Crime and Policing Bill

John Milne Excerpts

Tuesday 14th April 2026 Commons Chamber

Protest is part of the lifeblood of the labour movement, as it has been of every movement that has expanded rights, protections and dignity, and I implore colleagues across the House today to reject the vast expansion of anti-protest powers and to reject Lords amendment 312. I ask the Minister to explain why this House has not been afforded the parliamentary right to scrutinise this draconian piece of legislation, and what consideration has been given to a future Government that might be less benevolent towards our fundamental rights. If the Government are confident about this amendment, please put it to the vote.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

I shall speak to Lords amendments 6 and 333, regarding fly-tipping and vape shop closures respectively. On the face of it, those are very different issues, but they share a common thread, which is that communities are being undermined by people who think that rules do not apply to them, and the victims are being left to shoulder the burden. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for rural business and the rural powerhouse, and as the MP for Horsham, which is a largely rural area, I hear constantly about rural crime, including theft, livestock worrying and machinery break-ins, but one topic keeps coming up, and that is fly-tipping.

The Country Land and Business Association reports that a single incident can routinely cost a farmer over £10,000 to clear. How bizarre is that? Let us imagine ourselves in the position of the farmer. A criminal dumps a lorryload of waste on our field. We call the authorities and we have to foot the bill. That is offensive to anyone’s sense of natural justice. In my own area, I give credit to Horsham district council for working constructively with farmers to deal with dumping incidents, but even the best councils have to operate within a law that is highly dysfunctional as it stands.

The National Farmers Union, the Countryside Alliance, the Environmental Services Association and Suez Recycling and Recovery all say the same thing: waste crime is spiralling. An astonishing one fifth of England’s waste—that is 38 million tonnes—is thought to be being disposed of illegally. This is a big issue, and successive Governments have failed to rise to the challenge. The cost to the economy is estimated to be between £1 billion and £2 billion a year. The cost to individual landowners is even higher, from their point of view.

Lords amendment 6 would go some way to mitigating this situation. It would make clearing fly-tipped waste a duty of the local authority, not the landowner. It would ensure that the criminal—the tipper—paid, rather than the victim. It would strengthen collaboration between police, councils and the Environment Agency so that offenders could not slip between jurisdictions. In turn, councils would need to be funded by Government for their increased role in enforcement and to protect them against unrecoverable costs. Clearly, this would be an extra spending pressure on the Government, but perhaps that would serve to focus their mind on a problem that has been scandalously overlooked for many years.

Rural crime more broadly needs more focus. In my farmer surveys and surgeries, I hear that farmers are struggling with crimes such as sheep worrying, which has resulted in dead lambs, injured ewes and even the loss of an alpaca. Too often operators on the 101 line simply do not understand why this matters. We need better training, better data collection and a better grasp of rural realities.

The same logic applies to Lords amendment 333 on vape shops and closure notices: enforcement must be effective and swift. Under the current rules, a closure notice can shut an illegal shop for only 48 hours. Many police and crime commissioners have said that that is simply not long enough to prepare their case. Some shops open up again almost immediately, continuing to sell illegal vapes or trading as fronts for criminal gangs.

As it stands, illegal traders are undermining the health of the entire high street. Lords amendment 333 offers a practical fix. It increases closure notices from 48 hours to seven days, giving police and councils the crucial time to build a proper case. It allows courts to impose closure orders for up to 12 months instead of the current three months, and makes them renewable. It gives local authorities more realistic powers to act against shops that they already know are selling illicit vapes or targeting children.

Public faith in the justice system is being undermined because people feel that justice is either too slow or that the authorities lack sufficient powers to deal with modern crime. Sadly, the criminals are innovating much more swiftly than the justice system. The two amendments have a common principle at their heart: victims should not pay for crimes committed against them, and the authorities must be equipped to act decisively when they know that wrongdoing is taking place. The amendments would go some way to help with that, so I urge the Government to support them.