Louise Haigh
Main Page: Louise Haigh (Labour - Sheffield, Heeley)Department Debates - View all Louise Haigh's debates with the Home Office
Offensive Weapons Bill
Louise Haigh ExcerptsWednesday 27th June 2018
(5 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
It is important to begin on a note of agreement. The Opposition pledged in this House that the Government would have our support if they came forward with measures on acid sale and possession and further measures to combat knife crime, so we will support the limited but necessary measures in the Bill. Throughout the Committee stage, we will take a constructive approach in areas in which we believe it needs strengthening.
In and of themselves, the measures cannot bear down on a violent surge that has left communities reeling. That will require a much more comprehensive change. It is as well to look at the context of the Bill. Knife crime offences reached record levels in the year to December 2017. Homicides involving knives increased by 22%, and violent crime overall has more than doubled in the past five years to a record level. The senseless murder of 15-year-old Jordan Douherty, who was stabbed after a birthday party in Romford community centre over the weekend, brought the number of murder investigations to over 80 in London alone this year.
As we have heard, the problem is far from being just a London one. In my home city of Sheffield, which historically and until very recently was considered to be one of the safest cities in the UK, there was a 51% increase in violent crime last year on a 62% increase the year before. That is not a spike or a blip, but a trend enveloping a generation of young people and it requires immediate national action.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that what is omitted is of far greater consequence than what has made it into the Government’s serious violence strategy and their legislative response today. First, it must be said that unveiling a strategy that made no mention of police numbers was a serious mistake that reinforced the perception that tiptoeing around the Prime Minister’s legacy at the Home Office matters more than community safety. The Home Secretary might not want today’s debate to be about police numbers, because a dangerous delusion took hold of his predecessors that police numbers do not make the blindest bit of difference to the rise in serious violence, but that view is not widely shared. The Met Commissioner Cressida Dick has said she is “certain” that police cuts have contributed to serious violence. Home Office experts have said it is likely that police cuts have contributed too. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary said in March that the police were under such strain that the lives of vulnerable people were being put at risk, with forces so stretched that they cannot respond to emergency calls.
Charge rates for serious violence have fallen as the detective crisis continues, undermining the deterrent effect, but still Ministers pretend that a staggering reduction of more than 21,000 police officers since 2010 has had no impact whatsoever.
Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)
In the west midlands, the Labour police and crime commissioner has been able to raise additional funds through an increase in the precept, yet he has chosen to put no extra police on the beat, particularly in my constituency. Regardless of how much money is available, we have to get over the obstacle that police and crime commissioners might decide to spend it differently.
Louise Haigh
Recruitment is a matter for chief constables. My understanding is that West Midlands police are undergoing a recruitment drive. Obviously, I cannot speak to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, but how chief constables spend the money the precept raises is up to them. The issue we have with using the precept to raise funds for the police—the House has rehearsed this time and again—is that a 2% increase in council tax in areas such as the west midlands will raise significantly less than in other areas of the country such as Surrey or Suffolk. That is why we opposed that fundamentally unfair way to increase funding for our police forces.
The reduction in the number of officers has reduced the ability of the police to perform hotspot proactive policing and targeted interventions that gather intelligence and build relationships with communities, These not only help the police to respond to crime but help them to prevent it from happening in the first place. That is the bedrock of policing in our country. Community policing enables policing by consent, but has been decimated over the past eight years. That has contributed not only to the rise in serious violence but to the corresponding fall in successful prosecutions. Not only are more people committing serious violent offences, but more are getting away with it.
Stephen Doughty
I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. She will be aware that I have long campaigned for Cardiff to get additional resources because of the challenges it has as a capital city. I am glad that the Minister for Policing and the Fire Service has agreed to meet me, the chief constable and the police and crime commissioner in south Wales to discuss these very real concerns. Does my hon. Friend agree that community policing resources are absolutely crucial? Community police can deal with the grooming that my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) described, whether it is to do with knives and violence, drugs or extremism.
Louise Haigh
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, who is a committed campaigner for Cardiff to receive the police resources it needs. That is why the Labour manifesto put neighbourhood policing at its heart. Neighbourhood policing not only enables the police to respond better to crime, but it is an important intelligence-gathering tool for tackling terrorism, more serious crime and organised criminal activity.
The proposals in the Bill to strengthen the law to meet the changing climate are welcome, but, without adequate enforcement, they cannot have the effect we need them to have. The Government must drop their dangerous delusion that cutting the police by more than any other developed country over the past eight years bar Iceland, Lithuania and Bulgaria has not affected community safety. They must make a cast-iron commitment that in the spending review they will give the police the resources they need to restore the strength of neighbourhood policing so recklessly eroded over the past eight years.
Andrew Rosindell
One problem in my constituency following the murder on Saturday evening is the feeling that the police do not have enough resources. I agree with the hon. Lady. We cannot keep reducing resources for policing and say it will not have an effect on crime; clearly it will. However, Havering in my area, for example, is part of Greater London, so the resources are allocated by the Mayor of London. Our area gets far less than other parts of London. Yes, let us have more resources, but does the hon. Lady agree that areas like mine need a fairer slice of the cake? If crime is moving out to areas such as Essex, we need resources. We are not inner London—we are completely different—and therefore need a different style of policing and adequate resources to make our communities safe.
Louise Haigh
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that resources should follow demand. That is why it is a crying shame that the Government have kicked the can down the road on the police funding formula, which has denied resources to areas of the country that are in serious need of police resources. That funding formula should be based on demand.
Vicky Ford
Following the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), will the hon. Lady join me in thanking Essex police and congratulating them on the 150 officers they are adding to our force?
Louise Haigh
It is welcome when any police force recruits additional police officers. I do not have to hand the number of officers that Essex has lost since 2010, but I imagine that it is significantly more than 150.
Let us look at the Home Office research on the drivers of trends in violent crime. Neighbourhood policing was certainly mentioned; social media was acknowledged to have played a role, as were changes to the drug market, as the Home Secretary mentioned, particularly in respect of the purity of crack cocaine. They are all factors in the spate of recent murders, but one of the most important factors that the analysis showed was that a larger cohort of young people are now particularly vulnerable to involvement in violent crime because of significant increases in the numbers of homeless children, children in care and children excluded from school. Just 2% of the general population have been excluded from school, compared with 49% of the prison population. As much as this Bill is, and should be, about taking offensive weapons off our streets, the issues around serious violent crime are also a story of vulnerability.
The Children’s Commissioner has shown that 70,000 under-25-year-olds are currently feared to be part of gang networks. The unavoidable conclusion is that, for a growing, precarious and highly vulnerable cohort of children, the structures and safety nets that are there to protect them are failing.
Behind this tragic spate of violence is a story of missed opportunities to intervene as services retreat; of children without a place to call home shunted between temporary accommodation, with their parents at the mercy of private landlords; of patterns of truancy and expulsions; and of troubled families ignored until the moment of crisis hits. The most despicable criminals are exploiting the space where well-run and effective early intervention, prevention and diversion strategies once existed.
As the Children’s Commissioner notes, the pursuit of young children is now
“a systematic and well-rehearsed business model.”
The Home Secretary himself highlighted the importance of early intervention in tackling violence when he told “The Andrew Marr Show” that we must deal with the root causes, but the £20 million a year we spend on early intervention and prevention has to be seen in the context of the £387 million cut from youth services, the £1 billion cut from children’s services, and the £2.7 billion cut from school budgets since 2015. For most communities, the funding provided by the serious violence strategy will not make any difference at all. How can it even begin to plug the gap?
We know what happens when early intervention disappears. A groundbreaking report 18 years ago by the Audit Commission described the path of a young boy called James who found himself at the hard end of the criminal justice system before the last Labour Government’s progressive efforts to address the root causes of crime through early intervention:
“Starting at the age of five, his mother persistently requested help in managing his behaviour and addressing his learning difficulties. Despite formal assessments at an early age for special educational needs, no educational help was forthcoming until he reached the age of eight and even then no efforts were made to address his behaviour problems in the home. By the age of ten, he had his first brush with the law but several requests for a learning mentor came to nothing and his attendance at school began to suffer. By now he was falling behind his peers and getting into trouble at school, at home and in his…neighbourhood…
Within a year James was serving an intensive community supervision order and…only then did the authorities acknowledge that the family had multiple problems and needed a full assessment. A meeting of professionals was arranged but no one directly involved with James, other than his Head Teacher, attended, no social worker was allocated and none of the plans that were drawn up to help James were implemented. Within a short space of time, he was sent to a Secure Training Centre and on release…no services were received by James or his family. He was back in custody within a few months.”
How many Jameses have we come across in our constituencies? How many mothers like James’s have we met in our surgeries? The pattern described here could just as well be attributed to a young man I had been seeking to help over the past year but whose life was tragically ended just last month. He was stabbed to death in my constituency, and another 15-year-old charged with his murder.
It very much feels as though we have learned these lessons before and are now repeating the same mistakes.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
Given the intelligence we have received that the Mayor of London is doubling his PR budget, what role does the hon. Lady think he can play in trying to address the urgent problem in this city?
Louise Haigh
The Mayor of London has put £150 million into recruiting additional police officers. I appreciate the serious concerns in London but this is a national problem, as I have made clear and as the Home Secretary has acknowledged. This is not a London-only problem. Indeed, the increase in violence in London is actually lower than in other parts of the country, which is why a national solution is required. It is politically easy to pass the blame on to the Mayor of London, but it simply is not the case that that is the only solution.
Sir Edward Davey
The hon. Lady is speaking huge common sense, as everyone in this House knows. Anyone who looks at our prison population knows that people in prison are suffering from mental health problems and learning disabilities, all of which could have been dealt with through early intervention. I ask her not to be put off by completely irrelevant interventions.
Louise Haigh
The right hon. Gentleman need not worry; I will not be put off at all by interventions from Government Members.
Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)
The hon. Lady mentions that this is not only a London problem, but a lot of it does emanate from London. The county line operations and many other things start in our big cities, so will she join me in encouraging the Metropolitan police to work far more closely with other forces to make sure we break these county lines? The county lines are now heading across the country, but they largely start in London.
Louise Haigh
I completely agree that the county lines emanate from many metropolitan areas, and certainly not just London—they originate with organised criminal gangs in Birmingham and on Merseyside, too. I commend the Government’s approach through the national county lines co-ordination centre. Working between police forces is a nut that we really have to crack, because the county lines business model has been developed to exploit the challenges that police forces and other agencies experience in working together.
Andrew Rosindell
I agree with much of what the hon. Lady says, but can she envisage how local people in Havering feel? We are part of Essex, yet we are lumped into Greater London. My hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) proudly speaks of 150 new policemen for Essex, but people who come to Romford will realise that we are Essex, rather than London. However, we get so few resources from the Mayor of London—we really are left out. We are getting no extra policemen and far fewer resources than we need.
Will the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) please speak to Sadiq Khan and see whether he will prioritise the London Borough of Havering and give us the resources we need, or whether he will give us the chance to be a unitary authority outside of the Greater London area so we can manage our own resources and keep our communities safe?
Louise Haigh
I am sure Chelmsford has received both policemen and policewomen. I am sure the Mayor of London will be watching this debate closely, but I commit to passing the hon. Gentleman’s remarks on to him.
Stephen Doughty
My hon. Friend is making some excellent points, and she will recognise that in Wales the Welsh Labour Government have invested in keeping police community support officers in our communities, which has made a huge difference in my own community. Will she also pay tribute to the many voluntary organisations that are working with young people in particular? Tiger Bay and Llanrumney Phoenix amateur boxing clubs in my patch are working with young people who are very much at risk of being groomed or caught up in such things, and they are making a huge impact on those individuals’ lives.
Louise Haigh
I am grateful for that intervention. Across the country, such community organisations are filling a vacuum that has been created by Government cuts over the past eight years. They are doing sterling work with at-risk young people, and preventing many of them from falling into exploitation and violence.
I take this opportunity to commend the work of the Scottish Government not just through the violence reduction unit, which I am sure we will hear much of in today’s debate, but in their commitment to long-term research on the patterns of youth offending and violence. The last major national study of youth crime in England and Wales was 10 years ago, which means we do not know the impact of social media or, indeed, of austerity. We urge the Government to repeat that survey, to commission research on why young people carry weapons and on the risk factors that lead to violent offending, and to commission an evidence-based analysis of the success of various interventions. That could build on the excellent work led by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft), who pioneered the Youth Violence Commission.
In Scotland, the Edinburgh study of youth transitions and crime found that violent offenders are significantly more likely than non-violent young people to be victims of crime and adult harassment, to be engaged in self-harm and para-suicidal behaviour, to be drug users or regular alcohol users and, for girls in particular, to be from a socially deprived background.
Although, of course, I accept wholeheartedly the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) that any young person can be at risk of exploitation, it is in the public good for such vulnerable young people to receive targeted interventions at a young age, rather than to see them fall into the costly criminal justice system and their lives wasted. We hope to see significantly more action from the Government on that.
Vicky Ford
I am a member of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, and we have been looking at the evidence on early intervention. As has been highlighted, there are areas of excellent practice, including Manchester and, I am glad to say, Essex. Will the hon. Lady look at those areas of excellent practice? I reject the suggestion that, somehow, this is linked to cuts. Our good practice in delivering early intervention helps to make the difference.
Louise Haigh
I heartily recommend that the hon. Lady reads the Home Office’s own analysis, which suggests that cuts to neighbourhood policing and early intervention have played a part in the rise of serious violence, but of course I accept that some excellent work is going on throughout the country. That is exactly the point I am making: we need a proper evidence-based analysis of that work to make sure that we roll out the successful pilots.
Let me turn to the possession and sale of corrosives. We welcome the move to clarify the law. In March, the Sentencing Council explicitly listed acid as a potentially dangerous weapon, but it is welcome that that is made clear in the legislation. Nevertheless, concerns remain about the lack of controls on reportable substances. We welcome the passing of secondary legislation to designate sulphuric acid as a reportable substance, but the time has come for a broader look at the two classes of poisons to determine which are causing harm and should therefore be subject to stricter controls.
The purpose of the legislation prior to the Deregulation Act 2015 was to allow the sale of commonly used products while protecting the individual from their inherent dangers. The sale of such poisons as hydrochloric, ammonia, hydrofluoric, nitric and phosphoric acids was restricted to retail pharmacies and to businesses whose premises were on local authorities’ lists of sellers. That situation was not perfect, but in considering reform we should note that the Poisons Board preferred a third option, between the previous system and what we have today, which would have designated as regulated all poisons listed as reportable substances, meaning that they could be sold only in registered pharmacies, with buyers required to enter their details.
The Government have conceded the point that some acids that are currently on open sale are dangerous and so should not be sold to under-18s. Schedule 1 lists hydrochloric acid and ammonia as two such examples, but we know that only one in five acid attacks are conducted by under-18s. That means that four in five attackers will be free to purchase reportable substances despite the clear evidence of harm. Of the 408 reported acid attacks, ammonia was used in 69 incidents. In the light of that, will the Government conduct a full review of the designation of reportable substances and bring forward regulations to re-designate those causing clear harm?
We note that the Government have failed to extend to corrosive substances the specific provisions on the possession of knives in schools. There can surely be no justification, beyond a reasonable defence, for the possession of corrosive substances on a school premises. If we are to send a message that the possession of corrosive substances will be treated with the same seriousness as the possession of knives, it should follow that the provisions that apply in respect of knives in schools are extended to acid.
On knife possession, the measures on remote sales and residential premises are important, but a cursory internet search demonstrates the easy availability of a wide range of weapons that are terrifying in their familiarity: knives disguised as credit cards and as bracelets; weapons designed with the explicit purpose to harm and to conceal. With the increasing use of such weapons and the widespread use of machetes in certain parts of the country, we wish to explore with the Government what further action can be taken to bear down on such pernicious weapons, and how apps and platforms on which such weapons are made readily available can be held to account.
As the Bill is considered in Committee, we wish to explore the concerns, mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (David Hanson) earlier, of retailers and the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers about the offences imposed on retailers.
David Hanson
As the chair of the USDAW group of MPs—I declare that interest—I welcome that commitment. I was greatly encouraged by the fact that the Home Secretary said that he will look into this issue. I hope that we can consider it on a cross-party basis to ensure that shop workers are free from fear and that regulations can be put in place to make sure that we defend those who will have to defend the Bill’s provisions on the frontline, in shops.
Louise Haigh
My right hon. Friend is a long-standing campaigner for the rights of shop workers and I echo his point about hoping that we can do this on a cross-party basis.
Concerns remain about the open sale of knives in smaller retail stores, which is an issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft). Many of the larger stores have taken steps to secure knives in cabinets, but the fact that it is far too easy to steal knives from smaller stores renders much of the control of knife sales ineffective.
It was surprising to see that higher education institutions have been omitted from the extension of possession offences, given that they were considered in the consultation earlier this year. The justification that the Government gave for the proposal then was, I think, right, so I am interested to hear why higher education institutions have been omitted from the Bill.
On firearms, the laws in the UK are among the toughest in the world, but there is concern that restricted supply might be leading to the repurposing of obsolete firearms, meaning that law enforcement must be alive to the changing nature of firearms use. There has been a significant rise in the use of antique guns that have been repurposed to commit serious crime: 30% of the guns used in crime in 2015-16 were of obsolete calibre. The repurposing of handguns designed to fire gas canisters, and of imitation weapons, has grown in the past 10 years. We intend to press the Government on whether the laws surrounding decommissioned firearms, which are not subject to the Firearms Act 1968, need to be strengthened. The availability of firearms has been shown to be increasing through the legal-to-illegal route, so we very much support the Government’s proposals.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case, but as someone who has recently renewed their shotgun licence, I should say that that is a very thorough process. I would not want the wrong impression to be given of people who shoot for sport—I shoot only clays; I do not shoot animals—because it is a very responsible sport.
Louise Haigh
My hon. Friend brings his own personal experience to the debate and makes an important point. I am sure that will be heard in Committee.
Finally, we believe that the Bill is a missed opportunity for victims. The Conservative party manifestos in 2015 and 2017 promised to enshrine in law the rights of victims, a group too often neglected by the criminal justice system. With crime surging and the perpetrators of crime more likely than ever to escape justice, the Bill should have gone further and looked to strengthen the rights of victims of crime.
Vicky Ford
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way yet again. On the point about repurposing or reactivating deactivated firearms, will she mention for the record that of course the reactivation of a deactivated firearm is in itself a criminal act?
Louise Haigh
Yes, and I was not trying to suggest otherwise, but, as I have laid out, the number of crimes using repurposed weapons has increased significantly over the past 10 years, so it is clear that in considering the Bill we should look into how we can restrict the availability of decommissioned weapons.
Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
On the subject of a victims law, Sharon Fearon is the mother of Shaquan, a young boy who was murdered in my constituency, and there was never a conviction in that case. Sharon and I met Minister after Minister, including the Attorney General, and the one thing we were promised was that there would be a victims law and that their voices would be heard.
Louise Haigh
My hon. Friend has done sterling work over the past three years on youth violence, and particularly on the rights of victims, and her work is one of the reasons we think it is so important to strengthen the rights of victims through this Bill. I hope that we can do that on a cross-party basis, given the promises that were made in the 2015 and 2017 Conservative manifestos.
We would like to see a recognition that the rights of victims should be paramount, so we want consideration to be given to the introduction of an independent advocate, in line with the recommendations of the Victims’ Commissioner, to help victims of serious crime to navigate the range of services in the aftermath of a serious crime. With fewer than one in five violent crimes resulting in a charge, we will seek to legally entrench a victim’s right to a review of a decision by the police or the Crown Prosecution Service not to bring criminal charges or to discontinue a case. With homicide rates surging, Labour will also seek to provide national standards for the periodic review of homicide cases, because many families are deeply concerned at how cases can often be left to gather dust, with nobody brought to justice.
In the debate around serious violence, it is vital that the rights of victims are not forgotten. The aftermath of such an incident is traumatic and disorienting, with victims who are struggling to deal with their own personal trauma forced to navigate the at times baffling criminal justice system. As the number of victims of serious incidents is growing, now is the time to strengthen their rights.
I confirm again that we support the measures before us and will seek to be as constructive as possible in enhancing them. I hope that as deliberations on the Bill continue, we can have a full debate about adverse childhood experiences and the consequent policy considerations, such as trauma-informed policing and schooling, and about the implications of school exclusions and the increasing number of homeless children and children in care. As a result, I hope that we can improve on the measures in the Bill to begin to tackle the root causes of this growing epidemic. Violent crime is a contagious disease that is infecting communities across our nation. Without concerted political will and sustained Government investment, we will continue to see many more unnecessary tragedies.
Louise Haigh
Main Page: Louise Haigh (Labour - Sheffield, Heeley)Department Debates - View all Louise Haigh's debates with the Home Office
Offensive Weapons Bill (First sitting)
Louise Haigh ExcerptsTuesday 17th July 2018
(5 years, 9 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 17 July 2018 - (17 Jul 2018)
The Chair
The deadline for amendments to be considered at the first line-by-line sitting of the Committee is Thursday 30 August.
Motion made, and Question proposed,
That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(Victoria Atkins.)
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
I am grateful for the publication of written evidence, but the responses to the consultation that was the forerunner to the Bill have not yet been published. A summary of the responses is on the Home Office website, but several of the witnesses who will give evidence today reference their consultation responses in their biographies, and we have not had access to them. Could we at least have the consultation responses from the witnesses who are giving evidence today and on Thursday, if not all the responses?
Victoria Atkins
Q
John Poynton: I do not have the precise statistics on what is coming in, but there is no question that there is no place for zombie knives, machetes and large weapons like that. My concern is that a number of young people will come to hospital with all sorts of improvised weapon injuries from screwdrivers and the like. Clearly it is important to make weapons less easy for young people to get hold of, but there will always be a need for education and earlier intervention, to look at how we get young people to understand that certain weapons are tools, and that there are ways to use them. This should not be about finding any sharp implement, be it a screwdriver or something else that has been sharpened, to use. When young people come to hospitals, it is not as clearcut as saying that it is just about zombie knives or kitchen knives.
With regard to availability, a lot of young people talk about the traditional method of ensuring that the public feel safer that weapons are being taken off the streets: we see the traditional use of photos of weapons that have been found or taken, and that helps us to feel that those weapons have been removed. The broader picture—the public health approach to looking at this issue—is that lots of young people will see those same pictures that make us feel safer, but they will perhaps not read all the copy that goes with the picture and they will see those pictures as showing the weapons that are available, and they are somewhat traumatised by the idea that those weapons are available. The availability or lack of availability of certain weapons needs to sit alongside a clear and simple narrative to ensure that the entire community—including young people and us—understands that the community needs to be safe. We all need to have the same perception that the community is safe, and not have this misunderstanding of what they need to do to feel safe.
It was interesting for the police to recognise last year that only 25% of knife crime could be attributed to gangs. My question is about what we do with the 75% of “normal”—for want of a better phrase—non-gang members. How do we really educate them to understand that they do not need to pick up a knife to feel safe on the streets?
Rob Owen: Picking up on John’s point about escalation, it is almost like an arms race. What is happening with county lines in particular is that London gangs are looked up to as the grandfathers of gangs, and regional areas aspire to be more like London gangs, often because of social media. They are saying, “We now need to have weapons, because we need to up our game.” In the old days the drug market in a market or coastal town was safer. Nowadays the kids who are involved in county lines or local drug dealing groups are thinking, “We need to have the next big thing.”
There is definitely an escalation in violence, and there is definitely an escalation outside London of the use or ability to use a weapon. The really sad thing is that a screwdriver is more deadly than a knife. If you talk to a surgeon, they will say that it is more complicated to sort out a stab wound from a screwdriver than from a knife, which I was surprised by. In primary schools, it is about demystifying. On social media, people see that there are safe places to stab each other—this is well documented. Actually, there is no safe place to stab someone, because if you hit an artery, it is pretty much game over.
A public health approach has to be taken. When the police catch a kid with a knife, one of the things that has to happen is that has to be seen as a beacon of need—that that kid needs some support to try to break that cycle. The kid is carrying that knife for a multitude of factors, but we are not going to solve things by taking that knife away or taking the drugs off them—then they would have a drug debt, too—and throwing them in prison. They will come out and have the same problems. It is about putting in that intensive care, even if they are caught with a knife, however unpalatable that is to the Daily Mail or whatever it is. It is about a beacon of need. All these kids who are being targeted by gangs are either in pupil referral units or have been excluded from schools. So 100% of the clients we are working with on county lines who are carrying weapons have been excluded from school. If you ever want a beacon of need for where resources should go, it is kids who have been excluded from school.
Patrick Green: Clear, unambiguous messaging around knives is important in the preventive world. If you are working with young people and there is any ambiguity, you get the “but” argument—“but I know somebody who this didn’t happen to”. You can lose the group. We are working with peer groups in schools, and that is so important.
I believe that it is important that the online world is brought into line with the retail world in terms of sales and the restrictions on sales. I have no figures for you, but from the conversations we have with the young people we deal with—particularly those who admit to carrying a knife or having carried a knife—knives will mostly be got from domestic settings, but shoplifting comes very high up in where they get knives from.
I feel that the voluntary code for e-tailing is not delivering as it should be. That possibly relates to the second part of your sitting today. The open display of knives gives young people an opportunity to take knives that they might use in other places. They are less likely to buy a knife and are more likely to shoplift it. That is why I think the legislation is important. It will help the preventive agenda and our conversations with young people. It will make it clearer to them what they can and cannot do, and that is important at this time.
Jaf Shah: I would echo much of what has been said, particularly around deploying a public health approach to addressing the root causes of this escalation not only in acid attacks, but in violent crime. In the case of acid and the availability of corrosive fluids, many complications clearly arise from the availability of lots of household products that contain high levels of corrosive content. How you regulate access to those types of products is a challenge. What the Bill proposes around licensing for sulphuric acid is an important step, because sulphuric acid at a concentration of 98% causes enormous physical and psychological damage to survivors. That licensing is a vital step, but the passing of legislation in itself is insufficient.
We need to ensure that we deploy a long-term approach to dealing with the root causes. We know that once you reduce the availability of one type of weapon, another weapon becomes available, and I think that is what has happened with the rise of acid attacks. It came at a time when there were greater attempts by law enforcement agencies to control other weapons. Many would-be perpetrators saw loopholes in the existing system that are now being addressed, so they chose to use acid, because it is a lot easier and cheaper to purchase and causes an enormous amount of physical and psychological scarring.
Louise Haigh
Q
Rob Owen: I think it is very varied. We do work on prevention. Through SOS+ we go into quite a few PRUs. They have been fantastically helpful and welcoming. It is really mixed. A lot of schools do not like to admit that there is a gang problem—some primary schools particularly are very worried about admitting that they are becoming targeted.
The gangs are becoming much more sophisticated in the way they recruit. They often do it through siblings. It is not simple. The different county lines are not uniform; they all have their own style and tolerance to violence. They all do it slightly differently, but there is a theme emerging that any child excluded from school becomes a target, because they have become alienated, and are the sort of material that the gangs are looking for.
Sadly, the people we are looking at are 10, 11 and 12-year-olds. It is no longer 16 or 17-year-olds. County lines have been going forever, but it was always older kids doing it. Now the real problems are the level of sophistication in almost brainwashing them into the gang, the levels of violence that are associated with those gangs, and the targeting of kids who have been excluded from school.
Patrick Green: I would echo that. It is really sad. We work with a lot of young people who have been excluded from school. There is no question that they are in a particularly difficult place in terms of the level of intervention and support that they need. I feel that some schools, as you would expect, do that a lot better than others.
I do not think that there is universal engagement at the moment. Things have definitely changed. Certainly, schools listen to Ofsted. We could get far more co-operation from Ofsted in terms of safeguarding, not just in the school itself but in the surrounding area and on the journey that young people make to and from school.
I just think that far too many young people are being excluded from school in the first place. We can probably tell when primary schools come to us and highlight young people whom we are already concerned about, purely from the attitude that we can see in a short two-hour workshop. Far more could be done in terms of safety nets and checks and balances on young people. When they get to being excluded from school, it is really difficult and a tough road back.
John Poynton: There is a real need to not make the schools and the young people feel as if they just have to focus on a lesson on gangs and knife crime. We have all mentioned that knife crime, gangs and county lines are symptoms of much deeper, longer-term root causes. Schools will probably not have any problem recognising that they have children who have had adverse childhood experiences throughout their lives. They have parents who perhaps are not able to support their children in quite the way they need. I suppose I really want to look at how schools are supported to engage the families and the children on those root-cause issues, rather than at trying to talk a headteacher into just having a gangs, knives or county lines lesson plan in their personal, social, health and economic education. I think you need to do both but, again, this is similar to my point about showing weapons that have been taken off the street. In going into schools, my colleagues here obviously do a very good job of ensuring that children are not traumatised. For children who perhaps are not engaging or listening in quite the same way as those who are going to stay on in mainstream education and do well, they might hear that this is normal. There is an element of re-traumatising, or possibly triggering a previous childhood trauma.
For me, it is again about ensuring that schools are better supported to work as early as possible around adverse childhood experience and support the parents through primary school, so that, as Rob pointed out, we are not having to bring the personal, social and health education lessons around county lines and gangs lower and lower, because we should be meeting it at the very beginning.
It is less threatening to teachers and to heads to talk about how we support all children with adverse childhood experience from reception, rather than to try to go backwards in talking about the more worrying subjects. I am not saying it is either/or; it is both.
Louise Haigh
Q
“Children carry weapons for a multitude of…reasons”
and criminal justice measures are unlikely to be effective in tackling this. It also says:
“There is no evidence that the threat of custody deters children.”
Is that a concern that you share?
Rob Owen: I broadly do. I do not think that, for many of our clients that we are working with, that is a factor that stops them carrying a weapon, sadly. A lot of it is to do with the glamorisation on social media, which has been mentioned before. Social media is now explaining to kids the most effective place to stab someone in the heart. How is that possible? Failure rates of surgery are very sensitive, but kids are now being shown on videos the two places if you are going to kill someone.
It is not a simple solution about saying, “You’ll have a mandatory sentence if you get caught with a knife.” It is completely about educating kids to understand the effects it will have longer term and the effects it will have on families. The longer term solution has got to be much more about education than sentences. That is not working; it is not putting people off.
Louise Haigh
Q
Rob Owen: There have got to be two things. One is that there have to be regulations and laws, and I completely get that. At the same time, there has also got to be some form of common sense and humanisation about that situation and about what the best thing is for that person to ensure that they do not create another victim.
My experience of parents of victims, sadly, is that what they are most obsessed about is ensuring that no other child suffers and no other parent has to go through what they have gone through. What we are trying to achieve is that the best environment for that to happen is available. But that is often not just about sentencing; that has got to be about a package of support that is put in place.
Patrick Green: It is a difficult one. Certainly, from the victim’s perspective, many of the young people who have been victims of knife crime are often concerned that the perpetrator is back on the streets very quickly, and that heightens their feeling of insecurity. Our view in terms of first-time offences is, yes. Young people carry knives for a range of reasons; some of them may be around protection, and people are just making a mistake. Certainly, when it comes to second offences, there is due concern there about the young person falling into a trend and sentencing really playing a part in helping take that young person off the street.
The key issue is the support from the first offence to the second offence. I am not entirely sure that young people who are caught with a knife are getting the right level of support to help them and deter them from coming back on to the street the second time. The “two strikes and you’re out” should absolutely be the final option, but there should be a range of support. This is about rehabilitation and helping—as somebody said earlier on, if you are carrying a knife, it is almost a cry for help, and we should be doing far more around that.
John Poynton: Earlier this year, with Sarah Jones, we had young people from all around the country attend the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime to talk about their experiences. One of the overriding messages from them was that their experience of prison or the threat of prison was not a clear deterrent to being involved in risky or criminal behaviours. As Rob says, there needs to be a clear package of support. I think it is really important that that strategy is recognised. It is about vulnerability and safeguarding, and we need to look at how we support the young people.
The comment was made that young people are very clever at finding loopholes. We had a number of young women who talked about the fact that they are coerced into carrying weapons so that the young men are not caught carrying them. I am just making the point that the young people carrying the weapons are very possibly not the young people likely to be using them. That is a statement—just to recognise that young women and very vulnerable young children are coerced into behaviours that they would not otherwise deem normal on their own.
You cannot have a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I am very aware that the strategy is not saying that—it is putting a raft of support in to look at how we work with these young people—but my concern would be the classic “cry wolf” issue or the “but what about” point that Patrick made. Young people will always know of someone else who has been stopped twice holding a weapon, who, perhaps quite rightly for a number of reasons, may not have been given a mandatory sentence. The issue is that that will always become the narrative, “In that case, it is not going to happen to me.”
I would push for a really broad package of support for young people and a very simple narrative around the issue, so that young people recognise that they should not be carrying weapons. We also need to look at why these young people are being coerced into carrying weapons or drugs or other things that they would not normally do on their own.
Jaf Shah: May I flip back briefly to an earlier question around engagement with schools? As I mentioned, our engagement in the UK at a programmatic level is embryonic, but what we know from our work overseas in terms of engaging with schools, schoolchildren, teachers and so on, and engaging from a very young age, is that it is a very effective way of engaging with children about the repercussions of a violent act—in particular acid violence. By the very nature of acid attacks, the face is targeted, so you have a very visible form of violence. When survivors go into schools and talk with children, the impact is very strong. They certainly realise that there is a human beyond the facial disfigurement and that they have their own narrative, and that story carries a very strong message.
I was very interested when I visited Scotland and met Dr Christine Goodall from Medics Against Violence. I thought that their work was absolutely brilliant. It is a strand of work that could work particularly well with survivors of acid attacks engaging with school children.
To fast-forward to the most recent question, it is enormously difficult around the mandatory sentencing of under-18s, because there are many complicating factors. I have been hearing locally that young children are actually carrying acid in schools—but as protection, because it has become so commonplace. I think it is a very difficult subject in terms of having an absolute answer. It requires, as everyone else has mentioned, a far more sophisticated package of engagement with groups who might be affected.
Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
Q
Rob Owen: Same age.
Victoria Atkins
Q
Andrew Penhale: Again, it is important and needed. There is this gap with online provision, and it is really important that that is duplicated from knives. It is exactly the same problem: there needs to be a verification process to ensure that they are delivered to people 18 or over.
Ben Richards: We mirror the importance of this, and we understand that. As Trish has touched on, the issues are within statutory duties and resources to be able to take on duties on top of those already being carried out.
Louise Haigh
Q
Trish Burls: For trading standards officers, yes, it is.
Louise Haigh
Q
Trish Burls: We have powers within much of the rest of the legislation that we enforce that allow us to do things such as enter premises and seize documentation and goods in relation to an inquiry we are carrying out if we suspect that an offence has taken place. The Bill does not contain any powers for trading standards officers, whereas police powers would obviously come from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.
Louise Haigh
Q
Trish Burls: We could submit that to the Committee.
Louise Haigh
Q
Andrew Penhale: Gosh, that is a broader question than I had anticipated. We have resource. I cannot answer the question of whether we have sufficient to do our jobs as a whole; that is a bigger question that I guess the director would have to answer. We are resourced how we are resourced, and we are dealing with the crimes presented to us. We are certainly not not prosecuting because we lack resources to do the job.
We prosecute in accordance with a code, and whether cases meet the code because they are not evidentially sufficient is another matter. We can only prosecute those cases that do meet the right standard. In a very short answer to your question, we are not not prosecuting because we lack the resources to do so.
Louise Haigh
Q
Andrew Penhale: There are a number of cases that collapsed where decisions were made that should not have been made because of a lack of consideration of wider evidence. That is not necessarily a resource issue; that is a decision-making issue.
Louise Haigh
My point, Mr Gapes, is that there is not a lot of point passing new legislation if it is not going to be enforced.
The Chair
I understand your point, I am just gently suggesting that we focus on the Bill.
Louise Haigh
Q
Andrew Penhale: By the nature of their being mandatory, there is not a great deal of judicial discretion. In relation to some offences, they are there for a reason that Parliament has decided, which is to signify the importance of dealing with knife crime and firearms robustly. There are other offences where mandatory sentencing is imposed. Essentially, Parliament has made that decision. It is not really for the Crown Prosecution Service to say whether or not that is the right thing; we have got to implement what Parliament requires us to.
Louise Haigh
Q
Andrew Penhale: First, I think it is really important that the victims’ views in the criminal justice system are taken into account. The Crown Prosecution Service has a victim’s right to review system, which requires us to go back and explain our decisions, but also to review them where the victim disagrees. That process is already well established. Whether there is a place for a separate advocate is, again, for a wider debate rather than for the Crown Prosecution Service.
Paul Scully
Q
Trish Burls: We have local responsible retailer agreements on knives, which echoes the Home Office’s established voluntary agreement on the storage and sale of knives. These are local; it is not national. There are no regulations that prohibit the way in which a knife is displayed, whether that is via a shop doorway or for open access. We rely very much at the moment on retailers’ good will and common sense.
Louise Haigh
Main Page: Louise Haigh (Labour - Sheffield, Heeley)Department Debates - View all Louise Haigh's debates with the Home Office
Offensive Weapons Bill (Sixth sitting)
Louise Haigh ExcerptsTuesday 4th September 2018
(5 years, 7 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 4 September 2018 - (4 Sep 2018)
Victoria Atkins
The appropriate national authority will be the Secretary of State in England, Wales and Scotland, and the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland. We will consult the Scottish Government, however, because clauses 1 to 4 deal with matters that are reserved in relation to Scotland.
The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point about where in the Bill the affirmative procedure is specified. Clause 37(2) requires that regulations be
“approved by a resolution…of each House of Parliament.”
As ever, I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his forensic eye for detail, and I invite the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley to withdraw the amendment.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
As with the previous group of amendments, I thank the Minister for her response. I am satisfied that the legislation referred to in clause 1(10) will fulfil the objective that our amendment was attempting to achieve. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment made: 14, in clause 1, page 2, line 29, at end insert—
“( ) See section (Presumptions in proceedings in Scotland for offence under section 1, 3 or 4) for provisions about presumptions as to the content of containers in proceedings in Scotland.”
This amendment and Amendments 16, 19, 20, 31, 33, NC5 and NC6 provide for certain evidential presumptions relating to the nature of substances that are or were in containers to apply in Scotland in relation to an offence under section 1, 3, 4 or 5 involving a corrosive substance or product.—(Victoria Atkins.)
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
There is an issue that has not been raised through any amendments, and I hope the Committee will bear with me as I briefly address it. Clause 1(8) relates to the coming into force of section 281(5) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. We attempted to table an amendment to ensure that this provision is enacted within six months of the Bill coming into force. The subsection was legislated for 15 years ago and is still to come into practice. There is concern that the Government continue to bring forward legislation—as I am sure the previous Labour Government did—that rests on magistrates courts being able to give sentences of up to 12 months.
I understand from previous conversations with the Minister’s colleagues that there are some issues for the Ministry of Justice around enactment but, 15 years on, we need to overcome them. If we cannot, we should not be putting such provisions into new legislation, pretending that we can. I would like the Minister to clarify whether we are likely to see those provisions coming into force. If not, should we not be clear in the legislation that, in reality, the sentencing is six months and not 12 months?
Victoria Atkins
I note that the amendment in question was not permitted in the groupings, Mr Gray. With regard to the 2003 Act, the hon. Lady has correctly identified that this is a Ministry of Justice matter, and this small Bill is not the place to introduce a provision that will have ramifications across the whole of the criminal justice system. We keep magistrates’ sentencing powers under review, but there is currently no intention to implement provisions of the 2003 Act in the Bill.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 1, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Schedule 1 agreed to.
Clause 2
Defence to remote sale of corrosive products to persons under 18
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
The Chair
Just for the information of the Committee, the consultation responses from the Government are now available and in the room, if hon. Members would like to have a look.
Louise Haigh
Thank you, Mr Gray, and I thank the Minister for providing those consultation responses. We welcome clause 2 on defence to remote sale. It is an extremely important part of the Bill, because a significant proportion of the purchasing is likely to occur online, as it does at present.
Our concerns relate to the defence to remote sale under condition A, which I referred to earlier:
“that they took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence to avoid the commission of the offence”.
In subsection (6)(a), a seller is regarded as having taken all due diligence if they
“operated a system for checking that persons who bought corrosive products…were not under the age of 18”.
We know from evidence given to the Committee that there are concerns about what a system for checking persons who bought corrosive products would look like. Would it look like the online age verification controls introduced by the Digital Economy Act 2017? That would present significant difficulties. That legislation was limited to major commercial players, which have the means and capacity to implement age verification controls. However, such controls have proven perilously difficult to implement in a workable form. Has the Home Office considered what standard of age verification software or controls would be acceptable under clause 2?
The British Retail Consortium said:
“Ideally, we would like to see some standards, so we can be sure that online age verification systems developed by businesses such as Yoti and others will be accepted as due diligence by the enforcers.”––[Official Report, Offensive Weapons Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2018; c. 62, Q154.]
Currently, offline systems are standardised and clearly laid out in the legislation, but it is difficult for retailers to be sure that they are complying with online systems, which is why the Government are banning the delivery of corrosive products and bladed articles to residential premises, to make sure they are complied with. However, I want to press the Minister on what age verification controls the Government have considered and, as we will come to later, why they do not consider them sufficient to prevent the delivery of corrosive products and bladed articles to under-18s.
Victoria Atkins
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her speech. We have not set out in the Bill the measures that businesses could take to satisfy themselves that the person to whom they are selling is under 18 because we are conscious that different age verification systems are available, and the technology is developing at a very fast pace, as we have seen in relation to the Digital Economy Act 2017. We did not want to stipulate a specific approach in primary legislation for fear that it would quickly run out of relevance.
However, there are conditions of due diligence under the defence in clause 2. There has been a certain amount of misunderstanding about the conditions in the defence relating to knives—which I will come to in due course—but clause 2 is about ensuring that these dangerous substances are not sold to under-18s. We want sellers of these products to understand from the very beginning that they have a duty of due diligence to determine the age of those to whom they are selling. We know, from experience of other age-controlled items, that businesses will quickly develop these systems. It will be for the seller to show that they have robust age verification systems in place.
Louise Haigh
I completely agree, and I would never advocate including technological guidance or prescriptions in primary legislation. However, would it not be advisable to set standards that we expect retailers to comply with, for both corrosive substances and bladed articles, particularly given the very low rates of prosecution by trading standards? Perhaps there is an issue with “due diligence” being too vague for trading standards to be able to bring prosecutions forward.
Victoria Atkins
In other statutes—for example, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974—we have the test of “reasonably practicable”. I am anxious that, if a case reaches the court, we do not bind the hands of a magistrate in determining the facts of the case. I will happily consider what I think is the hon. Lady’s point about whether there is scope to provide best practice, guidance and so on, but we are of the view that the defence as it stands should be set out in statute and that it should then be for businesses and retailers to ensure that they comply with the law.
Louise Haigh
I am grateful for that reply, but a bit concerned that the Home Office had not already planned to issue guidance to online retailers. With something like this, I would have thought that, given that some retailers are not currently subject to age verification legislation at all, the Home Office would automatically issue guidance on what it would expect such age verification to look like—not best practice, but a standard beneath which a retailer would not be able to fall under the legislation. Is that not the case?
Victoria Atkins
We will publish guidance when implementing the Bill.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 2 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 3
Delivery of corrosive products to residential premises etc
Amendments made: 15, in clause 3, page 4, line 35, at end insert—
‘(13) In Scotland, proceedings for an offence under this section may be commenced within the period of 12 months beginning with the commission of the offence.
(14) Section 136(3) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 (date when proceedings deemed to be commenced) applies for the purposes of subsection (13) as it applies for the purposes of that section.”
This amendment provides for proceedings in Scotland for an offence under Clause 3 to be brought within 12 months of the commission of the offence. Under section 136 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 the default period for bringing summary proceedings is 6 months.
Amendment 16, in clause 3, page 4, line 35, at end insert—
‘( ) See section (Presumptions in proceedings in Scotland for offence under section 1, 3 or 4) for provisions about presumptions as to the content of containers in proceedings in Scotland.” —(Victoria Atkins.)
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 14.
Clause 3, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 4
Delivery of corrosive products to persons under 18
Stephen Timms
I rise to speak to new clause 9. It arises from a number of conversations that I had with a man called Mr Raheel Butt, whom I would briefly like to tell the Committee about. He grew up in West Ham, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), rather than in East Ham, and as he would freely acknowledge, he went wrong for several years and served a term in prison. I think he left prison in 2012, and since then he has made it his mission to try to ensure that other young people do not make the same mistakes he made. He set up a community interest company called Community & Rehabilitation Solutions, which works with the Metropolitan police in a number of ways, and he is very concerned about the ease with which people can get hold of very unpleasant weapons and corrosive substances—the new clause covers both corrosive substances and bladed weapons.
I arranged to meet Mr Butt a couple of weeks ago, and he came to Portcullis House to have a conversation with me about this issue. About five minutes after he was due to turn up, I realised that he had not arrived, so I gave him a call on his mobile. He said, “Well, the problem is I don’t know how to get past security with my offensive weapons.” I had not realised that he was planning to bring his offensive weapons with him, but that was indeed his intention. It caused a significant security alert; I actually never got to see the offensive weapons, because they were taken off him before he managed to get through Portcullis House security. I suppose that was reassuring.
The point he wanted to make, however, was that it is extremely easy to buy the most dreadful weapons online extremely cheaply. For example, I am just looking at a product that he pointed out to me—the ones he showed me are all readily available on eBay, and I know there are other websites where they are available as well. “Ultralight Self Defense Tactical Defense Pen Outdoor Glass Breaker Writing Pen” is the name of a product that costs £2.84 on eBay. It is designed to look like a pen, and it does look like a pen, but it is actually a lethal weapon. My worry, which I am sure is also the Minister’s worry, is how to stop these things getting into the hands of people who want to do harm with them, of whom there are sadly far too many at the moment.
Clause 4 covers the delivery of corrosive products to people under 18, and clause 15 covers the delivery of bladed products to residential premises. In both cases, the Bill places requirements on the suppliers. My worry is what happens in a case such as one Mr Butt drew my attention to. That ultra-light product on ebay.co.uk is supplied by a Chinese company called vastfire-luz. My worry is whether this legislation will cover companies such as that one in China, or companies elsewhere, that are sending these very damaging and unpleasant items to people in the UK.
I know that clause 15, on the delivery of bladed products to residential premises, puts in place arrangements to cover the situation where the supplier is outside the UK. An onus is placed on the delivery company; we will no doubt come to that in due course, but it is not clear to me how effective that will be. If a Chinese company posts an item, which could be in a perfectly innocuous small package, to somebody in the UK, will the arrangements in the Bill help us pick up that it is, in fact, a lethal weapon that is being delivered? It might be delivered by the Royal Mail through the post or by a delivery company of some kind. It is difficult to see how the measures in the Bill, although clearly intended to stop that kind of delivery being made, will in practice have that effect for suppliers determined to get around the impediments being put in their way.
That is the reason I have tabled new clause 9, which I accept looks like a rather odd proposition on the face of it, to move that a person
“commits an offence if they knowingly purchase an offensive weapon from a seller located in a country that is not a member of the European Union.”
The Bill is intended to manage sellers and delivery agencies, but I am sceptical whether that will work in practice. Through my new clause, I instead place an onus on the purchaser and, indeed, on people such as eBay who are facilitating these sales, and say to them: “If you are an individual purchasing an offensive weapon from a seller outside the EU, that is an offence.” That would be one way of shifting the onus on to the purchaser. Clearly, it would still be possible for businesses to import items into the UK in the ordinary way. What I am worried about is individuals buying the dreadful implements that are freely on sale at the moment, on eBay and elsewhere and that, as far as I can see, the well-intentioned measures in the Bill will not capture. This proposal would be another way of trying to stop those very damaging things getting into the country.
Louise Haigh
I rise briefly to congratulate my right hon. Friend on the ingenious way he has brought forward the new clause to tackle the thorny issue of websites outside the UK and the difficulties that the Government will have in prosecuting those who attempt to sell corrosive substances and, indeed, bladed articles, which are dealt with later in the Bill.
I want particularly to address the issue of platforms. As my right hon. Friend said, platforms such as Wish, eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Amazon proliferate the use of horrendous weapons. In 2016, a teenager killed a young man called Bailey Gwynne in a school in Aberdeen. He was cleared of murder, but convicted of culpable homicide. He had paid £40 on Amazon for a folding knife with an 8.5 cm blade. It is illegal even under the current law—prior to the Bill—to sell a folding knife to a buyer aged under 18 if the blade is more than 3 inches long, but that 16-year-old had been able to get around Amazon’s age-verification checks by pinning a note to his front door rather than accepting delivery in person.
I am sure that large retailers and online providers such as Amazon will comply with this new legislation, but individual sellers who sell through Amazon, Facebook Marketplace, eBay and so on are unlikely to comply, so there has to be a way, if we do not use the exact wording that my right hon. Friend has proposed, for us to crack down on platforms; otherwise, we will leave a gaping hole that will render essentially meaningless the worthy principles that the Bill is designed to implement.
Victoria Atkins
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East and the right hon. Member for East Ham for the amendments and the new clause. If I may, I will deal with amendments 43 and 44 first and then move on to new clause 9.
I start by saying that, sadly, it is of course not just in the context of the use of offensive weapons that there are people who do not have the scruples that we do when it comes to crimes and harms; they use online platforms to sell their wares. Indeed, only yesterday my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary gave a powerful speech on his expectations of all members of the tech industry when it comes to addressing the horrific prevalence of child sexual exploitation online. We are discussing here a different form of criminality, but of course we have to work to ensure that criminals do not have a gaping hole open on the internet to sell these horrific weapons.
Section 141 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 prohibits the sale, importation and other things of disguised knives. The Bill extends that to cover their possession, so I hope that that addresses the point made about the disguised weapon that Mr Butt—
Louise Haigh
I beg to move amendment 52, in clause 5, page 6, line 44, after “otherwise” insert
“, and any place other than premises occupied as a private dwelling (including any stair, passage, garden, yard, garage, outhouse or other appurtenance of such premises which is used in common by the occupants of more than one such dwelling).”
This amendment would extend the definition of public places in relation to England and Wales and Northern Ireland.
This amendment was specifically requested by serving police officers because of concerns about the definition of public place referenced in this clause. I appreciate that it is also referenced in other pieces of legislation, so I fully accept and expect that the Minister will raise concerns about differing definitions of public place, but it is important to have this debate about the clause, given the gravity and extent of the offences that could be committed, and because of the police’s concerns that the definition is too narrow and limits their powers in the event of possession in a communal area of a residential dwelling.
Our intention is to make it absolutely clear that “public place” also refers to any area that is exempt from the definition in the Bill due to its not being a place where any ordinary member of the public has access, but which is still regarded as a public place because it is not within a premise occupied as a private dwelling. Such places include any stair, passage, garden, yard, garage, outhouse or other place of such premises that is used in common by the occupants of more than one dwelling.
The amendment helpfully mirrors legislation in Scotland that gives the police broader powers to ensure the safety of residents in communal areas—clearly because of criminality that has taken place in such areas and in response to the police’s limited powers to take action. The existing definition of “public place” in section 1 of the Prevention of Crime Act 1953 is
“any highway and any other premises or place to which at the material time the public have or are permitted to have access, whether on payment or otherwise”.
In Scotland, in this Bill and other legislation, it is
“any place other than premises occupied as a private dwelling”,
such as a garden, yard or outhouse. That reflects the existing definition of “public place” in Scottish legislation. The offence of having an offensive weapon, or a bladed or pointed article, in a public place is set out in sections 47 and 49 of the Criminal Law (Consolidation) (Scotland) Act 1995.
A 2011 report by the Scottish Government explained that the definition was changed to capture locations such as the ones in our amendment. The explanatory note to section 37 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010 made it clear that possession in a public place offences
“may be committed by possession of an offensive weapon or a knife on the common parts of shared properties such as common landings in tenement blocks of flats.”
We strongly believe that these measures must be extended to those public places to bring security to residents in those areas and to give the police the power to act if offensive weapons are possessed within them. It is clear that the police need and want this power, and we see no reason why we should not align ourselves with the measures in Scotland.
Victoria Atkins
I am grateful to Opposition Members for tabling this amendment. It proposes that we extend the definition used in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to bring it closer to the definition used in Scotland, which would be an extension of the current definition and would include private properties. I absolutely understand why the police and others are seeking to close what they perceive to be a gap in the law. It appears that some private properties would not be covered by the offence in clause 5.
Of course, possessing a corrosive substance in a private place is not an offence. It may well be that some of us have an assortment of cleaning products that would qualify as corrosives in our home, so the Bill does not seek to make it illegal to possess a corrosive in a dwelling. There may well be properties that are not homes and have legitimate uses for corrosive substances, some of which we have already discussed during our scrutiny of the Bill. We do not want the Bill to criminalise members of the public who are going about their daily lives or enjoying a hobby outside their home.
The amendment applies solely to the offence of possession. It is worth noting that a number of other criminal offences are available to the police, in relation to threatening with a corrosive. For example, there is the offence of threatening the use of a corrosive substance as an offensive weapon, and it would be possible to charge a person with common assault under the 1998 Act or with a public order offence. I can see that there may be some benefit in expanding the definition to cover possession in all places that are not dwellings. I would be grateful if the Committee would allow me time to consider this matter further with my officials.
Louise Haigh
I am very grateful that the Minister is willing to consider the amendment. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment made: 20, in clause 5, page 7, line 4, after “See” insert “—
(a) section (Presumptions in proceedings in Scotland for offence under section 5) for provisions about presumptions as to the content of containers in proceedings in Scotland;
(b) ”—(Victoria Atkins.)
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 14.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Stephen Timms
I very much welcome the inclusion of clause 5 in the Bill. It is a very important step forward to make an offence of having a corrosive substance in a public place, in exactly the same way as having a knife in a public place is an offence. I am hopeful that the Bill will address some of the problems we have seen in areas such as mine.
I just want to ask the Minister one question. Subsection (2) makes the point that it is a defence for somebody if they can prove that
“they had good reason or lawful authority for having the corrosive substance with them in a public place”.
Subsection (3) goes on to say that it is a defence if the person has the corrosive substance with them for work. Will the Minister set out what the courts should expect to regard as a good reason for carrying a corrosive substance in a public place? I think that all of us would rightly accept having it for work to be a perfectly defensible reason. I wonder whether there is a risk of getting into some difficult areas where people come up with a raft of potential excuses for carrying acid in a Lucozade bottle. Has there been any thought about what would count as a good reason or lawful authority for having this substance, to give some guidance to magistrates courts and others who might themselves quite quickly having to make these judgments when cases come before them?
Louise Haigh
May I request a couple of clarifications from the Minister? She mentioned testing kits earlier. Are they to be made available to every constable in every police force in the country? If not, to whom will they be made available to enable testing while on the beat, so to speak?
With regard to the definition in clause 5 about not burning human skin. We discussed bleach earlier; household bleach does not corrode skin, so would that not fall under the definition in clause 5, since it does not in schedule 1? Will the Minister give us some examples of products that would match the definition in clause 5 but not come under schedule 1, if that makes sense?
Victoria Atkins
I will definitely have to write to the hon. Lady on that last point. That is all about concentrations and how long the substance has to be on the skin to corrode.
In answer to the question that the right hon. Member for East Ham asked about how subsection (2) as a defence adds to subsection (3), which is the specific work defence, it is to cover situations where, for example, someone might have bought a high-strength drain unblocker and are taking it to use at home. In the example he gave of the substance being decanted into a Lucozade or drinks bottle, the act of decanting the substance into another bottle would be a strong aggravating feature, certainly if I were prosecuting and hoping to prove my case on not being able to rely on subsections (2) or (3).
On the clause as a whole, we hope that this new offence will be able to help the police in the important and difficult work they do in tackling these crimes. I heard what the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley said about testing kits. We will have to review the policy of supplying them on the basis of what we know. After all, as the right hon. Member for East Ham said, his borough sadly has the highest incident of acid or corrosive substance attacks, but in other parts of the country they simply do not happen. I do not want to tempt fate or to mention the word “resources,” but we want to ensure that the resources are best deployed where the need is clear, as it is in some parts of London.
I hope that the Committee supports the clause, which will mean that the police can deal with someone carrying around acid for no good reason—
Louise Haigh
I am grateful to the Minister—I appreciate that she was literally about to sit down. I am a bit concerned about how that will work in practice. As a former special constable—I know I mention that often—I struggle to see how I would have implemented this offence without the testing kit being available. If I do not have such a kit and I stop and search someone, perhaps finding a water bottle, what am I meant to do? Obviously I am not going to test it on my own skin, so I would have to take the person to the police station to do forensic tests there, which seems like an unconscionable use of police resources. It is difficult to envisage how the police will implement the legislation if they do not all have the testing kit available, although I completely appreciate the Minister’s point about directing the kits to where the problem is most prevalent.
Victoria Atkins
Of course, the police will be leading our knowledge on this with the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council, so I do not want to commit to every single constable having a kit in their possession, in case those who know day-to-day policing in and around their force areas say, “Actually, we don’t think we need it in this area.” I do not want to make a promise, only for it not to happen in good faith. If I may, I will leave the Government’s answer as being that we will of course consult the police on the deployment of the testing kits.
Louise Haigh
I think my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South was asking whether it would be possible for this information to be made available before the Bill returns to the Floor of the House on Report. In particular, although I appreciate that its roll-out will be a decision for chief constables and police and crime commissioners, will it be made clear whether they will be provided by the Home Office or whether police forces will have to pay for them out of their budgets?
Victoria Atkins
I am conscious that the project team is being appointed and a work programme is being developed. I will use my best endeavours to bring those answers before the next stage of the Bill, but if I am not able to, that will be because these matters are out of my hands and the laboratory or others may need more time to provide those answers. We want to get the Bill passed as quickly as possible and we want to be able to help officers to use clause 5, where they need it, as quickly as possible.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 5, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 6
Appropriate custodial sentence for conviction under section 5
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
As with the entirety of the Bill, we fully support the intention and most of the content of the clause, but we share the concerns of some of those who have given evidence to the Committee and to the Home Office about mandatory minimum sentencing for children. The clause has been lifted from an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, proposed by the former Member Nick de Bois, that introduced a two-strikes sentence, meaning that adults convicted more than once of being in possession of a blade will face a minimum six-month prison sentence and a maximum of four years, and that children aged 16 and 17 will face a minimum four-month detention and training order.
Since that legislation was introduced, there have been multiple media reports that have suggested that those sentencing arrangements are not being carried out for adults or children covered by that clause. Will the Minister provide details of how many offenders have been sentenced under those provisions and whether there has been monitoring of how many offenders do not receive a custodial sentence included in that clause, having been charged and convicted of knife possession on two separate occasions?
For example, the Telegraph reported in March 2016 that provisional data indicated that since the legislation was introduced, only 50% of offenders had been jailed, while another 23% had been given suspended sentences. Of those offenders, 907 were adults and 50% received a custodial sentence with an average sentence length of 6.6 months. It stated that
“The remaining 59 cases were offenders aged 16 or 17, with…46 per cent receiving an immediate custodial sentence.”
Has there been any review by either the Home Office or the Ministry of Justice of whether those reforms in the 2015 Act are being implemented by the courts—and, more importantly, of whether those reforms are effective? Are they improving public protection? Are they acting as a deterrent to children and adult offenders? Are they reducing recidivism? Has there been any review of the measures? If not, would it not have been desirable to conduct such a review before bringing forward the identical measures in this Bill?
Part of the written evidence we received came from the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, which made a compelling case as the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 passed through Parliament—it restates it here: that mandatory minimum sentences for children do not necessarily act as a deterrent, do not necessarily rehabilitate children who are caught with knives and do not ensure that the public are protected, as opposed to when the judiciary has full discretion.
The Children’s Commissioner said in evidence:
“I want to have a system that can respond to individuals, so my instinct is not to go down the mandatory minimum sentences route but to look at individual cases.”––[Official Report, Offensive Weapons Public Bill Committee, 19 July 2018; c. 90, Q223.]
I fully acknowledge that during that same evidence session we heard from the Victims’ Commissioner, who said:
“I have to say that victims tell me they want mandatory; only then will it be effective.”––[Official Report, Offensive Weapons Public Bill Committee, 19 July 2018; c. 91, Q223.]
Of course, it is understandable that victims and the public at large should want to see people who commit, or intend to commit, abhorrent criminal offences sent to prison for a reasonable amount of time, but the ultimate objective of custody must be to reduce offending and keep the public more secure. To achieve that, we believe that we have to look at each individual case, especially when it involves children, and the judiciary should have full discretion to respond appropriately.
The Standing Committee for Youth Justice’s evidence is compelling in that regard. On the claim that custody acts as a deterrent, it contests that awareness of second sentencing among children is perceived by frontline practitioners to be low. There are many children in and around the criminal justice system who we would not expect to make rational choices, in the economic, behavioural sense of the word.
As well as that, children carry knives and weapons for numerous and complex reasons, often because of the perception that it is necessary for self-protection. Punitive measures, particularly custodial measures, are unlikely to act as a deterrent, even if the child is aware of the punishment and able to act rationally. In other words, for those children who fear for their safety and their lives, carrying a knife or corrosive substances may be seen as the rational course of action, and the threat they are facing—perceived or real—will be more significant than the threat of a custodial sentence. Research on deterrents has consistently supported that, with studies finding little or no evidence that sentence severity or the threat of custody acts as a deterrent to crime for children.
The statistics on knife-crime offences also support that evidence. Since the introduction of mandatory minimum custodial sentencing in 2015, the number of children convicted of possession or threatening offences involving bladed articles or offences weapons has risen.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
I want to add to the sensible speech my hon. Friend is making. In the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime, our first meeting was with about 15 young offenders who had been in prison for knife offences. We had a conversation with them about whether prison was a deterrent or not. Some of them said, shockingly, that going to prison was a relief, because it was a break from the streets. They could keep out of trouble and be fed. They were in a secure institution. Their lived experience was so tough that being in prison was not the worst thing in the world, so I endorse everything she is saying about it not necessarily being a deterrent.
Louise Haigh
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. She has done amazing work chairing the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime, following the tragic experiences of her young constituents. She brings that evidence and wealth of experience to bear, to show that it is not a deterrent.
The other argument made is around public protection. It seems obvious that if an offender is removed from the streets and detained, the public are better protected. That is undeniably true for many offence types and for prolific offenders, but children in and around the criminal justice system are a relatively transient group. They are quickly replaced by others. They can sometimes—more often than not—go through phases of criminality that they grow out of, so custodial sentencing is unlikely to have a significant impact on public protection.
The reoffending rates for children leaving custody are stubbornly high. Last year, more than 68% of children who left custody reoffended within a year, yet for those who received youth community penalties the figure—still too high—was 58%, which is significantly lower. We know from all the evidence that diverting children away from the formal youth justice system is more effective at reducing offending than any punitive response. I completely accept what my hon. Friend said about custody being a relief, but the evidence also indicates that custody is itself criminogenic: it encourages crime.
I am not for a second saying that offenders under 18 should not serve custodial sentences under any circumstances. Only a couple of weeks ago, a constituent of mine was attacked in the street and stabbed five times—including once in the heart and once in the lungs—by a 15-year-old, and I have urged the Crown Prosecution Service to review the sentence that he received on the grounds of undue leniency. However, that just demonstrates that every case is different.
Clearly, in the vast majority of cases, the carrying of acid for a second time should result in a custodial sentence. However, if the youth justice service and the judge deem that other interventions would be more effective, they should have the full discretion to impose them. I do not believe that subsections (2) or (4) provide for that. Will the Minister furnish the Committee with examples of the use of the sister clause of subsection (2) in the 2015 Act? It would be very helpful for us to understand in what circumstances that
“relate to the offence, the previous offence or the offender”
judges have chosen not to implement the mandatory sentencing otherwise expected in the 2015 Act.
I was interested to hear the Minister mention that one reason why the Government decided not to go above the age of 18 for the sale of corrosive substances and knives is that 18 is the internationally recognised age of the child. She is absolutely right: the UN convention on the rights of the child states that clearly. On that basis, how can we justify delivering mandatory minimum sentences for children, when so much of the evidence suggests that it is not effective or appropriate? The UN convention on the rights of the child states that mandatory sentences remove judicial discretion and the ability of courts to ensure that the penalty best fits the circumstance of the offence. Indeed, our own Sentencing Council in the UK said that a custodial sentence should always be a measure of last resort for children and young people; it seems that the clauses directly contradict the Sentencing Council’s guidance.
The Law Society also backs up those concerns. It said:
“In our view, courts should be trusted to impose the most suitable and just sentence in the unique circumstances of the offence and the offender before them. Sentencing guidelines exist to provide consistency and indicate aggravating factors, such as previous convictions. We accordingly do not support the setting of a minimum sentence for corrosive substance offences for the same reason.”
I appreciate that, even if the Minister agrees with these concerns, there are difficulties, given that we are trying to mirror what is already in legislation. However, I hope the Minister will accept the concerns that have been raised. If she is wedded to going ahead with the clauses, perhaps she will provide us with the evidence base for requiring mandatory minimum sentences for children, particularly relating to reoffending, public protection and deterrence.
Victoria Atkins
The clause is being inserted in the context of corrosive substances because we want to mirror the provisions in legislation concerning knives and to send out the clear message that corrosive substances are just as much as an offensive weapon as knives.
On the first occasion when someone comes before the court, the sentencing judge will obviously have all powers and options open to her or him to sentence the person in possession of a corrosive substance or a knife; they will have that power to exercise their discretion. However, as is the case with knives, we want to send out a tough message. Someone who has already been through the court process and stood in front of a judge—who may have given them a community penalty rather than imprisonment if that was deemed appropriate—is then on notice that, if they walk around with a knife or corrosive substance again, a court will have the power to impose an immediate custodial sentence, unless subsections (2) and (4) apply. Subsections (2) and (4) are important, because they allow the court to divert from the mandatory minimum sentence, if it is
“of the opinion that there are particular circumstances”.
Louise Haigh
I fully appreciate that there is a wide spectrum of views out there. In regard to the campaign led by the former Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, I would say that hard cases make for bad law. I made several requests in my speech for the evidence underpinning the clause and the provision in the 2015 Act. Rather than ceding to those siren voices that we routinely hear in this place about increasing sentence lengths—I often add my voice to them too—I would be grateful if the Minister provided us with the evidence that the provision will improve public protection and reduce reoffending.
Victoria Atkins
I am so sorry; I have got a note here. I am going to ask the Ministry of Justice and write to the Committee with a response to the questions the hon. Lady asked about figures and statistics and so on. That material is held by the Ministry of Justice, which owns this territory. I hope that assists the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 6 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 7
Offence under section 5: relevant convictions
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
If I may, I want to ask for one quick clarification in relation to subsection (2), which states:
“References in subsection (1) to a conviction for an offence are to a conviction for an offence regardless of when it was committed.”
Will the Minister confirm that that is compliant with the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974? Is subsection (2) the case even if any such conviction is now spent?
Victoria Atkins
Those who spend a great deal of time and effort in drafting the provisions of the Bill will no doubt very much have that at the forefront of their mind. It might well be that it is such a nuanced position and topic at 8.18 at night that I might have to write to the hon. Lady.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 7 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 8
Search for corrosive substances: England and Wales
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
The Minister made a slight reference earlier—it came as a surprise to me—to the Home Office consulting on stop-and-search powers. I note the consultation that the Home Office released last month, which I believe relates to codes C and H of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. That does not cover stop-and-search, but I note the Home Secretary’s announcement today that he is mulling over increased powers for officers on stop-and-search in relation to corrosive substances. I was confused by that, because clause 8 clearly provides constables with the power, under an amended PACE, to stop and search offenders who they have reasonable grounds to believe have committed, are committing or are going to commit an offence under the Bill.
Can the Minister confirm whether the Home Office is considering additional stop-and-search powers? Is it not convinced that the reformed stop-and-search powers in the Bill are sufficient to tackle the issue of corrosive substances? Does it have further plans to lower the stop-and-search threshold to levels currently associated only with section 60 of PACE, which, as far as I can see, is the only distinction that the Home Secretary could have been making in what he said today? He said that officers would have to have only suspicion, which I assume is a lesser threshold than the current threshold of reasonable grounds. I would be grateful if the Minister clarified exactly what the Home Office is taking further steps on. If it is not convinced that the Bill is sufficient, why is it not tabling amendments at this stage?
Victoria Atkins
While existing powers allow a police officer to conduct stop-and-search for a corrosive substance where it is suspected that a person is in possession of a corrosive substance to cause injury, they do not extend to the proposed new offence of possession in a public place. The proposed extension of stop-and-search seeks to address that gap to enable the police to take preventive action. We have to consult on such an extension, so it is clause 8 that we will be consulting on, but the consultation has not opened yet.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 8 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clauses 9 and 10 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 11
Consequential amendments relating to section 5
Offensive Weapons Bill (Seventh sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Home Office
Louise Haigh
Main Page: Louise Haigh (Labour - Sheffield, Heeley)Department Debates - View all Louise Haigh's debates with the Home Office
Offensive Weapons Bill (Seventh sitting)
Louise Haigh ExcerptsThursday 6th September 2018
(5 years, 7 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 6 September 2018 - (6 Sep 2018)
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
Welcome back, Mr Gray. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.
Clause 12 deals with the age verification systems needed to enforce the measures, it. We will discuss again the standards that will be required by the Home Office if the legislation is to have effect. I hope the Minister can give details of what she considers will meet the requirements of subsection 4(a), which refers to sellers operating
“a system for checking that persons who bought articles to which section 141A applied by the same or a similar method of purchase to that used by the buyer were not under the age of 18.”
What would be a reasonable system? Requiring a person to check a box to say they are over 18? Referring to the electoral roll? Requiring use of a credit or debit card owned by someone over 18, though that would not prove that the individual buying was the owner of the card? What kind of standards will the Home Office require?
Concerns have been raised about the work of trading standards with regard to online test purchases, which is frequently found to be unsuccessful. Can the Minister provide us with statistics on the online test purchases conducted, on the basis for bringing forward the clause, and on prosecutions brought by trading standards over the last year against retailers that have failed to comply with existing legislation on the sale of bladed articles to under-18s?
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Gray.
The clause is the first of the Bill to deal with knives. I report to the Committee with a heavy heart that there were 702 knife crimes in my borough of Newham last year—the second-highest number in London and a 15% increase on the previous year. Of those, 214 involved injury. In London as a whole, there were 80 fatal stabbings in 2017, including of 20 teenagers. I need not elaborate to underline the horror of those figures, and particularly of the fact that so many young people lost their lives as a result of being stabbed.
That was in 2017. In the first three months of 2018, there were 30 fatal stabbings in London. The fatality rate for those three months was 50% higher than in 2017. Of the 30 people who died, six were teenagers. It was reported in April, I think, that in the first couple months of this calendar year, London had a higher murder rate than New York, which is extremely troubling and chilling for all of us.
I looked this morning at the website of my local paper, the Newham Recorder. There are three headlines there at the moment: “Guilty: Three teenagers convicted for stabbing 14-year-old boy in Manor Park”; “Police appeal to find Fatjon Koka following stabbing in Stratford”; and “Man to appear in court following Romford Road stabbing”. Those are three separate and entirely unrelated items in the current issue of my local newspaper. The changes to the law in the Bill to bear down on this scourge are extremely welcome. There is clearly a pressing need to get a grip on what is going on, to change things, and to stop this seemingly rapidly escalating problem affecting so many people, particularly the young.
To get on top of this problem, we will have to increase police resources. For a number of years, the Government cut police resources and police numbers, and crime did not rise, but an increase in crime was utterly inevitable given the scale of the reduction in police numbers. The crime surge was delayed, but it is now very much with us. It is hitting us extremely hard. I very much hope that the clause and the other measures in the Bill will help, but we will need significant additional police resources.
On Tuesday, the Committee discussed how the Bill would affect sellers of corrosive products outside the UK. The same issues arise in the case of sellers of knives who are outside the UK; as I understand it, the Bill deals with them in the same way as sellers of corrosive products. We had a debate on Tuesday about my new clause 9, and as I indicated in the context of corrosive products, I am not convinced that the way the Bill deals with this problem is altogether satisfactory. The concern is greater here, because as I informed the Committee on Tuesday, Mr Raheel Butt has pointed out to me that it seems to be the norm for online purchases of appalling knives to be made from suppliers outside the UK, on platforms such as eBay. The Minister pointed out on Tuesday that the purchase of knives disguised to look like something else is clearly illegal in the UK, but there is no shortage of online platforms offering those products in the UK. They are freely available to purchasers here, even though their purchase is illegal, and in the particular case I mentioned, the suppliers were all located outside the UK.
Will the clause not have effect if a seller is outside the UK, as was the case with corrosive products, which we discussed on Tuesday? Will we therefore need to depend on separate measures—set out, I think, in clause 18, in which a responsibility is placed on delivery companies—to address the problem of sales from outside the UK? If so, can the Minister can clarify the position in cases where sellers are located elsewhere in the EU? As I have pointed out previously, eBay offers some pretty ghastly weapons supplied by firms in Germany, which is a member of the European Union, as are we, at the moment. Will clause 12 have no effect on sellers located elsewhere in the EU, as I think the Minister indicated was the case in the parallel discussion we had on Tuesday? If so, I am a little bit puzzled as to why. If a seller in Germany sells a weapon that is illegal in the UK to somebody in the UK, or a knife to a 16-year-old in the UK, how is it not possible to prosecute that company somewhere else in the European Union for having committed an offence?
We had a debate on Tuesday about amendment 53, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley, which proposed that the age threshold for knife purchases be raised from 18 to 21, and the Minister quite properly explained some of the difficulties with that. However, I hope that we will not leave this issue here. There is a compelling case for saying that some of those very unpleasant weapons, the only purpose of which can be to do damage to others, should not be freely available, as they are at the moment, to 19 and 20-year-olds. I take the point that there is not an amendment that would have that effect on the amendment paper at the moment, but I hope that we will not let this matter pass. We have to change the way the age restrictions work and find ways to limit the supply of weapons that are inflicting appalling injuries—and indeed death—on far too many people in our country.
Louise Haigh
As the Minister has just made clear, in that instance the seller committed a criminal offence under the existing legislation. Clearly, there is an issue of enforcement, and, as she said, of some online retailers’ awareness of the existing legislation. Can she make clear what the clause requires of online retailers that is not already required? Are they not currently required to have a system for checking that buyers are over 18, and if they are not, how is the current law enforced?
Victoria Atkins
Months of work have gone into the “Serious Violence Strategy”, and the Bill will try to assist not only the police but online retailers. I do not for a moment suggest that they are deliberately trying to evade the law, and we want to help law-abiding retailers to fulfil their responsibilities under the law. We hope that setting out these conditions, which will no doubt be widely disseminated in the industry and among retailers, will help retailers satisfy themselves that they have met the expectations of the law on those sales. The clause should be read in conjunction with clause 15, which is another stage in the process of preventing knives that are bought online being delivered to residential premises.
Victoria Atkins
It was sold by means of Amazon. It was a Scottish case, so I will have to find that out for the right hon. Gentleman, but I make the point about Amazon. If he remembers, we had this discussion about the difficulty with Amazon or a business such as Amazon. That difficulty is discerning when Amazon is selling in its own right as Amazon and when it is acting as a marketplace, antiques fair or whatever analogy one wants to use. That is difficult, a very tricky area in which to put into law the ill-harm we are addressing. The provisions on overseas sales try to address that. I do not pretend that we are 100% there, but we are trying to weave our way through to ensure that companies that knowingly take on online delivery of overseas sales meet the threshold. We will return to that at the appropriate clause.
Clause 12 amends section 141A of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, which makes it an offence to sell bladed articles to people under 18. That defence—namely, that the seller took
“all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence to avoid the commission of the offence”—
is modified, or explained, in clause 12 for when the sale is conducted remotely. If sellers do not put in place minimum requirements to meet the conditions set out in the clause, they will not be able to avail themselves of the defence that they took “all reasonable precautions” or “exercised all due diligence” to avoid an offence being committed.
The first requirement is that the seller has a system in place to verify the age of the purchaser. Sellers are expected to have robust age-verification processes to reassure themselves that the person to whom they are selling is 18 or above. The legislation does not prescribe what constitutes a robust age-verification procedure, and that is deliberate, because we know all too well how quickly the online world is moving. The age-verification industry is evolving rapidly, as we saw with the Digital Economy Act 2017. We do not want to put something in statute that is a commercial decision for retailers or that might result in out-of-date measures in 12 months’ time or ones that could already be improved.
Frankly, it is for business owners to decide which solution is best for their business model. I draw an analogy with the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which does not set out what is expected of anyone running a business such as a construction company or an iron foundry, but does set out the expectation that those employers will take all reasonable practicable steps to protect their workforce and members of the public.
Louise Haigh
We had part of this debate on Tuesday, when it was made clear that we should not be putting technological processes or procedures into primary legislation. However, it is reasonable to set minimum standards in primary legislation. I am afraid that the comparison with the Digital Economy Act, in relation to age restrictions for online pornography, does not hold water because the issue with age verification there is that there is no connection to an online sale in that Act, but there is in the Bill. That is why the age verification for online gambling is a good standard and should have been replicated in the Bill, because it is connected to a sale. For example, a bank can verify whether an individual is over 18. That does not get us round the issue that I mentioned earlier—that although the age of the card holder can be verified, it is not possible to tell whether the individual using it is over 18—but software is available to enable selfies to show that the person using the card is the owner.
Louise Haigh
I am sorry, Mr Gray. My point is that the provision is too vague for online retailers. It is too vague to be effective. We would like the Government to bring forward at least draft guidance for the Committee to show what standards they will require of online retailers.
Victoria Atkins
As I say, we have set out the expectations. We have already discussed, in the context of corrosive substances, things like checking the electoral roll and providing proof of a council tax bill, for example, and so on. I think retail will find ways in which to satisfy themselves that the buyer is over 18. Government can do so much, but if retailers are selling these products, all they have to do—I do describe it in that way—is work out that the customers with whom they have a relationship are over the age of 18.
Louise Haigh
Will the Minister make it absolutely clear that it will not be sufficient to meet the requirements of the clause for retailers to ask the customer to tick a box confirming that they are over 18?
Victoria Atkins
Yes, that is absolutely what we are trying to improve upon. Some retailers think that that is sufficient. It is simply not sufficient. If they are going to make those sales, I am afraid that, in the interest of the wider community, they have to ensure that they are lawfully permitted to sell to the people to whom they are selling. A tick-box exercise is simply not good enough.
A second requirement is for the package to be marked clearly to the effect that it contains an article with a blade—or one that is sharp and pointed—and that it can be delivered only into the hands of a person aged 18 or over. Frankly, I should have hoped that sellers would already have similar arrangements, if they wanted to ensure that a knife sold remotely would not be handed over to a person under 18, under current legislation. However, unfortunately some sellers do not mark the package as age-restricted, so we are building the further safeguard into the Bill.
The third requirement is for the seller to take all reasonable precautions to ensure that when the package is delivered it is handed to a person aged 18 or over. Again, the seller has a responsibility to ensure that the company delivering the item understands that age must be verified before it is handed over. The fourth requirement is for the seller not to deliver the package, or arrange for it to be delivered, to a locker. Some delivery companies nowadays have those facilities. That is not permissible for the sale of bladed articles—bladed products—under the clause. Obviously it would fall foul of the age verification process.
We expect that, with the placing of those minimum requirements on a statutory footing, they will be standard practice to comply with existing legislation.
Victoria Atkins
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his amendment. We have tried to limit the impact of these measures wherever possible to the issue of real concern: preventing young people from having access to the most offensive types of knives online. We are not trying to make life difficult for the constituent of the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn. It is a balancing act.
Amendment 46 would have the effect of restricting the range of addresses to which a remote seller can send a bladed product. It might mean, for example, that bladed products bought online could not be sent to a school or a hospital, which may not be registered as business addresses. A person working from home—for example, someone working part-time or engaged in irregular work from home—might not have registered their home as a business address. A farm might or might not be registered as a business address. We are very conscious of the fact that clause 15 will already have an impact on the online trade of bladed products, which can cover anything from breadknives to specialist bladed knives used for woodworking or agricultural activities, as the right hon. Member for East Ham described. We are trying to limit the impact on that legitimate trade by allowing deliveries to businesses to continue. The business could be a farm, a hospital, a school or a business run from someone’s home.
We considered using a registered business address as the basis for the offence, but we decided against that because there is no simple way for sellers to ascertain whether a premise is a registered business address—particularly if the person working there is self-employed or part-time. Of course, not all types of businesses that we would want to be able to receive deliveries will necessarily operate from a registered business address. We therefore took the approach of preventing the dispatch of bladed products to a premise that is used solely as a residential premise. That will allow deliveries to continue to hospitals, hotels, care homes, schools, restaurants, farms and any residential premise from which a business operates, such as a plumber who operates from home.
The right hon. Gentleman gave the example of a flat above a shop. It depends on the construction of the premise, but if it is a divided premise—in other words, if the flat has nothing to do with the shop—I suspect it would be viewed as a residential premise and so would be covered by the clause.
Louise Haigh
Will the Minister confirm how the seller is meant to confirm that a residential premise that they are being asked to deliver a bladed product to is used only for residential purposes?
Victoria Atkins
There are a range of ways in which the seller may satisfy themselves of that purpose. They could ask the buyer to produce evidence that the address to which they are delivering is a business. It might take the form of a document confirming that it is a registered business address. It might be that the buyer supplies business papers showing the address, a document setting out that the property is subject to business rates or a simple confirmation email from the buyer to confirm that they work from that address.
There are many ways in which to tackle this issue, and the step-by-step process that the Bill proposes will make it less and less likely that a young person who is sadly on a path of criminality will think it is worth the hassle, frankly. Sellers emailing buyers to confirm their business address and to ask what sort of business they operate and so on will put a responsibility on the buyer as well, and rightly so. I hope that that explanation of our approach satisfies the right hon. Gentleman, and I invite him to withdraw his amendments.
Stephen Timms
I am grateful to the Minister for that response, which she set out clearly. I am interested to hear that officials considered the approach based on a registered business address. In my mind, given the importance of restricting access to dangerous weapons, it might not be a bad thing to say to people that, if they want to buy what can be used as a dangerous weapon, they will have to register their address as a business address. However, I take the point that that is perhaps not the appropriate step to take for now. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
I fully understand and appreciate why my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham tabled his amendments, and that was an interesting discussion. However, I believe that the clause is fraught with potential consequences that could result from its application.
I think I am right in saying that the clause’s sole purpose is to ensure that the clause around sale to under-18s is absolutely safeguarded; as the Minister just described, the Bill, as it goes through, step by step, enforces previous clauses. However, it does not seem that other options presented to the Government, the Home Office and the Committee that would equally enforce those clauses have been properly considered by the Home Office, and I am confused about why they have not been added to the Bill.
One potential solution lies within the Bill itself. As we have discussed, clause 18 sets out the provisions by which an international seller can use a delivery company to deliver a bladed article, and the obligations on that delivery company to ensure that it is delivered into the hands of an adult. Could we not mirror that clause for UK sales, so that delivery companies for all UK sellers required age verification to prove that a buyer was over 18? Alternatively, the Minister could consider section 151 of the Licensing Act 2003, which covers the delivery of alcohol to children and when a seller is liable to a fine if a delivery is made to a person under the age of 18.
As the Committee has established, the clause’s potential consequences are extremely far-reaching; we have heard one example already, but others abound. I am sure that many Committee members will have received representations from businesses in their constituencies. As someone from Sheffield, I have obviously heard from plenty of knife manufacturers from the great steel city. I will come on to their concerns shortly.
I am concerned that an outright prohibition on sales to residential addresses, and all the unintended consequences that would follow, would not be necessary if the Government were clear on measures for online age verification. Surely, if we are prescriptive enough on age verification standards, these clauses would be unnecessary. However, the Bill makes no provision for such standards. We still do not know what the guidance, which the Government intend to issue, will say, when it will be issued or whether it will be statutory. It would be helpful if the Minister provided the Committee with the draft guidance that the Government intend to issue to online retailers on age verification. The Digital Economy Bill Committee, which passed verification measures, received draft guidance to help us scrutinise that Bill.
Stephen Timms
My hon. Friend has drawn the Committee’s attention to an interesting alternative approach suggested by industry. If I have understood correctly what she has said, the real problem is stopping knives from getting to under-18s. I am more sympathetic to what I understand the Government’s aim to be—stopping dangerous weapons getting to anybody, however old they are, and being delivered to them at home, but my hon. Friend raised some interesting and telling points.
When I read clauses 15 to 17, I did wonder whether the Government intend to stop the delivery of cutlery to people’s homes. The Minister is indicating that that is not the Government’s intention, but it is not clear to me where that is carved out in the wording of the Bill. As my hon. Friend pointed out, clause 17 tells us what a bladed product is, and I cannot see there where cutlery is carved out. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that.
Louise Haigh
My understanding is that a bladed product must be able to provide serious injury. I do not believe that that would include cutlery, although steak knives would be covered.
Stephen Timms
I am sure my hon. Friend is right. The real question I wanted to raise here is different: the position of sellers from overseas. As we have now discussed on a number of occasions, there is a real difficulty in stopping overseas sellers who are contacted online from doing things that the Bill does not want them to do.
In the case of clause 12, which is about the sale of bladed articles to under-18s, clause 18, which puts an onus on the delivery company where the seller is outside the UK, had to be alongside it. In clause 15, as far as I can see, there is not another parallel clause placing responsibility on the delivery company.
I hope I am wrong—if I am, I am sure the Minister will point it out—but it looks to me as though sellers outside the UK will be entirely exempted from the requirement set out in clause 15, because there is no way for them to be penalised for sending a dangerous weapon to residential premises somewhere. If that is the case, the clause will simply force everybody who wants these things delivered to their homes to buy them from overseas suppliers instead of UK suppliers, such as those based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley. That would be a pretty damaging outcome.
If clause 15 is going to be made to work, something must be done to address the problem of overseas sellers simply carrying on sending dangerous weapons to people’s homes, which the Bill as it stands makes no effort to address. The clause will be pointless because people will get round it in a very straightforward way.
Victoria Atkins
Clause 15 provides that where a sale is carried out remotely, it is an offence for a seller to deliver or arrange for the delivery of a bladed product to residential premises or to a locker. Checks should not be done only at the point when the seller processes the sale, but at the moment when the product is being given to or issued by the despatcher. The reason for that is the methodical journey of the sale process. If young people want to get their hands on dangerous knives, we must make it as difficult as possible, with the help of retailers, and ensure that that does not happen.
Various points have been raised. I have noticed in the correspondence over the past few months that there seems to be a misunderstanding, so this is a great opportunity to clarify exactly what is meant by clauses 15 and 17. We are not seeking to stop the online sale of knives or bladed products. We are trying to craft the law so that those who are entitled under the law to buy knives that have sharp blades can do so if they are over 18. We have used the phrase “bladed product” precisely because we want to differentiate it from the phrase “bladed articles” used in the 1988 Act, which is not as restrictive.
In answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s question, we have excluded cutlery, because we appreciate that people will want to be able to buy cutlery. With the best will in the world, a table knife will not meet the criteria set out in clause 17(1)(b). If we had not defined it, it would be an offence to sell a disposable plastic knife to someone under-18, which would miss the point of the legislation. The wording seeks to pinpoint the risks that we are trying to address.
Victoria Atkins
I will just finish this point. The hon. Lady has raised concerns from a variety of stakeholders and if their products fall within the definition of clause 17, they must satisfy themselves that they fall within it. We are not saying they cannot sell the products online. We are simply saying they have to meet the conditions of clause 12 and that, when it comes to delivery, the product should be delivered to the local post office, delivery depot or village shop that acts as the delivery depot for a company. Picking up packages from the post office and delivery depots is a fact of life in the modern age, when we all order stuff on the internet. The clause is not about stopping food processors being sent to people; we will just have to go to the post office to pick them up. I represent a rural constituency, so I am rather pleased that we will drive more business to rural post offices so that they continue to thrive in our villages and market towns. The clause is not about stopping bladed products being sold and delivered to people in a lawful manner.
Louise Haigh
Is the Minister confirming that the definition of a bladed product will cover food processors, coffee grinders, scissors and razors, and that those products will no longer be able to be delivered to residential addresses?
Victoria Atkins
Folding knives with a blade of less than 3 inches are excluded from the definitions of both “bladed article” and “bladed product”, and a scalpel would be covered by both. All I am saying is that the purchaser will have to go to the post office with identification to pick up such a product—that is it.
Louise Haigh
But what about the examples I just gave: food processors, coffee grinders, razors and scissors?
Victoria Atkins
I am afraid I do not have expert knowledge of the lengths of the blades in a Magimix food processor. The definition is clear. Products with blades of less than 3 inches are excluded from the definitions of both “bladed article” and “bladed product”.
Louise Haigh
I am sorry, but the definition is not clear in the slightest. Will it cover scissors? Will it cover razors? The people who gave us evidence were not clear, and I do not know about other Members but I am not clear either. I do not think it is unreasonable to ask the Minister to answer to those questions.
Victoria Atkins
Precisely. We have tried to acknowledge the different ways in which we rely on blades in day-to-day life. We know children do not go out with encased razors to threaten people on the street. They use knives, clearly. That is what the definition seeks to clarify. If Opposition Members had a yearning to buy a pair of scissors with blades longer than 3 inches, they could do so—they would just have to go to the post office to pick it up. That is the point.
If we did not have such a system, the seller could do everything they were supposed to do to check age at the point of sale, but the item may be put through the letterbox anyway and get into the hands of someone under 18. We know that has happened; we just want to stop it happening again. Again, I do not pretend that this is a magic solution that will solve all knife crime, but we are trying to build a journey for bladed articles and products that makes it substantially more difficult for young people, if they are so minded, to get around the measures that retailers take when selling them.
The condition that such articles cannot be delivered to a locker is also important. The clause is about deterring young people from trying to buy such articles online and getting around the law.
Louise Haigh
The Minister helpfully mentioned that the Government’s assumption is that such an article will be delivered to someone’s local post office or sorting office, or to a depot. Why, therefore, is there no mention in the Bill of the requirements on the individuals handing over the bladed product? Will there not be a corresponding offence for them of not verifying someone’s age? If there is not, how can we enforce checking at that point of the delivery?
Victoria Atkins
It is actually because the Government are trying to help post office workers by not making them criminally liable for handing over a package when all they are doing is their job and when they have had no involvement in the act of purchasing. Indeed, we have been in a great deal of discussion with delivery companies, including Royal Mail, about how together we can ensure that the Bill’s intentions are met in a way that balances the risks regarding young people with not placing post office workers, delivery drivers and so on under such a level of criminal liability. If the retailer has not done its job, I would feel uncomfortable about putting that duty on post office workers.
Louise Haigh
Can the Minister confirm that the legislation will not ban the delivery of screwdrivers to residential premises?
Victoria Atkins
Again, if it meets the criteria of the Bill, it will. If it does not meet the criteria, it will not. I will not go into a long speculative list of items because someone will always come up with another item that has a blade. The idea of a gang member walking down the street with a Magimix is a new one in my portfolio. I will not list items, because the wording is there in the Bill.
Victoria Atkins
It is the job of business to have that conversation with their sellers. We know already that online retailers such as John Lewis, which has signed up to our voluntary code for businesses in trying to prevent the sale of knives and corrosive substances, have stopped selling knives online because that is a business decision they have taken. For other sellers, when somebody puts an order in, they will have that conversation and say, “I’m sorry; you will have to go to the post office to pick this up.”
Louise Haigh
I am afraid it is not the job of business; it is the job of the Committee and the Government. When introducing a new definition into legislation, we must be clear what that definition covers. We have to provide guidance to those that will come under the legislation and that definition. I asked about screwdrivers because, as the Minister knows, they are routinely used in violent offences. The legislation might stop children accessing knives online, but it will not stop them buying screwdrivers online and using them in violent offences. My point is that the ban will have far-reaching consequences for individuals and businesses, but it will probably not have a significant impact on the number of violent offences committed by children.
Victoria Atkins
I have to say that I do not share the hon. Lady’s pessimism. If I may say so, her assertion is not made on the basis of evidence. To accept that, one would be extrapolating from the idea that children, having listened to this Public Bill Committee debate, will then suddenly start purchasing screwdrivers to commit violent acts. I fully accept that young people use screwdrivers as well, but the purpose of the Bill is to try to address the concerns that the police, charities and others have about the types of wounds they see emerging in A&E departments, and we need to fill the loophole we have discovered when it comes to the online sale of bladed products.
I could go through every item and say tick or cross, but I do not believe that is the duty of this Committee. The definition is set out in the Bill. It is for those affected by the definition to ensure that they meet the standards expected by law, which are already in existence; the concept of not being able to sell knives to under-18s has been in existence now for nearly 30 years. This is about addressing the problem of children getting hold of knives online, which we want to try to stop as much as possible. The Bill is directed at achieving that.
Louise Haigh
The Minister has not answered the questions about the licensing system that many knife retailers have put forward. She mentioned a loophole, but it seems to me that the licensing system would address many of the loopholes, including the platform issues that we have discussed at length.
Victoria Atkins
We have based the Bill on existing offences, rather than setting up a completely new approach. There has been a lot of talk about small businesses. The system that the hon. Lady described strikes me, as someone who used to be self-employed, as a whole raft of new bureaucracy, in a way that these measures will not be. We did not consider that option, because we felt that this system is preferable to trying to construct a whole new system that would place a burden on the woodcutter in Hampstead or the occasional crafter in rural areas. We believe that these conditions are sensible and reasonable, and I think that they will become part of day-to-day business life very quickly.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 15 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 16
Defences to offence under section 15
Offensive Weapons Bill (Eighth sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Home Office
Louise Haigh
Main Page: Louise Haigh (Labour - Sheffield, Heeley)Department Debates - View all Louise Haigh's debates with the Home Office
Offensive Weapons Bill (Eighth sitting)
Louise Haigh ExcerptsThursday 6th September 2018
(5 years, 7 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 6 September 2018 - (6 Sep 2018)
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
I thank the Minister for her explanation of the defences set out in the clause. I do not think that anybody has a problem with the defence set out in subsection (1), which seems absolutely reasonable. Subsection (4) seems fine, so far as it goes, although there is some suggestion that it might be useful to add some other purposes to that list.
However, subsections (2) and (3) are what my amendment is really about. I suspect and hope that they will work absolutely fine in practice, but they seem to have been drafted in a rather woolly manner. Subsection (2) is about bespoke manufacture. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but I think she said that adding “for a particular lawful purpose” into subsection (2), as my amendment would, would probably prove pointless in reality, on the basis that a buyer would simply make up a purpose to circumvent the rules. I may have picked that up wrong.
However, the amendment’s wording simply reflects virtually the same test that is already in subsection (3), which is about bespoke adaptations. Why is it pointless for bespoke manufacturers to have to check the purpose of the instructions that they are given, but sensible, and included in the Bill, for those doing adaptations to have to ask the buyer’s purpose and perform some sort of check? I do not know why there is that inconsistency. What is required of those doing bespoke adaptations in checking the purpose? Do they simply have to see whether the adaptation seems to fit the purpose that they have been told it is for?
As it stands, and as I pointed out earlier, the Bill does not even require that purpose to be lawful—it only has to be a “particular purpose”. I suspect that it is implied that it should be lawful, but that is not absolutely clear to me. For example, if I ask for an adaptation for the purpose of making a blade even more lethal, that would be a “particular purpose”, but it certainly would not be a lawful one. I would like some reassurance that that defence would not be allowed to be made. It may be that I am worrying over nothing, but it seems that there is still a little bit of difficulty in working out where we stand with subsections (2) and (3). For now, I think it is probably best that I leave it to the Minister and her officials to discuss. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
I want to consider a couple of other areas that we have not covered on which the Committee received evidence. One such example is a request for a defence under the clause for Scout groups and other such charities. We have received evidence that a large number of people who buy knives from this particular business are Scout groups and Scout leaders and, because of the way they operate, the majority of their orders are placed by Scout leaders and delivered to their homes. They are concerned that this ban would stop that and force them to go and pick up from other access points. The evidence we received requested that a specific defence could be made allowing charities to have knives delivered to their registered addresses. All Scout groups are registered charities.
The other area of concern that has been raised is antiques. I appreciate that in another part of the Bill we will be discussing antiques and the need for more controls on antique firearms, but just for the purposes of clarification and to respond to the many people who are concerned about this bit of the Bill, could the Minister tell us why she has rejected the proposals to include purchases for charities and of antiques as a defence under this clause?
Victoria Atkins
In clause 16, we have responded to the consultations made in the course of the Bill’s being drafted. I am conscious that I read out some of my speech on this previously. With the Committee’s consent, I will not repeat that, because the evidence is on the record.
We will come on to museums a little later in the knife provisions. I am seeking to pass an amendment to include museums under the clauses outlawing possession of weapons that are so offensive that Parliament has previously judged that they should not be sold, imported, or anything of that nature. We are just trying to close that gap. We will seek an exemption for museums, which may have flick knives or zombie knives in their collections.
If I may, I will write to the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley about charities, because I would like to explore whether the definition of a business would also include a charity.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 16 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 17
Meaning of “bladed product” in sections 15 and 16
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
I just want to reiterate the concern about the clarity of the definition. Will the Minister confirm that, essentially, any blade over 3 inches will be covered by this definition?
Victoria Atkins
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady. Would it help if I repeated my point of order?
Victoria Atkins
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding us that we have been in this world of expecting deliveries through the post because of online sales for only the last decade or so. He is right that to buy a pair of kitchen scissors, a steak knife or whatever in the past a person had to go to a local shop.
Louise Haigh
That is absolutely right. But, apart from the issues for disabled people and people living in isolated areas, the burden is not really on the individual, although it will be a pain to have to go to the local post office when previously something could be delivered to people’s houses. The burden will be on business, in having to separate out products that can, at present, be delivered to someone’s home without any additional checks other than perhaps, for certain products, that the recipient is over 18. Now businesses will have to separate out those products and choose somewhere else to deliver them to. That is why we need clarity about which products can be delivered where, otherwise I fear the legislation will have a devastating impact, particularly on smaller online retailers.
Victoria Atkins
As I said, we have tried with the use of the new phrase “bladed product”, different from the language used in the Criminal Justice Act, to simplify the definition as far as possible so that, under clause 17, the test is whether the product
“is or has a blade, and…is capable of causing a serious injury to a person which involves cutting that person’s skin.”
That is why, for example, encased razor blades are not included, or table knives, cutlery knives and disposable plastic knives, but the definition does include knives such as bread knives, steak knives, kitchen scissors and so on. The Bill has had to balance the needs and concerns of everyone.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 17 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 18
Delivery of bladed articles to persons under 18
Amendment made: 23, in clause 18, page 17, line 21, leave out “is guilty of” and insert “commits”.—(Victoria Atkins.)
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 17.
Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
At the risk of replicating the discussion, I will repeat some of the points I made earlier, because I do not think the Minister responded to the alternative proposal of expanding the clause to cover sales made internally in the UK, rather than just sales outside the United Kingdom.
We believe it could be possible to mirror this clause to cover internal UK sales, so someone would be entitled to purchase a bladed article online from a retailer outside of the UK and all they would have to do is prove that they were over 18 when it was delivered. Much of that would circumvent the issues that we discussed regarding clause 15.
Although the term “article” has, as we discussed, a different definition, it is clear that many bladed articles will be captured by the definition of “bladed products” in clause 18. Therefore a delivery to a residential address for an adult would be possible under clause 18, but not under clause 15. Will the Minister explain why there is not a similar provision to that in clause 18 for internal UK deliveries?
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
As my hon. Friend has pointed out, clause 18 deals with sales of knives by sellers outside the UK. The Minister has already rightly pointed out to us on a number of occasions that the British Government, or our laws, can impose very little control outside the UK.
The difficulty was illustrated by this morning’s discussion, in which it emerged that if in future I buy kitchen scissors from a British supplier I will have to go to the post office to pick them up. If, on the other hand, I buy them online from an overseas seller they can be posted direct to my home. That is quite problematic, and I imagine there will be more discussion of that as the Bill progresses through this House and the other place. It highlights the real difficulty of dealing with sellers located outside the UK. I have no idea what proportion of the dangerous weapons purchased in the UK are bought from sellers outside the UK, but my sense from looking at places such as eBay is that quite a large proportion of them are.
Victoria Atkins
Clause 18 introduces a criminal offence if a delivery company delivers, on behalf of a seller based abroad, a bladed article into the hands of a person aged under 18. A bladed article is an article to which section 141A of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 applies. Eagle-eyed Committee members will have noticed that we have moved from talking about a bladed product to a bladed article. The law under section 141A of the CJA applies to knives and certain articles with a blade or point—for example, axes, razor blades other than those that are encased, and all knives other than folding knives with a blade of less than three inches. Actually, with bladed products the length of the blade is also irrelevant, unless it is a folding pocket knife.
I am very conscious of the points that the right hon. Member for East Ham made about clause 18(1)(d), and I will reflect on them. I am also very conscious of the points made by the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, and will reflect on those, too.
I am grateful to the shadow Minister for her observations. It is part of the balancing exercise regarding delivery. If a delivery company makes the commercial decision to enter into a contract or arrangement with someone overseas selling products, we have sought to place the responsibility on the delivery company for ensuring that all is well with the person to whom they are providing a service. Extra-territorial jurisdiction is sadly not just an issue in the case of offensive weapons, but in many areas, such as ordering drugs over the internet, particularly using the dark web. We have sought to control it through that mechanism.
For sales where the seller and buyer are in the United Kingdom, we asked delivery companies as part of our consultation exercise what they would make of placing criminal liability on their post office workers or delivery drivers. We concluded that were we to expand the provision to all online sales of knives, delivery companies might start to say to themselves, “It’s just not worth it commercially for us to deliver these knives or bladed products at all. We won’t do it.” That would leave our small businesses in great trouble, because they would be unable to get their products to their customers.
I know that small businesses are having to go through a number of checks to get their products into the hands of their lawful purchasers, but we hope that the provisions in relation to the online world overseas will mean that delivery companies are very careful when they enter into such arrangements.
Louise Haigh
Will the Minister give an example of how a delivery company could ensure that, in her words, all is well with a seller overseas? Can she give an example of what that would have to look like to meet the standard in the Bill?
Victoria Atkins
These delivery companies are very big businesses by and large. They have extraordinary human resources departments. They will be drafting contracts with the people with whom they have delivery contracts. If someone orders anything from a major department store or online shop, it is unlikely, frankly, that they have their own in-house delivery service. They probably subcontract that to various companies—I will not advertise them in today’s proceedings, but we know who they are.
Frankly, I expect those delivery companies to understand what they are potentially delivering when entering into such arrangements. We are all aware of how illicit items can be posted from overseas to avoid customs and so on, so I expect those business to satisfy themselves that they are meeting the law. Every company conducts its contractual negotiations differently, but if a delivery company enters into an arrangement with a business that sells knives, it should be on red alert to ensure that it is a reputable business with which to do its trade.
Louise Haigh
In the example that we have discussed at length—someone buying an offensive weapon or corrosive product off an individual through a platform—how does the Minister anticipate that the delivery company will satisfy itself about what the individual seller is selling? It is one thing saying that it should establish that it is delivering for a reputable business, but if it is an individual overseas, how will the company ensure that it is adhering to the standards in the Bill?
Victoria Atkins
To clarify, does the hon. Lady mean that the delivery company has a contract with Amazon, for example, which is being used as an antiques fair?
Victoria Atkins
In those circumstances, I hope the delivery company will have a good understanding from Amazon, which will have a good understanding from the seller about the products. I am not pretending that this is easy, but that is the conundrum we all face nowadays with the global internet marketplace.
Louise Haigh
The issue here is the individual seller that uses a delivery company. Amazon and other platforms do not have their own deliverers—well, they do if they are directly selling—but individuals contract a delivery company, so Amazon is taken out of it at that point. I struggle to see how a delivery company can satisfy itself to the standards rightly included in the Bill that the individual is selling what they say they are selling.
Victoria Atkins
We have had to restrict this to contracts with direct arrangements between a delivery company and the seller. As I say, we are trying to close the net on these sorts of products. That is why I will be very interested to reflect on the point made by the right hon. Member for East Ham about what happens if, having entered into the arrangement in good faith and not understanding that bladed articles are in the marketplace, the delivery company then discovers that. If I may, I will reflect on whether they are then opened up under the clause.
Louise Haigh
I am sorry to press the Minister on this. We could easily have a situation in which an individual advertises a knife on Amazon and sells it online, and then takes it to the equivalent of the post office in their country and tells it that the item is something completely different. Is it sufficient, in that situation, for the delivery company—whoever it is—to have been told that it is completely harmless? Will the delivery company have met the standards in the Bill?
Victoria Atkins
That scenario is not envisaged by the Bill. Subsection (1)(c) states:
“before the sale, the seller entered into an arrangement with a person who is a body corporate”—
in other words, a company—
“by which the person agreed to deliver bladed articles for the seller”.
We foresee a relationship whereby someone sets themselves out as a knife seller. That is what they do—intricately carved knives, or whatever. They know that in the UK they have to get them delivered, and an arrangement is set up between the delivery company and the person selling the knife.
Louise Haigh
So is it the case that individuals who are not set up as body corporates will not be covered by this legislation?
Victoria Atkins
The wording in the Bill is “body corporate”, as in the delivery companies. I suspect by now the Committee has an idea of the difficult balancing exercise we have had to engage in to try to tease out these corners of the online international marketplace. This the arrangement that we have put into the Bill. In those circumstances, it will be up to the court to determine, on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the individual circumstances of the case, whether reasonable precautions were taken and all due diligence was done. Particular subsections in relation to Scotland are in the Bill.
Victoria Atkins
I thank the hon. Lady for that observation.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 18, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 19
Amendments to the definition of “flick knife”
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
I have a few concerns to express on behalf of several organisations and individuals who have given evidence to the Committee. We of course wholeheartedly support the principle behind the clause, which is to update definitions in order to reflect change in weapon designs.
The existing definitions include,
“any knife which has a blade which opens automatically by hand pressure applied to a button, spring or other device in or attached to the handle of the knife, sometimes known as a ‘flick knife’ or ‘flick gun’”,
and any with a blade released by “force of gravity”. Respondents felt that neither of those particular knives was of the type used in criminal activity now. We are not convinced by that argument, because the definition the Government were considering had not been published during the consultation. Now that the new definition has been published, I think it adequately captures the offence and has the benefit of being broadly defined. Many organisations, charities and those in the legal and criminal justice sector agree with the proposal, but there are some legitimate concerns.
In other cases, the definition for any knife, bladed article or bladed product has tended to expand as it has made its way through the courts and into case law. For example, butter knives are now bladed articles, thanks to a judgment in 2004, I believe. The majority of reservations expressed by retailers and individuals were around the possibility that the revised definition might capture knives that can be opened with one hand but are used in everyday life by those pursuing a hobby, such as rock climbers, or by those who require such a knife for their work.
One concern related to the definition in subsection (1)(a), which refers to a
“button, spring or other device in or attached to the knife”,
rather than
“in or attached to the handle of the knife”.
I have been provided with examples of safety knives used by kayakers that can be deployed with one hand by using lateral pressure against the stud of the blade, rather than the handle. That type of knife, which now involves only a possession offence without the reasonable excuse defence, would be prohibited. Will the Minister reassure the Committee that she has considered the representations of such sports enthusiasts regarding the definition and that she is satisfied that it will not criminalise perfectly legitimate products?
Victoria Atkins
The good news is that butter knives are not bladed products under clause 7.
Clause 19 amends section 1 of the Restriction of Offensive Weapons Act 1959 to provide that the definition of a flick knife will include knives that mimic the way in which a flick knife is opened, where the open mechanism design does not bring the knife under the definition set out in 1959 Act. In existing legislation, a flick knife is
“any knife which has a blade which opens automatically by hand pressure applied to a button, spring or other device in or attached to the handle of the knife”.
That is an old definition and new designs are now available that mimic the speed with which a flick knife can be opened but that do not strictly fall under the 1959 legislation. There are suspicions that they have been designed deliberately to skirt around that definition. I have seen some models that allow the blade to open at great speed from a closed to a fully opened position, but the mechanisms are not in the handle. However, we know that they can be very dangerous and that they are the sort of weapons that people who have ill will in mind find very attractive as an option for arming themselves.
We have therefore set out to include in the new definition of a flick knife any knife that opens automatically from a closed or partially opened position to a fully opened position by means of
“manual pressure applied to a button, spring or other device”
contained in a knife or attached to it. Knives opened manually, including those opened with a thumb stud, will not fall under the new definition. Similarly, knives with a mechanism that opens the blade slightly but not completely and need to be opened fully by hand will not fall under the definition. We are very conscious of representations made by tree surgeons and others, and we have tried to encompass their concerns. The definition will ensure that knives for a situation in which it is necessary to open a knife with one hand are available in the market. For tree surgeons, for example, the fact of their occupation would lend them comfort under the Bill.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 19 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 20
Prohibition on the possession of certain dangerous knives
The Chair
Order. We may have flogged this one to death.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 20, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 21
Prohibition on the possession of offensive weapons on further education premises
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
The Minister knows from Second Reading and from amendments that we have tabled that we would like this clause to go further. We await her response before considering what further amendments might be needed to capture fully all educational premises, and to include corrosive substances, so as to bring them in line with knives.
When the proposals were announced at the beginning of the consultation, we were under the impression that all educational premises, up to and including higher education premises, would be captured. The news release accompanying the consultation to the Bill—issued in July last year by the Home Office—specifically mentioned higher education institutions, but not further education. I am not persuaded by the argument that higher education facilities have been omitted because otherwise halls of residence would be captured, which are private and therefore legitimate places to possess bladed articles and products and corrosive substances. It would be relatively simple to put in caveats to ensure that possession of offensive weapons would not be considered in a domestic residence of a university campus. Subsection (7) covers this for an employee of a further education premises or a 16-to-19 academy; it explicitly excludes
“any land occupied solely as a dwelling by a person employed at the institution.”
It is difficult to see why that cannot be extended to exclude any land occupied solely as a dwelling by a student of a higher education institution. In any case, that will be covered by the good reason defence under the Criminal Justice Act 2003.
The 2003 Act and the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 have created specific offences relating to knives in schools and other educational institutions in order to make them a safe space for learning. Students should know that their school is safe and that they are free from harm, which is critical to any learning environment. Sadly, for many school students in this country that is not the case. That is the principle behind the extension to further education premises, which we support, and why we think it would also be welcome and significant to extend the clause to university campuses, particularly as college and university campuses are so often open and city centre-based. University campuses should be free from knives, other than those carried for legitimate purposes.
In the Bill—I appreciate the Minister will come back to this—the definition of “public place”
“includes any place to which, at the time in question, the public have or are permitted access, whether on payment or otherwise”.
Would that cover an individual arrested for possession on a walled-off university campus that they accessed via a key code? Probably not under the definition of the Bill, so they would be able to carry knives into that area without any reasonable excuse. Would it cover lecture theatres, which, on many of the city campuses of our universities, are places the public have access to, though perhaps they are not permitted there? Would it include walkways, departmental buildings or cafés on campus?
Under existing legislation, I think the best way to define “public place” is to look at the ruling in the landmark case at the Court of Appeal of R v. Kane of 1965, which gave guidance on whether a place is public. It said:
“The real question is whether”
the place
“is open to the public, whether on payment or not, or whether, on the other hand, access to it is so restricted to a particular class, or even to particular classes of the public, such, for example, as the members of an ordinary householder’s family and his relations and friends, and the plumber or other tradesmen who come to do various repairs about the house. If it is restricted to that sort of class of person then, of course, it is not a public place, it is a private place”.
Before land can be said to be public, the onus is on the prosecution to prove that the public had access to it. The following have been held by the courts to be public places: a field where point-to-point races are held; a football stadium; hospital grounds where visitors to the hospital and their friends were permitted to enter; a public house car park; a multi-storey car park; and the upper landing of a block of flats in respect of which there were no notices, doors or barriers to restrain the public. It is clear that many of the spaces on a university campus would not be covered by that definition. That is why we are pleased that the Government are willing to consider expanding the definition of “public place”, and why we want the clause expanded to cover university campuses. Clearly there would need to be carve-outs regarding scientific laboratories or use for educational purposes, just as there are for schools and will be for further education institutions.
Victoria Atkins
Clause 21 amends section 139A of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 to extend the offence to include further education premises. The change reflects the significant expansion in the number of students and the changes in such institutions since the law was amended by the Offensive Weapons Act 1996. The number of incidents of knife possession in education institutions other than schools is unknown because possession per se is not an offence at the moment, but the number of incidents reported in the media is low—although I know that, sadly, there is experience in some Committee members’ constituencies of such incidents. We want to give the police the powers they need to deal with an incident before it happens.
Colleagues have understandably asked why universities are not included in clauses 21 and 27. While standing by the promise I made on Tuesday to reflect further, I will explain the thinking behind that. It is that universities are generally attended by adults rather than children—in other words, people aged over 18. As such, a university can be regarded as more akin to an office or other place of work than a place where children, as strictly defined by the law, are taught. Not all parts of universities can be considered a public place—for example, halls of residence—and a person possessing a bladed article, or offensive weapon or corrosive substance, on part of a university campus that is open to public access would be caught by the existing and proposed offences.
I am conscious of the debate about keypads and stairwells and so on, and it reminds me that one of the most contentious cases in the last few decades in the Royal Courts of Justice was over the definition of a Jaffa cake. I am afraid that this is a similar sort of debate. We all know what it is and we know what we want to achieve; the issue is how we get the wording into statute in a way that can be applied properly by the courts.
I am delighted that the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn and the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras have been visiting schools in London to talk about knife crime. Hon. Members may remember that, not long after I was appointed, I invited former gang members into the House of Commons so that we as Members of Parliament could listen to them and they could contribute their ideas about what Government and Parliament can do to help to safeguard them better. Their thoughts—delivered directly, but also delivered through the great charities we work with, such as Redthread, the St Giles Trust and Catch22—very much fed into the serious violence strategy. The hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn will know that, having announced in April that we were setting aside £11 million to fund early intervention initiatives, the Home Secretary doubled that to £22 million over the summer recess, because we understand the importance of this issue and want to help organisations that are doing such great work on the ground to get the message out.
Just before schools rose for the summer holidays, I wrote to headteachers across the country and invited them to encourage their teaching staff to talk to children about knife crime before the holidays. We were conscious that sadly, summer holidays sometimes mean that children find themselves in very damaging situations. I do a lot of work on the curriculum with my colleagues in the Department for Education, and gangs and their impact form part of the latest safeguarding guidance from the Department. That issue is also addressed through the serious violence taskforce, which brings together the Home Office, all other Government Departments, senior Ministers, the Mayor of London, chief constables, police and crime commissioners, charities, healthcare providers, and so on. That taskforce is doing a great deal of work on what more we can do through early intervention to help children at an earlier stage.
This summer, we announced the results of the continuing anti-knife crime community fund, which is having a real impact on smaller charities in local areas that are working on the ground with children to safeguard them and lead them away from paths of criminality.
Louise Haigh
Will the Minister explain why the Home Office was considering higher education premises at the beginning of the consultation period, when it knew that universities are not occupied by children? What has changed the Home Office’s mind during the consultation process?
Victoria Atkins
Just that we have been troubled by this definition of a “public place.” Having listened to the submissions made through the Committee, we will look at the issue again, but this is a difficult area, because higher education premises tend to be frequented by people who are adults in the eyes of the law. Of course, if an adult walks around with a knife or does anything worse with it, that is already caught by the existing legislation, but higher education premises are a grey area, as are stairwells in communal housing. I will see whether we can do anything more that will withstand any challenge through the courts.
Louise Haigh
I hope that it goes without saying that the Opposition wholeheartedly support the intention behind this clause, which was in no small part motivated by the tragic killing committed by Blaise Lewinson with a zombie knife in 2016. Lewinson, who was eventually convicted of manslaughter, was fascinated by such knives, and the judge called the weapon used to commit the murder “ferocious.” There is no doubt that these weapons can and do glorify violence, and their manufacture and use brings a quasi-military element to the streets of Britain. That may have a significant psychological impact on vulnerable young people and those who have fallen into, or are on the borders of, the criminal justice system or organised crime.
I would like to press the Minister on the definition in the clause to ensure that the House has properly considered whether it fully matches the Government’s intention. Proposed new paragraph 1(s) of the schedule to the Criminal Justice Act 1998 (Offensive Weapons) Order 1998 describes
“a ‘zombie knife’, ‘zombie killer knife’ or ‘zombie slayer knife’, being a blade with—
(i) a cutting edge;
(ii) a serrated edge; and
(iii) images or words (whether on the blade or handle) that suggest that it is to be used for the purpose of violence.”
Victoria Atkins
The definition of “zombie knife” in the Bill is the existing definition under section 141(2) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 set out in the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons) (Amendment) Order 2016. I appreciate that we are fighting a constant battle to future-proof the definition of such knives, but that is the definition in law. I have listened to what the hon. Lady said about crossbows and I am happy to reflect on it. The definition of “zombie knife” was agreed by Parliament in a statutory instrument in 2016 and we have sought to be consistent with that.
Louise Haigh
Since that statutory instrument, how many possession convictions, or associated convictions, have there been in which the weapons cited by the statutory instrument were still being manufactured and sold?
Victoria Atkins
I will have to write to the hon. Lady about that. I commend the clause to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 23 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 24
Surrender of prohibited offensive weapons
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
There are some costings involved in clauses 24 and 25. I believe that the impact assessment estimated that a national amnesty would cost between £200,000 and £300,000, and the cost of compensation for surrendered knives would cost about £200,000. Whose budget will that come out of?
Victoria Atkins
Clause 24 provides for the regulations for compensation. I will provide a draft of the regulations in due course, and there will be an opportunity to scrutinise the arrangements when they are laid before the House following Royal Assent. The budget for the compensation will come from the Home Office.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 24 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 25 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 26
Offence of threatening with offensive weapon etc
Amendments made: 24, in clause 26, page 25, line 14, at end insert—
‘( ) Section 1A of the Prevention of Crime Act 1953 (offence of threatening with offensive weapon in public) is amended in accordance with subsections (1) and (1A).
This amendment and Amendments 25 to 28 provide for the repeal of the definitions of “serious physical harm” in section 1A(2) of the Prevention and Crime Act 1953 and section 139AA(4) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Clause 26 replaces references to “serious physical harm” in section 1A(1) of the 1953 Act and section 139AA(1) of the 1988 Act with references to “physical harm”.
Amendment 25, in clause 26, page 25, line 15, leave out from “In” to end of line 16 and insert “subsection (1)—”.
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 24.
Amendment 26, in clause 26, page 25, line 21, at end insert—
‘(1A) Omit subsection (2).
(1B) Section 139AA of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (offence of threatening with article with blade or point or offensive weapon) is amended in accordance with subsections (2) and (3).’
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 24.
Amendment 27, in clause 26, page 25, line 22, leave out from “In” to end of line 23 and insert “subsection (1)—”
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 24.
Amendment 28, in clause 26, page 25, line 28, at end insert—
‘(1A) Omit subsection (4).’—(Victoria Atkins.)
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 24.
Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.
Louise Haigh
The clause attempts to lower the threshold for the offence of threatening with an offensive weapon. The offence of threatening with an article with a blade or a point, or an offensive weapon, set out in section 139AA of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 requires the prosecution to prove that the defendant threatened another person with a weapon
“in such a way that there is an immediate risk of serious physical harm to that other person.”
This modification will strengthen the law to make prosecution easier.
The clause amends existing offences of threatening with an offensive weapon or article with a blade or point. There is a mandatory minimum custodial sentence of a four-month detention and training order for children aged 16 and 17 and a custodial sentence of at least six months for an adult convicted under the existing legislation. Let me take this opportunity again to put on the record the Opposition’s concerns about mandatory minimum sentences for children and the conflict between the Sentencing Council’s advice and the Government’s legislation.
The clause raises a number of questions, and several organisations have made their concerns clear. The Law Society stated:
“We are not persuaded that the proposed change to the definition of this offence is necessary. The requirement that the prosecution prove that there is an immediate risk of serious physical harm arising from the threat, as introduced by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, remains an appropriate, sufficient and objective, test.”
As far as I could see, the consultation paper provided no examples of cases where the current law proved inadequate, so will the Minister elaborate on that? Can she provide examples where someone should have been convicted of an offence but the threshold could not be met? If not, why is the clause in the Bill? What advice has she received from the police service about the evidential threshold being difficult to meet? The impact assessment suggested there would be a 10% uptick in prosecutions. Presumably that figure was not plucked from thin air, so may we have more information about how the Home Office arrived at it?
The Law Society continued:
“It is not clear what exactly is the asserted inadequacy with the current law to justify this change in the law. While we note the inclusion of an objective element of the reasonableness of the victim’s fear, by reference to a hypothetical person of reasonable firmness, this will provide fertile room for debate and appeals, in much the same way as occurred in relation to the old defence of provocation.”
That is important. As the Minister will know, the old defence of provocation is in section 3 of the Homicide Act 1957 and was changed in 2009. In its first report, the Law Commission stated that there were significant problems with that defence as it did not appear to be underpinned by any clear rationale, and that the concept of loss of self-control had become troublesome.
In the 2005 case of Harriot v. DPP, for example, a man at a bail hostel returned to find his room had been burgled. He placed two knives in his pockets and started becoming agitated in the communal reception area. He then went outside into the front garden of the hostel. The staff locked him out and the police were called. After searching him and finding the knives, they arrested him for possession of sharply pointed implements and he was convicted. However, he won his appeal by arguing that the private front garden was not a place where that offence could be committed merely because the public’s access to the area was unimpeded. That goes back to the problems with the definition of “public area”. In that scenario, could the staff be regarded as having a reasonable fear that they were at risk of physical harm? Would that be any more the case under the Bill than under existing legislation?
This is the ultimate question: has the Minister properly scrutinised the clause for such unintended consequences, and does she intend to define “reasonable” in clause 26(1)(b)?
Victoria Atkins
I should declare an interest: I used to prosecute for the Crown Prosecution Service and other law enforcement agencies. I say with my legal hat on that I am very pleased that we are changing the test from subjective to objective. The problem the CPS has under current legislation is that, to prove the offence, it has to get the victim to court to show they were worried that they were at risk of violence. We want to stop victims having to come to court to give evidence in situations where, frankly, a reasonable person would feel in fear. The old offence made it difficult for the CPS to bring prosecutions in cases where someone walked around shouting and threatening to use their knife. That is why so few prosecutions were brought.
I met a senior member of the CPS to discuss how we could help the police and the CPS to tackle that criminality, and the test in the clause was arrived at. It is a perfectly standard, objective test of a reasonable person. I do not accept the proposition that the courts will be unable to grapple with the “reasonable person” test. The objective test is used across the criminal justice system for all sorts of offences. This is simply about placing someone in court when they choose to go out and threaten people with a knife or put people in fear of their actions. It is about ensuring that we protect the community and that the police have the powers they need to bring such people to justice.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 26, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 27 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Paul Maynard.)
Louise Haigh
Main Page: Louise Haigh (Labour - Sheffield, Heeley)Department Debates - View all Louise Haigh's debates with the Home Office
Offensive Weapons Bill
Louise Haigh ExcerptsWednesday 28th November 2018
(5 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 28 November 2018 - (28 Nov 2018)
Mr Djanogly
I am afraid that I do not really understand the hon. Gentleman’s logic. I am talking about sports.
It was important and impressive that 74 hon. Members across the House signed the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) to remove the .50 calibre provisions. The Government are to be congratulated on tabling their amendments.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
May I begin by reiterating Labour’s support for the Bill? We gave our support on Second Reading and in Committee, but let me also say how disappointed we have been at the Government’s consistent mismanagement of this important legislation. This should have been a comprehensive and honest response to the horrifying surge in violence that we are seeing in every community in our country. Instead, it is a relatively meagre collection of proposals that, rather than being strengthened in making its way through the House, has been watered down, as the Government have rolled over in response to their Back Benchers.
It is deeply regrettable that the Bill before us is far less effective than what was presented on Second Reading and that, in the Government’s complete paralysis in the middle of Brexit negotiations in their own party, they have refused to listen to the voices of the most senior counter-terror and security experts in the country and instead have once again allowed ideology to win the day.
It is a very sad reflection on our times that matters of great public importance—no task is more important than the Government keeping their citizens safe—are being sacrificed at the altar of Brexit. We have offered our sincere and constructive support throughout the passage of the Bill, supporting the Government’s efforts to respond to the surge in violent crime. We offered our support in Committee and now on Report in their attempt to ban the .50 calibre rifle, but, unfortunately, once again they have proven themselves unable to govern in the national interest, in hock to a group of Members who are prepared to risk public safety.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. As the lead signatory to the amendment that sought to remove these 0.50 calibre weapons from the Bill, the hon. Lady has implicitly accused me of endangering public safety. That is completely untruthful and unworthy, and she should withdraw her remarks.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I did not see that comment as a personal accusation. One thing is clear—the hon. Gentleman has certainly put his view on the record.
Louise Haigh
Later in my speech, I will come to exactly why we think the amendment that the Government have tabled will indeed risk public safety.
The Home Secretary said back in April that he wanted to bring forward an Offensive Weapons Bill within weeks and that if it achieved cross-party support, it would become law “very quickly”, making a “big difference”. Over the weekend in London and across the country, more lives have been taken in senseless violence. Thirty-seven children have been killed this year. How can it have been allowed that the already limited measures in the Bill have been held up three times now because of a fight over high-calibre rifles? It reflects very poorly on this Parliament.
I speak in support of new clauses 3 and 4 in my name, new clause 2 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), and new clauses 18 and 19 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (David Hanson). I will also refer to the amendments regarding .50 calibre rifles, with which the Labour party profoundly disagrees.
New clause 3 would bring miniature rifle ranges under the existing provisions of the Firearms Act 1968. It would remove a loophole in our decades-old firearms law that is providing easy access for non-firearms holders to get their hands on ammunition. Law enforcement officials have been clear on this. They have said in no uncertain terms that the exemption in section 11(4) of the Firearms Act is glaring and provides an easy route for terrorists and criminals to access firearms. This little-known exemption allows non-certificate holders to acquire and possess up to .23 calibre miniature rifles and ammo in connection with the running of a miniature rifle range.
Section 11(4) also allows a person claiming that they are running a miniature rifle range to acquire an unlimited number of .22 calibre rifles and ammunition without any background checks being completed or the police being made aware. In this context, the term “miniature rifle” is something of a misnomer. They are semi-automatic rifles and go far beyond that which is safe in the hands of a non-certificate holder. These are potentially lethal weapons, so this exemption is far too broad.
We are asking the Government to consider using this legislation to stop criminals having ready access to potentially lethal weapons. We were not at all convinced by the Minister’s justification in Committee and were staggered that she suggested that the Government had not been approached regarding this loophole, when they have been copied into the specific correspondence from counter-terrorism experts and the police. They simply cannot say they have not been warned. Will the Minister outline the Home Office’s thinking? Why does the Department believe, in the face of expert evidence, that this exemption does not pose a threat?
New clause 4, in my name and the name of the shadow Home Secretary, would make it an offence to possess component parts of ammunition with the intent to manufacture. Again, this has been explicitly recommended to us by the National Ballistics Intelligence Service, which said in Committee:
“There is a lack of control and legislation around purchasing and acquiring ammunition components. People can freely acquire all the equipment they need to make ammunition; the offence kicks in only once you have made a round.”––[Official Report, Offensive Weapons Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2018; c. 42, Q99.]
Senior law enforcement officials have said:
“the reality is that individuals are being found in possession of primers (for which there is no offence) cartridge cases (for which there is no offence), missiles i.e. bullets (for which there is no offence) and smokeless powder (which is technically a minor offence contrary to explosives regulations but rarely…prosecuted).”
The fact is that, unless complete ammunition is found, there is no prosecution despite very strong suspicion that someone is making ammunition to be used in criminality. This simply cannot be right. New clause 4 is an attempt, in the light of the growing threat picture from DIY ammunition making, to give law enforcement the tools needed to clamp down on this practice, which is undoubtedly raising the threat to the public from firearms.
Bob Stewart
To the hon. Lady’s knowledge, have any of these heavier calibre weapons been used in criminality? If they have not, I am wondering what we are arguing about.
Louise Haigh
Twice in the last two years these guns have been found in the hands of criminals: once in the north, when the barrel was shortened and discovered in wasteland; and once when the weapons were found in the hands of a gun smuggler to organised criminal gangs.
Labour will vigorously oppose these amendments today and any attempt to weaken the already desperately weak provisions in the Bill. The measures contained in clause 30, which in effect ban the enormously powerful .50 calibre, 14 mm and 20 mm are necessary and proportionate. They have been backed up with expert justification of the risk assessments and we are convinced that that assessment has been made in good faith. We will not be playing politics with public safety.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
In my mind, I make a distinction between a legal gun owner and an illegal gun owner. In the two incidents that the hon. Lady described, were the guns held legally?
Louise Haigh
In one case, the weapon was held legally; in the other, it was held illegally. I hope that will help the hon. Lady make up her mind as to how she wishes to vote today.
There are many who seek to question the motives of the senior firearms officers who presented evidence to Parliament on the basis of an assessment of the facts. Those officers gave a reasoned, evidence-based analysis, and we are confident that they are not supporting anything that is not completely necessary to their work to keep us safe.
The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) made a point about ammunition. In fact, the user requirement for this gun for the military is a system that can immobilise a vehicle with all UK in-service .50 calibre ammunition—not exotic military ammunition at all. Mark Groothuis of Operation Endeavour, the counter-terror policing unit in the Met, told us:
“My concern is that, if one of these guns were to be stolen…and if it were to get into terrorist hands, it could be very difficult to fight against or to protect against. There is very little—nothing, as far as I know—that the police service have that could go up against a .50 in the way of body armour or even protected vehicles.”––[Official Report, Offensive Weapons Public Bill Committee, 17 July 2018; c. 33, Q66.]
How is this a risk worth taking? This is a proportionate ban affecting weapons of staggering power. This is the most powerful weapon of its kind still available to the public.
The idea heard in some quarters that this is part of an overall assault on lawful gun-holders is simply nonsense. Last year, there were 157,581 firearms certificates covering over half a million weapons, and over half a million shotgun certificates covering more than 1 million shotguns. This amendment would affect 129 weapons. The truth is that the only way to protect the public from this weapon’s enormous power is to remove it from public hands altogether, and the Government have utterly failed in their duty to do so.
Several hon. Members rose—
Victoria Atkins
Indeed, and I thank my hon. Friend for being kind enough to show me his great city only a few months ago. We met with senior police officers and others to discuss a number of issues relating to vulnerability, including the vulnerability of those being stalked. He brings to the Chamber his commitment to helping the most vulnerable in his constituency, and he has hit the nail on the head. Filling that gap to cover threatening behaviour in a private place makes it possible to address the sort of situation that he has described. Where gangs are in somebody’s home, perhaps at a party, and things turn nasty, the location of the person holding the knife changes under the current law depending on where they are in relation to the front door. The purpose of new clause 16 is to make it irrelevant whether their threatening behaviour takes place when they are standing on one side of the front door or the other.
New clause 5 concerns the secure display of bladed products. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley, who tabled it, knows that I have taken great interest in this area. We have looked carefully at whether prohibition as set out in the new clause would address the concerns that she and others have rightly raised. Our concern is that the prohibition is a blanket requirement. I have looked into whether there are ways that we could make it more targeted, so that councils with a particular problem with knife crime can lay an order covering the display of bladed products in shops in their locality. What we are doing—not what we would like to do, but what we are in the process of doing—is encouraging much stronger voluntary action by retailers to take more robust measures on displays using a risk-based approach.
Louise Haigh
The Minister is absolutely right that new clause 5 would impose a blanket ban on retailers displaying bladed products, but the Government are proposing a blanket ban on the sale of bladed products to residential premises. Why is it one rule for online and another for face-to-face retailers?
Victoria Atkins
We are indeed introducing a blanket ban on the delivery of bladed products to homes, first because we know that test purchases online have not led to the sort of results that we have seen with retailers. We wanted to close that gap and make it clear to online retailers, some of which do not seem to understand that they currently are not allowed to sell bladed products to under-18s and should have robust measures in place to ensure that they do not. The Bill seeks to re-emphasise that, but we also want to ensure that the person picking up the knife has to go to a post office, delivery depot or local shop with such arrangements and show identification to establish that they are over 18. That is the purpose behind those measures.
We do not currently have evidence of the rate of shoplifting of knives by young people who go on to use them in crimes. That is part of the problem. As a first step, my officials are working with retailers to come up with a much stronger voluntary response, which we know retailers are responding to well, because, in fairness, the voluntary commitments have been working well.
Louise Haigh
Unfortunately, there is not time for me to address all the amendments in the group, but I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), my hon. Friends the Members for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) and for Redcar (Anna Turley), my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (David Hanson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who have all tabled reasoned, evidence-based amendments that would significantly improve the Bill. I support them all wholeheartedly.
The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) was very kind in offering his support to new clause 5, which would introduce a simple prohibition on the display of bladed products in shops. The new clause is the result of a huge amount of work led by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft), who is chair of the cross-party Youth Violence Commission. One of her most important recommendations was the prohibition of knife displays in shops, a matter that was discussed when experts gave evidence to the Committee. The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers said that it would be helpful to put knives behind displays in shops. A representative said:
“Obviously, now big retailers are increasingly going down the route of making it more difficult for customers to get their hands on the product until they have been age-checked and the transaction is safe. The problem with it, of course, is that all sorts of bladed things are being sold and it is about where you draw the line.”––[Official Report, Offensive Weapons Public Bill Committee, 19 July 2018; c. 98, Q239.]
Obviously we want retailers to check people’s ages properly when they seek to purchase knives, but the fact of the matter is that many young people who want to access knives will go into shops and steal them if they are readily available. Ultimately, there is little point in having the provisions in the Bill, and putting all the restrictions and burdens on online retailers, if we are not asking face-to-face retailers to abide by the same regulations.
There are a number of restrictions under the law relating to other products—most obviously, the extremely restricted provisions relating to the sale of tobacco, which prohibit the display of tobacco products except to people over the age of 18. The Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002 specifically refers to under-18s, so the principle already exists in law. New clause 5 simply transposes to knives the already sufficient and proportionate response to tobacco. As the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle said, if we walk into a shop and buy cigarettes with which to kill ourselves, they will be behind locked cabinets. A young person, or any person, who walks into a shop and steals a knife in order to kill another person is free to do so: as things stand, the knives are not even behind locked cabinets. We see no reason why that should not be extended to bladed products. Given that the Government are so committed to clamping down on online sales, we hope they recognise that face-to-face sales are a clear issue that needs further consideration.
While we are on the topic of restricting the supply of knives, let me turn briefly to the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central. The clause to which they relate was debated extensively in Committee. We fully support the Government’s intention, but are worried that the clause may punish businesses while having little impact on the ultimate aim—to reduce violence.
I remain baffled as to why the Home Office has not simply put strict age verification controls on the sale of knives online, as it does, for example, with gambling, but instead has chosen to punish the online sales industry and traders such as those mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar. My hon. Friend’s amendments are very reasonable compromises, put forward by the very businesses that the Minister claims have complained that they are too bureaucratic. I fear that the clause has not been thought through sufficiently, and will have untold consequences.
New clause 1 was tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn, whom I congratulate on his incredible, impassioned speech and the fantastic campaign that he has mounted. We have made clear from the outset that we are prepared to support amendments to protect shop workers. In Committee, we heard powerful evidence from USDAW and the British Retail Consortium about the increase in the number of attacks on shop workers as a result of restricted sales, and we wholeheartedly support any measure that which will improve their protection. I congratulate USDAW on its brilliant campaign.
Let me now deal with new clause 31. The death of a pregnant woman, Sana Muhammad, just a few short weeks ago in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) has, in his words,
“shocked people…to the core.”—[Official Report, 14 November 2018; Vol. 649, c. 310.]
She was attacked in front of her five children by a man with a crossbow, and was tragically pronounced dead a short while afterwards. That tragic case has brought to light, once again, the remarkably weak controls on crossbows, which have lethal effects. It is incumbent on us as a Parliament to decide whether we are comfortable with circumstances in which a lethal weapon is freely available to anyone over the age of 18, with no licensing restrictions at all.
There have been many tragic and disturbing incidents involving crossbows, and the law as it exists has developed only incrementally. Our new clause would create a licensing system. That is not a step that any Parliament should take lightly, but we believe that it has the potential to remove the unregulated sale and possession of some of the most lethal crossbows, while also ensuring that the law-abiding community who use crossbows for sporting purposes are still able to carry out their legitimate pursuit. The clause also creates safeguards which allow further consideration of the power under which a crossbow would become subject to licensing provisions, allowing the Secretary of State to make regulations determining the appropriate draw weight.
Our new clause 6 calls for a report on the causes behind youth violence, a topic that is not discussed much in the entire debate around offensive weapons. The new clause goes to the heart of our issues with the Bill and the Government’s seriously weak serious violence strategy. The strategy was published only in April yet we have already seen a U-turn from the Home Secretary, finally agreeing that the public health model must be adopted and that agencies need to be working better to tackle violence. We have been telling the Government all of this for at least the last year, so we are pleased to see progress, but we are alarmed that the strategy is so desperately short on detail. Members hear almost every day from constituents about the levels of crime and the cuts to policing in our constituencies.
The police service is at risk of becoming almost unrecognisable to the public and irrelevant according to the Home Affairs Committee. “Panorama” reported recently that up to half of crimes are being “screened out” by some forces, meaning they get no investigation at all. This is just the latest indication of a police service creaking under the strain of soaring demand after eight years of austerity. When crimes are not being investigated, deterrence reduces and crime rises further still. It is a vicious circle and one the present Government have locked us into with little recognition of their role in it.
Axing the police was a political choice that has done incalculable harm to our communities, and it is a choice that I suspect many Conservative MPs who voted for swingeing cuts privately regret.
Mr McFadden
I strongly agree with the points my hon. Friend is making. Does she agree with me that if the Government get the police pensions wrong, the issue she has just highlighted will become even worse, because we have been warned by chief constables and police and crime commissioners around the country that thousands more officers could be lost if they are forced to pay for it out of existing police budgets?
Louise Haigh
My right hon. Friend is right. After eight years of cuts to frontline policing, the Government have slapped on another £465 million cut by 2022, which we have been warned will cut another 10,000 police officers from our communities. It is completely intolerable.
New clause 6 would release the Home Office evidence—that we know exists, thanks to leaks—to public scrutiny. We know that Home Office officials believe that the reduction in police numbers has led to a reduction in so-called hotspotting and to an increase in violent crime.
But of course this is not just about police numbers; we need a wholesale review of the impact of the Government’s austerity agenda on the vital safety nets that keep our communities safe and the consequent impact on rising crime levels. The now famous example of where we have seen a successful approach is on our doorstep in Scotland, where a 20-year strategic approach was taken to reducing youth violence. That is what is required, as opposed to the Government’s strategy, which uses the rhetoric of early intervention and prevention but represents at most a three-year strategy.
The amendments in my name and those of my hon. Friends seek to strengthen and improve the weak legislation before us today. They seek an evidence-based response to the long-term trend in violence that we are witnessing as a result of this Government’s austerity agenda. We hope the Government will accept that much more needs to be done if we are to prevent any more young lives from being needlessly taken and will accept the amendments in our name.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
I rise to speak in support of my new clause 26, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) for her support in that. I also, surprisingly, thank the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) for his support for the amendment, although I am disappointed that he did not say that I am one of the nicest people in the House—perhaps I can prove that to him afterwards.
Some Members have already referred to the Metropolitan police video that went viral showing officers tactically nudging criminals off their bikes in the height of chase. Regardless of whether people support that police strategy, the strength of feeling on this matter is demonstrated by the fact that the video was retweeted thousands of times and appeared on the front pages of the papers. That is because so many people have been, or know someone who has been, a victim of crimes committed by people on mopeds.
Criminals use mopeds because of the element of surprise it gives when attacking the victim, the victim’s helplessness when hit by someone on a moped, and the speed at which the criminal can get away, which makes it particularly effective for theft. Constituents in Hampstead and Kilburn have told me that they are now scared to walk down the street either talking on their phone or showing any of their possessions because they fear someone on a moped snatching those items away. I speak today to give those people a voice and to speak up on behalf of those who believe that the existing legislation to deal with such crimes is no longer sufficient.
Louise Haigh
Labour will not oppose the limited measures in this Bill tonight, but we regret how very limited the measures are. This country is facing a contagion of serious violence and, faced with that challenge, the Government have introduced a Bill that barely tinkers around the edges. We have record levels of knife crime, the largest continuous rise of violent crime on record, and high-harm offences are all on the rise. The number of unsolved crimes now stands at more than 2.1 million. We have a national crisis in detective numbers and a Government who are unwilling to take the action necessary to plug it. Some 21,000 officers, 6,800 PCSOs and 18,000 police staff have gone yet, rather than give the police the resources they need to launch a national offensive against violent crime, the Government instead seem intent on lumbering the police with a bill for hundreds of millions of pounds of pension liabilities, which the National Police Chiefs Council warns could lead to the loss of another 10,000 officers.
The levels of serious violence are not a spike; they are part of a now five-year trend. Behind the figures are stories of young lives destroyed and families torn apart. The serious violence strategy and the Offensive Weapons Bill stand as the Government’s response—it is nowhere near enough. It does not even begin to scratch the surface. As long as they insist on underfunding our police, nobody can say that they are taking serious violence seriously.
With regard to the limited provisions of the Bill, Labour has sought to enhance protections on the sale and possession of knives, to close dangerous loopholes in our gun laws that have been left open for too long, to force the Home Office to release evidence on the consequences of cuts to vital services for the levels of serious violence, and to advocate for the rights of victims of crime, which have been neglected, despite repeated manifesto promises from the Conservative party. There is no doubt that the Bill would have been enhanced by the inclusion of those measures. It is a matter of regret that important issues in relation to serious violence and the rights of victims have not been accepted by this Government.
Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)
I am slightly confused. I thought that, during the opening speeches, Labour Members suggested that the Government should have moved quicker with this Bill and that they are disappointed that there have been some delays, yet they do not seem to welcome any elements of the Bill. They just seem to regret the excellent progress that we have made.
Louise Haigh
We supported this Bill on Second Reading and in Committee, and we supported the Home Secretary’s attempt to ban the .50-calibre rifle, on which the Government have now capitulated to their Back Benchers in the face of overwhelming evidence from police, security and intelligence officials. We backed the measures in the Bill; it is a shame that the Home Secretary did not back his own measures.
We will not oppose these limited measures tonight, but we must be clear that they will not stem the tide of serious crime without measures to address its root causes and without a recognition from the Government of their own culpability in creating the conditions for crime to thrive. With a vulnerable cohort of young people without the support they need as services fall away and an ailing police force unable proactively to gather intelligence and build community relations, and unable adequately to investigate crimes that have taken place, this Government are unwilling and unable to address the consequences of their own actions. As such, this Bill can never meet its objective to bear down on violent crime.
Louise Haigh
Main Page: Louise Haigh (Labour - Sheffield, Heeley)Department Debates - View all Louise Haigh's debates with the Home Office
Offensive Weapons Bill
Louise Haigh ExcerptsTuesday 26th March 2019
(5 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Offensive Weapons Act 2019 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Commons Consideration of Lords Amendments as at 26 March 2019 - (26 Mar 2019)
Victoria Atkins
I think the hon. Lady is talking about the amendment tabled by the shadow Minister. We do not agree with that amendment. We believe that piloting and then the Secretary of State laying a report before the House is a perfectly proportionate way of assessing the pilots’ success. Let us not forget that we are talking about youth courts and magistrates courts using civil orders, with all the safeguards that are in the regime. This regime mirrors similar regimes used in, for example, gang injunctions. We should have trust in our youth courts and others that they will be able to meet the expectations of the House in terms of ensuring the wellbeing and the welfare of the young people they are looking after. The aim of these orders is to protect young people and also the wider community. On the proposal that a full report should be laid out, I am afraid that, in the usual way, such regulations are not subject to any parliamentary procedure, and the Government see no reason to adopt a different approach in this case.
There are of course other provisions that I have not even begun to address, although I may well have a chance do so at the end. However, I hope that my focusing on the three main issues arising during the passage of the Bill meets with colleagues’ approval. I very much look forward to hearing their contributions in the rest of the debate.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
I thank those in the other place for their careful consideration of this Bill, which is certainly in better shape than when it left this Chamber.
As the Minister has outlined, we have offered our sincere and constructive support throughout the passage of the Bill for the Government’s attempts to respond to the surge in violent crime. We offered our support in Committee, on Report and at Third Reading. We have fought to enhance protections on the sale of knives, to close dangerous loopholes in our gun laws, to force the Home Office to release evidence on the consequences of cuts to vital services for levels of serious violence, to force the Government to assess whether the police have the resources they need to tackle violence involving offensive weapons and to put the rights of victims of crime on a statutory footing—rights that have been neglected despite repeated manifesto promises by the Conservative party.
Let us not forget the absolutely farcical spectacle of the Home Secretary and the Minister, on Second Reading and in Committee, making the case for a ban on high-powered rifles—guns that have an effective range of 6 km—and then coming back to the Chamber on Report and making the exact opposite case in the face of Back-Bench rebellion. Our gun laws are in need of updating, and it is a sad reflection on the Government that all the passage of this Bill has done is weaken the provisions on firearms and kick the can down the road once again in pushing the issue to consultation. Furthermore, the Bill as it stands still ignores much of the key evidence contained in a leaked Home Office report on the drivers of serious violence. This included compelling evidence that violence was, in part, being driven by a precarious and vulnerable youth cohort shorn of the support, early intervention and prevention work necessary to stop those vulnerable people falling into a spiral of serious violence.
Turning to the amendments, I am grateful for the work of the noble Lord Kennedy, and that of my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) and for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who have managed to find a consensus on the delivery of knives to residential premises that protects children while not unduly hampering specialist knife manufacturers and businesses. We are therefore happy to support the amendment in the name of the Home Secretary whereby businesses will need to prove they have taken all necessary measures to ensure that a knife is delivered into the hands of an adult or will feel the full weight of the law.
On kirpans and Sikh ceremonial swords, I again congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Mr Dhesi) and for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) on their work. We understood the concerns raised across the House, and I am pleased that the Labour Lords amendment has been accepted that will allow Sikhs to practice their religion freely without fear of criminalisation.
But undoubtedly the biggest change has been the introduction of knife crime prevention orders, and that is what I wish to focus my remarks on. It is important when making any changes to the suite of police powers that Parliament has the fullest opportunity to consider the evidence and implications. That is why we are extremely concerned about both the way in which these proposed orders have been brought forward and some of their content. Our concerns are threefold, and I will address each in turn. As the Minister said, our amendments to the Lords amendments speak to those concerns.
Victoria Atkins
To correct the record, these orders have been discussed in the serious violence taskforce, which is attended by the Children’s Commissioner and many of the others that the hon. Lady mentioned. This is action that the police required of us. We turned it around as quickly as we could to get it into the Bill, in order to protect children. We are doing it on the advice of the police.
Louise Haigh
I would respectfully suggest that putting before Parliament orders that would criminalise children for up to two years requires more than discussion at a meeting. It requires full consultation and full parliamentary scrutiny, and none of that has happened.
Before Parliament approves any roll-out, the Government should release a report giving an explanation of what guidance has been given to authorities on the burden on proof, which is a civil standard, the impact of orders on the rights of children and the impact on different racial groups as defined in section 9 of the Equality Act 2010.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
Does the hon. Lady not think it is a bit rich that she is complaining on the one hand about the Government introducing a full consultation on a whole range of firearms issues enshrined in statute under the Bill, and on the other hand that the Government have not consulted enough on knife crime prevention orders, which are suggested by the police and are a much-needed part of the armoury in the fight against knife crime?
Louise Haigh
The Government consulted on the ban on weapons ahead of the Bill and concluded, on the basis of evidence from the most senior counter-terror police in the country, that it was right to ban assault rifles. It was only in response to a Back-Bench rebellion led by the hon. Gentleman that the Government caved and made the exact opposite case to the one that they made on Second Reading.
These are very basic requests for what is, in truth, information that Parliament should already have when being asked to pass legislation. The parliamentary lock we are seeking to add to the orders should not be necessary, but we know the damage that can result from a lack of joined-up thinking in youth justice, and our communities simply cannot afford another misstep. That is why it is only right that parliamentarians are given the full facts before being asked to approve a further roll-out.
Turning to the content of the orders themselves, all of us in this place are united in our mission to do everything in our power to bear down on the terrible scourge of knife crime, but we must be wary of taking action for the sake of action. Interventions must be evidence-based, have a clear purpose and fill a gap in the existing legislation. The police already have a substantial suite of powers for those they suspect of possessing a knife. The issue is, and has been for several years, the ability and capacity of the police to enforce those powers. As the chair of the Police Federation has said,
“How the Home Secretary thinks we have the officers available to monitor teenagers’ social media use or check they are at home at 10pm when we are struggling to answer 999 calls is beyond me.”
This Government have taken 21,000 police officers off our streets. Response times have rocketed, and in some force areas residential burglaries are rarely attended. The police’s capacity to respond to crime has been extremely diminished, so it is beyond doubt that they do not have the capacity to place orders on people who have not actually committed a crime, and then to monitor and implement those orders effectively. There has been no impact assessment of the resource implications for the police or any of the other services that may be brought in by these orders. We are concerned, and this is what our amendments speak to, that in trying to establish so-called wraparound care for young people, these orders will inevitably end up focusing on the restrictive elements such as curfews, social media bans and prohibitions, rather than the potential for positive, rehabilitative action.
I think we have now reached consensus in this place that, to combat youth violence effectively, a whole-system, cross-governmental public health approach is required. These orders could have been an attempt to bridge such a divide, but instead they place sole responsibility on the police as the only authority that can apply for an order, which risks narrowing the focus of the suite of options available. The fact that there is no statutory requirement to assess the needs of a child, establish their circumstances and consider the safeguarding implications of an order or their family history prior to an order being granted should be fatal for a legislative proposal that the Government have styled as a route to access wraparound services. It simply does not do what is required. That is why our amendments would establish a statutory requirement to consult with the YOT to produce a pre-sentence report. However, we are satisfied with the Minister’s commitment that this will be made clear in guidance.
Furthermore, I wonder whether the Government, in using the example of a youth worker as someone to be responsible for the delivery of an order, recognise the bind they would be putting such an individual in if they were responsible for reporting any breaches to the police. Central to a public health approach is a consistent, constant adult in vulnerable young people’s lives. This could provide an opportunity for that, but it cannot do so if such individuals are then forced to report them to the criminal justice system every time they do not abide by the conditions laid down in their order.
I will round off with a number of questions to which I hope the Minister will respond when she speaks again. The civil burden of proof is concerning, so what sort of intelligence does the Minister envisage would be sufficient for a court to grant an order? Will the police use the gangs matrix to target individuals? Will association with known offenders be sufficient for an order to be placed? Will past offending be sufficient, as the Minister in the other place appeared to suggest?
Does the Minister share the concerns of Members across the House that we risk criminalising children as young as 12 who have not actually committed a criminal offence? Does she really believe that a two-year custodial sentence is proportionate to a breach of a civil order, and can she give an example of when such a sentence would be appropriate? What exactly can KCPOs require or prohibit? Will guidance be brought forward on what measures are effective in tackling knife crime, or will it be anything that the court deems necessary, proportionate and enforceable?
Finally, who will be required or allowed to know that a child has an order, and what action will their school or alternative provider be expected to take when one has been granted? The implications for alternative provision are potentially severe, as some providers refuse to take children who have knife convictions, leaving them completely out of education and therefore much more vulnerable to becoming involved in violence. What consideration has been given to this?
I do not think that the Minister has satisfactorily answered the concerns raised by the Opposition in our amendments or those of expert organisations that work on these issues every single day, such as the Magistrates Association and the Association of Youth Offending Team Managers. We will therefore divide the House on our amendment (a) to Lords amendment 23 in relation to the parliamentary lock, as the report that the Home Secretary brings forward must be voted on before the pilots can be rolled out.
I conclude by thanking and congratulating my right hon. and hon. Friends who have significantly improved the Bill and subjected it to scrutiny during its passage, especially my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield Central, for Sheffield South East, for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft), for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), for Birmingham, Edgbaston and for Slough. The amendments in our names have sought to strengthen and improve the weak legislation before us today. They have sought an evidence-based response to the long-term trend of violence that we are witnessing as a result of this Government’s austerity agenda. We hope that the Government will accept that much more needs to be done if we are to prevent any more young lives from being needlessly taken, and we hope that the Government will accept the amendments in our names today.
Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh).
I should like to focus on knife crime prevention orders. If we are to reduce knife crime, we need to address the issue of drug usage. So many of the young people dying in our communities are dying as a result of the drugs trade—particularly cocaine. We need to consider increasing the costs attached to the usage of drugs, because drugs are historically extremely cheap at the moment; and if we want to attack usage, we have to increase the costs attached to recreational possession. The Minister said that she had looked at dealing with gangs—she had looked at knife crime prevention orders—but I think we need to look at drug prevention orders.
I think it is appalling that the chattering classes, wherever we may find them, whatever their politics, are wringing their hands about the deaths of mostly young men and children on our streets and then, moments later, too many of them are shoving a line of cocaine up their noses. That is not a line of white powder; that is a line of blood, and users of cocaine have blood on their hands—the lives of many, many young people and children.
So I say this to the Minister. Let us not build more prisons. Let us not lock more recreational users up—but let us hit them in the pocket. If they are caught in possession of cocaine, if they are responsible for the deaths on our streets, they should be fined accordingly. Let us say that you are a City trader on £300,000 a year, Minister: you should be fined a third of your income—a third of your income—if you are caught in recreational possession. Then users might start to think. If they do not care about the young lives being lost on the streets, they might start thinking about the consequences to themselves and their finances.
It may be a City trader. It may be a Member of Parliament. It may be a doctor. It may be a teacher. But if they are using cocaine, they are responsible for the tragedies that are happening daily, and I think they should pay—pay for recreational usage. They should pay by being fined a significant amount of their income the first time they are caught in possession, 50% the second time and 100% the third time. When we introduce laws like that, Minister, people may start taking this matter seriously, and we may actually start to address the mayhem, destruction and tragedy that is afflicting so many of our communities.