Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Earl Attlee Excerpts

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

The equality impact assessment acknowledges that there may be an indirect discriminatory impact but argues that this can be objectively justified, albeit not to the satisfaction of the JCHR or the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights. Ministers repeatedly counter accusations of discrimination with the assurance that the proposals will not affect the vast majority of Travellers, who are law-abiding citizens. We agree that the vast majority are law-abiding. The whole point of our concern is that this punitive legislation, with its imprecise wording, is likely to turn many of these law-abiding citizens into officially second-class, non-law-abiding citizens. The draft guidance has done nothing to assuage this concern. It will disproportionately affect the Traveller community either directly—because they are unable to avoid its requirements in the absence of adequate sites—or indirectly, because of the fears to which it has given rise. Can the Minister say to what other group the Government expect the legislation to be applied, and on what basis? I have yet to hear or read any convincing rebuttal of the charge that this clause will be discriminatory in its impact.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, in responding to this group of amendments, I shall make four points with varying degrees of effort.

First, I commend the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. She is one of the few people in Parliament who is prepared to speak up for the GRT community, which she has done for many years. In this context, we should also remember the work of the late Lord Avebury. It really shows the benefit of having an appointed House, complementing an elected one. While my next point might not find favour with the noble Baroness, I hope that she, and other noble Lords, will be rather more relaxed regarding my last two.

Secondly, we keep discussing the unwillingness of local authorities to provide sufficient sites for Travellers to meet the demand. A possible concern of local authorities is that demand might be insatiable. A far bigger concern is that local authorities are answerable to their electorates. As we have discussed, there is no sector of our society more despised and feared than the Travellers. I accept that local authorities have legal obligations and that they are not adhering to them.

It may help the Committee if I describe my own lived experience, which is not unusual for people who operate in the countryside. I have a small workshop near Basingstoke where I undertake pro bono engineering work, largely in support of a museum that is a registered charity. Every single day I go there, I have to expend 30 minutes of work releasing and, later on, securing my equipment so that it is too difficult for Travellers to steal it. In the countryside, everybody has to take similar anti-Traveller precautions, which are expensive and result in significant loss of productivity.

One day, the heavy-duty padlock for my workshop container was literally ripped off the door mechanism. Fortunately for me, there was nothing of interest to them inside. It was thought that they were looking for quad bikes. Soon after, and near that location, a farmyard complex was broken into and a quad bike was stolen. At a nearby farm, Travellers broke into a 40-foot shipping container. They applied such brutal force to the lock mechanism that the container was shifted 12 inches from its original position. Fortunately, there were no quad bikes to steal. I mention quad bikes because, in August 2019, PC Andrew Harper was killed by Travellers resisting arrest for the theft of a quad bike.

It may surprise the Committee and the outside world to hear that I am not wealthy. I am the original impoverished Earl. However, in January 2012, I was able to buy the one and only new vehicle that I have ever owned. It was a Land Rover Defender and, to put it mildly, I became emotionally attached to it, as most Defender owners do. On 21 October, when I was in your Lordships’ House, that vehicle was stolen from a railway station. It is very unlikely that I will ever see it again. It was most likely in a shipping container before I left your Lordships’ House.

Obviously, I cannot claim that it was stolen by Travellers. What I can report, however, is that when Hampshire police successfully raided a Traveller site near Odiham on 25 October, they recovered about 25 vehicles, including three Land Rovers and several quad bikes. Sadly, mine was not among them. I understand that this well-planned operation required 60 police officers in order for it be undertaken safely and without risk of disorder. This would have been a force-level operation and would have taken some time for the police to plan.

The inescapable fact is that, collectively, Travellers are above the law. When the police have good reason to believe that stolen goods are located at a Traveller site, there is little they can do about it. I asked the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, a Question on this very point on 15 October 2002. Afterwards, when we had a chat in the Prince’s Chamber, he said to me, “Not bad, not bad.”

My third point, which may be more palatable to most of the Committee, is that the provisions in the Bill are unlikely to help much, if at all. Despite the difficulties being experienced by the police, which I have already referred to, according to the Prison Reform Trust’s Bromley Briefings, 5% of the prison population identifies as being from a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller background. This is a totally disproportionate ratio that cannot be accounted for by bias, although bias probably exists to some extent. It is clear to me that a large proportion of the Traveller population is illiterate, innumerate and unable—and unwilling—to engage in exclusively legitimate economic activity. The youths convicted of killing PC Andrew Harper, I understand, fall into that category. However, I do not believe that a nomadic lifestyle cannot be legitimate. There must be plenty of things that Travellers can do to help our society.

My fourth and final point concerns solutions. How to prevent the Traveller community bringing up their children with the weaknesses and defects I have referred to is a complex social and cultural problem, and is not for me. The prison system is a different matter. According to the chief inspector’s monotonously depressing reports, all we do with prisoners of this nature is keep them in one building with extremely limited purposeful activity, fail to address their weaknesses and then wonder why we have a general reoffending rate of about 65% within 12 months of release.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

Can I ask the noble Earl a question? It seems, from listening to his speech, he is saying that all Travellers are criminals. He did not quite say that all criminals are Travellers, but he got some way towards it. What is his solution? Is it to deport them to some offshore island, so they do not affect our way of life?

[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.

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[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.

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[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.”

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

The only difficulty, of course, is that it is the countryside police offer who tells the victims that it was the Travellers.