Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Lord Bishop of Manchester

Report stage
Wednesday 28th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, traffickers exercise control over their victims by convincing them that they will not receive help from the authorities if they seek it. The Bill will simply add credence to that claim.

I fully sympathise with the desire to deter people from using our modern slavery laws as a means to make a spurious claim for protection, but where is the evidence? The Government cannot point at any evidence of widespread abuse of our modern slavery system, yet they propose to remove basic protections for some of the most vulnerable people in our country. It is a basic principle of law—I can find it for you in the Book of Genesis if you want—that, in our desire to convict the guilty, we should not end up punishing the innocent. Amendment 12 is the very least we need in order to protect that vital principle.

Some 41% of referrals to the national referral mechanism relate to people exploited as children, which is why I also support Amendment 112 in the name of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. We must ensure that no child victim, whatever form of exploitation they have experienced or whatever crime they may have been coerced into committing, should be disqualified from accessing protection. We owe that to children. We have a moral responsibility at the very least to provide people with the opportunity to have their case heard through the national referral mechanism without fear of immediate detention or removal.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, told us during the last vote about the views of all the members of the Council of Europe and specifically mentioned Hungary questioning what the UK is doing—Hungary.

My name is on the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on behalf of everyone on these Benches. The survivors of modern slavery should be protected and supported, not just because it is the right thing to do and the UK was lauded for it but to help the prosecution of criminals, of which we hear very little. The Bill indicates the extent to which the Government fail to put themselves in the shoes of victims and survivors, including those who have been trafficked here—who therefore have not come under their own steam—and particularly regarding the need for survivors to be in the UK to assist prosecutions. I could go on, but I will not.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, is right that we need an independent anti-slavery commissioner in post. How long has it been—a year and how many months? A considerable number of criteria should be assessed, but we are where we are. We maintain our opposition to how slavery and trafficking are dealt with. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on his filleting of the Bill. We will be with him.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Lord Bishop of Manchester

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Lords Hansard - part one & Report stage
Monday 10th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I support Amendments 90H, 90J, 95A, 95B and 95C, to which I have added my name. I also signal my support for other amendments in this group which also seek to control more tightly how serious violence reduction orders will operate. I draw your Lordships’ attention to my work on policing ethics, both for Greater Manchester Police and for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, as set out in the register of interests.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has indicated, Amendment 90H seeks to ensure that an SVRO can be applied only when a bladed article or offensive weapon is used to commit an offence, not simply when such an item happens to be present and in the possession of the defendant. As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, has indicated, as presently drafted, the Bill requires no substantive link between the weapon and the offence. An individual could, for example, commit a road traffic offence while driving home from a church picnic, with their used cutlery on the passenger seat next to them, and the prosecution could ask for an SVRO.

I can see that subsection (5) of the proposed new chapter is intended to mitigate that by requiring the court to consider that imposition of the order is necessary to protect the public or the defendant from possible future offences involving such weapons. However, I do not believe it adequately achieves that objective. Asking a court to conject what might happen in the future can all too easily invite decisions taken on discriminatory or flimsy grounds, especially as no court would wish to face public criticism for having failed to apply an SVRO should later violence occur. To legislate for future conjecture requires a robust link to what has already happened. Subsection (3)(a) gives that; it requires that the weapon was used by the defendant in committing the offence in question. Deleting subsection (3)(b), as this amendment seeks to do, would ensure that any order is based on genuine and evidenced risk. To put it bluntly, it would pass my church picnic test.

Amendment 90J, if I may turn to that, seeks to more closely tie the order to the offence by limiting it to the actual person who used or had possession of the weapon, not some putative third party who

“knew or ought to have known”

that they had it. The de facto joint enterprise element in the current drafting of this clause widens the net substantially for who can be affected, and includes people not convicted of knife crime. As the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has just said, this is likely to disproportionately affect women and girls, who may well know or suspect that a partner or family member may be carrying a weapon but are far too vulnerable to be able to extricate themselves from a situation where violence involving such weapons may be committed by others.

I understand that the intention may be to provide such vulnerable adults with an excuse to stay away from both people and situations with which violence may be associated, but when I try to put myself in the position of such a person, I cannot really imagine saying to my partner or brother: “Oh, I must not be near you when you have a knife because I might get an SVRO against me.” I think these people are far too vulnerable. I hope I have persuaded your Lordships that Amendment 90J will address this deficit.

Finally, on Amendment 90J, apart from it being grossly unfair by ignoring the impact on vulnerable people, subsection (4) appears to be unworkable. How will the court determine if someone “ought to have known” that some other person had a knife? The amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, tease out this point specifically. I will leave others to speak to them at greater length, but if our own Amendment 90J does not win your Lordships’ support, I would hope that her amendments are more persuasive.

I now turn to Amendments 95A, 95B and 95C on the pilot scheme. In order to understand how SVROs operate in practice, these are entirely welcome. SVROs present a major innovation. There are significant risks of dangers from unexpected consequences—dangers that may outweigh any good that SVROs achieve. If we are to roll them out across the country, we need to have confidence that they are doing the job intended and making things better and not worse. For all the eloquence of our arguments in this House, there is nothing quite like having real, practical experience on the ground to draw on if we are going to get things right. These three amendments, taken together, simply seek to strengthen the pilot; to make it a genuine gathering of all the most relevant evidence, and one that will feed into a proper decision-making process here in Parliament, ahead of SVROs being rolled out across the nation.

In my early days as Bishop of Manchester, we had an idea of how we might make better and more locally informed decisions on where we deployed our vicars. We set up a two-year pilot across about a fifth of our dioceses. Towards the end of that period, we commissioned an independent evaluation by outside experts. We learned a huge amount from the exercise, and, in consequence, we never rolled out the substantive project. We did something different; we did something better. A pilot has to have the capacity to substantially implement the eventual shape of whatever is the final product, otherwise it is simply window dressing.

It is clear from speeches already made here today that there is considerable uncertainty about SVROs. In particular, noble Lords have drawn attention to the danger that they become associated with disproportionality and hence diminish confidence in policing and the courts. None of us wants that. We noted the risk that, rather than prevent criminalisation, they may draw more vulnerable people—especially young women—into the criminal justice system. We have remarked that extensive use of stop and search powers, especially in the absence of specific evidence of intention to offend, has over and again proved counterproductive. These last three amendments cover both the process and the content of the pilot evaluation. They will make for much better decisions on how and when, and perhaps most crucially if, SVROs are rolled out across the nation. I hope the Minister will be minded to accept them or to meet us to find an agreed way forward.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I wonder whether I could ask the Minister a question about her amendments to Clause 141. This takes forward to one point of detail the comments made by other noble Lords about targeting particular groups of possible offenders. Amendments 92 and 93 would extend the guidance from the exercise of functions by the police to, as in proposed new subsection 1A(b),

“guidance about identifying offenders in respect of whom it may be appropriate for … serious violence reduction orders to be made”.

To me, this reads very much like profiling. Can the Minister tell the House whether “identifying offenders” is about identifying particular individuals or a cohort, class or demographic in respect of whom the Government may see SVROs as appropriate?