Violent Crime Reduction Bill

I should like to speak to Amendment No. 49 in this group. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, for having flagged this up for me. Like Amendment No. 2, it probes the necessity for introducing new legislation to tackle drunk and disorderly behaviour in this way. The matter was debated at some length in another place, and the answers there were unsatisfactory. The question is essentially about the adequacy of existing legislation, a theme which runs right through the Bill. This is not the first time it has been raised. Clause 1(2) says that an order may be imposed to protect persons from ““criminal or disorderly conduct”” by the subject, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has said. This raises the question: what conduct is disorderly but is not also criminal? There are already plenty of public order offences on the statute book that address the problem of drunk and disorderly behaviour. The main point is this: if the conduct is tantamount to committing a criminal offence, it should be dealt with as such. Section 5 of the Public Order Act makes it an offence if a person uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, but adds a proviso that it has to be within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby. All our amendment would do is remove the proviso. In doing so, it shows that pretty much any behaviour—for example, high spirits—might pass the threshold for a drinking banning order. Will the Minister provide an example of unacceptable conduct that is disorderly but not criminal? If he can provide such an example, why is the Public Order Act not being amended to catch such behaviour? I suspect that the reason why no such example will be forthcoming is that the Public Order Act already adequately covers the behaviour that most reasonable people would find unacceptable. If this is the case, DBOs are being introduced as a substitute for arrests and the Minister should come clean about it. No doubt, the police are overwhelmed in town centres on Friday and Saturday nights and do not have the resources to arrest people who in theory are committing an offence. We should then debate police resources and getting enough police officers on the ground to deal with criminal conduct appropriately rather than maintain a pretence that the problem can be addressed by giving more powers to the courts to deal with alcohol-fuelled disorder.