Criminal Justice Bill (Second sitting)

Laura Farris Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Norris]

Q76 May I come back to the point on the minimum age for community protection notices? When responding to the Government’s antisocial behaviour action plan, you talked about how we need to think about children as victims of antisocial behaviour—I think your phrase was “silent victims”. Could you briefly talk us through that?

Rebecca Bryant: Yes. I would like to bust a few myths, if that is possible while giving evidence. There is a perception in the media and the community that young people are the main perpetrators of antisocial behaviour when, in fact, they are not: the vast majority of antisocial behaviour is perpetrated by adults.

In focusing on young people, we should be thinking about how they are impacted by antisocial behaviour. They are often victims. You will have seen terrible films on TikTok and social media outlets of fights, violence and aggression. That means that those young people are victims rather than perpetrators as a whole. We certainly need to recognise that if we can get in early and use the early intervention and prevention tools available to us to stop the antisocial behaviour or stop those young people becoming antisocial, we will be able to reduce antisocial behaviour as a whole.

Antisocial behaviour is often a precursor to more serious crime, so if we can use our opportunity—I call it a “golden moment”—to intervene with a young person, perhaps with an alternative trusted adult from outside the home, and work with them to understand the impact of the behaviour that they may be perpetrating, that in itself does not fall into the idea that we should be reducing the CPN to the age of 10.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Laura Farris)]

Q Mr Redgrave, may I ask you a bit about some of the section 16 provisions about drug testing? You may be familiar with the ambition to give greater powers to test for controlled substances—class B and class C drugs—with a view to directing the person into appropriate treatment at an earlier stage; the idea is that that will intercept more serious offending further down the line. You have written something about this, for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, I think—or, at least, the Institute has done so. Can you comment on the provision, and what is your view of a wider form of testing in police stations?

Harvey Redgrave: I am in favour of this measure. I think it was used relatively effectively under the last Labour Government in relation to prolific offenders. [Interruption.] Sorry, do I need to speak a bit louder?

[The Chair]

Please try to speak up a bit.

Harvey Redgrave: I am in favour of the measure. It is right to test more offenders, particularly prolific offenders, many of whom are driven by addiction. The more we can divert offenders into treatment to address their offending behaviour, the better. I think there needs to be a broader look at how we deal with prolific offenders who recycle around the system sometimes tens or hundreds of times before they stop their offending. There used to be something called the prolific and other priority offenders programme, which was disbanded along with the whole infrastructure around it.

There is a need to place this drug-testing measure within a broader set of interventions that look at how we grip prolific offenders, how judges are able to defer sentencing, and how offenders are able to be rehabilitated and dealt with much earlier on rather than them serving short sentences, coming out, reoffending and going back in at great expense to the taxpayer.

[Laura Farris]

Q I think that some of that is in the Sentencing Bill, which is running in tandem with this legislation.

The other question I wanted to ask is about Crest Advisory’s role in Baroness Casey’s review—again, if you were not personally involved in that, you can correct me. I think Crest Advisory played some role in supporting her review into the misconduct issues in the Met police, and there are two provisions in this Bill that at least partially respond to that. I would like to look at clause 73, which is on ethical policing and the duty of candour. In the light of your work with Baroness Casey, do you think it is important, and if so why? What does it answer in relation to her findings about failings in the Metropolitan police?

Harvey Redgrave: To clarify, some of my team at Crest Advisory were seconded in to support Baroness Casey on her review, but obviously she led the review and wrote it herself. It is really important that we look at the ethics and systems around misconduct within policing. There is a crisis of public confidence in policing at the moment, particularly among women. The Commissioner of the Met has spoken repeatedly about wanting to have more say and control over getting rid of officers when there are cases of misconduct, and I think the Government have acted on some of that.

I support the measure, but I would argue that there is a case for going even further and looking at the whole system around vetting and how that takes place within policing, and the system of who really upholds the professional standards within policing. Which body do we hold responsible—the College of Policing, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, or the Home Office? It feels to me like there is a slight lack of clarity at the moment about where the buck stops on some of this at a national level, with each force able to adopt slightly different practices.

[Laura Farris]

Q Do you think it is helpful then that the duty of candour, and what is required underneath it, will be set by the College of Policing? Do you think that will help ensure consistency?

Harvey Redgrave: I think that it is helpful and is a welcome step, but I am not sure that, in isolation, it will be enough to bring about the kind of culture change that Baroness Casey believes is necessary, within not just the Met but policing as a whole.

[Laura Farris]

Q My final question on this topic is about the other highly irregular employment-law-type power in the Bill: the right conferred on a chief constable to appeal against a disciplinary outcome for one of their subordinates. I think we can put that in plain English: if they do not like an acquittal, essentially, they can submit an appeal. Do you think that is an appropriate power for a chief constable to hold? I think Baroness Casey dealt with that; I recall reading about senior officers who were unhappy about the fact that they suspected problematic people were still part of the team.

Harvey Redgrave: It comes back to the question of whether the chief constable should have more discretion over being able to hire and fire people, and to be able to get rid of people they are unhappy with. We have created systems and processes over the last 20 or 30 years that have taken some of that discretion away. It is a balance, and we need proper professional standards to be upheld by the College of Policing. In general, I think it a good thing for there to be greater discretion for chief constables to be able to act when they believe there is misconduct within their force.

[Laura Farris]

Q Okay, that is helpful. My final line of questioning is about one of the issues that has been debated in Parliament, not just in relation to this Bill but previously too. It was about having a stand-alone offence of assaulting a retail worker. I do not know whether you are familiar with the contours of that debate.

We heard from the Crown Prosecution Service this morning, and it said that it did not think such an offence was necessary because the mechanics of an assault charge apply anyway—obviously, with actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm, if that should arise. There is also a statutory aggravating factor for assaulting a retail worker. Do you have a view on this? If you do, could you set out what it is and why?

Harvey Redgrave: Shoplifting is a real concern and we need some deterrents in the system, but I am not sure that we get those deterrents through harsher sentencing. A bigger problem is whether we are catching offenders, charging them, and convicting them. All the evidence shows that for this type of offending, it is swiftness and certainty that deter rather than severity. Not many shoplifters are thinking about aggravating factors or how long they are going to spend in prison.

[Laura Farris]

Q Just to be clear, is your view basically that the police response needs to be more uniform, rather than we need a distinct offence?

Harvey Redgrave: In general, the Bill probably focuses too much on sentence lengths and not enough on what is happening at the front end, around the police’s ability to catch, detain and bring offenders to justice. That is where I think the real gap is.

[Laura Farris]

Okay. That is all from me.

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

Q I would like to ask Rebecca Bryant some further questions about the antisocial behaviour and nuisance begging and rough sleeping measures.

Rebecca, thank you for joining us this afternoon. In response to the shadow Minister, you raised questions about reducing the minimum age for community protection notices from 16 to 10, which is enclosed within clause 67 of the Bill. Do you agree that bringing 10 to 15-year-olds into the scope of CPNs provides an opportunity to halt a path into criminality that might otherwise occur? Combined with that, there is an opportunity to make other interventions to try to prevent the young person from getting into crime.

Rebecca Bryant: It is using a hammer to crack a nut. For 10 and 11-year-olds in particular who are on the cusp of causing antisocial behaviour, there are many other tools available to partners. I am not necessarily thinking about fining parents, because a lot of the young people who are involved in antisocial behaviour come from more deprived backgrounds, and breaching and fining is not going to enable change.

What we are looking for is a change of behaviour in the longer term. Yes, we are looking to prevent in the first instance, but then we look for change. Being able to engage with a young person and their parents by putting in positive mentoring and other youth interventions would surely have longer term success than a community protection notice would have. Also, there is a community protection warning before a notice; that kind of warning and discussion between a parent, a child and the authorities, which could be the housing provider, the local authority or the police, has much more impact when you are offering a positive intervention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Garnier]

That is really helpful. Thank you very much.

[Laura Farris]

Q I just want to pick up on one point about the suspension issue that Jess Phillips, who is no longer in her place, was raising with you, because I did not totally understand your answer. What is the threshold for the suspension of a police officer?

Andy Marsh: To explain the process, when a complaint is raised, internally and externally, the chief constable will have a delegated appropriate authority, which tends to be the deputy chief constable. They will have a pretty much weekly meeting, but sometimes it is a real-time daily meeting if something crops up that they need to consider.

The first thing that would happen is that a complaint would reach a threshold of gross misconduct or, indeed, criminal. Once it has reached that threshold, the deputy chief constable—the delegated appropriate authority—needs to make a decision about what should happen to that person. Should they be suspended? Can they continue with their duties? Should they engage in some degree of protected-type duty? What I can say, from my experience of working with police forces across England and Wales, is that the threshold and the tolerance before suspension has dropped substantially.

[Laura Farris]

Q That does engage quite a significant issue because it is so different from what would happen in the ordinary workplace. Under the Employment Rights Act 1996, let us say an allegation of serious sexual harassment—maybe not a criminal offence, but misconduct—was advanced. The employer has a duty in law to sort of establish the basic facts. In the example you gave, if both the complainant said, “That never happened,” and everybody said it was not true, it would not meet the threshold. But if it does meet a threshold where there is, as I think Jess put it, a case to answer, in any normal workplace that would ordinarily result in suspension on full pay, pending a disciplinary process, at which the member of staff may end up exonerating themselves. But this system seems quite nebulous.

Andy Marsh: No, I am not expressing it clearly, because if it would appear to be a substantial complaint—a complaint which would undermine the trust and confidence of the public should that officer remain serving—then they should be suspended. Actually, I can reassure you, in all the cases that I am aware of and that I look at where there are allegations of violence against women and girls, I see a very low threshold for suspension, so if I have misled you at all, I am sorry.

[Laura Farris]

Q But what if it was just sexual harassment?

Andy Marsh: Then they are very likely to be suspended, and I am really happy to write to the Committee and share the guidance and information—

[Laura Farris]

Q I am not putting you on the spot; I am just trying to establish where the threshold sits.

Andy Marsh: It is very low. If I was accused of any form of domestic abuse, verbal or physical, or coercive control, I can guarantee you that I would be suspended.

[Laura Farris]

Okay, thank you.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q I want to take you back to the shop workers issue. Minister Philp, in his comments, clearly demonstrated that the Government are a bit shy of having a specific charge related to assaults on shop workers. For the record, can you tell us why shoplifting and related crime does not get the attention it requires and that the public, shop workers and the USDAW would like it to have?

Andy Marsh: In explaining this, I am in no way seeking to justify a lack of attention, but when a call is made to a police control room, they will triage it and they will use something called a threat, harm and risk matrix. If the offender has left the scene and no one is at immediate risk, that is unlikely to secure an immediate deployment. There is more likely to be a follow-up investigation. The retail crime action plan and guidance on our website, and all the focus on the use of images and facial recognition and on persistent offenders, is bringing a much sharper focus to an area of standards and police response that has slipped to an unacceptably low level.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

Q That is very helpful. This is my final point. Clauses 11 and 12 address the offence of encouraging and assisting serious self-harm, and of course there are plenty of victims in that sort of category. Are those clauses fit for purpose or could they be improved?

Dame Vera Baird: I think they probably need to be strengthened quite a lot. I do not think there is anything in there that could criminalise somebody who provided a means for doing it as opposed to encouraging it. So if someone provides—I do not know—a knife or some drugs, I am not sure there is provision for that, and I think that is a big miss. This is a really worrying area and we need to legislate, and that is one of the good things in the Bill.

[Laura Farris]

Q I just wanted to clarify something. A statutory instrument is going through the Lords today on coercive control as both an aggravating factor and a mitigating factor, to deal with exactly the point that Clare Wade was driving at. Some of what we have done in relation to Clare Wade is not in this Bill. This is not the entirety of our implementation of the Clare Wade review, and I just wanted to provide that reassurance. Not all of that requires primary legislation.

In that context, coercive control is making its way through in different forms. I have a narrow question about what you thought about the use of MAPPA—multi-agency public protection arrangements—in relation to the management of a serious coercive control offence.

Dame Vera Baird: I think it is good to state that formally. I am sure that it happens now quite a lot.

[Laura Farris]

Q What difference do you think it will make when that person is out of custody?

Dame Vera Baird: It is a strict regime and it is very carefully managed. The probation service is aware of the high level of risk. It is definitely beneficial for dangerous offenders, and the probation service has recognised domestic abusers. Even when they have not committed domestic abuse offences, it still recognised them as presenting that danger, if they are already in MAPPA. I am sure that the most coercively controlling offenders already go into MAPPA. It is not a closed box that you can only fight your way into through these five categories of offending. It is much wider than that, but let’s do it—fine.

[Laura Farris]

Q In relation to that, just because it is not possible to look at domestic abuse without being a bit more holistic, how do you think domestic abuse protection orders, when they begin the pilot scheme in the spring, will interact with MAPPA management?

Dame Vera Baird: That is a very interesting question, but they are better and they have positive bits to them, don’t they?

[Laura Farris]

A DAPO does allow GPS monitoring, for example.

Dame Vera Baird: That is an improvement on the current model. There will have to be close working between those who apply for the DAPOs and those who are running MAPPA to make sure that there is no overlap or missing bits and so forth. This cross-boundary working is going to be particularly important with that. But they are both good steps. I do think MAPPA is slightly redundant, but let us do it, and the DAPOs and those positive requirements are definitely a big step forward. What you said about the statutory instrument is really interesting—

[Laura Farris]

Lord Bellamy, today in the Lords—

Dame Vera Baird: Yes, that is really good to hear, but these are going into statute. Why is the protection for women only going into a statutory instrument, which frankly fewer people will ever get to know about? Why is it being done in that way? Why is it not in here with these?

[Laura Farris]

I will have to revert to the Committee on the answer to that, because I actually do not know.

Dame Vera Baird: Anyway, I am not supposed to ask you questions—[Laughter.]

[Laura Farris]

Q No, that is fine. Just going back a bit, I am interested, as you can tell, in the combination of the MAPPA management and the DAPO scheme; we are at the brink of its inception. If you took together a wider application of DAPOs and then the MAPPA arrangements that are going to be formalised in this legislation for serious coercive control, do you think that creates a better blanket of public protection in relation to this nature of offence?

Dame Vera Baird: I think it is bound to, yes. I have felt since their inception that DAPOs, because of those positive requirements, were likelier to be more effective than just the negative nature of whatever they were called—I forget what they are called currently.

MAPPA is an effective mechanism. You raise very interesting questions about how they will interact, and I just think it is about cross-working, really, between police and probation in particular. They have to work in IOM anyway, so they must have ways of working together that ought to be reasonably effective. But I hope that you will, as it were, as a Government draw to their attention the need for an understanding of how those mechanisms will work together, because that would be an important way to point out that it needs to be done effectively.

[Laura Farris]

Thank you. That is all I had.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

Q So it may even be challengeable under the law at some future stage. I am looking forward to our line-by-line discussions in Committee, after the evidence that you have just given. Finally, do we need to add any new measures to better manage terrorist offenders on release?

Jonathan Hall: No, I do not think so at the moment. I am in constant contact with counter-terrorism police and the Home Office. I am not aware that the Government are looking for yet further types of measure; if they were, I think they would have sought to bring them in within this Criminal Justice Bill. All that this particular measure does is allow an existing measure, polygraphs, to be applied to a wider range of people. My beef with that is that it allows it to be applied to people who have never been convicted of terrorism, without it going in front of a judge. So I think that the answer is no.

[Laura Farris]

Q You have made some very important points about cohort and how that is determined, and obviously the risk of a borderline case—or a case where, in fact, a judge may not have found a terrorism offence—being brought into scope. More widely, what is your view on the efficacy of polygraph testing? How useful a tool is it in the detection of risk?

Jonathan Hall: I was in favour of polygraph measures after Fishmongers’ Hall. It was partly on the back of one of my recommendations that polygraph measures were brought in. They always, or at least for a long time, existed for sex offenders. You will recall Usman Khan, who was clearly a very deceptive man. My view was that polygraph measures could be useful.

[Laura Farris]

Q Can I just stop you there? That intimates that you are suggesting them as a sort of risk assessment tool. How would that have worked as a matter of practice? What flows from this provision that would prevent another Fishmongers’ Hall?

Jonathan Hall: Let us say that someone is in the community. They could be asked about their daily routine. The most likely outcome is that someone who is subject to a polygraph measure would feel that they have to tell the truth, and the evidence is that people who are subject to polygraphs make admissions. You could say, “Are you in touch with the well-known terrorist Jonathan Hall?”, and the effect of polygraphs tends to be that people go, “Actually, I am,” because they are worried about giving it away through the polygraph measure. That would give counter-terrorism police an amazing source of information to show that, contrary to what that person had been telling his probation officer, he was still in touch with the dangerous terrorist Jonathan Hall. That would allow new licence conditions, for example: if Jonathan Hall lived in a certain part of Birmingham, a licence condition could be imposed that prevented that person from going there.

[Laura Farris]

Q I see. So they accurately temper behaviour, not only in the way the individual responds to the fact of polygraph testing, but in terms of what the police glean from questions that may not go directly to the nature of the offending?

Jonathan Hall: Yes. You are completely right. This is not about extracting evidence that can be used in a criminal trial; it is about extracting information that is relevant to the management of offenders. If you think about a released terrorist offender who is now serving their sentence in the community, what you want to know is what their pattern of life is, who they are meeting, where they are going and what their objectives are. Are they visiting shops that sell knives, for example? Usman Khan must have gone to a shop to buy knives and tape to create the weapons used to kill two people. There are lots of factual matters that they can be asked about.

One of the benefits of the polygraph, I suppose, is that ultimately it is not covert. While MI5 and the police may have covert monitoring, it would be quite hard for them to put that information to the suspect. If the suspect has made an admission—“Yes, I am going to meet Jonathan Hall, the well-known terrorist,” or “Yes, I am going to visit knife shops”—that can be put to the offender, and you can work on rehabilitating the offender.

[Laura Farris]

That is very helpful. Thank you.

[The Chair]

As there are no further questions, I would like to thank the witness for giving evidence.