Thank you for calling me to speak in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. Anyone listening outside might imagine that Members were talking in different debates. On the one hand, we hear Opposition Members echoing Unite the union’s calling this Bill “dangerous, totalitarian legislation”, and on the other, we have colleagues such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) and my hon. Friends the Members for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) and for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards) praising the Bill’s extra protections for children from sex offenders, and for emergency workers from attacks in our hospitals, ambulances and police stations. What is going on?
The confusion comes, I believe, from a conflation after the ghastly death of Sarah Everard between the policing of the peaceful vigil on Clapham common under emergency pandemic laws to maintain social distancing, and measures in the Bill to legislate on public order, which are in part 3 of this vast Bill. The point is that they are separate issues. Let us not forget the core aim of the Bill, which is laid out on page 1. It is not domestic abuse, which is covered in a separate Bill that is also live at the moment, but safety and protection, as the introduction makes clear.
It is over three years since I raised, after meeting constituents’ parents, the issue of the grooming of young people by a driving instructor and a sports coach. Any Member who has read the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s case studies would not oppose the core principle of the Bill, which is the changes in the position of trust clauses. They are a major step forward that every parent and teacher should not just welcome, but applaud. Will the Lord Chancellor, either when he is on his feet later or on Third Reading, confirm that driving instructors are covered by clause 45(2)?
When Opposition Members complain that there is not enough to help women and girls in this Bill, I urge them to realise that the vast majority of those better protected through clauses 44 and 45 and, indeed, through parts 2, 7, 8, 9 and 10—and much else—are in fact women and girls.
Nor should anyone be misled by part 4 and clause 61, which concern unauthorised encampments. They take action against Travellers camping on land without permission of the owner, if they fail to comply with a request to leave
“as soon as reasonably practicable”.
Those in my constituency who have seen such encampments over the last decade—time and again they smash through fences in parks, sports grounds and dog walking fields—have seen their access and rights infringed and their children intimidated, while some, although by no means all, Travellers lift two fingers to the injunction processes.
The Bill also doubles the sentence for assaults on emergency workers and includes Kay’s law. That is why I will be supporting the Bill, and I am frankly astonished that everyone in this House is not doing so, with the details to be discussed on Third Reading.
5.42 pm