Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (Seventeenth sitting)

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Public Bill Committees

As in the French model, our law would allow for a perpetrator of sexual harassment to be given an on-the-spot fine of £500, which would rise to £1,000 for repeat offenders. We believe that that would not only deter offenders from targeting women in this way, but would send a loud and clear signal to women and girls up and down the country that sexual harassment of any kind anywhere is not acceptable—that we have listened and acted. I hope that the Government agree and that Conservative Members do the right thing by women and girls and support new clause 23.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles, as always.

I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) for tabling her amendment. I know it will not be pressed formally, but I put on the record my thanks to her for bringing the issue before the House and, indeed, to the hon. Member for Stockton North for giving us the opportunity to debate this important issue in Committee. The Government are absolutely committed to tackling all forms of abuse against women and girls, including sexual harassment. No one should feel unsafe while going about their daily life, and it is completely unacceptable for anyone to make a woman or girl feel objectified or scared.

Following tragic events earlier this year, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary reopened the first ever public call for evidence for the new tackling violence against women and girls strategy, to capture the many stories that women and girls shared with their friends and their family and on social media. We want to capture those stories as part of our work to shape the new strategy that is coming forward later this year. More than 160,000 responses were received in just two weeks, bringing the total of public responses to more than 180,000—an extraordinary figure for a Government consultation. It says so much about the determination of women and girls to stop those sorts of behaviours.

We are equally determined to respond to the sharing of those experiences. The new strategy will include work to tackle sexual harassment and to recognise the disproportionate impact it has on women and girls.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for giving way—we are so intuitive now that we do not need to ask to intervene on each other.

This sort of behaviour starts at a very young age, which is why the Government were right to accept my amendment to the Bill that became the Children and Social Work Act 2017, to make relationships education for all primary school children mandatory. That should have started last September; we are now told it will start this September. Will she comment about that early intervention and the importance of it?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for her previous work and for making this important point. I want to give the Committee an impression of the work that we are undertaking as part of the strategy. Legislation is of course an option, but we need to do so much more. We need boys and young men to understand that some of the things that they might have seen on the internet are not real life and not appropriate ways to behave towards women and girls in the street, the home or the school, as we have seen in the Everyone’s Invited work. Education is critical and, I promise her, flows throughout our work on the strategy.

I wish to correct some impressions that might exist. While there is not an offence of street harassment—or, indeed, of sexual harassment—a number of existing laws make harassment illegal, including where such behaviour occurs in a public place. That can include, depending on the circumstances of the case, offences under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, the Public Order Act 1986 and the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

However—this is a big “however”—I assure hon. Members that we are looking closely at the existing legislation on street harassment and we are committed to ensuring that the law is fit for purpose. We remain very much in listening mode on the issue. We will continue to examine the case for a bespoke offence and will listen closely to the debate as it develops through this House and the other place.

It is important to stress that a law is of limited use unless people know it is there and have the confidence to make a report in accordance with it. Equally—this relates to the point made by the hon. Member for Rotherham about education—it is important that police officers and law enforcement know how to respond properly to such allegations.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I am glad about what the Minister has just said, that she remains in listening mode and that she will continue to examine the case. Does she have more detail on what form that listening mode takes? Are people in the Home Office looking at this? Is there any possibility of it? Is there a timeline, a review, that we are waiting for before a decision or any kind of structure around that?

[Victoria Atkins]

I hope the Committee will understand that it is taking us time to work through the 180,000 responses that we received—an extraordinary number for any Government survey. We have a team of officials who are working through each and every response, and we have taken each and every response very seriously. It is taking a bit of time. Once that exercise, the results of the survey, has been fully understood—fully collated and absorbed—from that, the strategy will be shaped. Later this year, we hope to be able to publish.

The strategy will deal not just with the sorts of topics that have been discussed in the course of the Committee, along with many other forms of crimes that disproportionately affect women and girls, including, for example, female genital mutilation, so-called honour-based abuse and such like. We want this to be an ambitious strategy that meets the demands of the 2020s, including the emergence of online crimes. We know from our discussions of this Bill and the scrutiny of what became the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 that perpetrators of crime can find ample opportunity online to continue their abuse. We are being mindful of all those aspects when drawing up the strategy.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

The Minister is indicating a willingness to look carefully at this. Does she expect the strategy to which she is referring to end up creating new legislation? Does she expect new legislation to come out of it?

[Victoria Atkins]

The hon. Lady is asking a question I cannot properly answer at this stage. She will know from her previous experience that drafting strategies of such depth and breadth requires cross-Government work. I am not at a stage at the moment of being able to comment directly on that. Our wider work, such as commissioning the Law Commission to look at the use of the internet and image-based abuse, which I suspect we will be talking about later this morning, and the online safety Bill, is all part of ensuring that there is lots of work across Government knitting together to provide a safer environment for women and girls, both on and offline.

We are aware that the issue is not just about the public knowing and understanding what the law is, but helping the police in knowing how to respond. I am pleased that the College of Policing has agreed to develop advice for forces in England and Wales to assist them in using existing offences in the most effective way. The Crown Prosecution Service, similarly, will revise its legal guidance on public order offences to include additional material on public sexual harassment.

Hon. Members across the Committee will agree that legislation alone cannot be expected to tackle sexual harassment. We are clear that we need to continue to drive a cultural change in attitudes and help boys and girls grow up to understand what a healthy relationship looks like and what sort of behaviour is healthy, respectful and civil in public places, and we must ensure that the sorts of episodes that girls in particular referenced in the Everyone’s Invited work are no longer experienced. I acknowledge and appreciate the debate that the amendments have induced and understand what hon. Members are seeking to achieve through the new clauses. However, I hope that, given our assurance that the Government continue to explore the issues, the hon. Member for Stockton North will feel able not to press the new clause today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend is right, as always. The purpose of the new clause would be of no concern to people who drive safely and competently.

The new clause would also make it a requirement for companies to hand over that black box data to the police should they request it. As Members of the House have communicated to me, this problem is repeatedly raised on the doorstep in some communities and in constituency surgeries, and getting a grip of it would not only make people safer, but push back on the costs picked up by responsible road users who are penalised through their own insurance to cover the risk presented by a minority of reckless road users who drive vehicles without insurance that become involved in crashes.

The Motor Insurers Bureau has shared with me some troubling examples of questionable insurance policies being used by some companies in this rental sector. Agencies agree that costs are passed on to law-abiding road users by those abusers of system. A black box would help to provide an evidence base for determining whether road traffic offences had been committed and, ultimately, for securing prosecutions if necessary. That would protect law-abiding road users from risk and cost to them.

Over the years, I have seen the police and various partnerships deploy several attempts to address the issue, with varying success. The new clause would make a start by using legislation to address reckless driving facilitated by the irresponsible use of hired supercars.

[Victoria Atkins]

I have listened very carefully to the arguments made by the hon. Lady, and it seems to me that the issue comes down to the driving habits of the small group of people in West Yorkshire and elsewhere that she described.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

I fear, Sir Charles, that two non-car-experts are talking about cars, which is probably uncomfortable for car experts across the country. Many of the cars the Minister has mentioned are fitted with black boxes. Police cars are fitted with black boxes. A lot of companies offer much cheaper insurance if someone has a black box fitted to their car. Indeed, there are insurance companies with the words “black box” in their name. The provision is not extreme, and this is becoming normal anyway. Given the Minister’s argument about the breadth of models of car that might be affected by the new clause, perhaps she will commit herself to considering a better definition so as to tackle this particular, extreme problem, which is very concerning for a lot of people.

[Victoria Atkins]

There are other concerns about the new clause, which come back to the proportionality argument. I fully accept, of course, for those communities that are affected by the sort of antisocial—indeed dangerous—driving that hon. Lady has described, that their feelings as to proportionality will differ from those in a quiet rural area, for example, where there is no such behaviour, but this is where the powers that I have already outlined come in. They include public spaces protection orders, which can be particularly powerful, because they allow a local area to address the concerns in a particular part of the area as appropriate.

The concern that we have for the wider hire market is that the requirement to fit devices to these vehicles—the Honda Civic, the Volvo V60 and suchlike—could restrict choice and availability of vehicles. The low threshold may defeat the objective of stopping higher-performance vehicles being driven at speed. Consumers may in fact switch to lower-powered vehicles so as not to be monitored by black boxes, and continue to break the law.

[Sarah Jones]

As I understand it, given the problems that have been described to me, people specifically want to hire these high-glamour cars—Lamborghinis and so on—because they want to show off and race each other. Getting a lower-performance car is not what they are aiming for; the point is to hire these big, high-powered, high-glamour cars and show off in front of their friends.

[Victoria Atkins]

This is difficult, in terms of defining the type of car. But I also fall back on the proportionality argument, because in requiring devices to be fitted to every single car as a matter of law, we would be affecting the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens, who do not race Lamborghinis and so on—although I do note, having watched Jeremy Clarkson’s farming programme, that he has a Lamborghini, albeit a Lamborghini tractor, which I suspect would not fall into this category.

We would have further concerns about the privacy consequences of fitting these devices, because to ensure that we were acting in the way that the new clause sets out, it would have to affect responsible road users as well as irresponsible ones. Telematic data is normally used to assess individual road safety risk, which can be an inexact science. As the hon. Lady said, this is currently voluntary, not mandatory. Forcing those using even medium-sized rental cars to have these devices fitted could understandably lead to privacy concerns on the part of all rental vehicle users and not just the irresponsible racers, on which the new clause is understandably focused.

For those reasons—for reasons of proportionality but also because there are existing powers to deal with this irresponsible, dangerous behaviour—we do not believe that the new clause is proportionate and therefore we hope that the hon. Lady feels able to withdraw the motion.

[Sarah Jones]

I have heard from several MPs about the problem that this behaviour is causing in their constituencies. The argument of proportionality is always a strong one, but in this case the problem is such that people are concerned for their safety and for the lives of the people hiring these vehicles, and therefore I would like to press the new clause to a vote.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.