Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, I would like to address some of the issues in the Bill that relate to children and young people. Clauses 29 to 32 relate to children and alcohol; Clauses 33 to 41 relate to gang-related violence; and Clauses 79 to 90 relate to the Independent Barring Board, which is now to be known as the Independent Safeguarding Authority, and its functions. I shall deal first with the measures relating to children and alcohol. The noble Earl, Lord Rosslyn, made clear what a very serious issue this is in his excellent and very sensible speech, and I am delighted to find myself in very good company on this matter. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich; it is nice to have the blessing of the Almighty. The whole approach of this part of the Bill is wrong-headed. It will probably be ineffective and could actually be harmful. I think I know how the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child will judge it the next time it scrutinises UK compliance with the convention. I refer first to the clauses that allow the police to confiscate sealed containers of alcohol from young people in a public place, the offence of persistently possessing alcohol in a public place, and extending the directions to leave a public place to children as young as 10 years old. We on these Benches believe that children and young people who drink in a public place should not be dragged into the criminal justice system. Giving them a criminal record will damage their future prospects for employment and will be little deterrent against what is fairly common teenage behaviour. Education and a welfare-oriented approach will be much more effective than criminal sanctions. The danger is that children who want to drink will be more likely to seek out quiet isolated locations in which to do it, which may put them at great risk, particularly at night. I am also concerned that Clause 29 requires children to give their name and address to police, which will be used as evidence against them for the persistent possession offence in Clause 30. This requires them to incriminate themselves without an appropriate adult present, the significance of which they will probably not be warned about and certainly will not realise. Some of them may incriminate a completely innocent other young person by giving a false name and address, making it very difficult for the other teenager to disprove them. Clause 30 also contains the words "reasonable excuse", which means that an individual police officer will have to use his own judgment as to what such an excuse is. Will the Minister tell us what the Government have in mind? Would a child taking groceries for his mother to his grandmother be committing an offence if there was a bottle of Guinness in the bag? Clause 30 is unprecedented in that it criminalises something done a certain number of times, which may not in itself be criminal. For example, if the child takes his grandmother a bottle of Guinness once or twice he does not commit an offence, but to do it three times would get him a criminal record. That is over the top. Alcohol misuse is a serious health and social matter. I do not want to understate its seriousness, but I want to do what works. There are good examples of good practice that approach the problem in a very different way. Police in Lancashire have been accompanied by a nurse on their patrols of areas frequented by young people. She can provide health advice to young drinkers and help access to ongoing support. In Sefton, Merseyside, police and community wardens have litmus strips to test cans of soft drink for hidden alcohol. The parents of any young person found concealing alcohol like this will receive a letter from the local council’s anti-social behaviour prevention team. Initial evaluation of this scheme suggests that it has reduced the number of young people involved in street drinking and has enabled persistent offenders to be offered real help and assistance. Surely measures like this are better than the early criminalisation of children. Clause 31 extends the police power to issue "directions to leave" to children aged between 10 and 15. There is no requirement for the child to be drinking alcohol or be drunk or disorderly. I have great welfare and safeguarding concerns about this. There seems to be no obligation to take the child home or to a place of safety, as in other legislation about dispersal. The welfare of the child should be paramount in these situations. How can that be guaranteed if a child aged 10 is just moved on? In any case, other legislation already gives the police powers to take a child home or to a place of safety if he commits a breach of the peace or carries out threatening or abusive behaviour, or is found roaming the streets in the early hours of the morning. There are also curfew measures available. Why do the Government think it necessary to add to these existing powers? I support measures to ensure that young people find it very difficult to buy alcohol. I realise that it can be quite difficult for shopkeepers, especially in supermarkets where the child is not known and may look older than his age. In my local shop, the shopkeepers know most of the children, so it is not quite so difficult for them. They have no excuse. I endorse the voluntary proof-of-age schemes. I also endorse the many very good alcohol education programmes available to schools, such as those produced by Tacade, a not-for-profit organisation of which I am pleased to be a patron. These are the ways to go. I accept that we have a problem with gangs and some of them involve violence. Just the fear of violence that some gangs engender in local communities is a serious issue that damages the lives of law-abiding people. I understand that the Government are obliged to address the matter seriously. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich was right in suggesting that we should address the cause rather than the effect. This is a social problem. I believe that these measures go beyond what is appropriate for an injunction and are, in effect, an attempt to bypass the due process of the criminal justice system by using the civil courts. In doing so, they replicate some of the problems of other existing control orders and ASBOs. It is worth considering the purpose of an injunction. It is to restrain specified unlawful behaviour where the court is satisfied that it is ongoing or threatened and there is no alternative. It is entirely inappropriate to use an injunction to create an individual code of behaviour for a person to restrict their liberties and force them to behave in a certain way, particularly if they have not committed a crime. These clauses are very widely drawn. The description of a gang in these clauses might apply to any neighbourhood football team or even something as innocent as a youth choir. Perhaps those of us who are sceptical about this part of the Bill should gang together under that very dangerous gang leader, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and call ourselves the Bamboo Tendency. Seriously, I fear that these orders will be used disproportionately against young men, particularly black and ethnic-minority young men, as my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond has pointed out. The police need to be very careful that these powers are used only where there is genuine violence or a serious provable threat. There are serious doubts that Part 4 would be found to be compatible with the ECHR in domestic proceedings. In the case of McCann in relation to an ASBO, the House of Lords held that, given the seriousness of the matters involved, at least some reference to the heightened civil standard of proof should apply. It was decided that it was pragmatic that the criminal standard of proof should be indistinguishable from the heightened civil standard and that this should be applied in the case of ASBOs. Injunctions to prevent gang-related violence will in many cases involve more serious matters than those raised in ASBO applications, which are usually just neighbour nuisance and minor disorder. It is therefore not appropriate for a lower standard of proof to apply to gangs. Since these injunctions are not enforceable against children, it is really not appropriate to enforce them on adults for their own protection as we find in Clause 33(3)(b). It is also worth emphasising that contempt of such an injunction could lead to imprisonment. These sanctions are very serious, especially when the definition of violence in this case could refer just to damage to property, such as graffiti. Again, it is the usual hammer to crack a nut that we find from this Government. What evidence is there that these measures will be effective? Similar things have been done in the United States and not only have they not worked, they have been counterproductive and led to discrimination and stigmatisation of many innocent young people. I have little problem with the powers of the new Independent Safeguarding Authority, other than those we rehearsed many times during the proceedings of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act. We still have misgivings that matters such as unsubstantiated allegations can be revealed to prospective employers and that there is no right of appeal in certain cases. I have no doubt that we will discuss them again in detail in Committee. The Government are already familiar with those arguments from these Benches. In the mean time, I hope that the Government will heed the many voices raised in concern about the inappropriate criminalisation of children in this Bill.