Public Order Bill

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 18th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Chamberlain]

What I am trying to say is that the existing legislation already deals with those circumstances, and that, given that some of the Bill’s provisions mean that people need not even have done anything to be subject to them, there is a fear that it will prevent them from doing anything at all. I believe that the fact that our police service is grounded in policing by consent—unlike those in other countries whose police forces have evolved from more militaristic origins—is something to be celebrated.

If the police do not need the powers, if all that the Bill does is make it harder for legitimate protest to take place and if it restricts the right of citizens, I would argue that we do not need it at all. We should reflect on the fact that the Minister, in his opening remarks, claimed that the existing legislation was a reason for rejecting new clause 11.

Let me now raise another point, which I have touched on already. It is not about protecting the democratic rights of our citizens, but in many ways it is just as important, because it concerns the real impact on the capacity of the police service. In Committee I tabled a number of amendments, and although I have not tabled them again on Report, this is a key consideration.

When we pass poor legislation, we sometimes see the results in our constituency surgeries, but when it comes to legislation such as this, we will not be dealing with the outcomes directly. I believe that if the Government are confident that the Bill, in its current form, will do what it is intended to do, they should be comfortable with receiving reports from the College of Policing and from police forces about the capability and capacity of those forces to deliver the legislation—and that is before we even think about the huge backlogs in the criminal justice system. It will take some time for people to come before the courts in the context of this Bill.

The proposed new powers will require additional officer training. Sir Peter Fahy, the former chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, gave evidence to the Bill Committee. The simple fact is this:

“If there are not enough police officers trained to properly respond to protests and apply these new laws, that means that more people must be trained—training that costs thousands of pounds and means that officers are potentially in classrooms, not out on the street.”––[Official Report, Public Order Public Bill Committee, 16 June 2022; c. 191]

Chris Noble, the chief constable of Staffordshire Police, estimated that, under the current legislation, it takes an officer two or three weeks per year to keep up with necessary additional public order skills. The offences specified in the Bill will require significantly more training at the outset, at the least, and will mean even more days of actual policing lost at significant cost, with simply abstracts from core policing duties. Once the officers are trained, it is likely that deployment to protests will increase as a result of the Bill’s restrictions. Simply put, people cannot be in two places at once, and resources are limited. According to evidence given to the Committee, the arrest of a protester usually involves six officers. We will run out of police officers before we run out of protesters.

I know where I would rather the police were. I would rather see an officer making sure that the streets were safe for women and girls walking home at night, going after gangs and those working across county lines, stopping the scammers who target our elderly and vulnerable, working on counter-terrorism, and preventing organised crime. I ask colleagues to reflect on what they and their constituents really want when faced with the reality of these choices, which were made even more stark by the Chancellor when he stood at the Dispatch Box yesterday.

Policing by consent is one of the greatest attributes of our country, and it is something that I am passionate about. The Bill undermines that. Although we will support amendments that curb its worst excesses, I will continue to argue that the decision in the other place to remove these clauses when they were part of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 was correct. I cannot support the Bill in its current form.

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

I rise to speak in favour of new clause 11.

In a perfect world, no woman or girl would be raped; no foetus would have life-shortening, agonising conditions or endanger the life of the mother; and every baby born would be yearned for and cherished. But we do not live in a perfect world, and that is why Parliament has settled laws for the regulation of the provision of abortion services. This is what new clause 11 concerns. It is not about the form of those laws, or their details; it is about the provision of those services in day-to-day life.

I had the responsibility for looking after abortion clinic buffer zones from 2017 until I was promoted from the Home Office last year. It was, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) says, an issue with which I grappled, because there is a real balancing skill involved in weighing up not only the concerns of those women seeking medical services and those who support them, but the sincerely held beliefs of those who do not agree with abortion. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who is no longer in his place, has set out some of the history of this, and I was an active part of it, so I really am trying to help the Minister when I try to explain some of the shifting of that balancing operation.

In 2017 Amber Rudd was Home Secretary, and in response to concerns voiced by parliamentarians she commissioned a review into demonstrations and protests outside abortion clinics. We announced the results of that review in, I think, 2018, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) was Home Secretary. At that point I stood at the Dispatch Box and I signed letters to say that we had looked at the number of clinics and weighed up the power of PSPOs. At that point, from memory, one council—maybe two—had applied for a PSPO, and we felt that the balance was in favour of PSPOs being using on a targeted basis for those clinics affected.

The review continued—I genuinely kept this under constant review—thanks to the efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex and my right hon. Friends the Members for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) and for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), among many others on this side, as well as the hon. Members for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). It is a pleasure to see the hon. Member for Walthamstow in her place today. Indeed, only last summer we looked at this again in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. At that point, although the number of clinics affected by demonstrations had increased since the initial review, we felt that in the interest of balancing both sets of interests, PSPOs were the right way to go.

Today, however, five councils have applied for these orders, and happily the imposition of those orders has been upheld by the Court of Appeal as being lawful. We have heard in the course of this debate the concern that the five PSPOs cover five clinics out of some 50 that have been the subject of protests and demonstrations. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke made the important point that this is not just about the number of clinics; it is about the number of women who go to the clinics for these services. I think I am right in remembering that she cited the statistic that around half of women who seek these services had attended clinics where there had been protests and demonstrations.

So I find myself in the position of agreeing with new clause 11, not because I like banning things or because I am against the legitimate and sincerely held beliefs of those who cannot support the provision of abortion services, but because I come back to the point about the provision of services to women who need them and the circumstances in which they find themselves as they walk that long and lonely path to the doors of the clinic, hospital or surgery providing those services. I know from speaking to women who have been through these protests that they have made a difficult decision. There may be many factors surrounding the decision, involving their home lives, the circumstances in which the pregnancy came about and the concerns for what might happen if their friends, families or the wider society found out that they had had these operations. These are fundamental healthcare services that we provide, rightly and lawfully, in the 21st century. We must surely enable women to access these services as and when they need them so that they get the right help and advice.