Home Affairs

Debate between Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford and Emily Thornberry

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

We have had a very interesting debate this afternoon. I have been sitting here for most of it and have learnt a great deal and been very glad of the opportunity to hear the contributions.

The hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) put it on record that he is not a creep, something that Members in all parts of the House know in any event and which he really did not need to do. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) gave a very interesting analysis of UKIP in which he talked about the financial meltdown, saying that many people felt there was no control of such major issues by traditional politics. He felt that the public are looking for answers and that that had a lot to do with the rise of UKIP. He put some interesting matters before us, including a discussion of the biography of Jenkins.

The hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) made a bold speech on the benefits of immigration and started listing all the things that the Liberal Democrats would like to have done if the Tories had not stopped them. In doing so, he ran the gauntlet of the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) and his friends, but he kept going. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about the pressure on services created by immigration and the fact that Dr Clare Gerada had said that doctors should not be a type of border agency, a sentiment that he supported. He was concerned about how we can ensure access to services for the right people.

The hon. Member for Peterborough seemed to be unclear about whether he believed there should be a limit on the number of Brits going to Spain, and he accused the Scottish National party of narrow chauvinistic attitudes. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd) gave us the benefit of his 22 years’ experience and told us that no matter how slim the Queen’s Speech is, even those who find it bordering on anorexic may find something worth welcoming. However, he regretted the fact, as did many Members, that the Government seem to have dropped the Wild Animals in Circuses Bill, as it was not included in the Queen’s Speech, although legislation on plastic bags was.

The hon. Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) gave a very thoughtful speech about the Modern Slavery Bill. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) treated us to one of his best “Braveheart” speeches. It seems that the rest of us in Westminster are picking on him. The hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) spoke knowledgably about energy policy and in favour of fracking, telling us that the rest of the world was doing it and that we need to do it to be competitive. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) paid a worthy tribute to Anthony Steen and the work he has put into the Modern Slavery Bill. I know that Members of the House would want to thank Anthony Steen and all those who have put so much work into the thinking behind the Bill.

The hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) spoke about police cuts and a great deal about immigration. My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) talked about crime rates and how reported crime is going up but conviction rates are not matching that, which has a particular impact on women. He spoke very movingly about his relative, Agnes, who was murdered, and how the rest of his family remain to this day victims of that crime. He talked about the Modern Slavery Bill and his thinking on it, listing what he had been expecting, or hoping, to find in the Bill and explaining how it fell short of expectations by saying what was missing. I commend to the Home Secretary the Hansard report of many of the contributions about what else should be included in the Bill.

The hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) made a welcome appeal for political leadership on immigration, asking that we do not fan the flames of prejudice. He also gave the very powerful example of a 92-year-old constituent who had struggled to get a passport to go back to the Normandy beaches that he had fought on as a 21-year-old. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) talked about job insecurity, low wages and the house crisis in the south-west, and asked where the measures were to address those core problems for her constituents.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) made an intelligent and thoughtful contribution to the immigration debate and expressed concern that the Home Secretary seems not to be taking seriously the concerns expressed by many Members about backlogs at the Passport Office. My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) spoke with great passion about a case which she believes has been a travesty of justice, and showed her real campaigning zeal on that matter.

We then heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) and for Corby (Andy Sawford) who made important speeches, particularly on immigration issues. They had clearly listened to the concerns that their constituents have expressed over the past few weeks and months when my hon. Friends have been knocking on doors and standing on doorsteps listening. They had given the issues thoughtful consideration, particularly in relation to what we should do about gangmasters, problems with housing and undercutting of wages. They proposed solutions and again drew the comparison between the ideas that are bubbling under among Labour Members and the lack of any solutions in the Queen’s Speech.

My hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) made a passionate speech about prison overcrowding and penal policy. He showed himself to be a consummate professional, and despite being heckled by rattling speakers, kept going and silenced them. Finally, we heard from the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), who talked about data gathering and about gang and violent crime. She said that the daily suffering of girls who were on the edges of crime seemed to go unmentioned and ignored. It is important that she raised the issue in the House, and that girls who are the victims of crime and are on the edges of these gangs are not ignored. We need to address the relevant policy issues.

The Queen’s Speech contains a number of Bills relating to home affairs which are linked by themes. My concern is that although they sound marvellous and can be talked up beautifully in the press, the Bills often disappoint when we look at the nitty-gritty. For example, on the confiscation of criminal profits, the National Audit Office report was a call to arms as it showed that only 26p of every £100 of profits a criminal makes is confiscated. Some £1.5 billion has eluded the authorities because the assets have been hidden, siphoned away overseas or eroded by third-party claims.

The report focused our minds as never before on what we should do. Labour has pledged to introduce a raft of measures which would strengthen the confiscation regime. Although on the whole we welcome the Serious Crime Bill, we wonder whether it will deliver everything that is promised. Will it live up to its rhetoric or will it ultimately be disappointing? We will look carefully at whether there are serious measures in relation to the disclosure of third-party claims. We particularly believe that they should be at the restraint order stage and not too late. We are quite happy to share our ideas if Ministers will listen to, for example, our proposals that costs should be recoverable by defendants in freezing order applications, and that when defendants ask for their costs in freezing order applications, the amount they get back should be only at legal aid rates. We are happy to share our ideas on how to put pressure on defendants to bring their assets back to the United Kingdom.

The Home Secretary was so busy fighting with the Secretary of State for Education that she may not have noticed all the details that I put into my speech at the Proceeds of Crime Lawyers Association annual general meeting. If she has not seen the speech, I would be happy to send it to her. It went into some detail about what we believe should be done so that criminal assets can be confiscated properly. We wish to give the Home Secretary some advice. One of the most important ways of seizing the profits of crime is to foster better relations with overseas jurisdictions, because once those assets are overseas, they are very difficult to get back. We need to foster better relations to ensure that overseas jurisdictions will co-operate with us.

It is extraordinary that since 2008, £200 million-worth of assets have been frozen by the UK courts in response to overseas requests for legal assistance, but not a single penny of that money has been repatriated to the countries that asked us to seize and freeze those assets. If we do not co-operate with overseas jurisdictions, how can we expect them to co-operate with us? This is not something that requires legislation, but it needs clear policy drivers and it needs to be led on.

On professional organised crime, we will be watching carefully to see whether the measures announced with such trump will be a rehashing of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. We are concerned that David Thomas, the former head of the Home Office financial intelligence unit, recently told journalists that too often the Government dragged their feet in responding to foreign freezing requests, if they responded to them at all, because they consider them too much of a headache. We really need to be serious about reciprocity if we want to seize criminal assets.

As for the child abuse provisions, the extension of the definition of child cruelty is welcome, but it must be seen against the background of child cruelty conviction rates having fallen. In 2009, the rate was 720, and in 2013 it fell to 553. It is important to extend the offence, but it is also important to use the current law and ensure that there are proper prosecutions and convictions. With regard to the law on female genital mutilation, we ask the Government to consider the call from the Director of Public Prosecutions for anonymity of victims. We do not believe that that is in the current legislation, but it needs to be considered.

The Bill that has perhaps been praised the most is the Modern Slavery Bill. It is generally to be welcomed, but, again, we must look at the enforcement record. We know that the law on human trafficking has a bad enforcement record. In 2013, there were just 28 prosecutions for trafficking for sexual exploitation, and only 11 convictions. In relation to child protection, 300 children who had been trafficked were rescued from their traffickers and placed in care but then went missing. We have been calling since 2010 for legal guardians, and we are impatient that the legislation contains only enabling powers and that we must await the results of trials. We welcome statutory defence of victims of trafficking to ensure that they are not prosecuted for crimes that they are forced into, and we welcome the fact that there will be statutory guidance on victim ID and victim services, but we are concerned that the national referral mechanism is not working properly and needs review. Again, I discovered recently in a freedom of information request from the Crown Prosecution Service that it usually does not go to the national referral mechanism until after someone has been prosecuted and sentenced. In those circumstances, the data base is hardly doing the job it is supposed to be doing.

[Nicola Blackwood]

As I understand it, the NRM has been under review since April, and it is well known that that was a necessary process. Does the hon. Lady not welcome the prevention orders that are proposed in the Modern Slavery Bill, which will be a key tool for police in disrupting the very trafficking networks that she is talking about?