Child Sexual Exploitation

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) on securing this excellent debate, not least because it gives me the opportunity to tell the House about a dreadful case affecting the young daughter of a family that lives in my constituency that came to see me in my surgery last week. I am delighted to say that they are sitting up in the Gallery, listening to our debate.

At the age of 14, the daughter started being texted by the husband of a great friend of her mother’s. The texts apparently moved quickly from being simply manipulative to becoming more and more explicitly sexual. He was grooming and exploiting her for his own pleasure. Before long, these texts began to take a toll on her mental health. Her school work started slipping, and she developed anxieties about things like leaving the house unaccompanied. Her parents noticed this and wondered whether she might need the help of a psychologist; indeed, their daughter started going to see one. This young girl was trying to bear the burden of this appalling ongoing situation on her shoulders alone, because she thought she would be upsetting her mother by telling her about her friend’s husband. I have no doubt at all that this might well have been one of the reasons why he thought he would get away with it.

Eventually, early this year, when the texts started again after a break over Christmas, she broke down and explained what was really happening. Her parents rushed to report it to the police, and the man, in his late 20s, was immediately arrested. According to the parents, the police were absolutely brilliant and very supportive. They saw some of the texts and said they were indeed manipulative and completely inappropriate for sending to a young girl. However, there was a problem. Rather unsurprisingly, the young girl had deleted the vast majority of the texts, particularly the worst ones—and who could blame her? They were, as she told her parents, truly awful. Those that she still had, however, were enough to trigger the bringing of a case by the Crown Prosecution Service.

The most significant development was that the accused man admitted everything of which the girl had accused him. He admitted having sent her all those texts, perhaps because he did not know that she had deleted them. He admitted everything in a written statement, including the fact that he had asked her to meet up in some of the texts. It is reckoned that he had sent her more than 2,000 texts over 18 months or so, most of them of a horrific nature. According to the girl’s mother, he had even texted her across the table on occasions when the family went to visit him and his wife for a meal. How obsessive and frightening must that have been for a young girl who felt that the whole situation was something that she was completely unable to control?

The CPS certainly found what the young girl had to say sufficiently compelling to press the charge of intending to meet up with a minor for the purpose of rape. The man pleaded not guilty. While on bail before the trial—this shows how seriously the case was being taken—he was subject to extremely severe restrictions, including electronic tagging, a curfew and the confiscation of his passport. Meanwhile, the young girl was still understandably traumatised by it all. She almost entirely stopped attending school, and needed the support of her mother—who had to leave her own job—private tutors, the school and a psychologist in order to get through her GCSEs.

The trial finally took place last month. The charge was changed to intending to meet up with a minor for the purposes of sexual activity. The police advised the parents not to attend because the content of the messages was so distressing, so another family member stepped in. The young girl was grilled by the defendant’s QC via a video link. As I said earlier, the defendant himself had admitted everything in a written statement, including fantasising about her and “falling for her”. This, however, was the actual result of the trial: because no meeting had actually taken place, although the man had asked the young girl to meet him many times in texts, the judge was compelled to instruct the jury to find him not guilty. However, he certainly registered his utter contempt for the defendant, saying that he did not like him and refusing to grant him costs although he was to walk out of the court free.

The family are, of course, absolutely devastated. They feel that no justice has been done. The young girl is obviously very angry as well as upset, and is still badly affected by it all. Matters were made worse when the family heard that the man and his own family had held a large celebration party just down the road.

I am no expert on legal matters, but if that case reveals a gap in our legal system, surely it needs attention. The family have made it clear that they fully recognise that the judge was undoubtedly left with no choice on the issue of intentions not being turned into actions, namely meeting. They also understand that the CPS was trying to go for the bigger sentence, and therefore pressed more serious charges rather than concentrating on the texts themselves. However, the family have now run out of time in which to take the man to court over the texts in a separate case, and in any event they have been told that there would be a much less serious charge that would only attract a fine.

Surely this is most unsatisfactory. A young girl of 14 has been verbally raped, and a man twice her age has been forcing his unwanted attentions on her, which she could not resist. Surely it is likely that if his texts had been racist or homophobic, he would be behind bars by now. What protection are we offering young girls in circumstances like my young constituent? We must do better, and, if necessary, we must have new legal sanctions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

First, in relation to the case that the hon. Lady quoted, it is the case that on 27 June an individual known by the court initials CF was charged with breaching his TPIM notice. He is accused of travelling through the Olympic park area in Stratford, from which he is prohibited, on five occasions. However, the package of measures relating to TPIMs, including the requirement to wear a GPS tag, enables the police to respond and investigate any breach of a TPIM notice quickly and effectively. I cannot say more in detail about that case, because that would risk undermining the prosecution. However, TPIMs, which we have put in place, are a good tool and are being used effectively. The hon. Lady talks about the impact on the Metropolitan police, but she knows full well that extra funding has been provided to the Metropolitan police to cover any extra resources it needs.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

11. What steps she has taken to empower local communities to tackle crime.

[Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)]

15. What steps she has taken to empower local communities to tackle crime.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Lynne Featherstone)]

The Government are radically reforming the approach to tackling crime, shifting accountability away from Whitehall and directly to communities. We have provided the public with greater information, invested in neighbourhood policing and police community support officers, and increased direct accountability through beat meetings. This year, the public will be empowered through the election of police and crime commissioners—a landmark reform of policing that will increase accountability at the local level.

[Angie Bray]

Noisy neighbours and noise disturbance often blight the lives of those living in urban areas. What tools is the Home Office providing to help local communities to tackle this problem, particularly when police are unable to intervene?

[Lynne Featherstone]

I am sure that all Members have people coming to their surgeries with noise complaints that have gone on for years uninvestigated. As part of the reforms set out in the recent White Paper on antisocial behaviour, we propose to introduce the community protection notice, which will give front-line professionals a single flexible power to deal quickly with any inconsiderate behaviour that is affecting a community’s quality of life. The notice will also give the police new powers to deal with antisocial noise. We are putting power into the hands of local communities with the new community trigger—

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I understand that the National Union of Journalists has mounted an appeal in the courts against the granting of a number of orders, so I hope the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that it is difficult for me to comment on the specifics. Our understanding is that only a small minority of production orders are used to obtain journalistic material. The vast majority are made in relation to financial information. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to write to me, I will look into the specifics that he highlighted.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

5. What steps she is taking to tackle gang-related crime.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

15. What steps she is taking to tackle gang-related crime.

[The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)]

The Government report on ending gang and youth violence published last November sets out a long-term, evidence-based programme to tackle gang and youth violence. The approach combines the early identification of children and young people most at risk of being drawn into gangs, providing ways out for those wanting to leave a gang, and tough enforcement against those who continue with a violent lifestyle.

[Angie Bray]

My hon. Friend will be aware that Ealing has been identified as one of the 30 top hot spots for gang problems. Our local borough serious youth violence team is already hard at work. Can the Minister update the House on what more the Government are doing to tackle knife crime, especially among young people?

[Damian Green]

The Government’s position is clear. Any adult who commits a crime using a knife can expect to be sent to prison, and serious offenders can expect a long sentence. The Home Office has committed £18 million of funding for 2011-13 to support the police, local agencies and the voluntary sector to tackle knife, gun and gang-related crime. As my hon. Friend says, Ealing has been identified as one of the 30 most affected areas. That is why it is one of the areas selected to receive additional support. It has been allocated more than £230,000 in provisional support, and I know that that money will be well spent.

UK Extradition Arrangements

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I will move on to the level of scrutiny later, but the short answer is that the level in that case was not nearly high enough. The question today is whether we in this House have the will to stand up and ensure that the trauma of the Symeou case and many others is not inflicted on other innocent people. Let us be very clear that Symeou was innocent, as are many of the victims under the European arrest warrant.

The Symeou case exposes the fatal flaw in the European arrest warrant. Fast-track extradition in the EU—I think this will answer my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman)—is based on a leap of faith and an assumption that all European justice systems are of a decent standard. That assumption is a sham. The justice systems in many European countries are well below any acceptable minimum standard. The Baker review proposed no safeguards to prevent a repeat of such miscarriages of justice. The report expressed the aspiration that penal conditions and justice systems across Europe will get better in time. In fact, standards of justice in some of the countries concerned are getting worse. According to Transparency International’s corruption perception index—just one benchmark, but an important one—corruption is getting worse in Greece, Hungary, Italy and Bulgaria. Even if standards of justice improve across Europe, as we all hope they will, our duty is to protect our citizens today, not in five or 10 years’ time. That is why it is important to take action now and not accept the “hit and hope” counsel of the Baker review.

The Baker review failed to take evidence directly from the victims and hear about the trauma that innocent people and their families have been through. In contrast, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the hon. Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis), took evidence from a range of victims, including Frank Symeou, Deborah Dark, Michael Turner and Edmond Arapi.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

I am very much in sympathy with what my hon. Friend is saying. What is the balance between the number of Europeans who are extradited to the UK and the number of British citizens who are extradited to other European countries?

[Mr Raab]

rose—

Public Disorder

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

Ealing town centre was smashed up badly on Monday night and the damage was devastating and heart-breaking to see. It was also terrifying for those people who found themselves innocently caught up when the mayhem kicked off. A quiet suburb was literally turned into a war zone for one dreadful night. A 68-year-old man is lying critically ill in hospital after being attacked near Ealing Broadway for trying to stop some youths setting a litter bin on fire. Frankly, we are all still finding this hard to get our heads around.

However, since then the community has shown remarkable spirit in pulling together to reclaim the streets. A fantastic operation, organised by the council and enthusiastically supported by local residents, businesses and emergency services, had cleaned virtually the whole place up by lunchtime the next day, which was heart-warming. People were buying new brooms to join in. I spent all of Tuesday meeting many of those who had been caught up in the nightmare and was moved by their courage and determination to get on with their lives.

I have heard various accounts of what happened on the night, but there is a thread running through what most people have told me: they feel that they did not get the policing they needed. I understand their frustration, but it is important to say that this is not a debate about cuts in police numbers. In London, police numbers are actually going up and the borough commander in Ealing has told me that he is happy with his police numbers. The concern is about the deployment on the night. I must put on the record my admiration for the way the police were prepared to put themselves in harm’s way in order to protect the public as best they could.

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for being such a feisty champion for her constituents. Will she congratulate the 22 officers from Derbyshire police force who had been brought down to help the Metropolitan police? When they got the call at 2 o’clock in the morning, they packed their bags and came straight down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Angie Bray]

Yes, of course. The police have shown themselves to be really wonderful, particularly in being prepared to get together and help wherever there is trouble.

I also think that this country needs to have a debate about what policing it wants. As the Home Secretary said earlier, the police are often damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Too often we hear criticism that on occasion they are too heavy-handed, and next they are accused of being too soft. It is up to the public, their elected representatives and the police to have a debate and decide exactly what policing we want. Policing in this country is performed by consent. The police need our consent if they are to go in and provide a slightly more robust response, which is the sort of response that I am happy to see and for which they would certainly have my consent.

[Bob Stewart]

One of the real problems is that the police are extremely concerned that if they act out of a defensive position and go forward while holding the crowd or watching for evidence, they might find themselves in the dock. We must support them utterly and completely and say that from now on when they act in good faith they will have our total support, unlike what happened after the G20 riots.

[Angie Bray]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. They need our consent and the confidence to be able to go into any situation knowing that they have the authority to act of our behalf to do whatever is necessary to enforce the law, which is what they are there to do. In Ealing, we welcome the extra police officers we have had on the streets over the past few nights and the extra measures announced today by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.

The other big question everyone was asking is how parents can allow their young kids to be out on the streets after dark, knowing that there is trouble around and seeming not to care whether they get caught up in it. It is all very well demanding more of Government and more of the police, but we should also demand more responsibility from certain parents who just do not seem to care. So often it is their communities that take the hit, with businesses and shops shutting and jobs being lost.

What happened in Ealing at the hands of these feral young people, some of them only 11-years-old, contrasts so sharply with what I saw only a week ago, when I spent a morning with 60 16-year-olds who had just spent a week up north building a team together on an Outward Bound training course. Last week they were back in west London talking about how they would plan a fundraising campaign for local charities and organise some social projects for their local community. It was the first year of piloting for the new national citizens service summer programme. It was truly inspiring. Clearly, the more we can involve people in such programmes, the better our chance of keeping them off the streets and out of trouble.

Nowhere that has come under attack over the past few days ago has deserved it; Ealing certainly has not. It is a wonderful place to live and work, and it is already back in business, although a number of shops and small businesses will need all the help that they can get to get back on their feet. I very much welcome what we heard from the Prime Minister earlier about how we will help them to do just that, but we in Ealing want to know that, if trouble springs again, the police will be in a position to respond effectively and decisively with public support, and that those troublemakers who have brought such misery to our community will be brought to justice and given the punishment that they deserve, just as the Prime Minister confirmed to me this morning.

Policing and Crime

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The noise on the Government Benches conveys Members’ desperation about the cuts being made to police officer numbers in their constituencies right across the country. The difference is that we said yes, cuts of about £1 billion would need to be made over the course of the Parliament; their Front-Bench team is making cuts of £2 billion, with the steepest cuts in the first few years. That is why we are seeing 12,000 officers go and front-line services being hit.

The storm will not go away. It will keep building. The Prime Minister may think he can make it go away by finally making a speech on crime in the next few weeks—his first since the Government began—just to show that he is taking the grip that he clearly thinks the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary lack. But it is too late for tough rhetoric, because communities across the country are already facing a tough reality—12,000 police officers to go.

How can the Government have got so out of touch on law on order? Many people have claimed that the Prime Minister just doesn’t get it—that he is out of touch and does not understand the fear of crime in communities across the country. It is true that crime is lower in Witney than in Wakefield, but one would have thought that the Prime Minister had plenty of experience of antisocial behaviour in his street. Surely the Defence Secretary must be the first candidate for an ASBO after throwing brickbats at the International Development Secretary and the Chancellor. The Business Secretary may need an injunction for throwing brickbats at himself.

The Justice Secretary has clearly been causing carnage wandering unmonitored through the TV studios. The Prime Minister should tag him at least, although Downing street probably thinks he is rather better locked up. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs should serve a community sentence, replanting trees, and the Deputy Prime Minister is clearly regarded now as a nuisance neighbour. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is the only one the Government can count on to be supportive—he is only person rather pleased to see the cuts to the traffic cops. The entire Cabinet is in desperate need of a family intervention project. What a shame the Government have cut those!

Time and again we have warned in the House of the serious consequences of cutting 12,000 officers. Let us look at the evidence: domestic violence units cut in Hampshire, officers in sexual offences teams forced out in London, traffic cops cut in Manchester, fire arms officers cut in Nottingham, CCTV officers cut in Merseyside, neighbourhood police cut in Birmingham and—get this—in Kent the police have told us that surveillance officers have been called off their targets after six-hour shifts because of overtime cuts. I presume that as part of the big society the Home Secretary has kindly asked criminals to keep their misdemeanours to office hours.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Lady at least turn her attention to London, where the Conservative Mayor, Boris Johnson, through judicious management of his finances, is on course to increase the number of police officers by 1,000 by next year?

[Yvette Cooper]

Judicious only until the mayoral election, after which the number will be cut. The Mayor has realised, as Government Members everywhere else in the country seem not to have done, that the public do not like police cuts, so of course he is pretending to put the numbers up, having seen them fall already since the election.

Government Members tell us that all these problems will be solved by cutting bureaucracy, but even the Home Secretary’s most optimistic claims are to save the equivalent of 1,200 police officers in several years’ time. Unfortunately, she is cutting 12,000 officers now. As for the A19s, you couldn’t make it up, with up to 2,000 experienced officers being forced to take early retirement. Chief constables are being put in an impossible position, forced to use A19s to make the savings that their forces need. However, now we see, with the calculations from the House of Commons Library, that when we take into account the lost tax and pension contributions that those police officers and police authorities were making, forcing those officers to retire early will actually cost the taxpayer more. Tens of millions of pounds spent and thousands fewer experienced officers on the beat—how on earth does that fight crime?

Anti-Slavery Day

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who made an important point about the anger and determination of people 200 years ago to do something about slavery, and about how we need a similar fury now about the outrages we are aware of here. Funnily enough, my constituency played a major part in the abolition of slavery in so far as one of my predecessors promoted legislation to abolish it in the 1830s, and an archway was erected to celebrate the end of slavery—it is one of the few such archways still remaining. The sad thing is that it celebrates the end of something that has not quite ended, and we need to bear that in mind in this very important debate. We need to excite that sense of fury and anger about slavery.

I want to make several points. The first is that we have to get a measure of the problem, and my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) did exactly that. The fact that 27 million people across the globe are in slavery is simply outrageous. We cannot tolerate it.

My second point is about the importance of border control. I hope that the Minister will highlight how that will be strengthened. It is critical that we tackle border control issues, and it is very important that we deliver meaningful results.

The Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), put his finger on an important point. It is not just that they have come here that matters; where they came from and how they got here also matter. That international dimension needs a focus too, because we cannot just sit here on an island and say, “We’re doing okay. How about the rest of you?” We need to take an international attitude. At the end of the day, as recipients of the problem, even if we deal with specific cases more satisfactorily, a threat will still remain, because people will still be trafficking from other places. We therefore need to use our influence to tackle the source of the problem and those who traffic.

That brings me to the EU directive against trafficking mentioned by several people today. As I understand it, we will be reviewing our position once that directive is confirmed. Furthermore, of course, we are signatories to the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking, which is robust in its attitude. However, I hope that the Minister will look carefully at the EU directive, because if we are serious about taking action, we need to consider its impact.

I want to talk about the rule of law. A lot of people have talked about the legislation and measures already in place. Yes, they probably are in place, and we may need to strengthen some of them, but in this case the rule of law is being flagrantly abused by many. It is, therefore, a question of enforcement as well. We have to get the question of enforcement right, because, at the end of the day, a country such as ours should be able to pack a punch in that respect.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we should applaud an initiative by the Metropolitan police to press for legislation that would allow editors who continue to publish sex adverts that can then be linked to trafficking to be arrested and tried in court? Does he agree with the words of the deputy Mayor for London responsible for policing? He said:

“We don’t allow drug dealers to advertise in newspapers so why should we allow traffickers to advertise prostitution?”

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, a discussion is now taking place between the local police force and local communities about automatic number plate recognition cameras in Birmingham, and that is one reason why we intend, in looking at regulation on CCTV, to include ANPR.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

One of my constituents, who also happens to be my parliamentary researcher, was seriously hurt in an unprovoked attack after he had been out for dinner with a friend in Croydon last week. Does the Secretary of State agree that late licensing is partly responsible for the increase in violent assaults at night? Will she update the House on how plans are progressing to sort out late licensing?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Brokenshire)]

My hon. Friend provides a powerful example of the impact of violent crime and alcohol, and certainly 47% of violent assaults are believed to be carried out by individuals under the influence of alcohol. That is why we will bring forward proposals to rebalance the Licensing Act 2003 in favour of local communities, and in particular introduce a proposal for a late-night levy to deal with the costs that are attributed to dealing with licensing problems in certain areas.