Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 28th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I had hoped to avoid the approach that the hon. Lady takes. Of course we believe that women deserve strong protection—we absolutely do—but all I can say to the hon. Lady is that the Law Commission, in looking at the evidence over a three-year period and consulting widely across the sector and society more generally, found that the additional complexity was likely to make it harder to prosecute these crimes. I ask her to reflect on the fact that in proceedings in this House, she put her name to an amendment compelling the Government to adopt the Law Commission’s proposals in full. I am not sure why she has now reversed that position, but I hope she appreciates that we are as dedicated to and interested in the safety of women as she is.

[Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend and I worked hard on the issues underpinning the Bill and on the Bill itself. May I press him on Lords amendment 72? I accept that the amendment is defective. It does not create a new offence, however, but is about aggravating factors in sentencing. I commend to him the positive findings of the Law Commission, namely its proposal to develop an offence of street harassment, albeit with a sexual motive. I take issue with that—I think it needs to be a wider offence of street harassment, because we need to deal with wider issues than sexual motive—but I press the Minister to commit the Government to getting on with work on the Law Commission’s important recommendation to create a new offence based not just on racial hatred, but on hatred motivated against gender or sex.

[Kit Malthouse]

My right hon. and learned Friend is right that we need to have a serious look at the suite of offences used in this area. He will know that many street harassment offences are classified as some kind of public order offence. That causes a number of problems, not least the lack of transparency with the police’s analysis of what is going on out there in our streets.

There are three further areas of work that we want to turn to, as we sadly reject this amendment, well motivated though it absolutely is, on the basis of the Law Commission’s evidence. Those three areas are first, as my right hon. and learned Friend says, to adopt the Law Commission’s other proposal of looking at a specific offence of public sexual harassment, as my neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), asked for today. Personally speaking, I think it could be a new offence, but it could be some amendment to public order offences to allow us to deal with this particular issue.

The second area is police recording. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon has raised the issue a number of times with me outside the Chamber, and he is right that we need to look carefully at the forces recording data at the moment, what they are learning from it and what impact it has, because the Law Commission was equivocal about the value of that recording. I am not convinced personally, and I would like to understand what impact it is having from a policing point of view.

The third area of work I would like to see is encouragement of reporting. One of the key things, whatever the offence type, is that we know a lot of women, particularly in the public realm, who are harassed do not have the confidence to come forward or do not think anything will happen if they do. I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), is today launching an extensive communications campaign called “Enough”, encouraging bystanders and peers to report this kind of behaviour to the police.

[Sir Robert Buckland]

I have listened with care to my right hon. Friend, and I accept what he says. I am encouraged by what he says about development of the law. May I press him on reporting and recording? As part of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 process, we undertook to ensure that recording was rolled out nationally. That was more than a year ago. For that to happen, there must be proper expedition on this. It is no good saying that there is not a particular offence on which the police can hang this recording. We need to get on with it, because the time is coming, sooner or later, when there will be a relevant offence, and I would rather that the Government were ahead of the pack rather than behind.