My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman. I agree with many of his observations and will try not to repeat the points that have already been made in the debate. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Donaghy on introducing the Bill and pay tribute to her for the clarity with which she has explained the legislation and set out the arguments for it, not just in her speech today but otherwise in briefings and articles. I also record my thanks and congratulations to Holly Lynch and Chris Bryant, the more so because the Bill appears destined to make it to the statute book, which is no mean feat for a Private Member’s Bill—particularly as, in its original form, it faced the opposition of the Government. It is good to see a Bill get another chance, and I support it and wish it speedy passage. However, like others, I have reservations about the efficacy of what we are doing, and I intend to draw on that for the points I want to make.
It is more than 20 years since I practised law in Scotland. For the vast majority of that time, I served a community that was a microcosm of Scotland, and then went on to represent those same people as their Member of Parliament, so I knew the community well and knew the emerging trends in behaviour. During my time in the law, I confess that, like many others who work in the justice system, I was a stern critic of the tendency of politicians to seek solutions for emerging or increasing social problems by isolating particular trends in behaviour and legislating for a specific offence. Practitioners were universally of the view that this behaviour was already sufficiently covered by the provisions of the criminal law, and the problem lay with protecting people, enforcement or the increasing failure of sentencing to have a deterrent effect on people’s behaviour. Actually, they were reinforcing impunity by doing what they were in the community that I knew very well. We need to be concerned about that.
The former position, as explained by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, is exactly where the Government were originally: that there was already sufficient provision in law. Of course, by the same token, the Government held the responsibility for ensuring that that law was properly enforced or having the intended deterrent effect. They have changed their collective mind, for whatever reason, and I, too, have been persuaded, despite my reservations, that a
special offence is appropriate in this case, although I recognise that it can become a problem if you are persuaded by each individual case rather than addressing the issue that lies at the heart of the matter.
I read the Official Report of the Bill’s passage through the other place. I am also cognisant of our role as the secondary Chamber in this environment, and there appears to be unanimity in the other place that the legislation is part of the answer to the problem. What impressed me most was the argument made by my noble friend Lady Donaghy about the special nature of the work that we are asking these people to do. In her recent article in the House magazine, she rightly highlighted that while all cases of assault are to be abhorred and are difficult for the victim, emergency service workers are in the particular position where, in many cases, they cannot remove themselves from the situation. Not only can they not remove themselves from the physical scene, they often cannot remove themselves from the presence of and must be as near as possible to the perpetrator, because the perpetrator often requires continuing emergency attention. That puts people who do this work in a very particular situation and at particular risk.
I will be pleased to see the Bill becoming law, but we should not mislead ourselves that this is the job done. We have all received briefings from various places, and I am grateful for all of them, but I received an interesting briefing yesterday from the London Ambulance Service. I was struck by one point in all these briefings. As my noble friend Lady Donaghy said, there is undoubtedly an alarming increase. The statistics that the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, gave us of assaults on police officers were extremely alarming. This means that every police officer on the streets of our communities could expect to be assaulted every fortnight, by my calculation. These are extremely alarming statistics.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Bach that it is impossible to have what you would call accurate statistics about this. But what is not impossible is to have reliable statistics, and I was struck as I read all these statistics by the degree to which they were always qualified about their reliability. In the absence of those data, there is a problem for us in what we are trying to do here. Does not our duty of care to those public servants whom we expose to this risk include at least the obligation, in this day and age, when people are handling data in very imaginative ways for all sorts of things, to provide some methodology for collecting data about risk and incident that is reliable? That would allow us to appreciate not just the generic but the specific scale of the problem, and to understand the trends. That is where our business lies—in changing trends—and it is important to have data that allow us to know, over the course of time, whether what we do here is just symbolic, or whether it actually makes a difference.
That leads me to a couple of points that I want to make, drawing on experience otherwise on these islands. We have the Scottish experience with this particular legislation, over a decade of it. I am obliged and grateful to the Law Society of Scotland, which I encouraged to have a look at this legislation and which produced very quickly, with minimal resources, this
helpful briefing, which we all received. I am grateful to it for a number of things. I got it yesterday, so I have not had a chance to go into it in detail, but it is a distillation of some information over a decade of experience of a piece of legislation like this, in a jurisdiction which proportionately should reflect one to 10, and usually does.
The Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005 contains similar legislative provisions, was passed in 2005 and amended in 2008. Scotland has over a decade of laws like these. So what does it tell us? Table 1 on page 7 of the briefing has figures that demonstrate the rate of prosecution, although it does not demonstrate the rate of conviction—but it indicates to me that, after 10 years or more of this legislation, there have been approximately 250 to 300 concluded prosecutions in Scotland per year. So it does not seem to me to have made a significant impact on what must be the scale of the incidence of this sort of behaviour. I shall not do anything more than draw your Lordships’ attention to that, but it deserves some other study. I shall try between now and other stages of this Bill, if it proceeds from here, to have a look at what those other data reveal—because there are data from other places—and maybe draw some conclusions from that.
My final point is also drawn from the Scottish experience—and I make this short point to my noble friend and the Government. I acknowledge the positive revision that was made to the original version of this Bill in the other place, where additional workers were added. Scotland came back to this in 2008 and added mental health workers, social workers and, interestingly, members of Her Majesty’s Coastguard. So unless this Bill applies as an Act to members of Her Majesty’s Coastguard, we will be in the interesting situation whereby, for a UK service, if you serve in Scotland and are under that jurisdiction you have protection, but if you serve elsewhere, you will not have protection. That may be something that needs to be addressed.
11.23 am