Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Sheehan

Monday 1st February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to lend support to the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, and to my noble friend Lord Paddick, in opposing the Questions that Clauses 17 and 18 stand part of the Bill. The two clauses extend stop, search and seizure powers—powers that have a long history of being acknowledged as contributing to racial disharmony and breakdown in community cohesion. In 1981, Lord Scarman, in his reports on the Brixton riots, concluded that mass use of stop and searches were a direct cause of the riots.

As recently as 2014, announcing reforms to stop and search under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, said that,

“when innocent people are stopped and searched for no good reason, it is hugely damaging to the relationship between the police and the public. In those circumstances it is an unacceptable affront to justice”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/4/14; col. 831]

BME people in Britain today suffer such affronts to justice usually with a certain amount of stoicism. However, this Bill seeks to expand powers of stop, search and seizure. It is inevitable—and I would go as far as to say it is the Government’s intent—that the number of stop and searches of those from visible ethnic minorities would increase under the powers contained in this Bill.

There is a great deal of documented evidence that current car stops are disproportionately targeted at those from BME backgrounds. I refer to the survey carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, already cited by my noble friend Lord Paddick and the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence. Rather than going over the figures again, I draw attention to the sample size of the survey—more than 10,000—and contrast that with the evaluation of the pilot carried out in the West Midlands, on which the Government are basing their evidence for rolling it out nationally which has happened today.

The Race Equality Foundation expresses concern that the Government have produced no policy equality statement on these stop, search and seizure provisions, and I share that concern. I hope that the Minister will address that. Such respected bodies as Liberty and the National Black Police Association have expressed deep concerns about the potential of Clauses 17 and 18 to foster distrust and disharmony between the police and the public. Both organisations express regret that the good work of the Home Secretary to date to undo some of the harm associated with previous inappropriate use of stop and search will be undermined by the proposals under Clauses 17 and 18.

It seems that a great deal of power already resides with the Home Office to revoke the licences of illegal immigrants, without resort to a measure that would exacerbate the situation and damage the public’s relationship with the police, who, as the NBPA rightly says, would become the “whipping boy” for immigration officers.

If the Government wish to tighten these measures further, perhaps they would be better to consider tightening the issuance and monitoring of licences by the DVLA, and extending the same responsibilities and duties to that body as they are seeking to deliver to private landlords.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I hope the Minister will listen, as I know he usually would, to the contributions that have been made on all sides of your Lordships’ House, but especially to those of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence.

As those contributions were being made, my mind went back to those riots in 1981, of course not just in Brixton but in Toxteth in Liverpool. I had been a young Member of Parliament for about 18 months. In the weeks before the riots occurred, I had raised on the Floor of the House in another place the dangerous relationship that had been deteriorating between police and public in that part of Liverpool. Sir Kenneth Oxford was then the chief constable on Merseyside and he took a very provocative view towards the black community in that neighbourhood. I was not entirely surprised when, on a hot summer’s night in 1981, I was asked to come urgently to Upper Parliament Street, where two and a half days of rioting began, in which 1,000 policemen ended up in the local hospital. I dread to think what would have happened if guns had been so readily and easily available on the streets then as they often are now.

As a result of those riots, I visited the home of the young man who had been involved at the very outset, Leroy Cooper, who was a constituent of mine. I sat with him and his father as they described to me how the trigger had taken place on the street in Lodge Lane in Liverpool as an overzealous policeman confronted this young man. It was a traffic incident, which plays exactly into the amendments before your Lordships’ House today—not a car but a motorcycle—and, as a consequence of the anger that had been building up for some time, it erupted and riots occurred which had a devastating effect.

The overuse of stop and search powers at that time, which had been part of the incident, was set aside in the months and years that followed and a much different form of policing emerged. Bernard Hogan-Howe, who became the assistant chief constable on Merseyside, played a leading part in the introduction of strong community policing, having learned the lessons of what had gone before. It would be a tragedy if we were now to turn the clock back. I hope therefore that the Minister will think very carefully about and look at the terms of this very good amendment, Amendment 160, which says that,

“the authorised officer has reasonable grounds to believe the power should be exercised urgently”.

It does not take away the powers. As the right reverend Prelate said, those powers already exist in plenty of statute if there is a need to intervene. But something that could be used and seen as a deliberate attack on one part of our community will do nothing to enhance community relations. It will not foster good policing in our cities and could actually have a deleterious effect.

For all those reasons, I hope that the Minister will think very carefully about the arguments that have been deployed today. If he cannot agree today, I hope he will at least hold meetings with Members of your Lordships’ House between now and Report to see whether this could be modified.