Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Paddick and Baroness Jolly

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

[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.