Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Robert Syms Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Commons Chamber

I know the Minister is new in his post, and I urge him to listen to the professionals, including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Dogs Trust, the Kennel Club, the British Veterinary Association and others, and also to the Communication Workers Union, which represents thousands of postmen and women who deliver our mail every day, and up to 20 of whom are attacked just delivering our post. I ask the Minister to consider the new clause again. If the Government are not going to support it today, I urge them to consider it in the other place, because we need serious action to prevent dog attacks in the first place.

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

I welcome what the Government are doing. It is quite brave. Dealing with any topic such as this one fuels great passions. All of us love dogs, but those of us who are parents feel slight fear when we see an unruly dog in a playground or somewhere else.

We have to strike a proper balance. The whole thrust of what the Government are doing in this area is to simplify and make flexible antisocial behaviour legislation so it can be more easily used. Therefore I urge the Minister to resist most of the amendments, although I accept they have been tabled for understandable and strong reasons, and the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) certainly made a very good contribution. We ought to go forward with what is being proposed, which is CPNs, and see whether they deliver what the Government have assured us they will.

There are DPNs in Scotland and Northern Ireland and the Government have looked at them and concluded they would rather have CPNs. If devolution is to mean anything, it must allow Scotland and Northern Ireland to go their own way and the rest of the United Kingdom to go a different way if it perceives that is a better way to deal with the problem.

[Jim Shannon]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Syms]

No.

We all know the problem is irresponsible dog owners, and the Government’s raft of proposed legislation ought to be able to deal with that effectively. I therefore urge the Minister to resist most of the amendments, but I also urge him to give special attention to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) said. The Committee came up with some refreshing ideas. Some of the Back-Bench Members had meetings with Ministers, including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister Lord de Mauley. The refreshing thing was that they were prepared to look at the issue of the tariff and sentencing. A consultation took place in the summer, and although my hon. Friend is disappointed that it has not yet been published and any changes will be made in the House of Lords, by Whitehall standards this is the speed of light: we have a Bill, we meet a Minister, the Minister undertakes to have a consultation, we have the consultation and in a matter of weeks something will come back to the other place. That is pretty good, so I welcome what the DEFRA officials and the Minister have said.

[Richard Fuller]

I join my hon. Friend in commending Lord de Mauley for his speed of reaction in DEFRA. We are just looking for the same speed of reaction from the Home Office.

[Mr Syms]

Absolutely. Progress has been made and the Government listened to our Committee debates. I was surprised that my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), who mentioned cats, did not mention Mungo and Basil, as they got a mention in Committee. It was an interesting Committee and things were well debated. We made proposals that will improve the Bill. I urge the Minister to resist most of the amendments, but to consider the amendment to do with the tariff, which needs to be given serious consideration.

To go back to my first point, the Bill is about simplifying things and making them more flexible, and I urge the Minister to resist more complicated legislation. Let us get on with the job and let us make it easier for legislators. This is a good Bill, extending the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 to private property and protecting assistance dogs. It contains a lot of good things and if we can get the tariff up as well, it will be a result for those who served on the Committee and for this House.

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Poole (Mr Syms) and it was good to hear him speaking in the House, after a period in the Whips on the Front Bench, although what he had to say was still a little too loyal for my taste.

I welcome clause 98 and the extension of the offence of allowing a dog to cause injury or the fear of injury to all places, including all private property. That is long awaited and closes a significant loophole in the law. Ministers have simply been much too slow to make this change. Today, however, particularly with new clause 3, the new Minister has the opportunity to act ahead of a serious and growing problem, instead of just giving a long-delayed response to a problem, as we have seen so far. I am talking about the introduction of dog control notices.

We know that thousands of victims are injured and hospitalised each year as a result of dog attacks. We know that the number of owners sentenced for offences related to dangerous dogs has increased by more than one third since 2009. Just in South Yorkshire the police tell me that in the past year they have responded to 464 dog attack incidents, and that just in 2013 they have so far taken out 26 court cases pursuing prosecution against those owners.

The latest case reported to me was that of Rebecca Lowman of Goldthorpe, who was attacked and badly injured in the arm and leg last month when she was defending a woman who was being attacked by her own dog in her own house. While Becky was still in hospital, I sat down with her husband John, who was very upset by Becky’s injuries and very angry that the police had no ability to act on that dog because the attack took place in that private house.

Since I started campaigning on this issue in the past few weeks, a lot of people have contacted me, including Norma Saunders, who told me that she knows someone who was a victim of a dog attack. She said:

“After the dog attacked several times, our community felt terrorized. I did not let my little boy play in the garden & I did not walk to the shops, but the authorities were not interested.”

I pay tribute to Hallam FM in South Yorkshire, which has taken up this campaign, aired the problems and given listeners the chance to give their experiences over the past week. A couple have phoned in with very powerful points. One said that the law must be changed:

“I was mauled by an American Pitt bull crossed with a Bull mastiff at my friend’s house and as it was in its rightful house nothing could have been done…I have been left with traumatic memories and ugly scars, this dog has not been put down and has in fact bitten someone else”.

Another caller simply said that we should

“just do what is definitely necessary to prevent any more horrific and fatal attacks on innocent people and children.”

The Minister has the chance to do just that this afternoon.

I urge the Minister, taking advantage of his fresh mandate as a new Minister in a new post, to accept new clause 3. Dog control notices have been legislated for in Scotland for three years and this represents a sensible extension of the scope for local authorities, courts and the police to take action against a person in control of a dog whose behaviour is out of control. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) has explained some of the steps and sanctions available to the authorities when a dog control notice is in place.

Labour has been arguing this case but Ministers have been dragging their feet for three years now. During that time, thousands more have suffered serious and often debilitating injuries. Most dog owners are responsible and their dogs are well behaved, but a minority see dogs as status symbols or even offensive weapons. The Government must go further than this Bill. Closing the loophole in the legislation over attacks on some private property is a sensible step, but one that they have been pushed to take. Let us see Ministers take the next sensible step this afternoon, introduce and accept the principle of dog control notices and help to reverse the rising trend of attacks and to head off some of the attacks we will otherwise definitely see, which will leave adults and children badly scarred, badly injured, badly traumatised and, in some cases, dead.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Syms]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch). She has done valuable work in raising the issue of bullying, which blights many children’s lives and is a very important subject for politicians to consider.

This is a Christmas tree of a Bill. When a Bill has so many aspects it makes it difficult to provide enough time for discussion of important issues. However, I think that it has been improved during its passage so far, and it has certainly been given a great deal of scrutiny. I always enjoy the exchanges between the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, which are sometimes robust, and certainly—in the good parliamentary tradition—provide answers to the question of why a Government and an Opposition take particular points of view.

The main changes that have been made relate to extradition. There was a fair degree of consensus on the Bill, which was why at one point we had to slow down a little so that the extradition clauses could be tabled. The Committee had also considered the issue of extradition. In recent years, we have seen a number of examples of why the European arrest warrant is sometimes a good thing for Britain. We have seen gangsters extradited from Spain very quickly, sometimes within hours, and identified. One can understand why the Home Secretary is minded to opt back in to the arrest warrant, following an opt-out, subject to reassurances.

However, we are also aware of many constituency cases in which people have not been treated so well, and human rights have not been dealt with according to the good old British tradition of allowing someone his day in court. People have been whipped out of the country somewhere abroad, have spent a period in prison, and have ended up either not being charged or being acquitted. It is a pity that we did not have an opportunity to explore that more fully today, although I know that a good many Members will be doing so. Of course, the House of Lords is stuffed full of experts—lawyers and others who are au fait with the issues—and I am sure that there will be proper scrutiny in the other place.

I thank the Members who served on the Committee, and I thank the Ministers—including the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne)—for their contribution. We have considered some important issues, including antisocial behaviour, which blights many of our constituencies, and the National Crime Agency, which I think will be a great addition to crime-fighting, particularly across borders. Let us hope that they are considered further, and that we receive the reassurances on extradition that I think the House needs. I think that our constituents and the House will welcome many of those developments.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—