argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Thomas Christopher John Pursglove (Conservative, Centre-right): There are no less than 161 Lords amendments for the House to consider this evening. To ensure that as many hon. and right hon. Members as possible who wish to speak can do so, I do not propose to detail all the amendments in this group, as many were uncontentious and will have the support of the whole House. I will, however, outline the key Lords amendments in this group brought forward by the Government, before commenting on the two amendments in this group that were agreed by their lordships contrary to the Government’s sound advice I know that MPs from across the House will want to share our support for the family and friends of PC Andrew Harper and their campaign to strengthen the law so that no other families go through the same heartbreak they have suffered. We were therefore pleased to announce our amendment in the other place, following our commitment to look at what action may be possible in this area. Lords amendment 1, known as Harper’s law, will impose mandatory life sentences on those convicted of unlawful act manslaughter where the victim is an emergency worker acting in the exercise of their functions as such a worker. The amendment will apply to adult offenders and 16 and 17-year-olds. The amendment will also contain judicial discretion for the court to impose an alternative sentence in exceptional circumstances In the case of Andrew Harper, the court did not impose life sentences on any of the defendants. Each received sentences of between 13 and 19 years for manslaughter—sentences that were subsequently upheld by the Court of Appeal. They will all be incarcerated for a significant period, but the Government believe that where a person is convicted of unlawful act manslaughter and the person who has been killed is an emergency worker, that should be punished with life imprisonment, except where there are exceptional circumstances relating to the offender or the offence The successful campaign of Lissie Harper, PC Harper’s widow, and the Police Federation drew this issue to the Government’s attention, and we are grateful for that. Lissie has shown incredible bravery, fortitude and courage in campaigning for this change, and I know that it has had a profound impact on Members from all parts of the House and on our constituents in communities across the country, who have come together to support this change.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Thomas Christopher John Pursglove (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s question. If the scope of this measure was restricted to mandatory life sentences in situations where the emergency worker was directly responding to the unlawful act at the heart of the offence, it would not capture all the cases in which this Government believe the mandatory life sentence should apply. For example, offender A injures a defendant during a fight and, in their attempts to escape the scene, they run over the responding paramedic, who is on their way to save the life of the person injured by person A. In another scenario, offender B commits exactly the same actions, but in fleeing the scene, they run over and kill a police officer responding to a separate incident a mile down the road Both defendants have committed the same unlawful act, and in the same dangerous circumstances, and both have caused the death of an emergency worker as a result, but the grounds for implementing the mandatory life sentence would be based on the pure happenstance that one emergency worker was responding to that specific unlawful act, and the other was not. That disparity in sentencing would not accurately reflect the Government’s aim to ensure that those who commit the unlawful act manslaughter of emergency workers who are exercising their functions face a life sentence It is also worth setting out for the House’s benefit who counts as an emergency worker. We will define emergency workers in the same way as the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018 and section 68 of the Sentencing Act 2020. This definition includes police officers, prison officers, National Crime Agency officers and those employed in fire services, search and rescue services and frontline NHS health services, among others.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): The Minister is absolutely right to pay tribute to Lissie Harper and to our emergency services. He also makes the point that these are not isolated incidents. Will he take on board the broader point that, although there is obviously great support for this piece of legislation, the area that has not been addressed is the difficulty that juries face in deciding whether the offence—the facts made out—is murder or manslaughter I hope that the Minister will revisit a missed opportunity, which is the definitions of homicide under our current law. The Law Commission and others have suggested that they ought to be revisited because they create some difficulty and uncertainty, particularly in the difficult area between the intention to kill or to commit grievous bodily harm and gross negligence at the top end. I hope that the Government will consider revisiting the Law Commission’s work on that, because other jurisdictions have different categories of homicide, rather than the perhaps now old-fashioned categories of murder and manslaughter. We might then find it easier for juries to more accurately reflect the culpability by their verdicts, which is what we want to achieve.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Thomas Christopher John Pursglove (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s observations. We touched on those matters when we spoke last week when we engaged in advance of these proceedings. I said to him that that was something that I would certainly be willing to take away and consider, and I am willing to do that. He advocates that the Law Commission looks at the issue of homicide in the round and, as I say, I am happy to reflect on and consider that matter in the fullness of time To return to the question of the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), I am keen to provide the House with as much information as possible and to further clarify the position around it. If I understand his question correctly, it does apply to emergency workers who are off duty, but they must be acting as an emergency worker—off duty but still responding to an incident. I hope that that provides the House, in the correct terms, with the clarity that it is seeking on that point.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Thomas Christopher John Pursglove (Conservative, Centre-right): Again, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the question. If I may, I will touch on those matters in the wind-up, because I am conscious that hon. Members have quite a lot of questions and that there are quite a few hon. Members who are keen to speak. I will gladly pick up those points in the wind-up later when we have concluded Lords amendment 104 places on statute an aggravating factor for assault committed against anyone providing a service to the public. It will send a strong message that assaults against public-facing workers are totally unacceptable and will reinforce the seriousness with which the courts treat such offences. It has been welcomed by those in the retail sector who have campaigned on this important issue. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers), who has assiduously argued the case in this House for a change in the law in this area. In earlier proceedings, the House expressed a strong desire for such a change and I am proud that the Government are helping to deliver that In earlier stages of the Bill in this House, there were also calls for the Government to raise the maximum penalties for child cruelty offences. For years, my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) has campaigned tirelessly for Tony’s law, which is named after Tony Hudgell. As a baby, Tony was abused to such an extent by his birth parents that he is severely disabled. No child should suffer such appalling abuse, especially from those who should love and care for them the most. It is right to ensure that, in such cases, the punishment can fit the crime. Such criminality is truly shocking and heinous.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Thomas Georg John Tugendhat (Conservative, Centre-right): May I just place on record the extreme gratitude of Tony’s real parents—the parents who actually love him—who have cared for him since a few days after he was born and have restored him to an extraordinary and loving child? May I also place on record my enormous gratitude to the Lord Chancellor for his work on the matter, and to the Minister and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), who are both on the Front Bench, for showing the courage and determination to make sure the measure passes? This changes not, sadly, Tony’s life—thank God, he has been cared for well—but, with any luck, the lives of many in deterring such awful crimes from ever happening again.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Social Welfare
Thomas Christopher John Pursglove (Conservative, Centre-right): I am always grateful to the hon. Lady for her interventions, and I repeat my point: we do not believe there is a barrier, but as I say, we will review the matter in the way I have set out to the House. We of course recognise that local authorities have a long established role in children’s social care and the provision of secure accommodation for children and young people. In particular, the secure children’s home legal framework may present a more straightforward route to the expansion of local authority involvement in the provision of secure accommodation than does the 16-to-19 academies framework. I reiterate: there is no legal bar, and as such the amendment must be unnecessary. Fortunately, there is much agreement on this group of amendments in the House, and I will pick up on points raised during the debate when I wind it up.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): I am very grateful to the hon. Lady. We heard very compelling testimony on precisely those points. That is not to say that some people who are serving IPP sentences have not committed very serious offences and that some of them, because of their background, do not present a very real threat to the public. It may well be that in certain cases it will be a very long time before they are capable of being released, if ever, but there are many others who fall below that threshold who are trapped unfairly in the system, and who ought to be capable of being looked at afresh, processed and released safely into the community, but we have not yet managed to do that. The Government’s amendment holds the feet of the Parole Board to the fire on that, which is good so far as it goes The other point I want to make is that we heard compelling evidence from Lord Blunkett, the originator of the IPP sentences, who accepted that it had not worked out as he had intended. That was powerful and very humbling testimony. There was also very powerful testimony from Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the former Lord Chief Justice, who has taken up this cause. He made the point that what we are doing so far is helpful. Improving the ability of people to access courses and gain the threshold for release is helpful and that is what the Government are, through their amendment, seeking to do. The need to review every case, rather than leaving them in limbo, is really important so we do not get drift However, there are two things we are not yet doing. We are not tackling the issue of needless recall. Recall is an important tool to have while we have a licence, but there is a real concern that in many cases the trigger for the recall bears no proportion to either the index offence which had caused the original sentence or the amount of time that might then be spent inside thereafter. In some cases, there was a real concern that recall was triggered for comparatively administrative breaches of the licence, rather than substantive ones linked to reoffending or increasing risk. I urge Ministers, when the Parole Board looks at each case as it will now be obliged to do under the legislation, to ensure that we do not have, frankly, risk-averse recalls. It is always a terrible balance to strike and I am very conscious of the burden on the Parole Board and probation officers in doing that, but we ought to ensure it is not done on a tick-box basis just to make sure we have protected ourselves against criticism—almost a back-covering exercise, I hate to say. There is a temptation for that in the current arrangements, but we can do better than that and I hope we will. We ought to be assessing whether the breach suggests there is an ongoing risk of reoffending or a danger to the public. That ought to be the test.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Agriculture
Jonathan Simon Djanogly (Conservative, Centre-right): May I say how pleased I am to see the Government bringing forward proposals to stamp out illegal hare coursing? It is an issue that I and many other rural MPs have campaigned on for the best part of a decade, not least as a result of the extreme violence shown by coursers in Cambridgeshire and many other rural parts of the country to those who try to stop them—farmers, local people and even police. The coursers show disregard for property rights and cause huge amounts of damage to crops and hedges.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Shailesh Lakhman Vara (Conservative, Centre-right): As a Cambridgeshire neighbour, I am well aware of the difficulties that the Bill seeks to put right. When the matter has been raised with the police, one of the main points that they make is that until now the legislation has had no teeth. When the Bill becomes law, hopefully they will have what they have always wanted. Does my hon. Friend agree that what we really need, once the Bill is on the statute book, is for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to ensure that the maximum penalties are inflicted on those who are found guilty, not only as punishment for them but to act as a powerful deterrent to others?
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Jonathan Simon Djanogly (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree with my hon. Friend in every regard. He has made the important point that when legislation is on the statute book, it must be enforced. I think he will agree with me, given the experiences we have both had in talking to local police, that they seek this legislation, they are waiting for it and they will act on it, and no doubt we are both keen to see that happen Farmers have been complaining bitterly to me, with good cause. They have a tough enough job as it is without the worry of these coursing criminals. The basic problem is that the provisions of the Hunting Act 2004 often failed to work owing to their complexity, so prosecutors started to use the old 19th-century anti-poaching laws. While those worked evidentially, they failed to have the penalty clout that was required. Fines of tens or hundreds of pounds were pretty meaningless when there were dogs worth tens of thousands and gambling opportunities worth hundreds of thousands. I even heard that the coursing was being streamed into city pubs for gambling purposes. The problem then became worse, because the threat of intimidation was so high for farmers, versus a low penalty risk for the perpetrators, that many farmers did not want to become involved in prosecutions at all Now, with this legislation leading to higher levels of fines and confiscation orders, and the ability to charge for the detained dogs and their living costs, I think that we have a much better chance of significantly reducing coursing. Now, armed with these powers, rural police forces will be able to get to work against the perpetrators. I know that in Cambridgeshire they will have the support of all the county MPs, one of whom we have heard from this evening. All of them have been actively involved in this campaign. These anti-coursing measures represent a great example of the Government’s acting in the best interests of the countryside and the farming community to counter rural crime, and they have my full support.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Matthew Alexander Vickers (Conservative, Centre-right): I am delighted to see a Bill that will do so much to deliver justice and make our communities safer. There is so much to be said, but I will speak briefly on two changes to our law that are very much overdue First, we are making it a statutory aggravating offence to assault someone who is providing a public service. When the pandemic struck, many fled to the safety of their home, but our army of key workers bravely rolled up their sleeves and got on with their job to keep this country going. Health and social care workers, transport workers and retail workers are owed a huge debt of gratitude, but not everyone in our society has shown them that gratitude As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the future of retail, I hear the horrific and increasing abuse suffered by retail workers in town centres and shopping parades across the country. Last year there were 455 assaults on retail workers—not every month, not every week, but every single day. The youngster with their first job stacking shelves and the semi-retired person with an extra part-time job on the tills to top up their income to buy their grandkids something nice for Christmas: these are normal people just doing their job. They are often not well paid, they do not have stab-proof vests or body-worn cameras, and every day they have to return to the scene of the crime These people are not assaulted because they wear shirts with Tesco or Co-op written on them; they are assaulted because they are upholding the rules that are in place to protect us. They verify people’s age when buying knives or alcohol, and during the pandemic they checked people’s masks and social distancing, undertaking statutory duties and responsibilities that we in Parliament have placed on them. It is right that they will now have statutory protections Lords amendment 1 enacts Harper’s law, and I cannot imagine that anyone has not been touched by the horrific and devastating circumstances of PC Harper’s death. I cannot imagine anyone was not moved by the unbelievable heroism, bravery and determination of his family and his wife, Lissie, in campaigning for this change to ensure that no one else will have to go through such terrible misjustice. When our amazing emergency service workers run towards danger to protect others, it is right that our legal system will now have their back by delivering justice for them and their families.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Ruth Rosamond Edwards (Conservative, Centre-right): Pointy black-tipped ears, furry and brown, and the ability to make a getaway at 45 mph. This is the description of the suspect I found digging in our veg patch the other week. I am, of course, talking about the brown hare. The occasional episode of vegetable vandalism aside, we feel privileged to share our home with these fascinating creatures that we often see streaking over the fields around our house or lolloping through our garden I strongly welcome Lords amendments 61 to 69, which create tougher penalties for hare coursing by increasing the maximum penalty for trespassing in pursuit of game to up to six months’ imprisonment. New offences have also been created: trespass with the intention of using a dog to search for or pursue a hare; and, secondly, being equipped to do so Hare coursing is a huge problem in rural parts of Rushcliffe and throughout the Vale of Belvoir. Last night, I spoke to a local farmer, who told me that hare coursers had been trespassing on his land for as long as he could remember; several times a month they vandalise his property, destroying locks and pulling gates off their posts to gain access. They destroy his crop by driving all over it and, obviously, they destroy the local hare population. He told me there were now hardly any left. Worst of all, he told me, "We know who is doing a lot of it. It’s a couple of local families but they seem to be above the law." Farmers who had challenged them had their workshops broken into and vandalised, which is why I am not sharing his name today I hope these new offences will give the police better powers to target such criminals. I welcome the new powers for courts to order the reimbursement of the police for kennelling dogs seized in relation to hare coursing, because taxpayers certainly should not be paying for it. I also welcome new powers for courts to disqualify offenders from owning a dog—no one engaged in this sort of cruelty to animals should be owning one.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Thomas Christopher John Pursglove (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank Members from across the House for their many and varied contributions to the various amendments we are considering this evening. I wish to respond to a number of the points made First, let me respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) on IPPs. I have heard his view that the amendment does not go far enough and does not take action to help IPP offenders who are still in prison. The number of IPP offenders in prison, having never been released, stood at 1,661 on 30 September 2021, which represents enormous progress when we compare it with the peak of 6,000 in 2012. The IPP action plan, produced and regularly refreshed by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, remains the best means of providing all those continuing to serve the IPP sentence with every opportunity to show they can be safely released by the Parole Board. The action plan sets out a series of measures designed to rehabilitate IPP prisoners, including through psychology-led reviews, and improved central and regional strategic oversight of IPP progression. There is clear evidence that these measures are working, and the number of IPP prisoners has decreased. IPP prisoners continue to be released in significant numbers and have a high chance of a positive outcome from Parole Board hearings. In 2020-21, more than two thirds of IPP Parole Board oral hearings resulted in a positive outcome, either a release or a progressive move to open prison Despite all that, I hope I can reassure my hon. Friend by saying that, as Ministers have said during the passage of this Bill, in this House and in the other place, we are mindful that the Justice Committee in this House is currently conducting an inquiry into IPP sentences, and we look forward to hearing the recommendations of his Committee and we will certainly consider them closely. I, along with my fellow Ministers, will continue to engage with IPP stakeholders in this House and elsewhere, and we will continue to give full consideration to any options recommended. I hope that that gives him the reassurance that he is looking for as to our intentions.