Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-05
Topic: Law and Crime
Victoria Atkins (Conservative, Centre-right): This Bill delivers on our promise to the British people to keep them safe and to crack down on criminals. This Bill backs the police, recognising the unique and enormous sacrifices they and their families make to protect us all. This Bill imposes a legal duty on local councils, the police, health services, schools and prisons to work together to prevent serious violence in their neighbourhoods This Bill balances the rights of protestors to demonstrate with the rights of residents to access hospitals, to go to work, to let their children sleep at night. And, despite some of the claims from the Opposition, this Bill includes measures that will help to protect women and girls, but that go further than that and protect the whole of society from some of the most dangerous offenders that are sentenced. This includes managing sex offenders before and after conviction and, importantly, providing clarity on the extraction of data from victims’ phones, in line with the rape review that the Government published only a few weeks ago Let me briefly address the Government amendments in this group. In Committee, I undertook to consider further whether the reporting duty in respect of the police covenant should be extended to apply to the British Transport police, the Ministry of Defence police and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. Having reflected further, we agree. We want the wider policing family to be included in the covenant, and amendment 34 does exactly that, covering not only these three forces but the National Crime Agency. They do essential work for us, and we want them and their families to be looked after. Government amendments 35 to 45 standardise the traffic offences in clauses 4 and 5, and clauses in relation to serious violence reduction orders, for the British Transport police—again, consistency in how we deal with these important matters Let me turn to the non-Government amendments. I will not be able to deal with them all, but I will pick out the ones that have been talked about most frequently. First, I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and many other Members across the House for raising the issue of sexual harassment, not just in the context of this Bill but in our wider work The murders that, sadly, we have heard so much about in this Chamber—the murders of Nicole Smallman, Bibaa Henry, Sarah Everard and PCSO Julia James—have caused millions of women and girls to share their own experiences and fears of walking in our towns and cities. We have also heard girls’ stories about their experiences at school through the social media platform Everyone’s Invited We are listening to women and girls. In March, we reopened the survey on violence against women and girls and received more than 180,000 responses in terms of the survey as a whole. Each of those responses is helping to shape our work developing this vital strategy. We therefore recognise the shocking extent of street harassment and the strength of feeling concerning the need for a new offence While it is the case that there are already offences available to address sexual harassment behaviour, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham, whom I have met recently to discuss this, can rest assured that we remain open-minded on this issue and are continuing to examine the case for a bespoke offence. As part of the commitment, the new strategy on tackling violence against women and girls will focus on the need to educate and to change cultural attitudes. A new offence can do so much, but we need to go further than that, and that is our intention As I announced in Committee, I am pleased that as part of the cross-government work and work across agencies, the College of Policing intends to develop advice for police forces to assist them to use existing offences in the most effective way to address reports of sexual harassment, and the CPS will be updating its guidance to include specific material on sexual harassment Moving on, new clauses 26 and 27 have been tabled by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson)—indeed my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) has spoken to me about this—and they come out of the very tragic circumstances of the rape and murder of Libby Squire. As a constituency MP near the Humber, I very much join both the right hon. Lady and my hon. Friend in paying tribute to Libby and her family.