Crime and Policing Bill (Second sitting)

Keir Mather Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Luke Taylor]

Q It is good to see Neil, my ward councillor and council colleague in Sutton. I want to focus on the seizure of motor vehicles, which relates to an issue we have on our high street in Sutton, but I want to take a slightly different angle and ask whether Neil and Sara think the powers might go too far. Would the ability to seize vehicles without warning, and without an initial pushback on the behaviour, potentially give too much power to the police? Is there a risk of—I will not say “misuse”—over-policing? Do you have thoughts on that? Sutton is a good example but, Neil, your London Assembly seat also covers Croydon, where there might be slightly more rural issues. Sara, do you have any examples from the LGA area that you represent?

Councillor Garratt: You are right to flag that. I spoke earlier about why I think it is potentially of benefit that the police would not have to catch the same person twice. I spoke to a police officer about this, and that is essentially how he described it to me: the way the law stands, you have to catch the same person twice. He gave the example of the Ace Cafe in London, where there is an issue with motorbikes, rather than cars. It is tricky to keep track of precisely who you have recently given a warning. Sometimes the behaviour is so egregious, and well beyond what would require a mere warning, but it does require a warning, and then they ride off and are gone.

You are right to flag up the possibility that the threshold moves such that what might have been a warning turns into a seizure. That is absolutely a concern. In a way, that relates to my point earlier about levels of disruption from protest. Parliament sends words into the world and they take on a life of their own when interpreted by the police or the courts. I would want to see provisions in the Bill to make sure that the power could not be abused. But, fundamentally, as a matter of practical policing, not having to catch the same person, in the same vehicle, in the same kind of act twice would be a benefit of the Bill.

Councillor Conway: We can certainly send in more information to give a range of experience from across the country. Speaking specifically about what I have observed locally, those powers would be very welcome. Often, cars are used for all sorts of things, and completely blight a local street, area, park or whatever. It is important really to have those powers and see how it goes. We are happy to follow up with some more detail.

Councillor Garratt: Councillor Conway’s point about persistence in the same place is very important. Some people do not see this problem from one year to the next; other people see it almost every week.

[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.

[Joe Robertson]

Q Solving a set of issues in a given day depends on well-worded law that is targeted at the problem it is trying to solve. Can you share your views on backing that up with the appropriate resources, be it money or technology, for the police to be able to deliver on the law? Over the last decades, we have seen more and more criminal law come into being without necessarily the resource to back it up. Can you comment on the interplay between well-worded law and the resources for police to be able to act on it?

Dr Newport: On the resources point, some of my ideas here have been around CCTV procurement and AI. I think those things would help to reduce police time and costs. It should also be ensured that the public can see the effects of these things—that they are transparent and we are able to check on them, which at the moment we do not seem to be able to do. The fact that I have to try to ask an MP to ask a question in Parliament about the Connect system and still cannot get a response—there is still no way of checking—is completely and utterly unacceptable.

It is also the case that the British public, in survey after survey, put healthcare as the thing that they want to see the most funding to. Education and criminal justice are joint second and third. Government funding is nowhere near the public’s priorities on this. That is what I would point to on the funding question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Vickers]

Q There are measures in the Bill around the seizure of vehicles that are used antisocially. Do you have any views on that, or is there anything else you think should be done in that space?

Sam Durham: Again, that works as a good deterrent in some rural criminality, so we would support those kinds of issues. We do look at food security issues as well, including the illegal import of meat. I know our president is keen to investigate whether there is the potential to seize and crush those vehicles as a deterrent measure.

[Keir Mather]

Q Thank you for coming to give evidence today, Mr Durham. Rural crime absolutely blights communities across my rural North Yorkshire constituency, and a lot of the measures in the Bill will make a difference, whether they are to deal with off-road bikes, the theft of equipment from farm vehicles or fly-tipping. However, the substance of the law matters in its application, and a big challenge that we have in the Selby district is cross-border crime: criminals will perpetrate some of these acts on one side of a border and slip across to South Yorkshire or West Yorkshire and evade detection by the police. Does the NFU have a view on how we can take some of these provisions but operationalise them in a cross-border way to make sure that these criminals are brought to justice?

Sam Durham: Certainly. For a long time, while we have been working on crime, we have always pushed for co-ordination and consistency as the key. My members on any county or police force boundary will certainly say that they have the issues you mentioned. A criminal will know that they will get treated differently in one force area compared with the other, and stolen equipment can be taken across borders where there is less chance of investigation and action. We welcome some of the work the National Police Chiefs’ Council is doing now, including bringing together the national rural crime unit. The Home Office has funded that unit for the next three years, and that is positive news. Information sharing, the sharing of best practice and linking forces together is key.

We see that there is also a challenge for the Government to work across Departments. I was at the National Rural Crime Network conference on Tuesday, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Home Office were there. There are instances, such as with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and fly-tipping, in which other Government Departments can work together more at a national level and filter that down to working together on a local level.

[Anna Sabine]

Q I represent Frome and East Somerset, which has a large number of NFU members and farmers, who I meet a lot. They tell me frequently that they do not bother reporting rural crime, because they just do not think there is any value in doing so or that it will ever be resolved, which massively frustrates the local rural crime PCSO, because she never gets the intelligence she needs about what is happening. From an NFU point of view, do you feel there is enough in the Bill on rural crime to reassure farmers that the Government are taking their concerns seriously, and that, if they report rural crime, something will be done about it?

Sam Durham: Not necessarily in the Bill; it is all linked to funding, and the fair allocation of police funding as well. A lot of rural forces that I speak to, including Avon and Somerset and Lincolnshire, will say that the funding they receive from central Government does not necessarily reflect the operational issues they have in remote rural areas with tourists and vulnerable communities that take a long time to get to.

We challenge our membership to report crime. There is a culture in farming to just get on with it—if your fence is damaged, you repair it yourself, and it is not worth reporting—but we have sent that message out, and we are working with the police to say, “You do need to report it, because there’s no way you can increase police support or funding without that understanding of how much crime is occurring in rural areas.” We work with other agencies, which say that a lot of that crime is potentially linked to organised criminal networks. The reporting aspect is an important part of building that picture.

[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.

[Joe Robertson]

Q May I take you back to fly-tipping? We heard earlier how it is a problem for local authorities, but they are clearly more resourced than private landowners, who often own the sites where rubbish is dumped. Is there any opportunity missed in the Bill to try to tackle fly-tipping, particularly for people who, through no fault of their own, have waste dumped on their private property?

Sam Durham: The guidance to local authorities is key, and there are some really good examples of local authorities that are bringing all the agencies—the Environment Agency, the police and so on—together and having a co-ordinated approach to tipping. That means that members of the public know who to go to when they see an incident. There is not a general approach to that across the country, so if there is any way of legislating for that approach, or putting it in the local authority guidance, to make that happen, that would be key.

For the victim—the landowner—it is about knowing where to report, so having a single reporting mechanism that gets to the right people. They cannot view a tip and say, “That’s hazardous waste; that’s the Environment Agency’s responsibility”, “That’s the local authority’s responsibility” or, “That’s just rubbish thrown out of the back of a car.” They cannot judge that. A single reporting system that allowed them to log it and then found the right person to deal with it is something we would be campaigning for.