Small Boats Incident in the Channel

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

It is not entirely the same, but very close.

On a serious note, yesterday’s tragedy was the most tragic of reminders of the dangers of the English Channel, and that people’s lives are at risk every day in these small boats. It is a sobering moment for us as a nation, for France and for the international community. As I understand it, at least 27 people have died. We think of those lost, their loved ones left behind, and the two who were rescued, who are receiving medical treatment and fighting for their lives. I pay tribute to all those involved in the joint French-British search operation in the air and on the sea, putting themselves in danger to help others.

I believe that there have been arrests in France of those suspected of the vile crime of people smuggling. I appreciate the difficulties and sensitivities when there is an ongoing legal case, particularly in another jurisdiction, but I hope that the Government can assure the House that we will give all the co-operation required by the prosecuting authorities in France if we are able to help in that regard.

On the arrangements that we have in place with the French authorities, and the £54 million, referred to in the previous debate, can the Government set out for how many days a week the full existing surveillance capacity is operating? What will they be doing—as a matter of urgency, I hope—to increase that surveillance, particularly in light of what has happened? What will the Government be doing to deepen intelligence and law enforcement co-operation with the French authorities in other countries, so that the focus is on not only coastal patrols, as it appears to be currently, but disrupting the routes often facilitated across hundreds or thousands of miles by the gangs, who have a reckless disregard for human life?

May I press the Government on properly managed, safe and legal routes, and specifically the position on the Dubs scheme? It was closed down, having helped only some 480 unaccompanied children rather than the 3,000 many expected it to help. Will that scheme be urgently reinstated?

In the Statement, the Government spoke of a worldwide migration crisis, and that is the reality. In view of that, can the Government revisit their decision to cut the international aid budget and lead on the international stage with other countries to help those fleeing persecution? Yesterday’s terrible tragedy must be a moment for change. The time for urgent action to save lives is now.

I noticed that the Home Secretary said in the Statement that she has approved maritime tactics, including boat turnarounds, for border staff to deploy. Can the Minister tell us a little more about these maritime tactics that have been approved? What changes will take place as a result?

As I say, there is a reference to boat turnarounds. I presume that means turning around boats in the channel and sending them back to France, but perhaps the Minister could indicate precisely what that means and whether there are other maritime tactics, as the Statement implies, apart from those boat turnarounds.

I also picked up in the Statement that the Minister repeated the Government’s position, which they have stated on numerous other occasions, that people should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, and that nobody needs to flee France to be safe. Presumably, if our Government’s stance is that you should claim asylum in the first safe country you reach, they would have to accept that for most people who have come through France and then across the channel on small boats, unless there is evidence to the contrary, France was not the first safe country that they reached. Presumably, most went through other safe countries before they got to France. Do the Government accept that, on the basis of their own statement that you should claim asylum in the first safe country you reach, France’s situation is, in that sense, no different from ours, because France would probably not have been the first safe country that they reached? Some clarification on that issue might be helpful in the reply that I hope the Minister will give to my comments.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I repeat that my thoughts are with all those affected by yesterday’s tragedy in the channel. I asked for the Statement to be repeated so that Members of this House who had not signed up to the debate that we just had on this subject, scheduled before this tragedy happened, had an opportunity to question the Government.

The Home Secretary talked about traffickers finding people to manipulate and said that some of them do not even know that they are coming to the UK. What evidence can the Minister share with the House that people smugglers

“threaten … bully and assault the people who get into these boats”?

What evidence is there that asylum seekers, who must know that they are in France, or at the very least in mainland Europe, who are getting into boats, do not know that they are coming to the UK?

The Home Secretary gives the impression that vulnerable people are being forced against their will into these boats. Surely people traffickers would be only too happy to save money on boats and leave those who had already paid them in mainland Europe? Is it not the truth that these desperate people, who often speak English and no other European language, and who often have relatives or other people they know in the UK, know that they cannot seek asylum in the UK unless they are in the UK?

The Home Secretary says that people traffickers

“use the money they make for other heinous crimes”.

What are the heinous crimes to which the Home Secretary is referring? She also talked about a

“wide range of operational and diplomatic work”.

How can the Home Secretary talk about boat turnarounds the day after at least 27 people lost their lives, given that it is a tactic that can only increase the risk of further tragic deaths?

On diplomatic work, Ministers have talked about processing asylum claims in places such as Albania and Ascension Island. Meanwhile, Albania angrily denies any discussion on the issue and says that it would never agree, even if there had been discussions. Are the Government just making it up, and have they not got beyond the letter A in the list of fictitious partners?

The Home Secretary talked about the Government not being able to do it alone and it being impossible without close co-operation between international partners. Has leaving the European Union made such co-operation easier or more difficult? Is it not the case that, rather than pointing the finger at the French, who take more asylum seekers per head of population than the UK, or at the people traffickers, whom Clare Moseley of Care4Calais described as a symptom of the problem and not its cause, the Government should look in the mirror? The problem is not taking climate change seriously enough. The problem is reducing the UK foreign aid budget. The problem is UK foreign policy failures. All make it more difficult for people to remain where they are. The problem with channel crossings is that this Government refuse to allow people to claim asylum unless their feet are on British soil.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Paddick, for their points. I join with them both in mourning the loss of those lives in the small boat yesterday. It is a tragedy.

In terms of the various questions they asked, I am going to slightly work backwards. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, talked about offshoring. The Home Secretary has made it quite clear that she is considering all options and that nothing is off the table.

In terms of the heinous crimes that the Home Secretary talks about, it is interesting when you look at serious and organised criminals that these people are involved in multiple types of crime, not just people trafficking but money laundering, drugs and other things of that ilk.

In terms of evidence for bullying and people not knowing that they are coming to the UK, I am sure that the Home Secretary has said that based on the intelligence and information that she has got, so I think that stands. I assume it is fact.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said that France is not the first safe country. That is precisely the point—people are not claiming asylum in the first safe country. They are then travelling to France and trying to get to the UK.

The noble Lord asked about the turnaround tactics. They are lawful, as I explained in the previous debate. They are delivered in accordance with domestic and international law and obligations. However, I will say what I said before, which is that our priority—first and foremost—is always to save lives. Every action that the Border Force takes is safe and in accordance with the law.

The noble Lord also asked about surveillance. I do not know how frequently they are operating. That is a question of detail that I do not know. Of course, there is the fact of French law being different from UK law, so there are privacy issues around the use of drones. I know that they are working on legislation to put it through parliament. We, of course, have the joint intelligence cell, which was established back in 2020, with the UK and France working together. It is a cross-European problem. This is not isolated to the United Kingdom. All countries across Europe are seeing it.

The noble Lord asked about Dubs and the 3,000—3,000 was never agreed in Parliament and therefore was never pledged. We met our obligations under Dubs, and I outlined some of the other schemes under which people have come to this country since 2015, such as the Syrian resettlement scheme, family reunion visas and the BNO scheme. We now have the global resettlement scheme, the mandate scheme, the children’s resettlement scheme and the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme. There are many routes under which people have come and will still be able to come here.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked about law enforcement co-operation. That has been offered. We want to work with our French counterparts and we do through the joint intelligence cell, as I have said. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary spoke to Minister Darmanin this morning and again reiterated returns offers. As I said in the Statement, the Prime Minister spoke to President Macron last night. The Home Secretary was exploring the various gaps in our mutual capabilities and how we could solve what is now a mutual problem.

Windrush Compensation Scheme

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that. That claim that only 5% of people, or one in 20, have received a payment is actually a bit misleading. When we first set up the scheme, we made an estimate, which I remember saying to the House was quite difficult to make, of the number of people we thought might be eligible. That estimate was originally 15,000 and was then revised down to 11,500. It is now 4,600. Obviously, we will try our best to ensure that anyone who comes forward gets the compensation that they deserve. We now estimate, based on what I have just said to my noble friend, that 29% of people who have submitted a claim have received a payment.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend’s tireless efforts. We now know that there are lengthy delays, even in clear-cut cases, to making an initial payment. But we know that the Home Office is capable of moving quickly: it has tabled 18 pages of new offences and police powers for the police Bill within two months of the Home Secretary asking for them. So what is it about the Windrush generation that means that they are not a priority for the Home Office?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I think that statement is incorrect. The Windrush generation and the Windrush scheme are a priority for the Home Office. I have been through some of the improvements that we have made: we are increasing the number of caseworkers, and the amount of compensation has risen quite dramatically since we put some of the changes in place, from £3 million to over £31.6 million, with a further £5.6 million having been offered. There is no cap on the amount of compensation that we will pay out. We have also removed the time limit so that as many people who can apply do.

Some of the cases can be quite complex and therefore take longer than might be normal—and, of course, we are going back decades in time—but we are keener than ever, and it remains a priority, to ensure that anyone who is due compensation will be paid it.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

My Lords, before my noble friend Lady Blake comes to move her Amendment 292H, everybody will have seen what the plans are for today by looking at the groupings. They basically involve five groups dealing with things that have stood over from the pre-protest section of the Bill, and then three or four groups dealing with all the protest sections in the Bill, including one group, I think, dealing with all the proposed new clauses that have been added.

On any basis, the grouping is inappropriate. The proposed new clauses have the additional feature that they have not been debated at all in the Commons, from where this Bill originated. They have had no Second Reading of any sort in this House and now, to have Committee stage with them all crammed in effect into one or two groups means that there will be no proper scrutiny in this House.

Can I make a suggestion and ask a question? In relation to the new clauses, could we treat, without any additional formality, the proceedings today as a Second Reading in effect and then have an additional day in Committee so that there is proper consideration? In addition to that, could one have more time to deal with these very important clauses?

My concern is that this marginalises the House of Lords in relation to considering these provisions in detail—although I am sure that was not deliberate on the part of the Whips. It may well be that these provisions are needed; our role is to look at them line by line. The effect of the way in which this has been done is that now that is not possible. The House as a whole was entitled to look for protection in that respect from the Leader of the House and the Government Chief Whip. Instead, they have just gone along with the Government, like so many institutions, in pushing the institution to one side—and it is not right.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I support the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, in what he has just said. I have heard two rumours—one, that the Government Chief Whip is urging people to keep their comments on the Bill today short. I wish to declare to the Government Chief Whip that that is not possible, bearing in mind the number and complexity of issues that we are supposed to debate today. The other rumour that I have heard is that, if the House is still debating at 2 am, only then will the debate be adjourned. If that is right, looking at the timetable, that means that the most contentious parts of the Bill—the new amendments, as the noble and learned Lord said, which have not even been considered by the House of Commons—will be debated either side of midnight. That is no way for this House to be treated.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, I have not heard the rumour about keeping comments short. We are about to begin the 11th day in Committee of this Bill. In total, this House has sat for 60 hours in Committee, including starting early and going beyond 10 pm, as well as allowing three extra days. By the time when we finish today—and we intend to do so—we will have considered and debated more than 450 amendments.

As for the new clauses, they have been agreed with the usual channels and with the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. I would say to noble Lords who have spoken that we intend to finish Committee today.

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

Can the Minister then confirm, if the Government accept that it is unreasonable to force through these new amendments—these eighteen and a half pages of new offences and police powers— and that therefore they are going to withdraw those amendments, they also undertake to have the accepted gap between Committee and Report, which is 14 days, rather than the shortened period that has appeared in Forthcoming Business?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

If the Committee will allow, I can answer some of these questions. We intend to have an Order of Consideration Motion so that, on Report, items will be taken as much as they can be in the same order as they are in Committee—so there will be plenty of time to consider these matters. We have discussed, in the usual channels, how the arrangements for this Bill should take place. I completely accept that it might go quite late tonight. We have spent a lot of time on this Bill—I accept that. But this is the Committee stage, and it cannot go on for ever because, if it goes on and on, the House of Lords looks as if it is preventing the Bills that have been passed by the House of Commons from going ahead.

The noble Lord shakes his head. As my noble friend the Minister has said, there has been ample time to talk about this Bill—and all we are saying is that, after three extra days, we have to draw this to a conclusion at some stage. This is not an unreasonable number of amendments to deal with—we have often done this in the past. The key, of course, is that we actually get on with it and that noble Lords have a view to the rest of the Members of this House. None of us wants to stay up too late. It is perfectly doable to have this number of groups—we have done it before—if noble Lords are able to be brief and succinct and make their point.

On the government amendments, the idea of having them in Committee is that we can debate them today. My noble friend has said that she will withdraw them, and that allows Report to go ahead—and, if necessary, noble Lords can vote on them.

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[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

But they will be scrutinised, at the Committee stage and then at the Report stage.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, just because you cram 58 amendments, most of which are government amendments, into two groups does not shorten the debate.

Amendment 292H

Moved by

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[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

Briefly, I entirely support the repeal of the Vagrancy Act, and there is no point in repeating what have been compelling, eloquent and, I believe, unanswerable points. Long experience has shown that arguments do not get better by repetition.

What I wanted to do, however, was to make four quick points from my experience in support of Amendment 292J in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. First, the category of person dealt with is easy to identify. Therefore, that is not an answer. Secondly, the evidence of the risk of future offending is compelling. That in relation to Wales is set out—I need not repeat it—in the report of the Commission on Justice that I chaired and there is masses of such evidence. Thirdly, the proposal is plainly value for money. One has only to look at the cost of what it takes to deal with those who have gone wrong. Fourthly—surprisingly, some may think—the proposal would have enormous public support. When we canvassed views about it, and when I did so as a judge, one always found that the overwhelming majority felt that these people deserved a chance and support.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Thornhill has spoken comprehensively on these amendments, so I can be brief. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, for introducing the amendment. She rightly points to the failure of the current legislation to adequately deal with this problem on the basis of the facts that she presented. Something clearly needs to be done to ensure that the police play their part. If South Yorkshire Police can do it, why cannot every force? We support this amendment.

I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, for his Amendment 292J. Noble Lords may have seen the ITV “News at Ten” last night on how young people are increasingly being exploited, particularly by drug dealers. That is in addition to a 6% increase in reported domestic violence during lockdown, when many more children would have become vulnerable. There is too much emphasis on the criminal justice system as a way to deal with these vulnerable young people, rather than there being a statutory duty on local authorities, the NHS and the police, as this amendment suggests. We support it.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, introduced Amendments 320 and 328. I remember being told as a young constable about the antiquated legislation—the Vagrancy Act 1824—introduced to deal with soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars. That was in 1976—not the Napoleonic wars, when I was a young constable; they were a bit earlier. People should not be criminalised simply for begging and sleeping rough. There is adequate alternative legislation to deal with anti-social behaviour and the Vagrancy Act is now redundant. As the explanatory note says, these amendments would require police officers

“to balance protection of the community with sensitivity to the problems that cause people to engage in begging or sleeping rough and ensure that general public order enforcement powers should not in general be used in relation to people sleeping rough, and should be used in relation to people begging only where no other approach is reasonably available.”

On that basis, we support these amendments as well.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may begin by saying that I have great sympathy with the wish of the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, to firmly stamp out the illegal eviction of tenants. This distressing activity has no place in our society and it is an unacceptable practice carried out by rogue landlords, perpetrated on tenants.

I totally agree that the police and local authorities need to work together to tackle that. Many noble Lords have spoken in today’s Committee who have experience of this type of multiagency working. It is essential in terms of supporting the vulnerable, and there are many examples of that. I always talk about the troubled families programme, which is one such intervention but it is such an important one because some people have multiple problems. It is a fantastic way for agencies to sort them out together. Local authorities and the police also have mechanisms in place to work collaboratively to tackle criminal landlords. The police are also able to establish protocols for information sharing, which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, spoke about. We expect them to use those protocols to their full extent to aid investigations into illegal evictions and enforce the law.

If the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, has examples that suggest a lack of effective co-operation, I should be very happy to pass them on to my colleagues in DLUHC. As has been pointed out, there are lots of good examples of how interventions have worked well, particularly in Westminster. If there is an issue, the solution here is not more legislation. The existing powers we have are sufficient. But I accept that it is incumbent on the police and local authorities to work collaboratively to tackle crime in their areas, including on illegal eviction investigations. As regards the point about police saying that issues are a civil matter, which the noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy of Cradley and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, mentioned, the police have powers of arrest and it is important that those powers are used appropriately, including on illegal eviction investigations.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

What I was trying to say was that legislation is in place but, if it is not always followed in practice, it would be very helpful to know about it. However, I accept the final point that the noble Baroness makes.

I turn to the issues that the noble Lord raises in his amendment. If you consider first children impacted by domestic abuse, it is totally unacceptable that some children have to witness abuse carried out in their home by those whom they should trust the most. This Government have demonstrated their absolute resolve to tackle domestic abuse and its impact on children, both in legislation earlier this year—the Domestic Abuse Act—and through the upcoming domestic abuse strategy.

As part of the landmark Domestic Abuse Act, children are recognised as victims of domestic abuse in their own right where they see, hear or experience the effects of domestic abuse. This is an important step which will help ensure that locally commissioned services continue to consider and address the needs of children. Further, the Act created the role of the domestic abuse commissioner in statute to provide public leadership on domestic abuse issues and to oversee and monitor the provision of services for victims, including children. The provisions of the Act came into force on 1 November.

It is really important that young victims receive the right support at the right time—which was precisely the wording that the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, used—to help them cope and recover and to mitigate the long-term impact of their experiences. We are determined to continue to improve the standard of support for victims of crime. This year the Government will provide £150 million to victim support services, which includes an extra £51 million to increase support for rape and domestic abuse victims. That includes support for children and young people.

Through the children affected by domestic abuse fund we have provided £3 million this year for specialist services for children who have been affected by domestic abuse. This funding is enabling a range of therapeutic interventions for children, such as one-to-one or group support. In addition, the Home Office is this year providing £169,000-worth of funding to Operation Encompass, a scheme which connects the police to schools through a specialist support helpline for teachers concerned about children experiencing domestic abuse. The helpline was established during the Covid-19 pandemic, as noble Lords might recall, and we are continuing to fund it this year.

Turning to the matter of child criminal exploitation, the Government are investing in specialist support for under-25s and their families who are affected by county lines exploitation in the three largest exporting force areas—London, the West Midlands and Merseyside. The Government are also funding the Children’s Society’s Prevention Programme, which works to tackle and prevent child criminal exploitation, child sexual abuse and exploitation, and modern-day slavery and human trafficking on a regional and national basis. This has included supporting the #LookCloser public awareness campaign, which focuses on increasing awareness and encouraging reporting of the signs and indicators of child exploitation. We also fund Missing People’s SafeCall service, which is a national confidential helpline for young people, families and carers who are concerned about county lines exploitation.

Through cross-government efforts we are working to identify areas of learning with regard to child criminal exploitation and improving our response to it. The Home Office and the Department for Education are currently testing the effectiveness of how multi-agency safeguarding partnerships respond to serious violence and county lines through a series of deep dives. We have recently received the findings from those reviews and are considering the best way to share the learning and practice with local areas.

In the wider landscape, the noble Lord will be aware that the Government will be consulting on a victims’ Bill. As part of that consultation, we will seek views on the provision of community-based support services for victims, including children. The consultation will carefully look at how local bodies collaborate to support victims and will consider the evidence to determine where legislation could be used more effectively. Therefore, although I am very sympathetic to the aims of the noble Lord’s amendment, I hope that he is sufficiently reassured by the extensive ongoing efforts to tackle these two issues, the existing arrangements in place and, indeed, our plans to consider the duty to collaborate further as part of the victims’ Bill.

Finally, in relation to Amendments 320 and 328, I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Lord, Lord Best, that the time has come—

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. Before we get on to the Vagrancy Act and the other amendments, she talked about treating children as victims of domestic violence if they witness it, and about child criminal exploitation. There is a third group: children who witness violence, particularly in the home, and suffer adverse childhood experiences as a result which lead them into committing crime. I remember attending a juvenile detention facility in Scotland, where almost every child in custody had experienced violence in the home as a cause. The Minister talked about two issues, but there is this third issue of adverse childhood experiences leading to offending behaviour, which I believe the noble Lord’s amendment addresses in a way that the Minister has not.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My intention was not to leave out that issue; we could have a whole debate on the effect of childhood abuse, trauma and witnessing violence on the future prospects of a person when they become an adult and their increased likelihood of going on to abuse, but my intention was not to dismiss it. I apologise that I did not mention it, but the intention certainly was not to dismiss it at all.

Finally, I move to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best. As I said, the time has come to reconsider the Vagrancy Act—some of the language that was used is so antiquated that it would perhaps be alien to some of this generation. I agree that nobody should be criminalised just because they have nowhere to live. Back in 2018, we committed to review the legislation following mixed views among stakeholders regarding the continued relevance of the Act, given that it is, as noble Lords have said, nearly 200 years old. I am sure that noble Lords can understand that announcing the outcome of this review has been delayed by several factors. One noble Lord mentioned the dedicated response for vulnerable individuals who are sleeping rough during the pandemic, which was outstanding.

It has been imperative to understand the full picture of how and why the Vagrancy Act is used, and what impact any change to or repeal of the Act will have. Rough sleeping and begging are complex issues, and the Act continues to be used. The review considered a range of factors and at its heart has been the experiences and perceptions of relevant stakeholders, including local authorities and the police. The Act continues to be used to tackle begging, and, if repealed, a legislative gap would be left that might impact on the police’s ability to respond to it.

The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 is not an alternative in this context. The powers in the Act are available to police and local authorities to tackle specific forms of behaviour that meet the legal tests in that legislation—for example, behaviour that is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to a victim or community. As I have said, begging is complex, but plainly it does not always come with these forms of accompanying behaviours.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, Amendments 292K and 292L in my name seek to create a criminal offence of desecration of a corpse and concealment of a corpse. At present, there are only common-law offences of preventing a lawful burial and obstructing a coroner by concealing a body.

Marie McCourt, the mother of Helen McCourt, still does not know what happened to her daughter who disappeared on 9 February 1988, or where her body was hidden or disposed of. Marie is one of those extraordinary women who absolutely refused to stop looking for her daughter, even though Helen’s murderer, who was convicted on clear DNA evidence, has not only served his term in prison but been released on licence. Despite being pressed repeatedly by the authorities over the years, he has refused to say where Helen’s body was left or what happened to it.

Marie has been arguing for decades that the desecration and concealment of a corpse is an extra-heavy sentence on the victim’s loved ones. She has supported the families of many other victims who have seen their loved ones murdered but have no remains to bury, or have heard of unspeakable desecration of their bodies.

In 2015 Marie started to campaign for a change in the law for these killers, seeking to require them to reveal where their victims’ remains were before being considered for parole. In July 2019, she was successful in getting that law changed—but not in time for her daughter’s killer. Marie was not doing it just for her, her family or Helen’s friends. She does not want anyone else to go through the agony they have faced for over three decades.

Others have also spoken out: Coral Jones, Tony Cox and Lesley Rees are the parents and family members of April Jones, Lorraine Cox and Michael O’Leary, who were also not just murdered but had their bodies desecrated by their murderers. Some remains were dismembered and some were burned. These families have had the extra distress of not knowing what happened to part or all their loved ones’ bodies. For these families there is no closure. More recently, Sarah Everard’s remains were burned by her murderer—although in her case police were able to find her remains.

At present, with the common-law offence of preventing a lawful burial, and these days with excellent forensic skills such as those used by police and forensic staff in the Sarah Everard case, it is possible to identify not just remains but also links with the murderer. The common-law offence of obstructing the coroner by concealing a body is rarely used, and there are no consequences for a convicted killer who continues to conceal the whereabouts of a body. Some killers enjoy having this last part of control over their appalling acts. They know that most families will never have a day without reliving the distress of their loved one being murdered. Refusing to disclose what they have done with the body, or where they have concealed a corpse or partial remains, is a form of control.

I thank Marie McCourt, Fiona Duffy and Claire Waxman, the London victims’ commissioner, and her office, for helping to brief me this. There can be few things worse for a family than hearing that a loved one has been murdered. To then learn that their remains have been further abused or have never been found causes unimaginable distress. The current laws are inadequate and mostly not used by prosecutors. These amendments say that these two offences should become criminal offences where an offender has done an intentional act of disrespect towards the deceased person’s remains. The second amendment makes it a criminal offence for an offender to refuse to co-operate in the recovery of their victim’s remains. These offences will punish an offender who has committed these unspeakable acts beyond murder, and also perhaps begin to bring closure to grieving families. I beg to move.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Brinton for introducing these amendments, which we support. The “Helen’s Law” campaign has achieved a great deal by persisting in campaigning for victims and their families by ensuring that failure to disclose the whereabouts of a victim’s body can increase the killer’s time in custody. These amendments go further, as my noble friend has explained. She has worked with Helen’s mother, Marie McCourt, and others on these amendments, proposing to create specific offences of desecration of a corpse and concealment of a body.

These amendments address serious and real human suffering caused by preventing a victim’s family from recovering the body of their loved one, whose life has already been cruelly snatched from them. The proposed offences would respond to that cruelty in a way that may be inadequate in reducing the hurt, but at least they reflect the justified anger we all feel when killers compound their inhuman actions with further callousness and inhumanity. As my noble friend explained, the existing legislation is not only inadequate but rarely used. We support her amendments.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for the clarity with which she has put this forward. The driving force behind this amendment is Marie McCourt whose daughter Helen McCourt was murdered by Ian Simms, and the body was never found. Ian Simms never indicated where the body was, refused to acknowledge what had happened, and was eventually released on parole. Prior to him being released on parole, Marie had campaigned successfully for a change in the law, which said in effect that if you did not indicate where the body was, parole should normally be refused.

Now, very effectively and with great understanding, Marie McCourt has pressed for a change in the law to make sure that there is, in effect, a crime of desecrating the body of somebody you have murdered. This is a greater problem than previously. In recent times, 54 murder trials have taken place without a body. We on this side of the Committee strongly support this offence. It might be asked whether this matters if you are being charged with murder. It matters to the victims’ families and therefore it should matter to the law. That is why we support this amendment.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I believe the case for this amendment has already overwhelmingly been made from all sides of this Committee. The Green group would have attached our name to it to make it even more cross-party, had there been space.

I go to the words of one victim that, I believe, sum this up. They are taken from an article in the popular mainstream magazine Vogue, published this week. They are from a single victim whom it called “Chloe”, whose stalker was jailed after breaching protective orders more than a dozen times, even though he had never been convicted of stalking. Chloe told Vogue:

“The system designed to protect us is broken and reactive. It waits for harm … I will live in fear until the day he dies.”


Those are the words of lived experience. The system is broken. I believe the case for this amendment and for a strategy has been overwhelmingly made.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for moving Amendment 292N on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove; I wish her well.

Victims of stalking, including female Members of Parliament, are being failed, as the noble Baroness has just said. As the noble Lord, Lord Russell, set out in his opening speech, there were 892,000 victims of stalking in the year to March 2020, according to the crime survey. The noble Lord pointed out the findings of the HMICFRS report on violence against women and girls regarding the inconsistent approach across different police forces to stalking protection orders; that the majority of orders had no positive obligation on the perpetrator; and that officers in force areas were unaware that the perpetrators were even subject to the orders, so there was no enforcement of the orders.

There is clearly a need to address perpetrator behaviour, in addition to protecting victims. My noble friend Lady Brinton said—and I agree—that stalking is not being taken seriously enough. That is as much a cultural issue for the police and courts as it is for society as a whole. There is clearly a need for a stalking strategy to ensure a consistent and effective response from all the authorities involved, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, just said—not just the criminal justice system but charities and others that offer services to address the behaviour of offenders. We support this amendment.

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

I will be very brief as the case for this amendment has been so eloquently put by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and other noble Lords who have spoken. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, who unfortunately cannot be in her place tonight, and to the other noble Lords who are signatories to the amendment, for their tireless work on this issue. In that context, I also pay particular tribute to my noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon, who cannot be in the Committee today, for her dedication and years of leadership on this issue.

I know the Minister is also passionate about this issue, but for years the House has found itself returning to this debate, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, said, and each time the answer from the Government is largely that the current system is adequate although improvements are needed in how it is delivered. Yet each time we come back to it, more women have been killed and more lives devastated. This amendment has our wholehearted support, and I hope we can now look forward to a clear and encouraging response from the Government.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

In response to that and in support of the broad thrust of my noble friend Lord Coaker’s probing amendment—I think it is fair to call it that—I have long had concerns about public space protection orders in general, and I defer to no one as a civil libertarian, but there is a great tradition in human rights thinking for child protection. So my instinctive response to the noble Baroness is that it is not because the protesters are anti-vaxxers and I disagree with them, it is that it is at school. They are young and potentially vulnerable people, and it does not seem proportionate or fair to me that we as grown-up legislators in this place take greater protection for our immediate vicinity than we give to even primary school children up and down the country, regardless of the nature of the protest.

The point about free speech and freedom to protest being a two-way street is incredibly important, and I suspect that we will return to it in a forthcoming group, but on this issue, for me, at least, the principle is not that I think that this is dangerous speech or disinformation—it is out there anyway online, et cetera—it is that no young person, particularly a very young person, should be subject to an aggressive demonstration, whether or not it is one that I would approve of, on their way to or from school.

Some of us remember the Holy Cross school dispute in Northern Ireland some years ago. The reason why Her Majesty’s Government had to intervene with soldiers, and so on—it was tragic—was not to take sides in the dispute, it was to protect young children, who do not have the same robustness as an older person and should not feel scared on their way to or back from school. I would take that view whether or not the protest by adults from outside the school community was one with which I agreed—about the climate catastrophe or whatever else it happened to be.

It is so important at this stage in the evening, before we get to the next group, to introduce the concept of the two-way street in relation to free speech. So I support my noble friend Lord Coaker in the thrust of his amendment, about schools being special—particularly primary schools, but possibly also secondary schools; that will be up for more detailed discussion—and needing some level of protection from whatever kind of protest by people from outside the school community.

I add that caveat because I think children should be able to protest themselves if they want to. I would not want inadvertently to do anything that caused criminal sanction for children and young people who chose to launch their own protest about whatever it was.

I see this very much as a probing amendment, but the status quo, whereby we have these protections as legislators in the vicinity around the Palace of Westminster —and companies have greater protections from pickets than primary school children have from aggressive demonstrations from whatever quarter—does not seem right. Human rights principles are: always protect children first, and any interference then has to be necessary and proportionate. But equal treatment and the two-way street, particularly in relation to freedom of speech and the right to protest, are crucial.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who moved the amendment, which is about the need for fast-track exclusion zones around schools to prevent, in particular, anti-vaccination protests in the vicinity of schools.

If she will allow me, I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, I think after we finished on Monday night, how important it is to have her voice in the Chamber to test these sorts of issues. All I would say to her on this occasion is that the amendment talks about “activities carried on” that have

“a detrimental effect on the quality of life for pupils and staff”.

So it is not simply a question of banning any demonstration in the vicinity of a school. It would have to have that detrimental effect. I understand that that is a subjective judgment, but at least there is something there, rather than just a blanket ban on anybody protesting about anything at all.

Noble Lords will not need me to tell them that this is not about protecting children, perhaps older school-age children, from not being vaccinated. It is about protecting the whole community because, as we know from previous times in the pandemic, there is a risk of schoolchildren infecting vulnerable parents and grandparents. We also know from the health data that being double-vaccinated does not necessarily protect you completely from the worst effects of Covid, and in particular long Covid, although it gives you much better protection. On the news yesterday, an expert was talking about the fact that, although Covid has mild effects on children, it is not known how much they could be affected by long Covid. So this is not simply about a demonstration outside a school; this is a wider public health issue. However, I understand that, although that is what the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is aiming at here, the amendment, if passed, would have wider implications than just for anti-vaccination protests.

Amendment 292S, from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, relates to online racism against footballers and enabling football banning orders to be made against those guilty of online racial hatred directed at a member of a football team. He is probably the best-qualified noble Lord to talk on this issue, bearing in mind his experience on the Front Bench in the Home Office under the Labour Government who introduced the banning orders in the first place, and the beneficial effect that they have had in rooting out racism in football. It is a serious problem.

Talking about a hierarchy of diversity is fraught with danger. But, as a gay man, I have always considered racism to be a far more serious issue than, say, homophobia. Some people might argue against this; but I could conceal my sexuality if people from a different planet did not know who I was or what my background was. But you cannot hide your colour; you cannot avoid racism in the way that some gay people, at least, could avoid homophobia; it would not be obvious to people.

I do not know of any professional footballers who have been open about their sexuality, because of their concerns about being open about it. Hopefully, as years go by and social attitudes change, some professional footballers will be open about their sexuality. They should be able to benefit from similar protection, so this legislation should not exclusively provide protection for racism, which is the major issue at the moment, while professional footballers’ sexuality is not. This is a good idea, and hopefully the Government will discuss how this can be taken forward.

This group is diverse—not in the sense of “diversity,” but in terms of the different subjects covered. Amendment 292U, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, highlights a loophole in the law. My understanding—although I am not sure as there was no explanatory note—is that it is unlawful for scrap metal dealers to pay cash for scrap metal, but it is not against the law to sell it on for cash. That is the loophole. A scrap metal dealer who surreptitiously acquires stolen metal could sell it on for cash, and the noble Lord’s amendment would disallow that. The payment would have to be made by a traceable means, thus clamping down in the other side of the transaction, which makes sense.

We have debated the issue of scrap metal and the impact on the railway system and churches, for example, and the problem with catalytic converters. As shortages of resources are exacerbated by countries coming out of lockdown and the demand for raw materials grows, scrap metal will become an increasingly important issue. Therefore, closing this loophole regarding the other side of the transaction seems sensible, and we support it.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for taking part in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker asked if I could shed any light on the grouping methodology. No, I cannot, but I salute the collegiate nature of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for explaining what he describes as a probing amendment to tackle the issue of disruptive anti-vaccination protests outside schools. Like him, I stand by people’s right to protest, but as I am sure we will debate when we get to Part 3 of the Bill, this is not an unqualified right, and there is a line to be drawn. When crossed, it is right that the police or, in this case, local authorities should be able to take appropriate and proportionate action to protect schoolchildren and their parents, as well as teachers and other school staff.

The police and local authorities have a range of powers which can be used to manage protest activity affecting schools. This includes powers in the Public Order Act 1986 to manage protests, measures in the Education Act 1996 to prevent nuisance and disturbances on school premises, and measures in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014—as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker—targeted at anti-social behaviour. The police also have their common law powers to prevent a breach of the peace.

Despite prominent media reporting, the scale of the issue is quite small. I concur with the noble Lord’s statistics, which I have seen. The issue has affected 68 schools in the various geographies he talked about, and the number of protesters ranges from one to about 20. But the statistics do not add any colour to the human experience people are suffering, so I take the noble Lord’s point.

These people typically hand out leaflets and display placards, with some serving “liability notices” or “cease and desist” letters to head teachers. The Government continue to closely monitor anti-vaccination activity occurring at schools. There is close working between the vaccine programme, the police, local authorities and other partners to gather intelligence and provide proportionate mitigations to keep people safe.

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we are now on to arguably the most controversial aspect of the Bill—the public order measures. The debate began at 8.30 pm and is made even more controversial by the Government tabling more than 18 pages of new amendments last week, creating new offences and draconian new powers for the police that the other place was not even aware of when it passed the Bill. Not only that, but debate has been concertinaed into one day, on both the existing and the new measures, and, with the collusion of the Official Opposition, the vital two-week gap between Committee and Report is being shortened, further curtailing proper scrutiny. This Government are behaving unacceptably and Labour are letting them get away with it. Of course, I make no criticism of my hard-working and conscientious comrades on the Labour Front Bench, nor indeed of the government Ministers on the Bill, who will no doubt say they are just following orders; the criticism is of the usual channels.

I am speaking on every group today, bar one, so I have been unable to eat or have a proper break; it is a bit like being back on the Job—with a capital J, for the benefit of Hansard. No wonder observers think I look knackered, to use the words of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs.

As other noble Lords have said, this legislation should be a separate Bill because of the many fundamental issues around people’s human rights. I said last week that my comments on serious violence reduction orders were the longest I had made in eight years in the House. I am going to exceed that, and I will explain why—it will become clear.

It was gone midnight on another day of Committee when the Minister said four times that he would keep his remarks short because of the lateness of the hour. My response was that the Bill needs to be properly scrutinised and I do not care what time of night it is. I promise not to speak for more than two minutes on each amendment in this group, so, if noble Lords will give me 54 minutes, that should be enough.

For the information of the Committee, I was involved in public order policing throughout my policing career. I was deployed at Notting Hill Carnival in various roles for seven consecutive years—I can still hear—and at the Grunwick trade dispute, and the Lewisham, Southall and Brixton riots, as a senior officer, as the officer in overall command, and as gold commander at numerous events, having been selected and trained and regularly retrained to maintain my position in the small cadre of advanced trained senior officers in public order policing. This involved practical exercises, in riot gear, with commanding officers, and involved missiles and petrol bombs, as well as weekend table-top exercises with people from the media and community groups, looking at the practical consequences of banning or imposing conditions on protests.

I was, however, fortunate to spend time away from operational policing, being sponsored to undertake a full-time degree course during the miners’ strike, in which I took no part, other than to give money to support miners’ families. I think it is important that the House understands where I am coming from. I am also grateful to Liberty for its briefing.

I start with Amendment 293, in the name of the noble Lord, Lords Dubs, which I have signed. Not only is the right to protest a human right enshrined in the Human Rights Act but it is a right that British people have had for centuries. The police have recent history that is relevant here. Up to and including the early 2000s, the police had been taking an increasingly hard line with protestors, frequently using techniques such as kettling—which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, mentioned—where protestors, and many innocent bystanders, were contained in a small area and not allowed to leave except in groups of two of three, sometimes requiring those leaving to be photographed and to give their names and addresses.

As a result of violent incidents in 2009 at the G20 London summit protests, the Independent Police Complaints Commission concluded that the Metropolitan Police should review its crowd-control methods, including kettling. As a result, the Metropolitan Police, for a while at least, changed emphasis, stating that the police role was to facilitate peaceful protest, and, interestingly, putting women senior officers in charge of some of the most controversial protests. This amendment is an important reminder of the recent history of policing protest in this country, and the dangers of the emphasis being placed on controlling protest rather than facilitating protest.

It is also important to comment on the origins of this legislation in connection with this amendment. The Home Secretary asked Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services to look specifically at whether new legislation, further offences and stronger police powers were necessary. Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Matt Parr, a retired Royal Navy rear admiral, conducted the review.

I read the report with interest because, as the Guardian reported on 31 March this year:

“The official policing inspectorate showed repeated bias in favour of the police and against peaceful protesters as it compiled a report which backed a government clampdown, a whistleblower has alleged.”


The allegations were that HMICFRS wrote to the Home Secretary five months before the report was published, saying that it backed the need to change the laws. The Home Secretary replied—again, I quote the Guardian:

“Protests have proved a significant challenge over the last year and I am keen to ensure that the police have the powers and capabilities they need to help address the disruption they face. Your findings will help me to do that.”


The whistleblower, who had worked for HMIC for more than five years, said:

“The purpose of the report was not to collect evidence and then make a decision, but rather to collect evidence to support the decision that had already been made”.


I have read that report. I have also read the report into the Sarah Everard Clapham Common vigil by the same author. I agree with the whistleblower that the contents of both reports do not match the conclusions.

Almost all police forces outside London said that the limiting factor on policing protest was the number of police officers available to enforce existing laws, not a lack of legislation. Indeed, as we will see—yes, I am only just getting started—despite what the Government say, these proposals are based on a false premise. The Police Federation, which represents 130,00 front-line police officers, was not even consulted about these proposals. In my discussions with the federation, it is, to say the least—and to use a word that has been popular this evening—uneasy about them.

Amendments 294, 295, 299, 300, 303, 305 and 306 refer to new powers to control protests on the basis of them being too noisy, marking a significant expansion of police powers. As other noble Lords have said, protests are by their nature noisy, and threatening to curtail or close down protests because they are noisy is threatening to close down protest full stop. HMICFRS did not comment on the noise proposals in its report. Again, noble Lords are being asked to sign off on open-ended legislation because these half-baked proposals have to relegate important aspects of the proposed legislation to regulations that this House will not see until after the Bill receives Royal Assent.

Amendments 297 and 307 from my noble friend Lord Beith probe what “unease” means. The Joint Committee on Human Rights goes further, saying that it places too much into the hands of the police officer at the scene and that

“What one person considers to be noise sufficiently ‘intense’ to be likely to cause ‘serious unease, alarm or distress’ may be very different to what another person would believe meets this threshold.”


Amendment 302 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, rightly seeks to limit the conditions that can be imposed on an assembly for the reasons why they were restricted when the original legislation was debated. On 13 January 1986, in the House of Commons, the then Conservative Home Secretary said:

“We stopped short of a power to ban because we believed that that would be an excessive limit on the right of assembly and freedom of speech. For this reason, clause 14 does not permit the police to impose conditions changing the date and time of an assembly.”—[Official Report, Commons, 13/1/1986; col. 797.]


We think that Lord Hurd of Westwell was right.

We support all the amendments in this group but, to continue, Amendments 309 to 312 refer to disobeying conditions imposed on protests by the police. Not for the first time in the Bill, the hideous phrases “ought to know” and “ought to have known” appear. I understand that in the past some protesters have put their fingers in their ears or made a lot of noise so that they could not hear what conditions the police were imposing on them, but Amendments 309, 310 and 312 contain the much-preferred wording

“deliberately or recklessly avoided gaining knowledge that the condition has been imposed”.

Amendment 311 removes the increased penalties for disobeying conditions; we agree that non-violent civil disobedience should not face harsher penalties.

I stand alone with Amendment 318, requiring the most senior police officer present at a one-person protest who wants to close it down to hold at least the rank of inspector. It is a rank of officer who is on duty and available in every police area 24/7. It is a serious claim to make, that the decision on the level of noise or disruption caused by a solitary individual peacefully protesting should not be made by a police officer, no matter how junior. In fact, we do not believe that one-person protests should be subject to any conditions and we oppose Clause 61 standing part of the Bill.

I will talk now about the impact of these proposals on the police, in terms of both resources and public trust and confidence in them. In so doing, I will address my Amendments 296 and 301. The first thing to say, from my professional experience, is that the more conditions the police impose on a protest, the more police officers are needed and the more likely those conditions are to be resisted. Taking the point of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, it is not right that lots of police resources should be taken from the suburbs of London, for example, to police protests in central London, but the more conditions you impose, the more police officers you will have to take from the suburbs to police that demonstration.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I think the noble Lord will agree that the number of officers put into an event is usually down to intelligence about the nature of the event, which leads to the conditions, which then leads to the numbers. I am not sure it is down to the conditions; in my view, the conditions are always subject to the character of the protest.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I understand what the noble Lord is saying, and I shall develop my argument further.

I have referred to away-weekend table-top exercises that I attended as part of keeping my “certificate to practise”, if you will, my continuing professional development as an advanced trained public order senior officer. We were told the maximum number of police officers, horses and so forth that were available to us and we were often presented with scenarios where the level of disorder anticipated led one to contemplate banning the protest entirely or imposing severe conditions. We were divided into syndicates which separately presented their proposals for dealing with the scenario. Invariably, syndicates that advocated an outright ban or severe conditions found that they ran out of resources to implement the plan. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, has benefited from this sort of advanced public order training, but that is my experience. He has his experience, and I have mine.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

I am not quite sure of the noble Lord’s point. I go back to my original point: the nature of the intelligence tells you what the event is going to be, which drives the conditions and the number of officers. Nothing he has said has changed my view.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, a peaceful protest with no anticipated violent infiltrators and an agreed route, however large, can be policed with a minimum number of police officers, a lot of traffic cones and miles of white tape. Imposing conditions that the organisers are resisting is likely to require double to five times as many police officers, as confrontation must be anticipated and the conditions imposed by force if required, such as a march wanting to take a different route.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

The noble and learned Lord is exactly right about this constitutional problem, but there is a further point to be made. In this context, it is not just the usual problem of allegedly unclear legislation that is then going to be sorted out by regulation later, and the relationship between the Executive and the legislature not as it should be. It is also in danger of interfering with police operational independence. To be explicit about this, my fear is that the police will take whatever view they take of what this legislation means in certain circumstances and do their best—and if a Home Secretary of the day, even well into the future, thinks that the police are being too lenient towards protesters, or perhaps there is a commotion in the media, regulations will be used further to define what “serious” and “disruption” mean so as to mandate the police effectively to be more heavy-handed than the natural meaning of the words would suggest.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I can be relatively brief. Do not worry—it is a temporary blip.

Amendments 298, 308 and 319 question “serious disruption” being decided by the Secretary of State rather than being either defined in the Bill, as my noble friend Lord Beith proposes, or simply left to its natural meaning, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, suggests in his Amendment 308.

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, as we have heard, this group contains two completely different issues: protection of the routes around Parliament and potential places where Parliament may sit while renovation work is undertaken; and the new statutory offence of public nuisance. How putting these two issues into one group is supposed to save time, I have no idea.

Clause 58 is about the obstruction of vehicular access to Parliament. Noble Lords, particularly those with mobility issues, have had difficulty accessing Parliament, particularly during Extinction Rebellion demonstrations, although I would not describe the Prime Minister being hindered from attending Prime Minister’s Questions in September 2020 as someone with mobility issues, unless you are talking about levelling up. It is a bit late for subtle jokes like that.

These provisions go much further. They expand obstruction to include

“making the passage of a vehicle more difficult.”

Presumably, any delay caused, even slow-moving traffic, would be covered by such an offence, and this could potentially criminalise any protest within the expanded controlled zone outlined in these proposals. Protests that have resulted in Members of Parliament being prevented from accessing Parliament have been few and far between, which suggests that the existing provisions are adequate. Clause 58 is unnecessary.

Clause 59 allows the Secretary of State to move the controlled area in the event of either House of Parliament being relocated because of building works under the restoration and renewal programme. This enables the Secretary of State to impose restrictions on protest to whatever area she thinks fit, however wide, by regulations. Parliament has no chance to question or vary the extent of the controlled area; it must either accept or reject the proposal made by the Secretary of State. The clause also gives the Secretary of State power to

“make provision for any other enactment, or any instrument made under an enactment, to have effect with modifications in consequence of regulations”

under this provision. This is too much power given in regulations to the Secretary of State, who could effectively ban protest almost anywhere within a wide area around any place where Parliament may be relocated to. Clause 59 is too broad and should not stand part of the Bill in its current form.

Parliament is at the heart of democracy in this country, but what about other institutions and organisations that are also important to the democratic process? What about news broadcasters or print journalists who hold politicians generally, and the Government in particular, to account? Where is the protection from protests aimed at disrupting a free media, such as the blockading or invading of television news and radio studios and newspaper printworks? This looks very much like protecting the Government and Government Ministers while doing nothing to protect those who hold the Government and Government Ministers to account.

Clause 60 creates a new statutory offence of public nuisance, as recommended by the Law Commission, but the provision appears to be far too wide and could potentially impact on all protests. Liberty’s briefing quotes Lord Justice Laws, who said in the case of Tabernacle v the Secretary of State for Defence in 2009:

“Rights worth having are unruly things. Demonstrations and protests are liable to be a nuisance. They are liable to be inconvenient and tiresome, or at least perceived as such by others who are out of sympathy with them.”


If someone is seriously annoyed or inconvenienced, or is put at risk of being seriously annoyed or inconvenienced, by someone doing something, that person commits an offence if they intend to seriously annoy or inconvenience the public or a section of the public.

Almost every protest could be criminalised by this provision, and not just public protests on the streets, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has said. Are the Government a “section of the public”? If they are, take me away now. As a minority party in this House, we are, very often, unable to change what the Government plan to do, but we can seriously annoy the Government by pointing out the error of their ways and by holding them to account for their actions. Even if we do not have the intention of doing the Government serious harm—maybe—we may be at least reckless as to what harm it causes. Are we too to be criminalised by this provision, however much some noble Lords might like us to be?

The Government will point to the “reasonable excuse” defence contained in the provisions, but that applies only once a person has been charged with an offence under these provisions. The provisions do not say that a person commits an offence if, without reasonable excuse, the person does an act. Therefore, the police would be justified in arresting and charging people who believed that they had a reasonable excuse because the reasonable excuse provision applies only once a person has been charged.

We oppose in its entirety this provision as drafted, but we have Amendment 314, which removes the obstruction of

“a section of the public in their exercise of a right that may be exercised or enjoyed by the public at large”

from these provisions, to at least narrow the extent of this proposed new offence. A counterdemonstration against a far-right group, for example, would be caught by the provisions of this new offence as drafted, but not as we suggest that it should be amended. We support Amendment 315, as far as it goes, in attempting to ensure that the serious harm applies not just to one person but must be caused to the public, further limiting the extent of the offence.

We also support Amendment 315A tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Morrissey, to leave out serious harm to a person if, as a result, the person suffers disease. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, has said, we saw during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly with the attempt the ban the vigil for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common, restrictions on protest on public health grounds. That is why the police intervened in the Sarah Everard vigil. They felt that there was a public health risk. Although the provisions under which the Sarah Everard vigil was done have been repealed, this appears to be an attempt to reintroduce them. As drafted, it matters not whether the protesters intend to spread disease. They must only be reckless as to whether it would have such a consequence.

We also support Amendment 316—again, as far as it goes—but we would prefer there to be a reasonable excuse provision added to the offence itself, as I have said before, rather than protesters, for example, having to raise their reasonable excuse in court. People such as protesters, who have a reasonable excuse, should not be arrested in the first place. They should not be charged, and they should not have to appear in court. With respect to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, I am sure that his amendment is right, but I am not sure that it is necessary. However, I am sure that the Minister will enlighten us.

This clause needs to be withdrawn and thought through again.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate on Clauses 58 to 60. These three clauses will help ensure unimpeded vehicular access to Parliament and implement the Law Commission’s recommendation to codify in statute the common-law offence of public nuisance.

The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, mentioned pressure from “wherever” regarding Clause 58. In fact, the clause gives effect to a recommendation by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which Harriet Harman is chair, to protect the right of access to the Parliamentary Estate for those with business there, including, of course, Members of your Lordships’ House. The clause amends the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 to allow a police officer to direct an individual to cease, or not begin, obstructing vehicular access to the Parliamentary Estate. If a person does not comply with a direction, they will be committing an offence and may be arrested. Currently, parliamentarians and others conducting business in the Palace can face delays in entering and leaving Parliament via vehicular entrances, both impeding the functioning of our democracy and creating a security risk, with vehicles held stationary while police clear the way.

I should stress at this point that this power does not stop people protesting in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. Those who want to protest outside Parliament can continue to do so but, if asked by a police officer, must allow the passage of vehicles through the Palace’s gates or face the consequences.

Should Parliament need to relocate for any reason, such as the ongoing restoration and renewal works, Clause 59 provides the Home Secretary with the power to designate a new controlled area around Parliament’s new temporary location. This would ensure that the protections afforded by the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, as amended by this Bill, applied wherever Parliament relocated to.

Clause 60 implements the Law Commission’s recommendation that the common-law offence of public nuisance should be codified in statute. We heard last week calls for the Government to be more diligent in implementing Law Commission recommendations, so I hope noble Lords will support and welcome this measure. Putting the long-standing common-law offence of public nuisance into statute will provide clarity to the police and potential offenders, giving clear notice of what conduct is forbidden.

We have followed the Law Commission’s recommendation as closely as possible. In doing so, we are narrowing the scope of the existing common-law offence. That is being achieved by retaining the use of the terms “distress”, “annoyance”, “inconvenience” and “loss of amenity” within scope of the offence but by requiring that these harms be “serious”. We are also increasing the fault element of the offence. Currently, a person would be guilty through negligence; under the new offence, that is raised to intent or recklessness. Finally, we have made it a defence for a person to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for their act or omission that caused a public nuisance.

The Law Commission’s report stated that as the offence is intended to address serious cases for which other offences are not adequate, if a maximum sentence is set then it should be high enough to cover these cases. We have therefore set the maximum custodial sentence at 10 years. It is worth noting that that is lower than the current unlimited maximum sentence available under the common-law offence.

I turn to the amendments tabled to Clause 60, beginning with Amendment 314 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. As the clause is currently drafted, the offence is committed if a person’s act or omission causes serious harm to the public or a section of the public, or obstructs the public in the exercise or enjoyment of their rights. The amendment would limit the scope of the offence to only where serious harm is caused to the public. That would significantly narrow the scope of the offence. Most forms of public nuisance will, by their nature, impact on only a section of the public rather than the public generally.

However, I believe it is right that the offence be committed if it affects a section of the public. It is a fundamental part of the common-law offence of public nuisance that not every member of the public need be affected but a section of the public must be. Similarly, the offence should include where the rights of the public are infringed; the Law Commission concluded it is right to do so. For example, the effect of excessive and persistent noise or the release of a foul-smelling substance or gas in a public place may affect only a small number of local residents but potentially affects any member of the public who enters the relevant area.

Amendment 315 flows from a JCHR recommendation that aims to clarify that this offence is not committed if serious harm is caused to a person. That would be achieved by removing the word “person” from the definition of “serious harm”. I understand that the noble Lord is trying to clear up ambiguity as to whether an offence of public nuisance can be committed to a person, but I remain to be persuaded that the amendment is strictly necessary. Subsection (1) of the clause already sets out that the offence of public nuisance can be committed only against the public or a section of the public, with the references to persons in the definition of “serious harm” being an interpretive provision that does not affect the scope of the offence. That said, I am ready to consider this point further ahead of the next stage.

The amendment would also raise the threshold at which the offence is committed where an individual put the public at risk of serious harm. The amendment would raise that to “serious” risk of serious harm. We have followed the Law Commission’s recommendations in setting the scope of the offence and the thresholds at which it will be committed. The commission conducted a rigorous consultation on the offence, and it is right that, in this instance, we follow the recommendations set out in the report.

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Moved by

[Lord Paddick]

319AA: In Amendment 319A, in subsection (1)(b), leave out “or is capable of causing”
Member’s explanatory statement
This would limit the offence to an act that causes serious disruption.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we now come to the most controversial part of the Bill: the Government’s new public order amendments. They have not been debated before in either House—and this debate started at 11.49 pm. Is this any way to conduct legislation?

I have amendments 319AA, 319AB, 319AC, 319BA, 319BB, 319BC, 319DA, 319DB, 319DC, 319L, 319M, 319N, 319P, 319Q, 319R, 319S, 319T and 319U in this group, all of which are, of course, amendments to the Government’s amendments. If I took just two minutes for each of those amendments, that would be 36 minutes. I will speak to each of the government amendments in turn; I will then add what Liberty has said to noble Lords in its excellent briefing on each amendment. I will then outline our proposed amendments to each government amendment in turn. We oppose all the Government’s amendments.

Government Amendment 319A concerns locking on. I have to ask: how much of a problem is this? Yes, it is inconvenient and annoying but it is temporary, and the police are becoming quite accomplished at unsticking. The amendment includes the phrase

“causes, or capable of causing, serious disruption”

so there does not even need to be serious disruption for this offence to be committed. It refers to serious disruption to two or more people or an organisation. Is a counterdemonstration to stop Holocaust deniers marching past a synagogue, or an Islamophobic organisation marching past a mosque, causing serious disruption to two or more people or an organisation? What does “capable of causing” mean? If it were on a different road or at a different time, it would be capable of causing serious disruption. But if it is 3 am on a Sunday, is that still capable of causing serious disruption? It is difficult to say because “serious disruption” will be defined by the Secretary of State in regulations only after the Bill has received Royal Assent.

Amnesty has talked about case law having established that protestors have a right to choose the manner of conduct of their protest. That is an important aspect of freedom of assembly. I too will quote from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, which said that “most interviewees”—junior police officers—

“did not wish to criminalise protest actions through the creation of a specific offence concerning locking-on.”

Can the Minister explain why the Government have gone against what the police want where this is concerned?

Our Amendment 319AA would leave out “is capable of causing” so that the offence applies only if there actually is serious disruption. Amendment 319AB leaves out

“or are reckless as to whether it will have such a consequence”,

so that there must be an intent to cause serious disruption, while Amendment 319AC’s insertion of

“not exceeding level 2 on the standard scale”

is to probe whether an unlimited fine is proportionate to this offence.

Government Amendment 319B concerns going equipped to lock on. “Going equipped” offences have always been difficult as they often involve innocent articles where the intent has to be proved. You could buy a tube of superglue to repair a broken chair at home, then get caught up in a protest and be accused of going equipped for locking on, for example. Amnesty’s briefing asks, in relation to

“in the course of or in connection with”,

whether having a megaphone that might be used to shout encouragement to those intending to lock on is going equipped with something for use “in connection with” locking on. How broad is this offence?

Our Amendment 319BA would leave out “in connection with” to probe how broad that phrase is. I hope the Minister will be able to explain. Our Amendment 319BB would

“leave out ‘any person’ and insert ‘them’”

so that the offence applies only if the person carrying the equipment intends to lock on, while our Amendment 319BC is to probe whether an unlimited fine is proportionate.

Government Amendment 319C contains an increased penalty for highway obstruction. As the Minister mentioned, it does not matter if the road is already blocked. This is sentence inflation again—more people in prison for non-violent offences. The current offence involves only a fine. I can understand that the Government might want to lock people up, but sit-down protests are an important part of freedom of expression and assembly. The chilling effect if people fear being sent to prison will be considerable.

Government Amendment 319D is about the obstruction of major transport works. This is a blatant and direct attack on climate change protesters, covering such projects as HS2, with its impact on biodiversity; new roads, which will create more traffic; and new airport runways, such as the third runway at Heathrow. So when the Prime Minister carries out his promise to lay down in front of the bulldozers, he will be committing this offence. Amnesty questions whether construction workers picketing such sites would be committing an offence. Could the noble Baroness say whether this would apply to them?

Our Amendment 319DA would remove an undertaker

“taking … steps that are reasonably necessary for the purposes of facilitating, or in connection with, the construction or maintenance of any major transport works”,

because we feel that this is far too broad. Amendment 319DB would remove interfering with or moving apparatus, again because we think this offence is far too broad. Our Amendment 319DC probes whether an unlimited fine is proportionate for such an offence.

Government Amendment 319E provides the police the power to stop and search for anything made, adapted or intended for use in the course of or in connection with highway obstruction, public nuisance, locking on or the transport infrastructure offence. This is a massive expansion of an already contentious power—the power of the police to stop and search—at a time when trust and confidence in the police is low. It would apply the power to a whole range of new offences, providing the police with a whole new range of excuses to stop and search people. This power would allegedly be on the basis of reasonable suspicion, but other stop and search powers exercised on this basis result in the police allegedly “reasonably suspecting” black people eight times more than white people. The police did not ask for this power, and some do not want it, so why are the Government doing this?

Amnesty quotes the report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, which says:

“Some of the most intrusive and contentious … powers are those that allow the police to use force and to stop and search people.”


Police suggested 19 new powers they wanted in connection with policing protests, and this was not one of them. One police officer told HMICFRS that

“a little inconvenience is more acceptable than a police state”,

and HMIC agreed with the sentiment. This amendment could result in black and other minority ethnic people being deterred from protesting, and police could seize banners, placards and all sorts of legitimate props used in protests.

Government Amendment 319F would provide the power to stop and search without suspicion. We have already proposed the removal of the last remaining stop and search power without suspicion, Section 60 of the Public Order Act. Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, another suspicionless stop and search power, has already been repealed, and Section 60 needs to follow. When we debated an amendment to a previous part of the Bill, we set out comprehensively why stop and search without suspicion should not be exercised for anything, as it is hugely damaging to police-community relations and ineffective. Disproportionality increases—from being eight times to 18 times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black—and only one in 100 searches under Section 60 resulted in a weapon being found, the purpose for which it is now being used by the police. Objects can be seized, retained and disposed of, as set out in regulations. We have only just seen the proposed primary legislation, let alone the regulations. We cannot think of any useful amendments to this provision; we simply oppose these powers being included in the Bill.

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That is very serious and I am sure the Minister will have thought about it and seen the report, by this stage. I am concerned to know what she has to say about it. I regard this new material as being inappropriately introduced to the Bill at far too late a stage and very dangerous.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise. I forgot to speak to five more amendments: Amendments 319Q, 319R, 319S, 319T and 319U, which remove the ability for SDPOs to be renewed.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be brief and not repeat the valid and chilling points that have already been made. I just say this: for me to even attempt a line-by-line examination of this whole suite of new amendments would result in not just the Leader coming in to censor me again, but me probably being arrested. I am not going to do that, but I will try to say two things that noble Lords have not said yet.

On locking on and in particular going equipped for locking on, and stop and search with or without suspicion of locking on, I am worried not about the glue referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but about people with bicycle locks. I am worried about young people going about their business, sometimes riding to a demonstration or being in the vicinity of potential demonstrations, carrying bicycle locks. I cannot see how they are not potentially in jeopardy, en masse, of both the stop and search powers, and going equipped.

Secondly, as a former Home Office lawyer and a director of Liberty, to me, this suite of measures, which could be a Bill in itself, looks, smells and tastes a lot like anti-terror legislation of the kind that I have always opposed as being disproportionate and counterproductive. Whether it is the new orders, the stop and search powers, including suspicion, or offences including thought crimes, this new Bill within a Bill looks like some of the anti-terror powers that, when they were introduced, noble Lords opposite and elsewhere, and I and some of my noble friends—forgive me, I hope—looked the other way. Those powers have inspired what we see here, but this time they are not for terrorists but protesters.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

They are civil orders; they are preventive measures.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

If I can assist the House, the first amendment moved in the group was that of the noble Baroness, not mine.

Amendment 319AA (to Amendment 319A) withdrawn.

Emergency Services: Ministers of Religion

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I will certainly take my noble friend’s point back. I know the College of Policing welcomes engagement with faith community leaders and others who have concerns about the current authorised professional practice to understand views and consider possible next steps for this issue.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, surely there is a difference between the perpetrator sitting at the scene of a stabbing waiting to be arrested and an explosion where forensic recovery is essential. Can the Minister not bring together faith and police leaders nationally to discuss the potential use of discretion, in appropriate cases?

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, changing the subject, the Data Protection Act 2018, reflecting the GDPR, in Section 14 provides that “decisions based solely”— solely—“on automated processing” are “subject to safeguards.” Such a decision

“produces legal effects concerning the data subject, or … similarly significantly affects the data subject.”

The decisions are subject to safeguards under the Act, notification of the data subject and the right of the data subject to request reconsideration or, importantly, a new decision not based on automated processing. Noble Lords will appreciate the potential importance of decisions affecting liberty and that the use of artificial intelligence may well involve profiling, which does not have an unblemished record.

This amendment would alter the term “solely,” because “solely” could mean one click on a programme. The term “significantly”, proposed in the amendment, is not the best, but I think it will serve the purpose for this evening. I do not claim that this is the best way to achieve my objective, but I did not want to let the moment pass. The Justice and Home Affairs Committee —I am not speaking as its chair—has had this issue raised a number of times. The Information Commissioner is one who has raised the issue. Elizabeth Denham, before she left the office, said it should not just be a matter of box-ticking. The guidance of the Information Commissioner’s Office provides that there should be the following three considerations:

“Human reviewers must be involved in checking the system’s recommendation and should not just apply the automated recommendation to an individual in a routine fashion; reviewers’ involvement must be active and not just a token gesture. They should have actual ‘meaningful’ influence on the decision, including the ‘authority and competence’ to go against the recommendation; and reviewers must ‘weigh-up’ and ‘interpret’ the recommendation, consider all available input data, and also take into account other additional factors.”


The Minister will, I am sure, refer to the current government consultation on data, Data: A New Direction, published in September. We dealt with this issue by putting the amendment down before then but, even so, the consultation questions the operation and efficacy of the Article 22 of the GDPR, which, as I said, is the basis for Section 14. I appreciate that the consultation will have to run its course but, looking at it, the Government seem very focused on the economic benefits of the use of data and supportive of innovation.

Of course, I do not take issue with either of those things, but it is important not to lose sight of how the use of data may disadvantage or damage an individual. Its use in policing and criminal justice can affect an individual who may well not understand how it is being used, or even that it has been used. I was going to say that whether those who use it understand it is another matter but, actually, it is fundamental. Training is a big issue in this, as is, in the case of the police, the seniority and experience of the officer who needs to be able to interpret and challenge what comes out of an algorithm. There is a human tendency to think that a machine must be right. It may be, but meaningful decisions require human thought more than an automatic, routine confirmation of what a machine tells us.

The government consultation makes it clear that the Government are seeking evidence on the potential need for legislative reform. I think that reform of Section 14 is needed. AI is so often black-box and impenetrable; even if it can be interrogated on how a decision has been arrived at, the practicalities and costs of that are substantial. For instance, it should be straightforward for someone accused of something to understand how the accusation came to be made. It is a matter of both the individual’s rights and trust and confidence in policing and criminal justice on the part of the public. The amendment would extend the information to be provided to the data subject to include

“information … regarding the operation of the automated processing and the basis of the decision”.

It also states that this should not be “limited by commercial confidentiality”; I think noble Lords will be familiar with how openness can run up against this.

Recently, the Home Secretary told the Justice and Home Affairs Committee twice that

“decisions about people will always be made by people.”

The legislation should reflect and require the spirit of that. A click of a button on a screen may technically mean that the decision has a human element, but it is not what most people would understand or expect. I beg to move.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, with the leave of the Committee, I will speak briefly. In my comments on the previous group on which I spoke—the one beginning with Amendment 278—I did not mean to suggest that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, was filibustering. I tried to inject a little humour into proceedings, bearing in mind the wide range of issues that we discussed in the debate on that group and the length of that debate. I joked that it was beginning to look like a filibuster. I have apologised to the noble Lord but I wanted to include that apology in the official record.

We support this important amendment. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, Section 14 of the Data Protection Act 2018 provides some safeguards against important decisions being taken by automated processing. It allows a human review on appeal with the subject having been told, but only if the decision was “solely” taken automatically, rather than “significantly”, as my noble friend’s amendment suggests. Experience in the American criminal justice system of using algorithms shows that bias in historical decisions is replicated, even enhanced, by algorithms. We therefore support this amendment.

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

As has been said, Article 22 of the general data protection regulation provides that a person has

“the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.”

It also provides that there is an exemption to this if the automated decision-making is explicitly provided in law. Section 14 of the Data Protection Act 2018 provides, as has been said, some safeguards based on Article 22 for cases where the law allows automated decision-making on things that may have a significant effect on a person. It provides that where a significant decision is made by automated means, the subject may request that the decision is retaken with human oversight. The section currently provides protections for a decision taken, as has once again been said, “solely” by automated means. The amendment would extend this provision to decisions taken solely “or significantly” by automated means.

The issue of automated decision-making will become, and indeed is becoming, increasingly prevalent in our lives—a point made by all sides during the passage of the 2018 Act, when we tried to add far stronger safeguards to the then Bill to prevent decisions that engaged an individual’s human rights being decided by automated means. On that basis, I am certainly interested in the points raised to extend the right of appeal to decisions that are based “significantly” on automated processing.

Finally, it is potentially concerning that the Government are currently consulting on removing Article 22 of the GDPR and the associated protections from UK law altogether. I believe that consultation closed last week. Can the Government give an indication of when we can expect their response?

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[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, that was one of the most powerful statements I have heard in this House, coming from someone who knows what it is like to suffer. It is a horrible tragedy that the Amess family have suffered. I echo the noble Baroness who introduced the amendment in saying that our thoughts and prayers are with them tonight, and for the repose of Sir David’s soul.

I was not sure that I could add much to this debate, but I gave it some thought and would like to share some personal observations. Thinking about the amendment, I recalled the singing of the hymn, “Abide With Me”. I have heard it sung twice recently: first, when I tuned into a vigil mass celebrated by Canon Pat Browne, the Roman Catholic priest in Parliament, on the eve of Armistice Day, and, again, when I watched the Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall on television. What kept coming into my mind was a line in that hymn:

“Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes.”

Those words express what I believe many people of the Christian faith hope for at the end of life. They emphasise how important it is to receive spiritual comfort.

For Catholics like me, the last rites are an important and spiritual passage, a sacrament, an opportunity for reflection on past failings and for seeking forgiveness and reconciliation. I bear witness from within my own family of the peace experienced by loved ones when they were supported in their faith by a priest administering the last rites.

People of faith, whether Jews, Muslims, Christians or indeed of any other faith belief, desire the spiritual support that their faith can give them at the end of life. More widely, I think that many of my friends who have no faith would always wish to be surrounded by family and friends at the end of that life. Let us ask ourselves: who among us would not hope to leave this life comforted by family and friends or, as in the case promoted in this amendment, by a priest?

I strongly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, who made it clear that this is a probing amendment and the matter does not require legislation. Rather, it requires a little bit of common sense, perhaps education, training and research, so that the blue-light services, especially the police, recognise this matter and treat a request such as the one that has prompted the tabling of this amendment in a way that will allow a minister of religion to be with a dying person at the end.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, for bringing this amendment to the Committee, particularly in such a selfless way in that she said that she was neither a Catholic nor particularly religious. Seeing the arrival of Sir David Amess’s body at the House this evening was very moving, and our thoughts are with his family. I thank the noble Baroness for saying that she was not second-guessing the police officers at the scene of that terrible tragedy, but, as she said, there was a local priest who was not allowed to give the last rites.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds gave a very moving and sensitive speech, and I agree with much of what he said. I should declare an interest both as a Christian but not a Roman Catholic and as a police officer who served for more than 30 years. Religious faith is important to people, but so is bringing offenders to justice, particularly those responsible for offences where fatal injuries or injuries expected to be fatal are inflicted. The contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, was extremely powerful in giving first-hand experience of that tension between the need to preserve evidence in order to convict those responsible and wanting to address the needs of the dying person and their family.

Securing forensic evidence is often vital to the identification and prosecution of offenders, as in the case of Sir David Amess. I agree that there needs to be a meeting of police and religious leaders—not just Roman Catholics—to ensure that both sides understand the needs of the other. Police officers should have a real understanding of the religious needs of people and the religious leaders should understand the needs of the police in these circumstances. As I said this afternoon in Oral Questions, surely there must be a role for government in bringing these two sides together, in facilitating this understanding and in ensuring that, after this understanding has been reached, operational police officers share it and know how to respond in these very difficult situations.

Interestingly, in groups of amendments that are to come, I refer to the valuable lessons from Northern Ireland to which I do not think we are paying enough attention. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, for her remarks.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, what a moving and powerful debate we have had this evening. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and her noble friend will have been moved by it as well. The real challenge that has been presented to the Minister and the Government is how to capture what has been said in this Chamber tonight in relation to the practice that takes place in very difficult and challenging circumstances.

I am not going to rush this, and I am pleased that noble Lords have not rushed this either, as this is too important a debate to be rushed. In speaking to their amendment, the noble Baronesses, Lady Stowell and Lady Masham, spoke in such a way that gave respect to the awfulness of what happened with David Amess. I pay tribute to the noble Baronesses. Out of the horror of that situation, they are trying to make something positive happen in future. We have all been moved by that. The challenge for the Government is how to do something about it.

I say gently to the Minister that the system will respond in a bureaucratic, almost insensitive way, by saying, “It’s really difficult, Minister. It’s very tough to do something about this.” This is one of those situations that requires the system to respond. Human needs to speak to system and make it work, and that is not easy—it really is not.

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, brought her perspective from Northern Ireland. She did incredible work there in trying to ensure that, among the terrorist atrocities, somehow or other there was comfort for the dying and bereaved, as well as the pursuit of justice. That was a beacon in that situation, and they made it happen there. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, talked about the situation in his own family. The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, made a very moving, personal statement about the horror of what happened to her and the tension between trying to comfort the dying while ensuring that the police were allowed to do their work.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, made a brilliant speech. I am not a lawyer so, when I spoke just now, I spoke as a politician who demands that the system works. There are brilliant lawyers on both sides of this Chamber who can dissect the law; that is not me. I say to those with legal expertise, like the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that I may not have that legal expertise, but I know what the public would expect the system and the law to do. I know how they would expect the legal system, the courts and the police to respond, and how they would expect the system to work.

The phrase that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, used was, “Who owns the death?” Who owns it? I will talk about myself because that is easier to do. Maybe I have got this wrong, but my sense is that, if I were attacked in the street and stabbed—God forbid that this happens to any of us, but if it happened to me and I was dying—I would not want a police officer ensuring that the crime scene was not compromised. If my wife, or my children, or my grandparents were nearby, that is who I would want to come. I would not care if the crime scene was compromised; I would not.

I know that that is difficult for the police because the police will want—as, of course, in generality, we would all want—the perpetrator to be caught, put before the courts and dealt with. I am just saying what Vernon Coaker, a human being, would want: I would want my family or my friend, if they were nearby, to be allowed to come and see me and talk to me, in the way that no doubt the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds has had to do on many occasions. I would want them to give me comfort, and to give me a sense that I could say goodbye properly to my loved ones.

I do not know what that means for the law, to be honest, or what it means for the guidance, but I do not believe that it is impossible to learn, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, laid out, from other countries or jurisdictions, or from what is done elsewhere, to find a means of balancing those two priorities in a more sensitive way than perhaps we see at the moment. That is all that this Chamber is asking for—and that is what the Minister needs to demand from the system. The system will say, “It’s tough, it’s difficult. We need to do that, but we have also got to preserve the crime scene.” The Chamber is saying, “Yes, preserve the crime scene; yes, let’s catch the perpetrators, but not at the expense of everything else.” Let it not be at the expense of human beings knowing what is best for themselves—of individuals at the point of death being able to choose who they want to see.

I suggest that the majority of us would want our family with us, even if it meant some compromise to the crime scene. That is what I think and what I believe this Chamber is saying and demanding. The debate has been incredibly moving; people have laid out their souls. They have done it with a sense of purpose, to say to the law and the system: it needs to change; this cannot happen again. If this had happened to somebody else, I believe, as somebody else said, that David Amess would be saying the same as the rest of us. Maybe that is a fitting tribute to him as well.

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There have been positive developments. The Sun reported recently that the Home Secretary is currently planning a new law to crack down on cuckooing. She has recognised that we must act for the sake of the potentially hundreds of victims currently being bullied, coerced and exploited in their own homes. This is a hidden crime quite literally taking place behind closed doors in private homes. It must remain hidden from the law no longer. I beg to move.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, for raising the important issue of cuckooing. This is when criminals, mainly drug dealers, take over the homes of vulnerable people. It is a very serious and not uncommon problem, as the figures cited by the noble Lord gave witness to. I look forward to the Minister explaining why this amendment is not necessary or what alternative the Government propose.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I note the work that the noble Lord, Lord McColl, has done on modern slavery over many years, and thank him for it. It is right for us to acknowledge that in speaking to this amendment.

I want to draw particular attention to the section of the noble Lord’s amendment that covers something that is often not recognised to the degree it should be when it comes to county lines gangs’ operations and the way cuckooing works. Proposed new sub-paragraph (ii) talks about when a person

“is unable to give free and informed consent”.

That is the crucial bit. Too often, people are asked, “Why have you allowed this to happen? Why have you let them take over your property?” It is almost as though they have given their consent. But they are sometimes so frightened that they give their consent because, if they do not, the consequences will be such that they live in fear. Somehow, the law does not seem to recognise that.

Proposed new paragraph (c)(ii) refers to someone being unable to give “free and informed consent”. This is absolutely crucial to stopping the offence of cuckooing. People sometimes appear almost as though they have left a property of their own free will, saying, “Here you are. Come into my property. Use it for drugs and county lines operations.” Then, sometimes—not always, but sometimes—the police say, “Well, what did you do about it? Why didn’t you stop it?” That does not reflect the real world. People are terrified; they are frightened. They are told, “If you don’t let us use your property and get out of it, or if you tell anyone about it, we are going to do X, Y or Z to you or to your family.” That is sometimes not recognised, but it is the crucial part of what the noble Lord’s amendment gets at. If we want to stop cuckooing, we must understand that people are coerced into giving their consent; often, the law seems to treat them as though they have given their consent willingly. If we are to stop cuckooing, we must understand the context in which it occurs. I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to reflect on that.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly. I thank all noble Lords who spoke to this. It is a controversial amendment, but I think it has been spoken to quite sensitively, all things considered; maybe it is the lateness of the hour—maybe that was a good move.

I agree with the previous speaker that difficulties in the drafting of an amendment cannot just be dismissed as modalities because when we put forward draft amendments to legislation and say “must” we need to examine what that means. If, as the amendment suggests:

“Police forces in England and Wales must keep a record of the sex registered at birth of each person”,


how is that going to be executed and what will the consequences be? One has to imagine that one is a younger version of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, in the police station back in the day. People turn up to record whatever it is—a theft, shoplifting, burglary, or a violent offence. How is this recording of the birth sex as well as the subsequently declared gender going to happen and what is the sanction for the “must”? That is not a modality, it is what law requires; there have to be consequences to a “must” being breached. Whatever is really going on, I know there are really sensitive issues in our society at the moment of sex and gender which we will not, I suspect, resolve tonight—we might, but maybe not.

I agreed with my noble friend about the value of data. Whether in the health service or criminal justice system, data is great, but there is another side too, which I think my noble friend acknowledged: that data will put some people off. There are other jurisdictions not far from here where people are really nervous even about declaring their race because of obvious historic reasons for being sensitive about declaring your race at the police station—let alone declaring your birth sex.

We need to see the yin and yang of this particular debate. On the one hand is the brilliant research and analysis of crime we could do if we had more and more data. But on the other hand—and this is not completely different from the previous debate—what we want is victims to come forward and criminal justice to be done. We do not want to do anything that discourages victims from coming forward and reporting crime. That includes people who feel anxious about certain sensitive pieces of information about themselves. We would never want them to put off going to the police station for fear that they say too much. For instance, a person who has been burgled thinking “Was I burgled just because I was burgled, or because I am a trans person? Do I really want to draw more attention to myself because I am an anxious victim of crime?” We need to think about that, let alone the poor old practicalities for a younger version of the very youthful-looking noble Lord, Lord Paddick.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, for introducing my speech. This amendment is designed to compel police forces to

“keep a record of the sex registered at birth”

of anyone who is a crime victim or who is arrested by the police for a crime. It also forces the police to

“keep a record of the acquired gender of each person with a gender recognition certificate”

who is a crime victim of crime or is arrested for a crime.

It also says that providing this data to the Secretary of State will not be an offence under the Gender Recognition Act. Again, I want to try to focus on the amendment and not get drawn into the wider debate, as far as I can. As the noble Baroness pointed out, I was a police officer for over 30 years, so I want to look at this from the perspective of the police.

How will a police officer know what the sex registered at birth is—thumbscrews, or a chromosome test—even without the consent of the victim? Maybe they could force victims to give their fingerprints, in the hope that they may have had their fingerprints taken before they transitioned and that will prove it—except they may have had them taken after they transitioned, and that will then show their acquired gender, so that will not work. Will victims have to produce their birth certificates before they are even allowed to report a crime? Of course, if someone has acquired a gender recognition certificate and used it to have their birth certificate changed, as they are legally allowed to do, the birth certificate will show their acquired gender, so that will not work either. How exactly will police forces keep a record of something they do not know and have no reasonable way of finding out unless the victim or perpetrator volunteers the information?

If the victim or the perpetrator is a trans person, they are legally protected from having to disclose that information. “Well, it’s obvious,” some people will say, “you can tell, can’t you?” I have met trans men who you would never believe were assigned female sex at birth and trans women who you would never believe were assigned male sex at birth. I have also, embarrassingly, been with a lesbian friend of mine, assigned female sex at birth and who has always identified as a woman, who was stopped going into a women’s toilet in a top London restaurant because they wrongly thought that she was a man.

The supporters of this amendment may say that if they do find out, maybe the police can record it—that maybe the victim is reporting a transphobic hate crime or for some other reason volunteers that information.

The second part of the amendment is totally unnecessary. Section 22(4) of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 already states:

“But it is not an offence under this section to disclose protected information relating to a person if … (b) that person has agreed to the disclosure of the information”—


for example, if they are the victim of a trans hate crime—or, as stated later in the same section, at paragraph (f),

“the disclosure is for the purpose of preventing or investigating crime”.

So the police can use that information already, without fear of being prosecuted. The amendment is not necessary if the victim or perpetrator volunteers the information.

My noble friend Lady Brinton asked if she would have to declare every time she becomes a victim of crime, even if it is a burglary, that she has a disability? What about me? Will the next step be that I have to tell the police that I am gay before I can report that my flat has been broken into? For what purpose should victims have to out themselves? What if I get caught stealing a bottle of Marks & Spencer Prosecco?

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

You can do better than that.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

It is very good, actually; I had some on Saturday. I have not tried to do that but if I did, will I have to admit being gay, as well as being a shoplifter?

In 2018, the Government tentatively estimated that there were between 200,000 and 500,000 trans people in the UK. Noble Lords have said they like data; I am going to give them lots of data. Between the Gender Recognition Act coming into force and 2018, 4,910 trans people have been issued with a gender recognition certificate. If we take the top of the range of the estimate, I make that 0.75% of the population identifying as trans and 0.0076% of the overall population having a gender recognition certificate, or less than one in 10,000 people.

Even if a victim went through the whole criminal justice process without disclosing, and without the police establishing the sex assigned to them at birth, if they were a trans woman, it would increase the number of woman victims, and if they were a trans man, it would diminish the number of woman victims, and taken together, and taking account of the total number of trans people, it would even out. Taking into account that only a fraction of them will become victims of crime who report it to the police, any difference to the crime statistics will be statistically insignificant.

The police arrest, on average, 12 in 1,000 people each year—three in 1,000 women. I do not know how many of the estimated 7.5 in 1,000 trans people are trans women and how many are trans men. Of course, if trans women are counted in the female offender figures, they will also be counted in the female population figures, boosting both the numerator and the denominator. I was never any good at mathematics—I left that to my twin brother—but it is quite clear to me that trans people are not going to make any statistically significant difference to the crime figures unless we assume, and there is no factual or statistical basis to think otherwise, that trans people are more likely to commit crime or to commit particular types of crime.

Stop and Search Powers

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to correct some of the inaccurate claims. The first was that the delay was due to a record level of data, but that was a misrepresentation by journalists; actually, the Home Office needed additional time to quality assure more granular record-level data. Secondly, the decision for delaying the statistics for the PCSC Bill was made by the head of profession, in line with the code of practice for statistics, and was announced at the earliest possible point on GOV.UK.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I understand what the noble Baroness has said, but is she aware how this delay looks? On last year’s figures, black people were 18 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people when the police have the power to stop and search without reasonable suspicion. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill already contains new provisions to allow even more stop and search without suspicion and, on Monday, the Government laid 18 pages of new amendments to the Bill for debate next week, further extending the ability of the police to stop and search people without any reason to think the person they are searching has anything on them. What equalities impact assessment has been made of these new powers and what was the result?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

An equalities impact assessment has been done on the Bill, as is done on every Bill, as the noble Lord knows. On how this looks, I have explained the process for producing the statistics and I hope that is satisfactory for the noble Lord. I was disappointed that this Question was not being asked tomorrow, so that we could debate it more fully, with the statistics before us.

Terrorist Incident at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his questions, and I join him in paying tribute to our emergency services, who acted so quickly to try to preserve life at the scene of the attack, and to the taxi driver, who really was a hero in what must have been an extremely frightening situation. We wish him and his family well. With regard to the first question about lone actors, clearly we get information from all sorts of sources. The noble Lord is absolutely right to point out that the nature of terrorism is changing, and we have seen a number of lone-actor attacks in the past few years. I cannot comment on this attack further because clearly it is a live and very new investigation. The facts of the case will come out as the investigation continues, but I know that the police made a statement today. I will get back to him on the report he referred to if I can. I am not sure what more I can say about it today.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I understand the caution that the noble Baroness has expressed about the incident itself; it did not seem to stop the Home Secretary reportedly saying that

“The case in Liverpool was a complete reflection of how dysfunctional, how broken, the system has been in the past”.


Despite that, I also express my thanks to the police, the security services and the taxi driver. Does the Minister agree that so-called lone-wolf or lone-actor attacks are some of the most difficult to prevent, whatever motivates them; and that, while the police and the security services do an outstanding job, they cannot be successful without the help and support of people from every community? What are the Government doing to build trust and confidence with communities where this is lacking?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I totally agree with the noble Lord that these things are hard to predict and hard to deal with when they happen. I have seen a couple of comments, particularly from BAME communities in Liverpool, saying that they have faced hate incidences in the last couple of days, and we have seen before that, when an attack happens, quite often it is women who bear the brunt of the hatred and the name-calling. When I was Minister for Counterextremism, I remember going to many different communities, such as Muslim communities and Polish communities after Brexit, trying to provide reassurance. The police have been fantastic on the back of some of the attacks in reassuring local communities.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Lords Chamber

That may not be the Government’s intention—and I would be very happy to get my noble friend’s assurance that it is not—but as drafted it is perfectly possible that this hearing could turn into some sort of multiagency case conference, with all sorts of people turning up to give evidence to the judge as to whether a serious violence reduction order should be imposed. The whole process of fairness and balance would rely on the good sense of the judge. I am confident that that would be evident, but how much better would it be for everybody—indeed, for the judge—if he was working with the tried and tested processes of a criminal prosecution, using the evidence and the adversarial form that he is used to? That would give a much more just outcome if these orders are proceeded with.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has said, before the break we moved to the highly controversial area of serious violence reduction orders, and I moved Amendment 224 on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. I then gave way to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, who has to chair a Select Committee at this time. Then I sat down. That is why I am now standing.

We have tried to make this group more manageable by restricting it to the considerations for granting SVROs by the courts, and related matters, and moving what happens once an order has been granted to another group. It is still, however, an enormous and complex set of amendments. So, to misquote Captain Lawrence Oates, I may be some time.

This section of the Bill gives the police power to stop and search people without any reasonable suspicion that they may be in possession of anything unlawful. Its origins are in the Conservative party manifesto, which says:

“Police will be empowered to target known knife carriers with a new court order, making it easier for officers to stop and search those known in the past to have carried weapons.”


That statement seems to regard all knives as weapons. On the face of it, chefs and Sikhs, to take but two examples of innocent knife carriers, could be targeted with the new court order. Surely what the public, reading this part of the manifesto, would have been hoping for, is that the police would target criminals who have carried knives intending to use them illegally as weapons, or who have used knives in the commission of an offence, not just anyone “known to be a knife carrier”.

Furthermore, would the public have expected that, if you were with someone when you were caught committing an offence, and the other person—your accomplice—had a knife concealed on them, you too would be regarded as a “known knife carrier”, even though you were not carrying a knife? There may be a convention that we should not stand in the way of provisions set out in a governing party’s manifesto, but when they are as poorly drafted as the few lines the Government are relying on to include serious violence reduction orders in the Bill, perhaps we should make an exception.

These measures are controversial for many reasons, but two fundamental principles are breached here. The first is the use of previous convictions, as my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames said before the break. When an accused person is before a court that is to decide their guilt or innocence, in almost every case the accused’s previous criminal record is not considered relevant to whether, on the occasion the court is considering, they committed the offence. Convicted criminals have to be given the chance to turn their lives around and to move on.

The provisions in this part of the Bill allow the police to stop and search people because, at some time in the past, on the balance of probabilities, even based on hearsay, they, or someone they were with, may have had a knife on them. Unlike convictions that become spent after a period of time—the Government are making some welcome changes in this regard in another part of the Bill and unwelcome changes when it comes to cautions—these serious violence reduction orders can be renewed indefinitely. The individual could have a stop and search target on their back for the rest of their life.

The second fundamental principle, that could only be breached in very limited circumstances in a limited geographic area for a limited period of time and authorised by a senior police officer—although we think Section 60 should be abolished—is that the police can stop and search someone only if they reasonably believe that the person has something on them at the time of the stop and search that they should not have, whether it is drugs—usually it is, as 63% of stop and searches are for drugs—or something else that it is unlawful for them to have in their possession.

The trouble is that the overwhelming majority of stop and searches result in no further action being taken, but you are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black than if you are white, even when it is supposedly based on reasonable suspicion. As noble Lords heard in answer to an Oral Question earlier, it gets even worse. Only one in 100 Section 60 “no suspicion required” stop and searches results in a weapon being found, while disproportionality increases to 18 times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black compared with if you are white. It might also be useful for the Committee to note that, on stop and search based on suspicion where you are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black, you are no more likely to have anything illegal on you than a white person.

The evidence is irrefutable; stop and search, where no reasonable suspicion that the person you are searching has anything illegal on them is required, is ineffective and damaging to police-community relations. Yet here we are, with the Government are proposing more suspicionless stop and search. It is not just about damaging police-community relations. For those repeatedly stopped and searched by the police, there is a personal impact. It tends to increase offending, is associated with anxiety, the loss of sleep and the ability to study, which further inhibits an individual’s ability to turn their life around and be a productive member of society.

Turning to Amendments 224, 227 and 237, as my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames has said, and as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has just said, for any order that has serious consequences—in terms of a breach of the order resulting in a criminal conviction and potentially a prison sentence—the court should be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the conditions necessary for the order to be imposed are satisfied, not, as the Bill proposes, on the balance of probabilities. We have consistently argued this for other such orders, and I do not intend to rehearse those arguments today.

It is obvious to any reasonable person that, before such a serious order can be imposed, the court must be absolutely convinced that the conditions for making the order are satisfied, whether, in the case of Amendment 224, the offender had a knife, or, as in Amendment 227, it is necessary to make the order to protect the public or particular members of the public or to prevent an offence being committed involving a knife, or, in the case of Amendment 237, that the court considers beyond reasonable doubt that it is necessary to renew or lengthen the duration of an SVRO. Amendment 228, in my name, ensures that an SVRO can be imposed only if the court is satisfied that it is a proportionate way to ensure that people are protected or offences involving knives are prevented.

As we can see, these are draconian orders; they are likely to be ineffective based on evidence of other suspicionless stop and searches and to disproportionately impact on ethnic minorities. This amendment is designed to ensure that courts take these unintended negative consequences into account before imposing them.

Carrying a knife is not a criminal offence. The criminal offence is committed only when the knife is carried without reasonable excuse or lawful authority. Amendment 225 would disallow a serious violence reduction order from being applied if a person simply had a knife with them when the offence was committed.

I will illustrate with a fictitious example. Two louts are walking down a road. One of them smashes the window of a car that has been parked and left unattended. They are both arrested and charged with criminal damage. The active participant is found to have had a knife with him because he is an electrician who was on his way home from work, and he uses the knife in the course of his work. He could still have an SVRO made against him, under the Bill as drafted, even though he was lawfully in possession of the knife. Amendment 225 is designed to restrict SVROs to cases where the knife was used as a weapon in the course of the offence.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, and my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames have said, the legal concept of “joint enterprise” is already controversial—for example, where members of a gang who are present when one of the gang stabs another can all be guilty of murder. This is taken to another level by these provisions. The court should not be able to give the accomplice an SVRO—to go back to the manifesto, someone who is not a known knife carrier. That is the intention of Amendment 226, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, to which I have added my name.

Not only can an SVRO be given to the electrician’s mate even if the electrician did not use the knife to smash the car window, it can be given if his mate

“knew or ought to have known”

that he had a knife. Well, he knew he was an electrician, so I suppose he should have known he might have had a knife. No. We support Amendments 226A and 226B tabled by the noble Baroness, Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top, seeking to remove the condition that the offender

“ought to have known”

that his accomplice had a knife. The noble Baroness clearly explained the unintended consequences for women and girls who are often coerced into offending.

SVROs can be made not only on the balance of probabilities but on the flimsiest of evidence. For example, even if the evidence that the person had a knife with them when the offence was committed would not have been admissible in the trial for the offence, it could be used in deciding whether to impose an SVRO.

Let us go back to the example of the electrician and his mate who have smashed a car window. Imagine that, for whatever reason—perhaps it was his day off—the electrician did not actually have a knife with him when he smashed the car window, but then his mate says to the police, “He’s an electrician, and he usually has a knife”. This is hearsay evidence and it is not relevant evidence, in that it does not prove or disprove the offence of the smashing of the car window. Therefore, it would be inadmissible during the trial. But, as drafted, it is evidence that could be considered by the court in deciding whether to impose an SVRO. It may not even be true. Amendments 229, 230 and 231 attempt to strengthen the evidentiary requirements prior to an SVRO being made by excluding evidence that would have been inadmissible in the trial for the offence leading to the consideration of imposing an SVRO.

Amendment 240 proposes a far more rigorous examination of the piloting of SVROs—for example, whether they reduce knife carrying and serious violence; the impact on disproportionality; what types of offences led to the making of the order; and requiring the Secretary of State to obtain, record and publish relevant data before SVROs are rolled out.

The nonsense of this monstrous Bill, where the Government have tried to force so much controversial legislation into one Bill, and then tried to force as many provisions of the Bill as possible into each group of amendments, has resulted in my longest ever speech on the Floor of this House in my eight years here. Do not blame me—I am looking at the Minister.

If I am to end my speech here, all I can ask is for noble Lords to read my remarks on this group of amendments in their entirety in the official record and to take them collectively as the reasons why this clause, and serious violence reduction orders in their totality, should not stand part of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

If the Sikh was going about his business with his knife in his pocket, he would have reasonable excuse. If he then got into a fight and the knife was not used in the commission of the common assault, the knife would be irrelevant to the case. But I must absolutely caveat my comments: the court would decide the facts of the case.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

Could I further clarify what the Minister has just said? If the Sikh becomes involved in a fight and does not go for the knife that they are carrying during that offence, the Sikh can still be made subject to an SVRO, because they committed an offence and had a knife with them at the time the offence was committed, even though the weapon was not used.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I have just fallen into a trap that I do not like to fall into, which is to take on specific cases. The court would have to determine the facts of the case to decide whether the knife was relevant and, therefore, whether an SVRO could be made.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

This is Committee and it is important to get this clear. My clear understanding of the legislation is that it does not matter whether the knife was used in the commission of the offence; it is simply the fact that the person had a knife with them when they committed the offence which means that not only can that person be made subject to an SVRO but any person convicted with them who did not have a knife can also be made the subject of an SVRO by the court. So, without using specific examples, can the Minister please clarify that I am correct?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

What I can clarify is that I will not take theoretical cases again. But the court would need to consider whether in the circumstances it is proportionate to make an order. That does not go into the specifics of any given case.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I thank my noble friend—and he is my noble friend because he has come to my rescue time and again. I am not a lawyer and even less of an expert in criminal law.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

Perhaps I could just say that those examples should include, if they are right, non-violent offences where a weapon is not used in the commission of the offence in any way, where the person only has the weapon on them, and they have an accomplice who did not have a knife on them but should have known that the person had one concealed on their person when they committed a non-violent offence without using the weapon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I think I need to reflect further on what noble Lords have said. I will try to answer the noble Lord’s question in a letter before we start talking about examples. We are, after all, in Committee, and I am learning, like other noble Lords, as we go along.

Amendments 226, 226A and 226B would remove the provisions that enable a court to issue the SVRO if two or more people commit an offence but not all of them used or were in possession of the weapon—that is slightly going back on what we were discussing. When a knife offence or offensive weapon-related offence is committed, it is not always the case that all the offenders had the weapon in their hands—as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, pointed out—during the commission of the offence. But if the court is satisfied that a person knew or ought to have known that another person committing the offence had a knife or an offensive weapon during the commission of the offence, and this person committed an offence arising out of the same facts, we think it would be appropriate for an SVRO to be available. Again, I will put the various permutations and combinations to noble Lords in a theoretical way. This would allow SVROs to be made in relation to all the individuals who were involved and were convicted of such an offence, should the court consider an SVRO to be necessary in respect of those individuals.

This provision intends to cover situations such as a robbery or a fight where a weapon was used by one individual, but where other individuals convicted of offences related to the same facts knew, or ought to have known, that a weapon was being used or carried by another person involved in the offence, even if they themselves were not carrying the weapon. This is very similar to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, except that that individual was brandishing the weapon.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I am sorry, but that is not what the proposed law says. It does not talk about when there is a fight and somebody uses a weapon, and a person who was with them should have known they had a weapon. What the Bill as drafted says is that anybody who commits any offence—such as, for example, smashing a car window—who has a knife in their pocket can be given an SVRO. It may be that that is what was intended, but it is not what the legislation says.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

What I am saying, and what I said earlier, is that it will be up to the courts to decide whether it is appropriate, bearing in mind the facts of the case, and whether the court thinks an SVRO in respect of an individual is necessary to protect the public or any particular members of the public in England and Wales.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I completely understand that point it in the context of the previous debate. One of the things that we will be testing as part of the pilot is the impact of SVROs on the individuals subject to them, and how to ensure that vulnerable offenders—because sometimes people are caught up in these things completely unwittingly—are directed to local intervention schemes to help steer them away from crime. But SVROs used as part of a wider crime prevention approach will send a clear message that, if people are vulnerable and want to move away from crime, and in particular if they are being coerced into carrying things, or coerced generally, we will of course support them.

Amendment 228 seeks to increase the requirements for SVROs to be made. It would require that an order can be imposed only if the SVRO is proportionate to one or more of the relevant aims of the order. It is already a requirement for the court to consider the making of the order necessary to protect the public, or any particular member of the public, including the offender, from the risk of harm, and to prevent the offender committing an offence. It would be for the court to decide the seriousness of any offence, based on the individual facts of the case, and to decide whether it is necessary and proportionate for an order to be made in respect of an individual. Any order made will be at the court’s discretion.

An individual convicted of an offence involving a bladed article or offensive weapon could cause harm to any member of the public, including particular individuals. The provisions in the Bill allow a wide range of considerations to be made, so that an SVRO will have the greatest impact and protect members of the public, including the offender themselves, from the risk of harm.

Amendments 229, 230 and 231 seek to amend the evidentiary requirements for an SVRO to be made. They would provide that the court may consider only evidence led by the prosecution and by the offender and would remove provisions that allow courts to consider evidence that would have been inadmissible in the proceedings in which the offender was convicted. We think it appropriate that the court can consider a wider range of evidence about the offender that may not have been admissible in the proceedings. This goes in some sense to the heart of what we have just been discussing. For example, in answer to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, the offender may have a history of knife carrying that would be relevant to whether an SVRO would be necessary to protect the public.

Amendment 239 would make the guidance to be issued under Clause 140 subject to the affirmative procedure, as recommended by the DPRRC in its report on the Bill. As I have indicated in response to other amendments, we are considering carefully the arguments put forward by the DPRRC and will also reflect on today’s debate before responding to the committee’s report ahead of the next stage of the Bill.

Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher—through the noble Lord, Lord Paddick—has tabled Amendment 240 to Clause 141, which makes provision for the piloting of SVROs. I talked about this earlier. I can assure noble Lords that we will take the matters set out in Amendment 240 into consideration as we progress the design work for the pilot and agree the terms of the evaluation. That said, the general point is that it is not necessary to include such a list in the Bill. The approach adopted in Clause 141 is consistent, for example, with the piloting provisions in the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 in respect of knife crime prevention orders.

Working with the four pilot forces our aims are: to monitor and gather data on a number of different measures—including, as I said earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, the impact of SVROs on serious violence; to build evidence on reoffending and the outcomes for offenders who are subject to SVROs; to understand and learn how we ensure that vulnerable people are directed to local intervention schemes; and to understand community responses to the orders.

I think we can conclude by agreeing on the need to do all we can to tackle the scourge of knife crime, which is wrecking far too many lives. I hope that I have been able to persuade noble Lords of the case for the new orders as part of our wider work to prevent and reduce serious violence, and that I have reassured the Committee—although not on certain things, on which I will have to write—that many of the issues raised will be considered as part of the piloting of SVROs in advance of any national rollout. I reiterate my commitment to consider further the DPRRC’s recommendation in relation to parliamentary scrutiny of the guidance. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, will be happy to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this group, particularly the noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Coaker.

The Minister asked what works. The centre-right think tank Policy Exchange recently produced a report saying that, in reducing serious violence, the emphasis should be on community policing and not on stop and search. That summarises what the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, was saying. The Minister, in earlier proceedings in the House this afternoon, talked about how trust in the police had been seriously damaged recently. Despite that, the Government are giving the police more and more powers that are likely to further damage trust in the police.

The Minister talked about communities—particularly black communities—wanting this sort of thing in order to stop their young people dying on the streets. After I left the police, I went to a pupil referral unit, and students from the unit took me to a local council estate where a young mother holding a baby had been stabbed to death. As we looked at the scene, they said to me, “Yes, we want the police to take knives off the street, but we want them to target stop and search at the people who have got the knives.” To do that, and to target stop and search at those people who are carrying knives, the police need community intelligence, and these sorts of provisions are likely to push the community away, rather than encourage people to come forward with information. Do not get me wrong: targeted, intelligence-led stop and search based on community information can be effective in taking weapons off the street, but quite clearly, as I said on Section 60, with suspicionless stop and search, only one in 100 stop and searches results in a weapon being recovered.

The noble Baroness said that these provisions are very similar to domestic violence prevention orders on the balance of probabilities versus reasonable doubt. Throughout the course of that Bill, we persistently said that that was not acceptable, so the noble Baroness should not be surprised that we are saying it about these orders. However, we need to do all we can to reduce serious violence on our streets. The difficulty is where you have provisions such as this that prove to be counterproductive.

We will come back to this at Report—I can guarantee that. But at this stage, on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 224 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Paddick]

231A: Clause 140, page 130, line 46, leave out from beginning to end of line 2 on page 131

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I move Amendment 231A in my name and speak to the other amendments in this group. These amendments relate to what happens after a serious violence reduction order has been granted.

Amendments 231A and 231B remove the requirements for the offender to give, and update the police on, information about where they are living, including the home address on the day the order is given—which will be given to the court in any event and is therefore not necessary—any other place they regularly reside, and any place they move to or intend to spend more than a month living at. Noble Lords should ask themselves what the purpose of this power is. Is it so that the police can trace the offender, track their every move and then wait outside the place where they live, to stop and search them as soon as they leave? Create a power to stop and search someone who may or may not have carried a knife in the past if you must, whether you suspect them of having a knife on them at the time or not, but to enable, or even encourage, harassment of these individuals by supplying the police with continually updated information about their whereabouts smacks of stalking by the state.

As I will point out in a moment, SVROs can be renewed indefinitely. One of the most important ways a young criminal can turn their life around is to move away from the area where they were involved in a gang, for example, to start a new life. These provisions mean that their reputation follows them, making it even more difficult for them to be rehabilitated. They may have moved on, but the police will continue to stop and search them at will, without any reasonable cause to suspect that the individual is doing anything wrong. The offender would be justified in thinking, “What is the point? May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.” On the previous group, the Minister said that if an offender wants to move away from offending the Government will support them. Updating the police continually about where this young person has moved to, and enabling them to target that individual through stop and search, even though they are trying to turn their lives around, does not sound to me like supporting them in trying to move on from offending.

For similar reasons, the proposed power to give a chief constable for the area where the offender lives, and the area where the police believe the offender is or intends to come to, to apply to a court to extend or renew the SVRO should also be removed, as proposed by Amendments 235 and 236. The chief constable for the area where the offence was committed should be able to apply to have the SVRO varied, renewed or discharged—that is fair enough—but this should not be the case for any chief constable, anywhere in the country, who knows or even just thinks that the offender might be coming to their area. Offenders who genuinely want to turn their lives around should be able to move on with their lives. If they move home and fall into their old ways, the police in the area where they have come to notice can ask the chief constable in the area where the original offence was committed to make an application on their behalf. These provisions are unnecessary and potentially counterproductive in reducing serious violence.

Amendment 238 limits the number of times an SVRO can be imposed. Although each SVRO is restricted to a maximum duration of two years, SVROs can be renewed indefinitely. This means that our electrician’s mate could potentially be stopped and searched by the police, without any reasonable suspicion that he has anything unlawful on him, for the rest of his life. There are very few offences where there is not a spent period, after which the conviction no longer has to be declared. Yet the provisions in this Bill mean that, on the balance of probabilities, someone for whom there is no evidence of their ever having carried a knife could be targeted by the police for suspicionless stop and search for the rest of their life.

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I am again grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for his support on the duration of SVROs, about which I did not hear an explanation from the Minister. I presume that the Committee can assume that we are right that SVROs can be renewed indefinitely and that there is no legal restriction on that. That is clearly unacceptable, and we will return to it on Report.

The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, also made an important point about the blank cheque nature of the prohibitions that can be imposed when somebody is subject to an SVRO. They will be decided only by regulation, which on all accounts the House will not see until after the Bill has received Royal Assent.

I also thank my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames for covering my omission in not talking about the reasonable excuse defence amendment.

The Minister said that we are not breaking any new ground. With respect, allowing the police to stop and search somebody purely on the basis of previous conduct without any reason to suspect that they have something on them at the time of the stop and search is breaking new ground. Therefore, different rules should apply.

I understand the provisions in the Bill about various chief constables in various parts of the country being given the power to vary or extend these orders, but, again, the Minister did not answer the question why the chief constable in that area cannot simply ask the chief constable where the original order was made to vary, revoke or extend.

The Minister seems to place a lot of reliance on the pilot schemes. I am reminded of my lengthy service in the Metropolitan Police, where I was told that there was no such thing as an unsuccessful pilot. It was rather telling that the Minister said that account would be taken of what happens during the pilots before the SVROs are rolled out to the whole of England and Wales, but not “if” the pilots prove to be effective, they will be rolled out to the rest of England and Wales.

However, we will return to this on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 231A withdrawn.

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I was not going to speak in this debate but, very briefly, as the police have been mentioned, I should mention a meeting I had fairly recently with a police superintendent in London, who worryingly told me that the police were being made aware that there were a large number of solvable crimes, where people could be prosecuted, and the police no longer had the resources to pursue those offences. From what has been said in the debate, and from the briefing from USDAW, it is extremely worrying if offences are being committed against retail staff, where there is often closed circuit television of the perpetrator, yet the police still do not have the resources to prosecute those offences. As we all know, if somebody feels they can get away with a crime, or word gets around that you can go to a particular store and get away with it because the police will not do anything, it encourages more people to engage in the offence.

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for his clear outline of the problem at the beginning of the debate. That was really helpful. I support the amendments creating the offences for assaulting a retail worker.

I look at this problem from a completely different perspective. Apart from the four years I was at university, I have spent all my life in really rural settings, so I identify with the weekly trip to the supermarket. We have a village shop which doubles up as the post office, but I cannot walk there because the roads are too narrow so I have to drive. It is a different sort of world. I identify with this from when I was at university in Leeds too; the corner shops at the end of terraces were exactly the same sort of set-up as a rural shop. But they had their problems. CCTV has now appeared in these shops, which was never there before. There was a level of trust, which is slightly eroded when people move into the village and behave in a different way. This sounds like the 1950s, and sometimes it is.

Whether we are talking about cities or villages, there are many small shops still, and a lot of them have post offices which keep them open. We should not forget that, because they serve a lot of people: where I live, a lot of people do not have cars, and older people really prefer going to the small village shop and still collect their pension there. But a single-handed shop with limited security and often no cameras is a danger, and these shop workers are vulnerable to assault, even in areas where you think everybody knows everybody else’s business. Will the Minister tell us, when she sums up, what sort of recommendations or advice are given to such small shops by the local police? Is there any government guidance to ensure that their safety and that of their workers are protected?

I thank the ACS for its really helpful background briefing. The two amendments are really interesting: one in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is about the offence of assaulting a retail worker, and the other, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, is much the same. Something should come back: whether it comes back from the Government or from amendments tabled by Members, we really need to put a marker down before the Bill finishes on the issue of assaulting shopworkers. It might be quite sensible if those who have added their names to Amendments 263 and 264 could sit down together to craft an amendment that would fit with all the points that were made in this short but really quite informative and well-informed debate, and then bring something back for Report.

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, again, I was not going to speak in this debate, but it is important for me to share my professional experience of this. I once worked with Professor Larry Sherman, who was a leading academic on restorative justice at the time, on a pilot scheme in the Metropolitan Police. In support of what the noble Viscount has just said, two major things came out of that pilot.

One was about victim satisfaction. Obviously, the process was voluntary—victims were not made to confront their attacker if they did not want to—but many felt so much safer, for example if they had been mugged in the street, having met their attacker face to face than victims who were attacked by some anonymous person. They understood more about their attacker from that face-to-face meeting, so it is good in terms of victim satisfaction. This may be counterintuitive to members of the Government who feel that the public might see it as a soft option, but victims really benefit from this.

The other thing was the impact on perpetrators. Larry Sherman rightly pointed out that many offenders, particularly young ones, appear in front of a court but they never say anything. They plead guilty. They have a solicitor or a barrister representing them. They sit at the back, disengaged from the whole process, which happens without them participating in it at all. It has no real impact on them—apart from the custodial sentence at the end of it, perhaps. They do not quite understand why they end up in custody because they have not participated in the process at all. On the contrary, with restorative justice, they sit opposite the victim and the victim tells the perpetrator how that offender made them feel. This has a salutary effect on the perpetrator and their future offending behaviour.

I just wanted to tell the Committee about that experience because other noble Lords have not mentioned those two aspects of restorative justice.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, we have already had an extensive debate so I will be brief. I must note that I have heard my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb talk about this issue often; it is something that she is extremely passionate about. I have no doubt that she would have attached her name to this amendment had space been available under our systems.

We have heard some terribly powerful contributions, particularly from the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond. I really hope that the Government were listening. I am not sure that the point has been made that restorative justice should be the foundation of our justice system. It should be fundamental to what it is all about. At the moment, by contrast, it seems to be an afterthought added on at the end. This means that we have seen a loss of funding for some really practical things, such as restorative justice training for all prosecutors, including the independent Bar, so that they can better identify opportunities for restorative justice when handling cases. We also need to see restorative justice training for magistrates and judges so that they can be fully involved in facilitating it. Just as judges have a central role in enabling alternative dispute resolution in the civil courts, in the criminal courts, they should promote and encourage a restorative approach all the way from the initial arraignment right through to sentencing.

What we are talking about here is coming out after the awful event of a crime and repairing, restoring and making things better. We know well from our criminal justice system—a system at the end of which everyone comes out feeling worse about it—that what we have at the moment is not working for the people involved. It is not working for victims. It is not working to provide change for perpetrators. It is not working for the entire community.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to briefly and extremely humbly speak on behalf of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who signed Amendment 266. I am greatly honoured to follow two such champions of this matter of undoing great injustices of the past.

I want to record our support for this and also to ask the Minister a question—to which I do not expect an answer now. These clauses provide for people to apply. Why can we not have a situation where we go through, find and identify these case and wipe them clean? That is the question I was asked to ask, and I am asking it. I do not necessarily expect an answer now, but I am putting it on the record.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we support these amendments, so ably proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. I also pay tribute to the Minister for her sympathetic approach to these issues over the years. These offences should never have been offences in the first place. It therefore makes complete sense that, if people were convicted of such an offence and they apply to have a conviction or caution disregarded, and if that application is successful, they should be pardoned. Of course, deceased persons falling into this category cannot apply to have a conviction or caution disregarded, but they should be able to receive a posthumous pardon if the offence qualifies. It has taken 500 years to get to this stage and the Government have been making progress on these issues. These are the final pieces of the jigsaw and we support them.

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer also added his name to this amendment. We clearly support the amendments. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Cashman and the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, who I understand campaigned for decades on this issue. I thought it was quite moving, if I may use that word, to hear the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, saying he earnestly hoped that he was coming towards the end of his campaign. I hope he is right and that the Minister may be able to give him some comfort in that respect. Everybody who has contributed to the debate thinks this is a thoroughly appropriate amendment and, even though it has been a very truncated debate, the passion and the sense of finality have come through, and I very much hope that the Minister will give a suitable response.

Sarah Everard: Home Office Inquiry

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, as I have said, given the need to provide assurance as swiftly as possible, this will be established as a non-statutory inquiry because we want to get to the stage where conclusions are reached and changes are recommended quickly. This cannot be an inquiry that takes years to get to that stage. A non-statutory inquiry allows for greater flexibility, can be tailored to the issues and is likely to be faster, but we are able to turn it into a statutory inquiry if need be.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister keeps saying that the truth must come out at pace, but the Macpherson inquiry—a statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act—took 20 months and the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel took eight years, mainly because the panel did not have powers of compulsion. What makes the Government think that the police have changed, when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary only a few weeks ago described a “culture of colleague protection” in the police service?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right that at the time there was not that duty to co-operate. The various things the noble Lord mentions will all be looked at in the course of the inquiry. He is absolutely right that some of the culture and practices will be interrogated deeply to see whether any changes are needed.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has referred to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, which I chair. It is currently undertaking an inquiry into the use of new technology—I stress new, by which I mean artificial intelligence—and the application of law. I do not wish to pre-empt whatever the committee may recommend. We will certainly look at issues of so-called hard or soft regulation. We will also look at procurement standards, transparency—by which I mean intelligibility both to those who use AI and to those who are the subject of it—and accountability. The list of issues seems to increase with every evidence session. At a recent session, a witness said

“certain things with AI will always be the same. We will always have a data issue, a bias issue and an explainability issue”.

I do not think it appropriate to go into any detail this evening, other than to say, “Watch this space”.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we support the principle of the amendment the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has tabled. Picking up a theme here, facial recognition technology is an example of where officials are concerned. For example, the guy who is responsible for the regulation of CCTV has very serious concerns that the technology is running ahead of the regulations and that this needs to be addressed. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, the use of artificial intelligence is another new and developing area where Parliament should at least consider whether these new technologies need to be subject to debate in Parliament and regulation.

However, I am not sure about the example of drones, which are sort of a replacement for police helicopters. I left the police in 2007; 14 years ago, with something not very imaginatively called “heli-tele”, police helicopters could pick out people’s faces from however many thousand feet they were up in the air and transmit those images to officers on the ground who had television monitors in front of them. It was extremely useful to see where crowds were moving in a fast-moving demonstration situation. Clearly, you can have a lot more drones than you can have helicopters, because they are a lot cheaper and so forth. The increased use of drones may be of concern, but the way in which they are being used is no different from what huge helicopters have been doing for years, whether members of the public were aware of it or not.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, talked about the Mayor of London and water cannon. Again, I think it was Theresa May as Home Secretary who refused to allow their deployment. Unfortunately, if the Mayor of London had actually listened to experts in public order policing, they would have told him that they are more or less useless for the sort of things he was hoping to use them for. I think he felt that water cannon would be useful following the widespread riots across the country. In fact, in that scenario they are completely useless. They are lumbering giants of things that cannot possibly keep up with marauding gangs going round and looting and so forth.

I think my noble friend Lady Hamwee has hit the nail on the head—it is new technology that needs to be considered and regulated, or at least debated in Parliament to see whether it needs to be regulated. To that extent, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, for that. There is ample criminal law and ample tort law for nuisance. There are ample laws to protect people from burglary, nuisance and so on. This measure, however, is targeted. The euphemism is so thin: “without permission, with vehicles”. I wonder who we are talking about there. The euphemism makes this racial discrimination even more obscene.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we strongly support all these amendments. As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville said, the crucial point here is that if legal sites were provided it is unlikely that these provisions would even be in the Bill. Having adequate sites is likely to be cheaper than the cost of taking legal action against those who have no option other than to trespass. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, said, the Bill’s provisions, whether by accident or design, will very clearly disproportionately impact an already vulnerable minority: the Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities. What would happen if the Government and local authorities made it a criminal offence for motorists to park their cars illegally and then did not provide enough spaces for motorists to park legally? There would be uproar.

My noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Bakewell told the Committee from their extensive experience about hostility towards Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. I have to say to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that when he reads back what he said in Hansard it will be open to interpretation that, for every crime he described where he could not say who the perpetrator was, he implied that all those crimes were committed by Travellers, without any evidence that they were responsible for those particular crimes. That is why there is so much hostility towards these communities because speeches such as that can be misinterpreted as, “The noble Earl is saying that those communities are responsible for all these crimes, even the ones where we do not know who committed them.”

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

The only difficulty, of course, is that it is the countryside police offer who tells the victims that it was the Travellers.

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[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Earl is far more responsible than a police officer because I can take him to police officers in London who will say that all crimes in London are committed by black people.

My noble friend Lady Brinton also reminded the Committee that there are existing laws to deal with these situations. That goes to the point that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, raised. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has said that existing laws are adequate. The police say that more laws are not needed for this sort of offence. If the police are saying that, why are the Government bringing forward this legislation?

Rather than go through all these amendments, all I will say is that I agree with what my noble friends and other noble Lords have said. Part 4 should be removed from the Bill in its entirety because existing legislation is more than adequate.

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Whitaker on her powerful and persuasive speech introducing her amendments and opening this debate, as we expected it would be. As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said, my noble friend has been a determined campaigner on behalf of the Gypsy and Traveller communities.

As has been said, Part 4 relates to unauthorised encampments, which it criminalises, creating an offence if someone resides or intends to reside on land without consent in or with a vehicle. The Bill also gives landowners a role in criminalising a person who is trespassing, strengthens police powers to deal with unauthorised encampments, prohibits a person re-entering land without a reasonable excuse within 12 months and gives the police the right to seize property, including people’s caravans, which could be a family’s primary residence. The Bill also amends police powers associated with unauthorised encampments in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act to lower the threshold at which they can be used, allow the police to remove unauthorised encampments on or partly on highways and prohibit unauthorised encampments that are moved from a site returning within 12 months.