Emergency Workers (Protection) Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, although I cannot comment on the details about his constituency. In general, we need to take a fresh look at the legislative and regulatory approach so that we can encourage our young people to engage with our public services and understand just how they operate. We need to think outside the box. Changes in legislation that may not appear to have immediate relevance to the issue will in fact have an impact on it and we need to be aware of that. The Bill will encourage a more proactive engagement of all the public services, especially the police, with the fire brigades and ambulance services, with better co-ordination to ensure that there are more prosecutions. As was pointed out earlier, there is a lack of prosecutions under existing law, so by focusing public attention on the issue the Bill will go some way towards ensuring that all the agencies establish procedures to provide more evidence and an extra incentive for the Crown Prosecution Service to undertake more prosecutions. The antisocial behaviour order agenda could be a way of restricting the activities of certain antisocial young people who try to perpetrate vicious ambushes and stunts on the emergency services. In a small but significant number of areas, there seems to be a culture in which violence against members of the public services is part of a game designed for kicks—a sort of video nasty that is not on video. We must break that culture, and although the legislation cannot deal with all the social and psychological problems that lie behind that pattern of activity, it will undoubtedly be part of our armoury in taking action against it. I welcome the Bill. It cannot solve the problem alone, but by making it easier to prosecute people who deliberately impede those who carry out vital emergency services it will go some way towards addressing the problem. A secondary impact of the Bill, which may be more profound in the long run, is that it will focus attention on the issue and may stimulate other action to address the problem.