Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 31st March 2022 Lords Chamber

The noble Lord will know from his many years’ experience in the police that the only powers to ban assemblies are those provided for in Section 14A of the Public Order Act 1986, which relates to trespassory assemblies. This Bill does not amend Section 14A nor, for that matter, the separate powers in Section 13 to ban public processions in certain exceptional circumstances. The amendments that we are making in Clause 56 simply align the powers under the Public Order Act so that the police can attach any condition to a public assembly in the same way as they can already attach any condition to a public procession. Both the national policing lead for public order and the policing inspectorate are clear that the current distinction is illogical and anachronistic. The changes to Section 14 of the Public Order Act no more ban assemblies than Section 12 of that Act currently bans processions. These are sensible changes made by Clause 56 and should be accepted for what they are. I beg to move.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I say thank you, first, to the House for agreeing the amendment last Tuesday in such substantial numbers, because it sent a better message to the other place than the original vote, which was at 10 pm, and, secondly, to the Government.

The leaders of the FSA will say that these amendments are vital to its core mission and will make tangible benefits to the way that it can deal with food crime. I do not think that I ever claimed that my little amendment of 30 words would solve the problem; the proof of the pudding, of course, is that 1,300 words have come back from the Commons. I know the parliamentary draftsmen are good, but they did not do that last Wednesday. This shows the point: the Minister in the other place said, as the Minister has just said here, that there was no issue of principle between us. I notice, however, that Mr Malthouse spoke about the “unfortunate way” that we dealt with the matter in this place—well, I only know one way to deal with it, and that is within the rules, which is what we did.

It is worth saying that Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dem—who represents the second-best constituency in the UK, I might add—said

“It tells something about the attitude of the Home Office and this Government in general to Parliament and the other place that for something as prosaic as this it has taken two rounds of ping-pong before the Government have been prepared to accept what was surely to the rest of the world blindingly obvious.”—[Official Report, Commons, 28/3/22; col. 637.]


And it was something on which the Government agreed in principle anyway. The issue was parliamentary time. I know that there will be a consultation and that it will be several months, maybe even a year, before any of this comes into operation, but the fact is that parliamentary time is incredibly valuable. I know that, both as a troublesome Back-Bencher in opposition and as a Minister for 12 years: if you can get it, use it.

The Food Standards Agency issue in this Bill did not fit, but it fitted the Long Title. This is a classic example of where the use of that will save us enormous parliamentary time later on. It also makes the consultation that the FSA will do much more meaningful to the people who will be consulted, because Parliament has already done the primary legislation for it all. So I say thank you very much and I am very pleased with the outcome.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Motion B1. I thank the Minister for the way that she explained the Government’s view on this. Interestingly, we had a discussion in yesterday’s Cross-Bench weekly meeting about the diplomacy and constitutional sensitivity involved in ping-pong. There was a range of views; I will not say what they were but they were in fact quite moderate and very balanced, so we are conscious of the delicacy of pushing ping-pong too far. However, I think—I hope—that the Minister would accept that pushing this particular subject to the extent that we have has helped and provided some clarity, not only to those of us who have been pushing for it but to both Houses and, frankly, to the Minister and the ministerial team themselves, who I think were perhaps not fully aware of exactly what they had embarked upon when the commitment was made just over a year ago to make the police record this sort of data.

There were two objectives in going for yet another round of ping-pong. The first was to get reassurance that that commitment really was being followed through with vigour and a sense of direction and purpose. The second objective, which the Minister has just demonstrated, is for the Government to adopt a more open and frankly more honest explanation when they come across difficulties. We often promise to do things and then realise that they are slightly more complicated to carry out than we had imagined or realised at the beginning. But the best thing to do is to say so, because that builds trust, and one of the most important things in the dialogue about this is to do everything that we can to reinforce that trust and good will, particularly for women and girls at the moment who, all the evidence suggests, are not finding it easy to report crimes to anybody, let alone the police. It is incredibly important that we do everything possible to reinforce that trust and make them more willing to do so.

My contention is that the best way to do that is to be honest about what is going well and what is going less well, and what is working and what is not, rather than to pretend that this is all terribly important and one of our major priorities, while newspaper story after newspaper story and television documentary after television documentary tell us that it ain’t working in the way that the Government try to make us believe that it is.

So I welcome this new spirit of openness. I also welcome the fact that I landed the Minister and her Bill team with no fewer than 14 extremely detailed questions yesterday afternoon to consider. They come directly from the police forces that were earliest in starting to record this data, so they are informed by their experiences, good and bad, and their knowledge of some of the complications. I hope that she found those questions helpful because they get to the heart of some of the complexities that we are trying to deal with. The most important thing is that, when we get to the end of rolling this out, the data produced is reliable, accurate, and helpful to the police and to the Crown Prosecution Service, which is somewhat lagging behind in understanding how to use some of this data in informing prosecutions.

So I am grateful to the Minister and her team for responding positively. When the time comes, I will not test the opinion of the House, as I think we have achieved what we set out to do.