Speeches by Vickers.

“Q Having read the Bill, is there anything that concerns you that could be improved? Are there any measures you would like to see in it that are not currently in it? Venita Yeung: I would like to draw the Committee’s attention to a grave risk posed by the public order clauses, particularly those that would criminalise t…”

“Q The challenge for the Government is that a huge amount of money is spent managing protests in this country. In London, we spent around £53 million managing pro-Palestinian protests. Some of the measures are designed to aid the police in managing protests and protecting the public from people who would do them harm. H…”

“Q I have one last question on that. As we have mentioned, there are several powers in several pieces of legislation that allow police to do it, sometimes with notice and sometimes without, often based on whether or not they have insurance and where the bikes can be seized from. Am I right in thinking that there are no …”

“Q Last but not least, you might know that off-road bikes are a real hobby horse of mine. They are an absolute nightmare in my part of the world, as they are in many others—they are an epidemic. They are largely non-road-legal bikes that are being used by youngsters to commit antisocial behaviour or to enable crime. We …”

“Q We know that dispersal orders and public spaces protection orders are of huge value, and that they can have a big impact in controlling antisocial behaviour and so on. The Criminal Justice Bill liberalised the use of such orders—it made them more accessible to police officers and local authorities. Why would we want …”

“Q The Bill makes a change to the Police Reform Act 2002, but my understanding is that there are no nationally compiled figures showing which powers are being used to seize bikes, and that the Road Traffic Act 1988 is actually allowing many people to seize bikes without the notice set out here, and probably more quickly…”

“Q I realise that different areas are affected very differently by the antisocial use of off-road bikes and e-bikes. My area is absolutely battered by the issue. The Bill makes changes to the Police Reform Act 2002, introducing the ability to seize a bike without notice, and there are obviously other powers, but what mo…”

“Q On retail crime, I was delighted to see the assault on retail workers offence in the Bill. Previously, the Criminal Justice Bill included a mandatory requirement for a ban, tag or curfew after three incidents of shoplifting or assaults on retail workers. What is the rationale behind ditching that? We have all heard a…”

“I have not learned any BSL to any competent level, but I promise I will endeavour to do so before next year’s debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) on securing this very important debate. I want to celebrate the incredible contributions of the deaf community and BSL users across the United Kin…”

“We would want to return foreign national offenders; that is really positive. But the number of people choosing to cross because of that deterrent effect went down by not 10% or 20%, but by more than 90%. More than 90% fewer people arrived from Albania in small boats. That is huge progress. If we can replicate that else…”

“What is effective? The deal reduced the number of people coming from Albania by more than 90%. If we could get a few more agreements like that, we would be on the way—that would be huge progress. The Albania deal represented huge progress; to suggest otherwise is wrong. It choked off routes before boats had even launch…”

“Well, hot air is required in this room this afternoon, and I intend to provide it. We fought back with the Nationality and Borders Act third-country removals, which helped the Government to deter crossings by 36% in 2023 from 45,000 to under 29,000—not by chance, but by design, sending a message to traffickers and migr…”

“Liberal Democrat new clause 27 seeks to repeal provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 passed by the previous Conservative Government. By attempting to repeal section 29 of the Act, the Liberal Democrats are seeking to prevent the Government from removing people, including criminals, to a safe third country.…”

“People who arrive here deceptively claiming to be children cannot be allowed to succeed. We should make use of the best scientific age assessment methods available to us, with or without consent. Those will not be used in isolation, but alongside all the other possible assessment methods available to us. We can debate …”

“I welcome the fact that the Government will come back with scientific age assessments that also do not require consent. But if six months is too long, at what point would the Minister expect to be concerned? If we have not been applying these assessments and we have ended up with the wrong people in the wrong classroom…”

“New clause 26 does not specify the method to be used; it commits the Government to coming back within six months with a statutory instrument. How long does the Minister think it will be before the Government are in a position to do that? Is it six months’ worth of people coming here without our having the ability to as…”

“I hope the Minister agrees that we should be doing more, rather than less. We need to give agencies all the opportunities and powers to do so, with or without the consent of people who aim to deceive. That is the right thing to do. If we rewind to 2022, 490 disputes in quarter 1 ballooned to 1,782 by quarter 4. Now we …”

“I will stick to the new clause and the age assessments. This is a tool. It would not be used unabated. It is another tool that our agencies could use alongside whatever other assessments they might make. We would be giving them the opportunity to require people to undergo an assessment, and that is a good thing. That i…”

“I would trust our agencies to use them in context and apply all the other things that they might apply in any given context. This would be another tool that agencies could use, on top of all the knowledge that they might have of people coming in and what their ages might be. This is an opportunity to give our agencies …”

“I can tell the hon. Gentleman that these age assessments could go some way to ensuring that a 20 or 30-year-old does not end up in a classroom beside a teenage girl. There is an opportunity to provide a power that can be used, along with all the knowledge that the agencies have, to make an assessment. The science can b…”