I will be brief and speak to two issues: first, in praise and thanks; and secondly, by way of caution.
In praise and thanks, I am delighted that the Government have accepted the amendment moved in the other place by the noble Lord Best and the noble Lord Young repealing the Vagrancy Act 1824.
Almost 200 years ago, as the cities were filling with the dispossessed at the end of the Napoleonic wars, our forebears in this place came together and passed a piece of legislation that today seems anachronistic and wrong. As a result of the votes later tonight, we will consign that legislation to history. Our understanding of rough sleeping and homelessness has transformed unrecognisably over the course of those two centuries. Today, we see it as a crisis of housing, of health, of social justice and of the criminal justice system. We do not see it as a criminal offence for someone to find themselves sleeping rough on the streets, and we should not live in a country where it is a criminal offence.
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I am grateful to the Minister for his remarks earlier. He has been exceptionally helpful to me, to my hon. Friends the Members for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) and to others across the House who have taken this issue seriously. I urge him to make sure that this legislation is repealed as swiftly as possible, as there is no good argument for further delay. When I was Secretary of State I heard it argued that there may be some powers in the Vagrancy Act that need to be retained and modernised, but I have not seen any convincing arguments to back that up, so whatever review or consultation takes place, I hope that it is done quickly. I suspect that it will conclude that no further powers are required. I hope then that this part of the Bill will be commenced as quickly as possible, because we as a House will have done a good thing, and our society will have moved forward.
By way of caution, I will just speak briefly to the point about noisy protest. To me, the right to protest is fundamental to a free society. None of us enjoys being the subject of protests. In my time as a Minister, I was the subject of protests. They can be awkward and difficult and they can be noisy—the protests outside the Russian embassy were noisy this weekend—but we do have to exercise great caution when we start to limit those freedoms.
In the past week or two, I have been thinking about Canada, another great liberal society, and the way in which the protests in Ottawa were handled, or rather mishandled, by the Canadian Government. Even in a society that we might respect, admire and see ourselves akin to, Governments, police forces and law authorities can make mistakes. I echo the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), but wonder whether the Government are going too far in this respect. I accept his comments that this measure is very unlikely to be used often; it may never be used at all. For that reason, I wonder whether it is the right step to put it onto the statute book. I will not be voting against the Government and opposing the measure tonight, but I do hope that the Minister or his successors will carry forward their commitment to review this in the years ahead, because I suspect that this measure is a step too far and that we
are pushing up against the limits of what we as a free society should be doing, particularly in the context of what we see around the world, where we want to be a shining light for liberty and freedom.