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Emergency Workers (Protection) Bill

Certainly. That is an important part of the point that I was about to come to, which was raised by the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson). Is there a gap in the law, and if so, where are the spaces? That is a perfectly proper question to address. We have an offence under section 44(3) of the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004, which is in force and states:"““A person commits an offence if without reasonable excuse he obstructs or interferes with an employee of a fire and rescue authority taking action authorised under this section.””" In practice, one of the frustrations for the fire services has been that it has sometimes proved quite difficult to fulfil all the requirements of section 44 for a specific offence, because a fire officer must show that he has been ““authorised in writing”” to do certain things. That can be a quite laborious process, and it seems to be one of the things that has occasionally inhibited the success of prosecutions. The House is absolutely agreed: in every contribution, I have heard a belief that we should have an effective prosecutorial mechanism to protect emergency service workers from being obstructed. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) for his willingness to use the Bill to create a simpler, more straightforward offence of impeding or obstructing that could perhaps fulfil all the specific requirements under the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004. Of course there is no such offence in relation to ambulance workers, but he is trying to create a simple offence, whereby we could deal with the gap in the law for emergency service workers across the board.