Clause 16 - Places which are not designated public places
Criminal Justice and Police Bill
10:45 am
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
The amendments are intended to help the police and to clarify the situation. In previous debates, I referred to the difficult choices that an ordinary police constable on the beat may face. We ask the Government to consider the reality of policing in a town or city late at night, or in the early hours of the morning.
There should not be too many exceptions or limitations in the clause. We do not want an ordinary police officer, making difficult decisions about his powers of arrest, to face too many arguments about the legality of the arrest and about whether the person detained was in a public place. The Government have perhaps been too cautious by including paragraphs defining exceptions to designated public places in the Bill.
The Minister took seriously the matters raised by our amendments to the previous clause, and we hope that he will take these amendments equally seriously. We want to ensure that officers at the sharp end, who face difficult decisions while policing public places, will have the opportunity to make arrests in what they consider to be such places.
In an earlier group of amendments, we sought to give an arresting officer a reasonableness exception. If the officer reasonably believed that somewhere was a designated public place, the arrest would not be rendered unlawful if it was discovered later that it occurred just outside the designated public place. These amendments have the same purpose.
If it is clear that a place is a designated public place, there should not be too many restrictions on that, but the Bill makes the exceptions that
``A place is not a designated public place or part of such a place if it is...a place within the curtilage of any licensed premises''
or where there is occasional permission, or where sale of intoxicating liquor is not for the time being authorised by an occasional licence. There is a danger of many legalistic arguments arising at a later stage.
We will be interested to hear the Minister's response concerning whether the Government are being too complex and too taken up with niceties. We are concerned about the problems that an ordinary police officer will face when exercising the power that he will be given, and he should not have to face later legalistic arguments.