Let me confirm that I was talking about rough sleeping. The antisocial behaviour action plan, which is cited in the explanatory notes, to provide the support that is needed is vague, and I hope that the Minister will reassure us that far more support will be given to local authorities if these measures come through, to make sure that they have effective provisions in place.
I will speed up, Mr Speaker. The provisions in the Bill on intimate image abuse relate directly to the Law Commission’s work in this area. Again, I pay tribute to it for bringing forward those provisions and to the Government for taking them up. They will start to complete the necessary legislation to protect individuals from intimate image abuse online. To have an intimate image published online without one’s consent is akin to rape and it is now being dealt with in the criminal law,
for which the Government are to be applauded. I also thank Professor Clare McGlynn, at Durham University, who has done so much work in making sure that these provisions are as they should be.
There are a couple of issues where the Government might consider adding provisions into the Bill. I have already raised the first of those with the Home Secretary in my intervention: non-consensual intimate images not being removed online, even though they may have been part of a criminal case where somebody is now in jail. There are mechanisms for us to be able to remove these images, but it sounds as though some people are not removing them and that the law may need to be tightened further. Finally, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North has suggested that this Bill may be a place to decriminalise abortion for women. We will come later on, perhaps in the remaining stages, to whether this Bill is the right place to do that, when there is perhaps not sufficient time to go through all the details. If that were to be the case, I gently suggest that perhaps the Government will want to look again at my sentencing guidelines Bill so that we make sure we continue to take incremental steps to modernise the way women are treated in the law on abortion. We have had provisions on buffer zones and telemedicine, and sentencing could well be a way in which we could make sure that women are starting to be treated in the way they should be: as patients and not as criminals when it comes to abortion.
4.13 pm