, year on year, the share provided by the local ratepayer is increasing, and this is a continuation of that. It is legitimate to ask whether that is the best funding model. I will get to the funding formula shortly, but, as I say, that differential impact is not a serious way to bring down crime rates across the country.

To add insult to injury, the Minister says in his written statement:

“When setting their budgets, PCCs should be mindful of the cost of living pressures that householders are facing.”

Are the Government for real? Given the Minister’s role in the previous Government, and given the Government’s indifference to the challenges that people across the UK face, that is front beyond imagination. Telling our PCCs that they should be mindful? I say, “Physician, heal thyself.” The public will not be taken for fools by the Government, though. Just as, when they open their mortgage statements, they know what has happened, when they open their council tax bill, it will tell them all they need to know.

I turn now to the funding formula, which other colleagues have raised. Countless Ministers, including this Minister, have stood at the Dispatch Box or answered written questions over the years, pledging to do something about a system that is badly overdue for renewal. Members across the House have been raising this for many years with the Government. In December, the Treasury informed the Public Accounts Committee that a new formula would be introduced as soon as possible. In January, the Minister said, in response to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Alistair Strathern), that he would update the House on work to update the formula

“as soon as I can.”—[Official Report, 15 January 2024; Vol. 743, c. 569.]

Yet, two weeks ago, we saw in the press that the can is to be kicked down the road again, because No. 10 is worried about police funding cuts in a general election year.

[Alistair Strathern (Mid Bedfordshire) (Lab)]

I start by expressing my thanks for the fantastic work undertaken by local police officers right across Bedfordshire. However, with the Conservatives’ own police and crime commissioner agreeing that the current unfair funding formula leaves no meat on the bone at all for local police, does my hon. Friend agree that it is police officers and local residents who are being let down by inaction on this issue, and that Ministers owe it to them to live up to their previous commitment to ensure that a fair formula is delivered within this Parliament?

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for that contribution from my hon. Friend. Yes, I think the public would expect not only that the formulas reflect the need across the country, but that when promises are made repeatedly over multiple years, those promises are kept; even if the upshot was difficult political questions, the Government ought to rise above that. Instead, it just looks as though they are trying to dodge responsibility. I hope the Minister will be clear in his summing-up about the status of that formula. Has No. 10 Downing Street told him to put it on hold? If not, when will it be announced? The public deserve to know.

[Jonathan Edwards]

May I ask the hon. Gentleman kindly to take a look at the recommendations of the Welsh Government’s own independent commission on the constitutional future of Wales, which reported earlier this month? The commission strongly argued in favour of devolving policing and criminal justice powers to Wales, a position that is supported by the Welsh Government and the current First Minister. That would make a huge difference to funding for policing in Wales, because it would be based on population share and Barnett consequentials of spending in England, unlike the funding formula at present.

[Alex Norris]

I have had conversations with my colleagues in Wales on that matter. There is something to be said about the funding formula and Barnett—I am not conflating them, but I think that shows how badly broken the formula is. That point is well made and, as I say, I have had conversations with colleagues in Wales about it.

I will move on to the Minister’s priorities, as outlined in the settlement, and the police uplift programme. As I said earlier, 6,000 of the new recruits are not where the public would expect them to be. I have had a front-row seat, over my few months in post, as the Government have gone through all the contortions on this issue. Last autumn, they told us we had record numbers of police on the neighbourhood beat, but that has long since been disproven. Earlier this year, the Minister tried a new tack and said the Government would rebadge response police as neighbourhood police, so they could add those numbers together to would match up with the rhetoric. The public have seen right through that as well.

Last week, the Home Secretary tried another approach, demanding that police chiefs put more officers on the beat as part of his “back to basics” campaign—as if those chiefs were not working in overdrive to do that all the time, all year round. We respect and recognise the huge amount of work they are doing to get police out where communities want them. That is another approach by the Government, and another one that will fail; I was in short trousers the last time they did a “back to basics” campaign, but I do not think it has a very good history and I am not sure it is the right approach for them.

What we see, as always, is denial and deflection; it is always someone else’s fault. Labour has a better plan. Our community policing guarantee would rebuild neighbourhood policing. It would put 13,000 police and police community support officers back on the beat, embedded in our communities; not counting crimes, but solving problems and working with local communities to tackle and deter crime. That would be funded through a police efficiency and collaboration programme, saving £360 million through centralised standard-setting for procurement and increased collaboration on shared services and specialist functions. The Minister said in his statement that he wants to reduce inefficiencies, so that is a two-for-one for him: more efficiency and more officers on the frontline. Why are we not seeing those plans from the Government today?

To conclude, if the Minister expects garlands from colleagues, he will not get them from Labour. He tells the British people repeatedly that they have never had it so good on crime and policing. That rhetoric does not match reality or the public experience. As a result, this settlement is in line with those that preceded it for more than a decade. It will not deliver. The Government are wrong and the public know it. I know that sometimes the public and people in the policing family lose hope; all I would say is that, if we all pull together, we can make sure this is the last police grant settlement that this Government make.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Laura Farris)]

It is a pleasure to wind up this short but perfectly formed debate on police funding, and I am grateful to the Members who have spoken in it. Before I respond to the points that have been raised, I want to offer my own personal word of thanks and appreciation for the police officers, all the staff and the volunteers who work tirelessly to keep us safe and run towards danger when everybody else is leaving the scene. We are fortunate to have them on our side.

I do not propose to repeat the headline parts of the settlement that we are debating today. I will simply say that our investment of £11.4 billion is a significant commitment to policing, which goes to the heart of our three priorities for the police. The first is personnel: we have delivered ahead of time on our commitment to recruit 20,000 police officers in this Parliament, and today’s funding will continue to support and properly resource the 149,000 police officers who are employed in England and Wales. It will also allow us to give them a 7% pay rise on average, which is consistent with the recommendation of the Police Remuneration Review Body.

The second priority is, of course, public protection. Whether shadow Ministers like it or not, we are proud of the progress that, according to the crime survey for England and Wales, we have made since 2010. I know that they do not like that survey, but the Office for National Statistics—which the public are entitled to rely on—has described it as

“the best estimate of long-term trends in crimes against the household population.”

Shadow Ministers cannot get away from the fact that that survey says that overall crime levels have more than halved since 2010. All offensive weapon crimes have come down by more than 52%, and thefts, including domestic burglaries, have halved—in fact, domestic burglary is now at the lowest level on record.

I listened carefully to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris). I say this with respect: he gave three examples of where he asserted the Government had failed, but two of those concerned the retail environment. I accept that there has been an issue with retail theft, but he had to give two examples that were focused on retail crime because he did not want to get into domestic burglary.

[Alex Norris]

Is it not serious, then?

[Laura Farris]

Of course it is serious, but it has fallen so much. My right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) quite properly talked about homicide, the maximum high-harm offence. Homicide rates have fallen since 2010, but we are making progress every year: they have fallen by 10% in the past 12 months alone.

Our third priority is performance. The Government make no apology for seeking to drive improvement and efficiencies; one such efficiency was the partnership between the police and the BlueLight Commercial exercise that has already saved over £170 million, but we are continuing to drive efficiencies through technological advancements in areas such as detection. My right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South gave the example of facial recognition technology, which has been so successful in his own constituency. There is also imagery and better intelligence, and we are improving the performance of police officers themselves through the deployment of specialist trained officers for the most sensitive crimes, such as rape. More than 2,000 specialist trained officers will be deployed across all 43 forces in England and Wales by April of this year.

I will now address some of the points that were made by hon. Members, starting with my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double). First, he is correct, and it is good to see, that police numbers in his constituency have risen: they are north of 3,650 in Devon and Cornwall. He is also right to mention the fact that so much police time has historically been consumed by dealing with mental health problems, and I hope I can provide him with some reassurance. There is now a national roll-out of a scheme called Right Care, Right Person, which is effectively a toolkit that was very successfully piloted in 2021 by Humberside police. It means that police will not ordinarily attend a mental health incident: there is an exception when there is a possibility of a referral under section 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983, but other than that, they will not be involved. It is estimated that on a nationwide basis, that could save 1 million hours of police officer time in any year. My hon. Friend also made some very valid points about geography and the special requirements of policing in rural areas, which Labour has never fully or adequately dealt with. The reason—I say this very respectfully—is that very few Labour MPs represent rural areas, and there is a consistent ignorance of the kinds of crimes that are specific to rural environments.

In his very good speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) acknowledged that Suffolk constabulary had received a percentage increase. I listened carefully to what he said about the safer streets programme and the £500,000 reduction, but I would gently point out to him that overall, Suffolk constabulary is getting an increase of £11 million in its budget. What he has referred to involves only a small number of officers, but I promise to take his point away and get back to him on it.

To conclude, we could not be clearer: public protection is our priority. We have delivered on it, and we will always stand on the side of the law-abiding majority and support the police. We will take the fight to the criminals again and again, even as their nefarious practices evolve. This Government will always ensure that police have the resources, powers and capability to do their crucial work, and this settlement underlines our enduring commitment to strong and effective policing in England and Wales. I commend it to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Police Grant Report (England and Wales) 2024–25 (HC 482), which was laid before this House on 31 January, be approved.

Knife and Sword Ban

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Before we begin the debate on banning knives and swords from UK streets, I remind hon. Members that, under the terms of the House resolution on sub judice matters, they should not refer to any individual cases that are currently before the courts.

I call the shadow Minister.

12.47 pm

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House condemns the Government for overseeing a 77 per cent increase in knife crime since 2015; recognises the devastating impact that knife crime has on victims, their families and the wider community; acknowledges that the Government recently announced measures to ban zombie knives and machetes; believes, nonetheless, that this legislation does not go nearly far enough, meaning that a number of dangerous types of knives and swords will remain legal and available on UK streets; therefore calls on the Government to address the shortcomings of the ban by extending it to cover ninja swords and consulting on a further extension; and further calls for the Government to establish an end-to-end review of online knife sales and introduce criminal liability for senior management of websites which indirectly sell illegal knives online.

Ronan Kanda was 16. He went to get a PlayStation controller from his friend, and was yards away from home when he was murdered. He was murdered by two teenagers, who used a ninja sword. They had obtained that sword by buying it online, using someone else’s ID to collect it. They stabbed him in a case of mistaken identity. This is a heartbreaking, tragic story of a young life lost, with a family trapped in the most extraordinary grief, and we are here today because it is time that Parliament acts to tackle knife crime head-on.

Seventy seven per cent. That is how much knife crime has risen since 2015, according to the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office in recent weeks. That equates to a staggering 48,716 violent and sexual offences committed involving a knife or sharp instrument in the past year. There is a huge human cost to this, with 261 lives lost in the year up to March 2022—the last complete data available to us—and roughly four in 10 murders involving a knife or sharp instrument. For those carrying a knife, almost half of cases led to no further action, with current rules allowing those carrying knives to escape further sanction by writing an apology letter.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way because he is describing a situation that is virtually identical to the one we faced in Scotland 15-plus years ago. The initiative taken by the then Strathclyde police force and the Scottish Government since has been a very different approach to tackling it—that of treating it as a public health and social problem, with a violence reduction unit. There is nothing in the hon. Gentleman’s motion that I would disagree with, but it is like playing whack-a-mole with the different sorts of knives available. Does not he agree that this issue requires a much more fundamental and radical approach?

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and that will be part of my case, so I am sure I will be able to meet that test.

It feels like most days we wake up to another tragic story of death and families torn apart. The most basic search online tells us it is all over the country—Bristol, Feltham, Warrington, Haverhill. My own community of Nottingham was rocked last summer when my constituent Ian Coates and University of Nottingham students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar were killed with a knife, and I stand with their families in their attempts establish the facts and failings in this dreadful case.

Things are getting worse, not better, and that means more young lives lost, more children drawn into crime and more exploited by criminals. We know this has a huge impact on our society: hundreds of families crippled by grief for murdered loved ones; life chances of young people squandered; potential left unfulfilled; and the criminals getting away with it and going on to cause further misery. Knife crime destroys lives, devastates families and creates fear in our communities. That is why this debate matters. We must invest in our young people so that they are supported to make the right decisions in life, and we must come down hard on those involved in knife crime—real support, real consequences.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Under the Conservative Government and a Conservative police and crime commissioner, Cleveland has the highest crime rate in the UK, and only this weekend we saw another serious stabbing a mile down the road from me in Norton village. We hear the Government try to talk the talk but the bottom line has to be that they are not taking the necessary actions. I am sure my hon. Friend will agree.

[Alex Norris]

I share my hon. Friend’s view. He talks of a case in his community, and we are waking up seemingly so many days in every week with another case in another area in villages, towns and cities. The public are rightly looking for action from us, and that is what I will be setting out in my explanation of this motion.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

I am glad the shadow Minister talked about “us”. I understand that this is an Opposition day debate and the Government will be criticised, but is it not the case that what the public—on the left and the right and the apolitical—are looking for is cross-party consensus where it can be found in this place to deal with what is a very important issue, and that party politics should be set aside for greater cross-party working? Does he also agree that stop and search has a part to play? On machetes and zombie knives, banning them is not the only solution, although it is a good place to start, but the most radical step is to work together.

[Alex Norris]

We have been clear throughout that when the Government bring forward proposals designed to take this issue on we will give them our support. That is true of the forthcoming legislation on zombie knives, although we have concerns about the scope, but there has to be action, and where there is not action it is our role to point that out. I think the right hon. Gentleman will find that in the tone and spirit of my contribution: we serve no one if we do not do that, but of course we will build consensus wherever we can, and I hope the whole House can get behind our motion today.

It would be a key mission of a future Labour Government to make the streets safe and halve knife crime within 10 years. Recently, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and the Leader of the Opposition unveiled our plans to deliver this with a crackdown on knife crime today and a radical youth prevention programme, and this motion starts to build that out. We are clear: no more loopholes, no more caveats, no more false promises—we need a total crackdown on the availability of serious weapons on Britain’s streets.

[Sarah Dyke (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comments on this often heartbreaking topic. My constituent Julie’s daughter Poppy Devey Waterhouse was killed in her home with a knife already in her kitchen. Currently, offenders convicted of murder who use a weapon already available at the crime scene have a starting sentence 10 years lower than those who brought a weapon with them. Domestic violence murderers can bank on leniency. Does the hon. Member agree that women killed by knives already in the home need to see equal justice?

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Member raises an important point that needs parliamentary scrutiny. We have an anxiety, as hon. Friends have mentioned many times, that crimes happening in domestic spaces are in some way deemed less significant and that can be reflected in sentencing. This bears our parliamentary scrutiny.

To turn to the motion, we want to see restrictions on the sale of the most serious weapons, those with no functional purpose. Since 2015 the Government have released 16 different press releases about zombie knives but action has been slow to follow. We are pleased that two weeks ago we saw the statutory instrument aimed at taking some of the knives and machetes off the streets, and, as I have said, we will support the Government in that venture, but I hope to hear from the Minister an explanation of why that is a ban not for now or a few weeks’ time, but for September, eight months away. This is an immediate problem that needs more urgency; where is that urgency and leadership? He can be assured of our support, so let’s get on with it.

We also believe, as set out in the motion, that we should go further. We would broaden the ban to include a wider range of weapons and to toughen existing rules on serration and length. That would mean finally banning blades such as ninja swords, the weapon that killed Ronan Kanda. His incredible family are campaigning for this, ably supported by their Member for Parliament, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), and they are right: any ban on offensive weapons that would not have taken off the street the blade that killed their son is insufficient.

There is also an unintended consequence of leaving out ninja swords. Those who sell these weapons are indifferent to their customers and their customers’ intentions. If colleagues think I am overstating my case, they should just put into a search engine “zombie knives” or “ninja swords” and look at how they are marketed. If knives and machetes are prohibited, these firms will just move on to pushing ninja swords at customers. This is a hole in the Government’s plan and it must be plugged.

We can go further still here. Many banned knives continue to be sold where young people can buy them and have them delivered to their home within a few days. We would introduce, and believe the Government should introduce, criminal sanctions on the tech executives who allow knife sales on their online marketplaces—not just Ofcom sanctions as the Government have opted for, but proper criminal sanctions to send a very serious message to these leaders that if their platforms are being used, and they are not actively making sure they are not being used, for the sale of dangerous weapons, there are going to be very serious consequences, not ones that can be priced in as the cost of doing business. To add to that, we must ensure we have the right tools in law to deal with the digital age.

To drive this work forward, our motion calls for a rapid review of online knife sales from the point of purchase through to delivery, in particular looking at strengthening ID and age checks conducted by Royal Mail and Border Force for UK-bound parcels. Currently, all too often serious weapons can be purchased online with loose ID and age checks, with little oversight, and with no background checks. Every time oversight is loosened and checks are not carried out properly, these weapons potentially fall into the wrong hands and are used to kill. We must ensure we have the most robust system possible to prevent this. To those who carry these weapons, we need to send the unmistakable message that the law will come down hard on them—not apology letters, not weak warnings, but proper and serious interventions.

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a great speech. Will he support two parents in my constituency, Leanne and Mandy, whose children were killed by knife crime? They are calling for much stronger sentences and greater deterrence for knife crime; does he agree with me and their families?

[Alex Norris]

I am going to set out a few of them shortly, but I would be very interested in meeting Leanne and Mandy, if my hon. Friend could help facilitate that, to hear what more they might want to see.

Our commitment is for every offender to be referred to a youth offending team and have a mandatory bespoke action plan to prevent reoffending. As part of that we need tougher new guidance so that serious penalties are always considered where appropriate, such as curfews, tagging and behavioural contracts. Too many of these are being overlooked and insufficient sanctions such as a letter of apology being used in their stead. That is wrong; we need stronger guidance from the centre on this. But speaking to the point made by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), all of this on its own will not resolve and remove the issue of knife crime in our communities.

We must invest in young people, because prevention is better than cure. We need a total approach—not an either/or, but both. That is particularly germane to this debate, because we know that those who seek to profit from the sale of dangerous weapons shapeshift and adapt around legislation—that is one of the challenges. So we must tackle demand and tackle issues that mean that young people think they need to carry harmful weapons.

Building on the success of Sure Start—the last truly transformative prevention programme for young children—we would create the Young Futures programme to help prevent violent crime. It would be a targeted programme in every area to identify the young people most at risk of being drawn into violent crime and of buying these products that we are seeking to restrict. We would build around them a package of support that responds to the challenges they face.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

As well as providing support to young people—I welcome the £100 million of existing funding to divert and support young people through preventive work—does my hon. Friend agree that it is crucial to provide positive role models through mentoring to every young person in the country? I have worked on that with the charity UpRising, which I have chaired for many years. Does he also agree that we should look at institutions such as the Royal London Hospital and its trauma unit, which has worked on the frontline dealing with the results of knife crime, whether in hospitals or out with paramedics? We can draw on a great deal of knowledge to tackle this epidemic.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, because she has done incredible work that is admired by me and the shadow Home Secretary. A lot of what I am about to talk about is based on that experience, because that work has been very good.

The Young Futures programme will bring together services locally to better co-ordinate the delivery of preventive, evidence-based interventions around a young person that help to tackle mental health issues, substance abuse issues, and issues that people might get into with their friends and family. We will then bring that together in a national network that shares evidence, delivers support for teenagers at risk of being drawn into crime across boundaries and, where appropriate, could deliver universal youth provision. Then, crucially—this speaks to the point just made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali)—we would build out from that, with youth workers in accident and emergency units and in custody centres, and with mentors in pupil referral units, to target young people who are starting to be drawn to violence.

Those are change moments, particularly in healthcare and custody settings. We know it might be the moment when an individual who is sliding into serious violence, whether as a perpetrator or a victim, may need that intervention. It might be the moment where we can get that change in behaviour that will in many cases save their lives. That is why it is so crucial that we have this degree of investment into young people, because otherwise such measures will not work.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

The hon. Member makes good point. As the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) pointed out, a lot of this work has been going on in Scotland. Has the hon. Member met Medics Against Violence, whose “Navigator” project does exactly what he is talking about within a hospital setting? It intervenes through people with lived experience to try to get young people into that frame of mind where they might want to exit that lifestyle and that violence they have got themselves into.

[Alex Norris]

There is clearly much that we can learn from the Scottish approach. I have not had the opportunity to meet Medics Against Violence, but on the hon. Member’s recommendation I will seek to do that. We strongly support the idea of support and mentors in A&E and custody settings. The evidence shows that would be highly effective.

We need to end the exploitation of children and young people by criminal gangs, and that includes county lines. We need a new criminal offence of child exploitation and a new serious organised crime strategy to go after those cowards who make millions off the back of exploiting young people. To bring the change to deliver that, we need a new, proper cross-Government coalition to end knife crime, bringing together those who have key roles in tackling it and in keeping young people safe, whether they are Ministers, community leaders, faith leaders, the families of victims, sporting bodies, tech companies or young people themselves. Everybody should be brought into this fight. That is the sort of Government that we would seek to lead, if given the opportunity.

[Mr Louie French (Old Bexley and Sidcup) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making a passionate speech about bringing various people from across Government and communities together to tackle knife crime. When the shadow Home Secretary and the Leader of the Opposition held a summit in east London last year on knife crime, the Mayor of London, who is the police and crime commissioner, was nowhere to be seen. Can the hon. Member ask the shadow Home Secretary why?

[Alex Norris]

I have to say I am a little saddened by that intervention. This is a deeply serious issue about which the public expect to hear answers. I do not think the public would consider the policing of the diary of the Mayor, the hon. Gentleman or anybody else to be part of a substantive solution. I wrote my note for his intervention ahead of time, because I know that 86 days before a mayoral election, the Tories are much more interested in trying to fight that election than tackling the problem. If he really believes that is the approach—I do not, but it is for him to use his time as he chooses—let us put that to the people of London.

[Mark Pritchard]

On the point about working together, perhaps outside this House, rather than inside it, may I say I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman—yes, I agree with His Majesty’s Opposition—on working together more cohesively with local authorities, public bodies, health services and, in particular, around pupil referral units and exclusions? There are so many disparities throughout the country, and it makes sense to bring everybody together to look at best practice.

[Alex Norris]

That is a hugely important intervention from the right hon. Gentleman. I have real anxieties about pupil referral units, exclusions and internal exclusions. It was a problem prior to the pandemic, but what we are seeing with school absence only compounds that. There is a risk of there being a generation of young people who are vulnerable to these types of behaviour, unless we take the field and fight for their hearts and minds. The right hon. Gentleman and I are in the same position on that.

I will draw my remarks to a close, because lots of colleagues have lots to say. The motion before us in the name of the Leader of the Opposition is tightly drafted and calls for three of the most pressing changes that we believe are needed to kick-start this process: the ban on ninja swords, with a consultation on further extensions to the proposed ban on zombie knives; an end-to-end review of online knife sales; and criminal liability for senior executives of those websites who do not adequately prevent them from selling knives. We believe those are reasonable changes that the whole House can get behind, and I hope the Government will take them seriously. They should support this motion today. The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire and I have been working on the Criminal Justice Bill Committee for many weeks, and we will be tabling changes to enact those measures, and the Government should accept them. If they take up our ideas before the Bill’s next stages, we will support them, but we will not ignore the large-scale damage that knife crime is doing across the country. The public are rightly looking to us for leadership and action, and we stand ready to give them that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Yes, I am very willing to work with the hon. Lady and to look at detailed representations. I have been advised that those sections are quite broad-ranging. I have read them myself and—on the face of it, and reading them as a Member of Parliament would read any bit of legislation—they do strike me as very wide-ranging in their scope. However, I am of course happy to listen to particular representations and to discuss them. If those sections of the Serious Crime Act and the Modern Slavery Act contain lacunae, I would be willing to discuss that. I am looking forward to hearing from the hon. Lady on that topic and working with her if there are gaps to be filled.

We have talked about prevention and about the law needing to be strong enough, and we must come on to enforcement because we must protect our fellow citizens from criminal activity, knife crime in particular. Clearly, it is important to make sure that the police have the relevant resources. An Opposition Member referred to police numbers, and in March last year we achieved a headcount of 149,566 police officers—more than at any time in history. In fact, it is about 3,500 more than under the last Labour Government.

I would like those police officers to do a couple of things. I would like them to be patrolling in hotspots where crimes are a particular problem. We have been doing hotspot patrolling in 20 force areas, in what is called Project Grip and that has delivered very significant reductions in violent crime. We also trialled hotspot patrolling in 10 force areas, including Essex, Staffordshire and Lancashire, for antisocial behavioural last year, and those delivered reductions in antisocial behaviour of up to 36%.

Because that is working, from April this year—just a couple of months’ time—we are putting new funding of £66 million behind it, over and above the record police settlement. By the way, that settlement will see an extra £922 million go to police and crime commissioners, with that £66 million to fund hotspot patrolling in every single police force area in the country, targeted against antisocial behaviour and serious violence, because we know it works. I am sure Members will be lobbying their police and crime commissioners to make sure that those hotspot patrols take place in areas of concern to them. I know, for example, that one of the parts of Essex where those hotspot patrols have taken place is Southend, and it has been effective at reducing antisocial behaviour there.

Stop and search is another important part of this equation. It would seem that the Mayor of London and some Opposition Members do not like it, and I understand their concerns, but we need to use stop and search confidently and proactively—done lawfully and respectfully, of course—because it has taken 60,000 knives off the streets in the last four years. Every month, in London alone, 400 knives are taken off the streets by stop and search. We need to use it confidently and proactively and not pull back from using it, because it will save lives. When we talk to the families of victims—who, sadly, often come from ethnic minority communities—they say, “If only my son’s murderer had been stopped and searched on the way to the murder.” That is the kind of thing we hear people say.

If anyone is concerned about disproportionality—it was a topic I wanted to look at myself—the rate at which knives or drugs are successfully found on people who are stopped and searched is about the same regardless of ethnicity; whether someone is white, black, Asian or any ethnicity, the find rate is about the same, at approximately 22% or 23%. If there was disproportionality or unfair behaviour by the police, we would find a difference, but we do not. So I urge all chief constables and PCCs to use stop and search confidently and proactively.

My hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) mentioned scanning technology. Technology is being developed—it is not ready for deployment yet, but it is being developed and we are putting funding into it this year—to scan people walking down the street, for example, semi-covertly. It is not a knife arch but is a much smaller scanning device, and it can scan people to see whether they have a knife somewhere on their person. That is obviously much less intrusive than a stop and search, does not lead to some of the tension stop and search can lead to, and it is obviously much quicker to do. I am hopeful that if we can deploy that scanning technology, it will make it near-impossible to carry a knife in a high-traffic place such as a high street in London. We are investing in that technology.

There is also an opportunity to catch more perpetrators using facial recognition, including live facial recognition, which we discussed in the Bill Committee at some length.

[Alex Norris]

Don’t do this again!

[Chris Philp]

The shadow Minister is worried that I am going to spend the next 20 minutes describing it; I am not going to do that, but I will say that in the last week there has been a further deployment of live facial recognition in Croydon and it has caught wanted people. Over the past few weeks, people have been caught who were wanted for knife offences, rape and other very serious offences who would not otherwise have been caught. So live facial recognition can help us there as well. A strong approach to enforcement is critical, too.

We heard some political points from the Opposition Members. I have tried to deliver these concluding remarks in a spirit that is not too political, but a few Members said they thought the solution to this problem was a general election. I would politely and gently say that the largest police force in the country is London’s, and it has a Labour police and crime commissioner. Labour Members have said the way London is run is a model for a future Labour Government, but of the 43 police forces I oversee, Labour and Sadiq Khan’s stewardship of London is pretty much the worst. In the last year, knife crime in London has gone up while in the rest of the country it has gone down. It is the only police force to have missed its police uplift recruitment target. In fact it could have had an extra 1,062 police officers, for which there was Government money available, but it did not recruit them. If that is a model for a future Labour Government, heaven help us all.

In the meantime, where there are measures we need to take to go further, we will. I am very open to having constructive discussions such as those I have agreed to have with the hon. Member for West Ham, because I know all of us are united in our desire to fight the scourge of knife crime. Those of us who have attended the funerals of victims, as I did with Elianne Andam’s family a few weeks ago, and indeed all of us are under a moral obligation as well as a public duty obligation to do everything we can and leave no stone unturned in fighting that scourge, and I will work with Members on both sides of the House to make sure we do exactly that.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House condemns the Government for overseeing a 77 per cent increase in knife crime since 2015; recognises the devastating impact that knife crime has on victims, their families and the wider community; acknowledges that the Government recently announced measures to ban zombie knives and machetes; believes, nonetheless, that this legislation does not go nearly far enough, meaning that a number of dangerous types of knives and swords will remain legal and available on UK streets; therefore calls on the Government to address the shortcomings of the ban by extending it to cover ninja swords and consulting on a further extension; and further calls for the Government to establish an end-to-end review of online knife sales and introduce criminal liability for senior management of websites which indirectly sell illegal knives online.

Criminal Justice Bill (Fifteenth sitting)

Alex Norris Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 30th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Latham, for the Committee’s final day.

The new clause is a welcome addition to the Bill. Clearly, experts have identified that the person B knowledge gap is really important and is creating risk with respect to those who seek gratification in this way. It is right that that loophole is closed. My only question for the Minister is about the sort of scale we are talking about. She mentioned a small number of cases. Do the Government have an estimate of the number of cases that the measure is likely to apply to?

[Laura Farris]

I do not have any indication of the number of cases, but we have heard from the police that there have been problems with getting a prosecution where they cannot prove intent.

Question put and agreed to.

New clause 46 accordingly read a Second time and added to the Bill.

New Clause 47

Maximum term of imprisonment for certain offences on summary conviction

“In the following provisions for “6 months” substitute “the general limit in a magistrates’ court”—

section 1(6)(a) of the Prevention of Social Housing Fraud Act 2013 (unlawful sub-letting: secure tenancies);

section 2(7)(a) of that Act (unlawful sub-letting: assured tenancies and secure contracts);

section 30(3)(b) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (breach of certain orders or requirements);

section 339(2)(a) of the Sentencing Act 2020 (breach of criminal behaviour order);

section 354(4)(a) of that Act (breach of sexual harm prevention order);

section 363(2)(a) of that Act (breach of restraining order).”—(Laura Farris.)

This new clause provides that the maximum term of imprisonment for certain offences, on summary conviction, is the general limit in a magistrates’ court.

Brought up, read the First and Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 3

Removal of parental responsibility for men convicted of sexual offences against children

‘(1) After section 2 (parental responsibility for children) of the Children Act 1989, insert—

“2A Prisoners: suspension of parental responsibility

(1) This section applies where—

(a) a person (“A”) has been found guilty of a serious sexual offence involving or relating to a child or children; and

(b) A had parental responsibility for a child or children at the time at which the offence was committed.

(2) A ceases to have parental responsibility for all children, for a time specified by the sentencing court or until an application by A to the family court to reinstate parental responsibility has been approved.””—(Jess Phillips.)

Brought up, and read the First time.

Criminal Justice Bill (Sixteenth sitting)

Alex Norris Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 30th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Jess Phillips]

I will just read the first bit of my speech again and then sit down, because we have to get through proceedings today. More than six years ago, in 2017, the Home Office Minister for Crime, Safeguarding and Vulnerability said there needed to be

“a root and branch review of how women are treated in the criminal justice system”.

I will welcome it when it eventually comes. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause 39

Requirement for specialist rape and serious sexual offence teams

(1) The chief officer of each police force in England and Wales must establish a specialist team for the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences within the relevant force area.

(2) The chief officer must provide for members of the specialist team to be provided with such training and guidance on the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences as the chief officer sees fit.

(3) Any chief officer who fails to establish a specialist team must produce and publish a report to the Secretary of State outlining–

(a) the reasons for the chief officer’s decision not to establish a specialist team;

(b) how rape and serious sexual offences are to be investigated in the absence of a specialist team;

(c) what training and guidance is given to officers on the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences.”—(Alex Norris.)

Brought up, and read the First time.

[Alex Norris]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

It is a pleasure, Sir Graham, to serve with you in the Chair on this final afternoon in Committee. We did not want to miss this opportunity, as any criminal justice legislation is an opportunity to try to improve our dreadfully bad outcomes as they pertain to rape. According to Rape Crisis, there were 68,109 rapes between July 2022 and June 2023. By the end of that 12-month period, charges had been brought in 2.2% of those cases, so that is two out of every 100 resulting in someone being charged. That is just the ones that are reported, with five in six women and four in five men who are raped not reporting.

In the courts, we see trials delayed for years and a staggering 70% of survivors dropping out of the system altogether. Of that 2.2% charge rate, the number of convictions is just a fraction of an already dreadfully low figure. New clause 39 seeks to establish specialist rape and serious sexual offence teams in every police force by making that a requirement. Those teams would have to be provided with proper training and guidance.

If a chief officer of a police force or the Minister had concerns that such a measure fettered operational independence, the new clause hopefully offers a workaround on that. If a chief officer of a police force does not establish such teams, they will be required to publish a report to the Secretary of State outlining the reason, how rape and sexual offences are to be investigated and what training and guidance will be given to officers investigating such cases.

These specialist investigation units will be allowed to use tactics normally reserved for organised crime or terrorist investigations to identify and go after the most dangerous repeat abusers and rapists and get them off our streets. That is not just something that we are pushing forward; it is also a recommendation of the Home Affairs Committee. I am pleased to have the support of its Chair, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson). The evidence points to specialist teams being effective at investigating such serious crimes, and those forces that do have units already know how well they are performing. Clearly, this should be rolled out so that every victim, no matter where they are in the country, can have their case investigated properly with a view to securing a charge and a conviction.

[Laura Farris]

I am grateful to the shadow Minister for raising this important issue. I agree without reservation that centralisation is crucial to the effective policing of rape and serious sexual offences. When we published the end-to-end rape review, we took our obligations seriously. One of the things that has absolutely transformed the policing response is—initially as a pilot, now the national roll-out—Operation Soteria, which I saw in action with the Avon and Somerset police, who were the pioneers. The hon. Member will be glad to know that one of the academics behind its inception, Katrin Hohl, has just been recruited, so we have ongoing involvement with the academics behind it who are guiding us.

Let me give an idea of how effective Operation Soteria has been. As the hon. Member is aware, it is a completely new model of policing. We call it suspect-focused, but it is much more than that; it is a deep dive into the patterns of behaviour that the suspect has undertaken before the rape was committed, whether they were a family member, a stranger, a Tinder date or a long-term partner. Not only has it enabled the police to make far more referrals, but it is leading to far more convictions. To give the Committee an idea of what that looks like, now that Operation Soteria has been rolled out nationally the police are referring three times the number of cases to the CPS for a charging decision as they were in 2016, which was the high point before the Liam Allan case had that catastrophic effect on police outcomes.

Operation Soteria has been key therefore, but aligned with that is our commitment to recruiting 2,000 specialist RASO—rape and sexual offences—officers. That is very similar to the thrust of the new clause of the hon. Member for Nottingham North. Before appearing in Committee today, I considered the letter that the College of Policing sent to all 43 forces in England and Wales about implementation, which is called the RASO investigator skills development programme for first responders.

The training is available to everyone, and the letter includes a direction as to how many RASO specialists are required in each force—I can send a photocopy of the letter to the hon. Member afterwards. That number is worked out from the size of the population that the force serves, so it is appropriate, and no force will not have a healthy population of appropriate RASO-trained specialists. The date for the conclusion of the exercise is April 2024. With all that in mind, I respectfully invite him to withdraw his new clause.

[Alex Norris]

I note what the Minister says around the transformed approach. The only evidence that will work is whether the charging number increases and cases get to judgment. We will wait to see whether that proof is in the pudding, but on that basis I am happy not to press the new clause, although we might have to return to the matter on Report. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause 40

Doorstep theft: aggravating factor in theft offence

“(1) The Sentencing Code 2020 is amended as follows.

(2) After section 72 (supply of psychoactive substance in certain circumstances) insert—

‘72A Theft from outside a dwelling place

(1) This clause applies where the court is considering an offence under section 1 of the Theft Act 1968.

(2) Where the theft is of an item delivered to, but not yet taken inside, a person’s dwelling place, the court must—

(a) treat this fact as an aggravating factor, and

(b) state in open court that the offence is so aggravated.’”—(Alex Cunningham.)

This new clause defines theft from a doorstep as an aggravating factor for the purposes of sentencing in cases of theft.

Brought up, and read the First time.

[Alex Cunningham]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Increasing numbers of people are choosing to shop online regularly, as opposed to shopping on the high street. With that comes an increase in the number of opportunist thieves. Examples of crime prevention advice on doorstep thefts include, on the Staffordshire police website, Chief Inspector Giles Parsons advising shoppers

“to do all that they can to stop this crime happening… Ask for your deliveries to be diverted to trusted neighbours or friends if you’re not going to be home. If this isn’t possible, attempt to rearrange to a time when you know you will be in or choose to collect it instead.”

Similar advice urging preventive safety measures can be found on the Merseyside police website.

Meanwhile, parcel theft has received little attention in Parliament, although it was raised in the other place in June last year, when the then Business and Trade Minister, the Earl of Minto, said:

“Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, it is the seller’s responsibility to ensure items ordered are delivered and Ofcom requires postal operators to take all reasonable steps to minimise exposure of postal packets to risk of loss, theft, damage or interference in terms of an essential requirement.”

Citizens Advice assumed a statutory responsibility to represent consumers of postal services in 2014. It publishes a parcels league table, and the 2023 results showed that the rate of parcel problems is incredibly high. It says that urgent action is needed, but it focuses its work on better regulation of the parcel delivery sector, rather than on sentencing for individual offenders. Overall, there has been a more limited focus on the offenders themselves.

Contrary to the lack of parliamentary discussion, the issue has been gaining attention in the media. The Telegraph reported on “porch pirates” in December last year, arguing:

“It’s a crime born of modern lifestyles, the explosion in online shopping providing new opportunities for thieves.”

The technology and locker company Quadient submitted freedom of information requests to UK police forces seeking statistics on parcel theft. The average reported value of a stolen parcel is £115.07, which, with Citizens Advice claiming that 5.5 million parcels are stolen each year, suggests a hidden economy of up to £630 million. Police forces warn that just a fraction of parcel theft is actually reported, meaning nobody knows the true extent of the problem. Comparing data held by the police to Citizens Advice’s figure, it appears that fewer than 0.002% of parcel thefts are ever reported.

The material released in response to the freedom of information request also indicated that the most common time for thefts to occur is between 9 am and 5 pm. Forces report that people aged 22 to 34 are the most likely to have a parcel stolen, suggesting that many parcels are stolen from young people while they are at work. The highest average value indicated for a stolen parcel was—no surprise—from City of London police, at £1,128, almost 10 times higher than the UK average. Conversely, Durham constabulary reported an average of £9.78, less than a tenth of the UK average and £1,118 lower than City of London.

Given the growing concern among consumers, whose doorsteps are no longer safe places, it is clear that firm action must be taken. The new clause would introduce an aggravating factor for such offences, recognising that, while the thieves may not actually enter properties, they do trespass in the gardens or yards of their victims, who may well come face to face with them. Criminals should know that, if they are prepared to enter people’s property to steal—just like a burglar would—they risk a higher sentence than for theft from, say, a shop.

The Minister will be pleased to know that I have no intention of pressing the new clause to a vote, but I hope that she will recognise this growing crime in our communities and take action to address it.

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[Alex Norris]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

The new clause would create a new offence of assaulting a retail worker. It is no secret that I have been pursuing this issue in some form for my entire parliamentary career, so I do not think the Minister will have been surprised to see it on the amendment paper. The new clause builds on the long campaign by the shop workers’ union USDAW—I declare an interest as a member—the Co-operative party, Tesco, the Co-op Group, the British Retail Consortium and many others to create a new law with tougher penalties for those who attack and abuse shop workers. It is a campaign that unites workers and management, and retailers big and small. We have made significant progress in previous legislation by securing an aggravating factor in sentencing for assaulting a shop worker, but a proper offence has yet to be introduced. The new clause would do that.

Everyone has the right to feel safe at work. The Minister asked a number of times during the evidence sessions why shop workers should be treated as a distinct category. The important factor is that, as well as selling things for themselves or their employer, depending on whether they own the shop or are employed to work there, and wearing their name badge or uniform, they have been asked by us in this place to restrict the sale of dozens of categories of items, including cigarettes, alcohol, knives, acids—you name it. That is a hugely significant act of public service, and the consequences of their not abiding by that request are very significant for them personally and potentially catastrophic for the rest of society.

In that moment, shop workers are put at risk, because every declined sale is a possible point of friction. Actions taken by us have created that flashpoint for violence and abuse, and many of us will have heard the harrowing stories of life-changing injuries that shop workers have suffered simply doing their job. It seems to me proper that if we are going to use legislation to require shop workers to enforce restrictions, then we should be prepared to use it to protect them. We should have their backs in that moment. That is the basic premise.

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend referred to the evidence sessions. Paddy Lillis said:

“There are about 1,000 incidents a day, and we think that that is just the tip of the iceberg”.––[Official Report, Criminal Justice Public Bill Committee, 14 December 2023; c. 110, Q57.]

He went on to encourage retail workers who are not reporting incidents to do so. The Government’s defence against calls to introduce a specific offence has always been, “There’s not enough of it. It’s not significant enough for a specific offence.” Does my hon. Friend agree that if there are 1,000 incidents a day, there is good cause for the new clause?

[Alex Norris]

Yes. We are talking about an epidemic scale, and it behoves us to take action. Too many staff have given up on us or on the police and are just pricing violence and abuse in as part of the job, which they should never have to do, or leaving the industry and going to do something else.

The staggering degree of violence and abuse is now accompanied by shoplifting. The new crime statistics published last week show that shoplifting has increased by just under a third in the last year alone, as criminals run rife in our town centres. That is what our staff are facing every day—that is the level of the onslaught—and it has a knock-on impact on those who do not work in the shops but live in and love their community. Businesses in difficult economic circumstances can go under if hit hard by persistent shoplifting, which has a catastrophic impact on local economies and puts off residents. Similarly, big chains are making judgments on a store-by-store basis about whether to keep their shops open if they cannot protect colleagues or if crime makes them unviable, and a big retailer pulling out of a community has a huge impact on the high street.

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[Chris Philp]

Yes, I would. In fact, I think both those sectors have been invited to the larger six-monthly meetings of the retail crime steering group. I should have added that my first job in south London was in a Sainsbury’s very close to what is now my constituency —I must have been about 16 or 17—and the first business I ran was a wholesale distribution business whose main warehouse was on the Lichfield Road industrial estate in Tamworth. I recall on one occasion someone trying to drive a JCB through the wall to steal cigarettes and alcohol. That was 20-odd years ago, so I am very apprised of the dangers posed to the wholesale sector as well as the retail sector.

As I was saying, more police attendance is the second element of the retail crime action plan. The third element is targeting prolific and repeat offenders using facial recognition and analysis of data so that we can go after organised criminal gangs. The fourth element is Operation Pegasus, a nationwide project funded partly by about 16 retailers and run by police and crime commissioner Katy Bourne from Sussex. Again, its aim is to identify criminal gangs and go after them specifically.

The police made a lot of commitments in the retail crime action plan, published two or three months ago, and we will have meetings every three months of the retail crime steering group, which consists of leading retailers, the British Retail Consortium and many others, to hold the police to account for delivering the action plan that they have signed up to. I think the next meeting is in a week or two—it is relatively soon. Those are the operational steps being taken. We are working very closely with unions, retailers and representative groups, as I said.

Turning to new clause 41, I have a lot of sympathy for where the shadow Minister is coming from. I understand the desire to strengthen the law in this area, but I will make one or two observations. First, passing laws is the easy bit. The hard bit is creating change on the ground. That applies to a lot of the things we have talked about today, including this issue.

Of course, it is already a criminal offence to assault a retail worker, just as it is an offence to assault anybody. The proposed new offence would replace only common assault—all assault is serious, but that is the lowest level of assault—where the victim is a retail worker. It would not make any difference to or replace other, more serious forms of assault. Those include assault occasioning actual bodily harm, which causes a temporary injury such as a bruise; assault occasioning grievous bodily harm, which causes a lasting injury such as a broken bone; and grievous bodily harm with intent to cause serious injury. The maximum sentences for those other forms of assault are five years for ABH and GBH, and life for GBH with intent. The new clause would not affect those maximum sentences, which are much higher than its proposed maximum.

[Alex Norris]

Is the Minister saying that if a broader new clause covering all those types of assault were brought back on Report, it would be acceptable to the Government?

[Chris Philp]

That is not quite what I was saying. I am going to point out a number of potential weaknesses in the new clause. That is one of them, but it is not the only one. I am just saying that it does not address any of the more serious assaults from ABH upwards. It would not affect probably 100% of the assaults of most concern, and probably 90% of all assaults.

The second issue is equity between retail workers and other public-facing workers. Retailers do very important work. As the shadow Minister rightly said, they do things such as age verification, which we in Parliament asked them to do. They put themselves in harm’s way, and they have been suffering from appalling abuse, which we all want to stop. All of those things are absolutely true.

This new clause, however, targets only retail workers. There are quite a few other workers with an equally strong claim. When it came to the statutory aggravating factor, which I will talk about in a moment, we orientated it towards all public-facing workers—not just retail workers. If we accept new clause 41 as drafted, reasonable questions might arise about teachers, who sometimes suffer assault at school, or bus, tram or tube drivers. What about refuse collectors, local councillors, social workers, and all these other workers who do an important job on behalf of the public, who sadly are often assaulted? They might say, “What about us?” In the previous bit of legislation, which I will refer to in a moment, we directed it towards the inclusion of all public-facing workers, not just retail workers, important though they are of course.

--- Later in debate ---

On reviewing the Scottish evidence, it may be that the shadow Minister has some data that I have not seen, and I am very open to looking it at it if he does. I have not yet seen any compelling evidence on the impact of this measure in Scotland. While I sympathise very strongly with the sentiments expressed by the shadow Minister—and I maintain an active interest in this area and an enthusiasm to look at his data—we will not accept the new clause for all those reasons. We want to push operationally on this issue—I have mentioned the retail crime action plan—and we are certainly willing to keep an eye on it. If a case is made that tightening up the law is necessary to address the serious problems in this area, then I would not categorically rule that out in the future. I hope I have set out why I gently and respectfully resist new clause 41 at the moment.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful to the Minister for a very full answer and the thoughtful statement on the Government’s case is much appreciated. I start by saying that Ministers on a number of occasions, both in Committee and on the Floor of the House—the Home Secretary is very fond of doing it—have talked about reductions in crime and expect, to some degree, garlands for that. The Minister opens his argument here by saying, “Well, actually, this is something that is happening around the world and we are merely tracking that”, when he knows that those crime reductions, particularly around vehicle crime, map very accurately with our statistical neighbours. There is a danger of cakeism from the Government in saying that, when crime falls, it is because of the wit and genius of Ministers, and when crime increases, saying “Well, it is happening to all of us, isn’t it?” I did not want to let that go unremarked.

On the retail crime action plan and the steering group, we want those to work. We think that those are important interventions and we are all committed to seeing that happen. I know that, whether it is retailers or police, there is lots of energy in this space, and that is very welcome. I still fear that some of it is perhaps a triumph of hope over experience. On the reasonable lines of inquiry, we will again see. That is often cited by Ministers as a major plank in their approach, but I am still willing to take a wager that there is going to be a heavy degree of triage in some of that. The system suddenly being able to do that, having not been able to do that, implies a change of operating model, which has been available at short notice.

[Chris Philp]

First, I put on the record my thanks to Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman of North Wales police, who leads for the NPCC in this area and was instrumental in publishing the retail crime action plan. On the hon. Gentleman’s question about the deliverability of all reasonable lines of inquiry, the approach was based on that taken by Chief Constable Stephen Watson in Greater Manchester, starting about a year and a half ago—perhaps two years now. You might be familiar with this, Sir Graham, but it worked successfully in Greater Manchester, to the point that arrests went up 44% year on year, and I think two magistrates courts had to be reopened, because of the volume of arrests. We saw that working under Chief Constable Watson’s leadership, and we want to replicate the success across England and Wales.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for that, and we want to see that success. I add my congratulations to Chief Constable Watson, as well as to—for a little balance—the Mayor of Greater Manchester and to the Deputy Mayor, our former colleague Kate Green. However, we will see, because a lot of the action plan and the Government’s other plans are predicated on that work, but the results remain to be seen.

Facial recognition is a good tool in the toolkit. We certainly want detection and to break up organised elements, but again that is a retrospective tool, and it is only part of the armoury. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East made an important point that I should have made about the wholesale sector. This is about retail workers in the retail setting, but there is a wider picture, as the Minister said, citing the shocking example in his own experience. This is something that is happening in the supply chain, too: highly organised criminals are taking their in-store experience to go further up the supply chain. That behoves us to take action.

On the specific concerns about the new clause, if the Minister feels that it does not go far enough on assault or cover enough assaults, we are happy to shake hands now on an expanded definition. We would have no problem with that at all. On equity with other industries, we all say that no one should go to work in fear, or in actual fact, of being subject to violence or abuse. The reason why this case is different is that we have put extra obligations on individuals—an obligation with severe consequences: “If not followed, you will lose your job”—so there is some extra responsibility on us.

[Chris Philp]

Do we not put obligations on, for example, bus drivers to collect fares? That is just one example.

[Alex Norris]

That does not seem to be the same. Universally, passengers go on to a bus and expect to pay a fare; there is no sense of a growing picture of violence related to bus drivers asking for money from their customers. To be honest, going beyond that case, the point about our special responsibility in this place is that the volume alone behoves us to act. If I am wrong, I will take a different slant, but I do not believe that bus drivers or any of the other industries mentioned—teachers, refuse collectors, local authority councillors—face violence to this degree, with 1,000 incidents a day; if that starts to become the picture in those industries, I will be at the front of the queue to talk about the protections such workers might need. At the moment, however, a fire is burning in this sector, and it is having dreadful consequences for individuals and for the collective, which is why I believe that the change I have suggested is necessary.

On Scotland and the evidence, I was quoting what we had heard in the evidence sessions from Paddy and Paul. The Minister made a good point about the ability to separate assault, but Paul was talking in-store, so assaults that happened in stores would, by definition, be against retail workers. Again, that was all there in their evidence.

I will bring my remarks to a conclusion. This is a point of difference between us and the Government. The Minister made a cogent case, as always. It sounded a lot like the arguments that we had before we got the aggravated offence—the Government always say no until they say yes, in my experience—so I will give them a chance to say yes today, because I will press the new clause to a Division; then we will keep doing that until eventually—I have no doubt whatever we will—we form one mind on this issue.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

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Similar action has been taken in Australia, where legislation was passed in September 2014. The point of the new clause is to make it clear that a single punch is as dangerous and potentially deadly an act as the use of a knife or of any other lethal weapon. A person’s hands, when used as instruments of violence, can cause irreparable harm and heartbreak. It is hoped that implementing minimum sentences to treat one-punch killings with the severity they deserve will send out a resounding message that such acts will not be tolerated in our society. I do not intend to press the new clause to a vote, but I hope that the Government will introduce such a proposal on Report.

[Alex Norris]

It is a pleasure to follow the excellent contributions from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley and from the right hon. Member for Chelmsford. I have spoken to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland about the new clause; I commend her for her efforts and her courage. It takes real bravery to talk about this issue and press for change.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley said, the new clause intends to create a penalty commensurate with the impact and the nature of the offence. The right hon. Member for Chelmsford talked about unduly lenient sentences; what strikes me from even very cursory research on the topic is the significant range in outcomes, which is hard to understand. It shows that there is a bit of looseness in the legislative framework around this sort of offence.

We will not divide the Committee on the new clause today, but I hope collectively we will send the message that this crime is as dangerous as other forms of serious violence. It has a devastating impact—a ripple effect, as One Punch UK puts it—on individuals, families, local areas and communities.

We have just debated an important new clause about violence against retail workers. The setting for that is quite defined, so we can plan what the response to a crime of a certain nature that happens in a certain place should be. One of the trickier things about this sort of crime is that it could be part of antisocial behaviour or a dispute among neighbours; it could be done in a shop by someone who intended to commit a crime, but not the crime that ended up killing someone; or it could be related to drug use, driving or football. We need to keep an eye on football violence—I am a fan who has been going to matches for three decades, and it feels as though behaviour is changing. Every time we see that sort of aggression or violence, there is a possible moment of manslaughter.

Taking a lead from the Australian approach has merit. I am very keen to hear the Minister’s views. I commend the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland for her new clause.

[Laura Farris]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland, who has been such an effective campaigner on this deeply personal offence that completely devastated her young life. She has made sure that it is seen not as a minimal offence or a nasty accident, but as the most serious form of assault. I know that she has been engaging with the Lord Chancellor, and I do not want to pre-empt those conversations. I was due to meet her this week; she was unwell, but we will still do so, and there is a process of discussion.

I want to say a little about new clause 50, and about one or two of the concerns that we have at this point. One-punch manslaughter is already a form of unlawful act—manslaughter—and it closely overlaps with that offence. The new clause closely reflects the existing law, but the common-law offence of unlawful act manslaughter has a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

The new clause has two elements that differ from unlawful act manslaughter, meaning in practice that it would apply only to a small number of cases. First, the unlawful act set out in the new clause requires

“a single punch to the head or neck”.

Secondly, whereas unlawful act manslaughter requires that a reasonable person would have understood that the act posed some risk of harm, the new clause requires a “significant risk” of harm. In other words, it is setting a higher evidential threshold for what the perpetrator knew than the current principles of manslaughter. We would not wish to create an offence that made it harder to get a conviction rather than easier, as is currently the case with manslaughter.

We make similar observations in relation to GBH. Murder can be charged in two circumstances: where there was an intention to kill, or where there was an intent by the perpetrator to cause serious harm to the level of GBH. An intent to kill is not usually present in one-punch cases, but an intent to cause serious harm to the level of GBH may be present. That is called the GBH rule, and in some ways it overlaps with the specific circumstances described in the new clause. There is therefore a risk that people who could be charged with murder would deviate to pleading guilty to the lesser offence because they think that they would get less time. We want to avoid that.

I had another point to make in passing about the Australian system—I cannot lay my hand on my note, but I was going to say that it results in lower sentences than what is suggested here, so it is not a perfect read-across.

The Government’s other concern, as nobody on this Committee will be surprised to hear, is about the new clause setting a minimum sentence. We do not wish to create anomalies in the law. How would the family of a victim who was killed by a single punch to the abdomen feel if the minimum sentence did not apply? How would the family of a victim who was killed by two punches to the head feel if their case was treated differently?

As the Committee has seen over the course of our debates, minimum sentences sometimes create difficulties in the law on homicide and irregularities in sentencing. When we extrapolate those to certain circumstances, some of which we probably cannot even imagine as we sit here today, they could cause irregularities further down the line. None of that is fatal to the new clause, by way; it simply informs our thinking and our nervousness with the minimum-sentence suggestion at the moment.

We appreciate, without any reservation, the very serious harm that the new clause targets. We want to see laws and sentencing powers that are flexible enough to deal with different levels of culpability. We would not wish for more people either to get away with it because the intent could not be proved or to use this new offence as an alternative to murder.

We are thinking hard about it, and we wish to maintain consistency in the law. At the same time, we recognise the harm that is caused by this offending. We recognise the seriousness of it, and we recognise the importance of the campaign that my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland has presented to the House. I ask the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley to withdraw the new clause at this point, but we are continuing conversations with my hon. Friend.

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Brought up, and read the First time.

[Alex Norris]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 53—Defences to charges under the Computer Misuse Act 1990—

“(1) The Computer Misuse Act 1990 is amended as follows.

(2) In section 1, after subsection (2) insert—

‘(2A) It is a defence to a charge under subsection (1) to prove that—

(a) the person’s actions were necessary for the detection or prevention of crime; or

(b) the person’s actions were justified as being in the public interest.’

(3) In section 3, after subsection (5) insert—

‘(5A) It is a defence to a charge under subsection (1) to prove that—

(a) the person’s actions were necessary for the detection or prevention of crime; or

(b) the person’s actions were justified as being in the public interest.’”

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[Alex Norris]

The new clauses would introduce a statutory defence into the Computer Misuse Act 1990 for cyber-security professionals who are acting in the public interest to better protect the UK from cyber-criminals.

I want to say very clearly that cyber-criminals are more of a threat than ever, and we need arrangements that are fit for the present day to take them on. In the UK alone, there was a 77% increase in cyber-threats last year. We know that their impact on individuals’ lives can be hugely consequential, but the legislation that provides the foundation to take on that sort of cyber-threat is more than 33 years old. It was written to protect telephone exchanges before the widespread use of the internet and digital technologies. Legislation has not kept pace with modern cyber-security defence techniques.

Consumer organisations such as Which?, trade bodies and UK cyber-security companies have long campaigned for reform of the 1990 Act. The CyberUp campaign, from which we received written evidence and which is backed by a number of cyber businesses and trade associations such as techUK, believes that reform of the Act would future-proof our response to cyber-crime and could deliver benefits for the UK’s economic prosperity and criminal justice system and defend our democracy and national security.

Together, the new clauses would update section 1 of the 1990 Act, which prohibits unauthorised access to computers. Simply put, the legislation inadvertently criminalises a large portion of legitimate vulnerability, security and threat intelligence research by UK cyber-security professionals, who are committing a crime if they use legitimate techniques to check for vulnerabilities, to carry out research or to build defences. We are asking them to put themselves at risk in order to do something that is clearly a social good, so the new clauses seek to update the Act.

The former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), announced a review of the Act in May 2021, nearly three years ago, and Sir Patrick Vallance, who was the Government’s chief scientific adviser, gave his backing, saying:

“We recommend amending the Computer Misuse Act 1990 to include a statutory public interest defence that would provide stronger legal protections for cyber security researchers and professionals.”

In March, the Chancellor committed to implementing Sir Patrick’s review on the pro-innovation regulation of technologies. Hopefully, therefore, we are pushing at an open door. In its report on ransomware, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy stated that there has not been enough progress and that the Bill is deficient in this area, so there is a strong argument for this reform.

New clause 52 would tighten up the definition of an offence, and new clause 53 would tighten up possible defences that could be used by individuals legitimately either researching or protecting in the cyber-security space.

[Chris Philp]

The Government broadly support the sentiment behind the new clause—we want to enable people undertaking legitimate cyber-security work to do so without fear of criminalisation—but this is a very complicated area. The Government published their response to the review of the Computer Misuse Act last November, and we are actively considering options to strengthen the legislative framework. However, we need to make sure we do that in a way that does not inadvertently create a loophole or a defence that cyber-criminals or hostile state actors could exploit to defend themselves against prosecution. It is complicated and needs quite a lot of thought, and further work is required to make sure we get this absolutely right. We are therefore not ready to accept legislation, but we are committed to giving it further, very careful consideration, so that if changes are needed, we can make them in a way that does not inadvertently create loopholes.

On protections for people engaged in legitimate activity, I remind the Committee that prior to bringing a prosecution, the Crown Prosecution Service applies the public interest test. If somebody were engaging in legitimate cyber-security activity and inadvertently fell foul of the Act, it may well be that the CPS applied that public interest test and therefore did not proceed with the prosecution. However, this does need some more thought, and I do not think we are ready to legislate yet.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for the Minister’s assurances on the Government’s intent, and on that basis I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Schedule 1

Notification orders

“1 The Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 is amended as follows.

2 (1) Section 40 (overview) is amended as follows.

(2) In subsection (2) after paragraph (a) insert—

“(aa) orders applying the notification requirements to persons dealt with in the United Kingdom for certain offences to which this Part does not apply (see section 57A and Schedule 4A),”

(3) After subsection (3) insert—

“(4) Schedule 6A provides for orders applying the notification requirements to persons dealt with for certain service offences to which this Part does not apply.”

3 In section 57, in the heading for “Notification” substitute “Foreign offence notification”.

4 After that section insert—

“57A Domestic offence notification orders

Schedule 4A makes provision for notification orders applying the notification requirements of this Part to persons who have been dealt with for certain offences that are not offences to which this Part applies.”

5 (1) Section 59 (application to service offences) is amended as follows.

(2) The existing provision becomes subsection (1) of that section.

(3) After that subsection insert—

“(2) Schedule 6A makes provision for notification orders applying the notification requirements of this Part to persons who have been dealt with for certain service offences that are not offences to which this Part applies.”

6 (1) Section 61 (meaning of “dealt with” for an offence) is amended as follows.

(2) In subsection (4)(b)—

(a) for “or” substitute “, paragraph 2(6)(b) of Schedule 4A”;

(b) after “Schedule 6” insert “or paragraph 2(6)(b) of Schedule 6A”.

(3) In subsection (5), at the end of paragraph (a) (before the “and”) insert—

“(aa) paragraph 2(5) of Schedule 4A or paragraph 2(5) of Schedule 6A (conditions for making domestic or service offence notification order where offence dealt with before commencement),”

7 (1) Schedule 4 is amended as follows.

(2) In the Schedule heading for “Notification” substitute “Foreign offence notification”.

(3) For “notification order”, in each place it appears (including in any heading except the Schedule heading), substitute “foreign offence notification order”.

8 After Schedule 4 insert—

“Schedule 4A

Domestic offence notification orders

Introductory

1 In this Schedule—

“the appropriate court” means—

(a) in England and Wales or Northern Ireland, the High Court;

(b) in Scotland, the Court of Session;

“authorised person” means the Secretary of State or—

(a) in England and Wales, a chief officer of police;

(b) in Scotland, the chief constable of the Police Service of Scotland;

(c) in Northern Ireland, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland;

“offence”: any reference to an offence is to an offence under the law of England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (and does not include a service offence).

Domestic offence notification orders

2 (1) This paragraph applies where an authorised person makes an application to the appropriate court for an order under this paragraph (a “domestic offence notification order”) in respect of a person (“the offender”).

(2) The court must make a domestic offence notification order in respect of the offender if it is satisfied that the following 4 conditions are met (and must otherwise refuse the application).

(3) The first condition is that the offender has been dealt with for an offence (“the relevant offence”) that—

(a) was committed before 29 June 2021,

(b) is punishable with imprisonment for more than 2 years, and

(c) is not an excluded offence.

(4) “Excluded offence” means—

(a) an offence to which this Part applied when the offender was dealt with (see sections 41 and 42),

(b) an offence in relation to which section 30 or 31 of this Act or section 69 of the Sentencing Code applied,

(c) an offence in relation to which section 31 of this Act would have applied if paragraph (b) of subsection (1) of that section were omitted, or

(d) an offence under section 19, 21A or 39 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

(5) If the offender was dealt with for the relevant offence before the commencement of this Part, sub-paragraph (4) applies as if for paragraph (a) there were substituted—(a)an offence which, on the commencement of this Part, was within section 41(1) or (2),.

(6) The second condition is that—

(a) the offender has been dealt with for the relevant offence in a way mentioned in section 45 (reading any reference to an offence to which this Part applies as a reference to the relevant offence),

(b) the offender was aged 16 or over at the time of being dealt with for the relevant offence, and

(c) the offender—

(i) is imprisoned or detained in pursuance of the sentence passed or order made in respect of the offence,

(ii) would be so imprisoned or detained but for being unlawfully at large, absent without leave, on temporary leave or leave of absence, or on bail pending an appeal, or

(iii) is on licence, having served the custodial part of a sentence of imprisonment in respect of the offence.

(7) The third condition is that the relevant offence has a terrorist connection (see section 93).

(8) The fourth condition is that the period in respect of which the notification requirements would apply in respect of the relevant offence (see section 53) has not expired.

Restrictions on applications for domestic offence notification orders

3 (1) A chief officer of police may make an application for a domestic offence notification order in respect of a person only if—

(a) the person resides in the chief officer’s police area, or

(b) the chief officer believes that the person is in, or is intending to come to, that area.

(2) The chief constable of the Police Service of Scotland may make an application for a domestic offence notification order in respect of a person only if—

(a) the person resides in Scotland, or

(b) the chief constable believes that the person is in, or is intending to come to, Scotland.

(3) The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland may make an application for a domestic offence notification order in respect of a person only if—

(a) the person resides in Northern Ireland, or

(b) the chief constable believes that the person is in, or is intending to come to, Northern Ireland.

Effect of domestic offence notification order

4 The effect of a domestic offence notification order is that the notification requirements of this Part apply to the offender.

Modifications of this Part

5 (1) The following modifications apply where a domestic offence notification order is made.

(2) Section 43(1) does not apply to the offender, as regards the relevant offence.

(3) Section 47(1) (initial notification) applies as if the reference to the day on which the person is dealt with were a reference to the date of service of the domestic offence notification order.

(4) For the purposes of section 53 (period for which notification requirements apply), references there to “the offence” are to the relevant offence.

(5) For the meaning of “the relevant offence”, see paragraph 2(3).”

9 After Schedule 6 insert—

“Schedule 6A

Service offence notification orders

Introductory

1 In this Schedule—

“the appropriate court” means—

(a) in England and Wales or Northern Ireland, the High Court;

(b) in Scotland, the Court of Session;

“authorised person” means the Secretary of State or—

(a) in England and Wales, a chief officer of police;

(b) in Scotland, the chief constable of the Police Service of Scotland;

(c) in Northern Ireland, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Service offence notification orders

2 (1) This paragraph applies where an authorised person makes an application to the appropriate court for an order under this paragraph (a “service offence notification order”) in respect of a person (“the offender”).

(2) The court must make a service offence notification order in respect of the offender if it is satisfied that the following 4 conditions are met (and must otherwise refuse the application).

(3) The first condition is that the offender has been dealt with for a service offence (“the relevant offence”) that—

(a) is punishable with imprisonment for more than 2 years,

(b) is not an excluded offence, and

(c) if a day has been appointed for the commencement of section 1 of the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act 2021 as that section has effect for the purposes of section 69 of the Sentencing Code as applied by section 238 of the Armed Forces Act 2006, is committed before that day.

(4) In sub-paragraph (3)(b) “excluded offence” means—

(a) a service offence to which this Part applied when the offender was dealt with (see paragraphs 1 and 2 of Schedule 6),

(b) a service offence in relation to which section 32 of this Act or section 69 of the Sentencing Code applied, or

(c) a service offence as respects which the corresponding civil offence is an offence under section 19, 21A or 39 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

(5) If the offender was dealt with for the relevant offence before the commencement of this Part, sub-paragraph (4) applies as if for paragraph (a) there were substituted—

“(a) a service offence as respects which the corresponding civil offence was on the commencement of this Part within section 41(1) or (2),”.

(6) The second condition is that—

(a) the offender has been dealt with for the relevant offence in a way mentioned in paragraph 5 of Schedule 6 (reading any reference to a service offence to which this Part applies as a reference to the relevant offence),

(b) the offender was aged 16 or over at the time of being dealt with for the relevant offence, and

(c) the offender—

(i) is imprisoned or detained in pursuance of the sentence passed or order made in respect of the offence,

(ii) would be so imprisoned or detained but for being unlawfully at large, absent without leave, on temporary leave or leave of absence, or on bail pending an appeal, or

(iii) is on licence, having served the custodial part of a sentence of imprisonment in respect of the offence.

(7) The third condition is that the relevant offence has a terrorist connection (see section 93).

(8) The fourth condition is that the period in respect of which the notification requirements would apply in respect of the relevant offence (see paragraph 7 of Schedule 6) has not expired.

Restrictions on applications for service offence notification orders

3 (1) A chief officer of police may make an application for a service offence notification order in respect of a person only if—

(a) the person resides in the chief officer’s police area, or

(b) the chief officer believes that the person is in, or is intending to come to, that area.

(2) The chief constable of the Police Service of Scotland may make an application for a service offence notification order in respect of a person only if—

(a) the person resides in Scotland, or

(b) the chief constable believes that the person is in, or is intending to come to, Scotland.

(3) The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland may make an application for a service offence notification order in respect of a person only if—

(a) the person resides in Northern Ireland, or

(b) the chief constable believes that the person is in, or is intending to come to, Northern Ireland.

Effect of service offence notification order

4 The effect of a service offence notification order is that the notification requirements of this Part apply to the offender.

Modifications of this Part

5 (1) The following modifications apply where a service offence notification order is made.

(2) Section 47(1) (initial notification) applies as if the reference to the day on which the person is dealt with were a reference to the date of service of the service offence notification order.

(3) Paragraph 3(1) of Schedule 6 does not apply to the offender, as regards the relevant offence.

(4) For the purposes of paragraph 7 of that Schedule (period for which notification requirements apply), references there to “the service offence” or “the offence” are to the relevant offence.

(5) For the meaning of “the relevant offence”, see paragraph 2(3).””—(Chris Philp.)

The new schedule provides for orders applying the notification requirements in Part 4 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 to persons who have committed certain domestic offences or service offences.

Brought up, read the First and Second time, and added to the Bill.

[Alex Cunningham]

On a point of order, Sir Graham. Is it in order for me to thank you and your fellow Chairs for keeping us in order while still allowing us free-flowing discussions; the Hansard staff and other House staff; our Public Bill Office staff, who always manage to keep me in order; the Ministers for listening and recognising that the Bill has some way to go to satisfy those of us in opposition; and my colleagues and Government Members for their contributions?

I have saved my last comments for the right hon. Member for Croydon South. During our deliberations, he confessed to having some affection for me—I much appreciated that. I had developed an affection for his beard. I had thought that he was trying to rebuild the reputation of the beard within the Home Office after the Home Secretary, having insulting my constituency, was disqualified from the parliamentary beard of the year competition—a competition that I assure the Committee I went on to win. I hope that I can encourage the right hon. Member for Croydon South to reconsider and grow the beard again. He could succeed me next time around!