Public Order Bill

Huw Merriman Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 18th October 2022 Commons Chamber

We recognise that access to healthcare is important. Local authorities have to spend thousands of pounds to get these PSPOs, often repeatedly defending them in the courts. As we see from the numbers, this is a national issue and, therefore, it requires a national solution. Frankly, it requires our local authorities and our local police to support them, and not to say it is acceptable for only Ealing, Bournemouth, Manchester and Twickenham to have gone through this process.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for what she has done to bring us to this position. I am grateful that the Minister has confirmed that this will be a free vote, as it should be.

I support the Public Order Bill because it is about stopping people interfering with the right of others to go about their business. Does the hon. Lady agree that this is at the heart of new clause 11, which is about protecting women who want to go about their lawful business from being harassed? They are emotionally vulnerable, and the decision is hard enough as it is, let alone with what they have to go through outside the clinic. Does she agree that it is a Conservative principle of the Bill to ensure women have the right to go about their lawful business?

[Stella Creasy]

I would not deign to comment on or set out Conservative principles, although I have the free speech to do so, but I share the hon. Gentleman’s recognition that this is about balancing rights. This is an omission from the Bill because it is such a specific issue. Let me be clear: PSPOs are not working and new clause 11 is very tightly drawn about abortion clinics themselves. At 28 weeks pregnant. I was subject to sustained campaigns in my town centre. People put up pictures of my head next to dead babies. They told my constituents to stop me and they incited anger and intimidation. This would not be covered by the new clause. That is the free speech debate that we might want to have another day. Perhaps if those protesters had thrown a can of tomato soup at me, the police might not have seen it as a “both sides now” conversation. This is something different. These women have not put themselves up for debate and I understand that. As a public figure, I have put myself up for debate. Obviously, I had not put my unborn child up for debate, which is what those protesters felt that they could do.

This is about when a woman wants to access an abortion. The new clause specifies abortion clinics. It is no more broad than that, because this is a very specific problem. The challenge in this place is that we can dance on the head of a pin having theoretical debates, but it is our constituents who see the reality. They see the people shouting at these women. They see the women who are frightened, scared and vulnerable, who just want to make a decision in peace—who just want to go about their business.

That is why this amendment has such support from across the House, from among the royal colleges, and from among those who work with women and campaigners, particularly organisations such as the British Medical Association and the Fawcett Society. It is also why there have been so many emails pouring into our inbox. A person does not have to be a supporter of abortion to think that, at that point, we probably need to protect that person. A person does need to be a supporter of abortion to think that, if something is stopping women or is designed to deter them at a point when they have made a decision to have an abortion, we need to step in and not leave it to local authorities to find the money to cover the court costs, or even for that to be part of the decision they are making.

I understand that the Minister will talk against this measure. He needs to explain why, when 50 clinics have been targeted, only five have managed to get PSPOs. The current legislation is not satisfactory in dealing with that balance. It leaves it to chance and creates a postcode lottery of the protection that people recognise is required—whether or not they support abortion and whether or not they think about free speech.

I ask the Minister to listen to women. Women in their droves are asking for this protection for their sisters who are making this decision. They should not be shouted at when they are accessing it. Let them make that decision in privacy. If we consider abortion to be a human right, do not ask them to run a gauntlet to get one, which is what is happening now. I hope that colleagues across the House will recognise the thought, care and attention that has gone into this new clause, the widespread support across the House for acting and for not leaving it to local authorities to have to deal with these issues, and the fact that the abortion debate must continue, but that there is a time and a place for it.

Let me turn now to new clauses 13 and 14, which, again, I hope will have cross-party support. They reflect a concern that we need to tackle the experience of women on our streets, and, in particular, the fact that 24,000 women a day experience street harassment in this country. For too long that has become normalised. For too long, we have taught young girls ways to minimise their exposure rather than challenging those people who do it. For too long, we have asked the questions, “Did you have your headphones on?” “Were you wearing a short skirt?” What did you say when that person said that?” We do that rather than recognising this as a form of harassment.

I welcomed the words of the Prime Minister when she said that violence against women and girls does not have to be inevitable. She said:

“Women should be able to walk the streets without fear of harm, and perpetrators must expect to be punished.”

She also said:

“It is the responsibility of all political leaders, including us in Westminster and the Mayor of London, to do more.”

I know that the Mayor of London wants to do more because I have been working with him for many years on the campaign to learn from our police forces who treat misogyny as a form of hate crime and use that to identify the perpetrators of these crimes. I know, too, that there is support across the House for doing that. There is no other crime that happens on such a scale on a daily basis where we have not made progress. I welcome the fact that there is agreement in this place that we need to tackle street harassment. As ever, when it comes to upholding a woman’s rights and freedoms and basic ability to go about her daily business, the challenge today is that it goes on the backburner when something else turns up. It is something that we will get round to eventually. It is something that is terribly complicated, when shouting at statues is not.

I ask the Minister today to commit to joining all of us in saying, “Enough is enough, and we will legislate and legislate promptly.” We should not be at a point in 2022 going into 2023 where thousands of women are still experiencing street harassment. Over their lifetime, seven in 10 women will experience sexual harassment in public. It is clear that those who engage in these behaviours often escalate to further and more serious crimes. Recognising sexual harassment and tackling it, which is what the police forces who are treating misogyny as a form of hate crime have been able to do, offers us valuable lessons about how we can move forward.

I recognise what the Law Commission said, and I recognise that the debate has moved on, but having a standalone offence, which identifies where women are being targeted for street harassment, would help us to gather the data and send that very powerful message that no woman should have to look behind her or carry her keys in her hand just because she wants to go out and buy a pint of milk. That is a daily experience.