Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Crickhowell Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Marlesford on his amendment, but I wish also to make a small criticism of it—that it is lacking in focus. While it deals with the issues of litter very effectively, it does not go far enough in addressing the issues of offensive behaviour in cars and other moving vehicles, which is increasingly prevalent among young people.

I cite the example of recent Saturdays, when we have had the rugby at Twickenham. I have made endless attempts to convince my wife that rugby is a respectable pastime and not the equivalent of being found in bed with a supermodel on a Saturday afternoon, as she has often thought—although, given the way in which England have played recently, it is a good alternative. However, I persuaded my wife to come to Twickenham with me on each of the last three Saturdays and she was totally horrified at the sight of the school buses coming down the road full of children indulging in a pastime which is, I believe, called mooning. I am not going to explain it to your Lordships because we are in mixed company, but the sight of some 40 children mooning simultaneously is not a pretty one. My wife is a youth justice officer and as she watched the police motorbikes zooming past these kids, giving them a friendly wave, she said: “We have a law against this sort of thing. Why are they not being brought into court? I would put them away for a year if I got them.”

There is an omission in the amendment tabled by my noble friend in that it does not deal adequately with the bad behaviour that can come out of vehicles and interfere with others. That was one example, but there was another this week of which your Lordships should be aware. In its wisdom, the Times—I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, is not here to take down this message—is pursuing, to a ludicrous degree, the cause of cyclists to the point where they are creating a new and separate society in London, in which cyclists think they have a superior law and control over everybody in a motor car. This is going to lead to some catastrophic accidents very soon. On three mornings, driving up the A3 in the Balham and Clapham area, I have seen cyclists put their cycles up against the central reservation—not the line where the bus lane is—stand in the middle of the road with a camera and defy you to run them down while they photograph you doing it. That is what they are longing for. We need to have that sort of behaviour excluded because it is going to lead to their demise and our prosecution: it is ridiculous. I support the amendment, but it needs to go a little further.

[Lord Crickhowell (Con)]

My Lords, one step at a time. I am going to let my noble friend’s suggested change to the amendment pass by for the time being. However, I have a great deal of sympathy for both these amendments. I will concentrate on my noble friend Lord Marlesford’s amendment. I have now moved from my home in a national park, but I have always been horrified by the casual way that, in one of the most beautiful valleys in the countryside, people throw drink containers out of the windows of their cars as if that was a normal and natural thing to do. I am almost equally horrified—frustrated, indeed—by the attitude described by my noble friend as coming from Defra. I am not entirely surprised that it comes from officials: I am horrified that it has come in the form of letters from my noble friends who I have always regarded as thoroughly practical, sensible and wise people. I hope that my noble friend Lord Taylor will show that I am right in that respect when he responds to this debate.

The condition of our roadsides is really appalling. It is a very long time since I served in Lady Thatcher’s Government, but I well remember her returning from an overseas trip and expressing horror and consternation at the state of the road from Heathrow to London given the litter that was there, compared to the roadsides she had observed in the places she had been visiting. This was, I am afraid, one of the occasions when she did not do anything and here we are, 30 or more years later, and nothing effective has been done.

My noble friend described the comments from a Minister about the strength of the legal system and how, if you have a tough law and all the awful penalties he described, people were likely to take notice of it. I have to tell him that it is not only the hooligans and the ignorant who ignore the law. I well remember, when I was still a Member of Parliament for Pembroke, the president of my association—who had himself fought three parliamentary elections and was a distinguished local magistrate—telling me of driving back over the Preseli Hills from a magistrates’ meeting in Haverfordwest. He was horrified because someone in the car in front of him was throwing papers out of the window every few hundred yards. After he had driven for 10 or 20 miles and the confetti had been scattered along the roadside for a considerable distance, he decided to stop to see what the litter consisted of. He stopped, picked up the litter and discovered that it was the minutes of the magistrates’ meeting that he had just left. There you had a magistrate leaving a magistrates’ meeting who was so terrified of the law which my noble friend has described that he was taking no notice of it at all.

We have a very practical suggestion from my noble friend and it does not deserve the casual and rather absurd way that it has been treated so far by Defra. I hope that the Minister, if he cannot accept the amendment in exactly its present form, will tell the House that he will be prepared to discuss this whole matter in much more detail with his department in the hope that we can make some belated progress on this urgent problem.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, this is the first time that I have intervened on the Bill. I should declare an interest as leader of a London borough council; indeed, it is the council that I now learn is the world’s centre of mooning. I should apologise to Lady James of Blackheath for the offence that was caused. I will try to avert my eyes when I next go to Twickenham.

I express my immense support for my noble friend Lord Goschen and his amendment. He is exactly correct to point out the scourge of fly-tipping and I hope that the Government will be supportive. Equally, I am extremely supportive in principle and in practice of my noble friend Lord Marlesford’s amendment. I am going to anticipate what I fear the Minister might say about it, in the hope of averting the risk that he will push it aside. There are issues of policing that local authorities would have to face with this. It is not as easy to identify a car from which a piece of paper has been thrown as it is to find a parked car of which you can take a photograph and stick it on the web, so that the person who has parked the car can see the offence that they have committed. The proposed process imitates the process for dealing with a parking offence, and will still have issues of proof and so on attached to it. I am sure that the Minister may well be tempted to say that. None the less, I am sure that there are ways in which, with a will, these kinds of problems could be overcome. I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will take it forward in a positive spirit.

I should add to what my noble friend Lord Crickhowell said about motorways, where the situation is appalling. Last time I went up the M1, I saw the astonishing investment by the Highways Agency in having ridiculously exaggerated numbers of cameras at the first few junctions. Millions must have been spent on them, the side notices and so on. Yet along the side of the road, totally neglected, were piles of litter. Something ought to be done by the Highways Agency to prioritise investment and deal with this problem, which is a terrible advertisement for our country along its main highways and which a small local authority is not by itself competent to deal with.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I could not agree more with the noble Baroness about the importance of behaviour regarding the environment. All noble Lords would join in that sentiment. I do see this as an ongoing debate on how Parliament, the Government, and communities as a whole can deal with what is manifestly a big problem. I am grateful, therefore, for the opportunity to debate these issues through the amendments tabled by my noble friends Lord Marlesford and Lord Goschen. My noble friend Lord Marlesford has come back on this issue following his Private Member’s Bill and the amendments that he made to previous legislation on similar grounds.

I shall address his amendment first. I know that littering from vehicles is something that he feels about passionately. I have been in the House when he has raised this issue previously and I also know that many noble Lords share his concerns, as I do myself. I consider it a source of considerable annoyance to see the roadside littered—if I may use the word—with discarded litter, discarded by people who do not seem to care about the visual and other impacts on the environment and other people’s neighbourhoods. Therefore, I come from a position of saying that littering should be treated seriously. My noble friend Lord Crickhowell is absolutely right. It is simply unacceptable to drop litter. Littering from vehicles can also present a danger by distracting or even injuring other road users or by obstructing the highway. Littering is anti-social and this is an anti-social behaviour Bill. It demonstrates disrespect for the community and it incurs costs for the taxpayer. In many communities, a lot of litter collecting is done by voluntary community groups. In my own area, the local civic society takes on responsibility for clearing up irresponsibly discarded litter. The Highways Agency spends around £10 million a year clearing litter and this often involves closing lanes, which also causes delays to other road users.

As my noble friend explained, his proposed new clause seeks to make it easier for local authorities to fine people when littering is witnessed from their vehicle. My noble friend feels that more people must be punished for this anti-social behaviour and that, if more people were or could be punished, fewer people would commit the offence in the first place. The Government are at one with my noble friend’s intentions. However, as my noble friend Lord De Mauley advised my noble friend Lord Marlesford during the Second Reading debate on his Littering from Vehicles Bill earlier this year, we do not believe that the approach he proposes is likely to contribute significantly to the resolution of this problem, and I think that I owe it to the Committee to try to explain that.

At present, because littering is a criminal offence, we advise local authorities not to issue fixed penalty notices for littering unless they are confident that the evidence against the offender would stand up if the case went to court. It is, of course, for local authorities to satisfy themselves about this and to assess the strength of each case on its merits. The amendment would also mean that, as a matter of law, the registered keeper of a vehicle could be punished for an offence committed by someone else, such as a passenger, or a family member who also had the use of the vehicle. The amendment makes clear my noble friend’s intention that the registered keeper should be held liable whether or not they gave instructions or allowed the contravention to take place. People who are innocent of any offence would therefore have either to pay the fine or take on further inconvenience and expense in challenging it, while the actual offender would go unpunished. It is hard to see how this approach is going to change offenders’ behaviour if someone else bears the punishment for their wrongdoing. In law, fairness and proportionality are crucial in gaining public support for the use of fines to punish this type of behaviour, but under the amendment an innocent party might be punished for the crime of another.

I accept that there is a place for keeper liability when it comes to the enforcement of traffic-related offences, but it is a very big step to extend this principle to other categories of offences. Government guidance on the use of fixed penalties is very clear that people should be fined only when it is proportionate and in the public interest to do so, and fining the registered keeper for any littering offence committed from their vehicle, regardless of their guilt, is neither fair nor proportionate.

Enforcement is the issue, and I agree with all noble Lords who have spoken that we want the message to the public to be loud and clear: littering is a crime. However, the amendment would distort that message by essentially decriminalising littering from vehicles, and at the same time it would create a legal anomaly. Littering while standing on the pavement would remain a crime, but dropping the same litter from within a vehicle would be treated as a civil offence. That risks sending the wrong message—that littering from vehicles is not really so serious.

More importantly, we also doubt that this proposal will achieve my noble friend’s desired aim, as it relies on the offence being witnessed. Its effectiveness would be limited by the number of enforcement officers available to the local authority, and they cannot be everywhere all the time. It will not be of any help when the offence takes place in an isolated area, in the dark or at such speed that the vehicle registration cannot be recorded. In some cases, CCTV may help, but even CCTV has limits as to the level of detail that it captures.

When my noble friend raised this proposal in the context of the Localism Bill in 2011, the then Minister, my noble friend Lord Shutt, responded:

“It makes sense to learn the lessons from the application of that approach in London before moving to wider legislation”.—[Official Report, 10/10/11; col. 1370.]

I know that my noble friend Lord Marlesford feels that the powers under the 9th and 10th London Local Authorities Acts have been in force in London for a year and that we should therefore have had time to assess their operation by now. However, the current evidence suggests that these powers have not been widely used. It has taken a long time for the boroughs to put in place the necessary appeals system and paperwork. Barely a handful of civil penalties have been issued so far, and the new threat that registered keepers will be fined does not seem to have made much of a difference to the behaviour—

[Lord Crickhowell]

I am grateful to my noble friend. He is giving one lot of statistics but does he have any statistics relating to the number of occasions when criminal prosecutions have been effectively brought for the same offence anywhere in the United Kingdom?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I apologise to my noble friend because I do not have such figures. I am not quoting any figures here; I was saying that I understand that only a handful of civil penalties have been issued. I shall certainly write to my noble friend if I am able to obtain the answer for the number of littering crimes that have been committed. As I said earlier, enforcement is the issue. The new threat that registered keepers will be fined does not seem to have made much of a difference to the behaviour of the general public. After this debate, it would be interesting for me to talk to my noble friend Lord True about his experience in his borough and to find out how useful he has found these provisions under the London Local Authorities Acts.

The lesson we have learnt so far is that the evidence does not support this approach as being so effective in tackling the problem as to justify rolling it out on a national scale. While we share my noble friend’s sentiment and respect his persistence, we cannot support this amendment and I hope that he will withdraw it.

We have heard a number of speeches. My noble friend Lord James of Blackheath sought to get to the bottom of several issues, but we doubt that my noble friend’s proposal will assist us in dealing with the problems mentioned by many of the speakers in this debate.

I now turn to the amendment from my noble friend Lord Goschen. He alluded to a number of matters on which I can now inform the Committee. This amendment brings to our attention the problem of fly-tipping. Like littering from vehicles, this is another example of individuals having little care or concern about the impact of their actions on the environment.

I am pleased to be able to reassure my noble friend that there are currently seizure and disposal powers in respect of vehicles used for illegal waste disposal. These are set out in Section 6 of the Control of Pollution (Amendment) Act 1989 and they apply in Scotland, England and Wales. However, we will be improving on these powers when we commence provisions in the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 to repeal and replace them.

The new, wider powers relate to the seizure of vehicles used or about to be used in the commission of offences under Section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act, which relates to the unauthorised deposit of waste and includes fly-tipped waste, under Section 34, which imposes a duty of care to ensure that waste is transferred to an authorised person, and under Regulation 38(1) or (2) of the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2010, which require waste operations to be carried out in accordance with a permit. It will also make it easier for local authorities and the Environment Agency to exercise their powers—for example, by removing the need for a warrant before seizure and for the retention of the vehicles pending investigation or completion of court proceedings.

The new, wider powers also provide for the forfeiture of seized vehicles following convictions for offences under Section 33(1) of the Environmental Protection Act or Regulation 38(1) of the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations. The new Environmental Protection Act powers have already been commenced in relation to Wales and are in the process of being commenced for England. The related secondary legislation is in the process of being drafted and finalised. Subject to the normal clearance procedures, these powers are due to be brought into force as early as possible in 2014. Given that the powers sought by my noble friend’s amendment already exist and are in the process of being improved, I do not think the amendment is necessary and I hope that he will feel able not to press it.