Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill
Baroness Randerson ExcerptsWednesday 20th October 2021
(3 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 View all Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 40-I(b) Amendments for Committee (supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (20 Oct 2021)
Baroness Randerson
Member’s explanatory statement
This would specify that the new standards only apply to “police pursuit purposes” rather than all “police purposes”.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased to have this opportunity to introduce this group of amendments, and of those, Amendments 13, 15, 16 and 18 are in my name. They are of course probing amendments at this stage.
The Government are seeking to change the standards by which police driving is to be judged. I should explain to noble Lords that I have some background on this issue, because for 18 years I was a JP, and over those years I dealt with a number of cases that involved police pursuit. Controversial cases where police pursuit leads to traffic accidents of course occur regularly.
I have my own personal experience of this. More than a decade ago, I was involved in one such incident. One evening, I was driving along a long, straight stretch of road in Cardiff—a two-lane road, with a mix of residential and commercial properties, that had intermittent central barriers. I suddenly became aware of cars coming towards me at considerable speed, well above the 30 miles per hour limit. It turned out to be a car driven by a very young man, with a passenger, pursued by two police cars. The problem was that they were on my side of the road, and I was on a part of the road with a central barrier. There was literally nowhere for me to go. There was a head-on crash, my car was a write-off, and there was a three-car pile-up because the car being pursued turned over and one of the police cars impacted it.
The seriousness of the crash was indicated by the fact that the road was closed for the night. We had three additional police cars on the scene, two ambulances, a fire engine and a police helicopter. I spent the night in A&E, but it could easily have been very much worse, because the passengers in the other cars suffered only minor injuries too.
Why were the police taking the risk of this pursuit? There were a number of pedestrians around—the crash happened in front of a pub. The official explanation was that the car was stolen, and I was told that the young men were suspected of at least one burglary—but that was a historical suspicion. However, until the pursuit, there was clearly no risk to life and no immediate danger of violence. It has always been clear to me that that pursuit was unlikely to have been justified.
My Amendments 13 and 16 are designed to probe how the Government envisage the new standards being applied. Since the Road Traffic Act 1988, police driving standards have been judged in the same way as those for any other driver despite the additional training they receive and the various exemptions that apply to them. Following a Police Federation campaign, there was a Home Office consultation which included a question on whether the new looser standards should apply only to pursuit or to police response driving generally. Clauses 4 to 6 give effect to the proposed changes, which would judge police driving against the standards of a competent and careful police officer with additional training. The new standards are to be applied to police purposes generally. However, this is a very wide definition. My amendment suggests that it should be limited to pursuit only.
I fully accept that there is an argument that it could also include I-grade—immediate grade—responses. I know that the grading of police responses varies from one force to another but, generally, I-grade calls are those where the immediate presence of a police officer will have a significant impact on the outcome of an incident. It is typically categorised as where there is likely to be a danger to life, a serious threat of violence, serious damage to property or serious injury. The response time is 15 minutes. The other grades of police response are generally called significant, S grade, or extended, E grade, and they do not involve a risk to life or injury. S grade gives a response time of 60 minutes and E grade 48 hours. Clearly, in neither of those cases is there a justification for extremely fast speeds and less than the normal, competent standards of driving that the rest of us ordinary mortals are expected to follow. I would therefore appreciate an explanation from the Minister as to why any kind of police purpose would be regarded as acceptable. We need a greater justification for these changes.
Amendments 15 and 18 also probe the impact of these changes by suggesting that the Secretary of State be given the power to extend the new standards to other emergency services. Noble Lords will understand that this is an inquiry. Ambulance drivers and drivers of fire engines also receive special training. They are highly skilled drivers, trained to break the normal rules of the road. They respond to calls where there is an immediate danger to life. It could be argued that that applies routinely in the case of ambulance drivers, whereas it probably applies fairly exceptionally in the case of the police. My question to the Minister is this: where do the other emergency services stand in relation to the changes to the rules that the Government are suggesting in this legislation? Are we to expect changes for other emergency services in further legislation, or is that not necessary for legal reason that I have not been able to uncover?
I realise, of course, that the two sets of amendments do not sit particularly well together. I am not arguing a case one way or the other. I am simply seeking to emphasise that these are probing amendments to see what is in the Government’s mind. What is their intention?
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I have Amendments 14 and 17 in this group. I hope—in fact I am confident—that my noble friend the Minister will give a full explanation of the purpose of these clauses in the Bill, in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. My concern is the inclusion of staff members in these new tests of dangerous and careless driving. I can understand the need to include civilian police driving instructors, but what I do not understand is the inclusion of other staff members. I hope that the Minister can explain why they need to be included.
Lord Beith (LD)
My Lords, could I ask the Minister if I heard him correctly? I think that, in the early part of the remarks he read out, he used the phrase “pursuit or emergency.” That appeared to me to be quite a helpful definition of what we are talking about here, and excluded things that were neither “pursuit” nor “emergency”. Could that wording not be what the clauses should be based on, and was it not helpful of him to use it in the early part of what he said?
Baroness Randerson (LD)
I will wait for a moment or two. I do not know whether the Minister wants to answer now.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
Can I come back to the noble Lord on that in a second, please? Sorry.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
I first want to thank the Minister for his response and all other noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. In particular, the quick interchange at the end has been a helpful response to the situation. My noble friend Lord Beith has I think raised a realistic solution to the problems with this legislation that this debate has shown up for the Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and my noble friend Lord Paddick both referred to the controversies and tragedies that occur in these situations. There are endless stories of controversy. Any changes the Government make to the legislation will simply shine a harsher light on the problems that inevitably will occur. So the Government really need to tighten up their thinking on this, and I would ask the Minister to take on board my noble friend’s advice to consider some tighter wording. The Government’s own consultation in 2018 offered two options: the use of the phrase “police purposes” or the use of “pursuit”. That shows that the Government themselves must have been considering those options at the time—so there must have been a logical reason for offering them.
I would like the Minister to take the time between now and Report, when I am pretty sure the issue will come back, to look at potential amendments that the Government believe may be helpful. I thank all noble Lords who have taken part. The Government need to be on very sure ground here, because they have drawn a broad definition. “Police purposes,” as the noble Lord, Lord Attlee, said, is a very broad term, and the circumstances in which the new rules can be applied will be questioned. With that, I will withdraw the amendment.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
May I respond to the noble Lord, Lord Beith? I do not know if this is appropriate. I am probably breaking all the rules. I apologise if I am. I think I said, “to respond to emergencies and to pursue criminals”. This applies to all policing purposes where the staff member has had training. I will expand on whether the new test means that the police officer would be prosecuted if they departed from their training and guidance under any circumstances. The police driver training includes decision-making in line with the national decision-making model. This allows for a degree of flexibility. Police drivers should also take account of guidance found in the College of Policing authorised professional practice. The new legislation compares the police driver’s actions with what a careful and competent police driver would reasonably do. In other words, a police driver will be prosecuted for dangerous driving only if they drive in a way that would not be considered reasonable by a careful and competent police driver.
Lord Paddick (LD)
I am grateful to the noble Earl for his intervention. I think national standards would say that the tactic of colliding with a stolen motorbike was an acceptable tactic that officers could be compared against whether or not it was actually used by particular forces, bearing in mind the circumstances faced by different forces. So, legally, officers in Devon and Cornwall could use that tactic according to the national standard, but it would be very rare for them to use it—if ever at all.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My noble friend has raised the issue of national standards. I want to approach this issue in a slightly different way. I have added my name to the amendment because I have concerns about clarity. The existing standards are set out in the 1988 Act, and we as drivers are all familiar with them. We passed our driving tests however long ago, but on an almost daily basis we practise following those standards—fairly rigorously, I hope.
According to this legislation, we are now moving to a set of standards based on a format for training of which we, with the exception of my noble friend, have no real concept. We do not understand exactly what is involved in this training and what is expected of police drivers. Indeed, I am sure this debate has been very instructive for us all in finding out a bit more about it.
Add that issue to the fact that standards are different from one part of the country to another and we have a difficult situation for the Government in applying this new approach. Good law has to be easily understandable. Publicising the details of these standards—making sure that the public, as well as police officers, understand them—is essential for acceptance by the general public. That will be essential if cases brought under this legislation are to succeed in court.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I have a confession to make: I love the traffic police. I have spent many happy hours in the front of a police van with an automatic number plate recognition machine, spotting illegal drivers. The fascinating thing about criminals is that not only do they break the law on drugs, guns and so on, but they do not pay insurance on their cars either. If I were a criminal, I would make sure that my car was perfectly legal, but for some reason they do not. So the traffic police are incredibly successful at catching criminals; at one point—I do not know if this is still true—their arrest rate was far higher than that of the average police officer here in London.
In the 12 years that I sat on the police authority, I took advantage of that to go out with the traffic police. I remember one spectacular day when they had a car-crushing machine next to the A1. All the vehicles speeding down the A1 saw that machine and slowed to legal limits. We were not actually crushing cars that had been taken that day; they had brought some cars out with them from central London. So I am a big fan. The traffic OCU serves an incredible function of keeping our roads safe.
I support Amendment 19. Of course, everybody expects the police who respond to blue-light emergencies to drive fast, overtake, go through red lights and so on, and it is right that the police are given the necessary legal protections to do their job in these situations. Then there are more controversial and dangerous tactics, such as officers aggressively ramming moped drivers who refuse to stop. We cannot leave that for the courtroom to decide—it has to be a political decision. Whether a tactic meets the standard of a reasonable and careful constable is political, because you cannot leave police officers uncertain about whether their behaviour is legal. It would also leave the public unsure about what standard of driving you can expect from our public servants. Amendment 19 addresses that issue and is an extremely neat solution.
E-scooters
Baroness Randerson Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con) [V]
I can confirm to the noble and learned Lord that I was on the streets of London on my bicycle on both Thursday and Friday and I have actually witnessed police seizing these e-scooters, as referenced by the figures that I gave earlier. And, just to come back to my noble friend Lord Vaizey, I can tell him that 5 million kilometres of journeys have taken place since the trials began.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
The Government have let the problems associated with e-scooters escalate out of control. Retailers are not being held to their legal obligations and pilot schemes are so numerous that it is effectively back-door legalisation without any of the rules. Does the Minister accept that the Government instead should have legislated a couple of years ago with some basic, simple rules on minimum age, maximum speeds, licences and helmets?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con) [V]
My Lords, it is probably worth saying that it is not out of control. The statutory instrument for the trials was laid in June 2020, and you can own a private e-scooter but you cannot legally use one on the road. So the rules are clear and I have gone through the figures for how many e-scooters have been seized. But I do not think that there should be an outright ban on them. We should evaluate the trials as and when they finish next year.
E-scooters
Baroness Randerson Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Randerson (LD)
There are 50 trial areas and only 7,608 e-scooters legally in use on our roads across the UK, but local authorities have reported over 800 incidents, including serious injuries to a three year-old child walking on the pavement. Does the Minister agree that this is an unacceptable level of risk and will she and her colleagues urgently look again at the trials taking place with the intention of speeding up the introduction of proper regulation and penalties across the whole UK?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I do think that 300 injuries is too many—one injury is too many—and, to that end, I know that the Metropolitan Police have impounded nearly 1,000 e-scooters in the two years to April this year.
Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill
Baroness Randerson ExcerptsWednesday 24th February 2021
(3 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill 2019-21 View all Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 131-I Marshalled list for Committee - (19 Feb 2021)
There is some value in exploring an alternative, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is doing with his Amendment 9. This would introduce a statutory rule that these public lavatories should be treated, in effect, as separate hereditaments, so long as they can be accessed from outside and therefore given a separate value. I do not know how many there are—perhaps not many, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has suggested—and if so it may not take us very far, but some distance is worth travelling in the interests of addressing the problem through the Bill. As a lawyer, I cannot see any objection to this proposal. It is an adaptation of the ordinary rules, but if the law provides for it, it is a perfectly orthodox adaptation. I commend this as a very neat way of responding to a very real problem that needs to be addressed, and I am happy to give Amendment 9 my support.
Baroness Randerson (LD) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of an informal campaign group which seeks to improve the standards of public toilets generally. I am pleased to speak in support of the amendments in this group, and I am grateful to the Minister for his response by letter to issues that I, among others, raised at Second Reading. However, I am sure that he will forgive me when I say that I found his arguments unconvincing.
I accept that to include facilities open to the public, but not as separate or distinct buildings, would mean a valuation exercise. In each local authority area this would involve numbers maybe in the dozens, not the hundreds. That really cannot be seen as a costly hurdle. The Minister believes that it would divert resources from the 2023 revaluation. It should simply be part of the revaluation. I also reject the idea that identifying the facilities concerned would be difficult. These are public facilities and public bodies would self-identify. I also recommend to the Minister the Great British Public Toilet Map, available online, and a number of apps which guide you to local public toilets.
As it stands, the Bill is of course sensible, but it is a paltry little measure and will certainly not bring the transformation needed. I am not sure how deeply the Government consulted local government representatives. The local authorities that I am familiar with ceased building stand-alone public conveniences decades ago because problems of anti-social behaviour are so much greater in isolated blocks. Nowadays, new sets of conveniences are mainly incorporated in other public buildings, where issues of safety for users, maintenance and cleanliness are more easily dealt with. Stand-alone blocks obviously still exist but are often old and are too often already closed and shuttered.
I also wish to test the definition of “publicly owned”. The definition is very blurred these days. Facilities can be publicly owned but privately run—for example, in many areas that is the case with leisure centres. My area has publicly available toilets in libraries and shopping centres. The shopping centres are commercial developments and commercially run, but the toilets are discrete units. They are not just toilets in shops; there are separate doors to them, but it is a commercial operation.
We also have public toilets in the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff—a large building at the centre of Cardiff tourism in the bay. It houses major musical events and a lot of youth and artistic activities. It runs free concerts and there are shops and cafes. There is free public access to the toilets. The Wales Millennium Centre is run by a trust, but that trust has been funded by major amounts of public money. I know that the noble Lord will say that that is in Wales and that there is a separate set of rules, but I use it as an example. Clearly, it would not qualify for this scheme, but why should it not? It provides the same facilities, with cleaning and maintenance, and the public are allowed to enter for a large number of hours each day of the week.
It is really not difficult to ascertain whether toilets are genuinely publicly available or available for a reasonable amount of time each day. The Minister told us that the Government are adopting the community toilet scheme, and similar types of rules can apply for rate relief.
My concern is not just that the Government’s scheme is not generous enough; it is also that it is not even-handed. Public toilets in buildings still have to be maintained and cleaned, so why should an accident of situation define whether this relief is granted? It could even discourage major new developments from incorporating what would be genuinely public toilets.
Baroness Pinnock (LD) [V]
My Lords, I draw the Committee’s attention to my interests as listed in the register: as a member of Kirklees Council and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
The amendments in the names of my noble friend Lord Greaves and the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, to which I have added my name, challenge the scope of the Bill in its restriction to public toilets that are stand-alone and not part of a larger public building, such as a library or community centre. I thank the Minister for the opportunity to discuss these amendments and for the letter that he sent explaining the reasons for confining the scope of the Bill to stand-alone public toilets. However, we have to remember that one consequence of the long period of cuts to local government funding has been that many public toilets have been closed permanently. In my local authority, which serves nearly half a million people, there are now no stand-alone public toilets. The Bill is welcome but it is very much like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
These amendments are intended to encourage the Government to appreciate the wider need to increase the availability of public toilets. There is already pressure for some public toilets in public buildings to be closed because of the costs associated with keeping them open, as they are not part of the focused purpose of the building. For example, a public library is having to use scarce funds to keep the public toilets in its building open when there is barely sufficient funding to staff the building. That is the dilemma facing local authorities, certainly in the northern urban areas that I know well.
My noble friend Lord Greaves’s points are well made. Local people regard public toilets within a public building as being the same as stand-alone public toilets. The challenge is explained in the letter that I referred to earlier—the volume of work it would impose on the valuation office—but my noble friend Lord Greaves’s amendment seeks to find a way round this for public toilets that have separate access. I hope that the Minister is able to respond positively to that amendment.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, is an expert on these matters. He has said that valuation for rating is not just about facts and figures. One example that he provided was the relief given to charities. The Government would do well to take heed of the arguments that the noble and learned Lord made, and that view has been well supported by my noble friend Lady Randerson. As well as making those arguments and supporting my noble friend Lord Greaves’s view, she argued that improved public toilets are more secure and can be more easily kept clean if they are within a public building, rather than being stand-alone.
The Government have a responsibility to ensure adequate availability of publicly funded public toilets. It is a responsibility that has been accepted since the days of the great Victorian public heath reformers. The Bill demonstrates that the Government continue to accept that they have that responsibility. It is not sufficient, in fulfilling this obligation, to make those public toilets that have survived the cull zero rated. The Government must provide the means for local government to increase availability to meet local need. That is what these amendments seek to do and I wholeheartedly support them.
Baroness Andrews (Lab) [V]
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, and to support what she said. I am speaking in support of Amendment 11 and particularly to Amendment 13. I am conscious that the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, is not able to be in her place today, because we all know what a superb advocate she is for all these matters. I am happy to support these amendments, because they are significant.
Amendment 13 makes clear what everybody who supports the Bill already knows: that we want to ensure that it works; that it is seen to be working; and that the evidence is collected and available for us to see. There is a matter of principle here: that public policy changes should be seen to be effective, especially when public money is involved; that when local funds are dedicated to a particular purpose, they are used for that purpose; and that there is transparency and agency in local and national government.
There is also a practical issue here. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, we have waited a long time for practical and universal initiatives to be taken to stop the closure of public lavatories and to place them in their proper context, which is within a robust and vigilant policy for local health and safety, rather than in some afterthought where no one is really interested in what happens to them.
As I said on Second Reading, the Bill is very welcome, but it would be a major disappointment if the funding that is going to be generated is not used for that purpose. We have to know the impact of the Bill, that it works and that it has achieved its purpose, and we need the evidence to be published. As other noble Lords have said, it is all the more crucial that we know this, because the measures will be introduced at a time when local authorities have never been more strapped, and it has never been more difficult to decide on priorities. We need to know that this small change will take its place in the range of priorities.
Local government needs financial and political investment to repair the damage and help to rebuild communities. I think that the Bill is part of that and part of the fabric of our whole public health and preventive health system, for the personal reasons that many noble Lords have raised today, and as part of a series of principles. I support these amendments and look forward to the Minister’s response. I cannot see any possible reason for rejecting them and I hope I am right in that respect.
Baroness Randerson (LD) [V]
My Lords, all the amendments in this group are designed to ensure that the Bill is not the end of the matter, and that the Government are forced to confront the appalling and declining state of public conveniences in Britain. The Bill will not start to tackle the many problems. The Explanatory Memorandum tells us that it will involve redistributing £6 million back to local authorities in England. There are 343 local authorities in England—of course, I realise that there is some double counting because of two-tier areas—but this number does not include parish councils. There are 9,000 of those, many of which go on to take responsibility for public toilets. The Committee can immediately see from those figures that £6 million will not go far; it will be swallowed up in the general budget of local authorities, which are chronically short of cash.
My own Amendment 15 is designed to ensure that, in good time, the Government are obliged to undertake a comprehensive review of public toilet provision. Are there enough of them and are they clean, well designed, well maintained and so on? As a result of this review, the Government should bring forward further measures. I realise that they are already undertaking a technical review of the accessibility and provision of public toilets for men and women. My intention with Amendment 15 is to ensure that the review is expanded and that a year after the Bill becomes an Act it is looked at to assess its effectiveness, if any.