Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading - Day 1
Monday 15th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), a fellow Select Committee Chair.

The tragic death of Sarah Everard is obviously on all our minds. It has led women across the country to talk about our shared experiences of threats on the streets of our own towns and cities and also to express the anger that, more than 40 years after the first reclaim the night marches in Leeds, we are having the same debates all over again. In some areas, it feels like things have gone backwards. Five years ago, just 8.5% of reported rapes reached prosecution. In the last five years, that has fallen to just 1.4%. The Government have been reviewing this for two years, but in the meantime prosecution rates have got worse.

That reflects the broader near-collapse in the effectiveness of some parts of the criminal justice system. In the five years before covid hit, recorded crime rose by 40%, but the number of crimes being prosecuted fell by 30%. In just five years, hundreds of thousands fewer charges were brought, and hundreds of thousands more criminals are therefore getting away with their crimes. In West Yorkshire, recorded violent crime has shot up. The Government have passed lots of laws, but the number of people convicted of breaking them has fallen. There have been lots of changes to sentences, but fewer criminals are getting sentenced in the first place, so justice is not being done and victims are being let down. Over the last five years, the shocking truth is that it has got easier to be a criminal and harder to be a victim. We cannot let that stand.

There is an important debate to be had about the measures in the Bill, but I see nothing in them that will turn around those shocking figures, and that is what we should work across the House to do. We need the police covenant and stronger measures to support police officers and emergency workers who face attack. We need stronger sentences for the most serious of crimes, including whole-life sentences for premeditated child murder, which is one of the vilest crimes of all. I support those measures. The same should apply for premeditated kidnap, rape and murder, but that is not currently in the Bill. There should also be stronger penalties for rape and stalking, but those are not currently in the Bill. It would, I think, be wrong if we ended up with higher sentences for peaceful protest and public nuisance than for stalking. That would be to get the balance wrong.

I put forward measures last year based on Home Affairs Committee work to extend the register and monitoring provisions for dealing with sex offenders to cover repeat perpetrators of domestic abuse and stalking, to stop them moving from one victim to the next and destroying people’s lives because no one is keeping track or joining the dots. I hope the Government will accept Baroness Royall’s amendment in the other place. If they do not, I will table the same measures to this Bill, and I hope that support can be built for them.

There are further measures, which I hope first to discuss with Ministers, that I hope could increase the prosecution rate for assault and domestic abuse, where there have been such problems. The Government are right to place a duty on councils and the police to co-operate in tackling serious violence, but we should be explicit about including the youth service in that; that is not currently part of the Bill.

The Home Secretary will know, even from today’s debate, that there is cross-party alarm about some of the measures in the Bill that go against the British tradition of free speech and peaceful protest. In the coalfields, there is strong support for the work of the police, but people have long memories of things such as the policing of the miners’ strike, so there is also strong support for proper safeguards to protect peaceful protest.

In the Bill, several powers—the broad wording on noise disruption, even though we know few protests are silent, because people want their voices to be heard; the broad powers given to the Home Secretary on serious disruption; and the statutory public nuisance offences with sentences of up to 10 years for doing things that simply might risk causing serious annoyance—are too broad. Every one of us will have seen protests that we thought were seriously annoying, but we do not believe that they should have been stopped. We know, too, that when people protested outside the Iranian embassy for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the embassy could well have argued that the protests were disruptive to their activities or caused serious annoyance, but none of us would have wanted those protests to be stopped. I urge the Home Secretary to withdraw those measures, to re-consult on them and to try to build consensus not just on them, but on the other, wider, measures in the Bill, so that we can all support taking the action needed to cut crime.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 5th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Djanogly]

I thank my hon. Friend, because had I had five minutes in which to speak and that was exactly the case I was going to make. What he says was proven in our inquiry. Sadly, the time allowed today permits me to give only one example of concern on these new public order powers. Clause 55 provides powers to deal with non-violent serious disruption. First, that should be stated in the Bill, not in secondary legislation. Furthermore, I am concerned that it will provide excessive powers to prevent non-violent disruption to business, in circumstances where the business concerned may not be the focus of the protest. Again, this shifts the ground towards making a presumption of illegality. In practice, working out to what extent a business can be disrupted will only make the job of the police tougher, not easier, and it will certainly make it more political in nature.

For instance, if protest that has until now been kept away from residential areas will also be removed from business areas, where does it go? Presumably, it will go to a place where it cannot be heard, but, as has been said, noise and disruption are integral to protest. As many commentators have pointed out, in practice, the police will increasingly be put under pressure from businesses to impose conditions, and they will be put under pressure from demonstrators, who will then go ahead in any case, as they did at Clapham common and in Bristol.

This clause could well undermine public confidence in the police and reduce public safety. That is why our inquiry recommended the production of guidance to help both police and organisers to understand their respective powers and obligations—that is what is in new clause 85. More fundamentally, we also need to question whether it is still appropriate that police both condition protest and enforce their own conditions. To that end, I am drawn to having something like the Northern Ireland Parades Commission, which has power to place conditions on public processions, thus leaving the police with the enforcement role that they know how to do so well.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Home Affairs Committee has considered many different aspects of this Bill and these amendments at different times and in different ways, but given the time I will focus on just a small number of areas.

I particularly want to address new clause 69, in my name. Its purpose is to get justice for victims of domestic abuse who are being timed out and take action against perpetrators who are being let off the hook. Many domestic abuse cases are prosecuted as common assault in a magistrates court where police and prosecutors may say that the threshold for the Crown court is not met. In these cases, there is a time limit on justice—most victims are not aware of this—of six months from the offence, even though in domestic abuse cases it may take many months, for good reason, for victims to feel able to go to the police. They may still be in an abusive relationship. They may be afraid. They may not be safe. They may have children and be worried about how to leave or where they will go. It may take them time to get the support that they feel they need to be able to talk to the police. There are so many reasons that are, in themselves, the essence of continuing crimes of domestic abuse. That is why the new clause increases the time limit so that there can be six months for the police to deal with the case from the point of reporting, rather than from the point of the offence itself.

Somebody I have talked to told me her story. She was assaulted while she was pregnant. She went to A&E but did not, at that stage, want to talk about what had happened. However, when the abuse continued after the baby was born, she left and gathered her courage to talk to the police, who started an investigation but before long told her that she had passed a time limit she never even knew existed and her ex would not be charged. There are many more such victims of domestic abuse who, for serious and obvious reasons, do not report it immediately, and the perpetrators go on to be free to commit more crimes.

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank the right hon. Lady for having raised her constituent’s case with me in previous meetings. We take this issue very seriously, and I can assure the House that we will return with a proposal at a later stage. I certainly do not rule out an amendment, if appropriate, in the Lords. This must be looked into and I am extremely grateful to her for raising it.

[Yvette Cooper]

I welcome the Minister’s statement. I am keen to pursue this and to work with her on it, as we have cross-party support. I really do want to see progress and I hope we can achieve that in the House of Lords.

This is, once again, about the blind spot where the legal system does not recognise the reality of violence against women and girls. There may be many reasons why a six-month time limit is appropriate for summary offences about altercations between acquaintances in the pub or tussles in the street, but it is not appropriate for domestic abuse—for the experience of violence against women and girls that is, too often, being missed out in the criminal justice system, where thousands of cases a year may be affected in this way. We have support for changes in this area from the domestic abuse commissioner of Refuge, Women’s Aid, the Centre for Women’s Justice, and West Yorkshire police.

On new clause 31, the Select Committee has conducted a detailed inquiry into violent abuse against shop workers. We have recommended a stand-alone offence because we need to strengthen the focus on this escalating offence and to have the police take it much more seriously. It is simply unacceptable that shop workers should face this escalating abuse over very many years. The new offence of assault against emergency workers has made a difference and increased prosecutions, and we need to increase prosecutions in other areas as well.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Will the right hon. Lady give way? [Interruption.]

[Yvette Cooper]

No, because I am very conscious of Madam Deputy Speaker’s coughing to remind me not to.

I also hope that the Government will accept amendments that provide greater safeguards for freedom to peacefully protest and strengthen the law on kerb-crawling, but I particularly hope that we will continue to work on much stronger protection for victims of domestic abuse and those who suffer from violence against women and girls.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I have five new clauses in this group. New clause 64 would ensure more timeliness of investigations of complaints against police officers and allegations of police misconduct. On new clause 70, at the moment a police officer has the power to tell somebody to stop their car, but not to shut off the engine. My new clause 70 would give them the power to shut off the engine as well, because not having the power to do that can put police officers in a dangerous position, and this would deal with that anomaly. New clause 71 would remove the word “insulting” from section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986. People should not be guilty of an offence for using insulting language, in my opinion. It would still keep threatening and abusive language as an offence, but the word “insulting” really should have no place in the law. New clause 72 would criminalise commercial squatting and squatting on land. The Bill addresses the issue of trespassers on land, but misses the opportunity to expand the current residential squatting offence to cover village halls, churches, pubs and so on, and is much needed in many local communities. New clause 84 would mean that non-crime hate incidents could not be recorded on the national police database. The police should be focusing their efforts on tackling crime, not non-crime incidents. I hope, by the way, that the Government will respond in detail with why they are not accepting my entirely reasonable new clauses, because I would be very interested to know why they cannot accept them.

I also want to talk about new clauses 31 and 90. As somebody who spent 12 years working for Asda before I became an MP, I feel very strongly about the issue of violence against shop workers. These are often very low-paid people who are expected by the Government, in effect, to enforce the law—whether it is on age restrictions or, in recent times, about covid rules and restrictions, face mask wearing and social distancing—and the only thanks that many of them have had for keeping the nation fed during the covid restrictions, and for going out to work every single day to make sure that happened, was to see the number of assaults on them double over that period. It is an absolute disgrace.

The Government say that the courts can already use this as an aggravating factor if necessary, but the law to charge people with assaulting an emergency worker was introduced even though that could already be used as an aggravating factor if necessary. New clause 90 is better because it covers not just shop workers, but all people who are on the frontline and providing a service to the public. I hope the other parties will reflect on that and support new clause 90.