Assisted Dying

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I have been engaged in this issue since the very early days when I arrived in this Parliament in 1997, guided, along with many other right hon. and hon. Members, by the experience within my own wider family.

By 2040, nearly one in seven people is projected to be aged over 75, so we will be engaged in supporting an ageing population who will lead fuller lives, working longer, by adapting the workplace and ensuring that individuals can reskill throughout their life. But people will be living with chronic conditions, and multiple morbidities and cognitive impairments will become more common within our population. I have no doubt that our innovative and caring society will solve, or certainly ameliorate, these conditions, but the hard truth is that more of us will have to grapple with surviving with the pain and indignity of crippling progressive infirmity in later life.

If we do not change the law, even more people than the current one every eight days may travel to Switzerland for an assisted death—and, of course, there are all those people who do not have the means to travel and all those travelling to Switzerland early so that they can exercise the autonomy available to them there. I do appreciate the views not only of right hon. and hon. Members but of the public who express concerns over assisted dying. It is of course a controversial subject. However, the injustice and the tyranny of having no escape from pain and indignity that our law continues to impose on a growing number of our fellow citizens will not go away until we address it. In Oregon, since 1997, a total of 1,127 patients have died from ingesting these medications. Not only does the yearly figure barely rise above the 0.003% mark, but only 64% of those who have received prescriptions for the medications since 1997 have actually taken them.

When we discuss this emotional topic, the most grotesque characteristics of greedy, overbearing relatives are conjured up in some hypothetical dark fantasy, but these arguments about a slippery slope or the vulnerability of people simply ignore the fact that this applies only to terminally ill people. When the Assisted Dying Bill came to this House in 2015, its terms would require two doctors to sign off on the fact that the person would be dead within six months and the process to be overseen by a High Court judge. How many more measures would opponents of this principle want to satisfy them? The difficult truth is that for many, it is none. This is about the imposition of a faith-based view of the sanctity of life overriding any sensible application of personal autonomy for people in dreadful and terminal strife.

[Lyn Brown]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Crispin Blunt]

No, I will not. I might want to pick up on the example the hon. Lady gave later in my remarks.

That personal autonomy on any individual application of universal human rights includes the freedom to control and direct one’s own life and, in this case, death. Yet again, despite a poll in March of more than 5,000 people showing that 84% of Britons wanted a change in the law on assisted dying, they have to contend with the moral certainties of those who are not suffering extreme pain and who are taking these decisions on their behalf—us. We have a responsibility to discuss this issue in an honest, compassionate and evidence-based manner, and we have a swathe of evidence available to us.

The whole Oregon experience entirely supports that this is a practical, sensible, humane and decent measure. Over two decades later, the opinion of the people has not changed one iota. This Parliament, in not facing up to its responsibilities, is party to increasing tyranny, pain and despair.

Ultimately, this is about potential control. Just as people exercise control over how they live, they should be able to exercise control over how they die. In reality, the vast majority of people will never take this choice, even when faced with it. With strong safeguards, Oregon, Washington state, Montana and Vermont have had no documented reported cases of abuse. Why, when the evidence is clear, do we deny everyone the comfort of some personal control over the end of their life?

To return to the point made by the hon. Lady, I wonder what her mother’s view was, because under the law, she could not exercise her autonomy. I am utterly certain that the hon. Lady would have wanted, with all the generosity in the world, to ensure that her mother had the full support available to her. Well, that just might not have been the view of her mother, in the pain and difficulty that she was facing. Why was she not allowed the opportunity to make that decision?

[Lyn Brown]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; she would have argued that she should have had the right to take her own life, but let me put one statistic to him. He mentioned Washington state—51% of the people who took the tablets there said that their reason for doing so was that they were a burden to the people they loved. That is the exact reason that my mother would have done the same. We must weigh the evidence properly.

[Crispin Blunt]

The evidence is there to be weighed by two doctors and a High Court judge, and the hon. Lady’s mother and other people in those circumstances would have had the right to exercise their autonomy. It is that autonomy and that control that we are choosing to suppress. Sadly, for now, it remains that we have a cruel, outdated law that forces people to die earlier by traveling to Switzerland while they are fit enough to travel, or to suffer pain, indignity and degradation that we would never impose on a suffering animal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) on initiating yet a further discussion on this subject. We have heard some passionate contributions, and very moving ones, including that by the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who delivered his speech with great dignity; I congratulate him on that.

We discuss a wide range of matters in this House, from rather mundane ones, such as those which we were discussing before this debate, to those that affect life and death. Nothing, of course, can be more important than issues that affect life and death.

I am not a lawyer; nor do I claim any particular insight. Indeed, I see through a glass darkly. I have an uneasy feeling, which I know is shared by some hon. Members, that we as a society are moving towards a situation in which assisted dying is legitimised, and I recognise that many would support that, as we have heard this afternoon. For myself, I believe life to be sacred and God-given, and I readily acknowledge that that is a view that is not universally accepted. However, I am sure we can all agree that life is uniquely precious, and that we should do all we can to preserve it, and I do not in any way question the motives of those, be they Members of this House or members of the public at large, who take a different view. Many will have reached those conclusions having witnessed the slow, painful death of a loved one.

I believe that any move to lay out a statutory framework is a further step, however small, towards an acceptance that assisted dying is in some way given the seal of approval. Some things are best left in the grey area.

We are today discussing the functioning of the current law, and it is perhaps an argument to say that it is not as clear as some desire, but surely the question is whether we can give clarity to such a complex matter—can we, as the Legislature, frame an Act of Parliament to cover all the complexities—or is it better, in cases that are presented to the prosecuting authorities or the courts, to leave it to them to consider the unique circumstances that each case presents?

Both my parents died of cancer and suffered in their final months. I well remember the telephone call from a specialist who, having received the results of the tests on my father, said, “We must hope that God is merciful and does not allow him to suffer for too long”. Although he did suffer, it was not for too long. In fact, he lived for a further six months after I received that fateful call. In his final weeks, which he spent in St Andrew’s hospice in Grimsby, I saw what comfort could be offered through palliative care. No longer did he suffer the periods of pain that he had had in earlier weeks—and that happened as long ago as 1988. Through my visits to St Andrew’s since, and to Lindsey Lodge hospice near Scunthorpe, both of which serve my constituency, I have seen the advances that have been made in the years since. Sadly, my mother died in hospital on the day that she was to be transferred to St Andrew’s.

In the case of both my parents, it is probably true that their passing was hastened by drugs, such as morphine, and no doubt others would argue that it would have been better had they been given the opportunity to shorten their lives by a few weeks or months, but I firmly believe it is better that the situation is left as it is. If one is old, frail, weak and seriously ill, one needs help, support and compassion—not the added worry and the nagging doubt over whether everything possible is being done to preserve one’s life.

[Crispin Blunt]

I congratulate my hon. Friend. He is making an extremely good argument so far, except that it does not address the wider benefit that comes from a change in the law here, which is about the knowledge that you have that control available to you as you enter a period when you might be contemplating these very difficult decisions. That is the principal benefit that would come from a change in the law. By leaving a grey area in the law, we deny nearly all of us the benefit of knowing that we have that control at the end of our life.

[Martin Vickers]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and acknowledge that that is a deeply held view for him and many others, but I am afraid it is not one that I share.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

On 4 June, in making the case for holding this debate to the Backbench Business Committee, the basic justification set out by the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) was that a lot has changed since the House last debated these matters, and therefore it would be opportune for the House to have an opportunity to discuss them. I would like to go into that in some detail, in the short time that I have.

First, I want to say that I respect the views of others in the House greatly, and I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will respect my point of view, which may be very different from some of those expressed in today’s debate. I am a man of faith. My father was a man of faith; he died, and I know he believed in the sanctity of life, as do I. I believe that in my constituency of Strangford, the vast majority of my constituents also believe in the sanctity of life, and they also believe that the law should not be changed. I want to put that on the record at the start of my speech.

Both the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Physicians have moved to adopt a position of neutrality on the question of assisted suicide. The Royal College of Nursing actually adopted its position of neutrality some 10 years ago—six years before the Marris Bill came to this House. Neutrality is far from endorsement, and that has to be understood. It no more gives grounds to positively endorse assisted suicide in 2019 than it did in 2015.

The manner in which the Royal College of Physicians approached its poll, however, has had the effect of leaving a significant cloud hanging over it. In the 2014 poll, those who opposed assisted suicide were 44.4%; in the 2019 poll, they were 43.4%. The proportion opposed to assisted suicide is the largest by a significant margin, and almost identical to the 2014 result. For the Opposition side of the House—indeed, it is important for the whole House—I point out that in Tony Blair’s landslide 1997 general election victory, he received 43.2% of the vote. The Royal College of Physicians actually voted against this change by 43.4%. So there is a figure, when we come to stats in this House.

Before that poll, however, the council of the Royal College of Physicians, without consulting its members, decided that it wanted to go neutral, and structured the rules of the contest in such a way that that was bound to be the outcome. It took the extraordinary step of saying that unless 66% of respondents either opposed or supported assisted suicide, the college would adopt a neutral position. From that very moment, the result was a foregone conclusion. I want to talk about some reasons why it is the wrong one, and worded the wrong way.

Professor John Saunders, a former chair of the RCP’s ethical issues in medicine committee, wrote in The Guardian to accuse the college of carrying out

“a sham poll with a rigged outcome”.

Over 1,500 doctors and medical students signed an online petition expressing alarm over the college’s behaviour. Professor Albert Weale, chair of the college’s ethical issues in medicine committee, resigned in protest. He claimed that the RCP council failed to take notice of ethical advice that the committee had provided on the subject of the poll.

[Crispin Blunt]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jim Shannon]

I am sorry; my speech is subject to a time limit.

Professor Weale commented:

“There is simply no point in the committee offering reasoned positions if they are ignored by council.”

The process has resulted in a legal challenge, which is ongoing, and damaging criticism from the Charity Commission as well:

“It is unclear whether the Council took into account that”

the majority of at least 60% required

“would make it almost impossible to achieve”

that majority.

In looking at the results of the RCP survey, it is very important to consider the detailed response to the 2019 poll by specialty. It reveals that those whose specialism means that they have a real expertise in the field of death and dying remain overwhelmingly opposed to assisted suicide: 80.9% of those participating in the poll working in palliative medicine were opposed to a change in the law. Some 48.3% working in respiratory medicine were opposed, 44.1% in geriatric medicine, 43.5% in neurology and 43.4% in gastroenterology. Again, those figures tell the story.

I appreciate that the Royal College of General Practitioners and the British Medical Association have said that they will poll their members on this issue, but we do not have any results yet. Both those bodies would be well advised to study the RCP experience and learn from its mistakes. In that regard, they would do well to study an important new paper written by the former chair of the ethics committee, Professor Weale. They would find it very helpful indeed.

There were questions about the wording of the ComRes poll. In Dr Al Baghal’s executive summary of his review of the poll, he says:

“Overall, we would caution MPs and the public…There are a number of problems noted with this survey.”

Those problems included the fact that the poll is likely to be unrepresentative because of the demographic profile of respondents; the fact that only one side of the argument was presented to respondents in the question wording, using emotive language including terms such as “unbearable suffering”; and the fact that response options for several questions were designed such that they led people to choose a certain answer, even if they did not have a strong opinion, and may have led to respondents tending to select positive options even if that was not their settled opinion.

The basic problem with the proposal to legalise assisted suicide remains unchanged. It costs about £5 to give someone a lethal dose of barbiturates. It costs between £3,000 and £4,000 to keep someone in a hospice for a week. In that context, the right to die for the eloquent and financially well off will become a duty to die for the vulnerable. That is how I and other hon. Members feel, and it is deeply shocking that anyone living in a so-called civilised society should avail themselves of a state-sanctioned means of killing themselves.

In both Oregon and Washington State, 52% of those questioned said that not wanting to become a burden was one of the motivations for their decision. I have no desire to live under a law like that, and no desire therefore to see the legalisation of assisted suicide in the UK. We need a system that supports and helps families so that no one feels they are a burden, and I will push for change on this rather than in the current law.

Privatised Probation System

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

As hon. Members would expect me to say, these things have more nuances and complexities. The basic idea that it is impossible for anybody except the Government to deliver good probation services was disproved, in fact, by the Labour pilot—the Peterborough pilot—which by bringing in the voluntary sector and social investors was able to reduce reoffending by a staggering 9%, particularly by providing something that we are developing at the moment and that does not fully exist yet in Scotland: a fully integrated through-the-gate service linking the prison officer in the prison with probation in the community. We need to take into account that this is not a binary choice.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I am very slightly disappointed that my hon. Friend referred only to the Peterborough pilot, which we inherited when my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and I arrived in the Ministry of Justice in 2010. By the time that we were moved from the Ministry of Justice—for me, that was to spend more time with the Kaleidoscope Trust and with you, Mr Speaker—we had at least 20 different pilots, putting responsibility for the rehabilitation of offenders on the probation service in Wales and Staffordshire, three police services, three local authorities and eight health authorities dealing with issues such as drug addiction. We were waiting to see what was going to work best when all these pilots were swept away and the probation service was broken up. Will the Minister look at trying to make the system more coherent by establishing a link between the probation service and police and crime commissioners in the community to make the justice system rather better joined up across the community?

[Rory Stewart]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. and gallant Friend for the work he did on piloting many of these ideas. We can learn a great deal from those pilots. Central to our reforms will have to be co-ordination—having the right relationship between the national probation service and the community rehabilitation companies, and thinking about the geography—and part of that will be thinking about how the CRCs work with the police and crime commissioners.

Joint HMI Prison and Probation Report

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

May I join in the general welcome for the inspectors’ report in this extremely difficult area? I acknowledge that this is a growing area of criminal justice interest because of the public anxiety behind the nature of these offences, for all the reasons the Minister gave about the growing burden on the service. In order to understand the nature of the cause of the offending behaviour—for the probation officers overseeing it and for offender managers generally, but also for the offenders themselves so that they can manage their behaviour in future—it is critical that the investment in forensic psychology is appropriate to the demand placed on the system. Is he satisfied that sufficient resources from the national health service and from elsewhere are going into the criminal justice system in order for it to manage the scale of the problem that it is having to manage?

[Rory Stewart]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who was a prisons and probation Minister. The connection with the NHS is central. Additional funding has gone into the NHS, and we need to ensure that that focuses on the most vulnerable offenders in terms of mental health, addiction and the need for courses provided by the national health service. Getting that right will be essential in dealing with violent crime, sex offences and short-sentence offences. The NHS connection is vital. The most important thing, from my point of view, is ensuring that we have the treatment provision in the community for addiction.

Privately Financed Prisons

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Wednesday 27th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

The right hon. Gentleman has enormous experience of the issue, having been the prisons Minister responsible for managing private prisons. He is therefore aware that one reason we can stand up in front of the House and say we are confident we can do this is that we have been doing it for 25 years.

Some 14 private sector prisons are operating, with good reports from the inspectors. We have a lot of experience of how this is done. This is not a new area of Government activity; the right hon. Gentleman himself managed exactly these prisons. The key is balancing proper competition, which brings in diversity and innovation, with the right key performance indicators to make sure that we stay on top of that performance.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Unsurprisingly, I add my congratulations to the Minister to those of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke); I absolutely endorse his non-ideological approach. In considering what he will put in place in future, will he look carefully at prison maintenance contracts? I think it would be better if the prisons themselves had greater control over such contracts, rather than there being one contract let centrally to maintain very many prisons.

[Rory Stewart]

Getting the balance right on maintenance will be central. We are talking about three different kinds of maintenance: big structural maintenance, the daily replacement of fittings and so on, and the basic cleaning and facilities management. We need new approaches to all three, but in relation to the last, I pay tribute to the governor of Leeds prison, who is showing that prisoners, by focusing on such things, can get qualifications themselves, improve living conditions for prisoners and prison officers, and take those skills back into the wider community to find employment.

Administration of Justice: Daniel Cresswell

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the administration of justice in respect of Daniel Cresswell.

I sought this debate to address a plainly wrongful conviction of my constituent, Daniel Cresswell. It is one of the most serious individual miscarriages of justice that has been brought to me about a constituent in more than two decades in Parliament. Every agency, from the investigating officer through to the Crown Prosecution Service and the legally aided defence barrister as well as the route to the Court of Appeal, the Criminal Cases Review Commission and, to some degree, the prison system, have all failed Daniel Cresswell alarmingly.

The assorted oversight systems could not produce any remedy, either. They included the then Independent Police Complaints Commission, West Yorkshire police professional standards department, West Yorkshire police’s operational and political oversight in the form of its chief constable and its police and crime commissioner, the legal ombudsman, the Bar Council and, to date, even the Government as represented by Ministers. The formal purpose of the debate is to invite the Minister, on behalf of the Government, to instruct a judge to review the whole handling of the case, as agencies and their oversight systems have collectively failed. However, I must say I have no expectation that he can or will put a review in hand. Indeed, any number of junior Ministers are responsible for some element of failure in the system that individually they oversee.

I have the highest respect for the Minister selected to reply on behalf of the Government, and I know that today he can only really listen before consulting his colleagues as to whether the Government will act further. My primary objective is for this speech to serve as a point of reference for my constituent as he embarks on his post-prison life. This speech is for him, and I know the Minister will not be too distressed if I take most of the time available.

As Daniel Cresswell seeks to provide for himself and his family, he will be able to evidence that his Member of Parliament is convinced that his conviction is wholly unsound. Any putative employer, friend or acquaintance of Daniel Cresswell should be able to use this speech to understand why any assessment of his character should not carry the burden of the state’s conviction of him for the serious offence of rape that led to a sentence of seven years in prison.

In summary, Daniel Cresswell was fitted up by the female partner of a major debtor of the company that employed him—a debt he was engaged in pursuing. He allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a position whereby the woman spent the night in his hotel room. She made an allegation of rape from what is alleged to have happened when they woke up the following morning. The investigating officer was entirely focused on obtaining a conviction, not the truth. The defending barrister chose to present a case that was fatally confused by her own view of how to achieve an acquittal, not the defendant’s own account. All avenues of appeal and accountability were either systemically closed off or wilfully obstructed by oversight systems protecting their own.

What was not established in the investigation and trial process, and should have been, was that the claimant had a motive and created the means and opportunity to make a charge against the investigating officer of a company seeking to recover a debt in excess of £80,000. Equally, having made a serious allegation against a previous employer, her character was not introduced in court.

I will not name the complainant as the law requires. However, I will name deliberately and purposefully under the protection of parliamentary privilege the investigating officer: Detective Constable Clare Barran. I am satisfied that there is a prima facie case not only that she failed in her duty in the pursuit of truth and justice but that she lied both in the signed documentation that supported her investigation and in her testimony at the trial at Leeds Crown court.

I can only headline the key issues in the time available, but they were the subject of a 29-page submission to the IPCC. All attempts to have West Yorkshire police properly review the investigation were obstructed by that force, including by its chief constable, Dee Collins, and the subsequently elected police and crime commissioner, Mark Burns-Williamson.

I had a meeting and correspondence with the then Police Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), around December 2016. He encouraged the family and me to engage the police and crime commissioner as offering an improvement on the then current complaints model, which he described as in need of reform. Our experience has been that this PCC has woefully failed to hold his force to account.

The investigating officer was indolent in the extreme when it came to establishing Daniel Cresswell’s account and wholly one-eyed when investigating the complainant’s. Daniel Cresswell spent 415 days on police bail, and, after a year, the telephone records that would have supported his account, which he sought to hand over to the police—the request was declined—were deleted in the usual way by the telephone company, the police inexcusably having failed to request their protection. The only independent witness was not interviewed for 15 months and, while his recollection will plainly have degraded in that time, the police and CPS between them prevented his statement from being disclosed for a further 3.5 years. The video evidence that my constituent sought to protect as supporting his account of the evening became somehow accidentally and irreparably damaged in police protection.

There is then the issue of the central piece of forensic evidence that involves my constituent’s semen appearing on the complainant’s knickers. His account is that he awoke to find her artificially inducing it. The forensic examination made clear that,

“secondary transfer cannot be ruled out”,

but DC Barran altered that to,

“there is significantly more than mere transference”.

In the words of the forensic scientist “a trace” amount of DNA is termed by DC Barran as “a significant amount”. The complainant’s initial statement that her underwear had been “washed once” is changed by DC Barran to,

“washed a number of times”.

DC Barran signed a certification on 3 August 2013 saying that she,

“is not withholding any evidence that will support the defence”,

yet her own notes clearly show that she was aware on 28 May 2013 that the forensic science officer, having received new evidence, had concluded that either party could be telling the truth. Although that shows that DC Barran was aware the forensic science officer accepted that Mr Cresswell could be innocent, she withheld that information from the defence for 13 months, disclosing it only immediately before the trial. I happen to believe that that fatally misled the defence barrister on the strategy she should have employed for the trial. The original statement from the forensic science officer—which DC Barran knew was wrong—was submitted to the CPS and defence along with the above-mentioned certification in August 2013. It was only after 3.5 years that it emerged that she had conducted an interview with Dean Sygrove, the only first-hand witness, which was also not disclosed to the defence.

All the failures of the police investigation served to aid the prosecution and harm the defence. Had the actual evidence as to the course of events that led to my constituent and the complainant being together in the hotel room been disclosed, my constituent’s account would have been supported and the credibility of the claimant would have been undermined. What limited evidence there was from the hotel room received the same biased treatment.

We should at least understand the wider climate in which this police officer was operating: the climate in which DC Barran left my constituent on police bail for 415 days and took 15 months to interview the only first-hand witness, and where, contrastingly, she took one day to seek what she believed was confirmatory evidence for the claimant from the hotel. Ironically, I left office as the Minster for Criminal Justice in September 2012, two weeks after this alleged offence was reported to the police. I was well aware of the public policy anxiety to improve the number of convictions arising from complaints of rape to the police and indeed to support and encourage victims of rape to make those complaints to the police. This was not a climate created by Alison Saunders, the retiring Director of Public Prosecutions, but it was rocket charged under her term of office. Given today’s circumstances, with the discrediting of so many high-profile sexual offence investigations having revealed the one-sided and one-eyed way in which the police and prosecution have sought to deliver convictions and not give the defence the benefit of the information they hold, I personally think it is inconceivable that this case would now pass muster even to arrive at a decision to charge.

Alison Saunders’s recent claim that there are no people in prison today as a result of failures to disclose evidence on the part of the CPS must be nonsense. First, she cannot know, and secondly, the first-hand experience of my constituent plainly suggests otherwise. Daniel Cresswell is another victim of the enthusiasm to improve the conviction rate in rape trials. However, it is the interest of justice that has been sacrificed in the process, along with Daniel Cresswell’s liberty for three and a half years and his future reputation, which this speech is designed to at least alleviate.

Let me turn to Daniel’s representation by his legally aided defence barrister, Fiona Rowling. My review of the case is that her belief was that whatever happened in that hotel room would have been consensual. Therefore, rather than adequately challenging the complainant’s account, or advancing my constituent’s account that he had in fact been indecently assaulted, she attempted to present his account and her belief in parallel. Her performance in front of the jury was described as incoherent and disjointed, and it was muttered and mumbled so quietly and unintelligibly that the disdain and shocked disbelief on the faces of the jurors was conveyed as far as the public gallery. The transcript does not capture the shockingly poor manner of her delivery, which was seen as jaw-droppingly bad, as one member of the jury regarded her with his mouth wide open in astonishment.

Fiona Rowling’s defence strategy had shocked the family when she stated on the first day of the trial that she did not want to make the complainant out to be a liar. Advice was sought from a local Leeds solicitor about whether she could be removed from the case when she refused to follow her client’s instructions. One has sympathy for hard-pressed criminal defence barristers working on legal aid, but that quality of performance cannot be excused or form part of our justice system. Afterwards she asked her client to apologise to his family,

“who may have the impression that that didn’t go very well”.

Her performance was the subject of a complaint to her chambers— unsurprisingly that was rejected—followed by a formal complaint to the legal ombudsman, which bewilderingly found her performance “reasonable”. The legal ombudsman offered a final appeal to the Bar Council, but since the legal ombudsman was put in place because of concerns over the adequacy of the Bar Council as the regulator of professional standards, unsurprisingly that did not result in a satisfactory resolution either, and it was formally out of time. This investigation, and particularly the failure of the legal ombudsman to seek first-hand accounts of the woeful inadequacy of Fiona Rowling’s court performance, was another avenue of accountability that was closed to the family by rules and processes, and I hope that a judge reviewing the entire conduct of this case would seek to investigate that fairly.

In the wake of that one-sided investigation and incompetent defence, my constituent found himself sentenced to seven years in prison. That is when his family sought my help, given the administration of his sentence. Unsurprisingly, he maintained his innocence, and here he fell into a very difficult challenge for the prison service: what to do with myriad offenders—particularly those charged with sexual offences—who maintain their innocence? Among their numbers will be men like Daniel Cresswell, whom I believe to be innocent, yet they are now being doubly punished.

For two and a half years I had the pleasure of working with Michael Spurr, Chief Executive of the then National Offender Management Service, as his overseeing Minister. He said in a letter to me that,

“in prisons running the sex offender treatment programme, priority will be given to those who are willing to address their offending behaviour. Mr Cresswell is maintaining his innocence of the offences for which he is currently imprisoned and he is not ready to participate in a programme solely designed to address his sexual offending”.

As such, Mr Cresswell was detained in a prison much further from his home than would otherwise have been the case. His family visits were impacted as a consequence, and that also appears to have been used as a lever to try to get him to co-operate with his sentence plan—a position that to him was plainly impossible.

In my letter to Michael Spurr of 23 November 2014, I made a suggestion as to how the situation could be improved for non-compliant convicted sex offenders. Regrettably, however, given the litany of different parts of the justice system that need a reference in this time-limited speech, I cannot develop those thoughts further here. However, given the Minister’s responsibility, I am sure that he will give the matter the thought it deserves. I believe it is a growing systemic problem, given the number of sex offenders in custody, alongside our enthusiasm—understandable in many ways—to improve the conviction rate in rape trials. Given the way that such trials are now being conducted, the possibility of convictions such as that handed to Daniel Cresswell should give us pause for thought about the administration of justice.

After a wrongful conviction, the usual course would be to go to the Court of Appeal. An appeal must be made on the basis of facts and points of law, but given the circumstances of this case and the finding of facts by the jury, the family were advised—almost certainly correctly—that the chance of success at the Court of Appeal was frighteningly small. Therefore, two routes were pursued: an attempt to hold the investigation to account by seeking an investigation by the West Yorkshire police professional standards department, and what is known as a “non-appeal application” to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

The formal complaint to West Yorkshire police was made in December 2014, and after five months of no progress, the family sought help from the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the police and crime commissioner. That eventually led to an investigating officer being appointed, and throughout 2015 and into 2016 the inquiry was prodded by Daniel Cresswell’s father-in-law, Richard Cordle, who is a retired police officer. It is entirely down to Richard Cordle, who had the expertise to understand the failures in the police investigation system and—happily for Daniel—the time and determination to bring West Yorkshire police to account, that the quality of evidence about the investigation and the rest is so convincing. Indeed, it has completely convinced me of the inadequacy of the entire investigation process.

There is an unhappily fat file on the to-ing and fro-ing between the police force, Mr Cordle and the IPCC, which was occasionally reinforced by letters from me to the chief constable, inviting her to give the matter her personal attention. Any review of the process will demonstrate that this was a police force protecting its own, given that the investigating officer could potentially be facing a trial for perverting the course of justice. That conclusion is supported by the fact that an investigation did not proceed on the basis of such seriousness; it is supported by the failure of the police to interview their officer under caution, and by the delay and obfuscation of the professional standards department and the chief constable. That was topped off by the inaction of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which culminated in letters from me to Dame Anne Owers that even today remain unanswered.

In parallel to that was the route taken to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Understandably, the work of the CCRC is of particular interest to those trying to reverse an injustice. Through the United Against Injustice conference, and the claims of the erudite CCRC spokesman, David James Smith, the family gained encouragement about the powers that the CCRC could employ on their behalf to gain access to undisclosed and securely held material post trial—material that they would not otherwise know about or have access to. However 16 months after embarking on the CCRC route, they were told that it would not utilise those powers on a “fishing expedition”. The family feel utterly let down by the CCRC and are left with the belief that its function is to provide closure and to protect the status quo within the justice system.

Meanwhile, the lack of progress consumed almost half of my constituent’s time in custody. Every day of delay by the CCRC, the IPCC and the PSD of West Yorkshire police made the practical benefits of a remedy —Daniel’s release from his custodial sentence—less meaningful. The family maintain that the CCRC’s failings are borne out in the statistics—in its own headline figures. I welcome the newly created all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice, chaired by the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), which aims to campaign to improve the lot of the wrongly convicted, and reform the appeal system. Mr Cresswell’s family are now involved with that.

Stymied by a police force that will not investigate its own, by a police and crime commissioner who refuses to hold his own police force to account, by an Independent Police Complaints Commission that failed to get another force to investigate West Yorkshire police, by the actions of West Yorkshire police, and by the inability of the justice system as it is currently administered, my constituent has almost no effective remedy left. I understand that consideration is being given to finding out whether an out of time approach to the Court of Appeal might be possible. However, given the advice that has been received and the record of the Court of Appeal in cases such as this, personally I doubt the likelihood of success by that route.

Daniel is now out of prison and trying to rebuild his life. I am delighted that he has started so successfully. It is the purpose of this speech to be a published point of reference to my belief in my constituent’s innocence of the charge for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison. It is also my hope that those in a position to help him in future, in employment or in any other way, will pay due attention to this review of the multiple failures of our system of justice. Daniel Cresswell has been poorly served by the justice system, and I hope that this speech will help him to put the experience behind him. He has, however, been incredibly well served by the unstinting love and support of his family, who have enabled me to make this case and this speech for him today.

Oral Answers to Questions

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

The hon. Gentleman has made those points on a number of occasions. We are listening very carefully. Indeed, two members of our Department travelled to Port Talbot, to a very lively public meeting where those points were made repeatedly. We are listening very carefully to him.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Would there be an answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question on the industrial estate if any new prison fully incorporated the work of ONE3ONE Solutions, which was designed more than six years ago to increase the productive and commercial output of prisoners? The numbers given by the Justice Secretary just now suggest that we have not made much progress in the number of prisoners who are working. Will any new prison include ONE3ONE Solutions, and how are we getting on with prisoners working overall?

[Mr Speaker]

Particularly if any prospect of their working is in Port Talbot, upon which the question is focused.