Tag: Greg Clark

The statement made by Greg Clark, the Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, in the House of Commons on 24 March 2023.

In line with your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will address my new clause and the amendment in my name specifically, and I will also touch on the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope). I will not rehearse the reasons for the Bill. We have had a substantial debate on Second Reading and in Committee, and I hope it may be possible to say more on Third Reading.

New clause 1 would require the Secretary of State to issue guidance to the police about the new offence proposed in the Bill, and that guidance must include, but is not limited to, guidance on the defence of reasonable conduct that is already contained in the Public Order Act 1986.

During our debate in Committee, some Members were understandably concerned that the perpetrator of an act of deliberate harassment of a person on the grounds of their sex could escape the consequences of their actions by asserting that they thought their behaviour was reasonable. Some Members thought there was a risk that the police might be put off from taking the offence seriously, because of that potential defence. In fact, in the Public Order Act, reasonableness is not in the eye of the accused. Simply saying that behaviour that was intentionally designed to cause alarm or distress was reasonable does not provide a “get out of jail” card. Having clear guidance on this point would ensure that the matter is crystal clear to the police and all the authorities.

The proposed requirement for statutory guidance therefore provides that clarity, but it is not limited to that; the guidance can include other matters, should that prove desirable in future. The guidance would be addressed to the police, as is obvious from the terms of the new clause, but in practice its use would be wider than that, and would include the Crown Prosecution Service. That is because statutory guidance, once issued, is in practice taken by all parties to be authoritative. Indeed, there is no point in having separate guidance for the police, the CPS and any other body.

This is far from the only occasion when guidance is formally issued and addressed to one particular audience, rather than being proliferated to multiple actors. For example, statutory guidance within the Stalking Protection Act 2019 is formally issued to the police, but was drawn up in consultation with other statutory partners, including the Crown Prosecution Service. I envisage and hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that the same approach will be taken in this case, and that the CPS would be involved in drawing up the guidance to which my new clause refers.

It seems to me, reflecting on the debate we had in Committee, that an amendment that guidance must be issued and must include, inter alia, statutory requirements on the interpretation of reasonable conduct, is a pragmatic and practical way of responding to the points made in the debate. I am delighted that new clause 1 has attracted widespread support, including that of the Government, whose assistance in drafting it I grateful acknowledge.

Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)

How long does my right hon. Friend expect it to take for this guidance to be produced? The guidance requested last year on the draft code of practice on the recording and retention of personal data for non-crime hate incidents took more than one year to produce. Does he envisage a similarly long period? To what extent does he expect the House to have a say on the content of the guidance?

Greg Clark

I would be very dismayed if it took a year to draw up such guidance, and my hon. Friend gives a cautionary warning. When the Minister responds to the debate, I hope he might undertake to produce the guidance with dispatch. I said a few moments ago that it is right and appropriate that guidance is drawn up in conjunction with the CPS, which also has regard to it, and that will take some time. I hope, however, that it will be a matter of weeks rather than a large number of months. The Minister and I are experienced in office, and we know that only the Minister can give an assurance as to how long it will take, but I am delighted that my hon. Friend shares my impatience to get on with it.

Sir Christopher Chope

What about the ability of the House to comment on the guidance when it is produced, or during its preparation?

Greg Clark

As my hon. Friend knows, guidance is issued by the Government of the day. It is not a statutory instrument, and we are not proposing that it should be. I think it would be desirable for such guidance to be shared not just with the House but in public. Guidance that is important should enjoy the confidence and wisdom of those who intend to use it.

Sir Christopher Chope

Finally, does my right hon. Friend envisage that the guidance should first be produced in draft form, so that there is an opportunity for people to be consulted publicly on it?

Greg Clark

Again, that is a matter for the Minister, but I would not only be content with that but think it a desirable route to take.

On the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend, he is right to seek to ensure that legislation in this House is properly scrutinised and debated, and the points he has raised—including those he just made—are pertinent and valuable. As I hope he might expect, I have studied his amendments carefully, so let me deal with them in turn.

Amendments 3 to 5 prefer the words “due to” to “because of”. Precise language is important—he and I share that view—but I do not think that the preference on his part signifies any difference in interpretation. The expression “because of” is extensively used in existing legislation. For example, section 66(4) of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 refers to circumstances in which someone suffers loss or damage

“because of the dangerous state of the premises”

That is “because of” rather than “due to”. With perhaps more immediate relevance to our discussions, the Equality Act 2010 uses “because of” rather than “due to”. For example, paragraph 3(5) of schedule 11, on school admissions, refers to circumstances in which a school

“does not admit a person as a pupil because of the person’s sex”,

rather than “due to” it. It may well be that my hon. Friend’s use of language is more elegant than that contained in the laws already on the statute book, but I hope he will agree that there is some virtue in linguistic consistency in the law. That is the reason behind that choice of words.

My hon. Friend’s amendment 4 clarifies that it does not matter if person (A) specified in the Bill—the perpetrator of the offence in question—is a man or a woman. Although the majority of reports of public sex- based harassment have been by men towards women, the Bill applies totally equally to both sexes, and at no point does the Bill mention anyone’s sex. There is no ambiguity in the Bill on that point. If my hon. Friend is concerned that this may not be clearly understood in practice, such as by the police, it may be a candidate for inclusion in the statutory guidance to which we have already referred. As he will recall, the guidance specifies interpretation of reasonable conduct but is not limited to that. If, perhaps after taking soundings from the public, there turns out to be some ambiguity in people’s minds—if not in the Bill—there is the opportunity to address that.

Amendments 2 and 6 would introduce a concept of subsidiarity and primacy. In other words, an offence would be committed only if the sex-based harassment was the primary motivation or aspect of the behaviour, rather than one of a number of aspects. I completely understand the point my hon. Friend puts forward, but I will say two things in response. First, one of the purposes of the Bill is to bring harassment on the grounds of sex in line with the existing law as it affects other protected characteristics, such as race. To take race as an example, to be guilty of the aggravated offence of public harassment on the grounds of race does not require the racial elements to be the primary element of a torrent of abuse that one person might direct at another. Nor is public racial harassment defensible on the grounds that racist harassment was merely a secondary aspect of the behaviour in question.

Indeed, not only is there the argument of consistency, which the Bill seeks to address, but, in this case, it is right that it is framed in this way because racist abuse should not happen at all. The law should be clear on that, and that applies equally to harassment on the grounds of someone’s sex. For reasons of consistency with the established law elsewhere and, in my view, what is right, we should not introduce a special filter for primacy on the grounds of sex that does not already apply to race and other offences that already have this protection.

Amendments 7 and 6 would delete references to “(or presumed sex)”. The current treatment in the Bill is, again, drafted to be consistent with the Bill as it applies in other contexts, particularly to protected characteristics. To use the example of racial harassment again, section 28 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 makes it clear that an offence is racially aggravated if the offender demonstrates hostility

“based on the victim’s membership (or presumed membership)”

of a racial group. It is not always possible with 100% accuracy to determine a person’s race or sex in a public place. Indeed, Shakespeare would have been robbed of many a dramatic plotline were it otherwise. But that does not mean it should be acceptable to hurl abuse intentionally at someone who turns out not to be of the sex that was assumed, any more than it would be acceptable to scream racial abuse in public at someone who turned out not to be of the race that the perpetrator presumed them to be. Therefore, again, for reasons for consistency with the existing law and for reasons of justice, I think the drafting of the Bill has it right.

In amendment 9, my hon. Friend, as presaged in his earlier intervention, seeks to specify a commencement date of 1 August this year for the legislation to come into effect. I am very grateful to him for his impatience to get on with changing the law. He is quite right, in all seriousness, that if Parliament passes legislation, that signals the intention of Parliament that the law should change and the Government should not act as a brake on the law being changed in practice. Indeed, it would be unconscionable for the Bill to sit on the statute book uncommenced and therefore unusable to the police and courts. Those who might be watching these proceedings, or reading reports of it, will have a legitimate expectation that if the Bill passes, the law has been changed or will change shortly.

Should the Bill be approved by the House today, as all colleagues know, it would then need to go to the House of Lords, whose procedures and timings are not always clear to at least this Member of this House. If my new clause 1, requiring statutory guidance to be issued, is inserted by the House, that will, as we discussed a few moments ago, take some time, especially if we provide an opportunity to take soundings on it before it is adopted. So I fear that 1 August may be a little too specific and early to be in the Bill as the date by which commencement must be made. I do not want in any way to separate myself from my hon. Friend’s motivation—quite the reverse. Should the Bill attract the favour of the House and the other place, I hope that he will join me in pressing the Government today to commit in seriousness to commencing the legislation as soon as is practically possible. Should that commitment turn out not to be enacted in practice, I hope he will bolster my efforts in harrying the Government at every opportunity, and relentlessly—given his considerable experience, and indeed success, in that—until the legislation is commenced.

In conclusion, I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for his thoughtful and apposite amendments. I hope he can tell that I have seriously considered their effects. In no case am I antipathetic to the quite reasonable questions he raises about them, but I do think they have answers in the current drafting of the Bill, with the new clause I am moving today, so I hope that at the end of the debate he will feel able not to press amendments and, should circumstances arrive, to join me in continuing a campaign for great dispatch on the part of the Government.

The speech made by Greg Clark, the Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, in the House of Commons on 9 December 2022.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Two weeks ago, a group of more than 50 girls and women walked after dark from Rusthall, one of the villages in my constituency, to the centre of Tunbridge Wells. Those women, several of whom are in the Public Gallery, walked together to make a point. They felt safe together, but had they walked the same route alone at night, they would have felt afraid. Some would not have embarked on the journey at all, and many would have taken avoiding action such as getting a lift, a bus or a taxi. Some would have arranged to walk with someone else. Others would have deployed tactics all too familiar to women and girls across the country such as pretending to have a conversation on their mobile phone to signal that they were in contact with someone else. If alone, they would have been fearful of being followed or of having an offensive, suggestive or obscene comment directed at them, or of being obstructed or intimidated as they walked alone, as well as the fear of being physically assaulted.

For every woman and girl on that walk, hundreds more find that they have to engage in these routines and protections day in, day out to feel safe—and that is in Tunbridge Wells, a place with a strong community, a committed police force and less crime than in many others. When I visit schools, and especially sixth forms, confidence in using our streets, especially at night, is almost always raised by students, including by one young woman who came to see me to describe how outraged she was by the experience of being kerb-crawled by a man in a car when she was out jogging one morning. Why should a woman feel less confident on our streets than a man? The streets are theirs equally, but that is not how it is experienced.

According to the charities Our Streets Now and Plan International, who have done so much to highlight the issue and press for change, twice as many girls and women feel unsafe when alone on our streets as do boys and men. It is not just the commission of physical violence or assault that makes women feel unsafe. Deliberately distressing acts such as following a woman closely through the streets at night or directing explicit, abusive comments at women can and do contribute to that insecurity.

At the moment, there is no specific offence of public sexual harassment, yet in private settings, such as the workplace, everyone knows that sexual harassment is specifically and explicitly prohibited. Other types of harassment in public are identified in law—rightly, in my view—as being especially serious. They include harassment of someone on the grounds of their race or because they are gay. My Bill would close a loophole in the law whereby deliberately harassing another person on the grounds of their sex with the intention and effect of causing alarm or distress would be a specific criminal offence. It would, like harassment on the grounds of sexuality or race, be capable of similar penalties, should the court wish, as those other crimes.

The proposal was subject to a consultation carried out by the Home Office. I am grateful to the former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), for her passionate commitment to confronting the issue and for launching the consultation before the summer. The Bill follows that consultation, and I am grateful for the assistance of the current Home Secretary, and to the Minister and her officials for their help in preparing it.

The Bill is a simple one, as private Members’ Bills should be. It is intended principally to close a loophole and bring into alignment the treatment of harassment on the grounds of sex with harassment on the basis of other protected characteristics. It follows the comments of the Law Commission to its report on hate crime laws in December 2021, which said the Government should consider

“a specific offence to tackle public sexual harassment, which would likely be more effective than adding sex or gender to hate crime laws.”

One reason not to simply add sex to the list of hate crimes is that although harassment on the grounds of race is considered to be driven by a hatred towards a person’s race, specifying hatred or hostility could leave open a legal defence that a man who deliberately harassed a woman in public was not guilty of a hate crime offence, because it could not be proved that his behaviour was motivated by actual hatred of women. The simplest way to proceed, and a subject that the Home Office consultation examined, is to add to the existing law of harassment in the Public Order Act 1986. My Bill would therefore add a new offence of intentional harassment, alarm or distress on the basis of sex to that Act of Parliament.

Under my Bill, if an act of intentional harassment, alarm or distress is carried out in a public place because of the relevant person’s sex, an offence of sex-based harassment has been committed and can be punished, as with offences on racial grounds or grounds of sexuality, at the higher tariff that applies to those crimes by dint of the Crime and Disorder Act 1988—in other words, above the limit set in the magistrates court.

It is important to make a few features of the Bill clear. First, it is not meant to—nor will it—criminalise thoughtless or clumsy words. It is sometimes the case that behaviour, although unwelcome, is not motivated by the deliberate intention to cause alarm or distress. Sometimes, men and boys—even girls and women—can say or do the wrong thing without meaning to make another person threatened or alarmed. Such behaviour is not within the scope of the Bill, neither is behaviour that would be considered reasonable by normal standards. The Bill targets people who deliberately target other people to do them harm.

Secondly, although I referred to sexual harassment, the scope of the offence includes, but does not have to entail, a motivation of sexual gratification. Just as in the workplace, the harassment of women may be based on attitudes towards women that might not be best described as linked to sexual gratification. Thirdly, the Bill is drafted to address the specific loophole in the law about harassment based on sex. That means, in principle, that it applies to women and men if they are deliberately publicly harassed based on their sex. Public sexual harassment can affect men and boys, but we should be clear that it disproportionately affects women and girls.

Some might be concerned that my Bill, if enacted, would place extra pressure on police forces to investigate and arrest those suspected of deliberately sexually harassing women in public places. We all want the police to focus on fighting crimes, but these are serious crimes that affect the lives of millions of girls and women every day, causing them to change their behaviour when they should have no reason to do so. Recent years have shown that it is important that all of us, including the police, give greater attention to the protection of women. The consequence of passing this law to make sexual harassment in public a specific offence, triable if necessary in the Crown court, will be to establish that setting out deliberately to alarm or distress a victim is a serious matter that will be dealt with seriously.

The real purpose of the Bill is to help to change the culture of society so that it becomes even more obviously unacceptable to abuse, humiliate and intimidate women and girls in public. I hope that few prosecutions under the law would ever be required, but it is important that the law is there. We have seen that this is possible. To see someone abusing someone else racially in public is now universally seen as deeply shocking and obviously wrong. In my spare time, I enjoy attending football matches, and it is not many years since it was quite common to hear racial abuse on many terraces. It would be inaccurate to say that it has been completely eradicated, but it is vastly less frequent and is taken with great seriousness not just by the authorities, but by other people present.

Too many girls and women feel unsafe when alone on our streets—twice as many as men. Two thirds of girls and women have changed their plans at some time because they have been worried about or have experienced public sexual harassment. Our streets are their streets, and they should not have to do that. The Bill, if it is supported by Parliament, would eradicate the unconscionable situation in which public sexual harassment is not a specific crime. It will make it clear that the crime is serious and it will provide sanction against those who deliberately set out to frighten women and girls on our streets. It is a tightly drawn but, as I hope the House will agree, valuable step in protecting the more than half of our population who, for too long, have had to change their ways of living their lives when the abusers should change theirs.

Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)

My right hon. Friend is making a fantastic point. I fully support the Bill, but it still has to go through Parliament. Is he aware of the StreetSafe service, run by the police, through which any person who feels unsafe can report dark spots, lights that are out and difficult areas? Authorities can then look at and address them to make sure that we are immediately safer in our communities.

Greg Clark

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, which allows me to emphasise that although I think my Bill will be a great step forward in providing for a specific offence, many other measures are needed. That includes providing information nationally and, especially, locally. I commend the Home Office for its initiative in recent weeks to advertise in public places, encouraging people to step in when they see women and girls being abused. All of us as Members of Parliament and everyone in the community can step up and make a difference through those actions.

Those of us in the Chamber today can go a step further and make it very clear that the offence of harassing someone on the grounds of their sex in public will be taken very seriously. It will provide clarity that people will be arrested for that, and I hope that it will lead to a safer future for women and girls in this country. On that basis, I commend the Bill to the House.