Equality Act 2010 (Amendment) (Disabled Access) Bill [HL]

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support the “innocuous little Bill” of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. It is remarkable that every single person who has spoken so far is in favour of the Bill, which raises the question of why the Government are so obstinate on this issue when so many of us agree, particularly on the Government Benches. I spoke to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, before the debate to explain that I have to catch a train at lunchtime, so I might have to leave before the summing-up, but everybody—almost everybody—has been so concise that I think I can stay until the end. He gave me his full pardon and forgiveness; I also checked with the Minister, who was slightly less willing to give me her forgiveness but I think she was joking—I hope so.

I wanted to speak today not because I or anybody in my family is disabled but partly because I wanted to join in such a wonderful cross-party debate. For me, the Bill touches my sense of justice about what the world should look like and how we should include absolutely everybody possible. As many noble Lords have said, it is not just wheelchair users who will benefit from this. Even I—and I consider myself still relatively healthy—will benefit when I, like the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, have a heavy shopping trolley. This will enable so many people. As our population ages, it is essential that we think ahead on issues such as this to make it easy and possible for people to access every single building and every single home. I, too, salute the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, to make things fully accessible. That is what we should be aiming for. I subscribe to the social model of disability, which is based on the view that society disables us; it is not we who are disabled but society that forces it on us if it does not make things easy. We have to adapt society if we are to achieve equality.

Those of us in this House who see a six-inch step as a small or negligible obstacle must not allow our good fortune to inhibit the possibilities for people for whom it is a huge obstacle. The current regime of making reasonable adjustments is clearly inadequate. Ministers have previously said that the current duty is quite powerful and should be used more effectively rather than bringing in new legislation. Fine, but what do the Government propose to do about it? What are they going to bring in to make it possible?

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for his persistence in promoting this Bill. I believe that this is its fourth reincarnation, which shows considerable persistence. I think that the Government have to go away to consider this very deeply. In fact, I am hoping for a change of heart. Perhaps the Government will be able to accept the Bill and do the open and transparent deal that has been offered and make a statement about improving society here and now today.

Deaths in Police Custody

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I do not know whether this will entirely answer the noble Lord’s question. I suspect that it may not, in which case I shall write to him afterwards. The independent office for police conduct and the existing commission structure will be replaced with a new single head—the director-general—with ultimate responsibility for all investigative decisions. This position is barred to anyone with a policing background—hence the independence. The director-general will have statutory powers to determine which posts in the IOPC are barred to former police. From the noble Lord’s gesture, I think that I shall write to him.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, three things leapt out at me from the report—things which are lessons learned in the past but which are apparently still unlearned. The first is the disproportionate racial element to the deaths—the fact that young black men seem extremely vulnerable to police interventions. The second is the idea of having cameras in police vans. I have completely forgotten the third, but in relation to the first two, surely these things have been learned before. Why is there still a problem? Why is it still happening and, to repeat the question from the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, what are this Government going to do differently?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am glad that the noble Baroness forgets parts of questions because I forget parts of answers. In terms of whether black and minority ethnic people are more likely to die in police custody, the report commissioned by Dame Elish found that deaths in custody are representative of the detainee population and that the proportion of black people who die in police custody is lower than the proportion arrested for notifiable offences. In addition, in 2011 the IPCC published the results of a 10-year study that it had carried out into deaths in custody from 1998-98 to 2008-09. It found that 22 deaths—that is, 7% of deaths—were of black individuals. The report noted that the ethnicity of the deceased in police custody was broadly in line with the ethnic demographic of detainees. On the question of cameras in police vans, I shall have to come back to the noble Baroness.

Brexit: UK-EU Movement of People (EUC Report)

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I join in the appreciation of—even acclamation for—this report from the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and her colleagues. It is a very difficult subject and I congratulate them on producing it.

An earlier contributor to the debate said that it is obvious that the scale of immigration must be reduced. That is complete nonsense: nothing is obvious about the whole process of Brexit. I voted for Brexit but I did not vote to stop the free movement of EU nationals or to stop migration to Britain. That was not my aim. I probably voted for the £350 million to go back to the NHS, although that is not looking likely at the moment with this Government. I say that to demonstrate that, although millions of people voted to exit the EU, you cannot make assumptions about the things that they believed at the time. There simply was not a proper debate and everybody probably had their own view of what it meant to exit the EU.

I think that EU migration and wider immigration has been fantastic for Britain. It has brought us new ideas, new energy, dynamism and perhaps even a bit of cultural understanding of other nations. Whether migration is to or from this country, it is a very healthy thing for us as a nation to have. To me, Britain is an outward-facing, warm, welcoming and kind country to people. Some come here to work, some come as tourists, some are fleeing famine and wars—wars that we might have been instrumental in waging—and perhaps some are fleeing climate change disasters to which we have contributed. As a nation which consumes a huge amount of resources, we have a duty to people who flee here when their resources are reduced because of our greed.

YouGov polling today has shown that 69% of people support free movement within the EU. That is mainly because they want reciprocal relations, but 69% of people think that free movement within the EU is a good thing, and we have to keep that in mind when we think of the movement of people generally.

We have to recognise that immigration can change our communities. It can be very frightening and have quite a strong impact on some communities. It is the Government’s job to keep us secure and safe, to explain the situation to communities, and to help immigrants or migrants to assimilate, to join in and to have a secure lifestyle here. However, the Government are doing the opposite. They have suggested that the lack of GPs or school places can be blamed on immigration. That is scandalous and irresponsible, as well as blatantly untrue. If you meet a migrant in the NHS, they are much more likely to be treating you than to be ahead of you in the queue. The head of NHS England said today that he will recruit more than 2,000 GPs from abroad to meet the NHS’s staffing targets. Therefore, clearly the NHS sees the value of migration and immigration.

The lies about immigration mean that the real problems facing our communities are not solved. The grinding poverty that many communities face is simply swept aside because this other issue predominates. Instead, we have scapegoating and tough-sounding rhetoric. We have to make our immigration system fairer and more humane. We have to end immigration detention, scrap the minimum income rules for visas and make family reunion easier.

I and, I know, a lot of other people were extremely embarrassed that the Government did not immediately give EU nationals the right to remain. It made us look very mean. It is something that we will have to agree to in any case, so why not do it out of generosity of spirit rather than be forced into it? These people have made their lives here in good faith, and allowing those lives to be turned upside down, with many people leaving, is irresponsible of our Government. They have used these people as bargaining chips, which is a very unpleasant thing for them to have done.

I am not sure where we are on the Tory aim of introducing a cap of 100,000 on the number of immigrants. I know that the Tories have tried to achieve this quite often. I try to stay up with the news but politics is fast moving at the moment and I do not know where we are on that. However, such a cap would be arbitrary and very damaging to our society. We need movement of people—that is healthy. The cap is based on the premise that migrants are damaging to our economy but that simply is not true. They are damaging neither to our economy nor to our society.

The noble Lord, Lord Judd, gave us some cautionary words about evidence. I am now going to cite some facts, which many people do very selectively; I am going to do the same. A third of doctors are foreign born. There are 55,000 EU nationals in the English NHS alone. On international students, stricter rules could cost our economy £2 billion, and counting them as immigrants is absolutely wrong. These people pay a lot of money for their education and one hopes that they will always have a kind view of our country. We have heard previous speakers talking about agriculture, financial services, construction, farming and universities, but other areas to bear in mind are hospitality, catering and social care. Combined, those employed in all those sectors make up 34% of all EU nationals currently working in the UK. Furthermore, net migration to the UK dropped to 273,000 in the year to September, which was down nearly 50,000 compared with the previous year.

I find it hard to believe that the Government of the country that I live in and work so hard for have been so inept at handling this whole issue. They have not just handled it badly but lied about the impact of migrants and immigrants on our society and economy. We do not hear enough about the benefits that migrants bring. It seems to me that that is the Government’s job and they are not doing it at the moment. The whole anti-immigrant narrative has been very nasty and difficult to challenge. Many in this House have challenged it but, sadly, the Government have not picked up on that. I think that the UK will be much worse off without the free movement of people.

Finally, clearly this House will have an opportunity in the future to take the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and amend it for the better. We have it in our power—we have enough experts in this House—to make sure that it is a better Bill than the one the Government have produced. I think that we should join together across parties and vote down the worst aspects of the Bill. I very much hope that this House will demonstrate to the Government that they simply cannot pass legislation that is so cruel and inappropriate.

Security in the UK

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, this has been a well-informed—one might even say learned—debate, and I hope that I do not bring the tone down too far. It is obviously a huge topic, so I am going to pick a few issues where I feel the Government have got it extremely badly wrong. I would have added digital issues as well if I knew more about them, but as it is I have four.

The first issue is Prevent. No one would disagree that prevention is better than cure, but at the same time you have to make sure that what you put in place actually functions. I argue that Prevent does not: it has far too many failings. It has targeted too many innocent people, including children. At this stage, it does not have the respect of the communities that it is meant to be engaging with and has become counterproductive. Part of the problem is that it is vague and prone to misapplication, particularly because its definition of extremism is so broad. The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, QC, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, has described the definition as “hopeless”. Despite a declared intention to introduce a counterextremism Bill, there is not yet a statutory definition of extremism. The only working definition of it is the Prevent one:

“vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values”.

That is just too broad and encompasses far too many people.

The NGO Liberty has done a very good briefing on Prevent, which I can pass on to noble Lords. Its three recommendations are: repeal the statutory duty, which has absolutely failed and brought Prevent into disrepute; drop the focus on non-violent extremism; and establish an independent review of Prevent. We have had something close to this from the Prime Minister, but we really do need to move on with it. We need a community-led, collaborative approach to tackling extremism. The vast majority of people want to help to defeat terrorism, and we tend to ignore them. What the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, called a “culture of resistance” is exactly what we need. We need to engage with people and get them to trust us.

My second issue is the Government’s declared intention to establish a commission for countering extremism. We still do not know much about this commission, but we understand it will be statutory and called “the Commission for Countering Extremism”. Apparently it will,

“identify examples of extremism and expose them”.

It also includes proposals to regulate online spaces with a digital charter. We already have laws that fulfil these needs; we do not need any more. We need to use the laws we have and resource them properly. Part of the problem is that the agencies responsible just do not have the resources to do the job. The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Max Hill QC, has said that we do not need new laws to tackle the current terrorist threat. Despite this, the Government are still going to try to legislate and not even just for terrorism, but for what they call “non-violent extremism”. What does that mean? Is it ideas that are difficult, unpleasant or offensive or just ideas that the Government disagree with? The simple fact is that it is impossible to agree a definition of what constitutes an extremist. We all have very different ideas—personally, I would argue that the DUP is an extremist organisation. It is quite dangerous to set up a commission responsible for defining, identifying and exposing people whom it thinks are extreme. As I have said in your Lordships’ House before, I am concerned that we will create our own distinctively British brand of McCarthyism.

I also have concerns about press freedom. It is surely a fundamental British value that our press is free and reports on all our strange ways, whether we are politicians or members of the public. I also have concerns that people will be seen as criminals through thought crime. They will not actually commit a crime; they will just be thinking about it. However, that does not make them criminals.

I am also curious to know whether we will have our own equivalent of the European Court of Justice. I think I saw something today about our having an interim relationship with it. I would like to know more about that, if possible. Where will people take their cases when they feel that the Government have been intrusive or that they have been overpoliced? Where does the DUP sit in deciding all these things? How much of a voice does it have? I would like some answers to those points. At the moment, there are more questions than answers, so anything that we can be told would be great.

My third issue concerns policing. Given the more than decade and a half during which I was a severe critic of the Met, when I sat on its police authority and then on a policing committee, I did not think that I would defend it quite so fiercely today. It has experienced massive budget cuts, which were far too fast and far too hard, which meant that no rational decisions could be made. The Met had to cut many millions of pounds every year. Personally, I think that has created a Met police force which perhaps is no longer quite fit for purpose. Although one might argue that its budget is not changing, if the budget is static while costs are rising, the force is much worse off.

The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime said recently that the Met already has a budget shortfall of £170 million for national counterterrorism work. That is work over and above its responsibility as a police force for the capital. That money is normally expected to come from the Government, so will the Government please pay that back to the Met? I would like to know that. Personally, I think that the Government should, of course, pay that, but somehow the magic money tree cannot be found when it is a question of Londoners’ safety. I find that quite offensive. If we are to forge better relations with communities so that we can have vital intelligence on all kinds of crime, including terrorism, many more community police officers are needed. That means understanding how we can prevent attacks on our freedoms. It is what the noble Lord, Lord Bach, called neighbourhood policing. There just is not enough of it anymore, which means that communities do not have an easy way to express their fears and concerns if they think they are a little too mild to report officially.

My last issue concerns Saudi Arabia. As a politician, I understand that we sometimes have to work with some very unpleasant people and we have to sit down with them and negotiate with them. We might loathe them, but we have to keep a dialogue going. However, we do not have to sell them arms. Saudi Arabia is a brutal dictatorship. It is one of the world’s worst Governments in terms of human rights abuses. We should not be selling it arms. Today the High Court ruled that the case brought by Campaign Against Arms Trade was not valid and that it was perfectly legal for the Government to sell Saudi Arabia arms. I would argue that, if it is legal, the law needs to be changed. We also all know that “legal” does not mean ethical— tax avoidance springs to mind, for example, in this context.

The Labour leader has said:

“If Theresa May is serious about cutting off financial and ideological support for terrorism, she should publish the suppressed report on foreign funding of UK-based extremism and have difficult conversations with Saudi Arabia, not hug Saudi and allied Gulf states even closer”.


It is very embarrassing that we are selling arms to a country that is responsible for human rights abuses in its neighbour Yemen. It is bombing hospitals, schools and wedding parties. How do we square with our conscience the fact that our arms are being used in that way? I would like to know a little more about publishing that report. We heard a little about that earlier, but I would like to know more about publishing it. Is it true that the Saudi royal family is involved in some way in the foreign funding of extremist terrorist groups here, because that is what people appear to be saying? It would be good to know that. If it does involve Saudi financing of groups here in the UK, that is absolutely unforgivable, and the Government need to do something about it.

Does the Minister truly believe that we need more laws to fight terrorism, or does she accept that we have enough laws and we just have to apply them properly? We already have a lot of intrusion into our private lives, and we have a significant amount of repression of people who think a bit differently. I find that unacceptable. Theresa May herself said something about celebrating the diversity of Britain, but everything the Government are doing seems to be closing down that option.

Finally, to echo the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, how far are we prepared to go in reducing our own freedoms as a response to people who are trying to take them away? It seems to be the exact opposite of what we should be doing—we should be celebrating our freedom and allowing more of it rather than closing it down.

Terrorist and Extremist Propaganda: Online Sources

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right not only that the internet is a useful tool to challenge this sort of activity, but that freedom of speech and use of the internet are important in our society. There is a fine balance between freedom of speech and speech that is downright extremist and hateful. That is why we have adopted our approach, which is to take down extremist material and put up a counternarrative, in the meantime, helping to educate people about the dangers of radicalisation.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, following that answer, can the Minister tell us what definition of “extremist” the Government are using?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The Government are not using the definition of extremism which I know the Metropolitan Police has designated the noble Baroness with. “Extremist material” refers to content that is assessed as contravening UK terrorism legislation.