Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part one & Committee stage
Monday 25th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I have made no secret of the fact that I think that this is an appalling Bill. When I started looking at the amendments, I had to struggle not to sign up to all of them, because they all made sense, but I had to let my noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle sign some, and she signed Amendment 48. She apologises for not being in her place today.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, laid out why all the amendments in this group are so important. Bringing together all the local authorities and other bodies to reduce serious violence is an excellent initiative, but it cannot come at the expense of breaching key safeguards for sensitive personal information, especially medical information. The amendments are about striking the right balance so that authorities can work together without being under a duty to breach doctor-patient confidentiality. Without this, we risk ever greater government intrusion into our personal and private lives in the vague name of keeping us safe—something this Tory Government seem to be very keen to do by quite repressive measures. By supporting the amendments, we can ensure that the Government do not overstep the mark.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Monday 25th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I support Amendment 28, tabled by my noble friend Lord Paddick, which would add each NHS body in an area to the formal list of bodies to be consulted on a local plan, including why NHS bodies should not be a specified authority. I will use one example of how critical to planning they can be to support the argument.

Our Liberal Democrat colleague Caroline Pidgeon, a member of the Greater London Assembly, wrote a report in 2015 to the Greater London Assembly on knife crime. She encouraged the then Mayor of London to adopt the Cardiff model in A&E to help tackle knife crime. After a long campaign, Mayor Boris Johnson finally agreed, and one of the key recommendations in Caroline’s report was to collect anonymised data.

Currently all accident and emergency departments in London collect anonymised data on violent crime for those who need treatment. The scheme means that A&E departments share key information on things such as the location of crime and weapons used with the police and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, while protecting personal data. This data helps to guide interventions and prevention programmes and is invaluable in gaining knowledge on violent crime patterns. This is recognised as good practice, but there is an enormous amount of learning going on in our A&E departments as they collate that data. If the Government intend to emulate this elsewhere, it would also be helpful for the Bill to recognise that there is an enormous amount of expertise in our health bodies that can help tackle serious violence. It seems logical therefore that health bodies should also be statutory consultees.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle is unable to attend your Lordships’ Committee today, so I am proposing Amendment 30 in her place.

Along with the other amendments in this group, our amendment will improve the Government’s attempts to reduce serious violence. Youth groups, cultural groups and religious groups are just a few of the organisations that should be consulted in the exercise of the serious violence duty. There are many others too, and there will be big gaps in any serious violence reduction plan that has not consulted with and included these groups. They know their communities well, often with a different angle from other health services, local authorities and so on, and are currently not listed in the Bill—but they definitely should be. Perhaps most importantly, they can often shine a light on the failures of those other bodies with respect to how they perhaps underserve or misunderstand their communities.

So I hope the Minister will outline how youth, cultural and religious groups will be properly involved in this serious violence duty.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, as chair of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I support Amendments 33 and 41 in my name. I intend to speak only once on the whole Bill, unless the spirit moves me via my noble friend the Minister’s reply. She will know that there were quite a few recommendations in the Delegated Powers Committee report, but I have put down just these two amendments.

If the Committee will permit, I will take the first minute to run through the more general criticism we made of the delegated powers in the Bill. I will not return to this subject again. In our response to the memorandum, we said:

“We are surprised and concerned at the large number of inappropriate delegations of power in this Bill … We are particularly concerned that the Bill would … allow Ministers—and even a non-statutory body—to influence the exercise of new police powers (including in relation to unauthorised traveller encampments and stop and search) through ‘guidance’ that is not subject to Parliamentary scrutiny … leave to regulations key aspects of new police powers—to restrict protest and to extract confidential information from electronic devices—that should instead be on the face of the Bill; and … allow the imposition of statutory duties via the novel concept of ‘strategy’ documents that need not even be published.”


That is the subject of the amendments before us today, and that is what I shall major on.

We concluded our general introduction by saying:

“We are disappointed that the inclusion of these types of delegations of power—on flimsy grounds—suggests that the Government have failed when preparing this Bill to give serious consideration to recommendations that we have made in recent reports on other Bills.”


That is fairly scathing condemnation, and it is a bit unfair on noble Lords in this Committee and from the Home Office, because they had nothing to do with drafting these provisions.

We all know how it happens. The Bill has come from another place; Ministers who have served in the Home Office and other departments will honestly admit this. I dealt with about 20 Bills when I was in the Home Office. The Bill team and civil servants would come in and say, “Here’s the Bill, Minister”, and we would look at the general politics of it. Then they would say, “Oh, by the way, there are some delegated powers there. When you’re ready to come back again to tweak it, we can deal with it”. We all said, “Yes, jolly good; carry on”, but never paid any attention to them. I am certain that the Bill team in the Commons—the civil servants drafting the Bill—did not, and nor did the Commons Ministers. It came here and this bunch of Lordships have got a bit upset, and I suspect others will too.

I say to my noble friend the Minister to go back, as other Lords Ministers have to do, and explain to Ministers in the Commons and the Bill team—the Bill team thinks it is sacrosanct; it has drafted it and does not like people mucking around with it—that that bunch up the Corridor will want some concessions. My political antennae tell me that on Report there may be a few amendments made by noble Lords on all sides—amendments I might not approve of at all—but if we want to get somewhere, the Commons should make concessions on this, because they are really sensible.

Before I comment on the two amendments, I will give one example. We criticise the provisions on serious disruption; I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, wishes to remove them from the Bill. We say in our report that the Government have been able to draft a half-page statutory instrument describing serious disruption. If the Government can draft it there, stick it in the Bill, for goodness’ sake, and then it can be amended later.

That is enough general criticism. I apologise to my noble friend as she has to take it all the time, but other departments have been infinitely worse in some of their inappropriate delegations. The Home Office is not the worst offender.

Clauses 7(9) and 8(9)

“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”

to reduce serious violence. Clauses 7 and 8 allow collaboration between authorities and a local government area

“to prevent and reduce serious violence”,

including to

“prepare and implement a strategy for exercising their functions”—

all good stuff.

Under Clauses 7 and 8, a strategy

“may specify an action to be carried out by … an educational authority … a prison authority … or … a youth custody authority”,

and such authorities are under a duty to carry out the specified actions. However, there is no requirement for such a strategy to be published; instead, the Secretary of State has the power, exercisable by regulations subject to the negative procedure, to

“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”.

This power would appear to allow the Secretary of State to provide that a strategy need not be published if she so wished, or even to decide not to make a provision about publication at all. That does not make sense to us. My committee is

“concerned that the absence of a requirement to publish means that a strategy can have legislative effect—by placing educational authorities, prison authorities and youth custody authorities under a statutory duty to do things specified in it—but without appropriate transparency.”

We therefore recommend

“that the delegated powers in clauses 7(9) and 8(9) should be amended”—

that is, tweaked a wee bit—

“to require the publication of any action which is specified in a ‘strategy’ as one that an educational authority, a prison authority or a youth custody authority must carry out.”

That is a minor tweak—actually, so are many of the other things we recommend. We may be scathing in the report, but we are not asking that fundamental bits of the Bill be deleted or rewritten completely; we are merely asking for more transparency. Putting more things on the face of the Bill will save the Government rather a lot of grief in this House later on.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My noble friend has raised the issue of national standards. I want to approach this issue in a slightly different way. I have added my name to the amendment because I have concerns about clarity. The existing standards are set out in the 1988 Act, and we as drivers are all familiar with them. We passed our driving tests however long ago, but on an almost daily basis we practise following those standards—fairly rigorously, I hope.

According to this legislation, we are now moving to a set of standards based on a format for training of which we, with the exception of my noble friend, have no real concept. We do not understand exactly what is involved in this training and what is expected of police drivers. Indeed, I am sure this debate has been very instructive for us all in finding out a bit more about it.

Add that issue to the fact that standards are different from one part of the country to another and we have a difficult situation for the Government in applying this new approach. Good law has to be easily understandable. Publicising the details of these standards—making sure that the public, as well as police officers, understand them—is essential for acceptance by the general public. That will be essential if cases brought under this legislation are to succeed in court.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I have a confession to make: I love the traffic police. I have spent many happy hours in the front of a police van with an automatic number plate recognition machine, spotting illegal drivers. The fascinating thing about criminals is that not only do they break the law on drugs, guns and so on, but they do not pay insurance on their cars either. If I were a criminal, I would make sure that my car was perfectly legal, but for some reason they do not. So the traffic police are incredibly successful at catching criminals; at one point—I do not know if this is still true—their arrest rate was far higher than that of the average police officer here in London.

In the 12 years that I sat on the police authority, I took advantage of that to go out with the traffic police. I remember one spectacular day when they had a car-crushing machine next to the A1. All the vehicles speeding down the A1 saw that machine and slowed to legal limits. We were not actually crushing cars that had been taken that day; they had brought some cars out with them from central London. So I am a big fan. The traffic OCU serves an incredible function of keeping our roads safe.

I support Amendment 19. Of course, everybody expects the police who respond to blue-light emergencies to drive fast, overtake, go through red lights and so on, and it is right that the police are given the necessary legal protections to do their job in these situations. Then there are more controversial and dangerous tactics, such as officers aggressively ramming moped drivers who refuse to stop. We cannot leave that for the courtroom to decide—it has to be a political decision. Whether a tactic meets the standard of a reasonable and careful constable is political, because you cannot leave police officers uncertain about whether their behaviour is legal. It would also leave the public unsure about what standard of driving you can expect from our public servants. Amendment 19 addresses that issue and is an extremely neat solution.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendments would improve the Bill. The legislation in some respects is too loose, and needs to be tightened. I hope that, when we move from Committee to Report in a few weeks, the Minister will have had time to reflect on the previous group but also on some of the points being made here, because that will make what we all want much more likely to happen. I hope that he will be able to reflect on the points that noble Lords have made and come forward with the Government’s own amendments to take account of those points, some of which are exceedingly logical and good and would enhance the Bill and what the Government are seeking to achieve.

The amendments raise key issues in relation to the police driving provisions. The aim of the clause is not to allow the police to drive without safeguards or scrutiny but to ensure that they are not criminalised for what they have been trained to do. Amendment 19 raises a reasonable question about national standards for competent and carefully trained drivers. As we will come on to in Amendment 20, there are various levels of training, and the number of fully trained officers will differ between forces. However, that does not alter the fact that there is a need to set out in more detail and with more clarity what a nationally recognised standard will look like. Will it be covered in the training that officers receive, and is the Minister confident that the Bill makes it clear what a national standard means? The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, posed a reasonable question, which was answered well by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, about what that means between different police forces such as Devon and Cornwall and the Metropolitan Police, and how they do things. Those are the sort of points that the Minister needs to raise.

On Amendment 20, the idea of a reasonableness defence is an issue that officers are concerned about, which was raised consistently in the Commons. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, did not mention that quite as much as he did the national standards, but we need to ask how this whole area of reasonableness, which is used in the courts, stands with respect to this Bill. It is difficult to craft an answer, but the issue goes back to the level of training that an officer receives, which varies from force to force. It not only varies from force to force, however: the level of training varies within the police force.

Let me give an example for clarity. If I am a member of the public on the street, I know generally what a response car looks like, and you would expect a response car driver to have had the highest level of training, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said he had received in the past. It is about a proper response driver responding to emergencies or pursuing a vehicle. That is what you would expect if you were a member of the public. But not all police cars are response cars. What about a police van? I have seen police vans driving after people. What happens then?

Is this level of training—police pursuit—available only to response drivers? What about other drivers, or will they be compared to the normal standard? This takes the police into very difficult territory. I have not been a serving police officer like the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but I can only imagine that if someone said, “Officer, a mile down the road there is a really serious incident”, and a police van driver did not put the blue lights on and go down there, and as a consequence a murder or a rape took place, people are not going to say, “That officer driving the police van was quite right; he did not respond in the way that he should because he has not had the proper level of training”. This takes us into difficult territory, and it is also about the reputation of the police.

What happens, however, if the police van driver does that, but then crashes or injures somebody else? I thought that was the point of Amendment 20 and the reasonableness defence: you would expect the police officer driving the van to do that, even though they are not trained to the level of the police response driver. From the Bill, however, it is not clear whether the police van driver—I am making that up as an example—would be able to do that and respond to an emergency situation with the same level of protection that the Bill tries to give to a response-level trained driver, whereas the public would expect them both to respond in the same way.

That is the point of the reasonableness test that Amendment 20 seeks to drive into the Bill. I hope that I have given a clear enough example of the sort of situation that might arise for a police officer, whether operating in Devon and Cornwall, the middle of London, Sheffield, Cardiff or wherever.

This is the point of the Committee: it drives that level of detail that seeks to clarify the way the legislation is drafted—as we saw with the previous grouping, where there is a real problem around the phrase “police purpose”—but also tries to ensure that the legislation delivers in both its wording and its intention.

On the drafting of the Bill, can the Minister just give us some assurance that officers with basic police driver training would be protected if they found themselves having to respond to an incident that ideally required a higher level of training? That is a fundamental question and if I were a police officer driving a vehicle that was not a response vehicle, I would want to know whether I was protected by law in the way that we seek to protect other drivers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I have signed most of the amendments in this group because I think they are extremely valuable. I want to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, on his very thorough exposition of why they are needed.

As I and others have mentioned many times, there is a serious failing of the police and the Home Office to safeguard children and young people from serious violence. This is most explicit in the police’s ongoing use of child spies, where they scoop up children who have got stuck in dangerous criminal situations and put them in even more danger by working them as an intelligence asset with very few safeguards. Obviously, Amendment 50 could then apply to police officers who put children in that sort of situation.

The serious violence duty is important, but it must include a duty to safeguard children and young people who are caught up in the chaos of organised crime. Early interventions, removing children from organised crime, and well-funded youth programmes are all key to ending this cycle of violence. Writing them off as destined for a life of crime and using them as disposable police assets is inhumane and dangerous. I hope that the Minister can change tack on this so that we can change many young lives for the better.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester was in his place earlier but has had to go elsewhere for the evening. He has asked me to speak on his behalf on the amendments in this group tabled in his name alongside those of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I thank the Children’s Society and Barnardo’s for their support and helpful briefings.

The Church has a particular concern for vulnerable children. As far as the Church of England is concerned, there are 4,644 schools in which we educate around 1 million students. This educational commitment is combined with parish and youth worker activities that bring the Church into contact with thousands of families each year. Through the Clewer Initiative, many parishes and dioceses have worked closely on the issues of county lines and confronting the blight of modern slavery. Accordingly, we have seen at first hand and, sadly, all too frequently the terrible damage caused by serious youth violence and by the criminal exploitation of children. The latter is an especially insidious form of abuse, which one victim has described as “when someone you trusted makes you commit crime for their benefit”.

Amendment 50, as we have heard, seeks to create a definition of child criminal exploitation that would sit alongside other definitions of exploitation already in the Modern Slavery Act. The present lack of a single statutory definition means that local agencies are responding differently to this form of exploitation across the country. Research by the Children’s Society in 2019 found that only one-third of local authorities had a policy in place for responding to it. By its very nature, exploitation through county lines crosses local authority boundaries, so it is imperative that there is a national shared understanding of child criminal exploitation so that children do not fall through the gaps if they live in one area but are exploited in another. A consequence of the current lack of a shared definition and approach is that many children receive punitive criminal justice responses rather than being seen as victims of exploitation and abuse.

Youth justice data shows that in 2019-20, 1,402 children were first-time entrants to the youth justice system due to drug offences, with 2,063 being first-time entrants due to weapon offences. Both issues are often associated with criminal exploitation through the county lines drug model. Despite positive work from several police forces and the CPS, many criminal cases are still being pursued against a child even when they have been identified as a victim of criminal exploitation.

Relatedly, too many children are coming to the attention of services only when they are arrested by police for drugs-related crimes, as early warning signs are not understood or are simply missed. We too often find that not all professionals involved in children’s lives fully understand this form of exploitation and how vulnerabilities manifest in children. There are countless serious case reviews that point to safeguarding interventions not being made earlier enough in the grooming process.

A statutory definition agreed and understood by all local safeguarding partners would enable professionals to spot the signs earlier and divert vulnerable children away from harm, in much the same way as the recently adopted statutory definition of domestic abuse is now helping to improve responses on that issue. I am sure that every Member of this House shares the desire to protect vulnerable children. Adopting this definition would send a strong message to those children that their abuse is seen, heard and understood.

This also leads me briefly to address Amendments 21, 23 to 27, 42 and 43, which would amend the serious violence duty. Concern with the serious violence duty, as presented here, is about a lack of clear commitment to the safeguarding of children. No differentiation is drawn between how this duty impacts on children as opposed to adults.

Children and vulnerable young people experiencing serious violence require a different response. Being involved in violence is often an indicator that children are experiencing other problems in their lives, such as being criminally exploited. It is important to understand these underlying causes of why children may be involved in violence, and for these underlying causes in a child’s life or in the lives of children within certain areas to be addressed. We need to intervene to protect and divert children, not treating them as adult criminals. This requires a co-ordinated approach to preventative safeguarding which focuses on offering support to a child and family through targeted or universal services at the first signs of issues in their lives to prevent them being coerced into activity associated with serious violence.

Safeguarding and protecting children and vulnerable young people from harm should be the first priority of statutory agencies, and in any subsequent duty for these agencies to co-operate with one another. The duty as currently drafted does not mention “safeguarding” once, nor does it signal the need for the specific involvement of children’s social care teams in creating a strategy to prevent violence in a local area. A failure to write into the duty the need to safeguard children risks young people falling through the cracks in statutory support and receiving a punitive response from statutory services. It makes the duty all about crime reduction at the expense of safeguarding. It would also hinder the ability of the duty to be truly preventative if it did not specify the involvement of children’s services.

I hope that we shall receive some assurances from the Minister on the commitment to safeguarding, ideally on the face of the Bill, but certainly a commitment that the issue of how the duty relates to safeguarding will be more closely considered in guidance.

Black Dog Crisis Management Company

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

It is my understanding that this company has been engaged previously by the Home Office. I can get the noble Lord some stats on other government departments if he wishes.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, could the noble Baroness clarify this for me? If a company wants a government contract, is it better to have a friend in the Cabinet, to give a large donation to the Conservative Party, or both?

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 14th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak on this Bill. Every time I have worked on a Bill since I arrived in your Lordships’ House nearly eight years ago, I have thought, “This is the worst Bill I have ever seen”, and every one is, but this is a stinker and it is quite obviously not going to help the police. If you produce a policing Bill and you cannot get former police chiefs, UN special rapporteurs, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law on your side, something is wrong with it.

The Minister mentioned that the Government are increasing the number of police officers by 20,000 and increasing the budget, but I point out to her that in fact the police are not yet up to the numbers and do not yet have the budget that they had when the Tory Government took over 11 years ago, so this Government are not particularly kind or good to the police. We all know that policing is tough, but this Bill will not help.

Surprisingly—or interestingly, or however you want to see it—I, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, have 11 issues that I am concerned about in the Bill. I think there will probably be more by Committee and my noble friend Lady Bennett has her own issues as well, which are equally serious and disturbing. I will try to gallop, in the very limited time we have to speak at Second Reading, through these issues.

The first is Part 2. Unprotected data gathering and sharing is a very disturbing part of the Bill. For example, it mimics what has happened with the Prevent programme. That programme has disproportionately targeted Muslims and minority ethnic communities, and it is likely that human rights infringements will be felt most acutely by those already overpoliced and overrepresented in the criminal justice system. These measures could have a disproportionate impact on marginalised communities and groups advocating for social change, with Black Lives Matter, Muslim people, women and climate change activists—among whom I am, I hope, a guerrilla fighter—being particularly affected. This Bill makes it more difficult for those oppressed groups to have a voice in our society at a time when it is so desperately needed.

I agree very strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, that we should not be adding to the Bill. We should be removing things. In fact, if we could remove the whole Bill, that would give me a few nights of good sleep. In the meantime, we can fight on all these things.

Part 3 on public order undermines democracy by limiting freedom of speech. It poses a threat to the core purpose of a protest: to allow people who feel unheard by decision-makers to speak and be heard. This part silences them. When we talk about disturbance and unease from noise, I would like to complain about the noise we hear from the other end of this Palace. The way the House of Commons carries on often upsets and displeases me, so perhaps we could apply the Bill to it.

The Bill allows future Home Secretaries to determine what constitutes a disruption. Do the Government really think we trust Secretaries of State to do that? Throughout the Bill the vague language means that it leaves too much up to officers at the scene, and we have seen this year that the police misinterpret laws, partly because they are not given good, clear instructions by the Government, but that is another issue. For example, the policing of the Sarah Everard vigil at Clapham Common was terrible. To allow through such broadly defined legislation leaves the door open to more poor policing, which the police themselves do not want. There is nothing in the Bill to protect women and girls. That is a tragic oversight.

Finally, Part 5 is on road traffic. I would like to insist on the full review of road traffic offences and penalties that was promised in 2014. We have waited seven years, so perhaps it could happen. We also need to strengthen the penalties for serious hit-and-run offences, those where the driver knew or reasonably ought to have known that the collision was likely to involve fatal or serious injury, and tackle the exceptional hardship loophole whereby convicted drivers routinely evade driving bans by pleading that they would cause exceptional hardship. There was a classic case of somebody who claimed it would be exceptional hardship if he could not use his Bentley to drive one mile to the park to walk his dog.

Police: Body-worn Videos

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My noble friend makes a good point, but we have to be careful here. The use of body-worn video has to be lawful, necessary and proportionate, and I think that is why the call for its use in stop and search has been made. Its use generally has to be incident specific. I take the point that my noble friend makes, but it is probably not useful or advisable in all circumstances.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

According to a recent report, some videos showed that police officers were poor at communicating and lacked patience and de-escalation skills. Is it possible that the pressure on the police from 11 years of swingeing Tory cuts to their budgets and numbers is responsible for that sort of pressure? Their numbers are still not back to pre-Conservative Government levels of 11 years ago.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I do not agree with the noble Baroness, she will not be surprised to know. She can surely acknowledge that our efforts to enlist an extra 20,000 police officers are all to the good in fighting crime.

Law Enforcement Agencies: Duty of Candour

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to implement the recommendation in The Report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel (HC 11), published on 15 June, that there should be “a statutory duty of candour, to be owed by all law enforcement agencies to those whom they serve, subject to protection of national security and relevant data protection legislation”.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel recommends legislating for a duty of candour, which is a proposal put forward by the Hillsborough families. The Government are considering this as part of their response to Bishop James Jones’s report on the Hillsborough families’ experiences. The Government wish to engage with the families before publishing this response.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

That is potentially very good news. However, the independent panel highlighted obstruction and a lack of co-operation by the Metropolitan Police that

“placed its concern for its own reputation above the public interest.”

Who do the Government believe should be held accountable for that misconduct?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, first, I extend my deepest sympathies to the family of Daniel Morgan. Regarding who should be held accountable, the Home Secretary has asked the Metropolitan Police Service to account for the findings in the report. She has also asked HMICFRS to ask the chief inspector what steps the inspectorate can take to provide assurance on the issues raised in the report.

Criminal Trials: Intercept Evidence

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

We would need a few hours to have that discussion so, thankfully, given that the Lord Speaker’s direction is to keep my answers brief, I will not go into that. As I have said, there are checks and balances within the criminal justice system, as the noble Lord well knows, that safeguard one route from being used in order to achieve another.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

It has come to the attention of a few Members of this House that MI5 keeps files on them. If the police or security services chose to intercept our communications, would anyone in Parliament have the power to authorise or not authorise that?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving me notice of the fact that she was going to raise this issue; it is not really part of this Question, but that never stops her. As I said, we do not use intercept warrants as court evidence. In terms of who would authorise what, the Home Office would authorise its various agencies, the Foreign Office its agencies and the Northern Ireland Office its agencies, so it would be for those Secretaries of State to authorise those warrants.

Forensic Science and the Criminal Justice System (S&T Committee Report)

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 26th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Science and Technology Committee for its work in producing this excellent report, its chair, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for his masterly exposition of what the report is all about and, of course, the committee’s staff who have been so incredibly helpful in briefing Peers ahead of this debate.

I will now exhibit my worst character defect, according to some of my friends, and say that I was not a member of the Science and Technology Committee, but I was a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority for the 12 years of its existence from 2000 onwards. As soon as the idea of privatising the national Forensic Science Service was floated, I made a speech in which I said, “This is a mistake and it will cause all sorts of problems”. Well, I told you so—rather I told them so. I was very unhappy when it finally went ahead.

The worrying thing that underpins all this, across the forensic sector, committee and the Government, is the acceptance that miscarriages of justice have occurred as a result of the failures, changes and inconsistencies in the way that forensic science is conducted. That innocent people may have been found guilty and guilty people may have been found innocent should worry everyone in this country because it undermines the whole justice system and the rule of law. I am yet to see any serious reflection from the Government on the implications of this or any attempt to ensure that these injustices are remedied.

I will come back to this issue, and I would like the Minister to explain what conversations the Government have had with the Attorney-General and the Lord Chancellor to trawl through these past cases and ensure that any forensic errors are put right and that anyone wrongly convicted has their conviction overturned. This work should be conducted using government funds and should not be constrained by the availability of individuals’ funds or legal aid.

The Government’s response to the report, specifically on legal aid, sadly expresses that they are

“not aware of legally aided defendants being denied access to forensic testing and expert advice for funding reasons.”

Will the Minister expand on the basis of that assertion? Is it founded on ignorance or have they gone out of their way to seek examples of legal aid limits getting in the way of justice? I ask this because some Peers had an email from a forensics organisation that mostly does legal aid criminal defence work. It says that, while the three main laboratories that work with the police have had significant increases in funding recently, there has not been a corresponding increase in funding for the defence. It says that it has tried to engage with the Government about legal aid funding, but to no avail, for example, on the arbitrary limit on travel time of four hours. This does not tally with the Government’s claim that people are being denied access to the forensic science that they need to prove their innocence.

To conclude, I believe that it is impossible to separate forensic science from the wider undermining of criminal justice funding that has occurred during 11 years of Conservative cuts. At the beginning, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said that somebody gave evidence that a national crisis brought us to this point, but it was not; political decisions by the Conservative Government made it clear that we would take this route. The Government have treated people’s innocence as an unaffordable and optional luxury, rather than the underpinning of the fabric of society’s trust in the justice system. When people realise that innocent people can go to jail and guilty people can go free because of failures in the system that the Government have allowed to happen, the whole system is doomed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Palmer of Childs Hill) (LD)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, has withdrawn, so, I now call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd.

Undercover Policing Inquiry

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

HMICFRS published a report just last month on policing protests. It concluded that there was no use of undercover officers in protest policing, which appears proportionate to the nature of criminality inherent in protests generally. It makes only brief reference to the ongoing undercover police inquiry.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the chair of the inquiry has ruled that the Special Branch registry files, which could give more information about the work of undercover officers, will not be part of the inquiry. That means that the truth will be very filtered, which makes it hard for core participants, who feel that they will not get justice. Would the Minister agree to a meeting with me and perhaps a member of each of the opposition parties to discuss the major flaws in the inquiry and why the core participants are so upset?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

Just before Questions, I said to the noble Baroness that I would look into what I could and could not do because, of course, the inquiry is independent, and rightly so. Parliament would expect it to be independent and therefore would not expect interference from the sponsoring Minister—but I will take back her point.