VAGRANCY. (Hansard, 26 March 1935)

§ Brigadier-General SPEARS

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend section four of the Vagrancy Act, 1824, so far as it relates to persons wandering abroad and lodging in barns or other places. The purpose of the Bill is simple. It is to ensure that in future no person shall be sent to gaol for sleeping out just 1743 because he has not the money to buy himself a night's lodging. The law as it stands is flagrantly unjust. There never was a more blatant example of one law for the rich and another for the poor. If you have a little money in your pocket, or if you are rich and like to go about the lanes of your country sleeping under hedges or in barns, the police are powerless to stop you. If you have money you cannot be interfered with. Sleeping out is then a hobby, a health-giving pursuit in which the well-to-do may indulge under the benevolent eye of the law, but, if you are poor, so poor that you have not the price of a night's lodging in your pocket, you are a criminal if you sleep out, and a rogue and vagabond within the meaning of the Vagrancy Act, 1824, and you are liable to be sent to gaol.

It seems to have struck no one that, if it be a crime to sleep out, the criminal is surely he who sleeps out when he has the money in his pocket to buy himself a shelter, and not the poor fellow who cannot afford to do otherwise. The law as it stands is a barbaric survival of the time when there was much disorder in the land, and we had no properly constituted police. I hope that no hon. Member would be prepared to defend it to-day. The House would probably be surprised to learn—I myself was astonished—the number of the convictions that have taken place under this antiquated and—as I thought until I investigated the position—obsolescent law. In the period 1925–1929 the convictions averaged 2,163 a year. I am glad to say that they show a tendency to decrease, but in 1931, the last year for which I have the complete figure, 1,612 persons were charged with the offence of sleeping out.

Public opinion was focussed on the extreme cruelty with which the present law may operate by the case of Thomas Parker, who died in Winson Green gaol in June, 1933. Parker was an ex-guardsman, who enlisted when under age during the War, and served in France. After the War, like so many other ex-service men, he suffered long periods of unemployment. In the summer of 1933, when on his way to Tamworth in search of work, he was arrested for sleeping out. The policeman who woke him asked him 1744 why he was sleeping out, and, on being told that it was because he had no money, the policeman arrested Parker according to law. The magistrates at Coleshill sentenced this man, who had never been to gaol before, to 14 days' imprisonment with hard labour. On the subsequent tragedy I need not dwell. According to the prison doctor, Parker was probably suffering from claustrophobia, the fear of enclosed spaces, a nervous disorder not uncommon among ex-service men which makes confinement in narrow quarters a torture which may lead to insanity. All the evidence points to the conclusion that Parker was reduced to a state of frenzy by what he felt to be the injustice of his sentence. He was sentenced by the prison governor to three days' solitary confinement for creating a disturbance in the prison, and on the way to the punishment cell he met with injuries from which he died within a quarter of an hour. When the facts of Parker's sentence and death became known, public opinion was stirred, and ex-service men's associations in particular were deeply moved and indignant. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, as a result of the feeling which was aroused, set up an inquiry among chief constables, which convinced him that the law required amendment.

The Bill which I am asking leave to introduce has been prepared in close consultation with the Home Office. Some may think that it does not go far enough, but I would beg those who hold that opinion to accept the Bill as it stands, as any amendment might wreck it, and the time necessary for passing it might not be forthcoming. I can assure others who may have doubts in other directions, that the Home Office have seen to it that under the provisions of the Bill the professional or dangerous vagrant will not escape the purview of the police. As I said at the beginning, the Bill is a modest measure and one of elementary justice, and I hope that this House, which has shown itself at least as jealous as any of its predecessors of the liberty of the individual, will unanimously give me leave to introduce it. As far as I myself, as an ex-service man, am concerned, I feel that, if I obtain this reform, I shall be making what reparation I can to the memory of Thomas Parker.