Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister kindly came to today’s Cross-Bench meeting and talked us through the Bill from his point of view. He started by saying that we will have quite a problem defining a victim because, as evidenced by this group of amendments, there are an awful lot of groups of people who clearly identify as victims and for whom there is evidence that they are victims. Although I understand the Government’s wish to try to contain this to some extent, it is important that we have a proper discussion about all these different groups and work out whether there is an intelligent, sensible and pragmatic way for us to be cleverer about the definition than we are at the moment.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who put his name to my Amendment 4, apologises for being unable to be here to speak because of another appointment. Amendment 4 seeks to ensure that victims of persistent anti-social behaviour—we all love acronyms, and I will mostly refer to it as “ASB” from now on—are recognised as victims and provided with their own code rights. Persistent anti-social behaviour can be defined as behaviour that meets the level required to trigger an anti- social behaviour case review; this means three reported incidents of ASB over a six-month period.

Currently, many victims of ASB are not recognised under the code because the criminal threshold has not been met. The police may treat and regard some of these incidents simply as misdemeanours or disputes between neighbours. The police’s failure to recognise the reality of what these victims undergo can make it worse, so it is important that we and the police are able to look at the whole picture.

The cumulative impact of ASB can be, and is, devastating. It affects victims’ sleep, work, relationships, health and feeling of safety, even in their own home. Left unpoliced, the consequences can be absolutely devastating. In this instance, an example would be the deaths of Suzanne Dow, Fiona Pilkington, Bijan Ebrahimi, Matthew Boorman, Stephen and Jennifer Chapple, David Askew, Louise Lotz and—last but by no means least—Garry Newlove, the ex-husband of the former Victims’ Commissioner, the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. In the case of David Askew, he collapsed and died on his own doorstep after years of torment.

Every day, victims of ASB in England and Wales are failed by the system and are unable to access the support they need and deserve. Every year, the charity ASB Help receives tens of thousands of pleas from victims trying to work out how they can find help. This is made worse because no single agency holds responsibility for tackling ASB, resulting in a not untypical diffusion of responsibility across the police, local authorities, housing associations and private landlords.

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[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely accept the points that my noble friend is making, and I am very happy to have a further meeting to discuss this, the interrelationship between the bits of legislation that we are dealing with, the interrelationship between the various authorities and who exactly is responsible for what.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, to further emphasise that, I think it would be helpful to the Committee to recognise the sheer scale of anti-social behaviour. Some freedom of information requests looking at the period between 2019 and 2021 identified that, believe it or not, there were 3.5 million reports of anti-social behaviour, so it is on a similar scale to stalking on an annualised basis. Those are probably the largest two areas of cases involving victims across England and Wales.

Those statistics were done across 34 out of the 43 police forces. They demonstrate the huge variability across the country, police and crime commissioner by PCC, and police force by police force. That is the problem. Some areas are doing really well with existing resources, without needing extra money. With proper leadership, organisation and training, they are doing a really good job. Kudos to the Government and the Minister for achieving good results in some areas. The challenge for the Government is: what is the problem with taking action to ensure that is replicated efficiently and systematically right across England and Wales? The evidence is clearly that it is not. If the authorities can do it within existing resources, we are not talking about huge amounts of extra money. That is not the issue; the issue is the way they go about what they do.

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention and entirely accept the point he makes about the variability across the country. Although this evening we are not on Clause 6 and supplementary Clause 11, for example, or Clause 10, about code awareness and reviewing compliance by criminal justice bodies, one of the main drivers of the Bill is to raise the standard of victim support equally across the country; to publish league tables; to have the data; to put pressure, if you like, by almost shame and stigma on those that are not performing as well as they should so that it is publicly known; and, in extreme cases, to give directions that they need to improve and so forth.

The steps we need to think about are how we make the various parts of the legislation consistent and operational, what role the code plays in anti-social behaviour when it is criminal conduct, as it often will be, and how we operationalise the way in which particular police forces and other agencies offer consistent services across the country. That is my thought on this point.