Point of Order

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. On 25 July, the main estimates were laid before the House and passed without debate or vote. On 29 July, the Chancellor came to the House and made a statement about the public finances, and laid a further document called “Fixing the Foundations”, which showed a wildly different picture of the public finances from that which had been presented to us just one working day before.

Naturally, that raised concerns in the House. I and a number of Members questioned the Chancellor of Exchequer about it at the time. The fact that she was evasive in the debate and, frankly, look rattled raised further concerns. Today, a letter from the Cabinet Secretary to my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor has been leaked. It explains that officials knew at the time that the estimates laid by the Chancellor were incorrect. I also have a letter from the Office for Budget Responsibility in response to a freedom of information request that I made prior to the recess. It explains that the OBR was shown the contents of that document two days before the estimates were laid before the House. Indeed, the OBR was given the “Fixing the Foundations” document in order to fact-check it on the day that the estimates were laid before the House of Commons.

That raises a number of issues for the House, but the one that I am most concerned about is whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer has knowingly misled the House of Commons on the state of the public finances and her knowledge at the time. Knowingly misleading the House is a breach of the ministerial code, and I want your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker, on what the appropriate course of action might be for the House. If we cannot rely on the financial information laid before us, but trust that it is accurate and wave it through, we are in a very difficult place indeed.

I have notified the Chancellor of the Exchequer of my intention to raise this point of order. Obviously, once an independent adviser on the ministerial code is appointed, I can make representations to them, but in the meantime we are faced with a situation where either the estimates or the “Fixing the Foundations” document was knowingly wrong. In either case, the House may have been significantly misled, and I would be interested to hear your guidance on what we can do about it, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for advance notice of it. He indicated that he has informed the Chancellor of his intention to make the point of order, which of course is the correct thing to do. There are two separate points here. The first is one of privilege. He should write to the Speaker to make the point that he is concerned that the Chancellor may have misled the House. The second is about the accuracy of the estimates. That is not a matter for the Speaker, but it may be something that the right hon. Gentleman chooses to raise with the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee once they are elected next week.

Road Traffic and Street Works

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

1st reading
Wednesday 24th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about speeding offences on roads to which a 20mph limit applies; to make provision about the enforcement of moving traffic offences; to require 24 hour staffing of works on specified public roads; and for connected purposes.

As I am sure you are aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, life as a motorist has changed significantly over the past two decades. Cars have become safer, more efficient, greener and quieter, and yet despite the fact that the motor car is possibly one of the greatest contributors to human wealth, happiness and freedom, it has become seen by many as the root of all evil. Despite the enormous benefits that cars bring to our constituents’ families up and down the land and, indeed, to people across the world, for many motorists, the world seems to be filled with councillors and officials who are dedicated to making their lives more difficult. Driving is becoming a minefield of potential traps and penalties, such that drivers are becoming paranoid and resentful about the entire system. When that happens, order tends to break down, and the time has come for a rebalancing.

In the Bill, I propose three modest measures that would achieve a better balance and would hopefully see better results generally for motorists and members of our communities across the board. First, I propose that anybody caught speeding between 20 mph and 30 mph does not receive penalty points, rather they would be required to attend a speed awareness course. Repeat offences would require repeat attendance at speed awareness courses. I should declare an interest, having been at a speed awareness course recently after I was caught unwittingly doing 24 mph on the Embankment, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury—not at the same time or in the same vehicle, but he was also done for a similar offence.

The roll-out of 20 mph speed limits across the country has brought benefits in terms of road safety, but it has left many thousands of drivers disproportionately punished for straying over the limit. The fact that drivers can receive three penalty points for doing 24 mph in a 20 mph zone and for doing 57 mph in a 50 mph zone seems unfair to many and is in danger of discrediting the system. In addition to penalty points and a fine, drivers so punished would also face higher insurance premiums at a time when premiums are rising significantly in any event. As it stands, it is possible for someone to lose their driving licence by driving at 24 mph four times in three years.

Two years ago, it was revealed that as 20 mph zones were rolled out across London, Transport for London was setting a target of a million speeding fines a year with the Met police. That represents a huge increase in prosecutions and the accumulation of points. Analysis of Department for Transport data by Claims.co.uk confirms that of those speeding in a 20 mph zone, 49% were exceeding the limit by 5 mph or more, and only 19% were driving above 30 mph. Those numbers, of course, imply that 51% of those caught speeding were doing less than 25 mph.

In evaluations, speed awareness courses have proven to be significantly more effective in preventing reoffending than penalty points and a fine. If our objective is to improve road safety, particularly on residential roads, it would be more effective to put people through repeated courses, perhaps with increasing intensity and time required. That would be a more proportionate approach and would achieve better road safety. Points would of course still apply for those who fail to attend courses or, indeed, who fail their courses, which I understand is a possibility.

The second element of the Bill is for non-speeding traffic offences enforced by a local council or body other than the police. A first offence in those circumstances at a particular location should result in a warning letter, rather than a fine. A subsequent offence at the same location would attract a fine in the normal manner. Over the past few years, we have seen a significant increase in the number of traffic enforcement cameras operated by local authorities. In London alone, nearly 3.2 million tickets were issued in 2022-23, extracting about £200 million from motorists. The number of councils approved by the Government to operate enforcement in that way has increased steadily. There are regular reports in the media of the earnings of particular cameras. The most successful camera in Birmingham apparently pulls in £10,000 a day from drivers who stray into bus lanes.

A number of councils that have introduced enforcement cameras have started with a grace period, during which erring drivers have been issued with a warning letter for their first offence at a particular location, recognising that a sudden change may not be immediately appreciated by many. In Liverpool, the city of my birth, when cameras were brought in at one particular location, 1,400 drivers were caught out within the first 24 hours. Happily, they all received a warning letter first. That is a good and civilised principle, and it maintains public support for the enforcement system. It recognises that the vast majority of drivers will have made a genuine error, will learn their lesson and will not make the same mistake again.

This very British sense of giving people the benefit of the doubt should continue, and this Bill would make it a permanent feature. Anyone who commits a moving traffic offence—caught in the yellow box, straying into a bus lane or turning left when they should not—enforced by a local authority with a camera for the first time at a particular location would only receive a warning letter. Subsequent offences at the same location would attract a fine in the normal manner.

Finally, the third element of my Bill says that any roadworks on an A road should not be left unattended at any time. We know, as Members of Parliament travelling around our constituencies and to and from London, that the Government have struggled to control and minimise disruptive roadworks. Anyone who drives in any major city will say that unannounced roadworks with poor traffic management and inconsiderate positioning are a source of huge delay and aggravation—even more so when those works are seemingly abandoned and lifeless, sometimes for days.

Even in the past few days Hyde Park Corner, one of the busiest junctions in the capital, has been beset with works and temporary traffic lights, with not a soul in sight after 5 pm. There is a polite Government consultation out at the moment on increasing fines and tinkering a bit with the current system. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) introduced his ten-minute rule Bill, the Roadworks (Regulation) Bill, last year with an imaginative and more radical set of measures to address the same problem, and his “Can the Cones” campaign hit the mark with many.

My proposal is simple. It would require contractors to ensure that no roadworks on any A road can ever be left unattended. Someone must always be on hand to deal with problems, speak to the public, alert authorities to traffic issues and generally manage the site. That obligation would also provide a powerful incentive for the work to be completed quickly and the duty could be satisfied by having at least one person always working on the site—a very efficient use of resources and one that would show the public that contractors are being as diligent as possible and works are being completed as swiftly as possible. Above all, motorists would know that their safe and smooth passage through the works was being supervised at all times.

These three simple measures would improve all our lives, with greater road safety, a greater sense of proportion and civilisation in the enforcement of non-speeding traffic offences and less aggravation for motorists going through abandoned works.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Kit Malthouse, Royston Smith, Will Quince, Nickie Aiken, Sir Desmond Swayne, Philip Davies, Mark Menzies, Shailesh Vara, Julie Marson and Steve Tuckwell present the Bill.

Kit Malthouse accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 19 April, and to be printed (Bill 152).

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker, my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) kindly mentioned in his speech that I brought in a similar Bill, or at least a Bill on the same subject, last year. I commend him on what he has done and put on the record that the roads Minister was here to listen. If my right hon. Friend or I put in for an Adjournment debate to give the roads Minister an opportunity to reply on the subject, perhaps the Chair might be prepared in due course to look favourably on such a request?

Sentencing Bill

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

I will make a bit of progress, but I will give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

As my right hon. and learned Friend knows, I support this move, and I said so when he made the previous statement to the House. However, he will have picked up, as I have, a sense that this is a diminution of the retribution element of sentencing. I wonder whether he would consider during the passage of the Bill looking at whether the alternative disposals to prison could be made in many ways much tougher to satisfy that requirement from so many victims that there needs to be a sense of punishment. For example: extending the time that people are on home detention and curfew; extending the time that they are on a sobriety tag from a maximum, I think, of 120 days to a year or 18 months. Many people would see a trade there—okay, he is not going to prison for three months, but he will be on a curfew for 18 months. They would see that as a better trade than like for like.

[Alex Chalk]

That is a brilliant point, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. I think there is further that we can go. The position at present is that there is a maximum number of hours that a person can do unpaid work. In simple terms, that is designed to ensure that it is completed within a reasonable period of time, but, absolutely, we need to consider whether we have got it right. My right hon. Friend makes a very important point about the extent to which we can use technology to punish effectively. In the old days, the maximum period of time a person could be put on a curfew was about 12 or 16 hours, but we have extended that, which was opposed by those on the Opposition Benches—[Interruption.] You did. Extending the time is important because it is part of the punishment. Equally, those with alcohol tags effectively have someone supervising them—man-marking them—to ensure that they cannot do something that they would ordinarily like to do. However, we should consider whether to go further. My right hon. Friend, as always, makes an excellent point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Chalk]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who brings such expertise to the House and uses it in the public interest as a member of the Justice Committee and, indeed, by lobbying Ministers. It is precisely because of the circumstances of the people he has defended in the past that we have framed the Bill as we have. It has a really important aspect to which he did not advert. If someone is arrested, charged, convicted and disgraced for committing an offence that would attract a short custodial sentence while they are subject to an order, the presumption does not apply. He knows that all too often people in that group—I have seen them in court as well—will be subject to a community order or some other order. Community orders, as he remembers, can last up to three years. If anyone commits an offence during the currency of that order, the presumption does not apply. It is really important to make that point crystal clear.

The Bill sends a clear message, which goes a bit like this: either someone complies with a court order or they go to prison. That is a really important message that we send. We underscore the authority of court orders to give offenders a clear choice: either they do what they should do—repay their debt to society, rehabilitate themselves, and stay off the booze, if that is what the courts require—or they go to prison. It is up to them.

Let me move on. The tags enable the courts to monitor whether offenders are getting on with their lives by going to work and observing robust curfews of up to 20 hours a day, but we can also put in place exclusion zones to monitor whether offenders are staying out of areas where they are most likely to get into trouble—for example, a particular high street. They allow us to ensure that there is proper compliance with the punishments given out by the court—for example, unpaid work requirements. That means that offenders are visibly repaying their debt to the communities they offended against, but without it costing the taxpayer many tens of thousands of pounds to effectively pay for bed and breakfasts. If they breach any of those conditions, the probation service is quickly notified so that action can be taken.

Our high-tech alcohol tags have only been available for the past few years—my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire did more than any other Minister to roll them out. They take a reading of the offender’s sweat every 30 minutes to make sure that they are confronting the issues with alcohol that likely landed them in trouble with the law in the first place. The results speak for themselves: offenders who are ordered to wear those tags and have a complete ban on drinking stay sober, on average, 97% of the time. It not only means that they stay out of trouble, but gives them the opportunity to face up to their issues and turn their lives around. It is easy to see why: they know that within minutes of having a drink, any breach will be detected and a report will be sent to the probation service. The offender is then at risk of being brought back before the court and facing alternative disposal.

Offenders mandated by the court to wear tags have that sword of Damocles hanging over their head. They know that if they step even one inch out of line, they can be sent straight to prison by the courts. Essentially, the newer tags are the equivalent of expanding the workforce so that we can man-mark individual offenders. It is clear not only that we need this new approach, but that advances in technology mean that a new approach is possible.

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

[Alex Chalk]

I want to turn to the issue of exclusions, because they matter, but I sense that my right hon. Friend wants to intervene.

[Kit Malthouse]

My right hon. and learned Friend is being so generous—it is kind of him. Given what he has said about technology, does he share the view that for the first time in offender management, whether post-sentence or during sentencing, we are able to insert certainty of detection of breach through technology? Thus far, detection has been uncertain, and offenders have been able to gamble with their freedom. With sobriety tags they cannot gamble, and we have seen that faced with the certainty of detection and the knowledge that if they breach, incarceration is certain, they make the right choice. As my right hon. and learned Friend said, they comply 97% of the time. As he moves towards this presumption, will he reassure Members on all sides of the House that that certainty of detection of breach will be reinforced as much as possible by the use of this technology?

[Alex Chalk]

My right hon. Friend gets right to the point. I would not be making this argument unless I had physically been to look at some of the tags and asked questions of the suppliers about what they can and cannot do. Let me tell him a little bit about the tags, although I recognise that he knows about them already. First, they can tell if a person is in an environment where others are drinking. In other words, a probation officer can say, “Hang on, are you hanging around with the wrong crowd, which is a risk factor for you?”

Secondly, the probation officer can tell within half an hour whether that person has had a drink. I know that right hon. and hon. Friends will be saying, “Hang on a second.” [Interruption.] Opposition Members are saying it too. They will be saying, “I bet you there’s a way round it, like putting some foil between my leg and the sensor.” Not a bit of it—that does not work. They will be thinking, “I could just snip it off.” No, because there is a circuit that then sends the alarm. Some offenders have even tried to put a sliver of ham between their skin and the tag—[Interruption.] Yes, or chicken skin. That does not work. These are highly sophisticated bits of equipment that were not available more than two years ago, and they work. Yes, each one costs about £1,300, but that is an awful lot cheaper than £47,000 a year.

We have deliberately designed the Bill to ensure that there are exclusions from the presumption where offenders threaten the safety of others, or where a court order is already in place. Judges will retain the discretion to send offenders straight to prison where they pose a significant risk of physical or psychological harm to a particular individual or are in breach of a court order, such as for stalking prevention—as Members will know, we have introduced stalking prevention orders. That will give victims of domestic abuse the space and time they need to rebuild their lives, and will send a clear message to their tormentors that they can expect to go inside. That is really important, and I want to be crystal clear about that.

A huge amount of work has taken place over the past 10 years to protect women and girls. We have introduced the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, made the sentences for rape longer, and created the offence of stalking and stalking protection orders. Let me be clear: where there is a significant risk of physical or psychological harm to a particular individual, the presumption does not apply. There will also be no duty on a judge to suspend a sentence where further offences are committed while an offender is on licence or subject to post-sentence supervision, and a court may still impose a sentence of immediate custody where it deems there are exceptional circumstances that justify not passing a suspended sentence. As I have said, the presumption does not apply if a court has imposed an order, which sends a powerful message to offenders.

I turn to home detention curfew measures. As the House knows, HDC was introduced in 1999 to manage the transition of offenders from custody back into the community while maintaining significant restrictions on their liberty. When HDC was introduced, more than half of prisoners were serving sentences of less than four years; today, it is less than a quarter. Because sentences have grown longer, clause 8 will recalibrate HDC to restore eligibility to its original intention. This is a limited measure to adjust the HDC model, which has been successful in ensuring that offenders make the smoothest transition possible from custody into the community, while continuing to have their liberty appropriately curtailed.

I understand colleagues’ representations on the Bill. This is just a first step in the legislative process. The Government will of course continue to engage seriously with Members on their specific and important concerns as we look to strike the right balance in sentencing. We believe it is possible to create a Bill that will enable the courts to protect the public and to prevent more people from becoming victims, keeping the British people safe from the most dangerous offenders for longer, while ensuring that robust community sentences reduce reoffending and cut crime. I commend the Bill to the House.

Prison Capacity

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it was to hear the Lord Chancellor’s statement, which represents a big step forward for our criminal justice system? He and I have long shared the view that we do not lock up the violent for long enough and there are smarter ways of dealing with the non-violent. On that note, I applaud his expansion of the tagging programme. I have two questions. First, on GPS tags, does he intend to expand the acquisitive crime pilot? Currently, in 19 police force areas every burglar and robber released from prison is GPS tagged to reduce reoffending. Secondly, while we are not short of sobriety tags, which he will know I am extremely keen on, the problem is that judges are just not using them, so what steps will he take to expand judicial enthusiasm, given how much alcohol drives low-level crime?

[Alex Chalk]

My right hon. Friend did exceptionally important work in ensuring that the supply and roll-out of alcohol sobriety tags, and indeed other tags, proceeded at huge pace, and they make a significant difference. On his point about uptake, plainly sentences are a matter for the independent judiciary, but I do think that more can be done to ensure that judges and magistrates are aware of the sheer extent of the technology available, and the steps that can be taken to properly curtail people’s freedom in appropriate cases by way of punishment, and to ensure that they have the tags to steer people away from addiction. Ultimately, that can be the best way to ensure that people are properly rehabilitated and become contributing members of society once again.

Draft Judicial Pensions (Remediable Service etc.) Regulations 2023

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Wednesday 14th June 2023 General Committees

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I have a couple of questions—they are a bit of a protest. Obviously, the regulations are of much bigger size and much more complicated than a normal statutory instrument. Given that parts of it are effectively amendments to Acts that were introduced only 12 months ago, it seems to me that these provisions could have been an Act of Parliament, and I am not quite sure why they are regulations.

There are endless complaints about the shoddy scrutiny of legislation in this place, not least from the other place. Given the technical nature of the SI, the fact that we were given only a few days’ notice of our being on the Committee, and the fact that we do not have the opportunity to take any expert advice about what is in this very complicated document, this strikes me as a pretty poor show. Given the complexity of the regulations, and the fact that part of them amends previous legislation, I am fairly confident that we will be back at some stage to amend this SI because of technical problems with it.

Obviously, the regulations seek to remedy McCloud/Sargeant, which affected all the public sector. When I was a Minister at the Home Office, I spent a fair amount of my time dealing with the police’s issue with that judgment. There was a consultation on a remedy for the police on the same matter earlier this year. Can the Minister tell us when he expects the whole of McCloud/Sargeant to be resolved? The longer it drags on, the more uncertainty there might be. I congratulate him on getting something over the line for the judiciary, but there are a relatively small number of them and a much larger number of police officers, so it would be great to see movement on that as well.

On the settlement, I am quite surprised to hear that only 10 responses to the consultation were received. Was one of those responses from whatever collective body the judges have to represent their views? Knowing them as I do after many years of involvement with them, I feel that it is unlikely that only 10 of them would respond. If that is the case, there may have been a communication problem. They are normally pretty voluble on these issues.

My second question is whether the settlement for the judiciary is particularly different from, or more generous than, any of the other settlements that have been agreed with parts of the public sector. Are we likely to get any kick-back from people who feel that the judiciary have been privileged?

Finally, I have a question about partners or spouses of judges who sadly died between the judgment and the settlement. Will they be given the same options as living judges? I am not on top of the detail of the judicial pensions scheme, but I imagine that there is a death-in-service payment, and that a residual pension will fall to those spouses and partners. Will they be given the opportunity, retrospectively, to make the same choices that they would have been afforded if their spouse or partner was still alive? Given that the settlement is retrospective to 2012, and that the change took place in 2015, it is likely, given the demographic and the actuarial calculations, that a small number of judges will have died between the judgment and settlement. It is very important that their partners are given the same opportunities that they would have been given had their partners been alive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Freer]

May I first touch on the nature of the discrimination, because the word “discrimination” can be quite loaded? As the pension schemes have changed, those people who are coming up to retirement age and may have had fewer pensionable years to make changes to their provision have got some additional protection. The court case was because younger members felt that they were being discriminated against. It is important to put that into perspective. I understand why younger members felt that they were not being given opportunities that older members of pension schemes were getting, but equally, those of us who are older and are contributing do not necessarily have the working years ahead of us to make additional contributions or arrangements. I can understand why the situation arose, but we are where we are. I thought it was important to clarify that.

I turn to points raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire. It is quite difficult to say what the impact on other schemes will be, because each scheme is quite complex in its own right, as he knows and as we have seen with the digital scheme. Each Department will have to make its own statutory instruments to address the issues and the complexities of its own schemes.

I understand the question about why such a technical and complex matter is being addressed through an SI. In my time in this House, I have served on a number of statutory instrument Committees dealing with quite complex pension changes. It is not unusual for technical changes to pension schemes to be made in this way, but I take on board the very fair issue that my right hon. Friend raises about having time to understand the complexities.

On dependants, my understanding—I will double-check this point and write to my right hon. Friend if I have it wrong—is that the whole point of the McCloud remedy is to ensure that people are given the opportunity to put back in. My understanding is that that would include dependants. [Interruption.] I will quickly read my note to make sure that I have not misunderstood.

[Kit Malthouse]

Let me give the Minister a little time to read his note. I guess the question I am asking is: if I am the husband of a judge who died between the judgment and the remedy, will I be given the opportunity to make the same choices that my spouse would have made if they were alive? I would obviously have a dependant’s pension, and I would have had a death-in-service payment as well.

[Mike Freer]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving me a little time. The scheme election may be made in respect of a person who is entitled to the remedy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

So it is a yes.

[Mike Freer]

Yes—that might have been quicker. In a former life I used to sell pensions, although certainly not of this complexity, I have to say.

These are important regulations about a matter that we need to address. I am grateful for the support of colleagues and the Opposition. I commend the draft regulations to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Draft Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) (Amendment) Order 2023 Draft Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Commodity Derivatives and Emission Allowances) Order 2023

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 General Committees

[The Chair]

There are two statutory instruments before the Committee. Is it the wish of the Committee that they be taken together?

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Gray. In recent months, I have been a member of several Delegated Legislation Committees for which the Government have put two instruments together to try to rush them through, or get them through. In some cases, the two have been connected in some way, not just because they are from the same Department but because they are thematically connected. Although that is not entirely desirable, we can see the rationale for it.

In this instance, however, we have two statutory instruments that are completely unconnected, besides their departmental interests. The first deals with the consequences of leaving the EU and the regulation of commodity groups; the second deals with consumer exposure to financial instruments. They are not the same thing. Taking them together necessarily means that hon. Members have to digest two quite complicated bits of legislation at the same time. I realise that for a lot of colleagues, holding more than one idea in their head is possible, but for a number of us, particularly given the complexity of cryptocurrency and its implications, that is a huge imposition. Putting the two instruments together will not, in my view, give us a coherent debate on what are two quite important bits of legislation.

[The Chair]

I am most grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order. If he wishes to do so, he can simply object to the two instruments being taken together, in which case they will be heard separately. My question to the Committee is therefore whether it is content that both statutory instruments be heard together.

[Kit Malthouse]

Object.

[The Chair]

Objection taken. We will therefore consider the two statutory instruments separately—the first one being the draft Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Commodity Derivatives and Emission Allowances) Order 2023.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

It is a pleasure to appear before you, Mr Gray. There are many reasons for not just consumers, but Governments, to fear cryptocurrency. The growth in cryptocurrency effectively represents a loss of control in nation states of our money supply, and a loss of control by co-ordinating nations across the world of the global money supply.

At the moment, cryptocurrency capitalisation, if you like, or gross valuation is anywhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion, against a global liquid money supply of about $50 trillion, so it is not a huge percentage. Nevertheless, it could have an impact at the margin, and it is only going to grow. The Government should be careful about seeking to legitimise the use of cryptocurrency, not just among individual retail investors and users but among businesses. When I see this kind of legislation coming forward, I am not necessarily convinced that the full implication of the journey on which we are heading with cryptocurrency has been appreciated.

You will recall from your history studies, Mr Gray, the Dutch tulip bulb madness of, I think, the 18th century. Tulip bulbs became a form of currency, many a family were bankrupted to purchase one or two bulbs, and thereafter the market crashed. It was based on an imputed value of something that had no connection to reality. I am afraid that the same is true with bitcoin.

While bitcoin, ethereum and others—there are now hundreds, if not thousands, of these cryptocurrencies out there—are supposedly fungible and exchangeable, they effectively rely on trust between individuals as to the value, and an opinion of the value, unlike normal cash and assets such as the pound sterling or the dollar, which rely on the Government or the central bank standing behind the value of the currency. That makes them very different; it also makes them very volatile. There have been massive plunges in the value of bitcoin, for example, over the past few months: I think it is down something like 36% in just the past three to six months. That makes me wonder whether we want our constituents to be exposed to this currency—if it is one—at all.

In seeking to regulate the promotion of cryptocurrencies, the Government are, I am afraid, unwittingly giving them an element of legitimacy and bringing them into the same fold of investment as stocks and shares, bonds or anything that someone might put in their individual savings account. They will be promoted with a big banner headline, but at the bottom, tiny type that nobody reads will say, “The value of investments can go down as well as up. You could lose the farm, your house—everything—on this investment.”

[Peter Grant]

I put it to the right hon. Gentleman that the self-same weaknesses in the current system apply already to investment bonds and property development bonds. The issue is not the kind of scam asset that is being sold, but the fact that they are not being properly regulated, regardless of whether they are traditional investments or crypto investments.

[Kit Malthouse]

The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. Of course, traditional investments very often have some foundation in reality. A stock or share very often has a company behind it that is producing revenue or otherwise. A bond will have the same thing. With bitcoin, all that is being sold is the assumption that somebody else will pay for that asset, even though there is no asset whatever that sits behind it. That is where it is subtly and importantly different.

The other thing to bear in mind is that cryptoassets are being overwhelmingly used in international organised crime. They have become the equivalent of the £50 note, in that they are being used by large international crime syndicates to move money around the world, largely undetected and unmolested by Governments. That is another major problem and a reason to be wary. As the Government regulates—and therefore brings into the fold and adds a veneer of legitimacy to—this form of exchange, they are effectively facilitating transfers between the illegitimate and criminal market and the legitimate market.

An individual will never know from whom or where their bitcoin is coming when they buy it from their investment adviser. It may well have been through the hands of several organised criminals before it gets to them, and unlike many £50 notes it will not bear traces of cocaine or heroin. We have seen the scale of the problem with cash in this country. The Bank of England has about £70 billion-worth of cash in notes and coins in circulation. Only about £20 billion is seen through the tills, so £50 billion is somewhere else. The Bank reckons that about £1.5 billion is in suitcases under the bed, held in cash savings or otherwise. The rest, I am pretty certain, is involved in crime. The same will be true, I am afraid, of so many of these cryptoassets.

I will not necessarily vote against the draft order, but the Government have to ask themselves whether they are legitimising a form of exchange that in the long term is likely to be damaging to the country’s economy and the global economy, and to those individuals who invest in it. For all the warnings that we put on things, once this sits alongside all the other investments that an independent financial adviser will offer, it becomes a legitimate option. At the moment, it is an esoteric investment available only to the most sophisticated of those looking to invest. I realise that that is growing every day, but when it gets a stamp of respectability I worry that it will become like the economic equivalent of cigarettes, which were out there for years causing millions of people to die of lung cancer before we stamped a health warning on them all. By then, they were just too legitimised for us to do anything about them. I worry about that in particular.

My second major point is about fraud and money laundering. I understand that one reason the Government want to bring cryptoassets into the fold is to give fraud and money laundering legislation greater purchase. However, we have to reflect on the fact that over the past 30 years we have had ever greater attempts by Governments of all stripes to introduce legislation to deal with fraud and money laundering yet it is worse than it ever was. Strangely, criminals worked out that they too had a passport and a utility bill and therefore found it fairly easy to open a bank account. We are certainly seeing much higher levels of money laundering, particularly around drugs, than there used to be, and that is now very much enabled by cryptocurrencies. Given how much more susceptible such currencies are to being used in money laundering, fraud and crime in general, because they are much less trackable and traceable, I would be interested to know from the Minister why the existing rules will make any difference at all.

My final point is about the exclusion of NFTs. As the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn said, although NFTs are carved out in this legislation and are deemed to be different because, thus far, they have largely been used as collectibles because they are supposedly digital works of art, there is growing evidence that they are being used as a means of exchange and that, slowly over time, they will become fungible. It will not be long before there will be—in fact, there already are—central exchanges of NFTs that mark a price on them. We will have classes of price for different NFTs that will make them, in effect, the same as bitcoin. If the Government aspire to bring in this regulation, they really ought to include NFTs. Two students in a back room with a bit of sophisticated computer programming knowledge can create a class of NFTs and sell them—and people do buy them, sometimes for thousands of pounds. The idea that they should be excluded from the regulation seems to me to be a bit strange.

To conclude, I am concerned that a Government running helter-skelter towards cryptocurrency are not looking far enough ahead at the consequences. I realise that there is now a global consensus that crypto is a good thing, and we cannot be like King Canute and stick our finger in the dam, but cryptocurrencies present questions about the controllability of economies in the future. No one has yet come up with a solution to the significant and escalating crime problem that cryptocurrencies represent. No one has actually answered the question, before we bring in this regulation, of whether we think retail consumers should have access to this asset class at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Griffith]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent North. I will attempt briefly to address Members’ concerns.

The fact that there is an exemption process is something that came out of the consultation, to which we responded. It is the way in which we can encompass regulation around what is currently an unregulated sector. It still requires the relevant firms to act as if and to comply with the FCA requirements in this area. It is not a bug; it is a feature. I hope the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn will accept that.

We did not talk too much about the specific regulations with which we expect the FCA to come forward. It is right that the purpose of this SI is to set out the overall structure, on the bones of which the FCA will put some flesh. Members will be interested to know, though, that the regulations will certainly encompass, for example, a 24-hour cooling-off period.

I will try to address the points of my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire separately—he gave an interesting tour around this space—but he is wrong to assert that the regulation for cryptoassets would be the same as that for stocks and shares or for bonds. Cryptoassets would form part of a high-risk group that required, for example, a 24-hour cooling-off period, which we do not apply to those other assets. They are therefore being regulated as high-risk assets.

The hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn mentioned stablecoins. The detailed regulations for them have yet to be seen. There are stablecoins backed by fiat currency, and the thrust of the regulations will ensure that people can have the highest level of trust that they are properly backed. As ever, I am happy to write to the hon. Lady.

I think that I wrote to the hon. Lady about the decision on NFTs—I certainly wrote to the Chair of the Treasury Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin). We have clearly delineated that because NFTs are—as in their name—non-fungible and we do not wish investors and consumers to confuse them with instruments of investment. That is important because the counterfactual that Members should consider is not that consumers are not exposed to promotions of cryptoassets. One does not have to go far—we have only to venture down into London’s fine underground—to find currently unregulated promotions, which expose consumers to all the risks without any of the protections. The statutory instrument seeks to rectify that.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire gave quite a tour around the sector. He talked about money supply and cash fraud, on which he is obviously an expert. I would argue that by bringing cryptoasset promotions within the perimeter, we are not making the existing situation worse. Arguably, by imposing the FCA’s rigorous anti-money laundering measures and providing a greater incentive for more firms to come within them, we potentially add a clearly difficult task, on which I will not expand.

[Kit Malthouse]

I just want to take the Minister back to his point about NFTs. He said that they are not a form of investment, but I am afraid that they are. People are investing thousands of dollars in NFTs, and particular groups of NFTs, and effectively holding them as a collection as they would fine wine or art. They are certainly not a consumable. They are designed to hold value and to be disposed of at a future date, which is why NFT exchanges exist.

Secondly, does my hon. Friend accept that bringing NFTs into the investment fold grants them an air of legitimacy? We are saying, “This is a legitimate investment, notwithstanding the risk. We’ll give you some protections and the FCA will provide investment advice.” It makes such investment more legitimate than it otherwise would be.

[The Chair]

Order. Interventions must be brief.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful for your indulgence a second time, Mr Gray. Again, in delving into the details of the legislation, I wish to urge a little caution about this regulatory approach. The trading of commodities and, in particular, commodities futures can have a huge impact on the price our constituents pay for ordinary goods in their everyday lives. In history, attempts have been made to manipulate those prices. In the 1950s, two traders attempted to corner the onion futures market in the United States. That resulted in the Onion Futures Act, which is still extant in the US and forbids the trading of onion futures. Similarly, we saw—in the 1980s, I believe—a 10-year project by a trader at Sumitomo bank to corner the copper market, which eventually collapsed and failed. The trading of commodities and commodities futures, particularly at a time when there is more and more algorithmic trading and artificial intelligence being used in trading, means that we should take care in this complicated area of regulation and legislation.

One thing I could not find in the information given to us on this SI was why the current rules were introduced. What problem were they trying to solve? I acknowledge the supposed cost of these calculations, while being a little sceptical about them, given the amount of automation that so many of these traders use. Nevertheless, that rationale has not been offered to us, so I would be grateful if the Minister explained why the original rules were devised as they were and what problem they were deemed to be solving. In the past few months, we have learned that we need to take care because our regulatory organisations are not always watertight on looking at systemic and structural risk in financial markets, commodities or otherwise.

[Barry Gardiner]

I was listening to the right hon. Gentleman’s argument on onion futures trading. How does he reconcile that? Does it not give the lie to his argument about NFTs? It shows precisely that anything can be traded as a derivative in that way and therefore there would be no specific reason—he previously outlined this—to put NFTs into the other regulation. I find that his arguments conflict.

[The Chair]

I call Kit Malthouse, to respond specifically on the SI that we are considering.

[Kit Malthouse]

To respond to the hon. Gentleman’s point—

[The Chair]

No, no. You do not need to respond to it all, just specifically to points that relate to the instrument.

[Kit Malthouse]

Okay. Well, in all circumstances my view is that we need to take care about the extent of regulation, and whether and how we include things within a regulatory envelope. I just ask that people take care. My first question to the Minister was: why were the previous rules adopted as they were? What problem were they deemed to be solving? Why will that problem not reoccur with these rules? Paragraph 7.7 of the explanatory notes to this SI states that

“since the test and annual notification was introduced in 2018, no UK firms have exceeded the threshold of speculative trading activity and therefore the requirement to inform the FCA about the outcome of the ATT every year was particularly burdensome.”

That is a cause-and-effect argument. The fact that no firm has exceeded the limits for speculative trading may be because the limits were in place and there was a notification requirement. Obviously those limits for speculative trading were there for a reason: some kind of systemic threat was deemed to be posed, either to the individual organisation or to the market as a whole. I guess I am asking: what problem are we solving here, other than cost to these firms, and are we exposing ourselves to future problems?

The Minister will know that part of the calculation is the market share test, which does what it says on the tin: it works out who is trading the largest part of any particular market and therefore whether their trading is likely to present any kind of risk, either to other participants in the market or to the market as a whole. With the abandonment of this test for a number of organisations that, in effect, do not have to record that their trading is only ancillary, the calculation that they are doing, which they now do not have to do, is not revealing how much of the market they either individually or collectively make up. Given the example of the Bank of England and the structural problem that liability-driven investment phenomenon in pension funds caused us, I am concerned that we may be exposing ourselves to a structural problem here, without knowing.

My final point is about the dynamics of the market. As the Minister will know, when trading in commodity futures, whether on one’s own account or speculatively as a hedge fund, one is relying on one’s counterparty in that trade being good for the money or the commodity—whichever comes to fruition. When we remove regulation from a section of the market, we are not necessarily providing the kind of reassurance that others might need when they look to their counterparty risk in futures trading in particular.

When I contemplate trading in whatever it might be, whether it be in copper futures or something else, and I am trading with counterparties in that market, some will be FCA regulated and others will not be. How will that be reflected in the market, as I necessarily trade in the commodities that I have, and therefore what greater risk is being presented to me as a trader within the market? While I understand the Minister’s admirable desire to deregulate where he can and save money for firms—although as I said, I would be interested, given the level of automation, in understanding exactly what cost is required—I am concerned that we are unwittingly creating further problems for ourselves. What risk assessment has the Minister done of those problems occurring?

[Andrew Griffith]

I shall be brief. I am happy to be guided by the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn; she should let me know if there is anyone she would particularly like to be consulted as the FCA brings forward rules. This is the third consultation in the process, so it will be fairly well sighted on the interested parties, but, as ever, one would encourage the widest range of participants. That is certainly the way that we seek to make and inform policy, and I know that the FCA will also seek to do so.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire will forgive me; he used the word “trading” repeatedly, so let me be very clear that this is not the regulation of those who are trading in commodities. By their very definition, they would not be able to take advantage of this measure. This is for the manufacturer of an engine who seeks to place their order for copper some months in advance—those who are using a commodities market, but not for the purpose of trading. With this measure, we are reverting to the situation prior to 2018, when a piece of European legislation came into a regulatory environment that was working perfectly well, in which no one had diagnosed any problem. There was a pragmatic way for businesses to operate and then the bar was raised. We now have the opportunity simply to revert to the situation prior to the introduction of that legislation.

[Kit Malthouse]

I understand the Minister’s point. I am aware of the fact that it is perfectly possible for a company that is trading in a commodity to have futures trading, which is what we are talking about here—commodity derivatives trading—as an ancillary function of its overall business. For example, the Man Group, of which I am sure the Minister is aware, started as a cocoa and sugar ordinary trader. It had a small derivatives department, which was actually algorithmic black box trading—commodity trading adviser trading—which grew and grew. In the early days of the Man Group, under the test, that would have been ancillary to their trading. Nevertheless, it would have been a reasonably big part of the market.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

1. What recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of staffing levels in the probation service.

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

The probation service is committed to increasing recruitment to fill probation officer vacancies. The adequacy of staffing levels is monitored on an ongoing basis through operational management and plans around recruitment and retention.

[Chris Evans]

I recently spoke to a probation officer who is off work due to stress. They told me:

“We are losing no end of experienced officers and management doesn’t seem to care.”

With record levels of staff leaving the service and overworked officers fearful that any wrong decision could lead to tragedy, what specific actions will the Minister take to improve working conditions for probation officers?

[Kit Malthouse]

Although, obviously, people do leave the probation service from time to time, I hope the hon. Gentleman recognises the very vigorous recruitment campaign over the past three years. We have taken on: 1,007 new recruits in 2020-21; 1,518 in 2021-22; and 1,500 more this year. However, he is right that we need to work hard to make sure that we retain staff as well. There is a variety of strategies that we can put in place to make sure that that is the case, not least looking at the workload, which is often a cause of stress and strain. I am pleased to say that the latest numbers tell me that only 4% of probation officers have a workload above the recommended maximum, and there are obviously reasons why that may be the case. Having said that, there is, obviously, much more that we can do, and one of those things is to agree a productive and helpful pay settlement. We are in conversation with the unions and, indeed, with colleagues in the Treasury about reaching a conclusion on those discussions soon.

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Dedicated probation officers are telling me that they cannot manage their workloads as it is. One said:

“I used to spend about an hour each week with my high risk cases, but that simply isn’t possible with my current caseload. I no longer have confidence I can manage my cases in a way that keeps the public safe”.

After the Prime Minister’s pledge to cut civil service numbers by a fifth, will the Minister now rule out any more cuts to the probation service?

[Kit Malthouse]

As I said in my previous answer, we are always reviewing case loads. I know the hon. Lady will recognise that the Inspectorate of Probation report on case loads, workloads and staffing numbers indicated that the recommended case load should not exceed 50, although it also said that there should not be a precise target. I am happy to tell her that 96% of probation officers and probation service officers hold fewer than 50 cases, with an average caseload of 34. Having said that, we recognise that the profession, which is valuable and does important work, presents particular stresses and strains. As part of the reunification process, and moving towards a target operating model, staff wellbeing and welfare will be a key element in our considerations.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

2. What steps he is taking to reduce reoffending rates.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Given that 40% of crime is now economic crime, it is disappointing that the Law Commission has recommended restricting corporate criminal liability for failing to prevent economic crime to fraud, and leaving out key crimes such as money laundering and false accounting. Will my right hon. Friend agree to meet me to discuss the benefits of a review with a much wider scope?

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

Yes.

[Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)]

T10. In the wake of legal aid cuts and, now, cuts in a few charitable services—such as Support Through Court, which, as we heard earlier, has had its core funding cut—and given the cost of living crisis, how do the Government expect people who cannot afford lawyers to navigate court if the last remaining services that could help them are lost?

Community Payback

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I declare some interests: I work with the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group, as I mentioned in my intervention on the Minister for Crime and Policing, and I recently spoke at the POA conference in Eastbourne. In recent weeks, I have spoken in debates about the need for a national policing strategy for anti-social behaviour and for off-road bikes, and about repeat offenders and sentencing.

I did not intervene on the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler), but he said that the Conservative party is leading the way. I have served in this House for several years now, and I well remember that in 2011, the then Justice Secretary—who had held many high offices of state, including Chancellor of the Exchequer and Health Secretary, and now serves in the other place as Baron Clarke of Nottingham—proposed a similar solution, although in those days it was called a non-custodial sentence rather than community payback. The prison population was 85,000 then, but because of criticism from his own side, the then Justice Secretary had to back down. I well recall his statement, when the then Speaker remonstrated with him about the length of his answers; I said in his defence that I thought that that was a terribly unfair criticism because the Justice Secretary had already indicated that he was against shorter sentences. [Laughter.] Thank you.

I highlighted the difficulties experienced in our prison system and the lack of rehabilitation in a recent debate, to which the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), responded. The hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter), who is no longer in his place, spoke very well in that debate and was very constructive.

There are concerns among people who work in the system. I agree with the Minister for Crime and Policing that for community payback to be effective, it must be a team effort, but there are issues in our prison system with lack of rehabilitation and with the unsafe working environment for those in the Prison Service—not just prison officers, but prison educators and others. There is a serious threat to life and threat of injury for prison officers, whose service and commitment to public safety often go unnoticed behind the prison walls.

It is my intention to continue to raise the frustrations of police officers about pensions, particularly for new recruits. They have seen the number of their colleagues cut over the past year; there are fewer experienced police officers, and they are struggling to contain rising crime and antisocial behaviour. I know Ministers will say that we are recruiting extra officers, but we lost 20,000. We are running to catch up with where we were in 2010. I have the utmost admiration for the police officers who seek to ensure that our streets are safe, but many are new recruits. We have lost experience, as we have in probation and many other areas, and it will take many years to get that experience back.

Yesterday, we saw criminal barristers on strike, walking out of courts. Let me say for the record that as a Labour MP and as a lifelong trade unionist, I will always stand up for working people in their fight to protect their pay, pensions and terms and conditions, whether they are barristers, rail workers or postmen and women.

After 12 years of Conservative Government, there are frequent and systemic failures across our whole criminal justice system. Only yesterday, I had to raise a complaint about a constituent who has twice been unable to report crimes via the 101 service, owing to extended delays in answering calls. Today we are looking at community payback, but we will never even get to that point if the public cannot report crime. The hon. Member for South Suffolk may recall that I highlighted a particular case in last week’s Westminster Hall debate and subsequently wrote to him about it; he asked me not to raise it individually at the time because it was still ongoing.

On the surface, crime figures may appear to be declining in particular areas, but in the case that I pointed out, many in the community, including the victims, considered the sentence overly lenient. They have lost confidence in the system and are less likely to report crimes; in fact, the individual affected has said that under no circumstances will he ever go through it all again, because he does not feel that justice has been served. There are not enough police officers to attend incidents in a timely manner, and criminals are not being convicted because of court delays and backlogs. Sadly, the Government are refusing to take responsibility, but the decision to close 164 out of 320 magistrates courts since 2010 is clearly not helping the backlog.

The Government are undermining the quality and quantity of community sentences. In 2019, the chief inspector of probation found that because of the Government’s “Transforming Rehabilitation” reforms, which split probation provision into the public sector National Probation Service and privately owned community rehabilitation companies, probation services are

“failing to meet all performance targets…In too many cases, there is not enough purposeful activity…The probation profession has been diminished…There is now a national shortage of probation professionals”.

The chief inspector noted that there is too much reliance on unqualified or agency staff, and that

“in the day-to-day work of probation professionals, there has been a notable drift away from the evidence base”.

I think the Government acknowledge that privatising probation was an error, because they renationalised it, but these issues prevail. The courts are less inclined to give community sentences. My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) mentioned the reduction in the number of such sentences. Indeed, there has been a 46% decrease in England and Wales over the past 10 years, and a 25% fall in the four years between 2017 and 2020 alone in my region, the north-east. A decline in community sentences may indicate a more hard-line approach, given the increase in the use of custodial sentences. However, the prison population is lower today than it was in 2010. I do understand that during the pandemic there was less crime, and I think that the prison population fell by about 6% during that period, but what we have now are fewer police officers, fewer courts, and fewer community and custodial sentences.

The Conservative party often tries to portray itself as the party of law and order, but the statistics and the experience on the streets suggest that it is more the party of crime and disorder. Recently—and quite regularly—the Government have said, “Well, what would you do?” It is easy to throw stones and criticise.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that while different types of crime can fall in different ways, some serious volume crimes are, according to the Office for National Statistics, well down on where they were three years ago. Burglary is down, robbery is down, theft is down, and admissions to hospital with a knifepoint injury are well down. There are areas of concentration, to which we have given significant priority and resources, which are now significantly down across the country. That is British crime survey data, not data for reported crime.

[Grahame Morris]

I acknowledge the Minister’s intervention. My concern, which I raised earlier in my speech and also last week, is the number of people who, because of a lack of confidence in the criminal justice system, are simply not reporting crimes—not necessarily the very serious crimes involving physical assault but crimes that we might classify as minor, including antisocial behaviour.

[Kit Malthouse]

As I am sure the hon. Gentleman knows, we use two methods to measure crime. There is recorded crime, as he says, which is sometimes affected by sentiment, but the more accurate measure—the one that is generally used—is the British crime survey, which contains data that is not impacted by the kind of sentiment to which he is alluding, and that data shows that these important crime types are significantly down.

[Grahame Morris]

I am grateful to the Minister for that intervention. However, let me return to the frequent criticism of Labour for not being definitive enough in proposing alternatives. Let us be no doubt about this: Labour is not soft on crime. Through new community and victim payback orders, we would make offenders pay back to the communities they have harmed. I think that that is an excellent idea, and I hope there is a basis for us to move forward together, given that Labour has a solid policy that commands support in the community.

Labour would set up police hubs—indeed, we have an embryonic police hub in Horden, in my constituency—in our towns and larger villages, and would put more police back on the streets. That would give residents direct access to a way of sharing their concerns about their community. We all know that the most effective policing is intelligence-led, and features close co-operation with a community who can often identify those who are involved in crime. Finally, Labour would create new neighbourhood prevention teams, which would bring together police, community support officers, youth workers—that is very important—and council staff to tackle the causes of the antisocial behaviour that is blighting so many communities.

The Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary know that the cuts of the past 12 years were wrong, and I welcome the U-turn at the 2019 election, when it was proposed that 20,000 police officers be rehired, but the public should remember that they were, in the main, present for, and voted for, each and every cut to our criminal justice system over the past 12 years. When it comes to community payback and rehabilitation—although I believe in the concept—the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary are repeat offenders. It will take many generations for the criminal justice system to recover from the wanton attacks and mismanagement of this Government.

While we can restore numbers relatively easily, the decades of experience that we have lost among skilled professionals—in the police and the probation service, and among prison officers—are not so easily recovered. Even following the recruitment drive to which the Minister referred, there are still nearly 24,000 fewer police staff today than there were in 2010, and over 6,000 fewer special constables. That is 30,000 fewer people seeking to prevent crime and catch offenders. Moreover, the closure of so many magistrates courts means that we have halved the court capacity to process offenders who are caught and charged.

The probation service recently launched a recruitment drive—the Minister mentioned this—to attract 500 extra community payback staff. The question I want to ask is this: how does the Minister expect to attract people to these important roles, given that retention, let alone recruitment, is struggling? The probation union Napo tells me of issues involving staff feeling unsafe at work—that may be partly due to concerns about covid—frustrations over stagnant pay and a lack of progression in jobs, and, overwhelmingly, covid-induced backlogs that are still clogging up the system.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 28th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment 2.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Lords amendment 70, Government motion to disagree, and Government amendments (a) and (b) in lieu.

Lords amendment 72, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendments 114 to 116, Government motions to disagree, and Government amendments (a) and (b) in lieu.

Lords amendment 141, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendment 142, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendments 3 to 57, 59, 60, 108 to 113, 117, 147, 153 and 154.

[Kit Malthouse]

I propose first to talk about some of the key changes made to the Bill in the other place as a result of amendments brought forward by the Government, then to turn to the Lords amendments with which, sadly, the Government disagree for various reasons.

The Bill as passed by this House already included a number of significant measures to tackle violence against women and girls, and we have added to them during the Bill’s passage in the Lords. Lords amendments 13 to 15 make it clear in the Bill that domestic abuse and sexual violence are included within the meaning of the term “violence” for the purposes of the serious violence duty. It was always our wish that the serious violence duty should be all-encompassing, but following representations by Baroness Burton and others who were concerned to emphasise its importance, we are happy to agree to this being included in the Bill. The accompanying statutory guidance, which will be subject to public consultation, will make it clear that local areas, in drawing up their strategies to prevent and reduce serious violence, can and should include measures to tackle domestic abuse and sexual violence based on their local assessments.

With regard to Lords amendments 34 to 55, on Report in this House the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), reiterated the Government’s commitment to ensuring that the provisions of the Bill relating to the extraction of information from electronic devices are accompanied by strong privacy safeguards. These Lords amendments deliver on that commitment. Among other things, they add a new clause setting out the conditions that must be met in order for a device user to be treated as giving agreement to the extraction of information. These changes will increase victim confidence and ensure that the individual’s right to privacy is respected and placed at the centre of all investigations.

Lords amendment 56 will create new offences to criminalise recording images of, or operating equipment to observe, a person at a time when they are breastfeeding, without the person’s consent or reasonable belief that they consent. On Report, the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) made a powerful case for introducing such offences. Although at that time we made it clear that the Law Commission is currently reviewing the law in this area, we do believe that this amendment will ensure that parents are protected from non-consensual photography and can feel safe to breastfeed in public, ahead of the publication of the Law Commission report later this year.

Another compelling argument was made on Report last July by the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who is sadly not in his place, to address concerns that the time limit for bringing prosecutions for common assault or battery involving domestic abuse is unfairly short. Currently a prosecution for common assault or battery must be brought within six months of an offence occurring. However, victims of domestic abuse may often, understandably, take some time to report an offence, leaving the police and the Crown Prosecution Service with little time to conduct an investigation and prosecute the offender. In some instances, the time limit has expired before the victim even approaches the police. To address this issue, Lords amendment 57 will extend the time limit for commencing a prosecution for common assault or battery involving domestic abuse so that the six months runs not from the date when the offence occurred but from when it is formally reported to the police through either a witness statement or a video recording made with a view to use as evidence. A prosecution must be commenced within an overall limit of two years of the offence. This amendment will make a real difference to victims of domestic abuse and stop perpetrators hiding behind an unfair limitation on victims’ ability to seek justice.

Lords amendments 59 and 60 will ensure that the police’s processing of personal data in non-crime hate incident records is made subject to a code of practice issued by the Home Secretary. The amendments will address concerns raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), also sadly not in his place, in this House and by Lord Moylan and others in the other place by bringing parliamentary oversight to this process. The College of Policing is currently responsible for producing non-statutory hate crime operational guidance. The Government’s statutory code of practice, once in effect, will replace the relevant section of this guidance on non-crime hate incidents. The college’s guidance will remain in place until the new code enters into effect. When drafting the code, the Government will work closely with policing partners, including the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, to make sure that it will respect the operational importance of recording non-crime hate incidents to help to keep vulnerable people and communities safe while balancing the need to protect freedom of expression.

Let me turn to the Lords amendments that the Government cannot support—at least, not in their current form. Lords amendment 70 would require the Secretary of State to establish a review of the prevalence of, and the response of the criminal justice system to, the offence of administering a substance with intent under section 61 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003—commonly known as spiking. The Government share widespread concern about the offence that has prompted this amendment, whether spiking of drinks or spiking by needles, and we are taking the issue extremely seriously. I particularly commend my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) for bringing forward his recent ten-minute rule Bill on this issue. Everyone should be able to enjoy a night out without fearing that they will be a victim of this dreadful crime.

In September 2021, the Home Secretary asked the National Police Chiefs Council to review urgently the extent and scale of needle spiking. It is clear from what the police have told us that this behaviour is not exclusively linked to sexual activity and that it demands a response that goes beyond the criminal justice system. We have therefore tabled our amendment in lieu of Lords amendment 70, which is drafted more broadly than the Lords amendment and is not linked to any specific offence. It will require the Home Secretary to prepare a report on the nature and prevalence of spiking and to set out the steps that the Government have taken or intend to take to address it. In this context we are also exploring the need for a specific criminal offence to target spiking directly, as my hon. Friend recommended in his ten-minute rule Bill. The Home Secretary will be required to publish this report and lay it before Parliament within 12 months of Royal Assent. In preparing the report we will want to take into account the findings of the current inquiry by the Home Affairs Committee. This approach addresses the concerns that prompted the Lords amendment but in a way that enables the Government to consider the issue in the round.

Lords amendment 72 seeks, in common parlance, to make misogyny a hate crime. Hon. Members may be aware that in December last year, at the Government’s request, the Law Commission provided recommendations on the reform of hate crime laws. Looking very carefully at this issue, it found that adding sex or gender to hate crime laws may prove “more harmful than helpful”, as well as “counterproductive”. The principal reason is that it could make it more difficult to prosecute the most serious crimes that harm women and girls, including rape and domestic abuse. Obviously such an awful unintended consequence is not the intention of those who tabled the amendment in the other place. As such, the amendment seeks to exclude certain offences where the risks to their prosecution are acute.

The Law Commission looked at every possible model and unfortunately also found the one proposed in the amendment unsatisfactory. Time is short and I do not want to dwell on all its problems, but the review identified that to reflect sex and gender in some offences but not others would make the law very complex and imply that very harmful excluded offences such as rape are less serious, would result in tokenistic coverage of many misogynistic crimes, and would create new inequalities in how different groups are protected by hate crime laws.

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

The inner house of the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest court, has recently clarified that in the Equality Act 2010 “sex” does indeed have the meaning set out in section 11—that is, that it refers to one or other sex, male or female. Does the Minister share my concern that this amendment has that definition of “sex” but the word “gender” is undefined? Is he aware that many feminists feel that gender is not the same as sex and that in fact gender is a tool of sex-based oppression?

[Kit Malthouse]

I acknowledge some of the problems with the amendment that the hon. and learned Lady sets out. I think it is Women’s Aid that rejected the amendment and said that it would do more harm than good on the basis that she outlined: it is not specific about targeting crimes against women in particular.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I would like to correct the record, because that is not what Women’s Aid has said.

The Minister highlighted the issue of a carve-out as being the reason why the Government do not believe in adding sex or gender to ensure that any perpetrator who attacks a woman or someone they believe to be a woman can be captured by the offences in question. I think we would all agree that is important, but he argues that the carve-out is not the right thing to do. Does he also make the same argument then that it is tokenistic to carve out offences based on racial or religious hatred, which we already do in our legislation? We have carve-outs. Stephen Lawrence’s killers were not prosecuted for a hate crime, but we recognise the hate behind it. Why does he think that women do not deserve the same protection?

[Kit Malthouse]

I had hoped to avoid the approach that the hon. Lady takes. Of course we believe that women deserve strong protection—we absolutely do—but all I can say to the hon. Lady is that the Law Commission, in looking at the evidence over a three-year period and consulting widely across the sector and society more generally, found that the additional complexity was likely to make it harder to prosecute these crimes. I ask her to reflect on the fact that in proceedings in this House, she put her name to an amendment compelling the Government to adopt the Law Commission’s proposals in full. I am not sure why she has now reversed that position, but I hope she appreciates that we are as dedicated to and interested in the safety of women as she is.

[Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend and I worked hard on the issues underpinning the Bill and on the Bill itself. May I press him on Lords amendment 72? I accept that the amendment is defective. It does not create a new offence, however, but is about aggravating factors in sentencing. I commend to him the positive findings of the Law Commission, namely its proposal to develop an offence of street harassment, albeit with a sexual motive. I take issue with that—I think it needs to be a wider offence of street harassment, because we need to deal with wider issues than sexual motive—but I press the Minister to commit the Government to getting on with work on the Law Commission’s important recommendation to create a new offence based not just on racial hatred, but on hatred motivated against gender or sex.

[Kit Malthouse]

My right hon. and learned Friend is right that we need to have a serious look at the suite of offences used in this area. He will know that many street harassment offences are classified as some kind of public order offence. That causes a number of problems, not least the lack of transparency with the police’s analysis of what is going on out there in our streets.

There are three further areas of work that we want to turn to, as we sadly reject this amendment, well motivated though it absolutely is, on the basis of the Law Commission’s evidence. Those three areas are first, as my right hon. and learned Friend says, to adopt the Law Commission’s other proposal of looking at a specific offence of public sexual harassment, as my neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), asked for today. Personally speaking, I think it could be a new offence, but it could be some amendment to public order offences to allow us to deal with this particular issue.

The second area is police recording. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon has raised the issue a number of times with me outside the Chamber, and he is right that we need to look carefully at the forces recording data at the moment, what they are learning from it and what impact it has, because the Law Commission was equivocal about the value of that recording. I am not convinced personally, and I would like to understand what impact it is having from a policing point of view.

The third area of work I would like to see is encouragement of reporting. One of the key things, whatever the offence type, is that we know a lot of women, particularly in the public realm, who are harassed do not have the confidence to come forward or do not think anything will happen if they do. I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), is today launching an extensive communications campaign called “Enough”, encouraging bystanders and peers to report this kind of behaviour to the police.

[Sir Robert Buckland]

I have listened with care to my right hon. Friend, and I accept what he says. I am encouraged by what he says about development of the law. May I press him on reporting and recording? As part of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 process, we undertook to ensure that recording was rolled out nationally. That was more than a year ago. For that to happen, there must be proper expedition on this. It is no good saying that there is not a particular offence on which the police can hang this recording. We need to get on with it, because the time is coming, sooner or later, when there will be a relevant offence, and I would rather that the Government were ahead of the pack rather than behind.

[Kit Malthouse]

I completely agree with my right hon. and learned Friend, and I am as impatient as he is, not least because I am keen to kick off some analysis programmes looking at particular patterns of behaviour in particular postcodes. We men all know women who have been subject to this kind of abuse out in the public realm. My personal theory is that this sort of behaviour is not something a man does once. Much of this offending is repeated, and there are prolific offenders in particular neighbourhoods who could and should be identified, and they would be if we were better able to record it and had more transparency from a public order offence point of view. That is what we will be committing to do.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I am grateful for what the Minister has said, particularly about the early amendment on spiking. On this particular offence of misogyny, can we have it on the record in this House that no one in this House has any time for misogyny? The issue is purely one of law and what will be most effective. Everything that my right hon. Friend the Minister has said in answer to my neighbour, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland), is extremely relevant. Does my right hon. Friend recognise that some police forces, such as my own—Gloucestershire constabulary—are recording data on this and believe it to be useful? I hope he agrees that that could be an encouraging form of evidence towards the aggravating factor he referred to earlier.

[Kit Malthouse]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and he is absolutely right that we need to look carefully at the recording patterns and what they are telling forces such as Gloucestershire about how they can and should intervene in particular neighbourhoods. We then need to look to other forces exhibiting the same patterns of offending, but not necessarily recording it, so that we can act to spread this kind of practice more widely.

I am encouraged by my hon. Friend’s sense of cross-party enthusiasm for this issue. I know that some in the House—I am not sure necessarily anybody present here—would seek to make it a political issue, but as the person who devised and published the first ever violence against women and girls strategy in the entire country when I was deputy Mayor for policing at City Hall, I am proud of the work I have been able to do in this particular area over the past decade or so, and I hope I will do it for many years to come. This issue breaches all divides, because we are all sons, brothers, sisters, fathers—whatever it might be—and we all know people who have been subjected to this crime.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

The amendment to the hate legislation does not create a new offence, and the Minister will be aware of that. I had a long discussion with the Law Commission last week, and it admits that not all women’s rights organisations agree with its view. Many organisations, such as the Fawcett Society and the Young Women’s Trust, support this amendment.

[Kit Malthouse]

All I can do for the hon. Lady is quote from the Law Commission’s report, which I assume she has read, extensive though it is. It specifically states:

“We recognise that many people may disagree with our conclusion and find it difficult to understand given the prevalence of sex and gender-based violence and abuse…our recommendations have been decided…on the strength of the evidence and policy considerations before us.”

I hope she will understand that notwithstanding the division of opinion there may be, the fact that the Law Commission—after three years, and with weighty legal minds—disagrees with this move, along with large women’s organisations, such as Rape Crisis, means that in all conscience we cannot support an amendment that they say will make things worse. We have to commit ourselves to making things better and by other means, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) has pointed out. That is exactly what I am doing today.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the Minister for all his work. I am concerned about how ladies and girls will have confidence in the processes coming forward. He has clearly said that the amendment is not acceptable because he feels that, legislatively, the Government are addressing those issues, but the people who speak to me—the ladies and gentlemen, and the young girls in particular—need to have confidence in the processes. I do not see that, so how will he legislatively ensure that that is there for ladies and girls?

[Kit Malthouse]

I completely sympathise with the hon. Gentleman’s sentiment. Having been in this House for nearly seven years, I have often realised that we mistake the introduction of legislation for actually doing something out there on the street. Although we can and should legislate to make things crimes and to better dispose of them, we actually need somebody to take off their bicycle clips, walk out of the office or station and do something different out there on the street to make those of us in society who feel unsafe—particularly, sadly, women and girls—feel safer.

We are trying to give concrete life to that through schemes such as the safer streets fund, where we are specifically spending money on public realm improvements, whether that is CCTV or better street lighting, in areas where women and girls feel unsafe. I hope that the huge increase in police numbers that we are seeing at the moment will see more uniforms out there on the street in those areas where women and girls feel unsafe. There are wider cultural issues that we also need to address. The hon. Gentleman is right to point out, however, that legislation will only take us so far and that what is required is action out there on the streets.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

It sounds a bit like the Minister is saying that the words we say in here do not really matter, but the legislation that we pass here, including making misogyny an aggravating factor, sends messages to people out there. When I sat on the Committee of the Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019, the Government were clear that although other laws could be used to stop the awful practice of upskirting, it needed to be in a clear law against it. During the passage of that Act, they promised that they would look at and bring forward a measure to make misogyny an aggravating factor in hate crime. Why are they delaying on the promises that they have made?

[Kit Malthouse]

I am sorry, but I am not sure that the Government ever made that promise. [Interruption.] Hold on, I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has read the Law Commission’s report. Has he read it?

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I have read the section that the Minister is referring to.

[Kit Malthouse]

The Law Commission report is unequivocal about the dangers that it may present. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) is shaking her head, but the report’s conclusion says:

“We recommend that sex or gender should not be added as a protected characteristic for the purposes of aggravated offences and enhanced sentencing.”

That is the specific recommendation in the report. The Law Commission has much greater and more skilled legal minds than mine, and other groups do not support the amendment.

I realise that the issue is of great importance to hon. Members, and we must all reflect on the feelings of insecurity that women and girls feel in the public realm, but we are being told by the experts—by the Law Commission—that the measure is likely to do more damage than good. That is not necessarily a substitute for us not doing anything and I have outlined what more we may do, but the point is that we have to listen to the experts. To be honest, I am quite surprised that a party led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions would seek to ignore the Law Commission.

[Stella Creasy]

I would like to correct the record, because the Minister seemed to suggest that I was against what the Law Commission has said. He is asking all hon. Members whether they have read it so it is worth checking whether he has, because it says that there is a case for there being offences motivated by misogyny—for example, stirring up incitement or public sexual harassment. Those of us who have constituents such as Muslim women who get attacked in the street for being both Muslim and a woman recognise that misogyny is about not just sex but power, so we need offences to tackle that.

Does the Minister recognise that if the Law Commission is saying that there are offences motivated by misogyny, the risk of not including it as an aggravating factor is that we could end up in a whack-a-mole situation? For example, we could end up saying, “In these cases of incitement, what is incitement? In these cases, what might be sexual harassment?” It would be simpler to include it and it would recognise what the police are telling us. I stress that the police are telling us that they want this data and they want the courts to back them. They want misogyny to be treated in the same way as racial or religious hatred, because they see it driving crimes on our streets. I am pleased to hear that he is concerned for women, but women have had concern for donkey’s years. What we now want is action.

[Kit Malthouse]

I can appreciate the hon. Lady’s requirement for action. As I say, action is what we are trying to put in place. To be clear, again, we are not saying that the fact that we are declining to make this Lords amendment means that we should not do anything. As I said to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon, there are further offences that we need to consider.

In fact, the Law Commission’s report went further and said that if we were to introduce that offence, it would complement other work on offences that may be coming forward, such as cyber-flashing, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has raised several times in the House; rape threats; and intimate image abuse. There are several areas where we need to consider interlocking offences, and that work will take time beyond this Bill to get right. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North urged us, we are committed to adopting both recommendations of the Law Commission, and that is exactly the work that we intend to do in the months to come.

[Sara Britcliffe (Hyndburn) (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that it is important for Opposition Members to understand what Rape Crisis England & Wales has said, which is that:

“Rape prosecutions are already at an all-time low, and we believe adding sex/gender as a protected characteristic would further complicate the judicial process and make it even harder to secure convictions.”?

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend has put her finger on the button of the problem. It is not that we are unsympathetic to the issue—of course we are not. I just do not see how, given the views of large organisations and of the Law Commission, somebody could, with any conscience, vote for something that they are being told might be damaging. I understand that the hon. Member for Walthamstow is exercised by the issue—as are all hon. Members present—but we hope to address it in other ways and to look seriously at the further offence that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon has urged us to look at and bring it forward in future.

[Joanna Cherry]

In support of the English Law Commission—hon. Members should be aware that the legislation applies only in England and Wales—in Scotland, when the Scottish Government were looking at introducing hate crime legislation, they rejected misogyny as an aggravating factor after submissions from Rape Crisis, Women’s Aid and Engender in Scotland. Baroness Helena Kennedy is now chairing a panel to look at that with a view to reporting. There are arguments on either side.

I am most concerned that if we are to have an aggravation based on sex or gender, gender must be defined. We already have a protected characteristic of transgender identity, which is very important, but in this Lords amendment, sex is defined but not gender. Does the Minister agree that, in future, we should define what we mean by gender so that people know what it means?

[Kit Malthouse]

There are a number of definitional issues within the Lords amendment that produce fatal flaws, but I absolutely commend the spirit behind it. It comes from a good place and from a concern that we share. Given that legal expertise advises us against it and advises us to pursue another course, that is our intention and that is what we will do.

I turn now to Lords amendments 114 to 116, which relate to the piloting and national roll-out of serious violence reduction orders. I assure the House that we want to pilot them robustly, which is why the assessment of the pilot will be conducted by an independent evaluator and the Government will thoroughly consider the report’s findings before any decision is made to roll them out across the whole of England and Wales.

The report of the pilot will be laid before Parliament, but commencement regulations are not generally subject to any parliamentary procedure and the Government do not agree that that approach should be changed for SVROs. To assuage the concerns that have been raised in relation to the pilot, amendments (a) and (b) in lieu of Lords amendments 114 to 116 will set out in the Bill a non-exhaustive list of matters that must be addressed in the report of the pilot.

Lords amendments 141 and 142 seek to create two new offences to tackle so-called sex for rent. We are clear that exploitation through sex for rent has no place in our society and is a revolting phenomenon. We therefore fully understand the motivation behind these amendments. There are existing offences in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 that can and have been used to prosecute this practice successfully, but we do recognise the need to do more to stamp out this abhorrent practice and to support those at risk of exploitation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

On the consultation that the Minister will undertake, is it a very targeted consultation on the specific offence of sex for rent, or does it recognise the sexual exploitation of women in other areas and broaden it out to prostitution more generally?

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. I cannot give her a definition as it stands, but I am happy to write to her about the scope of the consultation. If she wishes to make representations about the scope, I am sure we will take them into account. However, we are very focused on the notion of a specific offence, so my assumption is that the consultation will be relatively specific.

[Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)]

It does sound, from what the Minister has shared, that this is seen solely through the prism of advertisements online—where there is a suggestion of sex for rent, but through an online medium—but is that right? Will any suggested proposal brought forward in this consultation cover media outside the online sphere?

[Kit Malthouse]

We do believe that the online harms Bill will cover the vast majority of the offending where this is advertised, and I have to say that the vast majority of that these days does seem to be online. However, the hon. Member raises a very good point, and I will make sure that the team putting the consultation together consider whether we should include that in the scope of the consultation and if a further offence is needed.

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

And finally!

[Janet Daby]

I thank the Minister for giving way on that point. Shelter states that over 30,000 women since the beginning of the pandemic have been pestered by landlords to exchange sex for a roof over their heads. Does the Minister not think that there is more the Government should be doing to move this forward? How long is the consultation period, and what will happen in the meantime?

[Kit Malthouse]

As I say, there are already offences being committed in those circumstances, and we have had successful prosecutions in exactly the circumstances the hon. Member outlines. Anybody who has been subjected to that kind of criminality should, I hope, feel in a position to report it. However, we need to look at whether there is scope for a more specific offence in this area, because at the moment some of the offending is dealt with through the prostitution legislation, which may not be entirely appropriate. The consultation that we will undertake before the summer recess will run for the normal period, and I hope we will then bring forward expedited legislation, possibly in the same vehicle in which we bring forward the further offences on street harassment. Let us see how we get on.

The other place has proposed some welcome improvements to the Bill, but it has also put forward some amendments that, while often well meaning and extremely well motivated, I am afraid we cannot commend to the House for the various reasons I have set out. I hope that the House will join me, as we support these various amendments, in sorting out what works and what does not, so that we can all move forward in this important area of policy.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy]

I hope the right hon. Member will understand what I am saying. The Law Commission did not look at this amendment, which has learned from the Bertin amendment. [Interruption.] She shakes her head, but the Bertin amendment, which sets out explicitly the offences we would carve out, did not exist during the time of its work. One argument the Law Commission made was with regard to the difficulty of carving those offences out. The amendment builds on where a carve-out can be made.

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

[Stella Creasy]

I will happily give way to the Minister. I hope he is not going to tell me again to read the Law Commission review.

[Kit Malthouse]

This is an important issue and I am grateful to the hon. Lady, but I just wanted to point out to her that the Law Commission said in its consultation paper that it thought it might be possible to overcome the challenges involved in excluding certain violence against women and girls contexts and there would still be value in including sex or gender within hate crime laws for the remaining criminal contexts. It specifically considered the notion of carve-outs. However, following further reflection and analysis, and with the benefit of detailed and thoughtful consultation responses, it now believes that all the possible models to do so create more problems than they solve. So the Law Commission did look specifically at this model of carve-outs, and indeed it specifically considered the option of the full recognition of sex or gender in aggravated offences, with enhanced sentences on the same basis as for other recognised characteristics.

[Stella Creasy]

I am sorry, but the Minister is conflating two different things here. The Law Commission did not look at the Bertin amendment. What it looked at was whether one might inadvertently downgrade sentencing for rape or domestic abuse by including it within this hierarchy. That is why, for example, Rape Crisis was concerned about a generalist clause. I am sure the Minister has spoken to Rape Crisis since the Law Commission’s report was made. I certainly have. I talked to it about this amendment, and it has been much more positive about it. I hope, if the Minister is quoting Rape Crisis, that he will listen to it when it says that it recognises what is being tried here.

I am not here to say that the Lords amendment is perfect, but I am here to say the because there are other crimes that could be motivated by misogyny, which it is right to recognise within sentencing and to treat as serious—for example, exposure, cyber-flashing, assault or blackmail targeted at disabled women; we see a lot of that in the evidence base—that means that we should dismiss this entirely and say, “Well, we won’t do this at all,” is yet again to ask women to wait for something that will never come. That is the challenge we have here.

The Minister wants to say, “Let’s not politicise it.” I agree. I extend my hand to him to say let us work together to get this right, but let us recognise that misogyny is driving crimes and that the Law Commission has said that. Its arguments were technical ones about how to do the drafting, not about the principle. I hope that the Minister would acknowledge that, because he cannot both argue—

[Kit Malthouse]

I have said that specifically.

[Stella Creasy]

That is not what the Minister has said, but I am pleased to hear him say that—[Interruption.] Great. Wonderful—consensus is breaking out, but consensus will not deal with the fact that women right now are at risk and are being harmed. This proposal is helping to improve conviction rates and to track perpetrators in the areas where it is operating.

The Minister will be aware that an amendment to the Bill that became the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 was withdrawn in the other place because Ministers committed to making sure that all police forces would do the reporting, but they have not. We can agree that the reporting is necessary, but it is not sufficient to give the police the backing that they need or to say, “This is about street lighting”. We have to look at how we tackle violence against women and at why and how we could have a carve-out to make this work. That is essentially what an incitement offence would do—

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

[Stella Creasy]

I will happily give way to the Minister; I can see him shaking his head and I am keen to hear his male voice about my experience of violence.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am sorry, but the hon. Lady seems determined to have a fight about this and I really do not want one. She keeps referring to street lighting, but that is one of a suite of things that we need to do generally in the public realm regarding safety. For clarity, I of course acknowledge that there are offences that are motivated by misogyny—I say that clearly, as I did in my opening speech—but this requires a number of approaches and solutions. We are merely saying that the evidence that the Law Commission and other groups put before us is that this particular approach is likely to cause more harm than good. We have committed to look at the other areas that it has highlighted, particularly the crimes that are motivated by misogyny, which I read out from its report. I reassure hon. Members that we are duty-bound to respond to the Law Commission’s report in six months, and we will do so.

[Stella Creasy]

I hope that the Minister will forgive me if I mention that there are, I think, more than 17 Law Commission reports that have been published since 2010 that the Government have not responded to and acted on—and that is just to look at the Law Commission. He also keeps saying that the Law Commission has looked at this proposal. No—the Law Commission looked at including sex or gender in all instances. It then looked at whether it was possible to have a carve-out, but we did not have the Bertin amendment, which specifically identified the offences in question and helped to shape this Lords amendment.

The Minister has said that he does not want to have a fight about this. Well, he is going to have one, because he is opposing the proposal and not coming up with any alternatives. He is not saying, for example, “We will introduce a proposal in the other place that addresses these issues” or that he will listen not just to all the chief constables across the country who have said that they want to see this happen, but to the organisations that have. Seeing as he is obsessed with major organisations, let us run through them: the Fawcett Society; Citizens UK; Refuge; Stonewall; HOPE not hate; Dimensions; Tell MAMA; the Jo Cox Foundation; and Safe & the City. Many of us have been talking to people who have expressed concerns to identify what those are and learn from them; that is where this amendment has come from.

The Minister will use the Government majority to vote this Lords amendment down, to say that violence against women is a complicated issue and that there are other approaches, and he will wait patiently and in fear that, yet again, there will be another moment as there was a year ago. The trouble is that, for us as women, waiting in fear is our daily experience, because we do not see things changing any time soon. We see the evidence base from Nottinghamshire and from the Met police. We want to know why there is a postcode lottery when it comes to the police taking violence against women seriously. We want to know why our courts want to exclude sex or gender from the protected characteristics that we rightly recognise when crimes are motivated by a hatred of somebody just for who they are, and we will tackle that.

People made many of these arguments 20 years ago on recognising racially and religiously motivated abuse. We now, rightly, all benefit from the protection and the freedom that has been given to people, so that they do not have to live in fear that they will be attacked just because of the colour of their skin or their religious identity. The Minister’s problem is that he says that he listens to and knows women and that he understands this area, but if he understands it at all, he should listen to the suffragettes, who told us that it was “deeds not words” that matter. All we have heard tonight is words.

This proposal is backed by the police. Opposition Members and many Government Members want to back the police and want to see the courts back up the police. If he does not accept this amendment, the Minister has the time and the opportunity in the Lords to come up with an alternative. He will have my support and that of the Cross Benchers to make that happen. However, if he continues to ignore women, to say that he understands the challenge and to blame them for not coming forward and reporting things—[Interruption.] He is right to shake his head, but he can probably go home without looking over his shoulder. Many of us cannot.

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[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I call the Minister.

[Kit Malthouse]

With the leave of the House, I shall respond to the debate. I am grateful to all the Members who have spoken, and I hope that what has been exhibited is our shared concern for many of the issues we have talked about today, not least the safety of women and girls, which has naturally and rightly dominated the debate. A number of undertakings were sought from me, latterly by my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), who has done so much work on the offence of spiking. I am happy to give him a commitment that we will come back within a six-month period, as he requested. Obviously we will be producing a wider report within 12 months, but we should be able to give him an indication at the time.

My right hon. Friend and neighbour, the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), asked for a specific legislative vehicle, but I am afraid that I cannot preview the Queen’s Speech, much as I would love to. I cannot give her a specific vehicle, but I can tell her that we will be responding to the Law Commission’s report within six months. We are giving serious consideration to the work streams that I have talked about. As I have said to her, it is my personal view that we have an issue that needs to be addressed, either through public order offending, through recording or through a specific offence. I hope that on that basis she will feel able to support us this evening.

The work that we will be doing in this area sits alongside an awful lot of other work looking at the issue of street harassment, including our safety of women at night fund and the safer streets fund. In September we launched the new StreetSafe tool, allowing the police to access greater information and data about where people feel, or indeed are, unsafe. I am told that more than 12,000 reports have already been submitted through that line. In December, the College of Policing published new guidance showing what the police can and should do when they receive a report of public sexual harassment. The criminal offence is already available and other protective tools can be used. As I hope my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North has just been to see, we have also launched a new communications campaign this evening. There is an awful lot to cover in this first group of amendments, but I hope that we have looked at a wide range of offences and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester for pointing out that we have been listening. The number of amendments we have accepted weigh in the balance of support for the votes that we are about to undertake.

On the misogyny issue, I commend the motivation behind the set of amendments that we are sadly declining. We understand people’s genuine concern about the safety of women and girls in the public sector, and indeed we share it. We are determined to make significant inroads in this area. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) and my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Newbury have pointed out so effectively, we cannot in all conscience support an amendment that the Law Commission and other large groups interested in this area believe runs the risk of damaging the cause of women’s safety. That puts an obligation on us to bring forward alternatives that will do something positive for women’s safety. That battle is under way, and we commit to doing exactly that.

Lords amendment 2 agreed to.

Lords amendment 70 disagreed to.

Government amendments (a) and (b) made in lieu of Lords amendment 70.

Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 72.—(Kit Malthouse.)

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

We now move to the third set of amendments. When I call the Minister to move the motion, it would be useful if those who are trying to catch my eye indicate they wish to speak.

After Clause 54

Accountability of public authorities: duties on police workforce

[Kit Malthouse]

I beg to move that this House disagrees with Lords amendment 71.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Lords amendment 74, and Government amendment (a) thereto.

Lords amendment 88, and Government amendment (a) thereto.

Lords amendment 73, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendment 80, Government motion to disagree, and Government amendments (a) to (f) to the words so restored to the Bill.

Lords amendment 81, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendment 82, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendment 87, Government motion to disagree, and Government amendments (a) to (f) to the words so restored to the Bill.

Lords amendments 89 and 146, Government motions to disagree, and Government amendments (a) and (b) in lieu.

Lords amendment 143, Government motion to disagree, and Government amendments (a) to (c) in lieu.

Lords amendments 75 to 79, 83 to 86, 90 to 93, 118 to 120 and 148.

[Kit Malthouse]

Lords amendment 71 would introduce a duty of candour for the police workforce. I am sure that hon. Members know that the Government take police integrity and accountability extremely seriously. So much so that, in February 2020, we introduced a statutory duty of co-operation for serving police officers as part of wider integrity reforms.

A failure to co-operate in that way constitutes a breach of the statutory standards of professional behaviour by which all officers must abide and could therefore result in a formal disciplinary sanction. It is our view that the duty to co-operate puts a greater onus on officers than the duty of candour provided for in the Lords amendment, as they could ultimately be dismissed for a breach. In essence, the Lords is proposing a dilution.

Hon. Members will also be aware of the Government’s forthcoming response to the Daniel Morgan independent panel and to Bishop James Jones’ report concerning the bereaved Hillsborough families’ experiences, and we will set out our view on a wider duty of candour for all public authorities. Before the Government respond to those reports, however, it is clearly imperative that the Hillsborough families are given the opportunity to share their views.

None the less, we are closely monitoring the impact of the new legislation on police co-operation with inquiries and investigations. As we consider the case for a wider duty of candour for other public servants and bodies, we will determine whether there are gaps in the existing framework that need to be filled to ensure public confidence. I assure the House that we will set out our conclusions later this year.

Before I turn to the Lords amendments to part 3 of the Bill, I point out to hon. Members that over the last couple of years, with regard to public order, we have all seen that the police have struggled with some of the demonstrations that we have seen on our streets. Last autumn, Insulate Britain’s new tactics put a lot of police officers in danger, caused a significant amount of misery to many thousands of people who simply wanted to get to work or to otherwise go about their daily lives, and were difficult to address. Since, we have seen further examples of wholly unacceptable forms of protest. I am afraid that their lordships may regret the day that they voted down the significant number of measures that we had inserted in the Bill.

The House of Lords did, however, recognise that freedom of speech and assembly are qualified rights under the European convention on human rights, and there are times when it is appropriate to restrict those rights to protect the rights of non-protesters. For that reason, we are sympathetic to Lords amendment 143, which would introduce fast-track public space protection orders. The Government have listened to the concerns raised in the other place about the harm caused by disruptive protests outside schools and vaccination centres. We agree in principle with the amendment, and our amendments (a) to (c) in lieu of Lords amendment 143 will have a similar effect but will ensure that provision for expedited PSPOs works with the grain of the existing legislative framework.

[Jim Shannon]

I very much look forward to the tightening of the laws, but I am also conscious that I look for balance. As one who has protested on the streets of Northern Ireland on many occasions—legally—with an important desire to do so, I ask whether the Minister feels that the balance is right in this legislation. In our words, the right to protest should be done in a peaceful manner, not to obstruct anybody.

[Kit Malthouse]

I do indeed believe that the balance is right, but the hon. Gentleman does not have to take my word for it. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire & rescue services was specifically tasked with looking at the balance of legislation and protest. After some examination, it decided that the balance had swung too far in favour of protest and too much away from the rights of others to go about their daily lives.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend knows that I have real concerns about the noisy protest legislation. How often does he expect it to be applied and how many past protests have been subject to something like that kind of police discretion?

[Kit Malthouse]

Obviously, it is hard for me to predict how often these things will be used. I will come on to talk about the noise provision more specifically, but it is worth pointing out that it is not common for conditions to be placed on protest generally. The National Police Chiefs’ Council tells us that in the three months to April ’21, there were 2,500 protests, and conditions were put on them no more than a dozen times. The Metropolitan police has confirmed that in 2019—hon. Members have to remember that in London, a protest takes place pretty much every day, and sometimes several in one day—it put conditions on only 15 times and, in 2020, only six times. Admittedly, 2020 saw a suppressed number of protests because of the pandemic, but this is nevertheless rare, and the police take care in placing such conditions.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

I will make a little bit of progress.

On my previous point about the Lords accepting the need for protection outside schools and vaccination centres, we believe it should not just be people working in those two types of facility who are protected from highly disruptive protests. The Government continue to believe it is essential that the police are able in some circumstances to place conditions on protests to prevent noise causing serious harm or impinging on the rights of others. The vast majority of protests in England and Wales will be unaffected by this legislation. The power may be used only in the most exceptional circumstances where police assess the noise from protests to be unjustifiable and damaging to others. I can assure the House that conditions will, by law, be imposed only where necessary and proportionate, with due consideration to all our freedoms of expression and assembly. The police are already legally bound to assess this balance with the powers they currently have.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Kit Malthouse]

I will come to the hon. Members in a moment.

I am sure that all hon. Members will recall vividly how proceedings in St Margaret’s church were intruded on by protesters’ noise when we were paying our respects to our colleague Sir David Amess. I am not sure we could call that intrusion damaging; if anything, it made us sing all the loudly and filled the church with an air of defiance as we mourned. However, we have to reflect on the fact that developments in amplification mean that noise can be used as a weapon and can cause significant psychological damage. This is why most local authorities have a noise enforcement team with powers to act. We need to recognise that, in a protest situation, noise could be used to make worship, business or residence impossible in particular premises, and our fellow citizens would expect protection from the police in those circumstances.

[Barry Gardiner]

To assure the House that there will be an objective standard rather than a subjective one, can the Minister explain either what decibel level there would have to be or for how long such a noise nuisance would have to continue for enforcing the powers to be reasonable and objective?

[Kit Malthouse]

As the House would expect, we are not prescribing limits in the way the hon. Gentleman is asking for, not least because the varying circumstances with which the police are presented mean that hard and fast rules do not necessary obtain. For example, it could be that one person with an amplifier attempting to drown out—I do not know—pursuit of worship in a particular church, temple or synagogue could be deemed over time to be a nuisance, and therefore be damaging and impinging on the rights of worship of others, whereas a crowd of individuals outside making a similar noise for a shorter time may not. As I have just laid out, I did not regard the noise that intruded on our grief in St Margaret’s as damaging—I would not have thought that that hit the bar—but if someone was outside the hon. Gentleman’s constituency office protesting day in, day out with a large and powerful amplifier, he might quite rightly in those circumstances seek protection from the police or indeed from the local authority. There is a series of these situations that the police are now presented with because of developments in amplification.

[Caroline Lucas]

Would the Minister acknowledge that our public order laws already make it harder to protest than in practically any other democracy, and that the kind of legislation he is bringing in now, as we have just seen, is completely subjective and puts the police in an impossible position? Laws already exist to deal with the so-called problems that he is raising. This is about throwing red meat to his Back Benchers so that he can try to get a bit more popularity, and it stinks.

[Kit Malthouse]

I do not know who is throwing the red meat here, but it is certainly not me. Obviously the hon. Lady has a constituency that will lap up her remarks, no doubt released on social media. In truth, the police have been asking for some time for improvements to the elderly public order legislation. We put the measures through consideration by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, which felt they were proportionate and sensible for us to pursue.

[Joanna Cherry]

The Minister is implying that the police and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services in some way wanted this new noise trigger. Will he accept that I am correct when I say that neither the police, nor Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, requested the noise trigger at all?

[Kit Malthouse]

The inspectorate obviously would not request that because that is not its job, but we certainly asked it to look at the balance that we are trying to present with what I think are relatively modest improvements to public order legislation. Indeed, from memory of the report, it felt we should go further, which we are unable to do because of the structure of the Bill. That means that on the rare occasion where noise is causing other people’s rights to be impinged on, and where worship or business or residence is impossible, we would seek protection.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jesse Norman]

I think it would help me, and it might help others in the Chamber, if the Minister would consider putting in place a review, perhaps a year or two years into the use of this power, if the House chooses to grant it.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am happy to commit to reviewing the offence. I would love to put a time limit on it but, as I said when I outlined the number of times conditions would be met, this measure may be used on only a very small number of occasions. We will have to consider the range of situations in which it is used, and obviously review it as we do with all public order legislation. We take very seriously the fact that protest is a fundamental building block of any liberal democracy, and now more than ever that is writ large. This is an important freedom for us in this country, and I am sure that lots of Members from all side of the House have been on protests of all kinds over the years. We must ensure that legislation moves with the times and reflects changes in technology, and that we give the police the powers they need, albeit in rare and often exceptional circumstances.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Ind)]

The Minister is being generous in accepting interventions. Does he think that, while well intended, the Bill may have the unintended consequence that individuals who think they are within the law in the way they demonstrate, because of the Bill’s subjectivity find themselves unexpectedly criminalised? That for them would be devastating.

[Kit Malthouse]

No, not necessarily—[Laughter.] No, no. As a former Westminster councillor and London Assembly member for central London, who was subjected to dozens of protests of all sizes, shapes and forms, I would encourage all people who are protesting, wherever they are, to engage with the police first and discuss their own safety and the safety of others. In any democracy it is responsible to ensure that people give forewarning of what they are about to do.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

Does the Minister appreciate that many people listening to this debate will be very suspicious of his words? They will see in the proposed regulations and discussions with the police a fundamental desire by him and his Government to shut down, control, and eliminate protest within our society. People have a right to protest, a right to make their voices heard, and a right to dissent. Surely that is fundamental to a democratic society. It is no good praising people in Russia if we close down protest here.

[Kit Malthouse]

Of course we are not closing down protest. The right hon. Gentleman is right that people have a fundamental right to dissent, to protest and to make their views known in the public sphere as they do in the private sphere, but, as the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights have said, the right to protest is not unqualified, and I am afraid that, in the last couple of years, we have seen protestors using tactics that are massively disruptive to other people’s lives. People just wanting to go about their business have been so frustrated that they have been leaping out of their cars and taking things into their own hands. We have seen protestors running on to the fast lane of motorways, causing danger to themselves and motorists, and distracting police officers from stopping people from being stabbed or burgled in all our neighbourhoods. We have a duty to address that, and the role of the House and that of the police is to strike a balance between competing rights. That is what we do, and that is what we are trying to do with these modest measures.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

No. I have given way lots of times. There will be many speakers, and I do not want to use up all the time. We have only got until midnight to get through all of this stuff. I will move on from the noise powers, which, as I say, we think will be used only in exceptional circumstances but must be available given changes in amplification.

Lords amendment 80 would prevent the alignment of the police’s ability to place conditions on public assembly with their existing powers to place conditions on public processions. HMICFRS found that a distinction between processions and assemblies was no longer appropriate. In the light of the practical challenges of safely policing protests, there is an unjustifiable inconsistency in the current law. When does a procession become an assembly and vice versa?

Lords amendments 74 to 79 implement a recommendation to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee to the effect that the term “serious disruption” should be defined in the Bill rather than in regulations. I trust that the amendments have allayed the concerns raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who is not in her place, in our previous debates on the matter.

I am afraid that Lords amendments 81 and 82 arise from a misunderstanding of the effect of the provisions in clause 58, which are designed, in the words of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, to protect the rights of access to the parliamentary estate for those with business there. The changes to the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, which governs prohibited activities in the vicinity of Parliament, will not prevent protests outside Parliament, nor will they prevent the Greater London Authority from authorising assemblies outside Parliament. Clause 58 will simply enable a police officer to direct an individual to cease or not to begin obstructing the passage of a vehicle into or out of the parliamentary estate. That is extremely important for those who are disabled or otherwise need a vehicle to access the estate, either to work here or to exercise their democratic rights. We expect police officers to use their sound judgements to determine when it is appropriate to make use of the power, and I do not see how it can lead to a prohibition of any kind on protests outside Parliament. Lords amendments 81 and 82 are therefore unnecessary.

Lords amendment 88 is a stripped-out version of the Government’s proposal to increase the maximum penalty for those who obstruct the highway. It would limit the increase in the maximum penalties to the obstruction of the strategic road network. Many major roads lie outside the SRN; indeed, some 98% of all roads in England do not form part of it. Were we to limit the increase in the maximum penalty in that way, protestors could continue to cause extensive and wholly disproportionate disruption to commuters and parents dropping their children off at school without facing sentences proportionate to the harm they have caused. Amendment (a) to Lords amendment 88 will ensure that the full extent of our road network is protected with the increase in maximum penalties.

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

I thought I was going to get away with it. Yes, go on.

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

The Minister talks about the cost of demonstrations—those on the road networks in particular—to people’s lives, and he has made statements about the costs of those protests. I tabled a written question asking him what assessment has been made of the cost to the public purse of the prison sentences being given out to Insulate Britain activists. That is a problem, because those sentences are not proportionate to what is happening. Surely there are better ways that are more cost-effective.

[Kit Malthouse]

At the moment, those incarcerations are at the behest of a judge in a civil matter relating to the injunctions, and there is nothing that the Government can necessarily do about that. However, I point out that deterring people from such action may result in cost savings further down the line for the wider population. I urge Opposition Members, and anybody looking at this issue, to ask themselves whether they believe that protests should not be restrained in any way, shape or form, or that there is a balance to be struck. If they believe, as the ECHR does, and as the House of Lords has accepted in some of its amendments to the Bill, that a balance should be struck, the only question is where.

Our view, which is backed up by evidence from HMI and elsewhere, is that the balance has swung too far away from the general public, who want to go about their lives, recognising the very many important issues that are raised by protest. While they acknowledge those problems, they want to get on with their lives, and they want protection from the state of their right to get to school, to hospital and to work. That is not a right to be taken lightly. One of the most frustrating things about some of these protests has been their self-defeating result. Notwithstanding the cause, important or otherwise, the protestors have turned off millions of their fellow citizens and caused a level of intolerance towards issues such as climate change, which is regrettable. We have a job to balance those rights, and that is what we are attempting to do.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister seeks to take public opinion as a whole, but people have had to take these matters into their own hands because air quality is killing their children, and because of the Government’s inaction on the very simple act of insulating housing. The proportionality is in the wrong place, and he is seeking to take on public opinion where it does not exist. If the Government took the right actions, surely there would be no need for the protests in the first place. People should be allowed to protest proportionately.

[Kit Malthouse]

We cannot operate a democracy on the basis that, unless the Government agree with everything that someone wants, they will protest. It is a crazy thing to say, I am afraid. Much progress in this country has been brought about by protest, but much more has been brought about by political campaigning and winning elections. Frankly, if someone wants to make a change in the country, as all Opposition Members are proving, that is the way to go about it. I hope that the House will appreciate that we are trying hard to strike a balance between competing rights.

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

No, I have given away enough; I have to move on. We acknowledge the fundamental importance of the right to protest in this country. We live in a liberal democracy. The right of someone to dissent and to go out on the street and make their views known is critical, but so is my right to get to hospital, to work or to church, and to do so without somebody blasting me out with noise. We have been balancing competing rights for decades, if not centuries, in this country. We are a mature democracy that can cope with that kind of responsibility—have no fear. We are ringed around by independent courts, a bicameral Parliament, all sorts of checks and balances on the power of Government to strike this balance, legislation, and our participation in supranational treaties. There are lots of ways that we protect ourselves and our human rights, but in the end, fundamentally, all democratic Governments have to strike that balance, and that is what we are attempting to do.

Lords amendments 118 to 120 give effect to a commitment made by the Prime Minister following the final of Euro 2020, in response to disgraceful online racist abuse directed at certain England players. The amendments would enable a court to impose a football banning order against persons convicted of online hate offences connected to football. That will prevent such offenders from spreading their criminal, hateful views at football matches, and I very much hope that the measure will also deter others from engaging in similar behaviours that are so harmful to victims and to our national game.

Lords amendments 89 and 146 would repeal the Vagrancy Act 1824. The Government are committed to ending rough sleeping, and as a result of our actions we have seen an historic reduction in rough sleeping in recent years. We agree that no one should be criminalised simply for sleeping rough, and that the time has indeed come to repeal the antiquated Vagrancy Act 1824. I know that that sentiment is keenly shared by a number of hon. Members. I pay tribute to the campaign that has been run by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken), my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and my predecessor in my constituency of North West Hampshire, Lord Young, in the other place.

However, we must balance our role in providing essential support for the vulnerable with ensuring that we do not weaken the ability of the police to intervene where needed. Therefore, while our amendments in lieu will provide for the Vagrancy Act to be repealed in full in England and Wales, we intend to enact replacement legislation in the coming Session before bringing the repeal of the 1824 Act into force. To allow for that, and ultimately to ensure that the police have the tools they need, we will delay commencement of the repeal for up to 18 months. In the meantime, we will publish a bold new strategy to end rough sleeping. The strategy will set up how we will ensure that rough sleeping is prevented in the first instance and is effectively responded to in the rare cases where it does occur, and that our police have the ability to intervene where needed and keep everybody safe, including the person at issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Allan Dorans (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (SNP)]

I wish to speak in support of Lords amendments 73 and 80, which would remove the ability of the police to impose noise-based restrictions on processions and greater conditions on static demonstrations. Peaceful protest is a legitimate and integral part of our unwritten constitution and for the Government to interfere with those rights and to try to impose restrictions and unnecessary conditions that affect and violate basic human rights is nothing less than appalling.

If Lords amendments 73 and 80 are not accepted, there are great concerns that police officers will be placed in the unenviable position of having to adjudicate between different stakeholders on the basis of broad and ambiguous criteria about whether to allow a “noisy” or “disruptive” protest to take place or continue. Far from enabling the police to maintain public order, these provisions will place an onerous burden on police officers in the exercise of their professional discretion, subjecting the police to even greater political pressure.

The police already have sufficient powers under the Public Order Act 1986. The additional powers in clauses 55 and 56 of the Bill are neither necessary nor welcomed by many senior police officers. As a uniformed police inspector in the Metropolitan police, I had extensive experience of dealing with public order and with processions and demonstrations of all sizes, and I can say honestly that none of them needed any further legislation; they could all be effectively dealt with by the current legislation.

There are serious concerns that the police, who serve a vital function in enforcing the law, are being instrumentalised for political purposes. That will erode the trust of the public, seriously damage the relationship between the police and the public, and adversely affect the cherished tradition of policing by consent that is at the heart of policing and our society.

Despite the disparaging remarks made by the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle), I pay tribute to the police officers out there policing our streets, who are overwhelmingly honest, trustworthy and hardworking. I commend them for putting themselves at risk and in danger to keep us all safe.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to all hon. Members who have spoken in what at times has been an impassioned debate. I have to say that it has been quite a rich experience to hear a defence of democracy from an Opposition whom I watched for month after month using every technical device at their disposal to try to overturn the democratic decision that the British people took in the 2016 referendum. Those months, happily, are long behind us, and the British people gave their verdict on that attempt to circumvent democracy in the 2019 general election, from which I am happy to say we all benefited.

Much of tonight’s debate has been about the difficult job for any democratic Government of balancing the rights of competing groups: the rights of people who own land, and of those who use land; the rights of public authorities that have parks, and of the Travelling community; the rights of those who want to go about their business and access hospitals, schools or businesses, and of those who wish to protest. These are difficult balances that democratic Governments have to strike from time to time. The Labour party has had to do it in the past; I well remember it banning any protest within 1 km of Parliament. The first arrest was of a woman reading the names of the Iraq war dead at the Cenotaph, if I remember rightly. That, I will admit, was a step too far.

We believe that the package of measures that we have put forward on protest represents a modest rebalancing.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Kit Malthouse]

I am not giving way. It is a modest rebalancing of the rights of the majority of British people who want to go about their business and the rights of those who quite legitimately want to protest. We yield to no man or woman in our desire to protect those inalienable rights of protest and dissent in this country. Our party has been in the position of protesting and dissenting in the past, as have many parties represented in this House. We do not take it for granted; we wish to protect it, and we believe that we are doing so while striking a balance.

On the undertaking that I was asked to give about the Vagrancy Act, let me say that 18 months is a maximum. If we can act faster, we will, but intensive work will obviously be required to get us there.

I believe that the Bill in its entirety represents a solid step forward, both for the safety of the country and for the difficult job of balancing our competing rights in what is now and will always be a liberal democracy.

Lords amendment 71 disagreed to.

Government amendment (a) made to Lords amendment 74.

Lords amendment 74, as amended, agreed to.

Government amendment (a) made to Lords amendment 88.

Lords amendment 88, as amended, agreed to.

More than six hours having elapsed since the commencement of proceedings on consideration of Lords amendments, the proceedings were interrupted (Programme Order, this day).

The Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded at that time (Standing Order No. 83F).

Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 73.—(Kit Malthouse.)

Lords amendment 73 disagreed to.

Murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Allan Dorans) on securing this debate and recognise his indefatigable efforts to secure justice for PC Fletcher and her colleagues, friends and family. I thank him for the advance indication of his questions, which I will come to in a moment, and join him in celebrating the dedication and perseverance of PC Fletcher’s friend and colleague, John Murray—most recently, for bringing the case to the civil court, as well as for his continuous efforts ever since PC Fletcher’s death. They are testament to the high regard in which PC Fletcher continues to be held to this day. I also pay tribute to the hard work and commitment that the Metropolitan police has shown over a prolonged period in its efforts to bring to justice those involved in the murder of PC Fletcher. Her death was an appalling tragedy and my thoughts remain with all who loved her.

The murder of PC Fletcher was one of the most notorious crimes of the past 40 years, representing an act of state-sponsored terrorism that resulted in the fatal wounding of a serving police officer on the streets of London. The hon. Member shared in great detail the findings of the civil case of 16 November 2021, which found that Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk was jointly liable for the killing of PC Yvonne Fletcher.

Following the conclusion of that case, many, including the hon. Member, have been lobbying for a criminal case to be brought against Mabrouk. In 2017, the Crown Prosecution Service made the decision not to pursue a prosecution in this case, and I understand that that decision was disappointing and frustrating for PC Fletcher’s family, friends and colleagues. It remains, however, an operational matter for the Metropolitan police and the Crown Prosecution Service to consider any criminal prosecution.

It is important to note the differences in making a finding on liability in a civil court as opposed to in a criminal court. A civil court is required to make its findings on the balance of probabilities. That means that a court is satisfied, on the evidence available, that the occurrence of the event was more likely than not. A higher threshold is imposed in criminal cases, which requires an allegation to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. That means that the jury must be sure that the person is guilty. It is therefore not by any means automatic that Mr Murray’s success in the High Court would or could translate into a successful criminal prosecution.

[Sir Mike Penning]

The Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police can make such a decision only if they have the evidence that the Government have, which they have not handed over to the CPS. Will the Minister answer the question about whether or not the information that the Government have will be passed over to the CPS so that it can make that decision?

[Kit Malthouse]

I will come to that point in a moment, if I may.

Following the Prime Minister’s meeting with the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock in September 2020, the Home Office contacted the CPS in December of that year to ask whether it had received any more information on the case; it had not. The position remains the same as in 2017, which is that the CPS is not currently considering charges in the case. As with any case referred to the CPS by the police, a decision to prosecute is made in accordance with the code for Crown prosecutors, and a case must meet the evidential and public interest stages of the code test. In accordance with the code, the CPS will consider any new information referred to it by the police in relation to the case.

On the hon. Member’s question about evidence being withheld, it has been the long-standing policy of successive Governments not to comment on the existence or otherwise of intelligence material. I am therefore unable to confirm or deny the existence of any material that may or may not relate to the case.

The hon. Member asked for confirmation of whether the Government issued a comfort letter to Saleh Mabrouk. We are not aware of any evidence to suggest that any such letter ever existed or was ever issued.

In response to the hon. Member’s question regarding the extradition of Mr Mabrouk, the House should know that whether an extradition application is sought in any case is an operational decision for law enforcement and prosecution agencies. The UK Government, as a matter of long-standing policy and practice, will neither confirm nor deny that an extradition request has been made or received until such time as an arrest has been made in relation to the request.

On the question of a public inquiry, I am aware of the strong feeling in this case and of the early-day motion that the hon. Member tabled calling for such an inquiry. While of course we recognise the strength of feeling that the case evokes, the Government are not currently considering an inquiry into the death of PC Fletcher.

In closing, I would like to state once more that my thoughts are with PC Fletcher’s family, friends and colleagues. They continue to have my deepest sympathy. I, like many, have often stopped at the memorial stone in St James’s Square to consider a moment in our history that had a huge impact on many of us who were around at the time. I would also like to recognise and pay tribute again to the efforts of John Murray and the courage and resilience that he has shown in seeking justice for PC Fletcher. Finally, I thank the hon. Member for securing this debate. The murder of PC Fletcher was a heinous act that shocked our country to its core, and she will never be forgotten.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Indeed: she will never be forgotten.

Question put and agreed to.