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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to my amendment. The purpose of this clause is to deal with low-level nuisance and disturbance. Obviously, if a person commits a criminal offence such as threatening behaviour or assault on hospital premises, they can be dealt with there as they can anywhere else. The police can be called, or the security staff can remove them. The key aim of the Government’s legislation is to prevent assaults occurring in the first place by tackling non-physical nuisance and disturbance behaviour before it escalates into greater violence. The clause is limited to hospital premises, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has just pointed out. That is not the only place where violence against NHS professionals takes place. In 2003, a survey was carried out by the British Medical Association. It surveyed a large number of UK doctors and found that more than a third of those who responded had received some degree of violence or abuse from patients. So the NHS Security Management Service—SMS—was set up in 2003 to address the management of security within the NHS. Various measures were introduced, but when the British Medical Association carried out another survey of nearly 600 doctors in October and November of last year it discovered that a third had experienced some form of violence, including threats and verbal abuse; one in ten had been physically attacked, including being stabbed, kicked, punched, bitten and spat at; and, of those, one in three received minor injuries and one in 20 was seriously injured. Most doctors—and I am talking about GP surgeries—did not report the attacks, so there is an underreporting element as well. I have to say that such a problem did not exist. One would never have thought in the past that doctors, whether in surgery or in hospital, or nursing staff would ever be attacked, not simply by the patients but by the relatives who were with them, which is of course who the Bill is aimed at. Unfortunately, it seems today that that has become prevalent. The British Medical Association, while firmly supporting the government measures in the Bill, say—quite rightly in our opinion—that they do not go far enough. What it seeks and what we seek is to extend that protection, as the amendment says, to, "““any premises in which medical, surgical or paramedical treatment is provided under arrangements made under the National Health Service Act 2006””." The argument that was put against this proposal in Committee, and which will no doubt be advanced today, is that hospitals carry security staff, and that they can be summoned to deal with disturbances of this sort. There is a ready made body of people trained who can deal with disruptive relatives and friends of patients. It would be a protection to GPs in their surgeries and to other medical professionals who are working in NHS premises to have at least the shield of the law around them so that they could require people to, as the Bill says, cease the nuisance so that they can be removed, and, if necessary, so that the police can be called to remove them if they refuse to go in a situation where the intimidation or the nuisance had not escalated into an actual criminal offence where the police could be called any way. It may be that GP surgeries and other primary care settings do not have the same security services as hospitals. But the fact that there is no security service does not mean that problems do not arise. As I said in Committee, a notice on the wall, to which a disruptive and intimidating relative’s attention could be drawn, is the beginning at least of calming down a difficult situation. We are familiar with notices that say, ““If you do this, you are committing a criminal offence””. Why should there not be a similar notice in a doctor’s surgery which would help doctors to point out to people who are causing problems the course to which their conduct will lead? That is the purpose of the amendment. We think that under-reporting would cease and that doctors would be more willing to report nuisance and disturbance if they had the protection of the law. We also think that it would be a framework within which a partnership could be built between surgeries, the people working in them and local police so that the latter could readily be called for assistance.