Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Monday 20th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am happy to move my amendment when the House and the Government are in such a contented mood. I thank all those who have stayed.

This is, I believe, the third time I have proposed this amendment, or at least some version of it, to the House. As the Minister knows, last year my Labour colleagues and I moved an amendment to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill which would have created a separate legal offence for assaulting any worker in the performance of his duties. Sadly, although many, including a number of those on the Benches opposite, were sympathetic to the amendment’s aim of encouraging prosecutions, acting as a deterrent and doing justice to the physical and emotional suffering of the thousands of workers assaulted each year, your Lordships did not give that amendment your approval.

One concern raised at the time was that the amendment was so wide in scope that it would cover so many workers as to render it ineffective. That is why I proposed at the Committee stage of this Bill in July the amendment before your Lordships, drafted with the invaluable help of the union USDAW. I thank all at USDAW for their great help on this issue. The amendment focuses specifically on those workers who are required to enforce, as part of their employment, compliance with the Licensing Act 2003. It creates a separate either way offence for assaulting a shop or bar worker who is selling alcohol, and in doing so, takes account of comments made by the Solicitor-General in the other place which claimed that, if we were truly serious about higher penalties, such an offence should be either way and not summary as was originally intended.

There are three problems in the way in which we currently deal with assaults on workers serving alcohol which this amendment attempts to address. First, it attempts to remedy the fact that at present the vital and dangerous public function performed by workers who serve alcohol is insufficiently acknowledged by the criminal justice system. Men and women who serve alcohol are required by the Licensing Act 2003 to enforce that law, in terms of its consumption and supply. They must refuse to serve those who they believe to be under age, and those who are already intoxicated. They are working in febrile environments and are responsible, like police officers, for enforcing the law. If they refuse to do so, they themselves can face legal action or lose their licences. It is therefore unacceptable that these men and women receive no effective protection from the legal system for that additional service and the physical danger that it puts them in.

That brings me to my second point. Men and women serving alcohol have, like all workers, the benefit of a clause in the sentencing guidelines—as the Minister pointed out in Committee—which makes the assault of a worker providing a public service one aggravating factor, but it is one of 19 aggravating factors, which is seldom acknowledged. This fails to acknowledge that those who serve alcohol place themselves in greater danger, and make a more vital contribution to public order and to public health, than most others in other professions. According to the Health and Safety Executive, alcohol was the trigger to threatened or actual violence in 38% of cases.

Thirdly, the current regime has inadvertently produced a system which disincentivises prosecution and ends up being too lenient. At the moment, if a worker who sells alcohol is assaulted, the crime will usually fall into the category of common assault. The problem is that common assault carries relatively lenient punishments, meaning that in many cases the Crown Prosecution Service decides not to bother prosecuting. That has certainly been the experience of the unions like USDAW and other organisations in the industry like National Pubwatch, the Wine and Spirit Trade Association and others. Lenient sentencing and lack of sentencing not only fails the victims of such crimes by depriving them of justice but also results in many incidents going unreported as people’s faith in the criminal justice system becomes less and less secure. USDAW found that 17% of workers attacked at work, or threatened with physical violence, did not report—they did not bother to report—the offence because they did not think that any action would be taken.

My amendment addresses these issues. It provides greater protection to this group of workers by doing three things. First, and most importantly, it recognises at long last the dangerous environment these men and women must work in, as well as the strenuous and vital public function they carry out in enforcing the law. It does so by creating a separate, specific offence for assaulting someone who sells alcohol, one that carries a harsher penalty of either up to six months in prison and a fine of up to £500 for those charged summarily, or up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine for those who are convicted or indicted at the Crown Court, for more serious offences.

Secondly, in creating that separate offence, it would act as a deterrent to such crimes. Between 2012 and 2013, reported incidences of violence at work increased—there were 649,000 overall, including assaults on bar and shop workers serving alcohol. At a time when we see that these crimes show no sign of abating and their frequency remains alarmingly high, we must recognise the service of this group of workers. Harsher penalties will act as a deterrent.

This brings me to the third major reason to support this amendment. It will encourage more prosecutions, as a separate legal offence is easier to determine than common assault. You can prove it more easily, and because it carries stiffer penalties, that will give the CPS greater incentive to prosecute.

I heard example after example recently at a presentation by USDAW. I know that Members of the House will know of other examples. I will not go into them in detail as time does not permit, but I assure the House that there were some horrific incidents causing great harm, which I know the noble Lords, Lord Lea and Lord Kennedy, and others who attended the presentation, will testify to. I am arguing in favour of the amendment before your Lordships today so that many thousands of other workers do not have to go through what those about whom we heard in that presentation have already suffered.

In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks—have I got the pronunciation right? I have the same problem in reverse—expressed his genuine sympathy with the amendment’s aims before arguing that it was not “at the moment” the right way to combat such crimes, citing a lack of evidence and the availability of other actions to deal with it. He also agreed to meet me and other colleagues, and he was true to his word. The general secretary of USDAW, my noble friend Lord Kennedy and I met him and we had a sympathetic response. He asked for more evidence and was interested in trying to deal with the issue, but, unfortunately, he was not willing to support this amendment, at least at this stage, until we had come forward with more evidence to persuade him.

I hope, nevertheless, that the Minister will today recognise the seriousness of this matter. If he does not accept the amendment—I hope that he will and I shall certainly test the opinion of the House if he does not—I hope that he will at least put forward some alternatives to take account of an increasingly serious problem. We should not let down these people who serve the public and make sure that the law is upheld. They deserve the kind of support that we can give them by supporting this amendment.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I may add one point which the union raised and which I think is the reason why the Government are having undue difficulty. It is an inconsistency which relates to semantics. These people are serving the public—they are in public houses after all. If you are a public servant, you seem to be protected in a way that these workers are not, yet they are in more direct, physical contact with the public—with many injuries sustained. I ask the Minister—I know that the matter has been brought to his attention in private conversations—how it is that these workers have less protection under a lesser criminal offence than applies to violence done to workers in the public sector who have an interface with the public. These workers are effectively in a private space, not in a public space, and the law works differently for them.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I support the principles of the amendment, which shows how belonging to a responsible union such as USDAW can benefit workers. As I have said in this House on previous occasions, it would be wrong for the Opposition to believe that all union members are adherents of their party. Indeed, one of the USDAW executive, Mr John Barstow, a member of the Conservative Party, keeps me informed of USDAW and its doings, which are generally very beneficial and certainly of value to its members.

In a debate earlier this evening—I do not normally intervene in this sort of debate; I generally stick to foreign affairs—I noticed all the statements made about knife crime and it being argued that just being found with a knife should be a reason for a custodial sentence. I was at the meeting with the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, the other day when we listened to USDAW. We heard some pretty horrific accounts. One of the most horrific things to me was the absence of prosecution by the police even in the face of CCTV evidence and other quite clear evidence that assaults had been committed. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us not only his views on the clause but also how we intend to get the law, as at present, implemented because what was done is already an offence—and was an offence in many of the incidents put before us. We do not need this new law. What we are facing is a crisis of the police deciding that the law should not be enforced as it stands.

Having said that, I see no reason why we should not afford these workers the level of protection that they justly deserve. After all, as Mr Foulkes—sorry, I have known the noble Lord as Mr Foulkes and George for a bit too long, I reckon—as the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said, these workers are actually upholding the law that we have passed. In many ways they are as much agents of the law as the police. When they are assaulted as a result of upholding the laws that this Parliament has passed, they should benefit from the protection that the law should afford. On that basis, I hope that the Minister will be able to give us a very positive response.