Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and Luke Taylor

Report stage
Wednesday 18th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

Let me start by highlighting my support for new clauses 85 and 86, which deal with neighbourhood policing. They would ensure that police forces are required to practise community policing

“at a level necessary to ensure effective community engagement and crime prevention”.

It is a shame that the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) is not in his place to intervene for a definition on that. It is about engaging with local communities and ward panels to define the appropriate levels in their areas—which I am sure he would support— rather than taking a top-down view. The new clauses would compel the Secretary of State to produce an annual report on the state of community policing.

We have outlined a way of funding that too: 20% of future police grants would be ringfenced for community policing activities, literally making crime pay—in the reverse of the manner in which that phrase is normally used—by allocating funds recovered from the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 to community policing. That is important, because commitments to policing numbers mean little without serious action to reverse the scale of forthcoming cuts, such as the cuts of 1,419 officers and staff that we in London are about to experience this year. Indeed, as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner recently told the BBC,

“ambition and money go alongside each other”.

I urge Members across the House to support those new clauses.

I will now turn to my new clauses 95 and 96. It is good to see the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), in her place to continue a conversation that we have had many times on stalking. Stalking is a heinous crime: it throws lives into chaos, leaves victims in life-changing and near-constant terror, and too often goes unpunished. The current legislation forces too many victims to meet an improbably high bar of evidence, forcing them to jump through hoops to be a perfect victim, just to prove the scale of the threat against them.

I have heard from victims in my Sutton and Cheam constituency who have had their lives completely upended by their stalkers, and who are completely at their wit’s end after facing so many obstacles to getting justice. It is clear that the two relevant sections of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 are the root of those obstacles. The distinction between a lesser section 2A offence and a more severe section 4A offence is failing victims and fails to recognise the total scope of stalking.

Successful prosecutions of section 4A offences are far too hard to achieve. The burden of proof is placed so heavily on the victim.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

Even celebrities such as Emma Raducanu, and others in the public eye who have been affected by stalkers, feel unsafe and unprotected by existing legislation. Does the hon. Member agree that is clear additional evidence that the law needs strengthening?

[Luke Taylor]

The hon. Member provides a clear and visible example of how the legislation is not working, if somebody with such a high profile and with additional security protection cannot be protected from stalkers. I thank him for his apt intervention.

The burden of proof means that many victims withdraw from the process completely and give up on gaining justice. My new clauses would compel the Secretary of State to publish a review into the two clauses within six months of the Act receiving Royal Assent, and to make time for that review to be properly considered in the House upon its completion. They would also compel the Secretary of State to launch a review into the effectiveness and adequacy of the stalking awareness guidance provided by public bodies in England and Wales, and to make similar provision for proper consideration and debate in this House. I know that aim is supported by the Minister, so I would like to hear how it is being brought forward.

New clause 43, tabled by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin), is incredibly important and deserves the support of the House. The new clause automatically commences the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Act 2023 when the Crime and Policing Bill receives Royal Assent. That he has managed to corral together such luminaries in this House as the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley), my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart), and the hon. Members for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry) and for Clacton (Nigel Farage), to support the measure is a triumph in itself.

We spoke about new clause 130 in Committee, and I very much support its measures on tool theft. It would add the theft of tools from tradesmen to the list of aggravating factors in the Sentencing Act 2020, and present a way forward towards more sensible regulations of temporary markets, where too many stolen tools are often sold out of car boots. I recently visited the Kimpton industrial estate in Stonecot in my constituency, where I heard more about the awful impact of that kind of theft from tradespeople, who too often are left with their livelihoods wrecked and very little proper recourse to getting their lives back on track, other than to fork out huge amounts to buy new tools, which in many cases are later stolen again. It is a horrible cycle, which I also heard about at the Stop Tool Theft rally on the streets outside this Chamber earlier this year.

The measures set out in the new clause provide a good path forward but will not solve the issue alone. Without the kind of commitment to restoring community policing that I mentioned in reference to new clauses 85 and 86, police forces will remain too overstretched to mobilise the resources to investigate these crimes in the first place.