Crime and Policing Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Harriet Cross and Keir Mather

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Keir Mather (Selby) (Lab)]

Q Thank you both for your evidence. Councillor Garratt, you remarked earlier about public order measures, protests and the concerns you have, quite rightly, about some of the protests we have seen in London. Can you speak to some of the specific provisions in the Bill, particularly those that create new criminal offences of concealing your identity at a protest, of climbing on specified war memorials, and of wearing or displaying articles in support of prescribed organisations? How do you think the practical application of some of these measures in London will help to deal with the public order concerns you mentioned?

Councillor Garratt: I welcome all the provisions you just listed, which are all positive. I think I might have seen them somewhere before, in fact.

When we at the Assembly press the police on how they police protests, there are two sets of problems: one is the issue around powers—what they can or cannot do—which I spoke about earlier. The courts have decided that they cannot remove somebody for simply sitting in a road if it is a protest.

On the other hand, there is a practical problem in the sense that if you have a very large protest—for example, the ones we have seen on Saturday mornings—with a very large group of people and a limited number of police officers, the practical ability to carry out what you might think of as a snatch operation comes down to a risk-based decision that the senior officer on the site has to make. One of the ways in which the new provisions may not necessarily make much difference is if the police judge that it is difficult for them in practice. For example, if you have a crowd of a thousand people all wearing face masks, what exactly is the practical step that the police would be able to take?

I welcome the provisions. It is a good idea to have them for people who climb on wall memorials and wear face masks. In particular, although being unpleasant is not against the law, I am very on board with the provisions for those who appear to be supporting terrorist organisations, or inciting violence against groups of people. The question mark I have in my mind is whether the police have either the resources or, on balance, the willingness to go into a large crowd of people, who probably will not welcome their arrival, to actually enforce those provisions.

Councillor Conway: We think the measures are broadly welcome. We will obviously have to see how they go in practice, but something fundamental is needed, as has been shown over the past year or so, in respect of the way you balance the very legitimate right to protest, which we have to enshrine, and people feeling intimated. There is a wider discussion than just this Bill in terms of how it is possible to disagree agreeably—we had this conversation last week. Some of this, in respect of the face masks and so on, sets a basic code for how you engage in public life and public space.

[Harriet Cross]

Q I would like to look at the requirement to report where there is reasonable suspicion of child sexual abuse to, among others, local authorities. From your point of view, how do you think local authorities are set up to receive such reports? Do you think local authorities should get involved in that?

Councillor Conway: I will read this is out, if that is okay, because—not that this is not all important—this really is an important issue. Child sexual abuse is obviously a horrific crime, and the LGA supports the mandatory reporting duty. We do, however, have several things to say that would make it more effective.

We believe there should be training and support for those who work with children. Multiple reports, including by Ofsted and the Home Office, have identified a lack of skills and confidence among professionals in responding to child sexual abuse. A duty must not be placed on professionals without the accompanying training that will enable them to identify and respond to child sexual abuse effectively.

We also believe that there needs to be support for victims, and that there can be a shortfall in dedicated support for boys, children from ethnic minority backgrounds and disabled children. If this duty identified more victims of sexual abuse, obviously it would also be imperative that services are in place to provide appropriate support.

On that, I would also highlight the pressure on children’s social care. The duty may result in an increase in referrals to children’s social care, as has occurred in other areas where mandatory reporting has been introduced, such as parts of Australia and America. Obviously this is in a context where spending on children’s social care has already increased by 11% in the last financial year to £14.2 billion. We believe it is absolutely vital that children’s social care is adequately resourced, to ensure that all referrals can be fully investigated, with the best possible support provided, including where children obviously need to be brought into care for their own protection.

On safe spaces, we would add that there is a very fine line between creating a space of trust and then a space of reporting. Obviously local government sits at the heart of that.

Councillor Garratt: I broadly welcome the duty to report. There are two concerns that I will raise. First, there does not seem to be—apologies if I have missed it—any sanction on anyone who does not carry out that duty. I question what kind of a duty it is if you can simply choose not to do it, with no ramification. Connected to that, if you think about the way this might happen in an organisation, the person who is making the report might in effect be in a whistleblower position, so what thought is given to any duty on the employer not to treat that employee adversely as a result of in effect blowing the whistle against things that the employer may wish not to have come to light?

My third thing perhaps is a question. To what extent would this duty apply to voluntary or religious organisations? We have seen, unfortunately, more than one example of child abuse occurring in religious settings, where often there is trust and there is sometimes difficulty with anybody coming forward because of a sense of mutual solidarity that makes it difficult for people to want to step away and blow the whistle.

Those are my three areas of concern. Is there a sanction for not carrying out this duty? Is there an obligation on employers to do something to protect the person? And would the duty apply to religious settings?

--- Later in debate ---

[Harriet Cross]

Q I want to ask about respect orders and the fact that they are pitched to come in at age 18 and over. Given how much antisocial behaviour is by juveniles, what would your view be on reducing that age to 16, or whatever level you might think? Or do you think 18 is pitched about right?

Dr Newport: There is good reason to consider it for 16 and above. That is because, exactly as you said, a lot of antisocial behaviour does happen at 16 or 17, and actually so does quite a bit of crime. There is good reason at least to look at the impact of doing that, and at whether it would help prevent people from going down the pathway to becoming career criminals.

[Keir Mather]

Q Thank you very much for your evidence, Dr Newport. I want to look back to something that you said at the beginning of your remarks about encouraging citizens to use CCTV in their homes to better allow the police to prosecute crimes. One issue that does recur, even when CCTV is available in people’s homes and they can say to the police, “Look, I’ve got this here for you to be able to use to catch who perpetrated this burglary”, or whatever else, is that the CCTV is not always used in the way people would like. I wonder if you could speak to that.

I think there is also a bit of a regional inequality point. In my part of Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, there is live access to CCTV in York. That can be important in allowing people to deal with crimes in the moment, as they find them, and to direct police forces to the right spot. In Selby, however, our CCTV looks like it comes out of the 1970s; it is too blurry and grainy to use half the time, and it poses major challenges for the police. Can you point to how those practical realities affect your earlier remarks?

Dr Newport: That is why home CCTV is so useful. Cameras now are vastly cheaper than they were even 20 years ago when a lot of this infrastructure was put in place. You can get high definition cameras now on your doorbell in a way that 20 years ago would have been obscenely expensive. For the price of £30, homeowners with one of those cameras can probably outcompete, in a lot of ways, the national infrastructure or otherwise that was put in a long time ago.

I completely agree that it is extremely frustrating that a lot of the time, even when there is CCTV, it is not being looked at or used. There are several ways of encouraging that and making it easier. One is that there should be clauses on the procurement of artificial intelligence systems that could scan that footage. It is extremely likely that current systems can do that, and future systems will certainly be able to do it. Give a system indications of what to look for, and it can highlight that to officers within seconds. We should have that, and the fact that it is not used at all is astounding.

It should also be the case that officers have training so that they look at footage in the most time-efficient way. For example, with binary searches, rather than viewing the whole footage on fast forward to see an incident, if you are looking for a bike missing, for instance, you watch the bike. You check in halfway through the footage—is it there or not? If it is, you check at 75%—is it there or not? You keep doing that in halves, and you can do an extremely fast search. It might take you minutes, when otherwise it would take you hours to go through footage. Some officers are still going through hours and hours of footage rather than simply using methods that we know work extremely well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Harriet Cross]

Q Missing from the Bill is anything to do with livestock theft or worrying. Do you consider those to be covered sufficiently in other legislation, or would you like to see something included in the Bill to recognise that that is a huge issue for farmers and rural landowners? I do not want to diminish theft from a shop in any way, but the value of a cow or sheep is significant. Should that be better represented in the Bill?

Sam Durham: On the livestock worrying issue, there is a private Member’s Bill progressing at the moment—the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) (Amendment) Bill—that I believe the Government have said they will support. A lot of the measures in it have appeared at other times in legislation but then been dropped. We have worked quite closely with National Police Chiefs’ Council and others, including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Kennel Club, and we would support a lot of those measures to give the police more powers to investigate, seize dogs and take samples to link dogs to attacked animals. I think that that Bill, if it progresses, will cover that issue.

Livestock theft is a complicated issue, because you need the skills to handle livestock in order to steal livestock, but it is a concern, because there are routes for livestock to enter the food chain, and if animals are being stolen and processed in a different way, there are potential food hygiene issues. The picture on livestock theft is not clear at the moment. The National Rural Crime Unit now has a livestock theft co-ordinator, who is doing a lot of research into how livestock theft is recorded by the police. At the moment, there is not a clear picture of how it is recorded by each force, so there is not a national picture on livestock theft. Again, we have the issue of how it is reported by our farming members. There are not measures in the Bill on livestock theft, but, potentially as a result of the research that the National Rural Crime Unit is doing, there could be scope for future legislation on it.

[Keir Mather]

Q I want to ask about the confidence that individual farmers will have in these measures. We are in an unenviable situation at the moment. Farmers in my constituency deal with criminality frequently, and they have to step up themselves and put themselves in danger. I was speaking to a farmer in Brotherton the other month who had chased a gang of people on off-road bikes across his farm, putting himself at personal risk and danger. Do you think that, if implemented correctly, these measures will provide individual farmers with reassurance that they will not have to put themselves in similar danger in the future?

Sam Durham: I hope so. In general, the rural community and farmers have a good relationship with the police. They recognise the challenges the police have with low numbers, but where forces have a rural crime team, they build a link with the local community and the farming community. When I go to meetings around the country, I hear that rural crime is a big issue, but they support the police; they just want to give the police the tools to deal with the criminality they are having to deal with themselves.

Certainly, the link to organised criminality is worth investigating as well. The theft of a quad bike from a farm may seem a low-level crime, but it is potentially funding bigger networks. On the fly-tipping side, there is evidence that waste crime is linked to organised criminal activity as well.

Putting the picture together—I have given you a long answer—I think farmers will be reassured that the Government are taking this issue seriously. Alongside some of the other legislation, on equipment theft and livestock worrying, the Bill shows that rural crime is being taken seriously.