As forensic psychiatrists we are used to assessing people charged with a range of offences. The Offences Against the Person Act dates back to 1861 and is very much common currency in Crown Courts throughout the country in the early 21st Century.
1861 saw the introduction of the Malicious Damage Act, which covers obstruction of the railway or trains. The most common cases involving this law in our experience have related to people standing on railway bridges and throwing items onto the railway. This most often occurs in moments of crisis, often relating to personality disorder but occasionally also to episodes of psychosis.
A recent case involved a prosecution under the Vagrancy Act of 1824. Much of the Act remains in force although some has been repealed. The Act was introduced following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in order
“to make further provision for the suppression of vagrancy, and for the punishment of idle and disorderly persons, rogues and vagabonds and incorrigible rogues”
The vast numbers of people returning from the Continent after the wars, both in uniform and civilians, led to a significant increase in homelessness in the years after the wars. The British Army and the Royal Navy cut their numbers dramatically once the old enemy had been defeated. This left former service personnel unemployed and, in the days before the welfare state, often destitute. Some of the repealed parts of the Act relate to
“every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, maeans or device, by palmistry or otherwise, to deceive…”
The repealed parts of the Act also prohibited unlicensed pedlars and prostitutes working on the street.
Although repealed in part over the years, the Act has also been extended by further legislation. The Vagrancy Act 1898 was initially seen as a means of limiting prostitution, but in the late Victorian period after it was enacted, it was commonly used to criminalise male homosexuality.
What relevance, then, does this almost 200 year old law have today? Concern has focused on the fact that the Act still criminalises rough sleeping and begging, with punishments ranging from fines to potential imprisonment. Under the ongoing provisions of the Act it remains a criminal offence to “wander abroad” or to be “in any public place, street, highway, court or passage[in order to] beg or gather alms”
Prosecutions under the Act have been relatively high in recent years, with almost 600 in 1988 and almost 1400 in 1989. A Freedom of Information request revealed that in 2018 there were just over 1300 prosecutions under the Vagrancy Act 1824.
The fact that prosecutions under the Act often involve the most disadvantaged in society behaving in ways which many people find difficult to condemn has led to increased concern over the last 10-15 years. 2014 saw three men prosecuted for taking food from bins outside a supermarket. The case was dropped.
The royal wedding in Windsor in 2018 saw calls for homeless people to be cleared from the streets using the Act. This would have marked a significant expansion of the use of the Act to deter, move on and criminalise homeless people over the years, by actual or threatened charges under the Act.
The most recent case in our experience involved a man with significant mental health problems who spent the night sleeping in an abandoned building and was subsequently charged with a series of offences, including the offence of
“[sleeping] in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence”