It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson). She knows that I very much agree with the sentiment that she has just expressed around the criminalisation of women who are in one of the most difficult situations. In years gone by, people who took their own lives were subject to the criminal law. We have seen the error of our ways and changed the law on that, and I hope that we will on this too.
There are many good things in this Bill, and we have heard from the Home Secretary that there are more good things to follow, particularly the legal duty to report child sexual abuse and the prohibiting of sex offenders from changing their names. The hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) has had a great deal to do with those measures and she certainly has my fulsome thanks for all the work she has done on them. These are important changes, and the fact that the Government have listened demonstrates not only the strength of her arguments but the strength of our ministerial team.
There is nothing more corrosive than the fear of crime, and we therefore have to be careful in how we use language to frame this debate. At the beginning of today’s debate, there were way too many statistics being bandied around for my liking, so I am going to start my comments with one fact. I was going to quote Mark
Twain, but I am not sure that the word “lie” is acceptable parliamentary language, so I will not talk about lies and statistics; I will just talk about facts.
One of the most important facts, and one that will help to stop an unnecessary fear of crime, is that this Government have put in place 20,000 more police officers. We now have over 149,000 police officers in England and Wales and the fact is that that is the highest number on record. That is unequivocal. I would like to pay tribute to my local constabulary, Hampshire police, and particularly to my police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, because they have gone above and beyond what the Government asked for, which was around 500 new officers in Hampshire. More than 600 new officers have been recruited to Hampshire. Those are facts, not statistics, so hopefully we can all agree on them.
It is important that we do not use inflammatory language when it comes to crime, because people become unnecessarily concerned. I see that on the doorstep when people start talking about their fear of burglary, whereas the Home Secretary has rightly said that burglary rates have fallen dramatically. There are many other sorts of crime that we should be concerned about, so let us not make our residents concerned about things that have fallen dramatically.
As my right hon. Friend said, this Bill demonstrates the constantly changing shape of crime. People find new unacceptable ways to benefit from others, and we have to make sure they become illegal. Following some very high-profile cases, of which we are all aware, I very much welcome the introduction of a broader offence of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm. I also welcome the new aggravating factors that increase the seriousness of child sex offences where there is grooming, and of murder connected with the end of a relationship. There are important changes to be made.
There will be a duty on the College of Policing to issue a code of practice on ethical policing, which is particularly important for those of us who are proximate to the Met police—my constituency almost neighbours the Met.
There are powers for the courts to order the attendance of offenders at sentencing hearings, and to punish them if they do not attend—again, this follows some very high-profile cases. Obviously, refusing to attend a sentencing hearing can cause huge distress to families.
The Bill also has measures on knife crime. Basingstoke is a county-lines town, as we are a gateway to Hampshire. We have seen some horrific knife crimes involving young people, often from south London, and I am not surprised to see that knives account for more than 40% of homicides in the last year. The Government have introduced measures to increase the maximum penalty and to criminalise the intent to cause fear of violence, and these are all things that need to be better dealt with in law.
My hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) spoke about the antisocial behaviour provisions, which will introduce new powers to lower the age limit of community protection notices to cover younger perpetrators aged 10 or above. It is sad that I recognise the measure’s importance, because my local police have talked to me about people under the age of 16 who are creating appalling nuisance and antisocial behaviour in my community. Extending community protection notices to that younger age group, and increasing
the upper limit of fixed penalty notices, will help to give the police the tools they need to deal with the real crime in our community.
I will now comment on two particular elements of the Bill, before suggesting a couple more that the Minister may want to think about. Although I understand the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford, I think the measures on nuisance begging and rough sleeping will be more warmly received in my community than she suggests, because organised begging in our town centre, often by criminal gangs, and begging that causes a nuisance around shops and cash machines is a concern not only to residents but to retailers and business owners. It is important that we have measures in place to deal with these issues as robustly as possible, but—and this is an important but—they need to go hand in hand with effective measures to make sure we do not simply move the problem of rough sleeping either into our prisons or into other communities.
We ran a very effective programme in Basingstoke under the then Conservative administration that I hope the current independent administration will continue. It was started by then Councillor Terri Reid, who worked with Julian House, a well-known charity that, through its outreach work, supports rough sleepers into accommodation and into the help they need. If the Minister’s intention with this Bill is to marry together these provisions with effective support, I can see how it might work. This measure worked in my constituency because the money that was given by the Government to the upper tier authority was passported down to the lower tier one, and it could then work much closer to the community and to the problem, making sure that we have effective plans in place. The number of people now homeless in my community is extremely small indeed.