Crime and Policing Bill (Second sitting)

Matt Bishop Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. First, and most important of all, if Members wish to remove their jackets, they may do so—those who have not already pre-empted the instruction.

I remind Members that questions are not limited to what is in the brief, but they must be within the scope of the Bill. In line with the morning sitting, for each panel of witnesses, I will call the shadow Minister to ask the first question, then the Minister, then the Liberal Democrat spokesman, and then box and cox backwards and forwards across the room. If anyone wishes to speak, please let me know—catch my eye; we are not mind readers—and we will do the best we can to accommodate everyone. We have to stick to the cut-off time specified in the programme resolution, so I will have no choice and will have to interrupt the questioning at the appropriate time.

I remind Members—we will do this in a moment—any relevant interests need to be declared, when speaking in Committee and tabling amendments. I am sorry to have to tell you that hot drinks are not permitted in the Committee Room. I did ask—I thought it was slightly more relaxed, but I am told I am wrong. They are certainly not permitted when the Committee is sitting.

Before we start hearing from witnesses, do any Members need to make a declaration of interest in connection with the Bill?

[Matt Bishop (Forest of Dean) (Lab)]

I remind the Committee that I am a former police officer and current member of NARPO, the National Association of Retired Police Officers.

Examination of Witnesses

Christopher Morris, Paul Gerrard and Graham Wynn gave evidence.

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[Jo Platt (Leigh and Atherton) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Thank you for attending. I want to address the breach of protection orders. This question is more for Suky. I have been dealing with a case in Wigan, where the victim’s ex-partner committed the most heinous crime. Given that more than half of stalking victims are targeted by former intimate partners, do you think the Bill goes far enough in addressing breach of protection orders, or could it go further?

Suky Bhaker: I think it could go further. That breaches are not being prosecuted robustly enough was something that the super-complaint committee picked up quite clearly. To that end we feel that there needs to be minimum sentencing in place for breaches to ensure that there is a clear deterrent to perpetrators—that this order holds weight and if it is breached, you will be prosecuted.

[Matt Bishop]

Q Baroness Newlove, given that intimate image abuse disproportionately affects women and girls, how do you think the changes will specifically help to address the unique challenges that they face in seeking justice and support?

Baroness Newlove: It is all about regulations. As the Victims’ Commissioner, I am working closely with Ofcom. It feels very much that this is designed for individuals. It is not designed to really get the tech companies to show up and do what they are supposed to do. We need to get more of the tech companies to take more responsibility and not leave it to the party who has been damaged.

[Louise Jones (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

Q Baroness Newlove, cuckooing is a pretty heinous crime that takes advantage of some very vulnerable victims. What impact do you think making cuckooing a specific offence will have on those victims?

Baroness Newlove: Don’t get me started on cuckooing! Cuckooing is an interesting area, and I have been working on it for quite a long time. People do not realise the level of harm it causes entire families. It can destroy them. My concern about cuckooing is centres on understanding and whether the Government will ensure there is guidance for police and other operational partners.

Cuckooing is not what you see on the soap operas. These are evil people who pick on vulnerable people and take over their lives. While this Bill creates a new offence whereby a person commits an offence if they exercise control of the dwelling, it sounds very blah-di-blah. What is needed is breaking down the problem and educating people on how this can absolutely take over the lives of the most vulnerable people. It goes into exploitation and county lines—there is no one thing. What I want is for all this to flow into this mechanism. Cuckooing has to be stated, but we must put it alongside exploitation, county lines, drugs and everything else. My concern is that when the guidance is published, victims of cuckooing will still not realise that they are being cuckooed. I do not know where they got the word cuckooing from, but that was what it was called when I went out with the police many years ago.

It is a really hard thing to break. If that person thinks that they are a part of the family, as well as the huge threat to their real family, it is very hard to recognise that. This problem must have a multi-agency approach and it must be in capitals and it must be where we are reporting. There have been many millions spent in this area, but I would like those involved to be more educated and to get a professional toolkit. I know a toolkit has been developed to help to disrupt cuckooing victimisation —I think it was issued to professionals in October 2024. I encourage authorities to utilise it. It is so important, and I have seen so much devastation from cuckooing. It is like watching a film on screen, but it is real life for some people today.

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[Dame Diana Johnson]

Q Okay, that is interesting. In the past, the Modern Slavery Act has often been relied on to deal with these issues of exploitation of children. Do you think that having this stand-alone offence will deal with the problem that we have identified, which the Modern Slavery Act cannot tackle, with the exploitation of children and young people?

Sharon Maciver: I certainly think that the offence is part of the solution, while also ensuring that we protect children. I think the Modern Slavery Act has fallen short in not talking specifically about criminal exploitation and assuming exploitation in other forms. That has been a limiting factor in gathering the suitable evidence to prosecute.

We have obviously suggested that there needs to be a clear definition of a “criminally exploited child”. Within the Modern Slavery Act, there is the assumption that children are victims of trafficking, so we need to prove that there have been issues of modern slavery specifically. A new offence will talk about the behaviours and the concerns that we have for criminal exploitation in its own right.

[Matt Bishop]

Q I have a question for Ms Maciver. How will the measures on child criminal exploitation help to ensure that there is a more effective and consistent response to it?

Sharon Maciver: Having a clearly defined offence will offer the police increased powers to disrupt and sanction these individuals, and will shift the focus on to what these individuals are doing. We know from our work that children often idolise these people who are exploiters; they do not see them as exploiters but as people with status and reputation. These people certainly do not see themselves as child abusers, and would not want to go to prison for abusing children. We hope that in itself will be a suitable deterrent for them to avoid the use of children in their activity.

Just yesterday, one of the members of staff contacted us to say that he had received a text message from a child who was missing, and had been for three days. The child felt that he could not go home because his house would be targeted. His house had previously had the windows smashed in on two occasions, and he had been stabbed several times on the street a few months ago by a gang. The text message said, “I will be murdered if I’m seen on the street. It’s me against a hundred people.” I feel that we do not have the option not to do something about this, given these harms are being caused to children every single day. That child did not feel that he could trust the system enough to support him, so he was trying to manage his own exploitation in that situation.

[Mr Alex Barros-Curtis (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Q Mr Sexton, I want to go back to what you were saying about the administrators and moderators aspect, and needing to look at people in the chain. Could you talk a bit more about that? Is that people who host websites? I have another question for both of you—not to pre-empt what you are about to say—but presumably that will be not just domestic but international, so what could the Bill do, if anything, through partnerships and cross-agency working, both here and abroad, to target that issue?

Dan Sexton: On the clear web, in order to get a website, you need to have an IP address and a domain name, which will come from a registry. In the UK, we have .co.uk, run by Nominet. It is about just removing the registrars, for instance. There needs to be some liability for them enabling a site that is hosting child sexual abuse material.

We work with those companies every day to say, “There’s child sexual abuse material here.” Some of them are very good and some of them are less good: “It is really not our problem; we don’t deal with the content.” So it is about anything that encourages them to act proactively rather than reactively—but even reactively, if you take away the domain name, there is no website and it disappears.

A lot of those sites are hosted on public clouds, so they might be on Cloudflare, Amazon or Google. There are lots of parts to the chain. Most of them are content agnostic—“We’re just offering a service”—but really it takes a lot of people to collude to create a website of any type. If that website is hosting criminal content or child sexual abuse material, all those parts of the chain should be taking more responsibility.

We hear a lot of, “This is not our fault; it’s the people downstream,” or, “It’s the people upstream.” Obviously, the administrators are the ones who are running that stuff, but there are lots of other people who had to be part of it for the sites to work. I would like to see more reason for those sites to take action. That would be extremely helpful for our work of finding and removing that content, and getting it down as quickly as possible.

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[Harriet Cross]

Q I want to reflect quickly on knife crime, and the Bill’s provisions on that. First, what are your comments on the clause to make it an offence to possess with the intent to cause unlawful violence? Do you think that is practically workable? How will that be enforced? More generally on tackling knife crime, what have you seen in your areas that has been good, bad or indifferent? Is there anything in particular missing from the Bill?

Matthew Barber: An awful lot of focus in legislation goes on the type of knife being used—the talk about zombie knives and so on. Although I would not oppose the legislation that has been put in place to prohibit the use or ownership of those weapons, the reality is that the vast majority of knife-enabled incidents—whether that is robbery, theft or injury—are caused by kitchen knives, which we cannot realistically outlaw in our society.

I think the use of intent and the ability to seize within private dwellings is really important. The police may be dealing with a suspect for an unrelated offence around drug possession, for example, and while they are in that property, they may see a stash of knives that are clearly likely to be used for criminal purposes—not for someone cutting their salad—yet they would currently be powerless to do anything about that, because they are being legally held in private premises. This is one of the things that I would put in that category of tying up some of the loopholes in legislation, which will not actually cost policing anything. At the moment we have police officers in situations where they cannot use current legislation to protect the public.

More broadly, where we have seen success, certainly in Thames Valley and across the country where it has been done, it is that focus on the possession of knives that is absolutely vital. It is about a good use of stop and search, and making sure that we are focusing not just on the people who are already committing the dangerous offences of robbery and assault, but on getting the knives off the streets in the first place, recognising that possession itself is critical to enabling others to commit further offences.

Roger Hirst: I very much agree with that. It has always been a difficult area, but I have never really understood why the previous legislation, and perhaps therefore this legislation, could not simply ban all bladed instruments that do not have a legitimate use in the environment in which they are found.

We had a machete battle on Southend seafront last summer, which was extraordinary. None of those young people had any reason to be carrying a two-foot bladed instrument. In fact, why on earth were they allowed to buy them in the first place? The provisions around purchase over the internet need to be enforceable. It must be the case that people have to produce ID when they order it, and when it is delivered, to prove that they are over 18. But also, why are things like that available over the internet at all? Having talked to agricultural and nature groups, I know there is nothing that you can do with a machete that you cannot do with a billhook, and you are not going to take a billhook to a battle, so why not just ban machetes? That would really help.

Also, with the way the Bill is phrased at the moment, the defence of saying, “I’m only carrying it for self-defence,” would effectively still work, because the implication is that you need to be going out with the intent to cause harm. I think if you are carrying it for self-defence, you are prepared to use it. I would ask the legal brains to think about a way of phrasing it to mean that the plea of, “I am only carrying it to defend myself,” is equally an offence, because that is something you can carry into a street fight.

Emily Spurrell: On Merseyside, notwithstanding some really tragic incidents, we have actually seen knife crime going down. We have seen about a 7% reduction in serious violence, and particularly knife crime incidents. I think there are two reasons for that. First, there has been a huge amount of proactivity. We were the first force to pilot serious violence reduction orders, which have made a difference in terms of identifying the individuals who are routinely carrying knives and posing the threat that has been described. It has been helpful to monitor that. There was a previous question about prolific offenders; we have seen some good success with that.

The flip side of that is public education and engagement, particularly with young people. We work with KnifeSavers to educate about the dangers of carrying a knife, and the fact that you are more likely to be a victim of a stabbing if you carry a knife yourself, even if you are doing it for protection. Through our violence reduction partnership, we have done some work to educate young people and help them to understand how they can get into that situation and what the alternatives are. There is a huge amount of work on education and prevention, which has to go hand in hand with all the enforcement activity.

[Matt Bishop]

Q I want briefly to touch on the police appeals tribunal. Police and crime commissioners up and down the country represent the public in holding forces and chief constables to account. In the context of public confidence in policing, how important is it that PCCs have an equivalent right of appeal to the police appeals tribunal?

Emily Spurrell: Very important. It was a gap in previous legislation, so in our view, this measure seeks to correct an error. As you say, we are responsible for holding chief constables to account. We are very focused on improving the trust and confidence that the public have in the police, so it is important to have that right of appeal if we feel standards have not been met, rather than having to go through a lengthy judicial review process.

[David Burton-Sampson]

Q This is obviously a meaty Bill. There is a lot of really good stuff in here, and much of it will give new powers to existing police officers, to people across the force and to local authorities. As PFCCs or PCCs, you will have a key role in helping to ensure that the Bill is implemented, assuming it passes through Parliament. How confident do you feel about making sure that happens? It is pointless passing laws if they are not implemented on the ground.

Roger Hirst: This goes back to the point that was raised earlier about whether we have the resources. I welcome the Government’s commitment to the 13,000 additional people in neighbourhood policing, but the vital thing is that we have the funding to both sustain the current workforce and build the workforce in the way you would like us to. There is a real challenge there, because the police force has expanded by 20,000 over the last six years. Those police officers will all be going through the police contractual incremental pay scales. The big jump is when they hit five and six years, so there will be a big boost to police pay at that point without us recruiting any more people.

To be able to do what we need to do with the Bill, we will need the resources that we have and the resources that are heading down the track towards us, we believe, which we are very grateful for. But funding the existing workforce is the real challenge, and that in itself is probably going to cost some £300 million a year.

Matthew Barber: I completely agree: a lot of it comes down to the money. The only additional point that I would make is about the reliance on other partners in this area. As we awaited our session, there was a conversation about fly-tipping, which is certainly an issue that exercises the police, but at the moment the responsibility for it lies with local authorities. The Bill proposes only some guidance, rather than any duties on local authorities to clear up the waste or to investigate; currently, they have powers but they are not obliged to use them.

On some of the wider antisocial behaviour provisions, as I said in response to the Minister, there is a huge reliance on local authorities to play their part, both in sharing information around reporting and in the exercise of powers. Many of the solutions to antisocial behaviour issues in our communities do not lie within the police remit. They are to do with the provision of housing from social landlords, and to do with the powers that local authorities have, so we need to work collectively.

I am confident that policing, given the right resources, can deliver the things that are in this Bill, but what is key is making sure that all those other partners are able to assist in that. Many of these provisions cannot be delivered by the police on their own.

Emily Spurrell: To add to that, it is not just about policing and the partners that Matthew has outlined, but about criminal justice. We know that having more officers and more PCSOs going through the system will create even more pressure on an already struggling courts and prison system. We need to be very mindful of the whole criminal justice approach.

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[The Chair]

Not at the moment.

[Matt Bishop]

Q Minister Johnson, could you briefly explain the Government’s rationale and thinking in not making it a criminal offence for a person in regulated activity to fail to report child sexual abuse?

Dame Diana Johnson: We heard from witnesses today who talked about this, and we are very conscious that regulated activity does not just include the people you would expect—perhaps social workers or teachers—but it can include, for example, taxi drivers who are taking children to school on the taxi run in the morning. It can also include volunteers who run the football club on a Saturday. It can include all sorts of people who volunteer their time to help out and work with young people, and to give back to their community.

We were very conscious that the recommendations that came out of Alexis Jay’s inquiry were not about criminalising those individuals. We want to make sure that individuals report to local authorities and the police when they hear really disturbing things from children and young people about sexual abuse—of course we do—but we did not think that it was appropriate to criminalise in that way. What we were very clear about—again, I think that Alexis Jay’s inquiry made this point—is that if anybody tries to interfere with or stop that reporting, that is the criminal offence. That is the bit that we think is important to have in the Bill. Alex has probably got something else to say on that.

Alex Davies-Jones: I just wanted to briefly come in to counteract some of the evidence that we received from Councillor Garratt earlier today. He was incorrect. There are sanctions in the Bill—professional sanctions—for those who fail to report. That also covers anyone working voluntarily or professionally with children in a religious setting. I just wanted to put that on the record.

Dame Diana Johnson: That is absolutely right. If you are a social worker and you do not report to the local authority or the police, there will be repercussions through your regulatory body and also through the Disclosure and Barring Service.

[Harriet Cross]

Q Thank you both. On retail crime, we heard in panel 4 that in Scotland, delivery drivers are included in provisions relating to the abuse, and so on, of retail workers. What work was done alongside the Scottish Act, or looking at Scotland, to reach the decision that they would not be included in this Bill?

Secondly, on respect orders, we have discussed reducing the age from 18. Why was 18 chosen? After the evidence that we have heard today, would any consideration be given to reducing the age, given who is responsible for most, or a lot, of antisocial behaviour?

Dame Diana Johnson: On the point about antisocial behaviour and why respect orders apply at 18 and above, that is because we are really clear that we do not want to criminalise young people. We do not think that it is appropriate to reduce the age limit to 16. Of course, civil injunctions are already in place to deal with young people under 18 who engage in antisocial behaviour. I think they will be called youth injunctions. They will carry on. We are also committed to prevention partnerships, which means identifying those young people who are getting themselves into difficulty, antisocial behaviour or other criminal activity, and trying to work with them early on. I think that keeping young people and children out of the criminal justice system as much as we can and diverting them is key to this. That is why the respect order is post 18.

On retail crime, it was a manifesto promise in the Labour manifesto last summer that we would introduce this particular measure. That was specifically about the fact that some retail workers are carrying out a public service duty. For sales of alcohol, they have to check the age of the individual, and they do so in many other instances as well. For sales of knives, you have to check. That is why we wanted to have a specific offence dealing with assaults on retail workers carrying out that particular role.