It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy).
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I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for having indicated from the Dispatch Box that this is to be a free vote; that is an important principle when considering new clause 11 specifically. I must gently say to him that I am a little disappointed that I have to speak to the issue without hearing his arguments on why the new clause is not necessary, although of course I will be here for the winding-up speeches to listen to his arguments then.
I will speak briefly on the hon. Lady’s new clauses 13 and 14 on street harassment. That is an important issue. We have seen work on violence against women and girls, started by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I am blessed to have sitting next to me my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who is bringing me up to speed on some of the more recent work done in the Home Office by her successor, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), and now by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Mims Davies). That is quite a list of female Members of this House who have sought over many years to get legislation on to the statute book so that we can tackle public sexual harassment effectively.
I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), who is still doing great work in this area, and I look forward to his private Member’s Bill. However, we had the recommendations from the Law Commission many months ago, we have had a Home Office consultation, and it feels to me that we are making very slow progress. Meanwhile, thousands of young women, particularly those in school uniform, are still subject to public sexual harassment—and indeed other types of harassment, as the hon. Member for Walthamstow pointed out.
There is great work going on in police forces up and down the country, including in my own county of Hampshire, which is no surprise given that we have a great female chief constable who has been leading on this issue and a female police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, who has spoken extensively up and down
the country and is the lead police and crime commissioner on violence against women and girls. However, the reality is that progress has been too slow.
On new clause 11, abortion is an important and emotive issue, and I do not in any way undermine the profoundly held beliefs people have on it, but the new clause, as the hon. Lady has pointed out, is about a woman’s right to access healthcare. It is a decision that they will have made in some instances many weeks before they ever attend a clinic.
I will speak of the experience we have had relatively locally to my constituency. Just a few weeks ago, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council successfully introduced a buffer zone in six streets surrounding the British Pregnancy Advice Service clinic in Bournemouth. That has come at significant expense to local authority taxpayers. I welcome its contribution to the patchwork of protections that we see in five areas of the country, but it is a patchwork; five areas have successfully brought in public space protection orders, but there are 50 clinics where they might be of benefit.
Enormous work has been done by colleagues on both sides of the House to bring forward protections for women—but protections from what? Specifically, in the consultation in Bournemouth, which was completed by more than 2,000 people, 75% of whom showed that they supported a buffer zone, it was protection from intimidation, protection from being followed and protection from being filmed. I think we would all in this House want to see people who are accessing healthcare being protected in those ways.
Service providers have consistently sought to use the laws that I know my hon. Friend the Minister will point out are already available and are suggested by the Home Office, but even where individual groups have been dealt with through the courts, other individuals have come forward and the protests outside the clinics have simply not stopped. Annually, about 100,000 women are targeted in that way—abused and harassed while they are just trying to access healthcare that is perfectly legal.