Emergency Workers (Obstruction) Bill

I congratulate the Father of the House on securing the Bill and on facilitating its smooth passage. As a member of the 1997 intake and a London MP, let me start in the same place as my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) did. At that time, we sat for perhaps half the Fridays available instead of 13. That was an interesting way to get more and more practice in this place. None of us can ever get enough of that. We had all-day Adjournment debates as well as debates on private Members’ Bills. I remember with great fondness duelling constantly, but mostly failing in the attempt, with my right hon. Friend—I hope that he would not have minded me calling him that—the former Member for Bromley and Chislehurst. As this is the first time that I have participated on a Friday since his sad demise, I want to put on record how much I learned from him. He was much maligned, misunderstood and excoriated—not least by Labour Members who did not know any better—but he will be sadly missed, not least by the 1997 intake of Friday boys, some of whom have been mentioned in dispatches today and some not. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) on securing cross-party support for the Bill. I also congratulate him on selecting, from among the plethora of choice of legal advice in this House, my hon. Friends the Members for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) rather than certain other learned colleagues. I can furnish him with a list of those on both sides of the House from whom he should never seek legal advice. It is important—this has underscored many of today’s speeches—to say what precisely the Bill is supposed to do. It is not an attempt to reinvent assault legislation. It is not an attempt to establish a legislative framework for other things such as education awareness, antisocial behaviour, respect and all the other relevant considerations that hon. Members have mentioned. The Bill does not seek to achieve all that. Nor does it seek to afford aggravated status to the offence of obstructing emergency workers—a point to which I shall return. However, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) suggests, the Bill seeks to fill a serious gap. Many of the concerns that he and my hon. Friends expressed would be more relevant if we wanted the Bill to be an overall comprehensive measure like the Scottish Act, but the Bill does not profess to be such a measure. There is no need for that, not least because, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath well knows, the Scottish Act sought to fill considerably more gaps in the Scottish legislative framework, and those gaps simply are not there in English legislation. I had to check my notes on this point, but I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West, for saying that a Bill that the Home Office had anything to do with was short and clear. That has not entirely been my experience, either as a Back Bencher or as a Minister, particularly in the Home Office, so I am grateful for those comments. The Bill is short and clear—rightly so, because these are extraordinarily serious matters, and filling the gap is hugely important. I must confess that although hon. Friends and colleagues have tried to explain such behaviour, I do not entirely understand why people think it a clever, smart or positive use of spare time to throw rocks at ambulances, or why they regard people in uniform who seek to help the public, and who invariably save lives, as invading their turf, or think that they are just ““uniforms””, like the police. Some colleagues were even more generous, saying that the blue lights sparked off adrenaline, everyone became terribly excited, and testosterone levels went through the roof, but none of those are excuses for impeding, obstructing or doing something worse to prevent our emergency workers from going about their business. That simply is not right in any way, shape or form. Whether it is just a kick-out at authority, or whatever the excuse is, or not, it must desist, and we must introduce legislation that addresses the issues—and the Bill is a necessary part of that. I know—all the more because, happily, there is a cross-party approach to the Bill—that the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) would tell us that the perpetrators simply need a bit more love and affection. He would say that they are much misunderstood, and if only we understood them more, everything would be so different, and that we should hug them or whatever—but I do not agree with that approach, either. However, to take one step back, I agree with the opening sentence of the contribution by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown)—her point was repeated by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous)—that we have to go a long way back along the chain and consider issues such as parenting, family breakdown and other factors that are the antecedents of antisocial behaviour, to try to address such matters. That is part of the Government’s comprehensive approach. Many of my hon. Friends mentioned the respect agenda and what we are trying to do to tackle antisocial behaviour. That very much fits in with trying to take preventive measures, but we have heard some horrendous stories this morning about the ways in which people seek to impede and obstruct emergency workers. Some of the points that colleagues have made are entirely fair and were dealt with in Committee. Some have been answered, but some perhaps will need to be revisited. It was right and proper to try to define an emergency worker as narrowly as possible, but also to include the escape clause so that we can consider adding to the categories, if experience dictates that the list is not adequate. I understand what was said by many colleagues about social workers and people who, in the course of their routine day-to-day work, may not necessarily be construed as emergency workers, but who are often put in positions in which they solve or help to solve an emergency. Those people deserve to be covered by the Bill so that they are not obstructed while carrying out their work. Those matters can and should be considered. As I said, the Bill was not intended to reinvent assault legislation in the context of public workers. We are doing that in many other ways. It has been pointed out that unlike Scotland, we have the Sentencing Guidelines Council. It already almost imposes a tariff for impeding people in the execution of public service, and we are considering in detail, with the council, other ways in which sentences can reflect the spirit and sentiment of the Bill. It is appropriate that many colleagues have put the wider issues of assault of public sector workers generally, and emergency workers specifically, in the context of the Bill, but the Bill does not try to do everything. Its narrow focus is appropriate. It probably was inappropriate that the original Bill almost exactly reflected the Scottish provision, given that we do not start from the same legislative base. I shall say very carefully—and I shall not, as I was invited to, tease the House about what the Sentencing Guidelines Council may or may not say—that that is a matter that the Government should keep under review. Having set up the Sentencing Guidelines Council, we should let it do its work. If that achieves what we want with respect to the legislative base, that is more appropriately done in that way, although I reserve our right to return to the matter.