Crime and Policing Bill

Josh Simons Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

In Ashton, Orrell, Platt Bridge, Hindley and Hindley Green, one issue dominates life for so many: antisocial behaviour. For months, I have been promising my constituents the measures in the Bill, and I thank the Home Office team for the hard work required to bring it to the House so quickly. To my mind, the Bill is one of the strongest examples of this Labour Government delivering for working people on the issues they care about.

The Bill takes tough action against serious crime—drugs, knife crime and terrorism—but I want to talk about a different, more everyday type of crime. These are the crimes that make life demoralising and sometimes frightening for many people, and that shape how people feel about their town centre, community and security. It is the fly-tipping in Bickershaw that makes parents stop their kids playing outside. It is teenagers throwing mud at cars in Hindley, and groups intimidating people by the shops in Winstanley.

Some of the toughest calls I have received in this job have been people ringing to tell me that thugs have destroyed a local sports club: Ashton Town—an arson attack—Hindley FC, and Wigan Cosmos, as well as St Jude’s pitches being destroyed in minutes by vandals on dirt bikes. Those clubs are great community assets where kids that I represent learn to become Wigan Warriors, or the elderly play walking football—places where people feel pride in their communities. I have supported fundraisers to help those clubs, working with local councillors and Warriors players to help St Jude’s build a fence to keep the bikes out, but local residents should not have to reach into their already stretched pockets. Our streets should not feel so unsafe that people resort to self-protection. We are one of the world’s largest economies and greatest democracies. That is why I welcome the measures in the Bill, such as new powers to seize bikes that wake people up at night, as they did to me this Saturday. Every time one of those bikes tears past me in the town centre, I hold on to my kids that bit tighter.

The Bill matters because it is about standing up for the good, hard-working people who love their towns and want to feel pride in them again. It is about what it means to feel respect for those who we stand by and live near, and it shows that the Labour Government will not tolerate those who make others’ lives a misery.

The respect orders, for example, are wisely named, because vandalism, thuggery and mindless destruction are about a lack of respect for our public spaces and for each other. The Bill empowers groups in society—police, councils, housing associations—with restoring that respect, asking them to say, “Enough is enough” and to take control of their communities.

I want to make a wider point about respect in our society. Often when I am travelling on the bus or train, someone is playing videos loudly on their phone without headphones. That is not illegal, but it is off-putting, because it forces whatever that person is doing on to everyone else, as if they somehow own our shared public space. It demonstrates a lack of respect for our public realm and for those around us.

In the end, the strength of our communities and our country depends on the respect, and even the love, we have for one other. That is what resilience is in a community. Over the last 14 years, the Conservative Government have allowed that respect to erode. Too many no longer trust that the law will be upheld and applied equally and fairly to everyone, and that erodes people’s trust in one another. That is why antisocial behaviour is significant: it is about treating one another with a lack of respect, as if we do not care about the things we have in common. Only by rebuilding and reinvesting in our public realm, and restoring the strength and integrity of institutions such as the police, will we rebuild that respect and trust.

The Bill takes a vital step. It shows that we stand with law-abiding, hard-working people. It sends a strong message to those who fail to recognise their responsibility. Respect must return to our streets, and this Bill will start to make that happen.