I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak about this very important Bill, and it is of course a pleasure to follow Scottish National party spokesman the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens).
There are some very positive aspects to the Bill that are welcome. Tackling violence against women and girls, giving powers to law enforcement agencies to respond to technological change, and strengthening the law to protect the public from violence and intimidation are much-needed measures that will certainly reassure my constituents. There are communities across my constituency that have been the victims of appalling antisocial behaviour in recent years. The police and local councils are doing what they can to protect these communities with the application and implementation of community protection notices and then public spaces
protection orders, but one challenge that the police have faced is that many of the perpetrators of antisocial behaviour are under 16. Lowering the age of a CPN to 10 will help the police in tackling antisocial behaviour and is much appreciated.
However, I am not comfortable with parts of this Bill—the last Criminal Justice Bill before the next election—and there are also things that are missing from it. I shall be as brief as possible. I apologise to those who have provided some excellent information, and I will probably do them a disservice as a consequence. I will also be blunt, as there is no other way of saying this, and I find myself being slightly firmer on this than the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper): I did not work as a Minister and as a Back Bencher on the repeal of the Vagrancy Act, only to see rough sleeping criminalised again via a different piece of legislation.
I get that there is an issue with aggressive begging. We on the ministerial taskforce, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) was very much a part of, were always aware of that. There was always a view that other pieces of legislation, such as the existing antisocial behaviour legislation, could cope with aggressive begging being transferred in. At no point did we, either as a taskforce or as part of the Vagrancy Act repeal, hear evidence about aggressive rough sleeping.
Rough sleepers require holistic support. They often have extremely complex needs, including significant mental health needs. Visibility may be uncomfortable for many, but it also enables support workers from the many brilliant charities and local authorities to reach out to them. Issuing prevention notices does nothing to solve the problem, but pushes them further away from the solution. Sentencing them to prison creates nothing more than extra problems for the person and the creaking prison estate.