Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Cryer Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Chris Grayling
I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that assurance. I have been very clear in saying to both barristers and solicitors—to the whole legal profession—that this is a consultation. I have challenges to meet financially, but I am very open to means of improving the current system in a way that makes it affordable while maintaining the quality and effectiveness of provision.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
Is it not the case that the Secretary of State intends to award legal aid franchises on the basis of price and not on anything else? That means that the lowest common denominator will prevail and one of the basic founding tenets of the legal aid system, equal access to justice, will be at an end.
Chris Grayling
No, it is not. I have no intention whatsoever of awarding contracts on the basis of price alone.
Metropolitan Police Service
Lord Cryer Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Damian Green
I will come to station closures. I take the point, which has been raised by the hon. Lady and other hon. Members. I want to deal with it.
The consultation includes commitments about not only the level of resources that the Met will have at the front line but—this point has been neglected but needs to be injected into the debate—how those resources will be used. At the forefront of the Met’s plans is the Met change programme, which is being used to transform how operational policing is delivered in London. The programme has several strands, including plans to deliver a flatter management structure, thereby putting more constables on the beat, engagement with the supply services market to examine new ways of delivering the services they provide in areas such as human resource, technology and finance, and plans to release under-utilised assets.
I hope that hon. Members agree that the Met’s recently issued plans show that it is looking at a transformational approach to the way in which it delivers policing in London. Everyone has observed that London is a fast changing city that is difficult to police, so it needs to keep ahead of the curve. Clearly, there has been great interest, not just in the debate, but across London about the closure of police stations. As has been said, decisions about the number of stations and their operating hours are matters for the Mayor and the Commissioner. I am sure that many hon. Members will contribute to the consultation.
It is important not to confuse buildings with quality of service provided to the public. Fewer than 50 crimes a night are reported at front counters throughout the Metropolitan police area. Since 2008, the number of crimes reported to those front counters has dropped 20%, and internet and e-mail reporting is up by 32%. That shows how changes in the modern world must be reflected in changes in the way the police deliver their services.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
I cannot keep quiet. I will give a concrete example of what will happen. Wanstead police station will shut, and there will be no replacement whatever. Response times will lengthen, and people will be put in danger. That will be a green light for burglars in the Wanstead part of my constituency. That goes directly against what Boris Johnson promised. People in Wanstead and throughout London want to know what Boris Johnson does not understand about the word “no”.
Damian Green
There is no reason why response times should go up. I have explained what is happening in the way people report things to the police. There are ever-increasing ways in which the public can contact the police. That includes contact centres on the new non-emergency number, 101, which takes some of the pressure off 999 services, and contact through supermarket surgeries and so on, where the police can meet thousands of people, instead of the very few who may come in to a police station.
Several hon. Members made the point that the quality of contact as well as the quantity of contact matters. It seems to be unarguable that getting the police out there into buildings where thousands of people are likely to be is a better way of making that contact than simply being inside a traditional big-building police station.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Cryer Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mrs Grant
The Government are committed to ensuring that as many victims as possible receive compensation from offenders. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 places a new duty on courts to consider imposing compensation in any case where the victim has suffered injury, loss or damage. Issuing guidance to courts is a matter for the independent Sentencing Council, not for the Government, but the council’s guidelines already draw the courts’ attention to their powers to impose compensation.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
To what extent is this form of compensation a substitute for the criminal injuries compensation scheme, which has been cut to ribbons by the order laid in July this year?
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Cryer Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Jeremy Wright
I am sure that hon. Gentleman will accept that I do not know the details of the case that he is raising. If he lets me have them, I will look into the matter and come back to him.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
Further to Question 6, is there any indication that any prisoner has received an inappropriate sentence because of the failings of Applied Language Solutions, given that, as the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), said, it has failed to fulfil 5% of its bookings even after the improvements that she talked about?
Chris Grayling
We have seen no such evidence. If the hon. Gentleman has a constituency case that he wants to bring to us, he should feel free to do so.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Cryer Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Clarke
I shall consider that point in the course of the work we are doing at the moment, but I do not want to encourage my hon. Friend too far because overcomplicating this does not necessarily help. What is important is that sentences should be allowed to reflect, in the most appropriate and consistent way, the disgust that the ordinary public feel when a crime is motivated by prejudice against a disabled person. It does make a crime even more serious than it would otherwise be.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
I agree with a lot of what the Secretary of State says, but not with his claim that this move would overcomplicate things. One single principle underpins all hate crime: the principle of intent. If that principle applies in respect of one group, does it not apply in respect of other groups, for example, racial groups or the victims of homophobic crime?
Mr Clarke
The hon. Gentleman is quite right to say that the intent of the offender makes for a particularly unpleasant version of whatever crime it is we are talking about. I will certainly consider the hon. Gentleman’s points, just as I have said I will those made by other hon. Members, in the course of seeing whether the law needs any further improvement, but I think that sentences do already reflect the fact that it is a serious aggravating feature of crime if prejudice against disabled people is involved.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Cryer Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Djanogly
We have just commissioned research on those topics, and there will also be a post-impact assessment within three years.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
Further to Question 7, will the changes to civil litigation make it easier or more difficult to take action against multinational companies? The consensus among non-governmental organisations is that it will be more difficult.
Mr Djanogly
People will still be able to be assessed by solicitors to decide whether they are prepared to represent them in multinational actions.
JUSTICE
Lord Cryer Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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John Hemming
I explained that those details were already in the public domain and accessible in Forbes Magazine, the Sunday Herald and many other places, so I do not think it would have been contempt of court outside the House. However, I accept the Speaker’s ruling on this issue.
I refer hon. Members to a story in The Guardian today relating to another injunction. I shall read out the first paragraph:
“A wealthy British financier is seeking to have his sister-in-law secretly jailed in a libel case, in the latest escalation of the controversy over superinjunctions and the internet, the Guardian can disclose.”
What we have here is true secret justice: somebody is being prosecuted in secret; they cannot be identified; and the person prosecuting them cannot be identified. As a rule, the Attorney-General does not prosecute civil cases, which the privacy cases are; one of the parties usually prosecutes.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
That has nothing to do with what the hon. Gentleman did yesterday.
John Hemming
Actually, it has everything to do with what I did yesterday, because Giles Coren was subject to similar contempt proceedings. There is a great danger that a secret form of jurisprudence will develop that aims to jail people in secret and keep their identities out of the public domain for relatively trivial issues.
The law of confidentiality and privacy, as being developed by the courts, seems to be in opposition to the views of Parliament about whistleblowing. That is an important point. A number of the court orders in place act to prevent people from reporting issues, whether to the police, the General Medical Council, coastguards or whomever. The rule of law is undermined by the court orders preventing that information from being given. That is another important issue.
John Hemming
Indeed. The issues of freedom of speech are not just about what goes in the newspapers; they are also about who communicates with whom and how tightly controlled things are. Some of the court orders issued prevent people from complaining to friends about what has been done to them; some prevent them from complaining to Members of Parliament; and others prevent them from going to the police with information. A dangerous system is developing. It is wrong to think that there is a difference between the ZAM case reported in The Guardian today and that of Giles Coren, because he could have faced exactly the same process.
John Hemming
The point I was making about Giggs was that his name was in the public domain already, so it would not have been contempt of court to name him outside the House. That is quite straightforward, and it does not, therefore, involve the use of privilege.
However, there is an argument about privilege where the legal position is uncertain, as it can be at times. We do not want to be unable to debate things because working out whether we can talk about them is so complex. Privilege is important and it needs to be used responsibly—there is no question about that—but my argument is straightforward. To have abused privilege, I would have to have used the name in the first instance, yet no one has evidenced to me the basis on which it would have been contempt of court for me to say outside the House what I said yesterday in it, and if it was not contempt of court outside, it cannot be an abuse of privilege within—
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Cryer Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Djanogly
England and Wales have by far the most generous legal aid provision in the whole world. For example, Spain spends £2.55 a head, France spends £3.31, and Germany spends £4.69. Countries with a similar system, such as New Zealand, spend on average £8 a head, compared with £38 a head in England and Wales.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
On the issue of pleural plaques, when does the Minister expect to make the first payments under the new compensation scheme?
Mr Djanogly
The mechanics of the scheme are being consulted on, and we hope to start making payments towards the end of this month.