Criminal Justice Bill (Seventh sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Philp]

It is a great pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Mrs Latham.

This series of Government amendments and associated clauses expands the police powers to drug test on arrest to include locations outside of custody. That includes introducing a new police power into part 3 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to drug test persons on arrest at a location outside of the custody suite when certain conditions have been met. It also amends part 3 of the Drugs Act 2005 to provide the police with a power to require people who test positive to attend an initial assessment—and, when appropriate, a follow-up assessment—in respect of their drug misuse.

The Government are keen to get more people into treatment: something that we have funded with £300 million of extra cash over two or three years, with the aim of creating 54,500 extra drug treatment places. I am sure that we can all agree that the best thing is to get people off drug addiction, to prevent criminal behaviour.

The assessments that I have just referred to will enable those people to be referred into treatment or support services, whose funding has just been increased, as I mentioned. The new power will operate alongside the existing power, as expanded in the Bill, to drug test people on arrest or charge in police detention under section 63B of PACE.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

During the evidence sessions it was made very clear, by both experts in the field and the police officers, that currently there is absolutely no possibility of this resource being available. Will the Minister please outline what resources the Home Office will put in place to ensure that the drug testing that he is rightly outlining will be able to take place?

[Chris Philp]

I thank the hon. Lady for raising the point. It is important to have capacity to deliver the testing. As I mentioned a couple of moments ago, we are now in the second year of a three-year funding commitment, as part of the 10-year drug strategy, to fund 54,500 extra drug treatment places across the country, delivered in partnership with local public health bodies. Those places have been created. There are now also liaison and diversion officers, I think, in every—or almost every—custody setting and in many courts as well, to help identify people who have a drug addiction.

Just before Christmas, I visited the custody suite in Northampton, where I met liaison and diversion officers. They speak to people who have been brought into custody and, if there is a substance problem, get them referred as we are describing. I accept that there is a need for resources, but those investments are being made. The implementation is being tracked by a cross-Whitehall taskforce that meets on a regular basis and includes officials from lots of Departments.

[Jess Phillips]

I thank the Minister for that and am fully in favour of more drug support services. What I was asking was whether the police have the resources to undertake the drug testing that the clause outlines. The police said no; this is not about whether somebody then gets referred on—the police, in the evidence session, said no. The Casey review into the Metropolitan police last year found that samples from rape cases were being kept next to packets of sandwiches in a police officer’s fridge. Yesterday, there was the story about the foetus in Rochdale. Also, if—

[The Chair]

Order. This should be an intervention, not a speech.

[Jess Phillips]

Okay. There are just not the clinical resources in police stations currently. Will the Minister outline how the testing will be funded?

[Chris Philp]

I have talked about the liaison and diversion officers and the treatment capacity, but on police resources, which the hon. Lady was asking about, we have just completed a substantial police recruitment programme. We now have 20,951 more officers than we had four years ago and 3,500 more than we have ever had before. The training takes two to three years; as officers complete their training, more and more will be available for frontline deployment. In addition, we are also—

[Jess Phillips]

It is not officers—it’s forensics.

[Chris Philp]

Well, the actual tests often get administered by police officers, and the hon. Lady asked about police officer capacity.

We are also removing some of the administrative burdens on policing by reforming the Home Office counting rules—that has already saved half a million hours of police time per year. Furthermore, the NHS are in the process of picking back up mental health cases where there is no criminality or threat to public safety. That is right; people in a mental health crisis need medical treatment, not the police. Once that is fully implemented, and we are in the middle of doing it now, it will free up more than a million hours of police time. In addition to record police numbers, we are removing some of the burdens keeping them from frontline activity, including what we are discussing.

I am satisfied that both police resources and medical treatment resources are available. If anything, the challenge is actually that we are not using all the treatment places available. Some of the proposals in this legislation will help the police refer more people for that initial assessment, which we hope and expect will lead to treatment in the extra places that we funded.

I do not want to stray too far from the clause, Mrs Latham. Following the community safety partnerships review and antisocial behaviour powers consultation, we are, as I mentioned, expanding drug testing on arrest to locations outside of custody so that the tests can be done quickly and easily and take up less time, to answer the point made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley. That expansion, in addition to the expansion of drug testing to class B and class C drugs, as the Bill already provides, will ensure that police have all the necessary powers to identify people with a drug problem and get them into treatment.

The Government amendments confer a power on the police to drug test when a person aged 18 or over has been arrested for an offence and the officer has requested that the person give a sample. The power is discretionary, to be used when the officer feels that it is an appropriate course of action. It is also worth being clear that when drug testing takes place outside of police detention—that is, not in a police station—only a non-intimate sample, such as a swab or saliva, may be taken, for obvious reasons.

As with the current powers to drug test in police detention, testing may take place only when a person has been arrested for a relevant trigger offence, or another offence where an officer of at least the rank of inspector has reasonable grounds to suspect that the misuse of a specified controlled drug has caused or contributed to the offence and expressly authorises the test. A refusal to provide a sample without good reason will be a criminal offence, as is currently the case with the existing regime for drug testing on arrest.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

In many domestic abuse cases—the fatal ones, sadly—the fact that the perpetrator was on drugs is used as a mitigating factor to get, for example, a manslaughter charge rather than a murder charge; I could cite many cases, but I will not stretch the Chair’s patience. Will drug testing be done in cases of domestic abuse, and has the Minister thought about how that might help the perpetrator?

[Chris Philp]

As I just set out, drug testing might be done, particularly if the inspector thinks that drug abuse might have contributed to the offending. If someone is on drugs that are causing them to commit domestic abuse, I am sure we would all want that identified so that action can be taken.

On the hon. Lady’s point about homicide versus manslaughter, that is not in the scope of this Bill—we are not making any changes in that area. I do, however, share her concern about the cases of people who murder their partners. We should not be somehow excusing their behaviour or seeking to diminish their culpability by saying, “Oh, they’re on drugs,” and getting the charge dropped from homicide to manslaughter. Although that is not the topic of this Bill—the Bill makes no changes as far as that is concerned—I share the hon. Lady’s concern. I hope that the legal community have heard the point that she has just made, with which I have enormous sympathy. I think it sounds reasonable.

The safeguards for the new power include that it can be used only by approved constables; that the statutory PACE codes of practice must include provision about how the new drug testing power is to be exercised; and that the sample may be taken only for the purpose of a drug test. That is to ensure that the power is used proportionately and only by those with appropriate experience.

The individual being tested must also be given a notice setting out why, when and where they were tested, and the result of the test. Following a positive test, a person can be required to attend an assessment with a drug-support worker, as is the case with the current drug testing regime. Non-attendance without good reason will itself be an offence. We will probably debate Opposition amendment 133 later; that tries to go further on this issue.

The trigger offences and specified controlled drugs will be set out in secondary legislation. The Secretary of State will, in line with the regime for drug testing in police detention, have the power to specify in regulations those trigger offences within the scope of drug testing in locations outside of custody, and the controlled drugs to be tested for. Such regulations will be subject to the affirmative and negative procedures respectively. That will ensure appropriate parliamentary scrutiny and allow for the regime to be varied if circumstances require.

The amendments also make various—I hesitate to use this term after the comments from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Nottingham North, last time—technical and consequential amendments; I think we should excise the word “technical” from our discussions in future to avoid triggering the shadow Minister. The amendments make various important and consequential changes to ensure that the drug testing regime outside of custody has the same legal effects as drug testing in police detention.

In talking through the amendments, I have explained the intent behind clauses 15 to 17. I will rest my remarks there and reply later to any further points raised in the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

Finally, new clause 13 is a really significant change. I have yet to hear from the Government what the real case for it is or what problem we are seeking to solve. That gives us pause. I will probably not press my amendment to a Division, but we may yet have to vote on new clause 13.

[Jess Phillips]

I am not offended by the fundamentals of the clause—the idea that everybody is drug-tested. I can foresee possible abuses of the discretion that the Minister described, and I will not be surprised in a couple of years’ time if that discretion is used with black people more than it is with white people, for example, but time will tell. Let us have the triumph of hope over experience that this occasion will not be like every other one that came before.

But as somebody who deals with police forces and forensics and testing, I really do have to challenge the idea that the capacity currently exists to take even just a swab from someone. I do not understand this. What is the timeframe? How long will it take to get the results? I am currently working on a case that I started in May last year, and where are we now? Seven months in I am still waiting for lab results from my local police force. It is not some backwater, but the second largest force in the country.

In reality, I do not believe that this will happen for every person who comes into a custody suite. Let us say it takes a week for the results to come back. The Minister should feel free to intervene to say that the system will work like in an airport, where a bag can be tested to see if it has cocaine in it—not that I have any personal experience! He should feel free to say that every police force will get new machines to enable a result within the time that somebody is kept in custody, and that an intervention will be put in place sensitively. I would be delighted to hear that the world is completely not as I recognise it from being in custody suites just over this past year—not over many years, but just this year. This situation just does not stack up in reality.

The lag in getting a result could be a week—again, let us go for the triumph of hope over experience—but we are much more likely to be talking months. Will that slow down charging? I want to understand exactly how this is going to work in an already overstretched system. In the case from May that I talked about, a victim of multiple rapes, forced marriage and 10 years of abuse has waited seven months for anything. We just get, “Sorry, we’re waiting on forensics.”

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

The hon. Lady’s points are well made and important, but, at the end of the day, does she fundamentally agree with the principle behind the measures? Is it just the process that she is worried about?

[Jess Phillips]

I believe in so many principles that I know in reality cannot be realised. I believe in the principle that when someone is in crisis with suicide, there should be a telephone line that I can call that means that they get what we used to call—because it used to exist—a safe and well check. I have done that many times myself. I believe in principle that that should happen. If a Minister were to stand in front of me and tell me that that was the policy, it would be like them telling me that the sky is green. It may very well be the policy, but the reality is completely different. In the evidence sessions, all the experts in the field backed me up.

I want to know how this will actually work. I absolutely want it to work, but, to the hon. Gentleman’s point, I am very concerned about some of the safeguards. One of the things that people who work in the criminal justice system notice is the trends in how wrong ’uns, essentially, start to get away with things—there is always some new defence coming down the line. In the days when we did not believe victims of domestic abuse and they could just be ignored—see yesterday’s report on Rochdale—people did not need a response. The current favourite of a domestic abuse perpetrator on a summary or more serious offence is a counterclaim against the victim—“Well, she’s abusing me”—and my God, does it work! The amount of women who are victims of domestic abuse currently being accused by police forces across the country of being perpetrators, not victims, of domestic abuse is plentiful.

We also know that if we look at our female prison population, or at the roll of women in any substance misuse service, we would go a long way before we found one who had not been a victim of domestic abuse or sexual violence—in childhood and adulthood—and exploitation. There is a reason why women end up substance-dependent. Incidentally, there is a reason why men do too, but the main reason why women end up substance-dependent is abuses they have suffered. It is very likely that a counterclaim that brings a woman into a custody suite will find that she smoked a few spliffs the day before. That will go against her not just in the criminal court, where she is much more likely to be convicted of those crimes than her partner, if we look at all the data on female convictions, but in the family court, where she will lose her children as a result of that evidence.

If a woman is distressed because she has just been attacked or has lived with fear and she is behaving erratically—who wouldn’t?—and somebody says, “I think she might be on drugs,” it will be used against her. On the defences I talked about, if a person commits domestic abuse and is on drugs, that will be considered a mitigating factor. I have seen it lots of times; in the most serious cases, it is the difference between manslaughter and murder. Let us flip it around: if a person murders or harms someone who is themselves on drugs, it is seen as an aggravation on their part, and they get manslaughter again. If a person kills a woman who is behaving erratically because she is on drugs, jackpot—manslaughter! If a woman takes drugs and is killed, it is a reason to give a man manslaughter. If a man takes drugs and kills someone, it is a reason to give him manslaughter. Frankly, the cards are stacked against us.

I agree with the principle of the clause, but what happens if there is a counterclaim and the woman is drug-tested and found to be on drugs and the man is not, or the other way round? Either way, there is a possibility—well, it is not a possibility, because every other law we have tried to change has been used by perpetrators; they are better than us in this regard and know their way around the system, as do their lawyers—that he will get a lighter sentence.

I wish the police were trained well enough, but only 50% are trained on coercive control, for example. We have to make sure that there is guidance so that, in cases of domestic abuse, where the woman has a potential counterclaim, these things are not taken into account; otherwise, they will be used to take her children off her—they will be used against her. I can already see it in my future. I ask that that is given some really serious thought, because I am a bit frightened about how this is going to play out.

As somebody with decades-long experience of living side by side with a heroin, crack and cocaine addict, who I am pleased to say is well now and has dedicated his life to the service of other people in that situation, I have to say that the idea that a person “has to” go to one session—it is about the compulsion—means that they are just going to go and tick a box. My mum sent my brother halfway round the world to have different interventions. They did not work. Thousands of pounds were spent trying to get somebody off drugs.

I hear what the Minister says about more money being put into this, and my brother was and continues to be part of Dame Carol Black’s review. However, there is this idea that just one interview will do the job. In reality, it is a tick-box exercise, and it will not work unless people’s initial trauma is dealt with. You would have to go a long way to see somebody with problematic substance misuse who has not suffered some form of trauma. Loads of people take drugs recreationally, and it does not harm them; they are not allergic to it and do not become problematic addicts. The reason why that happens to some people and they go on to commit crimes is that something else is wrong. One meeting will not a problem solve. If one meeting had been what it took, my mother would have died in a happier position than she did.

This proposal is not a panacea, unless we work with things such as the 12-step programme—I declare that I am on the all-party parliamentary group for 12 step recovery. The programme is completely free, so commissioners do not understand it; they do not know how to behave when no one is asking them for any money. I cannot stress enough that if this proposal is just to make a nice headline—“We are going to drug-test everybody”—rather than something that will work in reality, it is a massive waste of police time; it is pointless. I will leave my comments there.

[Chris Philp]

I will try to respond to some of the points made on this group of amendments and clauses. On mental health, as the national partnership agreement is rolled out, we are asking the NHS to do more to treat people when it is just a medical condition, and that is what the NHS should do, because a medical crisis requires a medical response.

To respond to the point about resources, the NHS is this year receiving an extra £3.3 billion above and beyond what was planned. A lot of extra money is going into mental health specifically, and things such as mental health ambulances and mental health places of safety are being invested in to create the capacity required for the NHS and the ambulance service to take on people who have, in the last few years, wrongly been picked up by the police.

On making sure that the roll-out is done as thoughtfully elsewhere in the country as it has been in Humberside, we are not taking a “big bang” approach; we have not just flicked a switch and said that it is going to happen nationally from tomorrow. Implementation is happening on a force-by-force basis. In each area, the police are working with the local hospital trust, the mental health trust and the ambulance trust to make sure that the capacity is in place before things get switched over.

The roll-out has already happened in some areas. In London, I think it went live on 1 October or 1 November, but it may not be implemented until the end of this year in other areas, because they are going through the process of making sure that the NHS side of the equation has the capacity and is ready. Things are being done in a thoughtful and measured way around the country to replicate the success in Humberside, to which the shadow Minister referred.

I will try to address one or two of the other questions.

[Chris Philp]

We are getting a little way off topic. Briefly, since the shadow Minister has raised the question, the roll-out is happening in a thoughtful way, rather than immediately, to make sure that such issues are addressed. As I said a moment ago, extra money is being put in. The NHS workforce plan, which is now in place, is designed to make sure that the people needed are there to meet the challenges, not just in mental health, but across the whole NHS spectrum.

Fundamentally, we all want to see people who have a mental health condition treated medically. Where there is no criminality and no threat to public safety, it is completely inappropriate to get a police response, which has been happening in recent years. Those people need to be treated, not put in a police custody cell, for example. That is the right thing to do, not just for the police, whose capacity is freed up to protect us and our constituents and to catch criminals, but for patients, who need and deserve a medical response. We are now working to ensure that that happens across the country, building on the successful trailblazer in Humberside, which shows that this can work.

On the question from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Nottingham North, about using the negative versus the affirmative procedure in Government amendments 25 and 26, no substantive change is being made. Essentially, changing the list of specified controlled drugs is subject to the negative procedure, the trigger offences are subject to the affirmative procedure and, if the changes are some mix of the two, that is subject to the affirmative procedure. That does not substantively change the current position.

Let me turn to the questions that arose on drug testing outside of a custodial setting. To be clear, we are conferring a discretionary power on the police. We are not compelling them to test; we are leaving it up to the police officer. There may be occasions when, for operational reasons and to test more people, they find it more operationally appropriate to test on the spot outside of a custodial setting. It may be that they do not plan to take the person back to a custodial setting. That will save police time. This is a discretionary power, not an obligation; the police can use it where they judge it to be helpful.

The shadow Minister also asked about time. These tests are not sent away to the laboratory. I accept that we need laboratory tests to be a lot faster, as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley highlighted in her remarks. However, these are on-the-spot tests, similar to those that might be seen in an airport—by the way, I think those are testing for explosives.

[Jess Phillips]

I didn’t have those either.

[Chris Philp]

I am relieved, but not surprised, to hear that. The result of these on-the-spot tests takes between 13 and 35 minutes to come back, so it is pretty quick.

I said these were so-called non-intrusive tests, and the shadow Minister asked, “What about urine samples?” To be clear, non-intrusive tests are defined in section 65 of the PACE code. That does not include urine samples but does include hair—excluding pubic hair—saliva and a swab taken from a non-intimate place, such as under the armpit. We are talking about pretty non-intrusive stuff.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

The clause provides a new power for the police to seize, retain and destroy any bladed article—a knife, for example—held in private when they are on the private premises lawfully, but where they have reasonable grounds to suspect that the item is likely to be used for unlawful violence. Such knives are legal and held privately, but the police are concerned they might be used for unlawful violence.

Data shows that incidents with a knife or sharp instrument have fallen by 26% since December 2019, but it is still disturbing to see the number of cases admitted to the NHS every year—we look at NHS hospital admissions data because that is the most reliable measure of knife crime. As I say, hospital admissions for injuries with a bladed item have fallen by 26% in the last four years.

Currently, the police have no power to remove potential weapons from individuals unless those are to be used as evidence in an investigation or are subject to a ban. Even if the police come across several potentially dangerous knives while they are in a property with a search warrant for an unrelated matter—for example, a drugs charge—the only way they can legally remove those knives, even if they have reason to suspect they will be used unlawfully, would be if they were to be used as evidence in the investigation. These knives do not fall foul of the definition of knives that are inherently illegal, which we discussed in our previous Committee proceedings. We will widen the definition of illegal knives shortly via a statutory instrument, and such knives are always illegal, even if possessed in private. We are talking here about knives—a kitchen knife, for example—that will remain legal. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West for her campaigning on the issue of banning a much wider range of knives completely.

It might assist the Committee if I share a case study to illustrate the need for this measure. A police officer might be conducting a search in the residence of a male arrested for murder involving a firearm. The person might have multiple links to local gangs. A quantity of drugs might be recovered from the premises, along with a number of knives. Although there were drugs offences, if the knives found were not related to those offences, the police would have no power to seize them, even though they were found in the possession of a known criminal.

[Jess Phillips]

I seek clarity. There is a load of big kitchen knives on the wall in my house, and I can see them when I walk in. I deal with the issue of violence in a domestic setting all the time, but would that count?

[Chris Philp]

No, it would not count. For the police to exercise the proposed power, they must have reasonable grounds to suspect that the item is likely to be used for an unlawful purpose. I do not think there would be any reasonable grounds to suspect that kitchen knives hanging on the wall of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley would be used for an unlawful purpose. By contrast, if the police were in the residence of a known prolific drug dealer and gang member, drugs had been recovered from the premises and they had been arrested or convicted for previous violent offences, that would be an instance where a quantity of knives—perhaps different knives beyond kitchen knives—would meet the threshold that I just set out. I hope that sets out the rationale.

In his evidence to the Committee on 12 December, Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said that giving the police this power is

“a very important preventive measure.”––[Official Report, Criminal Justice Public Bill Committee, 12 December 2023; c. 11, Q18.]

That is why are seeking to introduce the provision, justified in the way that I have set out. If somebody believes that their property—their knife—has been seized in error, they will be able to make a complaint to the police, as with any other police matter. In addition, we are providing a right of appeal in court to have the item returned, if the court agrees. If somebody did unreasonably seize the kitchen knives of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley, she would be able to complain to the police in the first instance. If they did not address her complaint and return the knives, she would then be able to go to the court and get them returned.

It is also important to say that there is no additional power of entry associated with the new power. The police would need to be in the property lawfully, which, presumably, would also not be the case in the hon. Member’s house. For example, they would need to be there as part of an investigation into an unrelated matter or invited into the property. We will amend code B of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to ensure that the codes of conduct reflect the new power, so that it is used in a fair and reasonable way.

Finally, amendment 32 is a minor technical amendment —we must not forget that—which clarifies that for the purposes of clause 18(8)(b), the final determination of an application includes the determination of any appeal. This provision will help the police to take dangerous knives off the street, or out of people’s houses, even if they are legal, where they are suspected of being used for unlawful violence. It is a useful additional power. The police asked for it in their evidence to the Committee, and I hope that it will command cross-party support.

Criminal Justice Bill (Sixth sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

Some provisions that were necessary in the context of an offence under the Online Safety Act could be done only by means of communications, such as forwarding messages, but that is not necessary in the context of this broader offence. I want to reassure the House that although the drafting of the broader offence differs in some respects, it covers the same behaviour as the Online Safety Act offence, in addition to other forms of encouragement or assistance. Clause 12 should be read in a way that complements clause 11. It is essentially a facilitation offence.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I missed Clare Wade’s evidence because I was unwell when she gave evidence to this Committee. Are we to assume that the clause will be used in the prosecution of cases where self-harm is caused by incidents within domestic abuse relationships or as a result of grooming, sexual violence and broader violence against women? I think that it was clarified during the evidence session that that was the case.

[Laura Farris]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. It is quite clear that Parliament’s intention, in the way that we are framing the clause, and how the clause might actually play out when it comes before the courts, are probably quite different. I have been thinking about that myself. This is very much an extension of what I may call—I hope you will forgive me if I use this as a shorthand—the “Molly Russell” principle, which was established by that tragic case and led to all the new principles of the Online Safety Act—bringing them into line with the offline environment.

However, I think that you are quite correct; when we read clause 11, we see that it belongs in a range of different circumstances, all of which I have thought through. Yes, I think that you are right to say that it could very easily exist within a domestic—

[Laura Farris]

My apologies. I am sorry for being too informal; I am not familiar with this. I think that it is the case that the issue is readily identifiable within certain forms of domestic abuse scenario, and that the clause would apply in those circumstances. It is obvious in the statutory language.

[Jess Phillips]

I will speak more broadly about the issue in a moment, and I am pleased to hear what the Minister has said; that is what we would all want to see. However, I am concerned about the each-way offences that the Minister outlined. Let us say that in a case of suicide a coroner found that domestic abuse had been involved—I mean, chance would be a fine thing in most cases—and a manslaughter charge was laid and then the perpetrator pled guilty. There has only been one case of this. I just wonder how these summary limits and these each-way offences would work in that situation.

[Laura Farris]

I thank the hon. Lady again for her question. Actually, I think that we would have to concede immediately that it would be on the charge sheet. However, the hon. Lady has raised the topical, important and very difficult issue of whether or not a domestic abuse perpetrator has elicited suicide in circumstances where, as she will know, there are evidential difficulties. There is a discussion happening within Parliament, and more widely within the legal profession, about the offence of manslaughter and its ambit when it takes place in the context of suicide.

Perhaps I can reassure the hon. Lady, though, by saying this: if we stop short of suicide—very much mindful of the fact that that engages quite difficult legal issues—and we think about the offences created under clause 11, I think that it is almost inconceivable that there would be a circumstance in which a clause 11 offence existed and was not accompanied by an offence of coercive control under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. I just do not think that, in a domestic abuse context, those two things would not exist in parallel. Therefore I think that we would already be looking at a more serious form of sentencing if we were into an “eliciting self-harm” clause 11 offence. It would also be automatically brought under the ambit of the Domestic Abuse Act, and it is already a more serious offence in that context.

Clause 12 is the facilitation element of the offence, and subsection (1) provides that anyone who arranges for somebody else to do an act capable of amounting to inducing self-harm is also committing an equivalent offence. Subsection (2) provides that an act can be capable of encouraging or assisting self-harm even when done in circumstances where it was impossible for the final act to be performed. For example, if pills were provided to a person and they ended up not to be the pills that were intended, it is exactly the same offence. Equally, if something harmful was sent by post but never arrived, the offence and sentence are the same irrespective.

Subsection (3) provides that an internet service provider does not commit the offence merely by providing a means through which others can send, transmit or publish content capable of encouraging or assisting serious self- harm. Subsection (5) provides that section 184 of the Online Safety Act 2023 is repealed in consequence of these provisions, which create a much broader basis, bringing the online and offline environments into parity.

[Jess Phillips]

The Minister and I have had some back and forth on this. I rise really to hammer home the point regarding the good intentions of the clause, but the need to think about it in the context of a domestic abuse, grooming or sexual violence situation. It is undoubted in any professional’s mind that one of the consequences of violence, abuse and coercion against an individual, specifically in young women, is self-harm and suicide.

As the Minister rightly says, it is important that we recognise that in the vast majority of cases self-harm falls short of suicide. There is a huge amount of self-harm going on across the country, genuinely encouraged as a pattern of domestic abuse, and we need to ensure that this piece of perfectly reasonable legislation, which was designed for those on the internet trying to get people to be anorexic and all of that heinous stuff, which we are all very glad to have not had to put up with in our childhood—I look around to make sure that we are all of a relatively similar age—also covers that.

There is one particular risk: how does the clause interact with institutions? Perhaps the Minister could assist me with that. The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire, a Home Office Minister, is sat in front of me. I was a few minutes late for the sitting this morning because I was in court with one of my constituents in a case—I am afraid to say—where we were on the other side from the Home Office. My constituent literally had to take medication during the court proceedings, such is the mental health trauma that has been caused to her by the Home Office. I wonder how this piece of legislation might be used. I suppose I worry that there is too much opportunity for it to become useful, in that there are so many ways in which institutions and individuals cause people to end up in a self-harm and suicidal situation. I seek clarity on that, unless Ministers wish to be found wanting by the Bill.

[Alex Norris]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley for offering a powerful dose of reality about what is happening and the risks. We know that abusers will find every possible gap and try to use them to perpetrate their abuse and these heinous crimes. We must follow them and close those gaps the best we can—or, even better, get ahead.

Clauses 11 and 12 make good the recommendations of the Law Commission in its 2021 “Modernising Communications Offences” report. The Minister described that as important and I echo her comments. The clauses also finish what was started during consideration of the Online Safety Bill. We supported it at that point, and the Bill was well scrutinised, so I will not rehash that debate.

The Government amendments extend the provisions to Northern Ireland. I wonder whether there is a different story about Scotland, because most of the Government amendments expand provisions to Scotland as well as to Northern Ireland. I would be interested in the Minister’s comments on that.

I will finish on the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley made about institutions. Throughout my time in Parliament, the issue of conversion therapies has been at the forefront. We wish that we were getting on with banning them today—goodness knows how much longer we will have to wait—but we know that very harmful self-harm practices can be part of those therapies. Will the Minister say, in responding to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley, how accountability will fall in cases like that? That is important; if there is a gap for a certain organisation, perhaps we need to return to this. It might be that we will be assisted by the provision in clause 14 that, where a significant senior person in an organisation commits a crime, the organisation can be held accountable. Perhaps that is the way to close the gap—I do not know. I will be interested in the Minister’s view.

--- Later in debate ---

I would like to come back on two points, though. The point was made about a person having a difficult experience of litigation against the Home Office, and we heard the example of the high-profile case related to the effect of an Ofsted inspection; there could be a number of other scenarios. I think we have to look at clause 11(1)(b) when we are thinking about those. We are not considering simply whether the perpetrator is said to have done an act that is capable of encouraging self-harm. By the way, I think that when that is considered by the court, it is not going to include something unpleasant that makes a person feel terrible and leads them to a bad place. That is not the purpose of the clause. In the context of this legislation, “encouraging” has to mean a direct incitement. So the relevant provision is subsection (1)(b), which refers to an act that “is intended” to have such an effect. I may be wrong, but—

[Jess Phillips]

In this case you are.

[Laura Farris]

Well, okay, but I struggle to conceive of circumstances, other than very unusual and extreme ones, where it would be said that a statutory body was doing an act with the intention of eliciting the consequence of self-harm. Anyway, the point has been made and I have responded to it. I know the hon. Lady’s case is an emotive one.

[Jess Phillips]

I am not going to talk about my case, but with regard to the charge sheet, coercive control legislation does not currently cover adults who are sexually exploited in grooming situations. In the case of a woman who is sexually exploited by an adult, like the woman I was with this morning, coercive control legislation does not apply. However, self-harm—I mean, I am going to say that literally being forced to be raped by 20 men a day is self-harm—is absolutely part of the pattern of coercion and abuse that those people suffer, so we would assume that adult-groomers would be covered by the Bill.

[Laura Farris]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I think a very helpful fabric of possible scenarios has been identified this afternoon. I simply say that in the different circumstances that she has just outlined, there are different criminal offences that would also apply. My simple point is that a case of the nature that she has described would not be confined to a section 11 offence under the Criminal Justice Act 2024, as I hope it will become in due course; there would be a range of serious criminality connected to that.

[Jess Phillips]

There isn’t. I hope, as the Minister hopes, that there will be by the time we have got to the end of our scrutiny of the Bill, but there is no crime of grooming adults in sexual exploitation; that exists only for children as an aggravating factor in offences. I suppose pimping legislation would not count in the case I mentioned if self-harm was caused. I do not think there are other bits of legislation for adult victims of sexual exploitation.

[The Chair]

Order. We are having a very important and thoughtful debate, but can we please try to observe the normal procedures so that Hansard colleagues, and those who are watching, can catch all of the proceedings?

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[Laura Farris]

The clause is the latest in a sequence of legislation dealing with intimate image abuse. People may correct me if I am wrong, but I think I am right to say that we have not dealt with intimate image abuse until this Parliament. The first time it hit the statute book properly was the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. I think it is also right to say that, as a Parliament, we have framed it correctly as something that is more often than not just another ugly incarnation of coercive control. It is highly intrusive, humiliating and distressing conduct.

In November 2022, following the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act, the Government announced their intention to create a suite of new offences to deal with intimate image abuse, closely based on the Law Commission’s recommendations in its July 2022 report. Under the Online Safety Act 2023—I hope the Committee will not mind if I spend a moment on the chronology and the legislative journey on intimate image abuse—the Government repealed the offences of disclosing or threatening to disclose private sexual images, replacing them with four new offences of sharing or threatening to share intimate images.

The Bill goes further to tackle the taking of intimate images without consent, and the process of installing equipment for that purpose. First, it repeals two voyeurism offences related to voyeurism of a private act and taking images under a person’s clothing, for which we use the shorthand “upskirting”—although that precedes the life of this Parliament, so I am wrong about that. Anyway, both those offences are reasonably new and have resulted in amendments to the Sexual Offences Act 2003. The Bill will replace them with new criminal offences to tackle the taking or recording of intimate images without consent and the installing of equipment for such purposes.

Those taking offences build on the sharing offences identified in the Online Safety Act to provide a unified package of offences using the same definitions and core elements. That addresses the criticism that there was previously a patchwork of protection, which the police told us led to gaps in provision when it came to this type of behaviour. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), who is not a member of the Committee. She has done a lot of work on the issue, and identified this problem in particular. As we know, one of the issues was proving intent.

I am grateful to the Law Commission for its work. It consulted widely with the police, prosecutors and legal practitioners, so we could not only read its report, but hear from a range of experts, including those supporting and campaigning on behalf of victims, and others who are far more knowledgeable than any of us.

The clause will insert a suite of new provisions after section 66 of the 2003 Act. The clause will create three new offences: the taking or recording of an intimate photograph or film without consent; and two new offences about installing equipment to enable a taking offence. I will go through them briefly.

The first provision of the clause is the creation of what we call a base offence of taking any intentional image of a person in an intimate state without their consent. That amounts to what we will call a section 66AA offence. It removes the requirement for a reason or motive. It does not matter if the person was doing it for a joke or for financial payment, or even if their reason was not particularly sinister. The base offence would be met if those elements were established. The offence is triable summarily only and will attract a maximum prison term of six months.

The wording of the two more serious offences mirrors some of the language that we are familiar with; the offences refer not just to “intentionally” taking an image, including of a person in an intimate state without their consent, but to having the intent of causing them “alarm, distress or humiliation”, or taking the image for the purpose of “obtaining sexual gratification” for themselves or another person. The offences are serious and carry a maximum sentence of two years. The three offences are designed to achieve the right balance between the protection of the victim and the avoidance of any over-criminalisation. I will return to that when I speak to new clause 20, tabled by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley.

The base taking offence is subject to a defence of reasonable excuse, such as a police officer taking an image without consent for purposes connected with criminal proceedings. Similarly, a base sharing offence is subject to the defence of reasonable excuse; for example, images taken for the purpose of a child’s medical treatment would meet that threshold, even if the victim was distressed by that. There is another exemption—I do not know who came up with this example, but it is a good one—if the image is taken in a public place and the person shown in the image is in the intimate state voluntarily. A distinction is therefore drawn between, for example, a photo of a streaker at a football match, and that of someone who had a reasonable expectation of privacy; that would relate to upskirting, for example.

We are also creating two offences to do with the installation of spycams, which I am afraid we see more and more of in cases going through the courts: an offence of installing, adapting, preparing or maintaining equipment with the intention of taking or recording intimate photograph or film; and an offence of supplying for that purpose. To be clear, it will not be necessary for the image to have been taken; if equipment was installed for that purpose, that is enough to meet the requirements of the offence.

Overall, the clause amends the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to ensure that notification requirements can be applied, where the relevant criteria are met, to those convicted of the new offence of taking for sexual gratification and installing with the intent to enable the commission of that offence. I commend the clause to the Committee. I will respond to the new clause later.

[Jess Phillips]

I will be brief. New clause 20 would extend the definition of “intimate image” to include specific categories of image that may be considered intimate by particular religious or cultural groups—for example, instances of a person not wearing modesty clothing such as a hijab or niqab when they would normally do so.

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[Laura Farris]

I am very sensitive to the issues that have been raised and will respond to them, but I will also explain why we do not accept the new clause.

We have steered very close to the course recommended by the Law Commission in what we have defined in law as an intimate image. It includes anything that shows a person who is nude or partially nude, or who is doing anything sexual or very intimate, such as using the toilet. It is a wider definition of “intimate” than was used in the revenge porn provisions under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. We have expanded it, but we have confined it to what we think anyone in this country would understand as “intimate”.

One of the challenges in adopting a definition of “intimate” that includes, for example, the removal of a hijab is that we are creating a criminal offence of that image being shared. It would not be obvious to anyone in this country who received a picture of a woman they did not know with her hair exposed that they were viewing an intimate image and committing a criminal offence. The Law Commission has made very similar points in relation to showing the legs of a woman who is a Hasidic Jew, or showing her without her wig on. This would be grotesquely humiliating for that victim, but that would not be completely obvious to any member of the public who might receive such an image of them.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Laura Farris]

I will, but I would like to develop this point a little bit more.

[Jess Phillips]

I strongly suggest that the hon. Lady does not come from the same community as me. I described images being sent to the community; the nature of the image would absolutely be clear to lots of people where I live.

[Laura Farris]

I was going to complete the point. If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will do so before I give way again. We have to create laws that apply equally to everybody in the United Kingdom. If we are to create an offence of sharing intimate images, we have to have a translation of intimacy that is absolutely irrefutable to anybody sending that image around. Even if they do not know the person in the image, it has to be absolutely clear to the sender that they are sending an intimate image. I have already made the point that it would not be immediately obvious to everyone in the United Kingdom that an image of a woman showing her hair was a humiliating image of her. It would not automatically be an intimate image even if the person sharing it knew that the woman in the image was Muslim, because some Muslim women do not wear headscarves.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley described a very dark case. She mentioned the language of blackmail and honour-based violence. She intimated coercive control. My simple point is that in the circumstances she has identified, there are a host of serious criminal offences being committed in conjunction with the use of the intimate image. We would say, very respectfully, that we think that kind of crime belongs much more comprehensively within other offences.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

rose—

[Laura Farris]

I am not going to engage in a case-by-case discussion. It is so difficult for me to do that; I do not have the papers in front of me. I understand the issue about community-based events, but if the purpose of sending the image is to blackmail a person, they have already engaged another element of the criminal law, and there is already aggravation, in that the perpetrator is being domestically abusive or is committing an honour-based offence, as the hon. Lady described.

I want to make it clear that by introducing the base offence, this legislation is removing the need to show an intention to cause distress. That is the issue that Georgia Harrison had, but managed to circumvent when she got that very successful and high-profile conviction against Stephen Bear, who went to prison for two years. She had an evidential difficulty in proving intent in her case. Although she did, she then became a really powerful advocate for removing intent from the offence, and we have done so.

I am not for a moment suggesting that there will not be cases of maximum sensitivity in which somebody is humiliated, but as I say, in the case that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley described, in the background, other offences were materialising. Our view is that it is more appropriate that they are dealt with under other elements of the law, rather than our muddling the police response, or even creating offenders where we do not mean to, because under the hon. Lady’s offence, the offender does not know they are committing an offence. They might think that they are sharing an image of a glamorous woman, not knowing that it is grossly offensive that they have shown a picture of a woman who does not have her hair covered as she normally would, because they do not know her.

I hope that answers the hon. Lady. With great respect, I urge her not to press her new clause. However, I would like to hear from her, because I did not give way to her a moment ago.

[The Chair]

The rules allow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley, to come back again—and the Minister can, in fact, respond again, if she would like to.

[Jess Phillips]

I understand exactly where the Minister is coming from. I understand not wishing to over-criminalise anybody for something accidental. I will just say that chance would be an absolutely fine thing. In the case that I was talking about, the police laughed at the woman when she went to them about it. Sometimes we on these Committees say, “Well, there’s already an offence for that,” and I think, “Is there?” In real life, there is not, when the rubber hits the road. I am not sure how many times people in this room have tried to get these criminal cases across the line. I do it every single week. In my life, I have done thousands and thousands.

The argument is the same for this legislation: what is the point of having it? Take Georgia Harrison’s case—let me give her a shout out. Good luck to her on “Love Island: All Stars”. I will definitely be supporting her; she is a friend of mine. There are probably all sorts of bits of legislation around posting an image of an ex partner. We say about spiking, “Well, there is already legislation for that,” but it does not work. Our job is to try to make laws that work in real life. I am afraid to say that there will be lots of cases of the kind that I am talking about. There just will, and the women involved will not be able to rely on this legislation.

The Minister said, “We try to make laws for all people in our country.” It does not always feel like that. We leave loads of people out. I will not press the new clause to a Division, because my point has been made. I am drawing a line in the sand when it comes to people in this Committee telling me, “There is another law for that,” when I know fine well that those other laws do not work.

[The Chair]

Would the Minister like to respond?

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[Alex Norris]

The hon. Member for Wyre Forest makes a very good point. The reason that I stopped short of doing that is that I was trying to stay within the “intimate” framing, but he is absolutely right. As we go into an election year, we will see, both in the States and over here, that being a real challenge to our democracy and to how we conduct campaigning. This provision would certainly not be right for it, but a new clause might be. That is good inspiration from the hon. Member, and I am very grateful for it.

The Committee heard about this during the evidence sessions for the Bill. Dame Vera Baird, the former Victims’ Commissioner, made the point very powerfully. She said that this use of deepfakes

“needs making unlawful, and it needs dealing with.”––[Official Report, Criminal Justice Public Bill Committee, 12 December 2023; c. 62.]

Indeed, she said she could not understand why they had not been banned already, and I agreed with her on that point. Amendment 57 is designed to address that. It will make it an offence for someone to intentionally create or design

“using computer graphics or any other digital technology an image or film which appears to be a photograph or film of another person...in an intimate state”,

whether that be for “sexual gratification”,

“causing alarm, distress or humiliation”

or offences under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

The amendment is an important addition to what we have. Some important progress was made with the Online Safety Act 2023, but I think this finishes the job. I am interested in the Government’s view on whether where they went with the Online Safety Act is where they intend to finish, as opposed to going that little bit further. I will close on that point, but I will be very interested in the response.

[Jess Phillips]

I rise to support both amendments, and, in fact, what the hon. Member for Wyre Forest said as well. No one should have the ability to host an image of a person that they did not want out there in the first place. Unfortunately, what people tend to get back is that it is very difficult to place these things, but all sorts of things around copyright are traced on all sorts of sites quite successfully. We put a man on the moon 20 years before I was born, and brought him back. I reckon we could manage this and I would really support it.

Turning to the point made by the hon. Member for Wyre Forest and the issue of faking intimate images, I am lucky enough to know—I am almost certain that most of the women in this room do not know this about themselves—that deepfake intimate images of me exist. As I say, I am lucky enough to know. I did not ever once consider that I should bother to try to do anything about it, because what is the point? In the plethora of things that I have to deal with, especially as a woman—and certainly as a woman Member of Parliament in the public eye—I just chalk it up to another one of those things and crack on, because there is too much to be getting on with. But on two separate incidents, people have alerted me to images on pornographic websites of both me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner); they have a thing for common women, clearly. There is nothing that even somebody in my position can do about it.

The first time I ever saw intimate images of me made on “rudimentary” Photoshop, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North called it, if I am honest, like with most abuses against women, I just laughed at it. That is the way we as women are trained to deal with the abuses that we suffer. They could only be fake images of me, because, unlike my children, I do not come from an era where everybody sends photos of everybody else naked. As a nation, we have to come to terms with the fact that that is completely and utterly normal sexual behaviour in the younger generation, but in that comes the danger.

The reality is that this is going to get worse. Rudimentary Photoshop images of me were sent to me about five years ago, or even longer—we have been here for ages. Covid has made it seem even longer. The first time I saw fake images of me, in a sexualised and violent form, was probably about eight years ago. Over the years, two, three or four times, people have sent me stuff that they have seen. I cannot stress enough how worrying it is that we could go into a new era of those images being really realistic. On the point made by the hon. Member for Wyre Forest, I have heard, for example, two completely deepfake recordings of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) that were put out and about. To be fair to Members on the Government Benches, they clearly said, “This is fake. Do not believe it; do not spread it.” We must have that attitude.

However, it is one thing to stop something in its tracks if it is the voice of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras saying, in that instance, that he did not like Liverpool, but that is nothing compared with the idea of me being completely naked and beaten by somebody. It is like wildfire, so I strongly encourage the Government to think about the amendments and how we make them law.

[Laura Farris]

Opposition Members have made two very good points, which I will respond to. The issue of publishing or hosting unlawfully obtained internet photographs is salient. It was probably thrown into its sharpest relief by Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times when he did a big exposé of Pornhub. I have never read off my phone in any parliamentary sitting before, but I will briefly do so, because the opening to his article is one of the best that I have read about Pornhub:

“Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality…Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering”.

The point is very well made.

Under the Online Safety Act 2023, we have ensured that all user-to-user services in scope of the illegal content duties are required to remove that type of illegal content online when it is flagged to them or they become aware of it. That would cover something such as the Pornhub apps I have described. We believe that the robust regulatory regime for internet companies put in place by the Act, with the introduction of the offence of sharing intimate images, which extends to publication, are the most effective way to deal with the problems of the spread of that material.

Our essential answer is that under the Online Safety Act a host site—I have given a big name, because I am critical of that particular site—would be under a legal obligation to remove content flagged to it as featuring prohibited content, so it would have an obligation under the law to remove an intimate image of an individual created without their knowledge or consent or to be subject to criminal sanctions. Under the Online Safety Act, those are substantial; Parliament worked collectively to ensure that meaningful sanctions would be applied in that regard.

There is a concern that creating a new offence would partially overlap with existing criminal offences—for example, that we would basically be duplicating some of the provisions under section 188 of the Online Safety Act. We worry that that would dilute the effectiveness with which such activity will be policed and charged by the Crown Prosecution Service. I understand that the provisions under the Act have not yet been commenced, so we would be legislating on top of legislation that has not been commenced. Respectfully, I invite hon. Members to allow the Act to come into force comprehensively before we make an assessment of whether we need to legislate again on the issue of hosting unlawful content. However, I am sympathetic to it, and I think the whole House agrees with the principle.

Equally, the Law Commission was asked to look at the issue of deepfakes, which it considered and responded to. I will remind the Committee of how it undertook its inquiry into the issue. It undertook a full public consultation on the point and engaged with the CPS and police, and it concluded that making a deepfake offence was not necessary. It identified certain associated risks, including difficulties for law enforcement and, again, the risk of overcriminalisation, which potentially would outweigh the benefits. The Government share the view of the Law Commission and have decided not to create a separate making offence.

I will provide hon. Members with some reassurance: nobody is in any doubt about the risk. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley described harmful, culpable conduct relating to her personally and to other senior politicians in this House. My hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest gave hypotheticals that could easily materialise, and we all know that there is an increased risk of that as we move into an election year on a global scale, because elections are happening all over the world this year. Nobody doubts the risk. I want again to provide the reassurance that such conduct generally involves sharing of these images, or threats to share, both of which are criminalised by offences under the Online Safety Act, or by other offences—communication offences and harassment offences—so it is already captured.

The secondary issue identified by the Law Commission concern the prosecution difficulties, because it would be difficult to prove some elements of the offence, such as an intention to cause distress, in circumstances in which the image had not been shared—by the way, I take out of that a circumstance in which the defendant has told the victim that they hold the image, because that has already crossed the threshold. The question that I asked officials—I have now lost the answer, but they did give it to me. Hang on a minute; someone will know where it is. Will the Committee give me one moment?

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his forbearance. Just to pick up on that point, I think he is right to hold the Government’s feet to the fire on the commencement of the Online Safety Act, because it is all very well having these provisions in law, but if they are not actually operational, they are not doing any good to anyone. I accept that tacit criticism as it may be advanced. I recognise that implementation now is critical; commencement is critical.

I will disclose the question that I put to officials. I was interested in the question of what happens if, for example, a schoolboy creates a deepfake of another pupil and does not share it, so that it is not covered by the Online Safety Act but is none the less an offence. I am told that that is covered by two separate bits of legislation. One is section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978, which includes making indecent images of a child, including if that is a deepfake, which would be covered by the statutory language. The second provision is section 160 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, which is possession of any indecent image of a child and would include where it had been superimposed.

I am satisfied that the current law, including the Online Safety Act—I have already accepted that there are commencement issues—deals with deepfakes. I am sensitive to the prosecutorial difficulties that I have identified and I think that these are covered, particularly by the Online Safety Act. We accept the Law Commission’s very careful work on the issue, which was a detailed piece of research, not just a short paragraph at the end. On that basis, I very respectfully urge the hon. Member for Nottingham North to withdraw or not press the amendments.

[Jess Phillips]

On the answer that the Minister got from her officials, there are so many bits of legislation about abuses of children, sexual violence towards children, sexual grooming of children and sexual exploitation of children, and there are none about adults, as though such behaviour is not harmful when someone turns 18. If the same kid in the same class is 17 and makes images of a person who is turning 18, the view is that one day it would be a problem and the next day it would not, as though the abuse of adult women is just fine. The Online Safety Act does not say the word “woman” once, so I will gently push back on the idea that it deals with this. I am going to scour Pornhub now—I will not do it while I am in Parliament in case somebody sees me—to look for these images, and I will rise to the Minister’s challenge. I am going to go to the police once the Online Safety Act is in force and we will see how far I get.

[Laura Farris]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point. She is making very, very good ones, as she always does. That is a legitimate challenge. I just would also ask her to bear this in mind. She has heard our answer. First, we are accepting the Law Commission’s recommendation for now. Secondly, we think the Online Safety Act covers what she has described in terms of sharing. The third point that I draw her attention to is the pornography review launched today. That is a critical piece of work, and she made the good point that we focus extensively on children. There is a really important element of that.

First, we know that there is a dark web element where a lot of online pornography is focused directly on child pornography. We also know that adult pornography not only contributes to the pubescent nature of abuse that we see in the violence against women, but also violence against women much more widely. I have spoken about this; the hon. Lady has spoken about this—we have been in the Chamber together numerous times talking about it. I hope that that review will get on top of some the issues that she is raising today. I hope she will accept our gentle refusal of her amendment and maybe consider withdrawing it.

[The Chair]

Order. Chunterings from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley are always—

[Jess Phillips]

Delightful?

[The Chair]

—informative and important. I would be very grateful if she could save them up and use them in her interventions so that we get them on the record, rather than overhearing them from a sedentary position, if she would be so kind.

Criminal Justice Bill (Fifth sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Philp]

As we have discussed, clauses 1 to 4 introduce new offences to criminalise the importation, manufacture, modification, supply, offer to supply and possession of particular articles used in serious and organised crime. They currently apply to England and Wales only, but after consultation with the devolved Administrations in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Government tabled amendments 14 to 22 and 41 to extend the criminal offences to the whole of the UK. This follows a request from the devolved Administrations, which we are happy to agree to.

Clause 2 contains a delegated power for the Secretary of State to amend the list of items covered by the clause. At the outset, we cover the templates for 3D-printed firearms, pill presses and concealed compartments. This creates a power, using an affirmative statutory instrument that is subject to full parliamentary scrutiny, to add additional items as we become aware of them. It is impossible for us sitting here to foresee or anticipate what items criminals may come up with in the future, so it is important to have this power to future-proof against criminal innovation.

The practical effect of amendments 40, 44 and 49 is to add these offences to the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which means that when a person is found guilty of an offence, they will automatically be considered guilty of having a criminal lifestyle when the court is making a confiscation order. I am sure that the Committee will agree that when someone is involved in serious criminal activity, we would want the proceeds of that criminal activity, particularly if it is serious organised crime, to fall into the scope of the POCA regime. I have already mentioned the items included, which are listed in clause 2, and I have also referenced the affirmative statutory instrument process for adding additional items in the future.

On clause 3, it is important that we include measures on vehicle theft in the Bill. I am sure that all of us have been contacted by constituents who are concerned about their cars being stolen, particularly from their home address. Criminals do that using various forms of technology that enable them to either pick up the signal from a key fob, or hack into a vehicle’s control system, disable the immobiliser, and activate and unlock the vehicle. They then drive off. Unfortunately, that is relatively prevalent.

There are things that constituents can do, such as put their key fob into a so-called Faraday bag—a little bag with an iron mesh around it—but that could be stolen. More modern vehicles, particularly in the past two or three years, have better security measures. Nonetheless, we parliamentarians want to do everything we can to prevent this kind of technology falling into criminal hands. That is why we are providing for two new criminal offences relating to vehicle theft using electronic devices such as signal jammers, but there are others also. The first offence criminalises possession of those devices, and the second criminalises importing, making, adapting, supplying or offering to supply those devices.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I might be showing my entire ignorance of signal jammers, but is there no other use for these bits of technology? I can see whether there is when it comes to stamping things on pills and plans to build a gun on a 3D printer, but my ignorance about signal jammers means that I do not know whether there is another use for them.

[Chris Philp]

I thank the hon. Lady for that very good question. These two offences require a reasonable suspicion that the device will be used in connection with vehicle theft. The judge or the jury, depending on whether we are talking about magistrates court or the Crown court, have to be satisfied there is a reasonable suspicion that that is what the device will be used for. It is important that the police have the powers to arrest and prosecute people involved in this kind of activity. The offences should help a great deal in stopping these electronic devices getting into criminal hands.

We have talked a little bit about the evidential burden of proof in clause 4, and I will not rehearse those points at great length, in the interests of Committee members’ patience and time. As many of the articles that we are talking about can be used only for criminal purposes, it is reasonable to construct the clause this way. Members of the Committee will recall that we took evidence on this issue from a number of people in law enforcement, including Graeme Biggar, the director general of the National Crime Agency. Law enforcement—both territorial policing and the NCA—strongly welcomes these measures as strengthening the police’s armoury in the fight against organised crime. Through this regulation-making power, Ministers and Parliament will be able to keep up with changes in technology, which is extremely important given how fast technology is moving these days.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

It is not reliant on that. It is simply that the data does not exist. The chief inspector of constabulary Andy Cooke said in his state of policing report last June that we are arguably safer than we have ever been before. If we look at the crime types for which we do have continuous data going back to 2010 and before—such as burglary, robbery, the vehicle theft figures that the shadow Minister himself quoted recently, violent and seriously violent crime—we see that all of those individual crime types have fallen dramatically.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Philp]

In a moment. Bicycle theft is down by 39%, vehicle crime by about 50%, and violent crime by around 50%. It is not the case that some sort of artifice going on and that if we added fraud, that would paint a different picture. Whichever crime type we look at, we see that it is going down according to the crime survey. We all know why police reported crime sometimes shows different trends. It is because the police are being driven by—we are getting a bit off topic here, so I am probably going to get told off in a minute.

[Chris Philp]

Yes. There is probably another time to debate this point, and perhaps now is a good moment to give way to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley.

[Jess Phillips]

I think I am at risk of offending you in the Chair, Dame Angela, but may I have the data for whether rape, child abuse or domestic violence have gone up or down?

[The Chair]

Order.

[Jess Phillips]

I know the answer.

[The Chair]

I have been quite lax because I prefer a free-wheeling debate in Committee. It is important that people are allowed to make arguments in a slightly wider way, but we still have to stay in order. I was happy to listen to the fraud debate, given the clauses we are debating, but let us get back to order.

Criminal Justice Bill (Second sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Philp]

Thank you, Rebecca. Those are all my questions.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Q Harvey, do you think that there is the capacity for police forces across the country to drug-test everybody who comes through their doors?

Harvey Redgrave: No, it needs to be attached to more resourcing.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So if this law passes, it will not be able to be enacted?

Harvey Redgrave: I am assuming there is an impact assessment and a cost that has been attached to the Bill.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Never assume, Harvey. So currently, across the policing estate in our country, this would not be able to happen.

Harvey Redgrave: I do not think it would be able to happen if you took current resource levels as the baseline. Some piloting is already going on in some forces, I think. I do not know how much of that has been allocated in future years.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. As the conversation was about Louise Casey’s review, I was remembering some of the highlighted things in that review—testing samples left in fridges with sandwiches and things. I cannot say I have noted that the police estate across the country could cope with anything like this law, so I just wanted to check. Going back to Louise Casey’s review and the issue of vetting and suspension, do you think that what is in the Bill is enough?

Harvey Redgrave: No. It is a good step forward, but not sufficient.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. Have you seen evidence that where police officers are suspected of violence against women and girls or child abuse they should be suspended from duty, not just put on paper-based activities?

Harvey Redgrave: I would agree, yes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q You would agree that they should be suspended, as a teacher would be.

Harvey Redgrave: Sorry—I would agree with the premise of your question.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. But currently that is not in the Bill.

Harvey Redgrave: If I could also add one further thing on violence against women and girls—

[Jess Phillips]

Please feel free.

Harvey Redgrave: One of the good developments that has taken place in the last couple of years is Betsy Stanko’s work on rape and Operation Soteria, which is now being rolled out across the country. As you know, it takes a new approach to the way that rape is investigated. There is a very good case for widening that to look at all violence against women and girls, because some of the same principles apply. I would look very closely at whether that requires legislation, and if it does not, at what is required to broaden that approach.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So you think there might be a legislative solution by writing that into primary legislation or secondary legislation.

Harvey Redgrave: Potentially.

[Jess Phillips]

I will crack on with that, then.

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

Q Rebecca, when you were talking about clause 67 and the CPNs, I think you suggested at the beginning of your comments that this was not a unanimous view from your members. Is that correct?

Rebecca Bryant: Yes, it is.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Good. Thank you.

[Jess Phillips]

Q My first question is to Andy Marsh on the issue of vetting, which he very eloquently said needs to be a constant. Do you not think, then, that there needs to be at least some guideline in law about the regularity of that vetting?

Andy Marsh: Yes, I do. That is a periodic hard stop, let us say, where there is a full review, but there should be a number of different control measures, both automated data searches and a duty—a responsibility to report and self-report—that will occur in real time between those vetting periods.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. What sort of timeframe would you put on that hard period?

Andy Marsh: Whichever timeframe you chose, you could see reasons why it wouldn’t be right.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Ten years is currently the suggested—

Andy Marsh: Ten years is the current one. I think to change that without massively increasing the capacity of vetting units would be to, let us say, write a cheque they couldn’t cash.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So currently, even if we were to legislate that the vetting had to be improved—

Andy Marsh: If you were to legislate then the police would have to find the money, and it is often—

[Jess Phillips]

And it is currently not available.

Andy Marsh: Difficult choices.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Difficult choices would have to be made in order to ensure that vetting was happening. I appreciate your honesty.

Andy Marsh: I would say, “What is the best way of ensuring a trusted, ethical workforce that actually is enforcing highly frequent—I would debate highly frequent—more frequent, hard-stop vettings which would be very costly, with back-office capability?” That might, in my opinion, not be the best way of doing it. I would rather move to a more agile, 21st-century—

[Jess Phillips]

Q Automated.

Andy Marsh: Yes, automated.

[Jess Phillips]

Database, AI and so on.

Andy Marsh: Yes. So many of the searches that are required for vetting can be put into robotic processes, with ultimately the human being making the decision at the end.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Of course. You talk about there being an automated system. I have asked everybody who has sat in front of me today this question. Currently there is no crossover between behaviours found in courts in the United Kingdom; so in family courts, in civil courts in our country, that would not currently be being used in the vetting. Let’s say a domestic abuser was found to be a multiple domestic abuser of various different women, in the family courts in this country. Would that come up in your vetting?

Andy Marsh: To directly answer your question, I don’t know. Possibly not.

[Jess Phillips]

The answer is no. I do know.

Andy Marsh: But actually, if you had a multiple domestic abuser, I am pretty confident that they would be flagging on other systems.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Except that less than one in five people come forward to the criminal justice system.

Andy Marsh: Excepting that.

[Jess Phillips]

Okay. Excepting the four in five that don’t come forward.

Andy Marsh: I take your point.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. But an automated system that had all of that data on it for vetting would be helpful?

Andy Marsh: Yes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q What is your view on the suspension issue? I have unfortunately heard of a case where a police officer was suspended for safeguarding concerns, shall we say, and was put on paper-based duty, and the thing they were doing was the vetting. Do you think that officers who are under suspicion of issues of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse and safeguarding-related crimes should be suspended?

Andy Marsh: Will you permit me a little commentary, rather than a yes to that?

[Jess Phillips]

Go for it, mate.

Andy Marsh: I will tell you an anecdote, which I think will explain why this is dangerous. People can use the police complaints system for reasons other than simply securing justice and fairness for having been treated unfairly. As chief constable of Avon and Somerset, I became aware of two reports that I had in fact—and you will be shocked by this—raped the police and crime commissioner, Sue Mountstevens. I certainly had not, and the lady reporting that was in a mental ill health institution, but the crime recording rules required the police force to record that there was a rape, and I was named as a suspect. I would have thought that it would be farcical, wouldn’t it, for me to be suspended under such circumstances, given that there was not a grain of truth in that? There is a danger—

[Jess Phillips]

Q But it would be very easy for a professional person to initially triage such a case, for example, and do some very clear due diligence about somebody’s mental ill health, the likelihood and the timings. If there were any sort of case to be investigated and answered, do you not think that the person should then be suspended?

Andy Marsh: Fairness and justice are for everyone, particularly victims of violence against women and girls; if you look at everything I have said and done in my career, you will see that that is what I genuinely believe. However, I believe that an automatic suspension would be swinging the pendulum way too far. I have given you a very simple example, which is of course ridiculous. What I have learned through 37 years in policing is that there are many, many different shades of ambiguity around situations.

[Jess Phillips]

I too will give you—

Andy Marsh: Very rarely do we find right and wrong.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Of course, of course. It is funny that often it is only on this issue that there are only grey areas. A police officer in my police force—in West Midlands police—was put on light duties after he was considered a risk to children, and he used that to access the data. He went on to abuse, and has since been convicted of abusing, around 19 teenage boys. He used the powers of being put on desk duties in the police force to do that.

Andy Marsh: That is shocking and disgraceful, and it should never have been allowed to happen.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I am afraid that I could probably come up with many more examples similar to that. You do not think that, in those circumstances, there should be a suspension.

Andy Marsh: In the circumstances that you just described, of course. But I will say to this Committee that I think each case should be treated on its merits, with a very low threshold for suspension.

[Jess Phillips]

Q On the basis of it being currently treated on its merits, which we cannot necessarily legislate for, how many do you think are being suspended, left in police forces on separate duties, such as vetting, or, of those on that sort of suspension—as was the case in I think the Metropolitan police; it was definitely a police force—are training the new officers?

Andy Marsh: I can write to you with that information, but I am afraid that I do not have it to hand.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. That would be very helpful, thank you. Confidence that anything can be implemented is undoubtedly vital. Your eBay example was a good one. You stated that you were confident that all this could be implemented; however, you just said that the police would need to write a cheque, or that a massive cheque would have to be written for some of the ethics and standards things. If everything in the Bill were implemented—I invite you to comment, for example on how you think the drugs testing would be rolled out—how it is possible that everything will be implemented at the same time as prioritising violence against women and girls crimes in every force? How will it be implemented so that confidence is not lost?

Andy Marsh: I do not think I said that I was confident that all the powers in the Bill could be implemented. I was answering the question about traceable property and the power to gain entry—that was the element that I was confident about.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Oh, specifically—apologies. Do you think that everything in the Bill could be implemented?

Andy Marsh: I am supportive of the measures in the Bill. Some will undoubtedly come with a requirement to increase the resource.

[Jess Phillips]

Such as?

Andy Marsh: The drugs testing would be a good example. I do not believe that there is currently a latent capacity waiting to do that.

[Jess Phillips]

There is currently not the capacity available to do that.

Andy Marsh: No.

[Jess Phillips]

I didn’t think there was. Okay, thank you.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

Q Andy Marsh, can I continue with you? I have an observation, following on from Jess Phillips, about what sounds like a nightmare, where you were accused of rape by somebody. Just as an observation, were that to happen to a Member of Parliament, you might find yourself being asked to stay away from the House. You might lose the Whip from the party you are a member of. It is an interesting observation that in this place, there is almost a presumption of guilt before anything else when it comes to this type of crime, where in theory Members of Parliament can have access to vulnerable people. It is an interesting dichotomy, I suppose, that where the police have access to vulnerable people the whole time there could be this same problem. As I say, that is more of an observation than me necessarily asking you to respond to it—

Andy Marsh: Well since you make the observation, I am not sure, as a police officer, that most police officers would agree that the standards of conduct in Parliament are necessarily higher than the standards of conduct for a police officer—if you don’t mind me saying.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

Q On the point about DAPOs and MAPPA, do you think that MAPPA currently covers all those who are suffering serious domestic abuse and then go on to be murdered, for example?

Dame Vera Baird: No.

[Jess Phillips]

Q You have said that this legislation is good—“Yes—do it.” Do you think that it makes any real difference on the ground to the issue of domestic abuse—policing and probation monitoring?

Dame Vera Baird: I think it is a good piece of flag waving, and it ought to be something that ups the attention of the relevant parties. A lot of people do not get protected sufficiently by MAPPA.

[Jess Phillips]

Q The vast majority do not get protected, would you say?

Dame Vera Baird: I do not know about the numbers, but it is not a foolproof system. When it works, it works well, I think, and it can be quite subtly tuned for particular kinds of offender. But I do not know that it works so well with domestic abuse generally. In fact, what does?

[Jess Phillips]

Q You said that you were pleased with the parts about intimate images. Do you foresee that this will increase and encourage victims of that particular crime to come forward?

Dame Vera Baird: I hope so. It is pretty straightforward. It started off with a nice private Member’s Bill, and it was good for upskirting, but it was very taken with the intention of the individual. Taking a photograph and upskirting—frankly, if you do it, it is a crime, I would have thought. Struggling to find out whether they had done it for their own sexual benefit or to sell it online or whatever: I do not think that matters. I think the Law Commission have got to, “If you do it at all—make an intimate image—it’s an offence. If you do it with that intention, it’s worse. If you do it with this intention, it’s worse,” and that looks as if it works well.

I do not know why deepfake is not banned. Everybody knows what that is. The Minister will tell me there is a Standing Order going through. You just gave me a shocked look. Deepfake is not in the Bill, is it?

[Jess Phillips]

No, deepfake is not in it.

Dame Vera Baird: So that is where you could have possibly even a performative person doing deliberately provocative, maybe naked actions. You can take their face off, put mine on instead and put that online. That is dreadfully, dreadfully damaging—every bit as much, possibly more, because of the potential bravado of the act, which would then be blamed on you. That needs making unlawful, and it needs dealing with.

The other problem is that there are no orders to get rid of the stuff that is online already. I asked Penney Lewis—who is coming presently, so she will tell you—why they did not try to tackle the question of taking down stuff. She said that their terms of reference relate to criminality, not the civil orders. My view is that there should be a new look at that, because the pain of being a victim of intimate images is knowing that they are online.

There is a heroic academic at Durham called Professor Clare McGlynn who has done a huge amount of work on this. The impact on somebody of knowing that there is a naked picture of them somewhere online makes them withdraw: they cannot face anybody new, because they think that inevitably they must have seen them online and will have a poor view of them. That is how it gets internalised.

So it is urgent. If the Law Commission was not asked to look at taking stuff down, which I understand is done effectively in Canada, it should be asked to look at it again, or you must find another mechanism for it. The pain is from knowing that it is still up.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Turning to some of the amendments proposed to the Bill, could I ask your opinion on the issues around removing parental responsibility for men convicted of sexual offences against children? What is your view on that?

Dame Vera Baird: Now that I understand that the mitigation relating to being coercively controlled will go into law, at least at a lower level—although I do think it should be in this statute—I am less worried. There is some possibility, isn’t there, if it is about murder or manslaughter, because a lot of victims who have been coercively controlled and strike back are convicted of manslaughter—

[Jess Phillips]

Losing their parental responsibility, you mean?

Dame Vera Baird: Yes. That would be a woman who had been persecuted. You are talking about sex offences?

[Jess Phillips]

Yes, specifically sex offences. That bit of law is in the Victims and Prisoners Bill—the law on murder and manslaughter, which I believe has some carve-out. Not to inform the Minister of this, but that is the reason why it is going through the Lords today: the carve-out, which is in that Bill, not this one. But what I was talking about was a proposal to take parental responsibility away from men convicted of sexual offences against children.

Dame Vera Baird: I am less convinced by that, because the definition of a sexual offence may be quite a wide one. I think it needs some reflection. I appreciate that if there is a sexual risk order, you can have a man who is banned from being in touch with all children except his own.

[Jess Phillips]

I think that’s the problem.

Dame Vera Baird: That is the point, so it needs tackling. But just sex offences—does it apply to flashers or people online? I do not know. I think it probably needs tuning a bit.

[Jess Phillips]

Q There are two amendments on the issue of the criminalisation of women who have an abortion. Do you have any views on those?

Dame Vera Baird: It is long overdue to be decriminalised, as it is in Northern Ireland. This Parliament decriminalised it in Northern Ireland. Why on earth is it still a criminal offence to do what is a tragic thing that nobody wants to do, and have a late abortion? The last time the offence was in play was quite recently: it was about six months ago. The Court of Appeal was amazingly benevolent towards the woman and accepted entirely that she needed support, not criminalisation. The Court of Appeal seems to be ahead of this Parliament on that at the moment. You used to have women from Northern Ireland coming over here for help with abortion; now, women from here go over to Northern Ireland to avoid the risk of criminalisation if they are a week late. It is quite odd.

[Jess Phillips]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

As there are no further questions, may I thank you, Dame Vera, for your evidence? We will move on to the next panel.

Examination of Witness

Jonathan Hall KC gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

I call Jess Phillips. Just be aware of the clock —you have eight minutes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q You are very, very defined in the things that you will say, and I appreciate that. What has the Law Commission suggested of late, in one of the things it has written about, that is not in the Bill? You have been grateful for the things that are in the Bill, but what is missing?

Professor Lewis: Missing from the projects that are implemented or missing from other projects?

[Jess Phillips]

Q For example, just to go to your point about hate crime and the aggravated factor, has that been realised in the law?

Professor Lewis: No. We are still awaiting a Government response on the vast majority of our recommendations in the hate crime report.

[Jess Phillips]

For example, women—

Professor Lewis: No, that is the one they responded to, because we recommended that sex or gender not be added for the purposes of aggravated offences or enhanced sentencing. You may remember that there was a statutory requirement for the Government to respond to that, and they responded accepting our recommendation not to add it. They have not responded to the rest of the recommendations, including our recommendation that there should be an offence of stirring up hatred on the basis of sex or gender as well as equalising the treatment of all the other protected characteristics in relation to stirring up hatred.

[Jess Phillips]

Q For example, that could have been in the Bill, but it is not.

Professor Lewis: I cannot comment on whether it could have been in the Bill.

[Jess Phillips]

You can put anything in it if you want— I am going to.

Professor Lewis: It is not in the Bill, and we await a response from the Government on the vast majority of our recommendations.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So you are awaiting a response. Therefore, although you are pleased to see quite a lot of things in the Bill, there are quite a lot of examples of things that the Law Commission has done pieces of work on that do not feature in a Bill—this Bill, the Sentencing Bill or the Victims and Prisoners Bill, which have all been going through at the same time.

Professor Lewis: I have to accept—in fact, I am pleased to accept—that in terms of projects that I have worked on, more than half of them have been implemented in the last year. The implementation rate of Law Commission criminal law projects at the moment is—

[Jess Phillips]

Q High?

Professor Lewis: Yes. It is fantastic.

[Jess Phillips]

That is good to hear.

Professor Lewis: We are really pleased to be able to work with the Government to implement our recommendations in so many projects; I think it is five in the last year.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. Going back specifically to the issue of confiscation, how do you foresee this working with the resources on the ground? I speak as somebody who, in the break between the morning sitting and the afternoon sitting of this Committee, received an email telling me that somebody was going to pay me some compensation for perpetrating crimes against me. Like every other time that I have received such a letter, I have absolutely no expectation of seeing a single penny, nor have I ever seen a single penny of that money.

Professor Lewis: Compensation for victims is a really important issue and one of the things that we recommended in the confiscation project, because compensation was not part of that project directly, is that there needs to be a separate review of compensation for victims.

None the less, we made recommendations where there is overlap. For example, we described it as giving priority to the payment of compensation. We recommended that where a compensation order is imposed at the same time as a confiscation order, the Crown court should be required to direct that compensation should be paid from the sums recovered under the confiscation order. At the moment, that happens only if the defendant does not have enough money to pay both orders, but we recommended that, even if the defendant does have enough money, the first lot of money should go on compensation.

Similarly, when multiple confiscation orders are imposed, priority should be given to the payment of compensation and after that to the confiscation orders. Paragraph 11 of schedule 4 basically implements those recommendations, saying that the court “must direct” that

“sums recovered under the confiscation order”

be applied to “ priority order (or orders)”. Priority orders are defined in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 as including compensation orders. Therefore, although you may not see the word “compensation” in that paragraph, it very much is in there, and the paragraph prioritises the application of funds to victims, whether that means that you as an individual victim are seeking compensation funds—

[Jess Phillips]

Q I find it highly unlikely. So, you think there needs to be a further review of compensation for victims.

Professor Lewis: Yes.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank the witness for the time that she has given us today.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Scott Mann.)

Criminal Justice Bill (First sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2023 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Before I bring Jess in, four further Members have caught my eye. You have nine minutes between you, so bear that in mind.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Q Message received.

To take you back to the conduct questions that you started with, are you satisfied with the current system in policing for finding bad conduct where it has occurred?

Chief Constable Stephens: Once the new provisions are introduced, we will be more satisfied with the system. When the new provisions are in place, we in policing will need to work hard to make sure that we are getting through at more speed. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has talked about the number of backlogs in the Met, for example. That is not just in the Met; it is replicated in our member organisations across England and Wales, so speed is definitely one thing.

Fundamentally—I have had these discussions privately with the Minister and others—we need to reclaim this as an employment process. It has become too legalistic over time.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay, but are you convinced that the powers in this Bill and the intelligence that you have currently is enough to identify misconduct such as—I declare a special interest—sexual violence and domestic abuse in offices?

Chief Constable Stephens: Yes, given the right emphasis and the right resourcing.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I know the answer to this question, but I will ask it anyway. Do you know whether the findings in civil courts in our country of a case where, for example, a police officer is found, in a finding of fact hearing in the family court, to have raped his wife, would appear on your intelligence system?

Chief Constable Stephens: I could not give a guarantee that it always would.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I guarantee you that it does not. Do you think that it would be helpful to have a repository of information from all of the courts in our land on safeguarding findings, such as on child abuse, for the police to access to ensure that conduct could be guaranteed?

Chief Constable Stephens: Yes, absolutely.

[Jess Phillips]

Thank you.

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

Q On the issue of rough sleeping, I totally get that the police need to work with partners. By the way, I would just like to say that Essex police are doing phenomenal work on this and many other issues in the Chelmsford city centre, using hotspots and grid policing and so on, but occasionally, even though we are trying to give people support, there are some people with complex needs who are still sleeping on the streets, and we sometimes have the issue that they are sleeping in the fire escape of a large store, for example, which causes danger to others. Are the powers in this Bill the sort of powers that you could use to gently request that that person sleeps in another venue, without blocking a fire escape?

Chief Constable Stephens: Policing can gently request, persuade, cajole and encourage without powers.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Before I call the next question, I remind Members to catch my eye as early as possible. If you do not, I will give leeway to those who caught my eye earlier and you may not get in. I appreciate that points may occur to you as discussions develop, but it would be helpful for timing. I call Jess Phillips.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Specifically to the NCA, what is not in the Bill that would help your work? For example, I take a personal interest in the NCA’s work on people smuggling and human trafficking, and—no offence to the CPS—the woeful levels of conviction in that space. What is missing from the Bill that would help you?

Graeme Biggar: There is nothing missing on people smuggling that we would need at the moment, to answer that direct question. I mentioned child-like sexual abuse dolls. Another issue that you care about is child sexual abuse websites. At the moment, it is obviously a criminal offence to possess or distribute indecent images of children, but it is not a specific criminal offence to be a moderator or an administrator of the dark websites that hold millions of images and videos of children being raped. We often investigate and we prosecute individuals for viewing and distributing the images, but there is not an extra offence for being the person who runs and sets up that kind of website.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Currently, there is no legal definition of adult sexual exploitation in our country, only child exploitation, and there is no strategy on adult sexual exploitation. What work does the NCA actually do in the space of huge grooming gangs, for example, or does it not matter when the people are over the age of consent?

Graeme Biggar: We do work on grooming gangs when people are below the age of consent, as you know, with Operation Stovewood in Rotherham. We also work on sexual exploitation of adults. We have had a number of investigations recently into women from Romania and Brazil being brought into the UK.

[Jess Phillips]

Q What about women from Britain?

Graeme Biggar: We have come across less of that in our investigations, but we will work with the NPCC.

[Jess Phillips]

I’ll take you on a night out, mate. I could show you it in every single part of the country.

Graeme Biggar: We focus on the ones who cross the border; it is the NPCC that focuses on adult sexual exploitation within the UK.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So the NCA would not undertake work on large-scale criminal gangs in our country that are exploiting British adults?

Graeme Biggar: No, we would. If we could see large-scale, organised crime that involves modern slavery, which includes the sexual exploitation of women, we would investigate it. We have not yet come across such a case—certainly not in my time in the NCA.

[The Chair]

Order. I remind you that you need to focus on the scope of the Bill rather than the general work of the agencies, not to in any way diminish the importance of the issue. Do you have any further questions, Jess?

[Jess Phillips]

I am done.

[Anna Firth]

Q Back to knife crime and clause 10 of the Bill. As you know, clause 10 will introduce a higher maximum penalty for manufacturing, importing, supplying or selling offensive weapons such as zombie knives and flick knives, especially to under-18s—to children. Amazingly, at the moment the penalty for that is only six months, and it is a summary-only offence in the magistrates court. Under the Bill, it will become an indictable offence carrying a penalty of two years. Do you think that is a good change, which will lead to longer sentences? Because it is indictable, it will give the police more time to investigate these crimes, particularly when they are online sales using web app groups and so on, and it takes a lot longer to get the data.

Baljit Ubhey: Certainly the fact that it is an either-way offence and you do not have the challenges of the six-month time limits that summary-only offences create —given, as you say, the complexities of how these knives are manufactured, sold and so on—will helpfully close a bit of a gap.

Graeme Biggar: We agree with that point and the points that Gavin made earlier in relation to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

Q My final question is about the minimum age provisions in that. I know that the age of criminal responsibility begins at 10, but based on your work, was that an area where you found that antisocial behaviour was perpetrated a lot by youngsters in their teens?

Baroness Newlove: I have not specifically looked at that. Looking at all the reviews I have done, I have said outside this role that parenting is the most difficult job anybody can do, but you have to be accountable for the actions.

I have concerns: yes, the age is 10, but there could be other areas in which that person is suffering, such as dyslexia or autism. Also, the parents could be suffering domestic abuse. How do you make them pay that fine, at the end of the day? If you go back to that, we had that kind of language in the riots, where we were going to get the parents and take them out of their homes. For me, there has to be accountability, but how would you get that parent, who is probably suffering from domestic abuse or may have mental health and addiction issues, to fully understand the impact that their child is having? They may need support to rectify that. Also, that child could have other issues.

I can see where you are going from that. I welcome anything, but I am just stepping back a little to consider how that would have an impact on the rest of the family to make sure we can get a better solution.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Nicole, give the Committee an idea of the number of domestic abuse incidents a year.

Nicole Jacobs: Well, according to the Office for National Statistics, it is 2.3 million.

[Jess Phillips]

And then those that get reported to the police?

Nicole Jacobs: One in five. Sometimes the research says one in six, but we can say one in five.

[Jess Phillips]

Q One in five of those, so you can all do the maths quickly—because the Prime Minister tells us that that is important. Last year, the conviction figure on coercive control was 564, so we have gone from 2 million down to 564 that will be affected by this Bill. Of course, it only affects those over 12 months, so I think that is 10% of that 564. Is that correct?

Nicole Jacobs: Yes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So we are getting down to under 100 victims of domestic abuse actually affected by this Bill. I just want to make sure that I have got that right. Is that correct?

Nicole Jacobs: That is correct for that provision, which is really why I was making the point about the wider work required. Or, as the Bill progresses, I am sure you will have people who might put forward other offences that ought to be included. However, that is correct, and I suppose that not every dangerous perpetrator of domestic abuse will be subject to MAPPA, because of the fact of the lack of convictions.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Yes. So, as you have said, the MATAC and Drive programmes, and actually what is going on in the Metropolitan police at the moment, look beyond a conviction rate. Therefore, actually, with this Bill, when we are talking about victims of domestic abuse with regard to MAPPA, I would say that a “drop in the ocean” would be an understatement, numbers-wise.

Nicole Jacobs: Numbers-wise, it would be modest—

[Jess Phillips]

It is about 56.

Nicole Jacobs: But I would not be against the principle of that, because I recognise that coercion and controlling behaviour is a known high-risk factor. Some of the policing risk assessments are really geared to understanding that better. There is obviously no harm in doing that, but I suppose that it is just that the ambition of us wanting to monitor and have a lot more active oversight is more geared towards those other programmes on recency, frequency and gravity—the algorithms that police use.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So would you like to see those in the Bill, rather than just this MAPPA situation?

Nicole Jacobs: I would love to see you consider ways that you could have a more active oversight that could be consistent.

[Jess Phillips]

Q And, just to be clear, on the number of people who go on to murder, is it the group who would currently fall under MAPPA in, to use the Minister’s words, the “most serious” domestic abuse incidents who largely go on to murder their partners and children, or is it other perpetrators of domestic abuse?

Nicole Jacobs: It is usually others.

[Jess Phillips]

Yes.

Nicole Jacobs: I will send the Committee a report that I just published last week, which is a compilation of findings from 300 domestic homicide reviews. We published four reports: one about children’s social care, one about adult social care, one about health-related recommendations, and one on criminal justice. That might be useful for this discussion because, in that report, you can see the numbers of perpetrators who have committed murder, how many had criminal convictions and what the nature of those recommendations were, so I would be very happy to send that.

[Jess Phillips]

Q On the vetting issue—I raised this with the chief constable who was in front of us earlier—you have eloquently said that the vetting of police officers should be taking place every five years rather than every 10 years, and I know that your offices have undertaken quite intricate work into the situation within the family courts. In the vetting of police officers, and, in fact, in the targeting of domestic abusers more broadly, do institutions such as the police or the courts use the evidence—proven evidence and found evidence in British courts, such as the family courts—in our criminal institutions and in the vetting of police officers?

Nicole Jacobs: No. The reason that they would not is that those IT systems would not speak to each other, even to know the fact finding within family court, for example. We are doing that; we are going into three court areas and actually looking at the domestic information. We have done a lot of legal academic preparation to do that. It is not even easy to get that from the family court system itself. In other words, that kind of fact-finding information is not quite readily available, even though it would have been found as fact in front of a judge and used, so that would not factor in.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So there is a situation in our country today where somebody could be found in the family court to have multiply sexually abused a child in that home, and that would not appear on the police’s vetting system.

Nicole Jacobs: Not to my knowledge. There was, for example, Project Shield in North Yorkshire where even orders of protection were having to be manually entered into the police national database. People underestimate the extent to which police have all the information they need at their fingertips to understand the whole picture and risk of a perpetrator of domestic abuse, and there is huge scope for improvement there.

[The Chair]

Do we have any further questions? We have 12 more minutes, if anyone want to take the opportunity.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Baroness Newlove, although Nicole could undoubtedly answer this as well, in your work with victims of serious child sexual abuse, sexual violence, domestic abuse—in fact, any victim of any crime, specifically childhood abuse—what do you think the incidence is of those people ending up in the criminal justice system or, for example, with substance misuse issues, which may lead to homelessness?

Baroness Newlove: I have not done any specific research on that, but there is probably a synergy of reasons. When I spoke to child sexual abuse victims when I worked on IICSA, I saw that there is a reason for survivorship. They have been made to do things—not because they are criminals, but because they are absolutely fearful for their lives. But I have not done percentage research and, as you know, Jess, I am more of a people person in the sense of really putting it as it is. A lot of victims were writing to me before I came back into this role who felt that that is not being recognised. Through no fault of their own, they have had to turn to things they did not wish to do, and they have turned to substance misuse to get them through the absolute harm they have gone through.

Nicole Jacobs: Again, I can send this to the Committee, but there is a really excellent piece of academic work, recently published in the form of a book, that makes a clear link to the anecdotal things we know, which is that it is related to experiences of domestic abuse as a child and how that impacts behaviour into adolescence, particularly with boys. I think that is something that could be considered.

One thing I was hoping to touch on and make the link to earlier was the extent to which we really struggle with registered social landlords confusing domestic abuse with antisocial behaviour, and others reporting it as noise nuisance and that type of thing. There has been a lot of reform over the last five years in particular to really help registered social landlords disentangle those things, so they are not misinterpreting domestic abuse as antisocial behaviour. That is worth considering in the provisions.

On rough sleeping, St Mungo’s will tell you that some 50% of female rough sleepers are there because of domestic abuse. We have to really think and consider how that impacts particular people in the wider context of some of the provisions of the Bill.

[Jess Phillips]

Q For women who are offenders, there is a pattern to the abuse they have suffered—all the research shows that in the high rates of, certainly, domestic and sexual violence in the prison population of women. As the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, how would you feel about those women being sent to a foreign country should they commit a crime?

Nicole Jacobs: I think the Ministry of Justice’s own female offender strategy is much more about diversion from prison, so you see women’s centres undertaking a lot of that kind of work, which I think is right. My view is that people who have been involved in crime who are subject to domestic abuse and that abuse is linked to their offending have very little place in prison, full stop. We have to understand the context of the offending and the extent to which doing so would be in the public interest. I would like to see them not in prison in general, but being supported in the community.

[The Chair]

If there are no further questions, I would like to thank our witnesses, Baroness Newlove and Nicole Jacobs, for their evidence and for their time. That brings us to the end of the morning session, and the Committee will meet again at 2 pm here in the Boothroyd Room to continue taking oral evidence.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Scott Mann.)

Town Centre Safety

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Laura Farris]

If I could just finish my sentence, I will of course give way to the hon. Lady. The most recent figures we have are from March 2023, when the figure for police offices in England and Wales was 149,566. It has never been higher. With that, I give way.

[Jess Phillips]

I wonder whether the Minister can provide the per capita of population figures.

[Laura Farris]

I do not have that figure, so I will have to write to the hon. Lady.

It is right that decisions about how police resources are deployed, including the number and composition of people in neighbourhood and local policing roles, are for the determination of chief constables, who know their beat better than anyone and are accountable to democratically elected police and crime commissioners. Nevertheless, the numbers have a broader significance, and I want to draw the Opposition’s attention to four points.

First, due to the investment in the police uplift programme, the number of police officers in local policing roles is the highest since comparable data began to be collected, with an increase of 6.5% in the 12 months to 31 March. We have more female officers and more officers from minority ethnic backgrounds than ever before—something that I hope the hon. Member for Nottingham North will agree is consistent with some of the conclusions that were certainly implied, if not made explicit, on the nature of representation in Baroness Casey’s report into conduct in the Metropolitan police.

We have more officers receiving specialist training for specific categories of crime. I will give the House one example, because yesterday I visited Avon and Somerset Police, the pioneering force conducting Operation Soteria Bluestone in the investigation of rape. They made it perfectly clear to me that the increase in numbers that they have seen locally has facilitated a huge increase in the number of specialist trained rape and serious sexual offences police officers. In fact, there are 2,000 nationwide. I noted that the hon. Gentleman said that we were setting the police up to fail. That could not be more different from the information that that force gave me yesterday—and if they are incorrect, I would appreciate it if he would explain why when he closes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim McMahon]

I do agree with that—in fact, it is Labour party policy to create those banking hubs—but we should not have got into this position to begin with. It should have been required by law that the last bank in town has a community responsibility. There is not a single bank in Royton or Chadderton district centre; we would have to build a hub from scratch, because when the Lloyds and Halifax closed in the respective towns, the Government took no action to say, “Hang on. We have already lost five, six or seven banks. We need to make sure at least one remains, so that there is consumer choice.” There will be a lot of making-up to do when the election comes; it will be done, but I am afraid we will be starting from a very low point. However, I accept the right hon. Gentleman’s generous point about the importance of those banks.

We have had 9,000 shops close in the last decade, affecting 125,000 jobs in their communities: 41% of those were clothing shops, 19% sold household goods and 10% were convenience stores. Thinking about convenience stores, whether it be the local Co-op, Tesco Express or Morrisons, where will the cash machine be after the bank closes? The bank closes, the post office closes and the convenience store closes, and there is no cash machine for people to take out money from the bank, leading to financial isolation in many places.

Pubs are the beating heart or the anchor of many communities, and the place where people can get together to tackle loneliness and isolation. Particularly in industrial towns such as mine, the buildings of significance on the high street—where the heritage is really brought out and we get the character of the place—are the church, the pub and the town hall. In many places, those big assets are under threat. Some 13,600 pubs have closed in the last 10 years—the numbers are down 22%.

If we look at the public sector, in my town of Oldham—a town of a quarter of a million people—thousands of jobs are being taken away from the town centre. Those are people who do not go out to lunch to buy a sandwich and do not support local retail. More than that, it removes a sense of identity and of belonging in a place, and it has an impact on how safe people feel there. The Government have not just closed our county court and our magistrates court, but caused the closure of so many police stations that there is not a single custody cell in our town. Even if somebody was arrested for violence against a shop worker, they would be taken out of town to be processed. The chief superintendent in my town says that that has a material impact on the decisions officers take about arrests being made and people being taken to custody, because they cannot afford to take a whole day out from the frontline on the beat for that. It is having a material impact.

[Jess Phillips]

My hon. Friend talks about the time that takes up for police officers. I was sat recently with my ill father for 24 hours in A&E—not just a TV programme—and I noticed that there were three shift changes of police officers to sit with somebody who was also waiting for 24 hours in A&E, so the crushing of public services elsewhere is detrimental for our police forces.

[Jim McMahon]

We do see that, as I will come on to say a bit later. In Oldham town centre, we have a lot of conversions from offices, pubs and retail to houses in multiple occupation. A lot of complaints are caused by that concentration of high-demand social problems, but there is not the back support that used to be there for drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and on-street offences. In the end, the police are the only number people call because they are the only ones who might turn out. The point about attendance at A&E is absolutely right. In many places, the police are not just upholding the law, but trying to keep society together because all else has given way.

We see these problems much more broadly, even beyond the public sector and in local government. Our HMRC office has closed and the Department for Work and Pensions office has closed, taking hundreds or thousands of staff away from the town centre. We are also seeing cuts to arts and culture: local theatres have closed and local community organisations have withdrawn services away from towns.

More than that, in the face of such decline, local authorities have been disempowered in dealing with what follows. We have seen offices that used to provide footfall and jobs for the local community being converted, with no consideration of the capacity and infrastructure of the local community, to substandard accommodation—we call them guinea pig hutches because they are so small, and they do not provide the right living standards—or to HMOs in which people have shared accommodation. The Government’s housing benefit changes in relation to financial provision for under-21s are adding to that social problem. The market has been completely changed, so when we walk down a high street, what used to be a pub, a bank or a shop is completely blank. We can walk from door to door without seeing a single shopfront because they have been converted to that type of residential use, with all the issues that brings.

Another issue is ownership. The Government could bring in a register of beneficial ownership so that we know who owns our high streets. The trouble many local authorities have is that a building can be empty and boarded up for decades or generations, attracting antisocial behaviour, but they are not able to take any action because they cannot find out who the owner is. If the owner is registered at that address, but they are not there, how on earth does the local authority find out who owns it? Many owners are offshore or around the world. The Government could make that change, but they choose not to do so.

On taxation, how odd is it that with business rates, someone is taxed before they can take a penny through the till? They are taxed to open the shop door. They can take not a single penny through the till during a trading day, and they will pay to exist. There is no other form of taxation that charges people to exist; it is usually charged on the income they receive or the profits they make. That is not the case with business rates, and that is having a material impact on the survival of shops.

On transport and accessibility, how many bus routes have been cut so people cannot get into town? Especially in rural and coastal communities where the service is not as frequent, when it gets cut, how on earth do people get anywhere near their town centre?

On crime and antisocial behaviour, many MPs in the Chamber will have attended their local high street and town centre for Small Business Saturday, when we of course celebrate independent retailers, and they will have heard the same story that I have heard from Maggie Hughes, who owns a clothing shop called Zutti in Oldham. It is a staple of our community: it has been there for 40 years, and everybody knows and loves Maggie and the staff who work there. She is also the vice-chair of the town centre board. She said that she is fearful for the street and the way it is declining, because of antisocial behaviour and crime. For the first time ever, I had to wait to be buzzed in before I went through the door because, for her own safety and that of the shop workers, she has had to put a security lock on the door. That is not right.

It is not right that people go to work fearful for themselves and for their staff, let alone for their stock. Most retailers accept that, to a degree, they are going to get some marginal loss of stock, as they call it. However, they do not at all accept that the staff who are there to work—by the way, many of the employees in retail jobs in town centres are female—are vulnerable not just to theft, but to people turning violent if they are challenged. Even more than that, if when they are challenged they are detained, staff can call the police, but the police do not even turn up in the majority of cases.

We can see how all this is adding to the perfect storm, which is why the Co-operative party, USDAW, the Labour party and Co-operative Retail Services are demanding a change in the law to protect shop workers. It is not enough for this to be an aggravating factor; it has to be a stand-alone offence. This Parliament makes laws that we expect shop workers to uphold—on cigarette sales, on alcohol, on knives, on fireworks—and they deserve the protection of this Parliament in protecting our communities, so no more words; let us see action on that front.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

As a member of the wokerati, I absolutely will. I gently point out that the wokerati were coming alive in Woke-on-Trent under the current Government. I urge the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) not to be so fearful. I will take my lead from him in praising some of the officers. I want to praise our local copper, a police officer called Orla Jenkins. Such a rock star is she to my staff that when she came to visit my office recently, they put a countdown on the board to show how excited they were to see her. Local police officers who do the beating heart of the work in our communities deserve all of our praise.

On the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) about the findings of lots of different people, the Social Market Foundation last year revealed that police officers’ pay had declined by 17% in real terms. Not last week but the week before, 24 coppers came knocking at my door—[Laughter.] Not last week but the week before, I got in a cab from Euston to an appointment that I had in London and the person driving my taxi was a sergeant in the Metropolitan police. He told me that on his off days he drives cabs. He also told me that his inspector, also in the Metropolitan police, did Deliveroo. That is the reality, and what I have heard today, certainly from the Minister and from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North in his rousing speech, is fantasy. I respect the hon. Gentleman’s electioneering—it was absolutely top class—but does he know what the British public absolutely hate? They hate it when we stand in front of them and say, “Everything’s fine, isn’t it great, we are world leading,” but then when they call for a copper, nobody comes.

I had a security guard from the local B&Q in my constituency come to see me. He had previously worked in the Prison Service and he wanted to talk to me about strategies for preventing people who end up in prison from ending up there, and I was grateful to him for that. He also came in to tell me that he gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to call 101 to report the crimes that have happened in B&Q that day because he cannot get through in the daytime. He told me that the impunity that he sees in his store is such that, on the day he came to see me, somebody had stolen a hot tub from B&Q. If people think they can get away with that level of crime, it is because criminals have never had it so good. There has never been a better time to break the law, with charging rates on the floor and hardly any crimes being detected. To bring people back to reality—in this amazing world we are pretending we live in—this applies even to the most serious cases. I recently dealt with a case where a woman whose husband was on bail for trying to kill her turned up at her house with a machete—the evidence was on a Ring doorbell camera—and five days later the police officers came.

I could stand here and say that all sorts of things need to change in police forces. I am here all day for better standards and better training, and for much more prioritisation of the kind of crimes I am talking about, but the reality is that that is like hoping for something that cannot exist while police officers across our country are expected to pick up the pieces of a crumbling society in every other regard.

[Mr Ellwood]

I have a lot of respect for the hon. Lady, and we have done a few gigs together, including “Question Time”. I hesitate to pose this question, because I do not want to take away from where she is going, but she mentions society, which is quite personal to me. I am concerned that there is too much of a “walk on by” society. She mentions the theft of a hot tub, for example. Would she concur that there is a role for the general public? I do not want to encourage them to put themselves in danger but, collectively, the people who are around, not the police, are the first responders. They should perhaps react a bit more positively and proactively in calling out bad behaviour.

[Jess Phillips]

I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman, in that I am a proper intervener. I will cross the road to have a fight. I have intervened in many domestic abuse situations while out door knocking. In fact, when I was door knocking for my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater), I walked into somebody’s house to break up a domestic abuse incident. After years of working with offenders and victims, I am more than capable of accurately risk assessing a situation and intervening. I do not suggest for one second that anybody else who was door knocking with me could have done the same thing. We have to be very careful in how we manage that.

The trouble is that people in my constituency will tell the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), as they tell me, that they try to intervene. They see drug deals on their street every single day and they try to do something about it—they organise neighbourhood meetings, the local neighbourhood police come along and we all agree that it is a terrible problem—but when they ring about these hotspots, nobody comes and nothing changes. It is the same drug dealers, with the same dispossessed people walking up the street like zombies, every single day. They do not bother to report it any more, because there is no point.

On burglary, the police have become a third arm of the insurance companies. For a lot of people, the police are just there so that they can get a crime reference number. Orla Jenkins is a cracking copper and, more than anything, she just rings up people to give them a crime reference number. That is not why she went into policing. Officers are pulled away, and I have given the example of officers sitting and waiting in A&E for hours and hours.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) mentioned, the proliferation of unregulated exempt accommodation is one of the single biggest reasons for call-outs in the city where I live. Hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is spent on putting vulnerable people in inappropriate accommodation in our neighbourhoods, and the police are repeatedly called out. When I went on response with the police, every call we went to was to vulnerable people’s exempt accommodation in the city, and I was much better suited to that work than the police officers, because I ran vulnerable people’s accommodation for years.

For years, we have been asking the Government to regulate. Every single time I have asked a Minister for regulation to address this terrible, dangerous, exploitative accommodation, which causes antisocial behaviour on every street in Birmingham, on every street in Manchester and all across Oldham, as has been said—it might not be happening in rural communities, but it is happening in our urban communities, and it will be happening in Stoke-on-Trent—the Government have said to me, “We just don’t have parliamentary time to legislate on that yet. There isn’t parliamentary time.” I have been told that twice. So hundreds of thousands of pounds—hundreds of millions of pounds—of taxpayers’ money is going to bad landlords, housing crack addicts alongside rape victims. This is the country that has been created. It is causing harm, and the Government have the power to stop it, to regulate that accommodation and to end what would be at least half of all antisocial behaviour in the city where I live. They have the power to do it, but they do not, so the police get called out, and called out, and called out forever. That is a waste of their time, and it is something that the Government are directly responsible for, and could end.

I could make the same speech about the degradation of mental health services across our country, for every police officer who sits for 24 hours in a house because there is no emergency response any more. There is no protection for people when they are suffering suicide ideations, so a copper sits with them for hours. By the way, in my area there are 800 fewer police officers than there were in 2010. So much for “the best since records ever began!” If population is taken into account, the situation is even worse. [Interruption.] Would the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) like to intervene? No? Okay. I would welcome it; as I said, I am big on intervention.

[Jonathan Gullis]

rose—

[Jess Phillips]

Go for it. Cracking!

[Jonathan Gullis]

I reassure the hon. Lady that I completely concur with her views that our brave police officers should not have to sit with people with severe mental health disorders to keep them safe, when that is the job of the other emergency services. I will happily stand shoulder to shoulder with her and badger Government in any way necessary if there is time for legislation, because supporting our police officers should be an absolute priority of this Government.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I am hoping to get on to the wind-ups by about 4.10 pm, for 10 minutes each, and we can then start the next debate shortly after that.

[Jess Phillips]

I welcome that intervention. Very noisy people from the midlands are my favourite. I actually think Stoke-on-Trent is in the north, but we are splitting hairs now.

I just think the gall to suggest that everything is all right looks really crass to the public. If hon. Members want to electioneer, as many of them seemed to want to do today, I suggest that they change that patter and do the things that they can do centrally, rather than blaming everybody else.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

If the remaining three speakers would speak for about seven minutes, we could keep to time—and Mr Brereton is going to show us how to do it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

I thank both shadow Ministers for the opportunity to debate this important topic, and it is a particular pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones). We worked together when we were both on the Culture, Media and Sport Front Benches. I am not sure whether she is following me or vice-versa, but it is a pleasure to continue to work with her.

I agree that the retail community, which serves this country so well, is the lifeblood of our town centres, and it breathes life into the heart of our communities. My very first job was working in a shop, in Sainsbury’s in south London, not far from my current constituency. I was stacking shelves among other things, so I have had direct experience of working on the frontline of retail, as I am sure other hon. Members have had as well.

Before I talk a little about shoplifting and antisocial behaviour—as a number of Members from across the House have said, more needs to be done there—I want to talk about the facts on crime and policing as a whole. We have heard many Opposition Members trying to paint a sort of dystopian, almost Dickensian picture as part of their pre-election campaigning—they have referred repeatedly to an election, and make no bones about it: this is a piece of electioneering. Their dystopian anecdotes do not bear scrutiny when measured against the facts. We owe it to this House and the public to be clear about the facts.

Let me start with the crime statistics. The Office for National Statistics says that the only reliable source of crime data is the crime survey of England and Wales. In the past year, all crime as measured by the crime survey has fallen by 10%. Since 2010, when this Government came into office, crime has fallen by 56% on a like-for-like basis, meaning that crime under the last Labour Government was around double the level it is today.

Looking at some of the more serious crime types individually, here are the falls we have seen since 2010: criminal damage is down by 73%, domestic burglary is down by 47%, theft from the person is down by 44%, vehicle theft is down by 39%, violence is down by 52% and total theft is down by 47%. Those are the facts, those are the figures and they are published by the independent Office for National Statistics. [Interruption.] The figures for the last year include fraud and are down by 10%.

Let me talk for a moment about police numbers. Some Opposition Members referred to the reduction in police numbers that occurred in the years following 2010, before I was even a Member of Parliament. Let us remember why there was financial pressure in those years. That was because, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, helpfully said, there was no money left. The economic devastation left by the last Labour Government led to difficult choices. In the past three years, we have hired 21,000 more police officers.

[Jess Phillips]

rose—

[Chris Philp]

I will give way in a moment. We now have 149,556 police officers employed in England and Wales. That is more than we have ever had at any time in this country’s history, including 2010. Labour has chosen to look today at neighbourhood policing, which is a subset of local policing. When we look at all local policing, which includes several different subcategories, the number has gone up from 61,000 to 67,000. That includes a number of categories, not just neighbourhood and response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

I will give way first to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), and then to my hon. Friend.

[Jess Phillips]

I just wonder, as the Minister is doing such enthusiastic cheerleading for his Government, whether he could remind me who the biggest cheerleader was for the mini-Budget.

[Chris Philp]

I am not sure what that has to do with the devastation that the last Labour Government wreaked on the economy, with the biggest recession for a generation and unemployment at twice the level it is today. I am surprised that the hon. Member wants to talk about the last Labour Government’s appalling economic record.

Let me return to crime and policing, or you will tick me off for being out of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I acknowledged a moment ago that there are some areas where we need to do better, and shoplifting and antisocial behaviour are two of those, as Members on both sides of the House have said.

Let me start with shoplifting. Across the western world, including in the US, Germany and France, in the past year or two we have seen a considerable increase in shoplifting, and the same has happened in the United Kingdom. While the 29% increase in prosecutions for shoplifting in the past year is welcome, we clearly need to do more. That is why the Government set out a retail crime action plan to do more in this area, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Tom Randall) said in his excellent speech. That was published just a few weeks ago. It includes a commitment by the police to attend shoplifting incidents where that is necessary to secure evidence, where there has been an assault, or where a suspect has been detained, for example, by store security staff.

It is not acceptable, frankly, that the Co-op has discovered that in about three quarters of cases where its staff have detained an offender, the police did not attend. I have said directly to the police that that is not acceptable, and they have responded with the commitment they have made in the recent action plan. I expect better, and the police have committed to delivering better.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Monday 18th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Rapes at knifepoint are at a record high this year. The number of cases has more than doubled since 2015. I am currently supporting a case of a woman violently raped using weapons, and the detective on the case told me that he is the only detective in his team working on serious sexual violence. The Police Foundation describes the current number of detectives as a “chronic shortage”, highlighting a staggering 7,000 vacancies. Is it any wonder that there has been a 60% drop in the overall proportion of crimes being charged since 2015, including almost 1 million violent crimes and 36,000 rapes? The Labour party has proposed requiring all police forces to have a scheme that directly recruits detectives with relevant professional backgrounds, so what are the Government doing about this chronic shortage of detectives and the abysmal charge rate that they preside over?

[Chris Philp]

The rape charge rate is a serious matter, and Operation Soteria Bluestone, which the hon. Lady will be familiar with, has been rolled out around the country under the supervision of the safeguarding Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (Miss Dines). In the forces that adopted that measure early, rape charge rates dramatically increased by two to three times. As that rolls out around the country, those charge rates will increase, but we would like to go further.

On the question of specialist trained officers, now that we have record numbers of officers across England and Wales as a whole, we will be targeting individual forces with training and recruiting a specified number of specialist officers to make sure that those people are in place to properly investigate these issues, because we want to do a lot more in this area.

Rape and Sexual Violence: Criminal Justice Response

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I of course welcome today’s statement—any progress on this issue is to be welcomed—but I would outline that the rape review was commissioned in 2019. It then took two years to publish, and we rightly got an apology from the Government for the catastrophic decline in prosecutions. However, the report contained only piecemeal changes, which is why, another two years on, we are here today discussing progress, yes, but marginal progress.

In the data outlined by the Minister on the number of cases now being charged, she did not make it clear that hundreds of cases were still not charged in each police force area she spoke of. The Government seek to get back to 2016 standards, without recognising that it was on their watch that the system crashed. Charges and prosecutions dropped to their lowest levels on record, just at the time when rape offences recorded by the police skyrocketed to record levels. What the Government are celebrating today is simply the beginning of a reversal of their failure of survivors—like smashing a vase and celebrating when it is half stuck back together with sellotape. In this time, countless rape victims have been left unsupported, or have dropped their cases or never even come forward. This morning, I received a text message from a rape victim I have been supporting, who waited over five years for her case to be heard. She said:

“Is there anyway I can see you this week? I really need to speak to someone before all this gets any worse, I just cannot deal with my own head right now.”

She, like thousands of others, has been let down by the system, and the public have been left at risk, with attackers still walking free.

The numbers that the Government have not mentioned today are those for outstanding rape cases, which show a record high of 2,040, up from 1,379 a year previously. More rape victims are waiting longer than ever before. The Government’s own scorecard for 2022 has the attrition figure at a staggering 62%. Survivors are still being left unsupported and are dropping their cases. Will the Minister say whether the Government will back Labour’s proposal for all rape victims to have legal advocates, when my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) pushes that amendment tomorrow in the Victims and Prisoners Public Bill Committee? Rape Crisis has called for it, the Labour party would do it, and the victims need it. Will the Government vote against support for rape victims tomorrow?

The green shoots of police improvements from Operation Soteria are welcome, as is its roll-out as a national operating standard. However, to be successful, it must maintain that academic rigour and independent input throughout the national implementation. It cannot just be a good pilot that is spread out to police forces as a checkbox. Will the Minister confirm that the academic rigour that the scheme started with will continue in every one of the 43 forces, as it is rolled out? The total number of charges for adult rape in quarter 1 of 2016 was 2,270. In quarter 4 of 2022, it was 1,748, a 23% drop.

Labour announced over two years ago that we would implement specialist rape courts, listing rape cases as a priority and fast-tracking them. The Labour party has called again and again for specialist rape and sexual offence units in every police force, something that still does not exist. The Government say today that they are having a think about them. I ask that they think a little faster. If they had listened, they could have all been rolled out and could be supporting survivors now. Labour would also increase the number of prosecutors, to put rapists behind bars and reduce the record backlog across the courts. We welcome progress, but the Government could and should be doing much more.

Ethnic Minority and Migrant Victims of Violence Against Women and Girls

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I believe this is the first time I have had the pleasure of serving under your chairship, Ms Nokes. I want to say a massive congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) for bringing forward this important debate, and to all the agencies that compiled the report. I am hopeful that the Minister will want to arrange a meeting with them to look at the findings, which, from my experience, are clear and accurate.

The nub of the issue, as my hon. Friend identified, comes from Refuge data, which found that black women are 14% less likely to be referred to its services for support by the police than white survivors. I have worked in the field for a long time, and people often say these are—I hate this language—“hard to reach” groups. In actual fact, black women are 3% more likely to report abuse to the police and 14% less likely to be referred by police services to specialist services. This is not a hard-to-reach cohort of people; this is a group of people asking for help and not being provided with it. There is something fundamental in that statistic about where we are going wrong, before we even get to the idea of people being criminalised.

To my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum): maybe I just have not slept very well this week, but the statistic about Calpol being the thing that was most stolen in her constituency, based on police data, made me want to cry. That is unbelievable, yet so believable. That was before she went on to speak about her experience, where criminalisation was undoubtedly used as a weapon by her abusers. That is not uncommon. I first read about the charges against my hon. Friend in The Sun, when she had only just been elected. It was not a very detailed piece but as a professional in this area, on reading it, I did not see a woman being criminalised; despite having never spoken to her, I instantly knew that she was a victim of domestic abuse. I contacted her immediately to say as much. Why on earth could the first criminal justice agency to interact with her in that case not see that from the evidence in front of it? It is a disgrace.

What I am seeing at the moment, specifically in domestic abuse cases where children are involved, is that the new game in town for those accused of domestic abuse who want to attack their accuser is claim and counterclaim, and I have recently encountered counterclaims against known victims of domestic abuse that have led to their arrest. In one case I am handling, the health visitor of a woman who had been to the multi-agency risk assessment conference eight times, such was the high-risk nature of the threat to her life—two attempts had been made on her life, and on the lives of her child and parents—turned up at my office in a desperate panic because the woman had been put in a prison cell owing to counterclaims by her ex-husband.

Every single claim and counterclaim case I have been involved with in which the police have made an arrest has involved an Asian woman—and that is not just because of the demographics of the area that I represent. I am watching black and minoritised women being criminalised literally for being victims of domestic abuse. As I say, that interacts very badly with our failing family court system, where the game in town for a long time was parent alienation. Now that has been widely rebuked, there is a new game: every single domestic abuse claim a woman makes in family court—bar rape, one notices—gets turned around and put back on her. In every case where I have seen claim and counterclaim lead to either criminalisation or poor decisions in family court—this is totally anecdotal, based on my personal experience; I would love to show some data, but neither the Home Office nor the family courts collect any, so everyone gathered here will have to take my word for it—it has involved a black or Asian woman. There is definitely a problem in the system; I am seeing it live with my own eyes. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse is incredibly brave to talk about her experiences again, and I am proud to know her.

To the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), again, missing data is part of the problem, but the brutal exploitation of girls in gangs, both criminally and through sexual exploitation, only for them to go on and be criminalised, is absolutely woeful. Some 63% of girls and young women serving sentences in the community have experienced rape or domestic abuse in intimate partner relationships. I have absolutely no doubt that a large number of those will be linked to the gang and sexual exploitation activity that is going on.

We in the Labour party are seeking to amend the Victims and Prisoners Bill so that child criminal exploitation is defined in law. So far, the Government have pushed back against that, but hope springs eternal that by the time the Bill comes back in its next iteration they will have decided that defining child criminal exploitation in law is important. I know my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall has lent her voice to that. Moreover, on the push for data, I cannot express enough how we need better data on all of these things. The situation is woeful.

This is not new news. At the moment, I sometimes feel like I am in a meeting that I was in 20 years ago. We must be 20 years on from Baroness Corston’s report, which roundly proved that criminalising women was costly to society, dangerous for our criminal justice agencies and bore no results. I used to run a female offenders’ centre in the west midlands that came about because of what was in the Corston report and we had a 97% non-reoffending rate. Sadly, I think the state has the opposite: a 97% reoffending rate. We know that women’s centres and services that divert people from prison work. It is not soft touch; it stops criminal activity. Do I think for a second that somebody who has stolen some Calpol should go to prison? That is phenomenal, yet it happens up and down our country. We know the data.

Unfortunately, the Government have a policy of building new women’s prisons, which they will fill overnight at great cost to the taxpayer. The reoffending rate achieved will be nowhere near as good as investing that money in women’s centre services. I set up a women’s centre because I watched victims of domestic abuse from my refuge being criminalised as part of the pattern of the abuse they had suffered, for things such as their children not going to school—that is the point of a women’s centre. Women move miles away from their home, where they have been living in horrendous situations in which they have basically been enslaved, and their children are frightened to leave them to go to a new school. Then they are criminalised because their children will not go to school. That is just unbelievable bad practice, all over the country.

I am not entirely sure why the Government, in the small bit of data they bother to collect, would look at the reoffending rates from prisons and women’s centres and think, “Prisons: that is the one for us.” It is absolute madness and does not make any sense. The failed and now returned to the state privatisation of probation—a dreadful and failed experiment over the past 10 years—has largely decimated our women’s criminal justice centres, which were doing brilliant and amazing work. I cannot stress enough the need for better data and understanding in this space.

On statutory defences, as alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton, I tabled amendments to that effect in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. I continue to believe that statutory defences in cases of domestic abuse and sexual violence and exploitation should have a role in our law. Just as my hon. Friend pointed, it seems ridiculous that the same provisions for cases of force used in break-ins do not exist for victims of domestic abuse. It is as if the state is basically saying “We are not expecting zero violence. You should be able to take a bit of violence before you kick back.” That is pretty grim, and I urge the Government once again to look at statutory defences. Under the stewardship of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), statutory defences were put into law in cases of modern slavery and human trafficking.

I am afraid to say that, although the law is written well, the practice is not so good, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall pointed out, so much more work needs to be done in that space. But there is nothing for victims of domestic and sexual violence. The right hon. Member for Maidenhead, the ex-Prime Minister and Home Secretary—back in the time when Home Secretaries stayed for a long time—acted with a spirit of fairness and had an understanding of what will work and what is right. I encourage the Government to take on that grit.

As for the firewall, I will briefly say that a woman in my constituency came to me because her husband was threatening to kill her. He continued to threaten to kill her after she called the police, as I told her to do, and she had a “sig” marker put on her house because her life was at risk. The police turned up, and the next thing I know she called me. Because she did not speak particularly good English, she said that she was in Bradford, but she was actually in Bedford, in Yarl’s Wood, because when she called the police to say that her husband was threatening to kill her and was coming round, she ended up in immigration detention. She has since, of course, been given indefinite leave to remain; I think she is actually a British citizen now. She should never have been detained, and she certainly should not have been detained when there was a threat to her life, because the next time her husband threatens to kill her, she will not call the police, and then I will read out her name on the next International Women’s Day.

We have case after case like that, and the Government’s response to our amendments on the firewall—the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has made clear that he supports that, and anybody who knows anything about anything thinks it is a good idea—is to act as if they are doing a kindness. What a kindness they did to my constituent when they put her in detention when her life was at risk. They act as if they are doing a kindness when they say, “Well, sometimes there is a need for the police to speak to immigration.” Of course there is. I speak to immigration all the time, but I do not do it as an enforcer; I do it to try to ensure that a victim’s immigration status can be sorted out and she can access the right services, and I do it at her request.

There is absolutely no reason why the police could not act in exactly the same way. No one is saying that we can never speak to immigration, but we should speak not to immigration enforcement, but to the Home Office at the point at which the victim needs her immigration sorted out. Caseworkers in violence against women and girls services do that all over the country, all the time, and nobody ends up in detention, so why do they when the police do it? It is a disgrace—it is part of the hostile environment—that the Government do not want to end the practice of detaining women who come forward to say that they have been raped or abused, that their lives are at risk, and that something should be done about it.

The Government agreed to the Istanbul convention, apart from the bit about migrant women. They literally carved out their rights, creating a two-tier system.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind the shadow Minister to leave time for the Minister.

[Jess Phillips]

I will sit down shortly.

There is literally no excuse. I really hope the Government look at the report I mentioned, take its recommendations incredibly seriously, and use facts and evidence, not ideology, to make decisions about what they do with my constituents’ tax money.

--- Later in debate ---

[Miss Dines]

I am grateful, Ms Nokes.

On the cost of living, the Government remain committed to supporting victims. We have launched a £300,000 flexible fund, which we are working closely with Women’s Aid to deliver. I was privileged to visit a refuge recently, and to speak to the women who will benefit and who have benefited from that money, which has been accepted. The fund was launched on 10 May, and it makes payments of between £250 and £500. More financial support goes to pregnant women or those with families. Further support—

[Jess Phillips]

Will the hon. Lady give way on that point?

[Miss Dines]

Yes, of course.

[Jess Phillips]

That fund ran out within about three weeks of it being launched. I have tried to access it twice, and there is no longer any money in it.

[Miss Dines]

I am always pleased when money runs out because that means it has been fully utilised. I was about to finish the sentence by saying that further support is under review. The demand for that service has been considered.

Let me mention one or two other points that hon. Members raised with great earnestness. On the drugs strategy and county lines, on 6 December 2021, the Government published a 10-year drugs strategy, and through that strategy we will support our flagship county lines programme, investing £149 million over three years in that area. That funding will add to the £65 million invested since November 2019.

How will the Victims and Prisoners Bill improve people’s experience and the experience of victims? We are supporting victims of domestic abuse by enhancing the position of independent domestic violence advisers, while improving wider support services through a joint statutory duty in England on police and crime commissioners, local authorities and health bodies to collaborate in commissioning support services. Beyond the Bill, we are providing £51 million to support victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse. Those are unprecedented numbers that the Government have committed to this field.

I have a little more time to mention support for migrant victims of domestic abuse. How we support migrant victims of domestic abuse has been raised by several hon. Members today. Let me reiterate that the Government are committed to supporting all victims of domestic abuse, regardless of their immigration status. We know that victims of domestic abuse with insecure immigration status can face additional barriers when seeking support from agencies and professionals. That is why in April 2021 the Government launched the support for migrant victims scheme, which is run by Southall Black Sisters and their delivery partners. I have had the pleasure on numerous occasions to speak with members of that organisation. That scheme provides wraparound support for migrant victims, including accommodation, subsistence support and counselling. As I mentioned, I am pleased to have met members of the organisation on several occasions and I am grateful for their work in this area.

As committed to in the domestic abuse plan, we allocated up to £1.4 million in 2022-23 to continue to fund the scheme. We have now extended that funding into March 2025. More than 950 victims have been supported through the scheme since its introduction, and I welcome the important work that Southall Black Sisters and many other specialist organisations do in this area.

Data sharing, which has been mentioned by several hon. Members, is an area where there are strongly held views. Following our 2022 review of data sharing for migrant victims of crime, we will be establishing a migrant victims protocol. That will provide an assurance to individuals that no immigration enforcement action will be taken while criminal justice proceedings are ongoing or while support to make applications to regularise their stay is being sought.

Alongside establishing that protocol, we are developing a code of practice on personal data sharing between the police and the Home Office regarding victims of domestic abuse subject to immigration control.

[Miss Dines]

The Government have committed large amounts of funding to support partners, and are always looking at and reviewing what they are going to do.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Miss Dines]

If I could just progress a little, I will mention the code of practice, which is pertinent to this area. Both the code of practice and the migrant victims protocol are currently under development. We are engaging with the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and the Information Commissioner Office on the code, and considering how to engage further in this area.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Miss Dines]

I will be happy to do so once I have made a little more progress.

Right at the beginning of the debate, the hon. Member for Edmonton said that she had grave concerns about how people are dealt with by the police. I agree, on behalf of Government, that it is crucial for police officers to have the right tools and training to engage sensitively and appropriately will all victims of domestic abuse.

I hope it is useful to set out what training is already available for the police. For those entering the service, the College of Policing’s foundation training includes substantial coverage of police ethics, including the effects of personal conscious and unconscious bias. The initial training, undertaken by all officers, also covers hate crimes, ethics, equalities and policing without bias. Further training is then provided in specialist areas throughout an officer’s career. For example, training for those involved in public protection includes methods to raise officers’ self-awareness of their own views, stereotypes and biases.

[Miss Dines]

When I have had engagement with the national leads from the College of Policing, I have always been impressed with how they have been prepared to develop and pursue areas in their training. I know the hon. Lady will make representations to them and to me on how the training can be made better, and I am always interested in hearing about that.

I am pleased that Domestic Abuse Matters training has been widely undertaken. The Domestic Abuse Matters programme has been delivered to the majority of forces and we are supporting the roll-out to remaining forces. There are also updated modules, which are of assistance.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Miss Dines]

I will just pursue this point for a little while.

The first responders training specifically considers the needs and vulnerabilities of different victims as a core thread running throughout. The training also specifically covers responding to so-called honour-based abuse. We have not debated that in detail today so I will not spend too long on it, but I am pleased the training is developing in areas where that is needed. That is why debates such as this are so informative—because new ideas and recommendations can be brought forward. The College of Policing also issues authorised professional practice documents, which are the official source of professional practice on policing.

Various hon. Ladies raised the issue of data, and that is important because data and evidence is what informs us. While we received much reassuring information in December when His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services and its partner organisations published their report on the super-complaint, there is a need for improvement in the recording of ethnicity data and for the police to develop wider awareness of the different cultures and religions in their local communities. The Home Secretary and I take this very seriously. I am pleased the police have accepted the recommendations relating to those points and I look forward to seeing positive change as a result.

Funding for ethnic minority victims has also been raised in the debate. Violence against women and girls affects a wide range of people, and a one-size-fits-all approach is not always the most appropriate way to support victims, especially those with specific needs and vulnerabilities, which includes ethnic minority victims. We recognise the importance of specialist “by and for” VAWG services to understand the specific issues that ethnic minority victims face; they have the necessary skills and experience to provide that support. One of the pleasures of being the Minister with responsibility for this area has been meeting so many experienced people in these fields—voluntary, paid, individuals, groups. It has been wonderful.

To further bolster this important work that the Government do, the Home Office, alongside the Ministry of Justice, has launched the violence against women and girls fund, which will allocate up to £8.4 million of funding for “by and for” and specialist services across England and Wales over two years. The competition has concluded and announcements on successful bidders will be shared in due course.

The Home Office has also recently awarded over £10 million to organisations providing specialist support to children who have been impacted by domestic abuse, an area close to the hearts of all of us in this room. As part of this, we have provided SafeLives with funding to specifically improve the support available for children from ethnic minority backgrounds. This includes developing the knowledge of frontline professionals by delivering training with support from specialist “by and for” organisations.

As set out in the tackling domestic abuse plan, we aim to enable a whole-system approach to make sure the whole system operates in greater co-ordination to respond to domestic abuse and support victims. This support is essential and that is why we committed to invest up to £7.5 million in domestic abuse interventions in healthcare settings. It is very important that we tackle this and support each and every agency we can. This will include independent domestic violence advocates informed by, and specialised in, the needs of marginalised victims.

The Government response to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s “A Patchwork of Provision” report, published in March, reiterates the value of “by and for” specialist services in providing the tailored support required by those with protected characteristics and those who experience the highest levels of exclusion from mainstream services.

I offer my thanks again to the hon. Member for Edmonton for securing the debate. I look forward to reading in further detail the recommendations in her assessment report, which will be given to me. This is an important and emotive subject, as reflected in the emotions and careful considerations of this debate. As I said at the beginning, the Government are wholeheartedly committed to tackling violence against women and girls. That means going after perpetrators, strengthening our systems and, crucially, ensuring that victims and survivors get the support they need and deserve, whatever their background and ethnicity.

Illegal Migration Bill

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will refer to that issue myself later on, because the Government have not thought through the implications for the numbers of traffickers and perpetrators caught as a result of this Bill.

I said that I was not going to dwell on the legal issues, but there are genuine questions of incompatibility with article 4 of the European convention on human rights, which is, of course, part of UK law through the Human Rights Act 1998, and with aspects of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, such as articles 13 and 10.

However, the heart of the problem is, I believe, very simple. If someone is trafficked into the UK by illegal means, coming from a country where their life and liberty were not threatened, and is taken into slavery here in the UK, they will not be able to claim modern slavery or have the protection of the Modern Slavery Act. That would cover most of the men, women and children who are trafficked into slavery in the United Kingdom.

Let me let me give an example. A woman from, say, Romania, who is persuaded that there is a great job here for her in the UK, is brought here on false papers and put to work as a prostitute in a brothel. She has come here illegally from a safe country, but she is experiencing sexual exploitation and slavery here in the UK. That is just the sort of case, in addition to British nationals who have been enslaved here, that the Modern Slavery Act was intended to cover. Let us say that she manages to escape and meets some people willing to help. She is taken to the police, but the Government say, “You came here illegally. We’re deporting you to Rwanda.” Alternatively, the traffickers may fear that she is looking to escape, so they take her to one side and explain, “It’s no good doing that, because all they’ll do is send you to Rwanda.” We could have handed the traffickers a gift—another tool in their armoury of exploitation and slavery.

The Government might say that it will be okay if the woman helps with an investigation, because the Bill contains that caveat, but that seriously misunderstands slavery and the impact of the trauma of slavery on victims. It can take some considerable time—weeks and weeks—for somebody to feel confident enough to give evidence against their slave drivers. Under this Bill, by the time they might have been able to get that confidence, they will have been removed from this country. As my right hon. Friend said, it will become harder to catch the traffickers and slave drivers.

I could give another example. Perhaps someone comes here illegally and works in the economy, which, sadly, people are able to do, but then finds themselves vulnerable on the streets and is picked up by slave drivers and taken into slavery. Again, even if they escape, perhaps after years of exploitation, the Government will shut the door on them and send them away under this Bill. I could give other examples, but the hon. Member for Glasgow Central has already given some and I think the point has been made.

There are a number of possible solutions. At the weaker end, the Government could delay the commencement of the Bill’s modern slavery provisions; I note that the official Opposition have suggested doing so until a new Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner is in place and has assessed the impact of the Bill. It would be good to have a commissioner in place and to hear their views on the Bill, but I think that there is more to consider.

First, the Government should not introduce the modern slavery provisions of the Bill until they have assessed the impact of the changes that they made in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the relevant provisions of which came into force at the end of January. They are piling legislation on legislation that they have already passed, and they have no idea whether it is going to work. This approach is therefore not necessary. Secondly, they need to assess the impact of the deal with Albania, because in recent times a significant number of people coming on the small boats have come from Albania. Thirdly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green and I have both pointed out, they need to assess the Bill’s impact on people’s ability and willingness to come forward, to be identified as slaves and to give evidence against the traffickers and the slave drivers.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Has the right hon. Lady seen the letter from all the Home Office-funded providers of modern slavery support services that arrived yesterday from their overarching body, the Salvation Army? Literally every single one of the specialist support providers doing the exact work that the right hon. Lady has identified has clearly stated to the Government that the Bill will make it absolutely impossible for them to provide support and help to catch traffickers.

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for pointing that out, because I had not seen that letter, as it happens, but I am not surprised that those who are working directly in the field are making those points to the Government. Sadly, I must say to my right hon. Friend the Minister that I fear the modern slavery aspects of the Bill reveal a lack of proper consideration of slavery and what it means, of the experience of victims and survivors, of the need to catch the perpetrators if we are to stop it, and of the difficulties that the Bill will create. I think the Government should assess the Bill’s impact on people’s willingness to give evidence and therefore on our ability to catch the traffickers and slave drivers.

It would be of more benefit to our ability to catch slave drivers and support victims and survivors, however, if we ensured that people in slavery in the UK were excluded from the Bill. That would mean recognising the intention of the Modern Slavery Act: that those who have been in slavery in the UK should be protected by the Act regardless of their immigration status. Some of my colleagues may say, “Doesn’t that mean an awful lot of people will want to stay here?” and worry about the numbers, but actually many people who are brought here into slavery want to go home. They do not want to stay here, but under the Bill I fear it is more likely that they will stay in the UK and stay in slavery.

I could say much more about the Bill and its implications, but in the interests of time I will not. I realise that I have already spoken for longer than I told the Whip I might—a black mark in the book!—but this is in our interests. I want to sit down with the Government and find a way through that does not deeply damage the Modern Slavery Act, abandon victims and make it harder to catch traffickers and slave drivers. I fear that the Bill will do all those things. Let us find a way to ensure that it does not. Let us find a way to maintain our world-leading reputation for supporting those who are the victims of slavery, and for the work that we do to catch the traffickers and perpetrators.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

I agree with everything the right hon. Gentleman is saying and I look forward to working with him to get some of the things that we all want to see. Does he agree, though, that there would be no risk of modern slavery victims—or those making fake modern slavery claims, who the Government seem to be convinced exist—being held up in the system and being allowed to stay here if it did not take an average of 553 days for them to be assessed? If we went back to the 45-day system that used to exist, which might be the case if more had been put into it over the years, there would be no risk that people might use it to stay in the country longer.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

Clearly the faster the claims can be assessed, the better it is for everybody, as they can be discovered either to be illegal or to be genuine victims. That is the key thing.

Clear evidence of abuse of the system needs to be published, because it is important that the figures are there to be understood. A very small number are actually claiming it, and the 73% that we were told about on Second Reading in fact refers to those who are detained for removal after arrival. That amounted to 294 people. We need to get the figures in context, then we can understand what the problem is and how we deal with it. If the evidence shows that there is an increase, we will then be able to use parts of the Bill.

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[Robert Jenrick]

Sir Roger, it is an observation but it is also incorrect, because I have already spoken about the many questions around children that have been raised.

Before I wind up my remarks, I want to address the issues regarding modern slavery that have been raised by my right hon. Friends the Members for Maidenhead (Mrs May) and for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). All of us in Government look forward to engaging with them and learning from their unrivalled expertise and experience in this field as we ensure that the Bill meets the standards that we want it to meet. A number of hon. and right hon. Members said there was no evidential basis for taking action with regard to modern slavery. I do not think that that is fair. Let me just raise a few points of clarification. When the Modern Slavery Act was passed in 2015, the impact assessment envisaged 3,500 referrals a year, but last year there were 17,000 referrals. The most referred nationality in 2022 was citizens of Albania, a safe and developed European country, a NATO ally and, above all, a signatory to the European convention against trafficking.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I am not going to give way on this occasion.

In 2021, 73% of people who arrived on small boats and were detained for removal put forward a modern slavery claim.

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[Robert Jenrick]

With great respect to my right hon. Friend, I do not think it is correct to denigrate the concern that 73% of those people who arrived on small boats and were detained for removal put forward a modern slavery claim. I think that figure suggests that, were we to implement the scheme in the Bill—and it is absolutely essential that we do—a very large number would claim modern slavery. That would make it almost impossible for us to proceed with the scheme. The evidence, I am afraid—

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I am not going to give way. I am going to bring my remarks to a close, because I think I have spoken long enough.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

As I have previously said to my right hon. Friend, I look forward to listening and engaging with him and like-minded colleagues. However, we come to this issue with a serious concern that there is mounting evidence of abuse of the system, and we want to ensure that the scheme we bring forward works and does the job.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I will not give way, because I am about to bring my remarks to a close.

[Jess Phillips]

He’s scared of me!

[Robert Jenrick]

I will happily give way, then. I am certainly not scared of the hon. Lady.

[Jess Phillips]

The Immigration Minister says there is mounting evidence. Which agency does it come from? Is it Border Force? Is it the National Crime Agency? Is it local authorities? Which of the agencies that make modern slavery referrals is responsible for the most fraudulent referrals? Is it one that the Home Office manages, or is it somebody else?

[Robert Jenrick]

I gave way to the hon. Lady against my better judgment, and what she says is not the point. The point is that three quarters of people on the verge of being removed from this country claim modern slavery. I am afraid that is wrong, and we need to bring it to a close.

With that, I fear I have run out of time. I look forward to engaging with colleagues, particularly those I have referenced this evening. I encourage colleagues on both sides of the House to continue supporting this incredibly important piece of legislation.