The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is always a delight to have a lawyer in the House, but not too many, eh? [Interruption.] I think I have carried the House with that one.
The hon. Gentleman does, however, make a serious point. I tabled the amendment simply so that we could have this debate and the message goes out completely unambiguously from the House that merely spitting—I use the word “merely” legalistically; in other words, spitting alone—can constitute a common assault. That is true of
the Criminal Justice Act 1988, and spitting at an emergency worker of any kind should constitute an assault under this Bill.
My other amendment—amendment 3—relates to sexual assault. The major part of the Bill introduces an aggravated offence; that is to say that the Bill lists a series of different offences that, when perpetrated against an emergency worker, will be considered to be aggravated. When I drew up the Bill, I was primarily thinking of physical violence towards emergency workers. But the truth is that, since I have been working on the Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax and I have received lots of representations, particularly from health service workers, about the sexual assault of ambulance workers, nurses, mental health nurses, doctors and others. One difficulty, both for the Government and for us, has been that these statistics have never been gathered by NHS Protect, which no longer exists anyway. However, the numbers of such incidents reported by the trade unions working on this matter are quite dramatic, particularly given that the figures show increases.
Since 2012, such incidents are up 143% in the East of England ambulance service; up 40% in London; up 133% in the North West ambulance service; and up 1500% in Northern Ireland. Incidents have increased by 400% in South Central ambulance service since 2013; by 100% in the South East Coast ambulance service since 2015; by 400% in Yorkshire ambulance service since 2013; and by 500% in the West Midlands ambulance service since 2012. I wanted to say that is true that these are not large numbers, but there have been 238 reported cases of sexual assaults on ambulance workers in the East of England ambulance service. Parliament has to take cognisance of such figures and we have to act.