Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

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

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[Baroness Chakrabarti]

132B: After Clause 54, insert the following new Clause—
“Commissioning of police weapons, surveillance equipment or investigatory technology
(1) Save as provided for by regulations under this section or as specifically authorised under other legislation, no constable, police force, police and crime commissioner or other policing body may commission the development or deployment of weapons, surveillance equipment or investigatory technology.(2) The Secretary of State may by regulations—(a) authorise a relevant policing body to commission the development or deployment of weapons, surveillance equipment or investigatory technology specified in the regulations;(b) specify technologies or providers that may or may not be commissioned by any relevant policing body;(c) prescribe conditions that must be met by any technologies or providers if they are to be commissioned by any relevant policing body;(d) authorise a person, or panel of persons, to monitor such commissioning as is authorised and compliance with such conditions as are prescribed.(3) Regulations under this section must be made by statutory instrument.(4) Regulations under this section—(a) may make different provision for different purposes or areas;(b) may make financial, consequential, supplementary, incidental, transitional, transitory or saving provision.(5) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 132B—a probing amendment—is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Hain. The Committee will know that everyone here is engaged with scrutiny of the present Bill because we believe that police powers, criminal justice measures and the criminal law need to be on a clear and, for the most part, statutory footing—certainly on a clear legal footing. A brief skim of this very hefty piece of legislation will throw up references to well-established and legendary Acts of Parliament. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act is an obvious one, as is the Public Order Act; the list goes on. These measures, over the years, have come to govern police powers in particular: powers of arrest, investigatory powers, and so on.

However, because we are nearly a quarter into the 21st century, so much technological development—some of it just as intrusive as traditional powers of arrest and subsequent investigatory powers—has proceeded apace. I, for one, despite having been around this territory for a couple of decades, am not clear about the statutory footing for much of it. That is really the legal and constitutional basis for this probe, if I might put it like that. In a moment, my noble friend Lord Hain will use a more specific example that spurred us to table this amendment, even though that was only a couple of days ago.

In a sense, this is not that dissimilar to the amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and many of his friends on the Benches opposite debated a few days ago. That was about non-crime information sitting around on databases, potentially to the detriment of citizens. His cry then, supported vociferously by people from across the Committee, but particularly that side, was that it must be on a statutory footing. The same must be true as a matter of law, not least the law of the European Convention on Human Rights but constitutional principle, in relation to the commissioning of weapons, surveillance equipment, investigatory technology and new algorithmic technology—much of which is currently under investigation by the new House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee, ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who is in her place, and comprising many illustrious Members of your Lordships’ House.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

If the noble Baroness wants to elucidate further—perhaps not in the Committee—on those issues, I would be very happy to engage with her on them. The only point I was making is that they are elected.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all Members of the Committee who spoke on this amendment. I want to be clear: it was a probe, and my ideal scenario would not even be for a regulation-making power in a great big criminal justice Act, it would be an Act of Parliament itself. I say to the Minister—and I mean this genuinely in a constructive spirit—that it was a Conservative Government in 1984 who introduced what is now the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

What I am really saying is that there is so much of this kit and technology developing apace that we need something at least equivalent to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to put questions of commissioning and regulation—of who decides what the tests are and what the accountability is in relation to all this development and commissioning of this new technology in the policing space—in one Act of Parliament. Again, it is not a partisan point; I would be saying this whoever the Government were. That was a really important piece of legislation in 1984, and the time has come for something like it. There happens to be another Conservative Government, and I think something like that will come.

What I said to the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson—sitting down—I said a couple of years ago to his predecessor: what is the legal basis of telephone extraction? I was told data protection and consent, or something of that kind. Here we are now, a couple of years later, in response to concerns, and there is going to be under this Bill a clear statutory framework.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I hope the noble Baroness does not mind me intervening, but I again refer her to the Science and Technology Committee, because the Policing Minister talked about gaps in the legislation. In fact, the honourable Member Graham Stringer was pleading for legislation, and I refer her to the comments the Policing Minister made in that regard.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that, and I will certainly go back to look at that. When she made her comments, I asked about the statutory framework, the legal basis. A list came back which began with the common law, the Data Protection Act, the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act—all good things—but my suggestion is that, as a matter of good governance, sound regulation and accessibility for the public—this is not about just civil liberties concerns and privacy but public money and accountability—all this regulation should be under one framework. That way there will be consistency across all 46 police forces in relation to where the commissioning should be, which providers are considered to be ethical and which are not, how they are to behave and what the conditions are, and then, once the technology has been developed, how it is to be deployed. I do not think it is asking a lot to suggest that this should all be under a single statutory framework. It would be something that the Minister and her Government could be proud of, and there could be a regulatory framework that could last for many decades, just as, broadly speaking, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act did.

I thank all noble Lords who spoke. To go back to my noble friend Lady Bryan of Partick’s point, where is the statutory underpinning of a National Police Air Service? Where is the Act says that says “there shall be a National Police Air Service”? I am not aware of it. Where is the Act of Parliament that set up a national College of Policing? I am not aware of it. It may exist somewhere, but I have not found it and I do not see it. I am not doing this to score points; I think it would be good governance and good legislation from which many generations and many Governments in future might benefit.

With that, and with my gratitude for taking this seriously, I hope that I have planted a seed for future thinking. The committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on which I have the privilege to sit, will no doubt develop this conversation with the Minister in due course. I thank everyone for their patience and engagement, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 132B withdrawn.

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[Earl Attlee (Con)]

When the noble Lord looks at my speech carefully, he will see I said there is legitimate economic activity for Travellers. I accept that plenty of Travellers engage exclusively in legitimate economic activity. I decided not to tease the noble Lord and ask him who he thought was stealing all the electrical cables from the railway system.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, the lateness of the hour and eloquence of many of the speeches tonight mean that I can be brief, but I feel compelled to say a few words in this debate. First, to the noble Earl opposite, to cite particular crimes committed by particular people of whichever community is no justification for a measure that targets all members of that community. We could all cite the statistics of people in prison. We know, for example, there is a disproportionate percentage of black and brown people in prison. Would that justify further criminalisation and demonisation of people who look more like me and less like the noble Earl? I think not.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

When the noble Baroness looks at my speech in Hansard, she will see that I am arguing, as I will in relation to my Amendment 241, that we need to do something useful with people when they are in prison. The system we have does not address their needs.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Earl for that. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people are a tiny percentage of our population in the United Kingdom. Undoubtedly, they are one of the most demonised minorities, not just in our nations, but historically and in Europe. We would not have a post-World War II human rights framework but for atrocities perpetrated against minorities, including Gypsy and Roma people.

It is very upsetting to look at Part 4 of the Bill. It is a disgrace. I am sorry to have to say this, but Part 4 is an inherently discriminatory piece of legislation. It is as discriminatory as previous ignominious legislation targeting east African Asians or gay people. If it passes in its present form it will be notorious. I have no doubt at all that it violates Articles 8 and 14 of the convention, at the very least, as other noble Lords have said. I praise the eloquence and perseverance of my noble friend Lady Whitaker in particular, and of many noble Lords and right reverent Prelates.

They know whereof they speak: to persecute people for their nomadic lifestyle—to criminalise the Traveller way of life—is the equivalent, I have no hesitation in saying, of criminalising people for their dress, their food or their prayers. It is a significant attack on their way of life to criminalise them for stopping in places when they have nowhere else to stop. Part 4 is that despicable. I signed one of the amendments; I could have signed any of them. This part, however, should not stand in any primary legislation in a civilised country.

This bit of the Bill is being put forward as part of a very populist and nasty culture war, to use the phrase of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. It is very dangerous. As the honourable Member for Maidstone, who has not been in this Chamber—perhaps one day she will come—but whose name has been mentioned at many points today, said, be careful about the difference, the fine line, between being popular and being populist. We might well remember that when we consider this part on Report.

My final thought is that in a former role I once had the privilege of chairing a meeting—it was, as I recall, at the Conservative Party conference. The audience was very sceptical about the value of human rights, and the Human Rights Act in particular. It was, potentially, a tricky meeting. I chaired a speaker who was addressing concerns in the audience about prisoners having human rights. Again, that is not a popular group in our society—prisoners and human rights is a bad cocktail. He was saying that prisoners have human rights and that some of them even thought that they had a right to a flushing toilet. What a disgrace that was—the audience was very upset and wanted to scrap the Human Rights Act, as some people still do. This eloquent and learned speaker said that it was very simple to deal with the problem: just fix the loo.

Fix the loo—do not demonise the prisoner, do not scrap the Human Rights Act, just fix the problem that is giving rise to the concern. In this case the fix would be to give people stopping places and the support that they need. The criminal law will deal with burglary and with people using their dogs to terrorise people, and will protect the innocent farmer. I wonder whether the eloquent speaker and passionate defender of the Human Rights Act who spoke at that meeting will remember the occasion, as I always have. He was, of course, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

I remember that remark very well, and I adhere to everything that I said then. I hope that the noble Baroness is not setting up an Aunt Sally. The speech that I gave a moment ago did not criticise the proponents of these amendments. It criticised much of the content of Part 4 of the Bill. All I asked was that in seeking to provide a solution for one group of people we did not create a problem for another group.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

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

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

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

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

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It is also wrong to assume that no criminal activities take place on official sites as well—

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Will my noble friend give way? He has just come to a very important part of his remarks. Every community is capable of committing crime, and therefore we have criminal and civil laws that apply to all communities rather than specific measures targeted in a discriminatory fashion.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness, but I think I made it clear in my contribution that I do not believe the Government’s proposals are right or necessary. Do not find a difference with me on those grounds, because it is not what I am suggesting.

If we really want to find a solution to these problems—I think one of the right reverend Prelates made a point about discrimination in education—lots of schools take real pride and make an effort in accommodating Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children. They are the examples of best practice which the Government should encourage. It is not true to say that all Gypsy, Roma and Travellers are illiterate and innumerate—far from it. In fact, one person I met who impressed me was a young woman from a Traveller family who had taken herself through university and become a teacher and an absolute credit to her community. We should beware of sweeping generalisations. They do not help us in these circumstances.

I am aware of the lateness of the hour, but I wanted to make this contribution. I like to think that my activities in support of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller group will not cause me to be labelled as unfairly prejudiced or discriminatory. Ever since I was capable of doing it, I have fought all my life against any form of discrimination, whether it is anti-Semitism, racism or discrimination against Gypsy, Roma and Traveller groups.

My plea to the Minister when she gets to her feet is to take into account the fact that there are some genuine concerns from a number of us about the nature of the government proposals and whether they will help the situation and are necessary—or whether the existing laws are such. I also do not believe that the nature of the amendments, if I take that of my noble friend Lord Rosser as an example, is a solution to the problem. That is why I suggest that, before we reach Report, the Minister convene a meeting, which might enable us to find a bit more common ground than appears to exist in the Chamber at the moment.