28: Clause 7, page 8, line 31, at end insert—
“(d) each NHS body in the area.”Member’s explanatory statement
This is to ensure that the local health sector is consulted when a a local plan is being prepared to prevent and reduce serious violence in that local area.
My Lords, in moving Amendment 28 in my name, I will speak also to the other amendments in this group.
Those under the new legal obligation to collaborate with each other to prevent and reduce serious violence are set out in Schedule 1 to the Bill and include clinical commissioning groups and local health boards, but they do not, for example, include hospital trusts. We will come to what should be included in serious violence in a later group, but in that group, the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, has an amendment to include violence that results in the victim receiving injury that requires emergency hospital treatment, or where the injury amounts to grievous bodily harm.
Leaving the definition of serious violence to one side until we reach that group, we know from the work of Professor Jonathan Shepherd of Cardiff University how important information about knife crime, for example, is to the police in tackling that type of serious violence. It therefore seems to be a serious omission that not all NHS bodies in the area are listed as bodies that must be consulted as provided for in Clause 7(4), particularly hospital trusts. This omission leads one to question again to what extent this is really a public health approach to tackling and reducing serious violence. I have suggested that hospital trusts, for example, are included as bodies that must be consulted, rather than specified authorities, to avoid hospital trusts being compelled to divulge sensitive personal patient information under the other provisions of this chapter.
Hospital trusts can also play an important role in allowing charities such as Redthread to engage with victims of knife crime at “teachable moments” when victims involved in gangs are at their most receptive to being approached to discuss a way out of their violent lifestyles, particularly when they have been seriously injured or their injuries are life-threatening. I have personally heard powerful testimony from a young father, the mother of whose child had committed suicide, realising when in A&E with a serious knife wound that his child might have to grow up without either of his parents if he did not turn his back on his violent past. This is an example of a truly multiagency, public health approach to serious violence, where those involved in violent gangs are not necessarily imprisoned—where they may be further brutalised—but are supported to turn their lives around.
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As I said on Wednesday, many young people lack family support and find themselves groomed by gang members who appear to provide them with the sense of belonging that they so desperately seek. Of course, the reality of being in a gang is very different, where discipline within the gang is enforced by violence and junior members and girls are often abused and exploited. It is often not the fault of the parents, or the lone parent, who must do three minimum-wage jobs to pay the rent, put food on the table and pay their energy bills, and as a result can rarely be there for their kids, but it creates an emotional vacuum that gangs can so easily fill. Young people’s groups can provide positive alternatives to gangs, where that need for a sense of belonging can be met. Similarly, religious groups can provide not only a similar positive sense of belonging but a positive counternarrative to extremist distortions of true religion which can lead to serious violence. As the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks—may his memory be a blessing—said, the antidote to bad religion is good religion.
I acknowledge and admire the tireless work of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, to raise awareness of the negative impacts of alcohol on society. In his Amendment 32 he also includes drug use as another driver of serious violence. Certainly, drugs such as crack cocaine can lead to violent behaviour, as alcohol does, and of course, while drug supply continues to be in the hands of criminals, there will be violence associated with turf wars between rival drug gangs. When the only way to enforce drug deals is through the use or threat of violence, drugs can also be a cause of serious violence by that means.
We also share the concerns of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee in Amendments 33 and 41, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, and supported by my noble friend Lord Beith, that a strategy under this part of the Bill can have legislative effect, for example, to place authorities such as education authorities under a statutory duty to comply with a strategy that does not even have to be made public. However, I am not convinced that a national serious violence oversight board, as suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, is necessary, as I would hope that such bodies as Her Majesty’s inspectorates would already be under an obligation to review serious violence strategies and share good practice—but I will listen with interest to her arguments and the response of the Minister. In the meantime, I beg to move.
My Lords, I support Amendment 28, tabled by my noble friend Lord Paddick, which would add each NHS body in an area to the formal list of bodies to be consulted on a local plan, including why NHS bodies should not be a specified authority. I will use one example of how critical to planning they can be to support the argument.
Our Liberal Democrat colleague Caroline Pidgeon, a member of the Greater London Assembly, wrote a report in 2015 to the Greater London Assembly on knife crime. She encouraged the then Mayor of London to adopt the Cardiff model in A&E to help tackle knife crime. After a long campaign, Mayor Boris Johnson finally agreed, and one of the key recommendations in Caroline’s report was to collect anonymised data.
Currently all accident and emergency departments in London collect anonymised data on violent crime for those who need treatment. The scheme means that A&E departments share key information on things such as the location of crime and weapons used with the police and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, while protecting personal data. This data helps to guide interventions and prevention programmes and is invaluable in gaining knowledge on violent crime patterns. This is recognised as good practice, but there is an enormous amount of learning going on in our A&E departments as they collate that data. If the Government intend to emulate this elsewhere, it would also be helpful for the Bill to recognise that there is an enormous amount of expertise in our health bodies that can help tackle serious violence. It seems logical therefore that health bodies should also be statutory consultees.
My noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle is unable to attend your Lordships’ Committee today, so I am proposing Amendment 30 in her place.
Along with the other amendments in this group, our amendment will improve the Government’s attempts to reduce serious violence. Youth groups, cultural groups and religious groups are just a few of the organisations that should be consulted in the exercise of the serious violence duty. There are many others too, and there will be big gaps in any serious violence reduction plan that has not consulted with and included these groups. They know their communities well, often with a different angle from other health services, local authorities and so on, and are currently not listed in the Bill—but they definitely should be. Perhaps most importantly, they can often shine a light on the failures of those other bodies with respect to how they perhaps underserve or misunderstand their communities.
So I hope the Minister will outline how youth, cultural and religious groups will be properly involved in this serious violence duty.
My Lords, as chair of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I support Amendments 33 and 41 in my name. I intend to speak only once on the whole Bill, unless the spirit moves me via my noble friend the Minister’s reply. She will know that there were quite a few recommendations in the Delegated Powers Committee report, but I have put down just these two amendments.
If the Committee will permit, I will take the first minute to run through the more general criticism we made of the delegated powers in the Bill. I will not return to this subject again. In our response to the memorandum, we said:
“We are surprised and concerned at the large number of inappropriate delegations of power in this Bill … We are particularly concerned that the Bill would … allow Ministers—and even a non-statutory body—to influence the exercise of new police powers (including in relation to unauthorised traveller encampments and stop and search) through ‘guidance’ that is not subject to Parliamentary scrutiny … leave to regulations key aspects of new police powers—to restrict protest and to extract confidential information from electronic devices—that should instead be on the face of the Bill; and … allow the imposition of statutory duties via the novel concept of ‘strategy’ documents that need not even be published.”
That is the subject of the amendments before us today, and that is what I shall major on.
We concluded our general introduction by saying:
“We are disappointed that the inclusion of these types of delegations of power—on flimsy grounds—suggests that the Government have failed when preparing this Bill to give serious consideration to recommendations that we have made in recent reports on other Bills.”
That is fairly scathing condemnation, and it is a bit unfair on noble Lords in this Committee and from the Home Office, because they had nothing to do with drafting these provisions.
My Lords, my name is on the amendment, following that of the chairman of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. I commend the committee’s work in general, with more general comments on this Bill and the two amendments to which it has given rise in this particular case.
I am not persuaded of the merits of having a statutory structure for local co-operation strategies. I am strongly in favour of local co-operation; it should be happening everywhere to deal with serious violence and many other problems in the system. Where that is done and works well—as it has done in youth justice, to some extent—it demonstrates its value pretty quickly.
However, this is a statutory scheme; because of that, statutory obligations are created and there must be accountability for them. I am in a charitable mood so I will suggest that, if not exactly careless drafting, this did not anticipate the question, “What if no provision is made for publication of the strategy?” That is what the two amendments deal with. Perhaps the Government are undiminished in their intention that the strategies will be published and will therefore be accountable to the communities in which they are deployed but, as the Bill stands, it is weak on that point and it would be much better to make it clearer.
This is not by any means the worst delegated power issue to arise in the Bill—I am intrigued that the Home Office got off lightly tonight, with the chairman of the DPRRC calling it not the worst department. However, in this particular case, it needs to be made much clearer that, if statutory obligations are created and strategies have the force of statute, they must be published and must be accountable to the communities in which they operate.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for his remarks. It will come as no surprise to the Minister that I have a few things to say about alcohol over the course of our deliberations.
The Home Office’s outcome delivery plan, published on 15 July 2021, highlights alcohol use as a principal driver of serious violence and other crimes. However, the plan does not include any measures to reduce alcohol use. Reducing alcohol availability, increasing alcohol price and limiting alcohol marketing are powerful levers already in the hands of the Government for reducing serious violence, but none of these is included anywhere. As drafted, the Bill appears to be blind to the ubiquitous role of alcohol in serious violence both in and outside the home.
In 2019, 176,000 people in England and Wales needed emergency hospital treatment after being injured in violent incidents. Most of this serious violence takes place after 10 pm and is alcohol related. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the Crime Survey for England and Wales demonstrates so clearly. People living in the most deprived areas are six times more likely to be affected than those in the least deprived areas. Quite apart from triggering violence, intoxication increases vulnerability, including to sexual violence, as physical decision-making capability is eroded. Hate violence increases as inhibition decreases.
One of the solutions is pricing. Even tiny alcohol price increases make a big difference. A 1% increase across the on and off-licence trades is estimated to reduce the number of people injured in serious violence by at least 6,000 in England and Wales. But at the moment, the Government’s action is in the opposite direction: they freeze or even reduce the levies and duties on alcohol. We wait with interest to see what the Chancellor will do this coming Wednesday, because effectively what the Government have done in recent years by reducing the price of alcohol in relative terms is give a licence for people to drink more and commit more violence, particularly after 10 pm. I hope there is some chance that we will start taking a different view of that. The statistics should not be ignored; they have got worse, and we should be taking action.
My Lords, I declare my interests in the register of interests. I am the independent chair of the Nottingham Crime & Drug Partnership. As this may cross some of the things I say, I am also a principal research fellow at the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham.
The Bill requires authorities involved in the serious violence reduction duty to prepare and implement a strategy to prevent and reduce serious violence in their local area. These amendments are incredibly important because the strategy is about how we implement all the other things we are talking about. The amendments are about that strategy, what it should involve and how it can be made more effective. Such detail is what the Committee stage is about.
The Government’s figures from the impact assessment published on 30 June 2021 are simply unacceptable and we have to do something about them. They say:
“Since 2014 certain types of serious violence have increased markedly in England and Wales. Offences involving knives increased by 84 per cent between the year to June 2014 and the year to June 2020. Homicides increased by around 38 per cent and gun crime rose by 28 per cent between year to June 2014 and year to June 2020.”
In the year ending June 2020, 262 people were stabbed to death. In 2019-20, 4,800 admissions for assault by a sharp object were recorded, with some offences never reported. Redthread, which the noble Lord mentioned, is one of the special projects in Nottingham which deals with that. I say those figures not to be alarmist or to criticise, but to outline for the Committee, those who read our affairs and some who are no doubt watching them, that this is a colossal problem for us as a society. We are struggling to deal with it and do something about it.
I asked many Ministers in the other place and am starting to ask in this place, why this Bill will be different from other Bills. Nobody has passed a Bill on serious violence over the past 30, 40 or 50 years that has not sought to do exactly what this Bill is seeking to do. There has not been a police force, a justice system or a local authority across the country that has not sought to reduce serious violence. It is a failure of public policy for decades, but it is particularly pronounced at the moment. Whether it is drugs, alcohol or other things that are motiving and pushing it, the Committee are considering how this time it will be different. Why will the strategies we are putting forward now mean that the police, local authorities, NHS bodies, youth services, residents’ associations, wherever they are, are empowered to succeed in a way that strategies that were implemented before have not been successful?
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The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, suggests that young people’s groups and religious and cultural groups must also be consulted. In these cases, such groups can have a crucial role to play in providing a safe alternative to the sense of belonging that many young people desperately seek and that criminal gangs appear to provide.
We all know how it happens. The Bill has come from another place; Ministers who have served in the Home Office and other departments will honestly admit this. I dealt with about 20 Bills when I was in the Home Office. The Bill team and civil servants would come in and say, “Here’s the Bill, Minister”, and we would look at the general politics of it. Then they would say, “Oh, by the way, there are some delegated powers there. When you’re ready to come back again to tweak it, we can deal with it”. We all said, “Yes, jolly good; carry on”, but never paid any attention to them. I am certain that the Bill team in the Commons—the civil servants drafting the Bill—did not, and nor did the Commons Ministers. It came here and this bunch of Lordships have got a bit upset, and I suspect others will too.
I say to my noble friend the Minister to go back, as other Lords Ministers have to do, and explain to Ministers in the Commons and the Bill team—the Bill team thinks it is sacrosanct; it has drafted it and does not like people mucking around with it—that that bunch up the Corridor will want some concessions. My political antennae tell me that on Report there may be a few amendments made by noble Lords on all sides—amendments I might not approve of at all—but if we want to get somewhere, the Commons should make concessions on this, because they are really sensible.
Before I comment on the two amendments, I will give one example. We criticise the provisions on serious disruption; I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, wishes to remove them from the Bill. We say in our report that the Government have been able to draft a half-page statutory instrument describing serious disruption. If the Government can draft it there, stick it in the Bill, for goodness’ sake, and then it can be amended later.
That is enough general criticism. I apologise to my noble friend as she has to take it all the time, but other departments have been infinitely worse in some of their inappropriate delegations. The Home Office is not the worst offender.
Clauses 7(9) and 8(9)
“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”
to reduce serious violence. Clauses 7 and 8 allow collaboration between authorities and a local government area
“to prevent and reduce serious violence”,
including to
“prepare and implement a strategy for exercising their functions”—
all good stuff.
Under Clauses 7 and 8, a strategy
“may specify an action to be carried out by … an educational authority … a prison authority … or … a youth custody authority”,
and such authorities are under a duty to carry out the specified actions. However, there is no requirement for such a strategy to be published; instead, the Secretary of State has the power, exercisable by regulations subject to the negative procedure, to
“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”.
This power would appear to allow the Secretary of State to provide that a strategy need not be published if she so wished, or even to decide not to make a provision about publication at all. That does not make sense to us. My committee is
“concerned that the absence of a requirement to publish means that a strategy can have legislative effect—by placing educational authorities, prison authorities and youth custody authorities under a statutory duty to do things specified in it—but without appropriate transparency.”
We therefore recommend
“that the delegated powers in clauses 7(9) and 8(9) should be amended”—
that is, tweaked a wee bit—
“to require the publication of any action which is specified in a ‘strategy’ as one that an educational authority, a prison authority or a youth custody authority must carry out.”
That is a minor tweak—actually, so are many of the other things we recommend. We may be scathing in the report, but we are not asking that fundamental bits of the Bill be deleted or rewritten completely; we are merely asking for more transparency. Putting more things on the face of the Bill will save the Government rather a lot of grief in this House later on.
I bring apologies from my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, who is unable to speak today. Had she done so, she would have talked about the related issue of drugs. Drug-related homicides are increasing. There were 311 such homicides in England and Wales in 2018-19 and 337 in 2019-20.
If one takes the consequences of the abuse of alcohol and drug taking, one sees that we have not a diminishing problem but an increasing one. We need to take all the steps we can in any way open to us to try to ensure that we start moving in the opposite direction. The amendment that I bring to the Committee seeks to ensure that the consequences of alcohol, and the need for those consequences to be recognised, are recognised in the strategy that will be drawn up, which I hope will be worth while and worth pursuing.
I have been listening carefully to how many Members of your Lordships’ House are using their experience from wherever they have come from to inform the Government, because we want the Government to succeed. Virtually every single morning at the weekend you wake up to the news that somebody has been stabbed. Sometimes there is a 14 year-old involved in the stabbing, as was on the news recently. I listen to that with horror. How will this be better? The challenge for the Government in the best sense of the word is about how these strategies will work and how we will make them work.
I am really grateful for the work of the Delegated Powers Committee, which is not seeking to embarrass the Government. It wants to improve the legislation. What the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Beith, said is quite significant. To repeat what the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, very powerfully said, there is no statutory requirement on the Government in the Bill to publish the guidance. It said that it considers that there perhaps should be. It did not put it like that, but that is essentially what it said. In parliamentary language, it is saying to the Government, “You aren’t required to do it, but that’s not a very good idea, and you should.” Common sense would dictate that if guidance is going to guide people, surely the Government should be required to publish it or have it, and that is why the amendment is there.
Amendments 28 and 30 would add NHS bodies, young people’s groups and religious and cultural groups to the list of groups that must be consulted. The Minister will no doubt say, “It is our intention to do that; of course they will be consulted. We would never dream of doing it without consulting them”, but people want reassurance that these bodies, groups or parts of society are actually in the Bill.
On 13 September, the Government published the Home Office Measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill: Equalities Impact Assessment. The Government’s own advice to themselves says that
“there is also often a disproportionate impact of certain knife crime offences on young people. Therefore, greater benefits could fall to those with the same characteristics”,
and it goes on to talk about ethnicity and some other issues. So the Government’s advice is that young people are disproportionately impacted, therefore it might be a good idea to consult them about the solutions to this. I say to the Minister that that surely should be included in the Bill. There is nothing lost by it, whether with NHS bodies or young people. I can hear the reply now: “There is no need for it, because of course we will.” But it is so important for those things to be listed in the Bill. That legislation needs to be there, and those points were made by a number of honourable Members in the other place.
Amendment 32, from my noble friend Lord Brooke and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, as was outlined by my noble friend, is on alcohol and drugs as drivers of serious violence. I do not know whether my noble friend would agree, but alcohol and drugs are often, somehow or other, not given the same prominence in how we deal with this. I will give one example of how serious violence and alcohol are linked: if the police regard a particular football match as difficult, they will start much earlier in the day, before the pubs are open, essentially. Why do they do that? I am not a police officer—the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, might know better—but I presume that, if you start it then, the incidence of violence is likely to be less, although this is not definite. This cannot be overstated, so what will the strategy say about dealing with alcohol and drugs? This is fundamental to public health.
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and my noble friend Lord Rosser on Amendment 53. I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, is yet to be convinced by the national serious violence oversight board. It is a mechanism by which the signers of the amendment and those who support it seek to ensure that these strategies will work and contain something so that not just the local authorities delivering them but, somewhere along the line, somebody holds people to account for trying to deliver them. If a national oversight board does not do that, who will? Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said that Her Majesty’s inspectorate might be able to.
To be honest, I am open to persuasion about what the mechanism should be, but the importance of the amendment cannot be overstated, because it says that the Bill and these strategies will work if there is some way of trying to understand whether they are working. What measures will be used and who is going to look at whether they work? Who is going to review the strategy to ensure it is any good? Who is going to share relevant data and good practice? Who is going to do that if not an oversight board? Somewhere along the line, people have to be held to account so, if Amendment 53 is not a good idea, what is? We cannot just let it run free and work; we need some way of measuring it and knowing that it is working.