Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Tracey Crouch Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

I welcome my hon. Friend the Minister to his new position and I look forward to working with him in the future on some key issues.

Government amendment 4 would replace the amendments to the Bill that I tabled and that were passed in Committee. I am grateful for Opposition support for the amendments and for the support of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara). It is important to set out in context the reasons why I pressed those amendments to a vote in Committee and the background to the issue.

When we came to discuss the issue of antisocial behaviour and the new injunctions, it was clear that this was a perfect opportunity to talk about the vitally important issue of bullying. It is a key issue for many children and their parents. The statistics speak for themselves. Research now shows that one in three children have experienced bullying, with some suggesting that 70% of young people have at some point experienced some form of bullying. One million kids are being bullied every week, both in and out of school. It is one of the greatest concerns for children as they grow up and their parents. Beat Bullying research found that 44% of suicides among ten to 14-year-olds were explicitly linked to bullying, and at least 20 children every year commit suicide because they are being bullied.

I wish to pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) who, like me, has met the family of Ayden Olson, who unfortunately committed suicide as a consequence of bullying. Politicians need to take notice of such stories and try to make a difference to them.

I felt that the new injunctions were a really good opportunity to bring bullying back to the forefront of public debate, not least because in the past people have been concerned about criminalising bullies. Under previous legislation, bullying could lead to some sort of criminal sanction. The change to injunctions requiring instead a civil punishment meant this was the perfect opportunity to require them to include a positive requirement as well as the punishment of the injunction.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning my constituent, who was involved in a horrific bullying case that led to his suicide. Does she agree that the Bill is a good opportunity to find a way in which to protect vulnerable children and to punish bullies in the right way, as in the case of my constituent that she has highlighted?

[Tracey Crouch]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and that is exactly why it is important to add to the Bill the requirements to deal with bullying. We can deal with the bullies as well as the victims, because bullies are often victims of wider bullying, perhaps at home. The positive requirements would enable all sorts of agencies to intervene at an early stage and protect not just the victims, but the bullies themselves.

Bullying is not just face to face any more. Cyber-bullying is a massive problem, and it is certainly something that Ayden experienced. We are seeing increasing numbers of cyber-bullied victims. Some 63% say that the bullying started offline and then continued online. Bullying is not the same as it was when I was at school, when it was people being mean to each other in the playground. It is now persistent bullying on and offline. That is why I am pleased that the Government accepted the need to put bullying back into the guidance on the injunctions. It was originally in the guidance on the 1999 Act that introduced ASBOs. The subsequent review of ASBOs in 2002 also included persistent bullying, but the 2006 guidance—which until recently was the current Home Office guidance—did not mention bullying. I was grateful therefore for the commitment in Committee, from the former Minister, that bullying would be included in the guidance. Having seen an early draft of that, I am content with the guidance that will be issued.

If we are including bullying within the guidance of the injunction, it is logical to give those who primarily have responsibility for dealing with bullying—mainly schools, which unfortunately retain most of the responsibility—the tools to deal with it. That is why in Committee I pressed for head teachers and principals to be given the opportunity to apply for the injunctions. That would have been a permissive power that I thought would be a logical step. Unfortunately, that view is not shared by the teaching unions, all of which I have subsequently consulted, so I am reluctantly resigned to the removal of heads and further education principals from the Bill and I accept Government amendment 4.

I hope that bullying is not taken off the agenda. I hope that it is recognised as an extremely important issue for both children and parents, and that we recognise that further steps need to be taken to protect our children. We must ensure that perpetrators of bullying are dealt with in a way that helps them in their family and in society, and that they can have the positive requirements that the injunctions will give, despite the teachers and principals not applying for them. I am pleased that the Government continue to recognise the importance of bullying by keeping it in the guidance on the injunction, but I am sad that the teachers did not feel that they wanted the power to apply for it.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I support amendments 158, 176 and 177, which have been tabled by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I am not sure that they go far enough, but they are what we have before us.

On amendment 158, my anxiety relates to the wording in clause 1. It almost legislates for pre-crimes, which became fashionable a couple of years ago. Hon. Members might recall that, at the time of the royal wedding, Dr Chris Knight and a number of his friends wished to protest against expenditure on the royal wedding. As part of a theatre group, they were going to take papier-mâché representations of the royal family to Buckingham palace on the day of the royal wedding and ceremonially guillotine them. The police arrested Dr Knight and his friends, detaining them—this was eventually legally challenged—on the basis that this was not a crime, but a pre-crime that could, at some point in the future, be designated as a crime.

The Bill, without the relatively minor amendment from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, states:

“The first condition is that the court is satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that the respondent has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing a nuisance”.

That is not conduct causing a nuisance and not a crime that is taking place, but a judgment that there could be a crime in the future. That is a burden of judgment placed on a police officer or others that is almost impossible to determine and will leave us open to legal challenges until the cows come home. I support the amendment because it would at least define “reasonable judgment”, with criteria brought forward when the judgment is exercised. Otherwise, we will potentially be giving officers and others—in particular, the court—extensive powers, with little evidence on which to base the exercise of those powers.

The theme of our concerns in amendment 176 is to ensure that people have the right to express their views and the right to protest. Part 1, by designating certain forms of behaviour as unacceptable, can close down, as pre-crimes, certain activities. Those activities are exemplified by the experience of Dr Chris Knight, who was simply attempting to voice an alternative view. I am grateful to Mr Matthew Varnham for pointing out, in his evidence to the Joint Committee, that, as the Bill currently stands, any spontaneous act of protest could be designated as antisocial behaviour.

Curiously enough, I met Mr Varnham on a protest in Parliament square—people with disabilities were campaigning against work capability assessments. The protest had been applied for in advance and the police had given permission for it to take place. Spontaneous acts will take place at such protests. Groups will break off spontaneously and undertake other forms of protest, because they will have been convinced by the people speaking or by the debate that has taken place that further action needs to take place. As the Bill stands, that form of spontaneous protest would be outlawed and we would be dragging people through the courts simply because they went along to listen to a speech—for example, by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes)—were excited by it, and decided that they wanted to do something spontaneous to ensure that his views were echoed in the wider community. At the moment, they would be arrested. God forbid that the right hon. Gentleman would ever incite anyone in that way—not on the basis of his speeches in this place, but perhaps elsewhere.