Sarah Jones

Thank you, Mrs Hobhouse. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. Members might be pleased to know that I probably will not take all the time available to me—perhaps I will give them a few minutes of their life back to do something else. I want to start by saying what an important debate this is. My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Chris Evans) is absolutely right to bring the issue of the abuse of shop workers to this place. It is enormously important, and many Members of Parliament have campaigned for many years for the legislation that we have just passed, alongside the incredible work of the Co-op, USDAW and others. When I was shadow Policing Minister, I remember introducing a similar amendment to Government legislation and debating it with the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), who was the Policing Minister at the time. He argued that there was no need for these measures, because abuse of a shop worker is an aggravating factor, and that the evidence did not support their introduction. That argument was wrong, and I am really pleased that we have passed this law. It was the right thing to do for a number of reasons. First, as my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly said throughout his speech, we need to make sure we are implementing the legislation and seeing results, and that we use it now that we have it. It sends a powerful message that we in this place see and understand this behaviour, and that we will not tolerate it any more. It is important that we say that loud and clear. The speeches made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Burton and Uttoxeter (Jacob Collier) were really important and spoke to the nub of the problem. The hon. Member for Strangford said that people feel that the system has abandoned them, and that is right. The Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), also spoke about the way in which people who live by the rules feel that everybody else seems to be getting away with not living by the rules. That has wider consequences for our society than just the problem of retail crime and the abuse of shop workers. My hon. Friend the Member for Burton and Uttoxeter spoke of a very serious case in which somebody was doused with liquid and then threatened with being set on fire. That is horrific. The abuse that shop workers receive, which was mentioned by the spokesperson for the Lib Dems, the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney), ranges from those very extreme cases to the abuse that people get every day. I remember talking to shop workers at my local Co-op about the abuse they faced. Someone said, “Well, it’s just part of the job.” No, it is not. It needs to stop and we need to make sure we are doing all the right things.