Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, the Bill sailed through the other place without much fuss, but I am glad to see that there has been a bit of fuss here with regard to some of the changes advocated. I, too, welcome the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, to this House and congratulate him on his speech. I hope that in future he will not be as restrained as he has been today and that he will join us in examining the Bill with great care, and possibly even criticism.

I have always had very deep reservations about the ASBO because there are plenty of laws and by-laws that deal with real anti-social behaviour: criminal damage charges, breach of the peace, vandalism, drunk and disorderly, insulting words and behaviour—there are lists of crimes that can deal with the sort of behaviour we are talking about. I have always felt that it was a measure introduced to compensate for inadequate policing, and that good community policing should deal with anti-social behaviour under existing law. However, politicians always want to reach for new ways of restricting liberty. There was a particular temptation, encouraged by the police, that the lowering of the standards of proof would be a good way forward. We created a hybrid in law, a legal development that should have caused us much greater concern.

However, I have real unease about its replacement. Some aspects of it may seem to be an improvement but there is a real problem when you have something that is so ill-defined. At least with the ASBO as created by Labour the law required you to have caused or been likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress, whereas this new law says that you just need to be capable of causing nuisance or annoyance. This House is full of people capable of causing nuisance or annoyance, and long may it be so.

I am therefore very concerned about this new invention, and I am not sure that it is a very real improvement. What is even worse is that the test will be that the police think that the injunction is just and convenient, and that it will be on the balance of probabilities whether a person might be a nuisance or not. The conception of the provision is flawed and I hope that we will test it hard in this House.

I wish to respond to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, who gave some credence to the idea in Clause 151, which I think is totally disreputable and contrary to the high standards that we should be proud of in our common law. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, described it well. Quietly and in measured tones she made a powerful speech about the real problems with this clause. I acted in the Guildford Four appeal. I had colleagues who acted in the case of the Birmingham Six. I chaired an inquiry into the sudden infant death cases involving young mothers convicted of killing their babies and who were ultimately acquitted after it was clear that there had been miscarriages of justice. I acted for a woman who was convicted and spent 11 years in prison for causing the death by arson of two people, and it became clear that she was totally innocent. There was something I always remember about acting in those cases. After the Irish miscarriages of justice—those mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan: the Maguires, the Birmingham Six and so on—the senior judiciary ran around the Inns of Court insisting that the defendants were probably all really guilty, despite the fact that they had had the hell beaten out of them by the police. Lord Denning disgraced himself by suggesting that it was a vista that was too terrible to imagine that the arm of the state might have behaved in such bad ways. Members of the judiciary found it very hard because they had been in their own way at fault due to the ways in which they had allowed those miscarriages of justice to take place.

Miscarriages of justice are something terrible in our system. Happily they happen rarely but when they do they are a source of shame. When people seek compensation it does not matter whether we think that they may in fact be guilty. The point of compensation is to remind the state of its responsibility to hold those who act for it to the highest standards. That is the purpose of taking compensation out of the state’s coffers—to make sure that we do not let it happen too easily. That is why we, constitutionally here in this House, have to maintain very high standards when it comes to the whole issue of criminal justice. I therefore remind the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, that there are good reasons in place for saying that when someone is acquitted ultimately after it has been shown there has been a miscarriage of justice, particularly because of police bad behaviour, it is right that that person should be compensated because the state has to hang its head in shame. That is the purpose of compensation.

I move on to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, which is also dealt with in the Bill. It introduces a number of other factors. Many of the changes are designed to rein in the powers available to police officers and other authorities. That is a good thing. However, what remains is the exceptionally broad discretion that allows for individuals to be stopped for no good reason. That should be a cause of concern to us as civil libertarians. In our legal system the norm is that the police should stop and search people only when there is a reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime or might be about to do so. Under this proposed law, people can be stopped whether or not any grounds exist for suspecting that they may have been involved in terrorist activity. There does not even need to be a suspicion. It is almost as though everyone becomes a suspect and so you are stopped in order to rule yourself out. It is rather like that business of having to show that you are really innocent. I ask the Minister why this extraordinary power is deemed justifiable. Of course we are seeking to deal with terrorism, and that is an important and challenging problem for our society, but maintaining high standards in the law is one of the best ways of countering the insult and assault made by terrorism. This is a break from the common-law principle and is not just about an abuse of human rights.

The powers will continue to allow the seizure, copying and retention of significant personal data when personal electronic devices such as smart phones are seized without justification. Phones and computers can be completely cloned by the authorities without any reason being forthcoming at all; it can simply be random. We should be concerned about that. These powers were brought into particular disrepute because of the detention recently of David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist responsible for many of the Snowden articles about the surveillance activities of agencies of the state.

The Government have reduced the length of time that a person can be detained at an airport for questioning from nine to six hours and I welcome that reduction. However, I encourage the Government to think harder and to consider reducing it possibly to three hours—a more reasonable period of detention at an airport.

The operation of Schedule 7 has been a consistent cause for concern for many and the subject of real concern for the Equality and Human Rights Commission, because the use of these powers has serious implications for equality and human rights and because it is having particular impact on people from ethnic minorities. The effect of that discrimination really does not help us to gather intelligence and deal with the threat of terrorism.

There are many things in this Bill that I think should be a cause of concern to this House. It is about lowering standards where standards in fact should be maintained, because that is what makes our legal system—and this country—great.