Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (Fourth sitting)
Sarah Jones ExcerptsThursday 20th May 2021
(4 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 View all Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 20 May 2021 - (20 May 2021)
Sarah Champion
Q
Will Linden: The Scottish perspective is very similar, but this comes down to the fact that we collect a lot of data on individuals and families—crime data, health data and social work data. The problem is that the data do not speak to each other.
We often hide behind GDPR and data protection rules. The datasets and the data holders need to be more aligned so that when we are trying to make some of the strategic decisions, we can interrogate the data better, understand the impacts on families and understand the impacts on young people. For me, this is not about collecting anything new; it is about using it smarter. From Scotland’s perspective, I do not think we are much further ahead than where we are in England and Wales now, because we need to get smarter at that too.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
Q
Will Linden: I come from a background of looking at prevention and looking at what works, both from a public health perspective and from a criminal justice perspective—not any particular one lens.
Looking at the Bill and what it is trying to do with violent crime reduction orders and other aspects, the intent is there to try to reduce violence. Some of the challenges I have with it regard the unintended consequences of the Bill. If you are going to use some of the measures in it, such as what are essentially increased stop-and-search powers and increased powers over individuals connected to, and guilty of, violent crime and carrying knives, we have to be sure that those are the targets that we want to target with this, because we really need to be focusing on those who are the most at risk of committing the highest level of violence.
For the majority of young people—it will be young people who are caught up in some of the violent crime orders—they will probably be one-off offences. What we will be doing is further criminalising them, and the unintended consequence is that we might be pushing them further down a criminal justice pathway. Looking broadly at the Bill, it is a good idea in principle, but it is about who we point it towards and who we target it at. If we are targeting it at a wide spread—everyone who is caught with a knife, or everyone who has something to do with violent crime—and everyone becomes a part of the Bill or a part of this order, the consequences could far outstrip the outcomes that we are going to try to achieve.
Iryna Pona: From the Children’s Society perspective, we are supportive of the intention behind the duty to bring together different agencies to develop a strategy to reduce and prevent serious violence in their areas. However, we know that the success of such a duty would rest a lot on how it is implemented locally. It is really important that the duty is formulated in such a way as to encourage the greatest focus possible on the safeguarding of children and on the early intervention and support for children and families, as opposed to being seen as a crime reduction initiative.
We therefore believe that for the duty to have a significant impact on reducing the criminal exploitation of children when criminal exploitation is linked to violence or children’s involvement in violence, it is important that the safeguarding of children is recognised and included in the name of the duty, encouraging multi-agency action to address the underlying causes of violence, such as poverty, poor housing, exposure to domestic violence, and criminal and sexual exploitation.
All those are really important, because I agree with what Will said. Potentially, if it is just treated as a crime reduction initiative and prevention is focused on police action, it is very different from when it is safeguarding and focused on offering the best support possible to children.
Sarah Jones
Q
Iryna Pona: Yes. I believe it will help with interpretation of the duty locally, to enable it to be interpreted in a very similar way across the country and to focus attention on action that needs to be taken by different agencies locally on safeguarding children and taking action to provide support. It is not necessarily preventing escalation or further involvement in violence, but preventing as early as possible involvement in any violent activity. That would be really important.
I also think there are other simple ways in which the duty can be improved—for example, by making sure that when the strategy is produced, social care is part of the consultation, because it will have information about who the vulnerable children are, what the level of need is and how things can be improved locally.
There are different elements related to the duty—for example, about information sharing—that are also important. Information sharing is obviously a very important area. We agree that it is crucial that relevant information is shared to enable agencies working together to plan a better response to children. But there is also something in the duty and in the accompanying guidance that suggests that information may be shared or requested directly—for example, from schools—by the police about individual children. We would have concerns about that, because schools have such an important role to play; school is a place where children have trusting relationships with teachers and educators. It could undermine some of the trust that children have. We believe that there are already in place multi-agency structures—such as multi-agency safeguarding hubs or multi-agency risk assessment conferences—that are better placed for that information sharing about individual children.
So I think there are elements in this duty that are really important, but there are also ways to improve it.
Sarah Jones
Q
Iryna Pona: Plugging is when young people are exploited by criminal groups to deliver drugs across the country and—sometimes—they are delivering those drugs inserted in cavities in their bodies. It is a horrific experience for children—it is also a great risk to their health. Unfortunately, it is something that a lot of children we are working with are experiencing. It is experienced by a lot of children who are exploited by criminal groups for county lines drug trafficking.
Sarah Jones
Q
Iryna Pona: Yes. That definitely came up a lot when we were doing our research for the county lines report. Practitioners were—[Interruption.]
Sarah Jones
Q
Will Linden: A public health approach to tackling violence is quite simple. It is about using an evidence-based approach to address the causes of the violence in the first place—looking at the challenges, the underlying situation and the underlying evidence, and addressing them before they becomes a wider issue. The public approach is nothing to do with specific trauma or with criminology; it is solely about applying what works at the earliest possible stage. It is evidence-based, it is tried and tested, and it is there to try to deliver long-term, sustainable outcomes. Obviously, over the last year we have all become aware of the public health approach in terms of dealing with the covid situation. This is the same idea: it is looking at what works. How do you vaccinate a community? How do you try to reduce violence? In relation to young people and violence, it is not necessarily about crime, prison and stop-and-search; it is about why they got to that point in the first place and what we can do about it.
Sarah Jones
Q
Will Linden: There are a number of thoughts about that in terms of what has happened over the last few years. There are increasing levels of inequality and the reductions in the services that are available because of some of the decisions we have had to make; there are also issues such as social media and young people’s culture. What is interesting for me from a Scottish perspective is that although we have seen increasing levels of youth violence in England and Wales, we have not seen the same thing in Scotland. We have seen the level of violence change, go up and stabilise at a certain level, but not necessarily among young people. It is a different group and a different type of violence.
There is something particular happening within certain cultures in certain areas of the UK. We know that violence is not constant across the whole country; it is in pockets. For example, in Scotland, about 60% of the violence is attributable to less than 1% of the population at a very small geographic level. Although we talk about looking at a public health response to the whole country, it is sometimes about much more targeted interventions at a local level.
Sarah Jones
Q
Will Linden: I do not hold much stock in the comment that violence is just increasing anyway, because throughout the western world violence has been reducing for centuries. We are safer today than we were yesterday, despite what the crime figures, and sometimes the newspaper headlines, tell us.
In Scotland, we looked at policing to start with. Policing is incredibly important, because sometimes you have to stabilise the patient and deal with the problem before you can put in prevention measures and deal with the underlying causes. For us, that was heavily about education. It was about looking at schools and access to young people, who were our initial target, our biggest group and our biggest challenge, predominantly in Glasgow and the west coast of Scotland, not in the whole of Scotland. That is who we targeted.
We targeted young people with education, programmes and advertising campaigns. We looked at how we could get people into jobs and mentor and support them. It was not a one-fix thing. It was about trying to understand the local situation, so in specific areas of Glasgow we looked at the gangs problem, and in Lanarkshire we looked at unemployment. It was about looking at different problems and trying to apply the solutions locally. That took a great deal of partnership working and a great deal of intelligence and information.
Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)
Q
Will Linden: That is an important question, because they do have to fit in with existing structures. One of the successes we have had in Scotland in delivering on the strategy is because we are connected in. We are connected into policing. We are connected into the Government. We are connected into local government across the country. If you are introducing any new structures alongside that—VRUs; it does not matter what it is—how are they going to connect into local delivery and local services? More importantly, how is it going to connect into local communities?
If we are looking at strategies based on short-term turnaround—for example, we are going to provide x amount of money to provide a reduction in the next year—that is not going to work, because you are looking at how to build the building blocks, within these communities, areas and partnerships, that are going to deliver long-term, sustainable outcomes. That does not mean that the partnerships, in whatever area of the country they are, cannot get reductions just now, but what we want to do is to build upon those short-term wins in order to build long-term, sustainable reductions that are built into the system—that are not additionality.
Alex Cunningham
Does anybody else wish to comment on that? If not, I will pass to Sarah.
Sarah Jones
Q
Nina Champion: Thank you for that question. We responded to the consultation on serious violence reduction orders to oppose them—well, we tried to oppose those orders, but there was no question to enable us to oppose it. That option was not given as part of the consultation; it assumed that these were going ahead before the consultation had actually happened. What we do know is that many respondents to that consultation said that one of their key concerns was the disproportionate impact of this provision, particularly on young black men.
We do not believe that serious violence reduction orders are needed, or that there is evidence that they will reduce knife crime. Of course, we all want to reduce knife crime, but rather than additional surveillance, we would rather see additional support for people convicted of these offences. We worry about these very draconian and sweeping police powers to stop and search people for up to two years after their release without any reasonable grounds. Reasonable grounds are an absolutely vital safeguard on stop and search powers, and to be able to be stopped and searched at any point is a very draconian move that, again, risks adversely impacting on those with serious violence reduction orders. For young people who are trying to move away from crime, set up a new life and develop positive identities, to be repeatedly stopped and searched, labelled and stigmatised as someone still involved in that way of life could have adverse impacts. It could also have impacts on the potential exploitation of girlfriends or children carrying knives for people on those orders. There could be some real unintended consequences from these orders.
In relation to your point about what could be done, if these powers were to go ahead, we would like to see a very thorough evaluation of them before they are rolled out nationally. I do not have much confidence in that, given that section 60 powers, which also allow suspicion-less searches to happen, were rolled out following a pilot after several months without any evaluation being published or any consultation. It is therefore absolutely vital that these powers are thoroughly evaluated. That could involve things such as looking at the age and ethnicity of those who were stopped and searched, the number of people stopped in the belief they were someone who had an order but did not—we might see increased stop-and-account of people who have got nothing to do with an order, in cases of mistaken identity for someone who is under one—or the number of times individuals were stopped.
We would like to see scrutiny panels given access to body-worn video footage of every stop-and-search that is done under these powers or in belief of these powers. It is crucial that the evaluation speaks to people who are directly impacted by these powers, interviews them and understands what the impact is. It should also interview and speak to the organisations working with them. Ultimately, it should also look at whether this has achieved its aim. Has it reduced knife crime within an area compared to non-pilot areas? Much could be done to ensure that the evaluation is thorough to avoid the roll-out of these powers, which we believe are not necessary and could have disproportionately adverse impacts. They are just not needed.
Chris Philp
Q
Dr Bild: Yes.
The Chair
We will go in reverse order. Gracie first, then Oliver and Colin.
Gracie Bradley: Thanks. I would like to set the Bill in its wider context. What we are seeing is a shrinking space for people to speak up and hold power to account, the Human Rights Act potentially being watered down, and attacks on judicial review. Now we see this policing Bill that inevitably poses an existential threat to our right to protest. These aspects of the Bill are so significant and so serious that they cannot be mitigated by procedural amendments.
The right to protest is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy and it is protected by articles 10 and 11 of the European convention on human rights. I recognise that it is not an absolute right, but the state has a duty to protect that right and has a positive obligation to facilitate it. We must not forget that protest is an essential social good. For people who do not have access to the courts or the media and so on, it might be the only way they have to make their voices heard.
In Liberty’s view, we have not seen a compelling case in favour of expanding existing powers in respect of protests. The existing powers are already broad and difficult to challenge, and they are weighted heavily in favour of the authorities. I know that there is some analysis to suggest that the protest provisions in the Bill are a direct response to Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter. I just remind the Committee that during the judicial review of the Met’s decision to ban Extinction Rebellion protests in 2019, the commissioner conceded that there were sufficient powers in the Public Order Act to deal with protests that were attempting to stretch policing to its limits. We are incredibly concerned by the existential threat to protest that the policing provisions in the Bill propose. We invite the Committee to say that they should not stand part of the Bill. I will leave it there for now because I am sure others have more to say.
Oliver Feeley-Sprague: Again, I agree wholeheartedly with what Gracie has said. Amnesty is part of a number of civil society organisations and academics who think that part 3, on protests, in its entirety should be removed from the Bill. It is neither proportionate nor necessary.
I have been working on policing issues for the best part of 25 years and I have never seen a roll-back of policing rights in all of that time. Often I think what is missing from these discussions is recognition that it is not necessarily about a lack of policing power. It is a tactical and operational decision made by commanders at the time to maintain and uphold public order, and they already have a variety of powers and laws. You have only to look at the College of Policing’s authorised professional practice on public order to see the enormous list of powers police have at their disposal.
From an international perspective—you would expect me to say this as someone from an international human rights organisation—these are international legal obligations under article 21 of the international covenant on civil and political rights. Interestingly, the Human Rights Committee issued a general commentary on this issue last year. It is quite normal in international legal circles for authoritative bodies to introduce guides and interpretation statements about how these things are supposed to be implemented. Importantly, the commentary on the right to peaceful protest issued by the Human Rights Committee last September said that states parties should avoid using
“overbroad restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly.”
It stated that peaceful assembly can be
“inherently or deliberately disruptive and require a significant degree of toleration.”
Lowering the thresholds and introducing vague terminology such as “noise”, “annoyance” and “unease” are the clear definition of overly broad restrictions on the right to peaceful protest. It puts the UK out of step with its international obligations.
That is also important in the foreign policy setting, because Britain—the UK—goes out of its way to say that it wants to be a champion of human rights around the world, especially on issues of civic space and freedom of assembly. It was a feature of the integrated review and it featured in the UK’s response to the G7 communiqué. It is awfully difficult for the UK to champion these issues on the world stage when domestically it is rolling them back. If any other regime in any other context were to introduce powers of the kind introduced in the UK by this Bill, the UK Government would be the first to criticise. It gives those regimes an easy excuse or get-out clause. They can point the finger and say, “Well, the UK is as guilty as all of us. The UK has no credibility to lead on these issues on the world stage.” That discussion is missing a bit from this Bill.
Professor Clark: There is little I can add to what has been said, but I will do my best.
The words that Olly quoted—“noise”, “annoyance” and “unease”—are replicated in other parts of the Bill, where there is talk of “disruption”, “damage” and “distress” of a significant nature. What strikes me is the imprecise language and terminology of the Bill, and the potential that it would introduce for discretion, the operation of prejudice and bad governance, in a sense. It leads to some fundamental questions about what kind of democracy we want to live in. Do we want to live in a democracy that protects human rights, protects peaceful assembly and guarantees both formal and substantive citizenship rights?
I am of an age where I remember being outside where you are right now back in 1993, peacefully assembling to protest the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 for the same reasons that we are here today. There is a real sense of déjà vu about this in terms of the rights to protest and to peaceful assembly. Then, of course, it was raves and the succession of repetitive beats, as the Act made it known. It was a section of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 that effectively ripped up the obligation of the state and local authorities to provide Gypsy sites within local authority areas. There is a real sense that we have not made much progress here at all.
Again, I concur with what Gracie and Olly said. I hope this is taken on board.
Sarah Jones
Q
In terms of protests, it is completely reasonable for the police, particularly in London, to say, “We have these enormous protests that last for several days. They may well be peaceful, but the city grinds to a halt. Is the balance of power right in this setting?” That is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and there are different views about what the answer is. You have all made your views clear on the Bill, and I agree, but do you think there is anything reasonable that should be done, perhaps not through the Bill but in other ways? There are lots of different practices that could be looked at. Does any of you have a response to the charge that there are protests that last for days and cause significant disruption, and what are we to do about that?
Gracie Bradley: That is as really interesting question. It is a good question, but the problem is that, in seeking to legislate for that kind of thing, we have ended up with something that is so broad and has the lowest threshold so far that essentially any protest may be targeted. That is just not really what is at hand here. The issue is that nearly any protest could be considered to cause serious annoyance. All kinds of protesters may fall foul of it, and nobody should face a sentence of up to a decade for exercising their fundamental rights. That is the problem that we have with this legislation.
I appreciate that you are asking what we should do with protests that go on for days, and are disruptive and so on. As I said, protest is a fundamental right, and it is the state’s obligation to facilitate it. The very essence of protest is that it will be disruptive to some degree. One person may say, “This has been going on for days,” or one public authority may say, “This has been going on for days and now it is causing a huge problem,” but other people will perceive the threshold as much lower, so it is a really dangerous road to try to go down. What we should really be looking at is how we uphold the right to protest.
Again, there is a perception that this is just about Extinction Rebellion or Black Lives Matter, but people have been out to protests for all kinds of reasons over the last year, be it either side of the Brexit debate, lockdown or BLM. The Court of Appeal said:
“Rights worth having are unruly things. Demonstrations and protests are liable to be a nuisance. They are liable to be inconvenient and tiresome”.
It is to approach the question from the wrong perspective to be saying, “How can we limit?” We really need to be looking at how we can facilitate, especially when we have had scenes like the ones at Clapham Common under existing powers, and when the Black Lives Matter protesters last year were subject to very heavy policing—kettling, horse charges and so on. We have seen a nurse fined £10,000 for organising a protest. Really, the question is, “What can we be doing to better protect and uphold protest rights?” rather than, “How can we clamp down?”
Professor Clark: I very much agree with what Gracie says. In a sense, this issue is back to front. It is ostensibly an issue of management and pragmatics, and how to better facilitate protest, as Gracie puts it. We recently had a situation here in Glasgow. It was two tales of the weekend, really: on the Saturday we had Rangers football fans in Glasgow city centre, and then on the Sunday we had a march in support of Palestine and against what was going on there.
I attended the Sunday event, not the football event, but it seemed to me that those were very much issues of management and pragmatics. The Sunday event was well planned and prepared for, and proportionately policed and managed. It had a clear start point and end point, and as far as I am aware there was no trouble whatsoever—there were stewards present and so on. The Saturday was a rather different matter. It was expected but not particularly well planned for, particularly by Police Scotland and other representatives.
Bearing in mind what happened there and in other instances of what this legislation could be used for, it strikes me that we need to come back to the idea of how we embrace and understand questions of formal and substantive citizenship, and manage the pragmatics of given protests and how we can better facilitate and prepare for them. That seems the right thing to do if you believe—to go back to what I said earlier—in human rights and want a better functioning democracy.
Oliver Feeley-Sprague: I repeat what I said earlier about the fact that the right to peaceful protest is a right, enshrined in international law, that everybody has, and for centuries those rights have been used, often in very noisy and productive ways, to deliver everything from votes for women to preventing serious wrongdoing, behaviours and things of that nature. Noisy and uneasy protest is often the way that we see very productive social change happen. I think that is recognised in the international commentary around how states should react.
The way the police manage public order is an enormous skill of tactical and operational consideration. I would just go back to the toolkit that they already have. Sometimes they make the right decision, and sometimes they make the wrong decision—everybody is human—but the answer here is a toleration, not a restriction, and a tactical and operational decision about how best to manage. The threshold needs to be set high to prevent serious threats to public order, not noise and unease.
I would like to bring in two other points so that we do not miss them. The Bill captures other people by using a very low threshold of “ought to know”, which basically means in this context that if you attend a protest, you should be aware of any restrictions that may have been imposed either by a Minister via regulation or by the police. You are then criminalised for that—criminalised for things that in any other context would be perfectly lawful. That is a very dangerous threshold for ordinary citizens to have to face going about their daily lives.
Allowing Ministers to further define these vague terms through secondary legislation, by issuing regulations, creates a space for the Executive branch of Government essentially to outlaw things it finds uncomfortable, rather than the general threshold of serious threats to the public health or order. By doing it via the regulatory framework, you are not allowing Parliament enough scrutiny and enough checks and balances on that.
The way that bystanders and people who participate may be criminalised, and the way that it gives Ministers disproportionate power, are two dangerous things that should not be there.
Sarah Jones
Q
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (First sitting)
Sarah Jones ExcerptsTuesday 18th May 2021
(4 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 View all Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 18 May 2021 - (18 May 2021)
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
Q
I have some quick-fire questions first concerning several other issues in the Bill that we do not have time to go through in detail, so do not feel that you have to give long answers. On the police covenant—that we welcome—would you have liked to see other police officers included in the primary legislation, such as the British Transport police and the Ministry of Defence police? That question is to Martin.
Assistant Commissioner Hewitt: As I say, we work as one police service and we really have done so over the last 14 months. Potentially, that would be a positive thing. We are working closely with the Government. I have set up a shadow police covenant board which has all the representatives of the organisations: staff associations, unions, police and crime commissioners, and the NPCC. We are working really closely with the Home Office officials who are putting it together. My view is that we operate as one UK police service, and it would be helpful if that was likewise.
Sarah Jones
Q
Assistant Commissioner Hewitt: There could be some potential to that. We have, as you know, been alive to the issue of exploitation, particularly in the guise of county lines. We have used other legislation to prosecute the criminals exploiting those children. It is clear, though, that it is a phenomenon. That is why the requirement to share information is important: so that we identify all the risk factors as we collectively try to reduce violence. It may be worth considering a specific definition, but it is well understood in policing. That aspect is part of how we try to deal with those issues— particularly but not exclusively county lines.
Sarah Jones
Q
“The solution to unauthorised encampments lies in the provision of sufficient lawful accommodation accompanied by closer working between the police, local authorities and all other public services.”
Will you expand on that view? Why did you come to that position? These are really quick-fire questions, sorry.
Assistant Commissioner Hewitt: This is a really challenging area for policing, and it provokes strong views on all sides. The police often find themselves in difficult situations when dealing with these issues. Our group, which worked very closely on this issue, strongly believes that the fundamental problem is insufficient provision of sites for Gypsy Travellers to occupy, and that that causes the relatively small percentage of unlawful encampments, which obviously create real challenges for the people who are responsible for that land and for those living around. Police still get involved at the moment. The view of our group is that the existing legislation is sufficient to allow that to be dealt with, and we have some concerns about the additional power and the new criminal provision and how that will draw policing further into that situation. Really, our point fundamentally as the NPCC group is that the issue here is the lack of provision that theoretically should be made, which means that we have this percentage of Travellers who are on unlawful spaces and you end up in the situations that we end up with. Our view is that the current legislation is sufficient to deal with that issue.
Sarah Jones
Q
Assistant Commissioner Hewitt: I think we all understand that the volume of digital evidence that is required for almost every investigation has grown and grown as all of our lives are lived more digitally. That has created real pressure on the time limits of investigations and our ability to gather the evidence that we need to take an investigation forward. We have increased the capability. It is partly about equipment and having the right equipment to be able to extract digital evidence. It is also about having officers and staff who have the right capabilities to assess that evidence and produce it in an evidential form.
There is no doubt that that is a growth area, and all sorts of discussions are going on between us and Government about increasing our capacity and capability for that. However, the flip side and the really important point is making sure that what is being done is lawful, proportionate and necessary. Again, that side of the work is equally important.
This is never going to be about randomly extracting data; this is about extracting the data that is required to conduct a proper investigation, provide evidence and decide how something goes forward and, really importantly, doing that in a timely fashion. As we all know, there are real concerns about the timelines for investigations and prosecutions, and one of the key factors in the delays in those processes is the extraction and analysis of digital forensics. So we need the legal framework to allow us to do that properly and we then also need the resourcing and the capabilities to do it within the right time limits.
The Chair
Can I remind you, if Mr Cunningham is coming in, that you are in the last two minutes of your time, so how you use it is up to you.
Sarah Jones
Q
Chief Constable Harrington: Of course, there is a process by which we have to react to highway obstruction. It does not allow us to assess impact on hospitals or access for emergency vehicles. There is clarity between what is a procession and what is an assembly, and we can apply such conditions as are necessary, with all of the balancing around what could be a march or an assembly or both. If you take Parliament square, sometimes people will rotate around it. I know there is particular interest in St Thomas’ Hospital with Westminster bridge, for example. The ability to have consistency allows police commanders, where required, depending on the size and nature of the march, protest or assembly, to be clear in advance about where emergency vehicles will be allowed to get through.
I use Parliament square as an example because it will be evident to members of the Committee and easy to describe, but the same issue might arise elsewhere. The process enables us to be clear in advance where that threat is posed or, at the time, to be clear and able to communicate that. With highway obstructions, there is a need to negotiate, discuss and decide whether there is lawful authority and if an emergency vehicle is trying to get through, that takes time and it will not be effective.
The Chair
Thank you. I have got to switch to the Minister, Victoria Atkins. If there is time, I will come back to Sarah Jones.
The Chair
Chief Superintendent.
Chief Superintendent Griffiths: Picking up on mental health and trauma impacts across the police service, we are also starting to see police charities supporting these areas. There has been a 36% increase in inquiries to the police charities compared with the previous year, the vast majority of which are mental health concerns. There is clear evidence of the impact of trauma on police officers and staff. We recognise that everybody will experience some trauma in their life, but the exposure for police officers is quite significant.
We then have to look at what is the best thing that we can do. There is a whole array of things that we can do: providing appropriate space for debrief, increasing communication, and occupational health support. There is a whole catalogue of things, but I would class those as probably falling under what I would describe as the programme management, rather than any legislative concerns.
There are two matters I would like to raise on the police covenant. The first is the important role of independence within the processes, so that we get an independent view. Our employment rights are restricted—naturally so, we would not contest them, because of the nature of our role and responsibility in society—but measures that can be put into place to provide independent support, guidance and oversight are really important, so I stress the importance of independence in the system.
I would also like to raise the issue of mental health concerns and seeking the police covenant as a way through helping and supporting. Unlike the Police Federation, the Superintendents’ Association goes beyond the 43 Home Office forces. We support other police forces, including British Transport Police and Civil Nuclear Constabulary, which at the moment are not directly covered by this legislation. I would like to emphasise the importance of the whole police family and make a plea to consider as part of the legislation those wider non-Home Office forces that play an integral part in UK policing.
Sarah Jones
Q
You have just made exactly the point that I was going to ask you about, on the importance of the police family and the wider family as part of the police covenant. Can I push you both a bit on the notion of independence from the Government when we are looking at the covenant? What could that look like? Would there be a benefit of some oversight from policing bodies, perhaps chaired independently, on the covenant report that is produced by the Home Secretary? Would you both welcome that?
Chief Superintendent Griffiths: It has always been my perception that a police covenant is almost the sector asking the Government for additional support or assistance, or to rule out any adverse impact on police officers, and for the Government to play their role across all other public agencies to try to level the ground and make sure everything is fair and supportive for policing.
The NPCC has employer responsibilities, which are sometimes in statute and are sometimes just its moral code for how to look after staff, so the way it is constituted in terms of how this flows is really important. My fear is that it would be left in a situation where the Government would direct the NPCC on how to support its own police officers, staff and volunteers. It is incumbent on Parliament to consider how best to get some level of independence, in terms of the oversight, and echo the responsibly to work across Government in terms of supporting the police covenant and all officers and staff.
John Apter: I want to touch on something that Paul said to a previous question. It is important that the Police Federation’s views are noted. This is about who the covenant actually benefits. Paul is right that we represent the Home Office forces, which are the big chunk of who the covenant legally covers, but we work incredibly closely with the non-Home Office forces, Police Scotland, the Scottish Police Federation and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It is really important that we are all treated equally within policing. We do not want the benefits that the covenant hopefully brings to be diluted in any way for any part of policing. I completely support and echo what Paul says.
On the independence—absolutely. When we were pulling together our concept of the covenant—obviously we want it to be very far reaching, but we accept that we have to start somewhere—one of the things that I was insistent on was that it must be enshrined in law; it must mean something. It is a positive step for the Home Secretary of the day to report to Parliament on a legal framework. It is right that the Home Secretary of the day has that responsibility.
When we talk about oversight, I do not want the covenant to become wrapped up in bureaucracy and red tape. If it is, nothing will be achieved and nothing will get done. Within policing, we have some strong views about the need for it to be independent. That is not to say that the Home Secretary, the policing Minister and the Home Office have not been incredibly supportive. They have, and we could not have got this far without that support, but in order to make the covenant meaningful for our members, retired colleagues and volunteers, I think that level of independence on the oversight programme, the oversight board and the delivery board, which would then lead in to the Government, is really important. We fed back those views collectively as policing. It is not just the federation calling for this; collectively, we all believe very strongly in it.
Sarah Jones
Q
Can I ask Paul about pre-charge bail? What are your thoughts about breach of bail, which we have talked about previously? We are finding our way through that with this piece of legislation. How do you think that would work in an ideal world?
Chief Superintendent Griffiths: I should probably start by saying that we did voice some significant concerns in 2016 about some of the changes that were coming in and highlighted this at the time as a joint letter between the Police Federation, the Police Superintendents’ Association and the National Police Chiefs’ Council. We worked with the changes that Parliament instructed, and we are grateful for the recent amendments that may come through the Bill in terms of timeliness and some of the issues that have been challenging us over the last four years.
We are supportive of the vast majority of it. The one area where had some concern was on the breach of police bail, where bail conditions are imposed and then suspects continue to breach those bails. Of course, those bail conditions would be there to protect victims or even the wider public. It could be extremely useful to us for that to be an offence in its own right. I note that there is an introduction to prevent the start of the custody clock, which was another risk that we thought may come from somebody who would consistently breach their bail, risking an impact on the investigation custody time limits for other aspects for which they were under investigation. The Bill suggests that three hours is sufficient to deal with that breach of bail, and that seems appropriate, but it could be beneficial to the police service for that to be an offence in its own right in terms of processing individuals for such breaches.
Sarah Jones
That is really helpful; thank you. Shall I go over to Alex? I am aware of the time.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (Second sitting)
Sarah Jones ExcerptsTuesday 18th May 2021
(4 years, 4 months ago)
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Sarah Champion
Q
Matt Parr: Shall I go first? I am afraid it will be a short answer. We are aware of the issue, and as you may know we do a 43-force inspection of all police forces on a rolling basis. We think that it is a bit early and that we need more time to reach an informed view on the issue, but we will look at it in our next round of inspections.
Jonathan Hall QC: I have a short point to add: I did look at one issue. There are special arrest powers in section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000, and those powers differ from other arrest powers in that they allow for people to be held for up to 14 days. I did consider whether there should be the power to bail after arrest in section 41 in my first report, but for various practical and technical reasons I thought that was probably wrong. That is the only thinking I have done about that.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
Q
Jonathan Hall QC: I thought there were three key points. First, managing the terrorist risk from released offenders involves practitioners from agencies who are not always good at working together. For example, the probation service and MI5 do not have, historically, an easy way of working together.
Secondly, the likelihood of making really good decisions at the right time, which is what matters, would be increased if there was a shared understanding of risk. That involves greater data sharing, and not just secret data sharing—though that is important—but sharing data from all other sources. One of the good things about the Bill is that it resolves an uncertainty about when data can and cannot be shared. It also requires better understanding in all the agencies about what tools exist. Probation has a really fantastic, powerful tool—the ability to recall risky offenders to custody. That is probation’s power—it is not the police’s or MI5’s—and it is important for MI5 to understand that and to make sure that the person making that decision understood the risk. So a comprehensive understanding of each of those powers is important and, as you know, I recommended a couple of extra powers, which are in the Bill.
Thirdly, there is a particular difficulty in practice of managing people who had not been convicted of terrorism offences but who were of terrorist risk when released. Take, for example, someone who went to prison for a very violent offence and became radicalised in prison—they present a terrorist risk on release. It is quite difficult to get them into the structures that exist for managing such a terrorist risk, but the Bill is going to change that to make it easier—[Inaudible.]
Sarah Jones
You froze. You were saying, “to make it easier”.
Jonathan Hall QC: The Bill will make it easier for MAPPA—the management structures of risk—to apply to all terrorist risk offenders. That is not just people who were convicted of terrorism offences but people who are of terrorist risk when they come out of prison.
Sarah Jones
Q
Jonathan Hall QC: I have nothing to say in relation to the power of the police to arrest urgently where there is a breach of licence; that is a really sensible addition. There is a power in clause 159 to apply for a warrant to search the premises of a released offender, and I support that. The point of detail is that it would be possible to apply to a judge for a warrant that would allow you to enter on any number—potentially an infinite number—of occasions. If you think about released terrorist offenders on licence, their licences can last a very long time—for example, 10 or 15 years—so perhaps the Committee may want to think about whether it is appropriate to have a power that would authorise multiple entries into a person’s premises throughout 10 or 15 years. The power of multiple entry under warrant does exist when you are talking about a live operation, and the police find that quite useful. I am not quite sure whether it is justified in the context of this particular risk. That is just one small point of detail, more by way of a safeguard.
Secondly, I recommended and am pleased to see in the Bill a power to search the person of a released terrorist offender. For example, if someone is going to London for the first time, or if a released offender who is very dangerous is going to meet a probation officer for the first time, that would authorise the police to pat them down to make sure they are not carrying something. That is good not only as a deterrent, but as a reassurance. It is reassuring to have that ability, which exists in the context of offenders under civil measures called TPIMs—terrorism prevention and investigation measures.
The only small point is that in the Bill the purpose of searching is
“for purposes connected with protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism”.
In other statutes, for example the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011, the power is to be used for
“ascertaining whether the individual is in possession of anything that could be used to threaten or harm any person.”
When I was thinking about this point, I had in mind patting someone down for a weapon or something of that nature, rather than a personal search to check generally whether they are complying with their licence conditions. Again, that is something that the Committee will probably want to consider—what precisely is the purpose of the search. It may be that the purpose of the search goes a bit wider than is necessary. Those are two relatively small points of detail.
Sarah Jones
Q
Jonathan Hall QC: No, I do not think there is anything in the Bill to address that. The only other bit of the Bill relevant to my area of business is the power to refer an individual who has become dangerous in prison to the Parole Board so that they cease to be someone who is automatically released and can only be released by order of the Parole Board. I think that is sensible. I do not know whether you know that I am doing a review of terrorism in prisons at the moment. The need to be agile and respond to the radicalisation that does sometimes happen in prison is important, so that is to be welcomed. I do not think—unless you can refer me to it—that there is anything that addresses the question of deradicalisation or desistance. I think the truth is that officials will say that it is an ongoing process. I am not saying it will not work with some people, but I would not put all my eggs in that particular basket.
Sarah Jones
Q
Matt Parr: I have got quite a lot of sympathy with what you say. We were very clear in what we said that any reset should be modest. We also said that, because of article 10 and article 11 rights, some degree of disruption is not just an inevitable by-product, it is sometimes the whole point of the exercise of protest, and on that basis, it has to be encouraged. Zero protest is certainly not the aim as we saw it; zero disruption was not the aim either—some degree of it is inevitable. It is just a question of where the balance lies.
I take your point. Some of the things in the Bill we were not asked to comment on. For example, imposing conditions on one-person protests—clause 60 in the Bill —we were not asked to comment on. Some of the specific areas such as access around Parliament—clause 57 and then clause 58 if Parliament moves—we were not asked to comment on, either. There are things that we did not really look at, and therefore I have not got a judge on what effect they might have and what the potential benefit might be.
Perhaps the most contentious would be the third of the proposals that we were asked to look at that widens the range of circumstances in which police can impose conditions on protests: static assemblies or processions. It could be either type. We said that at the moment there are four acid tests. In the disruption one, it was “serious disruption” to the life of the community. As I understand it, the proposal is that that is modified to “significant impact” and so on. Ultimately, these will have to be judged in the courts. It struck me that it clearly aims to set a lower bar. Personally, when I reviewed it, I did not think the bar was necessarily the problem. There is just as much of a problem with educating and training the police officers and making sure they understand how article 10 and 11 rights can be properly tempered. It was a question of training and understanding as much as it was of where the bar was for disruption.
Interestingly—again, I am probably simplifying it a bit too much—there is quite a stark difference between London, which obviously gets a disproportionately large number of protests, and elsewhere. Senior police officers outside London—again, I am generalising—tended to think they had sufficient powers, and senior police officers inside London tended to think that more would be useful. I think that is a reflection of it.
I think yes is the short answer to your question. I think there are dangers and, as ever, the bar for measuring what was significant or what was serious should be a high one. We all recognise that. It should not be done on the flimsiest of pretexts. Again, it would then be open to challenge, and I think police officers would only wish to use it when they were confident.
Alex Cunningham
Q
Jonathan Hall QC: Certainly most of those convicted of terrorism offences will have some sort of Parole Board referral anyway, so automatic release for people convicted of terrorism offences has virtually come to an end. I spoke—
Sarah Jones
Q
David Lloyd: Can I come in first on that and perhaps also bring in another bit? One of my concerns about the Bill is that it does not go far enough; in fact, it does not really mention how we might use police and crime commissioners more. My concern has always been very much about trying to be at the centre of the criminal justice system and how we bring that together with someone who is a focus for that on a local basis.
One of the benefits of police and crime commissioners has been their ability to bring different parts of the criminal justice system together, along with local authorities, so that we can better ensure that we reduce violence and crime, that the lessons are properly learned and that we put support for victims and perpetrators in the right place. I think it is perfectly reasonable to establish the situation as we are doing it, but we need to go further. One tends never to talk about what is not in a Bill, but the big thing this misses, as far as I am concerned, is how you put PCCs at the very heart of the criminal justice system.
Frankly, with extra duties falling to police, more people will be arrested, and they will end up in a queue going to court which is getting ever longer. Until you have got someone who is able to break through that long queue to get to court, none of this will really work. That is a crisis that we need to solve, and I think we have a solution in trying to give more power to police and crime commissioners. That might be a discussion for another day, but it is something we really need to focus on.
Councillor Caliskan: I think the LGA would highlight that a prevention-first approach is a long-term, sustainable approach to deal with crime in our communities. We absolutely support collaboration and a multi-agency working approach, because it works. The evidence demonstrates that it works, and the best and most successful outcomes demonstrate that. Take the violence reduction units, for example; there are very good examples of that.
There are not violence reduction units everywhere, so there is this inconsistency. They were, as I understand it, first established based on the areas where there were high levels of knife crime. Now, whether that should be the criteria going forward is a matter for debate, but I would emphasise again that the long-term statutory responsibility is suitable and that the multi-agency approach is properly resourced to be able to deliver those early interventions.
The community safety partnerships are really welcome as well. Again, there are some good examples of them. I guess that the benefit of community safety partnerships is that local communities can decide what the issues are. That gives communities agency, and it allows different organisations to come together to have ownership of the problem.
We at the LGA would ask for there to be more consistency. For that, we should see violence reduction units extended and offered in more areas, and there should be a more sustainable funding model. If we are serious about seeing a reduction in crime, we have to have models that move away from just one-off grant funding or one-year grant funding, to five-year periods of funding, so that there can be long-term projects.
Alison Hernandez: If I may say, I get a bit frustrated with the conversation about funding, because it is not all about having funding from the Government. I absolutely applaud the serious violence duty. One of the challenges that we all recognise is that, generally, society is getting more violent. This isn’t, “Who has got the most violence in their area?” We have a general societal problem, which every area needs to be looking at, focusing on and tackling.
In Devon and Cornwall, we are not one of the areas that received the violence reduction unit funding, so the chief constable and I have come together in a partnership to establish a serious violence prevention programme. We are funding that through council tax payers’ funding, because we believe that it is fundamentally important that we make this a priority. So you can do it yourselves if you think it is important. The serious violence duty will help people to see that this must be prioritised to be tackled. We want to do prevention; we do not want to deal with the things in the Bill that are just about enforcement and the hard end of it. We are able to look at that early intervention and prevention.
Many Members will have heard of things such as Operation Encompass, which is throughout the country in all 43 police forces, to try to help children who are at the receiving end of domestic abuse. In that sort of thing, we are trying to help children as young as possible, to break that cycle of violence. We fundamentally know that domestic abuse is one of the key issues that, if not tackled at a young age, leads to more violence in later life. I am an absolute supporter of the serious violence duty. We have things within our own powers, as commissioners with our local authorities, to set the priorities to tackle that.
Sarah Jones
Q
Councillor Caliskan: I think you are right. There is no point talking about just enforcement if you want to see community cohesion. Enforcement alone does not allow for Gypsies and Traveller communities to have their place in our community when they want it. It is the nature of their protected characteristics.
What needs to happen? There was a question mark over the efficiency of—[Inaudible]—policy. There has to be a commitment from local authorities that those sites are allocated. The statutory legislation that already exists for these protected characteristics needs to be taken seriously. We should be meeting the obligations that are already set in statute, which says that we should have adequate sites for these communities, but we just do not.
I would like to give parliamentarians some reassurance that the LGA absolutely takes tackling crime seriously. That is why councils up and down the country fund multi-agency working. We take it really seriously—it is a priority, because residents tell us that they want to be safe. We also recognise that crime is a symptom of what is often a complicated socioeconomic issue. If we want to collectively be serious about tackling crime, we have to tackle it at every stage, which means talking about prevention and—[Inaudible.]
Sarah Jones
Q
Marc, it was put to us earlier that this is not about discrimination or attacking Gypsies or Travellers. It is about people who are engaged in significant criminal damage in places where they should not be. It would be helpful to have your response to that charge—Adam first.
Adam Wagner: I hear that. I will just quote Lord Justice Laws, who said:
“Rights worth having are unruly things. Demonstrations and protests are liable to be a nuisance. They are liable to be inconvenient and tiresome, or at least perceived as such by others who are out of sympathy with them.”
Protest has not changed; protest has always been a pain, a nuisance and liable to be inconvenient and tiresome. What has changed is that we have a Government who do not like certain protests—although that in itself has not changed either.
Extinction Rebellion is no different from any widespread protest movement—the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the environmental movement previously—but what is different is that it has managed to attract hundreds of thousands of people to its cause and is making real inroads on the public consciousness. That in itself is not a justification effectively to give the police powers to ban or impose conditions on any protest or, even more troublingly from my perspective, to give the Home Secretary—whose role is only to protect public order, not to protect particular opinions or to impose her, his or the Government’s opinion on any particular group—powers in effect to give examples of protests that she considers to be noisy, the ones that this legislation is targeting. You are getting yourself into a situation not where the public is better served, but where this essential part of democracy is going to be reduced down and chilled.
Sarah Jones
Thank you. Marc?
Marc Willers QC: The first thing to say is that those who are committing significant criminal damage can be prosecuted using existing legislation. If they are committing antisocial behaviour, existing legislation is in place. Indeed, the police made that point in their responses to the consultation on these proposed measures, and did so in spades. The response from the vast majority of the police forces was, “We do not need additional powers”, or, “We do need the existing powers under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to be strengthened.”
I have no hesitation in saying, fund the police properly and ensure that they prosecute those who commit criminal offences, whether they be Romany Gypsies, Irish Travellers or members of the settled population—everyone should be treated in the eyes of the law—but part 4 and the proposed provisions do not just affect those who are committing significant criminal damage; they affect each and every Gypsy and Traveller who is exercising their right, enshrined in our convention and under the European convention of human rights, to nomadism, to roam. We should not force them into a position in which they are only lawfully exercising that right when actually on the road—a road to nowhere.
The provision not only will force them into that situation, in which they are literally only within the law when they are moving along the road, but will give police the power to seize their homes, should they fall foul of the provisions. Should they camp on a piece of land and be asked to leave by an occupier who is prejudiced against them and would not want them to be there out of fear that they might commit some behaviour instilled in the mind by prejudice against Gypsies and Travellers, then as I said, it is a fait accompli for the police who are called in. They will have to arrest and almost certainly seize the caravans, that being the home. The individual and family might end up being destitute.
This is all at a time when there is insufficient transit and permanent sites for Gypsies and Travellers to live on. The proposed legislation ignores the rather elderly and enormous elephant in the room—the lack of site provision. That lack of site provision has continued unabated since the 1960s, as I said, when the commons were first closed.
Rights to Protest
Sarah Jones Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. The hon. Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers) made some slightly misguided remarks about what we are debating today. It is perhaps a bit insulting to his constituents who enjoy the right to protest, and to mine.
On my screen, I am looking at four very powerful women who are in Parliament and have contributed to the debate. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) mentioned the Suffragettes. Dorinda Neligan, who was a headteacher in Croydon and a great Suffragette, got arrested several times in Parliament in 1909 and 1910. I am sure that if she was watching today, she would say, “Well, it’s a jolly good thing that we got the vote and that these powerful women are here today making a case for British democracy,” which is what we are standing up for today—no more and no less than that. I hope the hon. Member for Stockton South will reflect on his comments.
All the speeches that we have heard have made powerful cases. I do not know what is in the water in Bristol, but there are a lot of protests there. There are many active members of the community, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) made a powerful case by saying that the police have pretty much got things right during this difficult past year, but that we have to protect the right to protest. People have to think wisely and well about how they do that and how they win arguments.
The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion made a very powerful case when she said that our fundamental rights are not multiple choice. As she says, we cannot pick and choose which ones we like and which we do not. I have not been arrested, and I am not much of a protester, but I absolutely and fundamentally believe that we must protect the right to protest. Every six weeks, I meet a group in my constituency—they are largely women in their 50s, 60s and 70s—who are active campaigners on climate change. The last time I met them, they were absolutely adamant that the changes would be very damaging to them and their rights to make their case, which they want to do powerfully and peacefully, for more action on climate change.
We talked a bit about the petition. A quarter of a million people have signed it, which is a significant number. The Petitions Committee used an online survey to ask petitioners for their views, and 95% of respondents were concerned that proposals to increase police powers would prevent the public from being able to hold the Government to account. Three quarters of the respondents were also concerned that the proposals could result in restrictions being imposed on protests, prevent protests from going ahead and result in people who take part in protests facing criminal charges. Respondents said that peaceful protest is democratic, a human fundamental and a basic right, and they were concerned that increased police powers would limit opportunities for people to express dissent, hold the Government to account and bring about positive change. Respondents were also concerned that the Bill would curtail peaceful, well-managed protests and, in doing so, risk increasing unorganised violent protests.
As hon. Members of different political parties have pointed out, the right to protest is a fundamental freedom—a hard-won democratic tradition that we are deeply proud of.
Throughout our history, as we have heard, protests have led to significant change for the better. The Government’s proposals are risky and unnecessary and will be damaging to the traditions at the heart of our democracy.
The arguments have been well made, but I want to make four broad points. First, the Bill is incredibly broad and vague. It has already been mentioned that the measures target protesters for causing “serious unease” and “serious annoyance”. Such measures would definitely have prevented the great protests of history, and that vague term “serious unease” seems a low threshold for police-imposed conditions. It is hard to imagine our society as one where the police can impose directions on a protest for simply being noisy, but that is what the Bill would do. There is also a penalty in the Bill for someone who breaches a police-imposed condition on a protest when they “ought to know” that the condition existed. If someone attends a protest and the police have placed conditions on the number of people allowed to attend, how will those attending know that they are the 101st person to join, and that they are therefore breaching the conditions? The clause could effectively criminalise people who do not know that they are breaching conditions.
Currently, protest must involve at least two people to engage police powers, but the new measures would allow the police to issue conditions on a one-person protest; so if one person protesting causes another person in the vicinity to suffer
“serious unease, alarm or distress”
or the noise that the protesting person generates may have a
“relevant impact on persons in the vicinity of the protest”
the police are able to impose conditions. Those powers are clearly too broad. Steve Bray’s shouts of “Stop Brexit!” were incredibly irritating for all of us, I suspect, but that does not mean he should not have been able to make his point, or that he was causing any damage or harm by doing what he did.
The point of protests, as has been said, is to capture the attention of people and of the Government. Sometimes—pretty much always—protests are noisy. That is the point of them. Sometimes they are annoying; but they are as fundamental to our democracy as Parliament and the courts are. The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), made that point on Second Reading, expressing concern about the proposals, and pointing out the risk of their going against the right to freedom of speech. Sir Peter Fahy, a respected former chief constable of Greater Manchester police said:
“People need to be really worried about this…the right to protest, the right to gather, the right to have a voice is fundamental to our democracy, and particularly British democracy.”
He spoke about the bringing in of legislation
“on the back of the Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion demonstrations, rushing that legislation through, putting in some really dodgy definitions which the police are supposed to make sense of”,
and said that if one thing had been learned from the coronavirus legislation it was that
“rushed legislation and unclear definitions cause huge confusion for the public and for the police having to enforce it.”
That brings me to my second point. The Bill would put the police in a difficult situation, having to make judgment calls for every protest and no doubt getting the blame because those judgments would be seen as political choices. I support the police. As shadow Policing Minister I think they have done a good job through covid times, in difficult circumstances, with legislation that was brought in at the very last minute, which they had to try to understand. They had to try to police draconian legislation as they had never had to before.
It cannot be right for the police to be attacked or assaulted. We have seen attacks on police and other emergency services increasing in recent years, and more needs to be done about that. At the weekend police officers in the Met were injured as they dispersed crowds during an anti-lockdown protest. Violent protest is never right, but the new powers are so vague that they will force the police to make political decisions about which completely non-violent protests they are under pressure to deem unlawful. That is extremely concerning and will put the police and the public in a difficult position. Why do the Government want to make the police the gatekeepers of public protest?
The public order measures in the Bill risk putting the police in a difficult position more often and creating more disorder and disruption. The Government should not be putting the police in that position. Where the rules are too confusing and too broad, they will only create more flashpoints. It is also worth pointing out that the Government have decided to introduce this contentious legislation restricting the right to protest in the middle of a pandemic, when we have very difficult laws that the police are trying to implement. Why make a decision that potentially puts public health at risk by forcing the public to protest against their freedom to protest being taken away from them in the middle of a pandemic?
My third point, which again has been well rehearsed, is that the changes give dangerous powers to the Home Secretary to make regulations about the meaning of “serious disruption”. The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead, made a really important point in her speech on Second Reading. She said:
“It is tempting when Home Secretary to think that giving powers to the Home Secretary is very reasonable, because we all think we are reasonable, but future Home Secretaries may not be so reasonable.”—[Official Report, 15 March 2021; Vol. 691, c. 78.]
The idea of giving the Home Secretary such a big power to impose their own perspective on what lawfully constitutes annoying or too noisy is deeply alarming.
If there is a peaceful protest outside the Home Office that the Home Secretary does not like, will they criminalise everyone for shouting too loud? If the Minister wanted to protest about a cause that he cared deeply about, would he really want the Home Secretary ultimately to decide whether what he was saying was right or wrong, or whether the protest was too loud? I know that I would not.
Finally, and really importantly, the existing legislation is sufficient to cover the concerns that have been raised. The Public Order Act 1986 and other powers appear on the statute book to police protests. I am not sure why that legislation is not enough. There are probably questions about when and how it is implemented, but the laws are there. They are really clear, and they are plenty strong enough to stop disruptive or violent protests—the kind of protests that the police would need to be able to stop. The police have the power to break up protests that cause harm or serious public disorder, serious damage to property, or serious disruption to the life of the community.
As the Member for Brighton, Pavilion mentioned, Michael Barton, who is the former chief constable of Durham police, compared the measures in the Bill to that of a paramilitary-style police force, and asked whether the Government are
“happy to be linked to the repressive regimes currently flexing their muscles via their police forces”.
That seems like strong words, but there is a delicate balance between the need for the police to keep order and ensure that protests are peaceful, and the legitimate right to protest on the causes that we all care about.
The police officers I speak to do not want to undermine that balance. They want our respect. They want fair pay. They do not want to be assaulted. They want to get on with their jobs. They want to fight crime, but they understand those Peelian principles. The right to express our thoughts collectively through protest is one of the cornerstones of our British tradition. It would be of great concern if the Government passed laws to protect them from any public proclamation of criticism.
The police are the people and the people are the police. The co-operation of the public diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of force. Can the Minister tell us what “serious unease” or “annoyance” is? Can he tell us what too much noise sounds like? Which protests would he have stopped under the new legislation, and can he tell us why the Government are introducing rushed, undefined, broad measures that will inevitably undermine the right to protest? Finally, will he reflect on the words of the former Prime Minister, senior police officers, and a quarter of a million petitioners, who are asking him to think again?
Trespass
Sarah Jones Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab) [V]
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I want to begin by thanking everyone who signed the petition and all the individuals and organisations that have spent a lot of time, in the various consultations and processes around this issue, giving their views. It is clear that there is a very strong community of organisations, from all kinds of backgrounds and interests, that are coming together to give their view and to oppose what the Government are seeking to do. I thank those individuals and organisations.
I thank the hon. Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher), who I thought gave a very balanced view, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) said; and I thank my hon. Friend, who is so principled and so practical in everything that he says—I hope that the Minister was paying close attention. Indeed, I thank all colleagues who spoke in the debate. We have heard about both the importance of keeping our countryside open as much as possible for as many people as possible and about the other side of this issue, which is the prejudice and harm that the legislation will do to the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities. That was very well articulated by several hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy), who made a really powerful case. I thank everyone for their contributions.
As we have heard, over 140,000 people signed the petition against the Government’s proposals. That is not surprising, given the moral and practical problems that the Government are introducing with the proposals. The Petitions Committee’s online survey was really interesting and asked petitioners for their views. As has been said, over 84% of respondents told the Petitions Committee that
“the criminalisation of trespass would have a ‘major’ or ‘moderate’ effect on how they live their lives as they do today…Many respondents were concerned that criminalising trespass could increase pre-existing tensions, mistrust, and lack of understanding between their local community and Travellers. There was consensus that more needs to be done to provide authorised sites for Travellers.”
As I mentioned, a broad coalition—from the NSPCC to Liberty, from the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities to the Ramblers Association, and from the police to Shelter—is united in the view that the proposals put forward by the Government would be wrong and unhelpful and would go against our basic rights. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is designed to criminalise the act of trespassing when making an unauthorised encampment. What is proposed in the Bill on the trespassing of unauthorised encampments is deeply concerning and unnecessary. As one of the responders to the Petitions Committee’s survey put it:
“The criminalisation of trespass will simply exacerbate an already fraught relationship. Gypsies and Travellers will still camp but there’ll be more prosecutions, more distrust, more public money spent on legalities”.
Other people who have a nomadic lifestyle have told me that they feel that they will no longer be able to live on the road in the way that we have seen in this country since the 16th century, and that the Bill risks criminalising their way of life. Failure to comply with a police direction to leave land occupied as part of an unauthorised encampment is already a criminal offence, but the proposals create a new offence of residing on land without consent in, or with, a vehicle. The broad way in which the definition is drafted seems to capture the intention to do this as well as actually doing it—the intention can be criminalised as well—with penalties of imprisonment of up to three months or a fine of up to £2,500, or both. The loose drafting of the wording in the legislation invites problems with its interpretation, and it is simply not fair to put that on the police. If someone were to drive in a car, park it and walk somewhere in order to wild camp beneath the stars, what does “with a vehicle” cover in the legislation? How far away from the vehicle would the campers have to be in order to escape carrying out a potential criminal offence?
The major concern that the Opposition have with this part of the Bill, and that is articulated in the petition, is that it is clearly targeted at Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and such criminalisation could breach the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. When the powers in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 were first debated in Parliament, it was stated that the powers were intended to deal with “mass trespass”. In the new Bill, however, even a single Gypsy or Traveller travelling in a single vehicle will be caught by the offence. What constitutes
“significant damage, disruption or distress”
is subjective, particularly as there needs to be only one vehicle, and what constitutes the intention to cause
“significant damage, disruption or distress”
is even more subjective. That is in part why the measures to increase police powers on unauthorised encampments are not backed by the police, as we have heard. When Friends, Families and Travellers researched the consultation responses that the Government received, it found that 84% of the police responses did not support the criminalisation of unauthorised encampments.
In her opening speech, the hon. Member for South Ribble quoted the Minister as saying he wants to ensure that the police have the powers they need. Actually, they believe that they already have the powers they need. Senior police are telling us that the changes in the Bill relating to unauthorised encampments would only make matters worse. They would add considerable extra cost to the already overstretched police and risk potentially breaching the Human Rights Act.
The views of the National Police Chiefs Council and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners were clearly put in their joint submission to the 2018 Government consultation.
They state:
“Trespass is a civil offence and our view is that it should remain so. The possibility of creating a new criminal offence of ‘intentional trespass’…has been raised at various times over the years but the NPCC position has been—and remains—that no new criminal trespass offence is required. The co-ordinated use of the powers already available under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 allows for a proportionate response to encampments based on the behaviour of the trespassers.”
Why are the Government determined to lock up Gypsies and Travellers against even the advice of our own police?
The police already have extensive powers in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to move on unauthorised encampments. As of January 2020, just 3% of Gypsy and Traveller caravans in England were on unauthorised encampments. Some 419 of those caravans were on sites not tolerated and 275 were on tolerated sites. Police and campaigners tell us that the evidence is not there for these new powers to be necessary at all and that many more authorised encampment sites should be provided instead. In their joint response to the Government’s consultation on unauthorised encampments, the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chiefs’ Council called for the shortage of transit sites and the lack of accommodation provision to be addressed.
In a ministerial statement on 8 March 2021, the Home Secretary stated:
“As of January 2020, the number of lawful traveller sites increased by 41% from January 2010.”—[Official Report, 8 March 2021; Vol. 690, c. 22W.]
Friends, Families and Travellers has pointed out that
“this is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.”
It says that the 41% referred to by the Home Secretary is in fact
“an increase in transit provision and the Ministerial Statement fails to include this key component of referencing ‘transit’.”
That amounts to about 101 additional transit pitches, which is 10 a year over 10 years, whereas the number of permanent pitches has gone down by over 500 since 2010. Friends, Families and Travellers goes on to say:
“This misrepresentation of the figures leads people to believe there has been a much greater increase in site provision than there has. In fact, the Government published figures show there has been an overall 8.4% decrease of pitches on local authority Traveller sites.”
The Government should be focusing on ensuring that local authorities have the resources they need to provide more space for Traveller communities to legally reside. By taking an enforcement approach to addressing the number of unauthorised encampments, they are overlooking the lack of site provision. Friends, Families and Travellers notes:
“There are other solutions to managing unauthorised encampments, such as negotiated stopping, whereby arrangements are made on agreed permitted times on stopping and to ensure the provision of basic amenities such as water, sanitation and refuse collection.”
The Conservative party manifesto commitment and the Government response to the consultation refer to littering as a problem. Why do the Government not consider providing more authorised camping sites with proper refuse facilities? If a family are asked to move on, where are they supposed to go if there is no authorised encampment in their area? Why do the Government think that confiscating someone’s home, putting them in prison and fining them is the answer?
The legislation that the Government seek to introduce would cause harm to Gypsy and Traveller communities for generations and threaten their very way of life. It is impractical, misleading and adds nothing useful to the law that already exists to tackle problems such as rubbish and antisocial behaviour, which we all abhor and which the Government claim they seek to address. I urge the Government to rethink these harmful proposals.
This debate has been a good opportunity to raise concerns about the forthcoming Bill, which we will discuss in more detail in Committee. I end by asking the Minister to answer the following questions in his response. Can he provide an update on the progress of the national strategy to tackle Gypsy, Roma and Traveller inequalities, which was announced by the Government in June 2019? We have heard nothing since then. Under the provisions in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, what would happen to a Traveller family in a single vehicle who are residing on a highway and have nowhere else to go?
Can the Minister clarify the Home Secretary’s claim that there has been a 41% increase in site provision? Can he confirm that that applies only to transit provision and that permanent site provision has significantly decreased? Can he confirm that the provisions in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill on unauthorised encampments are not in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010?
Will the Minister look at different approaches, such as that of the Welsh Labour Government, who have placed a legal duty on local authorities to ensure that the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers are properly assessed and that the needs for pitches are met? As an example of the current lack of provision for Gypsies and Travellers, only eight of 68 councils in south-east England have identified enough land in their areas for Travellers to live on. Will the Minister tell us where those Gypsy and Traveller families, who will otherwise be criminalised, are supposed to go?
Finally, does the Minister agree with the multiple concerns raised by the police, and what is he doing about them? What is he doing to ensure that the Bill, if passed, does not damage our rights as British people and cause more harm than good?
Oral Answers to Questions
Sarah Jones Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Priti Patel
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the blended way in which forces should come together, because county lines cross boundaries. Whether it is the British Transport police, his own police or the neighbouring forces, we need them to pull together to deal with the level of criminality that he has spoken about. That is taking place on one of the biggest issues that faces our country, which is county lines drug gangs. He will know, from when we have spoken previously, of the great operational work that is taking place across our police forces and intelligence agencies to go after the criminals that are out there pursuing such high-harm crimes.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
The shadow Home Secretary will speak about the violence last night in his remarks. I simply want to say that there is never an excuse for violence, and as shadow Policing Minister, my thoughts are obviously with the police who were on duty. I wish them a swift recovery.
Mr Speaker, I want to associate myself with the remarks that you made about PC Keith Palmer and, if I may, I would also like to send my best wishes to the Minister for Crime and Policing, the hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse). I hope he continues to show no symptoms of covid-19 and that the virus was not passed on to anyone working in the Home Office. One would hope that this is a lesson to him of the importance of sticking to the rules.
Thousands of women across the land, including the Home Secretary, have spoken of the danger they feel on the streets and the harassment they have suffered. Now is the time for action. The number of stalking and harassment offences recorded by the police has more than doubled in four years, with 500,000 offences last year, and we know that this is the tip of the iceberg, as most women do not report street harassment. Will the Home Secretary work cross-party to introduce a law similar to the one introduced in France in 2018 to make street harassment a specific criminal offence?
Priti Patel
I say to the hon. Lady that street harassment—in fact, all harassment against individuals, male and female, but particularly women and girls—is absolutely unacceptable. I have spent some time with campaigners who are campaigning to change the law on street harassment, so I am absolutely committed to working with everybody on this. This will be part of our strategy on violence against women and girls. The hon. Lady will know of the work that is taking place on the VAWG consultation right now, and we are going to build on that. We will look at all the calls that come in, and look at how we can have a proper strategy that will formulate legislation to bring about the changes that women and girls quite rightly want to see.
Fire Safety Bill
Sarah Jones ExcerptsWednesday 24th February 2021
(4 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Fire Safety Bill 2019-21 View all Fire Safety Bill 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Commons Consideration of Lords Amendments as at 24 February 2021 - (24 Feb 2021)
Kit Malthouse
My hon. Friend speaks with some expertise in this area and has been a constant presence in debates on this matter over the past few years. He is right. The amendment is self-defeating given the number of, for example, freeholds that are held in limited liability vehicles, which could, in the position he points out, simply put themselves into some kind of insolvency procedure. That is why any measure along these lines would need to be scrutinised carefully and thought about in a little more detail before we brought it in.
Alongside all that, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government has committed to taking decisive action to end the cladding scandal once and for all through the Government’s five-point plan to provide reassurance to homeowners and build confidence in the housing market. Funding will be targeted at the highest-risk buildings, in line with long-standing independent expert advice and evidence. Lower-rise buildings with a lower risk to safety will gain new protection from the costs of cladding removal through a long-term, low-interest Government-backed financing scheme. The Government are also committed to making sure that no leaseholder in these buildings will pay more than £50 per month towards this remediation. Let me be clear: it is unacceptable for leaseholders to have to worry about the cost of fixing historical safety defects in their buildings.
I ask hon. Members to recognise that while these amendments are based on good intentions, they are not the appropriate means to solve these complex problems. By providing unprecedented funding and a generous financing scheme, we are ensuring that money is available for remediation, accelerating the process, and making homes safer as quickly as possible. I give my assurance that the Government schemes to address these issues will be launched as a matter of priority and that we will provide an update on the underpinning details, as Members have urged us, as soon as we are in a position to do so. For the reasons set out, I hope that the House will see fit to support me in my aspirations with regard to these and other amendments.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the Policing Minister. I, too, put on record my best wishes to the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), who cannot be here to lead for the Government today. We all wish him a speedy recovery
I thank our fire and rescue services, who are going above and beyond to keep us safe and have worked tirelessly to protect us throughout the covid pandemic. I am grateful to Ministers, to officials and to House staff who have worked with us on this Bill. I give particular thanks to Yohanna Sallberg and Kenneth Fox, who have supported me, in particular, throughout the Bill’s passage. I thank Lord Kennedy of Southwark, and all those Lords who have led this Bill through the House of Lords, and ensured that Labour’s key amendment on implementing the Grenfell phase 1 recommendations was accepted there.
Every time we debate and discuss the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, we hold the memory of those who died in our hands. We must be gentle and respectful, but we must also see the injustice, and honour those who died by taking action, and by not resting until justice has been done and everybody has a safe home that they can afford. I pay tribute to the campaigners—Grenfell United, the families, survivors, and the entire community—for their tireless fight for justice. I also pay tribute to those campaigners who are fighting every day for the hundreds of thousands of people who are trapped in unsafe buildings, and who face extortionate bills and are unable to move. The drumbeat of their lives is fear and anxiety. No Parliament can ignore that.
Thousands of people are working on this, but I particularly thank Ritu and Will from the UK Cladding Action Group, for their assiduous efforts. I thank the 200 people who joined our roundtable this morning, so that we could hear at first hand the horrors that this Government are wilfully enabling. As Ritu said, “we are fellow human beings in these buildings—your family, your friends, your colleagues.” To everyone who is affected, and who is living in fear and anxiety, I say sorry—we must do better.
As we have said throughout the passage of the Bill, we support it, but it is small and the only piece of concrete legislation we have had since Grenfell. That is not an adequate response to the biggest housing safety crisis in a generation. It does not even scratch the surface of the work that must be done to fix the wild west of building control and fire safety that we have seen played out with such horror over the past few weeks during phase 2 of the Grenfell inquiry. It has taken so long to get here, and at every stage we have had to drag the Government into action.
The Government promised to act swiftly after Grenfell, yet it took them almost three years to introduce this Bill. We waited 12 weeks just for them to bring the Bill back to consider Lords amendments. This is intended to be a foundational Bill. Its purpose is to provide clarity, and state what is covered by the fire safety order, which will inform other related and secondary legislation. In Committee the Minister said that the Government intend to legislate further, and he spoke many times of action still to come, as he did today. By this stage, however, we need more than vague commitments about secondary legislation. At the very least, we need a clear timetable from Government that sets out when further changes to the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order will be delivered, when secondary legislation will be introduced, and when the Bill will be implemented.
In response to a deeply frustrated letter from Grenfell survivors in September, the Government said that the introduction of the Fire Safety Bill was a key priority, yet the Bill does not include provision for any of the measures called for by the first phase of the Grenfell inquiry. We would like many issues around improving fire safety to be included in the Bill, but many will now have to be introduced through the draft Building Safety Bill and by secondary legislation. We have no idea when any of those things will happen.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I have been asked to speak by my party leader, my right hon. Friend the Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson), and by other Members who have relatives who own such flats on the mainland. They have extreme concerns, and the fears that the hon. Lady has referred to about their properties, and what that means for the future. Although the Government have good intentions, I believe —as I think does she—that the Bill does not go far enough. Is she convinced by what the Minister has said, and if not, will she push the amendment to a vote?
Sarah Jones
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I do not think the Government have gone far enough, and I do not accept the reasons why we are going at such a snail’s pace on something so important. I will come to what we think should be done about it.
The Government rejected many attempts to amend the Bill. The draft Building Safety Bill places various requirements on what is called the “responsible person” and refers to the fire safety order for the definition of that, but the fire safety order does not provide a definition of the responsible person. The draft Building Safety Bill even attempts to put into law a building safety charge. It is vital that the fire safety order makes it clear that there is no ambiguity around the definition of responsible person and that it does not mean leaseholders. However, the Government chose to reject that amendment.
The fire safety order requires regular fire risk assessments in buildings, but it includes no legal requirement for those conducting the assessment to have any form of training or accreditation. In Committee and on Report, we tabled amendments that would bring into force an accreditation system for fire risk assessors, rather than waiting for more secondary legislation. We also tabled an amendment to require the schedule for inspecting buildings to be based on a prioritisation of risk, not an arbitrary distinction of types and heights of building. On that point, I am glad that the Government have listened, having turned us down in the initial stages, and taken good practice from Croydon and other areas and introduced a risk-based approach to the Bill.
We tabled an amendment on waking watch to require the Government to specify when and for how long such measures should take place. Thanks to Lord Kennedy of Southwark, our amendment on implementing key measures from the first phase of the Grenfell inquiry passed in the Lords, despite the Government’s attempts to block it. The Government have made so many promises to address the fire safety crisis but failed to keep them. The families and survivors are still waiting for justice, and hundreds of thousands of leaseholders and tenants are still trapped.
As we debate the Lords amendments this afternoon, the Government face a choice on what they include in the Bill. They could do the right thing and fulfil their promises, or they could push the can down the road again—“We do care, just not quite enough, not quite yet.” There are two answers that thousands of people across the country are watching and waiting for today: will the Government change their mind and back the Lords amendment to implement recommendations from the Grenfell inquiry, and will the Government legislate to ensure that leaseholders—blameless victims of this crisis—do not have to foot the bill for measures to make their buildings safe?
Kevin Hollinrake
Although I understand the point behind the hon. Member’s position—I assume she will vote for Lords amendment 4—can she answer the point I made to the Minister? What will she do when the building owners simply walk away? Where will the costs go? Does she have a solution for that? Does she not accept that this amendment is fundamentally flawed and is not the right way to achieve what she wants to achieve?
Sarah Jones
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. He is an expert in this area, and I very much respect what he says. The answer is that it is for the Government to resolve this crisis. It is not for leaseholders to foot the bill. We suggested a national taskforce, whereby the Government could take responsibility for assessing the costs of the remediation work and then find out who is responsible, so that, as with the polluter pays principle, we could get to the point where the people who were responsible for the problem were paying the bill. That is fundamentally what we are trying to achieve, because in law at the moment, those who can least afford to pay are the only ones having to pay. The Minister says that there are flaws in the way the amendment is worded, but he could have amended it.
Lords amendment 2 would place robust requirements on building owners or managers and implement the key recommendations from phase 1 of the Grenfell inquiry. The Minister said that he had concerns with the way the amendment was worded. Again, the Government could have tried to amend it and to fix some of the problems along the way, but have chosen not to do so.
The Government said that they would implement the Grenfell phase 1 inquiry recommendations in full and without delay, and Lords amendment 2 would be a straightforward way for them to fulfil that promise. It seeks to require the owners of buildings that contain two or more sets of domestic premises to do four simple things: to share information with their local fire and rescue service about the design and make-up of the external walls; to complete regular inspections of fire entrance doors; to complete regular inspections of lifts; and to share evacuation and fire safety instructions with residents. Those measures are straightforward and supported by key stakeholders. Indeed, a common response is incredulity that these measures are not already in law.
The Government have even tried to water down proposals on the evacuation of disabled people, as has been reported today. They have proposed requiring personal evacuation plans for disabled people only in buildings with known safety issues and a waking watch. It is only after legal action by the families of those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire that the Government have relaunched a consultation on this.
Stephen Doughty
I wholeheartedly agree with the points that my hon. Friend is making. I want to emphasise the importance of paragraph (a) of Lords amendment 2, on sharing information about the materials that a building is constructed of, because my constituents in Cardiff South and Penarth have real difficulties getting hold of, for example, architectural drawings and original “as built” drawings. There is simply no consistency in this across the UK, which means that fire and rescue services, let alone anybody trying to undertake works, have a much harder job.
Sarah Jones
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I have had many similar cases in my constituency, with people just trying to get to the bottom of what the issues are, and meanwhile they cannot sell their flat and are facing fire remediation and waking watch charges, their insurance is rocketing and their lives are on hold. We heard from many such people this morning, and it really was very sad.
It is hard to understand why the Government have put forward a motion to disagree with Lords amendment 2. I heard what the Minister said, but my challenge is that he could have tried to amend our amendments if he had a problem with them, to make them work. The answer, “We will do these things, but later” is simply inadequate.
Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)
I think that we all share the same objective across the House. I certainly want the recommendations of the first phase of the Grenfell inquiry to be implemented as quickly and robustly as possible. I am afraid, however, that the hon. Lady is trying to make a political point, because my has made it very clear that we have a robust system in place. We have the Fire Safety Bill. We have already done the consultation on the fire safety orders, which will be coming out in the spring. Our methodology has been backed by the National Fire Chiefs Council, and the step-by-step process has also been backed by Dame Judith Hackitt.
Sarah Jones
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I do not doubt her sincerity or the work that she has done on this since becoming a Member of Parliament, but I fundamentally disagree. The step-by-step process might be the right process, but it is so slow. It is almost four years since the Grenfell fire, and it is a year since the recommendations were made. The consultation finished in October, and the Government are still considering the responses. It is painfully slow. Have we not seen with covid what is possible when we put our minds to something? Look at how tremendously quickly we have achieved amazing things through this year of trauma. I think that, with commitment, the Government could work faster on this.
Ben Everitt
We all share the frustration and want this to be done quickly, but it has to be done right. If it comes down to a choice between quick and right, we owe it to the leaseholders to do it right.
Sarah Jones
I hear what the hon. Member says, but whether we should have a system in law whereby we check that a lift is safe is really not that complicated. Of course there are experts, but throughout all stages of the Bill the Government and the Minister have referred to steering groups, taskforces and consultations, rather than actually implementing the recommendations. We could have gone much faster. The Government published the consultation on fire safety in July and it closed in October, but four months later they are still analysing the feedback. They cannot keep promising to act later; they need to act now. There really are no more excuses. There is no reason why this amendment could not be made. The Lords were right.
I will now move on to Lords amendment 4, to which many amendments have been tabled in an attempt to improve it and build on it. This morning I heard from many leaseholders in this very situation. They told me of their desperation, how their lives have been put on hold, how they face mental health issues, how their insurance has rocketed, how their waking watch costs are exorbitant, how they cannot get EWS forms and so cannot sell their homes, how they face costs of other fire remediation way beyond cladding, and how they live in blocks not covered by the Government schemes. Many of them face bankruptcy. They simply cannot understand the injustice of having to pay for things that were never their fault. They cannot understand how the Government do not get this and will not put it right.
Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Con)
To echo the comment from my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), it is about getting this right, rather getting it done quickly. Does the hon. Lady not agree that a lot of these policies that we are bringing forward have been measured, have been accepted by experts and are tackling the issue? It is right that we tackle those at most concern of not being safe first, and then follow through afterwards, rather than trying to do all of them at the same time and getting it wrong.
Sarah Jones
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I genuinely struggle to understand why the Government have not grasped the scale of this crisis and the quantity of people who cannot sell their flat, who cannot afford the costs that they are currently looking at, who cannot change jobs and who cannot get married or have children because their lives are on hold. Many are first-time buyers who have saved up, worked really hard and got their flat. If the Government would say today, “We will commit to legislate to say that lease- holders should not have to foot the bill”, we could accept that there was a commitment there, but there is not.
There is no commitment to say that leaseholders should not have to foot the bill. The words are said, but there is no action to put it into law. [Interruption.] The Minister says from a sedentary position that there is £5 billion, and that is true, but that does not cover the vast number of people who are still affected—the vast number of people whose lives are still on hold. One could say that some of them are perhaps traditional Conservative voters. We struggle on this side of the House to understand how the Treasury has not grasped the scale of this crisis and is not putting it right.
Stephen Doughty
I know for a fact that some of those affected are traditional Conservative voters. I have spoken to people from all walks of life, and they are in absolute anguish about this. They are being left in the dark. We had the announcement the other day—it was typical to announce a big sum of money and then not be clear about how much would come to Wales, how the system would work or when the money would come through. These people have been living in the dark and in anguish for months and for years, and it is completely unacceptable.
Sarah Jones
My hon. Friend is completely right. There is the idea that someone would have a long-term loan where they pay £50 a month. If someone needs to pay off a £20,000 loan, and that loan stays with the building, they have no chance of selling their flat. Nobody is going to want to buy a flat with a bill that high.
Kevin Hollinrake
What evidence does the hon. Lady have for that claim? This is a maximum charge per unit per month of £50. If she understands how property transactions work, that is a maximum of £600 a year, which capitalises to about £12,000. I am not saying it would not affect the value of that property, but it does not make them unsaleable. It makes them far more saleable—I draw the House’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—than they are today and actually affects the value by a relatively small amount.
Sarah Jones
The hon. Member said, “I am not saying it would not affect the value of that property”, and that is the key. This issue should not be affecting the value of the property when people have saved up for many years, worked hard, bought their flat and then through no fault of their own suddenly finds that the value of their property goes down because of the Government failure to deal with the problem.
Through successive lockdowns, the people in these blocks have gone to bed at night with the added pressure of sleeping in a building at risk of fire or being themselves at risk of bankruptcy and deep financial trouble. It is taking a heavy toll on people’s mental health and putting millions of lives on hold. Leaseholders have been trapped in this impossible position for far too long.
I hate that we are still having this conversation. I hate that I have stood here at this Dispatch Box time after time for years saying the same thing to Ministers, and I hate that good people on both sides of this House are saying the same things and it is still falling on deaf ears. The problem is not going to go away. The Government could legislate today to ensure that leaseholders do not pay by supporting the Lords amendment, the McPartland-Smith amendment or the Labour amendments. At this point, I do not mind which one they pick; I just want the job done.
Jim Shannon
One of the items that has been brought to my attention is that 57% of flats requiring remediation were purchased for under £250,000, which means that many of those people are living in negative equity in their properties. Does the hon. Lady agree that this is not about cake tomorrow, but about what happens today, and unless the Government accept the amendments that have been tabled, those people will feel that they have no hope for the future?
Sarah Jones
The hon. Member is absolutely right. We heard from a lady this morning that the cost of insurance for her small block had gone up from £30,000 a year to £500,000 a year. We heard from a lady who lives in a block in Kent—I know one Government Member has stood up for her in this place many times—where the residents have already spent £500,000 on a waking watch. It is quite extraordinary.
I was alarmed to see reports this afternoon that the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, has said:
“Our problem with McPartland’s amendment is that, far from speeding things up for constituents across the country who are worried about finding themselves in these properties, it would actually slow things down.”
That mirrors the intervention that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has made, and it is an absolute cop-out. We are four years on, and leaseholders are struggling. We think that 11 million people are affected by this—not necessarily those living in dangerous blocks, but those living in blocks where they do not know, because they have not got the forms sorted and they are paying more insurance. That is a huge crisis.
Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady recall that in the Opposition day debate called by the Labour party just a few weeks ago, I asked the Minister, if our amendment is defective, why do the Government not take it, fix it, and make it work? They had the opportunity then. Does the hon. Lady think they should have done that?
Sarah Jones
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: if there were any problems with these amendments, they could have been addressed by the Government through this process. They had 12 weeks between the Bill leaving the Lords and coming here to try to effect some of these things, but have chosen not to.
The amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) are to prevent leaseholders from being billed for fire safety repairs. Labour’s amendments went further, because the McPartland-Smith amendments—supportive and good though they are—would not cover leaseholders in blocks where flammable cladding had been added at some stage following the building of the block. Labour’s amendments would have included, for example, Grenfell Tower, which was built in the ’70s but to which the flammable cladding was added later, in 2017.
In our amendments (f), (g), (h) and (i) to Lords amendment 4, we have sought to go even further, to make sure that the cost of fire safety problems from refurbishment jobs such as the cladding of Grenfell Tower cannot be passed on to leaseholders. Our amendments (f) and (g) would ensure that leaseholders cannot be passed on the cost of remediating problems issued under the fire safety order wherever the problem was created. Labour’s amendment (i) would ensure that the Bill protects leaseholders from the day it comes into law, instead of an unknown date in the future, and Labour’s amendment (h) would have ensured that if the fire safety order is extended in the future, the Secretary of State must publish an analysis of the financial implications for leaseholders—although that amendment was not selected today, as it was out of scope. [Interruption.] You are hurrying me along, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I am turning pages so that I can speed up, which I will of course do.
To conclude, Labour’s amendments in lieu are straight- forward. They are based on issues that the Government need to address and have pledged to do so, but have not acted on. The risk of fire and looming bankruptcy will not wait while the Government dither and delay, with inaction or failed proposals that keep many lease- holders in debt. Each amendment I have spoken to today corresponds to a broken promise from the Government.
Today is another chance for the Government to finally put public safety first, and bring forward a set of legally binding commitments to deliver on the promises they made to leaseholders and implement the recommendations of the Grenfell phase 1 inquiry. Blameless victims of this crisis, who are in dangerous homes and facing financial ruin, expect nothing less. As debates over the past four years have repeatedly shown, solving this issue fairly would command cross-party support, and today should be a day to deliver justice. It is not too late for the Government to put the British public first and do the right thing.
Policing (England and Wales)
Sarah Jones Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow on from the excellent contributions we have had in today’s debate. I begin, as many others have, by thanking our police officers and staff for everything they do to keep us safe. Covid has placed enormous strain on our police service, and I thank them in the House today for putting their lives on the line for us.
As the shadow Home Secretary said in opening this debate, it is galling to hear warm words from this Government followed by a pay freeze and no news on when our police officers will be vaccinated. We do not oppose this year’s settlement—we would not oppose a motion that puts more resource into our cash-strapped police forces—but we will not pretend that this is enough; that it fills the deep hole in resources that 10 years of cuts have caused; that it makes up for the catastrophic rise in violent crime and the collapse in charge rates that this Government have overseen knowingly for many years; that it forgives a Government who have sat back and watched for a decade as hundreds of thousands of victims of crime have seen no justice done; or that it makes up for the levels of incompetence that have got us to a place where, when every taxpayer’s pound counts towards tackling crime, the Government waste billions on bungled IT projects. This Government have a chaotic approach to crime, and it is the police and the public who are paying the price.
Let us begin with the funding formula, which has been debated so powerfully by cross-party representatives from Bedfordshire. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) and the hon. Members for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) and for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) were united in calling for a change to the formula, which is outdated and unfair. In 2015 the now Minister for Crime and Policing himself described the formula as “manifestly unfair” and praised the then Minister for having “the cojones” to finally deal with it. However, much like the cladding crisis that the House heard about earlier today, the Government have not dealt with it. Northumbria’s funding has fallen by 25%, while the figure for Surrey is only 11%. If the Government are serious about levelling up, they need to act. Perhaps the Minister can tell us when—or, indeed, if—he plans to address that inequality.
Turning to the police grant for 2021-22, we are told that overall funding will increase by £636 million from last year’s settlement, and that includes £415 million for local police forces. Unfortunately, the £415 million increase is dwarfed by the £600 million that has just been slapped on to local forces to fund the vastly increased costs of the emergency services network. Although they may have a few years to pay, it is more than a major and completely unnecessary headache for local police chiefs, but the Minister has brushed it off as minimal. The hon. Member for Wakefield (Imran Ahmad Khan) challenged the Government to be vigilant in how they spend their money, and I agree with him.
Of course, we all know that there is still a £2.2 billon real-terms gap in central Government funding grants to local police forces, and a £1.6 billion real-terms gap in overall funding compared with 2010-11. Is it any wonder that charge rates have collapsed and that criminals go free and victims see no justice? To add insult to injury, instead of directly increasing funding for the police, Ministers have chosen to heap the burden on to hard-pressed local taxpayers, through the council tax precept. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) said, they are being asked to pay more for less. Through smoke and mirrors, the Government are passing on a bill of £15 a year to precept payers in the middle of a pandemic. Does the Minister accept that there is a £2.2 billion real-terms funding gap compared with 2010, and what does he think have been the consequences of that funding gap? Does he really think that now is the time to increase the tax burden on local people?
As my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) and others have said, the police workforce stand at 23,824 fewer personnel than in 2010. That includes 7,179 fewer police staff and 7,262 fewer police community support officers. I am hearing from police forces around the country that this is having a significant impact on the new officer uplift. The cuts to police staff mean that newly recruited officers will end up behind desks, covering for the vital work of police staff instead of being on the streets. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington said, one should not be substituted for the other.
Cambridgeshire is having to cut 40 police community support officers, the entire team of seven community safety officers, and six inquiry desk officers. In Devon and Cornwall, the Conservative police and crime commissioner Alison Hernandez has announced plans to replace PCSOs with volunteer special constables. Warwickshire, as we have heard, is having to cut 56 police staff investigators, nine domestic abuse risk officers, 10 intelligence officers and 10 multi-agency support staff. Unison has described these moves as an “act of desperation.” We have raised this before with the Minister, but he brushes it off as down to local decision making. Police staff are investigators, intelligence officers, forensic crime scene investigators and domestic abuse officers. They investigate and prevent crime to protect our communities.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) mentioned, the Prime Minister said last year that the most important thing politicians can do is back the police, yet this Government have no plans to replace the PCSOs or police staff that have been cut, despite the Government overseeing increases in violent crime and record levels of knife crime. Perhaps the Minister can tell me what his Government have against PCSOs, or perhaps he will correct me and announce plans to fund more.
If this Government want to start getting a grip on the exponential rise in violent crime we have seen under their watch, they need to seriously up their game on prevention, with a public health approach to tackling violence. Many hon. Members have raised the issue of county lines and the impact it has on their communities. The Government announced funding for another year of violence reduction units, but they need a long-term funding commitment from the Government to carry out their vital preventive work.
Many areas that really need them do not have a violence reduction unit. I recently visited Cleveland virtually, and it has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country—the hon. Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers) talked about it today—but it does not have a violence reduction unit. Perhaps the Minister can tell us why Cleveland and areas like it do not have a VRU. Why is tackling violent crime less important in those areas? Does he have any plans to address that imbalance?
Since the Conservatives took office, attempted murders have nearly doubled. Before lockdown, robberies were up 18% and weapons possession offences had increased by four fifths. Violence against the person has increased in every police force area in the country and, as many hon. Members pointed out, only one in 14 crimes leads to a charge. Can the Minister tell us what plans he has to tackle this crisis?
Unlike this Government, Labour’s record in government shows that we can be trusted on policing and crime. By the time we left government, there were 6 million fewer crimes than there were in 1997. The risk of being a victim of crime was at its lowest since the crime survey began in 1981, and police officers reached record numbers —up by almost 17,000 since 1997, alongside more than 16,000 police community support officers. It took us years to build up neighbourhood policing, and the Government are spending their years undoing that good work.
The first duty of any Government is the safety and security of the people they represent in our towns, our villages, our cities and all our communities across the country. This Government need to step up, and fast.
Oral Answers to Questions
Sarah Jones Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Kit Malthouse
I know that living in one of the most beautiful constituencies in the country is not sufficient compensation for a lack of connectivity, although it provides some commiseration to my hon. Friend’s constituents. As somebody who found out just the other day that, frustratingly, the fibre network in my constituency stops 200 metres short of my house, I understand the impatience for connectivity in his area. It is true to say that we have experienced some delays, not least on legal negotiations last year. Happily, those have now been overcome, and I am confident that we can now proceed with all speed to make sure that the shared rural network, alongside the emergency services network, is rolled out on schedule to 2025.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab) [V]
The new emergency services network, which is much needed to replace our outdated system, has become yet another embarrassment for the Home Office. Costs have spiralled to an eye-watering £10.3 billion, and constant delays mean that the project will not be finished for up to seven years. Local police forces, already under strain from cuts and covid, have to foot a large part of the bill, and their bill has just increased by £600 million. That would fund around 8,000 new police officers, yet when I asked the Minister about this in a parliamentary question, he said that the extra cost was “minimal”.
There is a pattern: £600 million is “minimal”; the catastrophic loss of 400,000 essential data records is brushed aside and still no answers given; and the Home Secretary breaks the ministerial code and we are all somehow to brush that aside as well. When will the Government accept that their incompetence is wasting taxpayers’ money, delaying vital work and putting the public at increased risk?
Kit Malthouse
I understand that the hon. Lady feels that her job is to trade in hyperbole, but I think she has slightly overstated her case today, not least on the cost of the emergency service network, which is actually only—“only”— £4.2 billion, not the £10 billion-plus that she quoted. Governments of all stripes—and, indeed, many private companies—experience challenges, shall we say, in executing large technical IT projects, and this project has been no different. Having said that, we have made significant changes to the leadership team and we have reset the project. It is broadly back on track and, critically, we now have a new system of, effectively, joint decision-making with the end users—the police and the other emergency services—which we believe is breeding much greater confidence in the programme at the moment and hopefully over the next two or three years as we bring it to execution. This is an absolutely vital piece of equipment for police officer safety and, indeed, for the better prosecution of crime, and we are determined to get it right.
Oral Answers to Questions
Sarah Jones Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Priti Patel
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to bang the drum for the London Borough of Sutton. Of course, he will know that the Metropolitan police has been allocated an additional 1,369 new officers. Its funding has increased as well, by £193 million. I must emphasise that that is money for the frontline—for police officers to deal with the crimes that my hon. Friend highlights, along with a lot of the serious violent crime we see across London.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
The Government’s police officer uplift is of course welcome, but it must surely be only the starting point for what is needed to repair the damage to policing by Conservative Governments. New figures revealed in The Sun on Sunday show that there is now only one police community support officer for every 6,475 people in England and Wales, compared with one PCSO per 3,292 people in 2010. While the population has grown and violent crime has risen by 150%, the Government have cut nearly half of our neighbourhood PCSOs, and on top of that we have lost over 12,000 police staff roles. The Prime Minister said last year that
“the most important thing politicians can do is back the police,”
yet he has zero plans to replace the PCSOs or police staff that have been ripped away. When will this Government live up to their promise so that our police officers can get a grip on crime?
Priti Patel
It is important for this House and the British public to know that this Government have put record levels of funding into the police, and that this Government, this Prime Minister and this Home Secretary absolutely, unequivocally back the police. The hon. Lady asks about the recruitment of PCSOs. Obviously, that links to the powers and the duties that they have, but she will also know that that is a decision for chief constables and police and crime commissioners, so across London, for example, where there might be an issue with PCSOs, it is for her, as a London MP, to raise this with the Labour Mayor of London. These are operational decisions, but I maintain that this Government back the police. Our funding settlement illustrates that day in, day out, as does the recruitment programme, with almost 6,000 new police officers recruited to the frontline.