I wish to speak to the new clause and amendments that I and the hon. Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis) tabled, and I will also say a word about the Government amendments and Labour’s amendment 96.
Our amendments all arise from the deliberations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which has just completed its report on the Bill. I welcome the Minister of State, Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker)—if I can have his attention for a second—to his new responsibilities. I hope it will help him and the House if I say that we do not intend to seek to divide the House on the new clause or the amendments, but I hope that he will be able to give me a positive and constructive response. On many occasions we have been on the same side, trying to get positive and constructive responses from previous Conservative and Labour Governments. We have not always succeeded, but I hope that the new form of double act will allow me to ask for some reasonable changes and him to agree, either today or very shortly, to the changes that we seek.
I will put on record the relevant parts of the summary of the Joint Committee’s report, which we published on 9 October. It was the Committee’s fourth report of this Session. It states:
“The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 9 May 2013…It is a substantial Bill containing many provisions with significant human rights implications”.
The new clause relates to one of those implications. All the amendments in this group have human rights implications, which is why Mr Speaker has grouped them
We should like Ministers to pay attention to the issue of antisocial behaviour, which I shall come to expressly; to that of forced marriage; and, probably most politically controversially, to those of powers to stop, question, search and detain at ports, and compensation for miscarriages of justice. We shall come to those matters later in our deliberations.
We are grateful for the way the Bill team facilitated the Committee’s scrutiny of those issues, but we have three qualifications, as set out in our unanimous report. It states:
“First, we doubt whether the mechanisms for ensuring that a systematic analysis of the impact of laws and policies on children’s rights is carried out are yet embedded across Whitehall. We repeat our call for the Government to reassure Parliament that in future it will conduct a thorough assessment of the impact of legislation on the rights of children under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child before the legislation is introduced. We propose to raise with the Children’s Commissioner the question of what can
be done, in practical terms, to accelerate the Government’s progress towards implementing its undertaking to Parliament of nearly three years ago.
Second, the number of significant Government amendments to the Bill with potentially significant human rights implications has made our scrutiny—”
any Committee’s scrutiny, but ours in particular—
“of the Bill’s human rights compatibility more difficult”.
We take up that issue with the Leader of the House on a regular basis, because the more amendments are tabled late in the day, the more difficult Committees such as ours find it to report to the House and advise colleagues on how to respond. The summary continues:
“Third, the Government has not always provided us with information it has promised in sufficient time to enable us to scrutinise it adequately. We call on the Government, once again, to ensure in future that we are provided with the information we request in time to inform our scrutiny of Government Bills.”
Let me address the new clause and amendments to the antisocial behaviour proposals collectively, and then I will consider them individually although I do not anticipate detaining the House for too long. Parts 1 to 6 of the Bill reform current measures on antisocial behaviour, and the Committee’s view is that preventive measures against antisocial behaviour are, in principle, a welcome fulfilment of the state’s positive obligation to protect people against having their rights interfered with by others—that is the important context in which we consider all human rights implications of the Bill’s antisocial behaviour provisions.
New clause 33 would add to the Bill the requirement that
“The courts must take into account the best interests of the child as a primary consideration”
when imposing an injunction. It is a common principle of criminal and welfare law that the best interests of children be taken into account, and we would like that written into the Bill. The new clause simply states that the best interests of the child should be taken into account in four situations, namely when the courts are deciding to impose
“an injunction;
the terms of any prohibition or requirement;
sanctions for breach of an injunction; and
when determining reporting of a child’s case.”.
The Committee considered the human rights compatibility of the new civil injunction to prevent nuisance and annoyance—an IPNA. The Bill states that an IPNA may be imposed if the court considers it “just and convenient” to prevent antisocial behaviour—a lower test than the test of necessity required by human rights law. We also considered that the new IPNA definition of antisocial behaviour is too broad and not clear enough. I hope Ministers will consider positively the idea that the Bill should be as clear as possible and compatible with other legislation; we should not start introducing concepts not found in other legislation, which would mean that people would not know how the law would be interpreted.
In the Committee’s view, the Bill’s current provisions on the prohibitions and requirements that can be attached to an injunction are far too broad. Furthermore, we have not been persuaded that it is necessary to state expressly that prohibitions and requirements in an IPNA must “so far as practicable” avoid any conflict with religious beliefs. The Committee is clear—the House has been clear about this on many occasions—that the
freedom to hold religious beliefs, or any beliefs that may not be from a religious perspective, is not a relative right but an absolute right that cannot be interfered with. The power to exclude a person from his or her home through the use of an IPNA is a severe measure, and the Committee believes further provision is required to ensure that such a power is used only when necessary.
As the new sanctions can be imposed on children as young as 10, the Committee also scrutinised the provisions and considered their impact on the rights of children. To reduce the potential negative impact of IPNA measures on children, we recommend that the courts must take into account the best interests of the child as a primary consideration in any IPNA legal proceedings. That explains the Committee’s position, and I will now consider quickly other amendments in the group.