Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

Absolutely. As I said right at the start, we have a new directorate within Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and a new team across the Home Office and the Prison Service, with new funding to tackle that and to roll out our anti-extremism strategy. The right hon. Gentleman, who is a member of the Justice Committee, will also be aware that just last week we announced the separation centres that Ian Acheson recommended in his review and that will remove the most poisonous individuals from the main population of our prisons.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

About 1,000 individuals have been identified as extremist or as vulnerable to extremism, so the creation of those separation units is welcome. However, the key is monitoring people when they come out of prison. Can the Minister reassure us that that will happen?

[Mr Gyimah]

To be precise, there are actually about 700 people of concern. Of those 700, about 180 are in prison or on remand for terrorism-related offences. The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about what happens when people come into the community. The multi-agency protection arrangements with law enforcement mean that those people are subject to strict licence conditions, and if they breach those licence conditions, they can and do end up in jail. The police are obviously part of that.

I take this opportunity to thank the police, especially those who protect us here as we go about our daily jobs.

Prison Officers Association: Withdrawal from Voluntary Tasks

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend will have noticed measures in the Bill that we introduced last week to make it easier to test for drugs and deal with the problem of drugs in our prisons, and we are taking a lot of action on mobile phones. For example, new legislation under the Serious Crime Act 2015 has allowed us to turn off 160 mobile phones in our jails in the past few months. We are also working with mobile network operators so as to be able to switch off mobile phones in our jails. A lot of work is being done, but it will take time.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

These are worrying developments. Does the Minister share my concern that this action will have an impact on family visits? As he knows, the ability for prisoners to meet their families and see their children—there are 200,000 children of prisoners—is extremely important for rehabilitation. Can he confirm that this will not be affected?

[Mr Gyimah]

As I have said, strike action is unlawful. If prison officers withdraw their labour, that will make the regime even more restrictive, as the Chairman of the Justice Committee suggested. That is why we are urging hard-working prison officers to go back to work and make sure that prisoners can carry on with these regimes, whether in continuing important rehabilitative work or in making sure that our prisons are safe.

Prisons

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon]

I really do need to make progress, I am afraid.

The ambition set out in the White Paper to increase staffing levels is welcome, but 2,500 officers represent less than half the number of prison officers cut by Conservative Justice Secretaries since 2010, and in order to get 2,500 extra officers, 8,000 will have to be recruited in just two years. I wonder whether the Justice Secretary has confidence that that will happen, because I do not come across many in the justice sector who think it any more than a pipe dream under her management. In the year to September 2016, she had about 400 fewer officers. There is a crisis in staff retention; they are leaving more quickly than she can recruit them. The Prison Officers Association membership has very recently rejected a pay deal offered by the Government. What plans has she made to improve the offer and begin to make those jobs more attractive to the public? She currently faces a recruitment drive that is in danger of failing before it has begun.

Announcements that ex-service personnel will be recruited to the Prison Service might grab quick headlines, but in truth this is nothing new. There have always been former members of our armed forces taking jobs in our Prison Service. The role of soldier and prison officer are not exactly the same, by the way, as prison officers who have been in the Army have told me. The Secretary of State must explain how she can compensate for the fact that, as we have heard, so many experienced officers have left, and are leaving, our Prison Service.

Overseeing a transformation to a prison estate populated by more experienced prisoners and more inexperienced prison officers presents a clear and present danger. Inadequate staffing levels have a range of consequences. Prisons are less safe because staff are far outnumbered. Prisoners are spending more time in their cells because they cannot be managed outside, and prisoner frustration is heightened by the lack of time out of their cells.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I commend my hon. Friend for his excellent speech. Does he agree that one way to reduce the prison population would be for the Government to make better progress in the transfer of foreign national offenders? At the moment, there are 10,000 foreign national offenders in our prisons, representing 12% of the prison population. The Government sign agreements, but very few prisoners get sent back.

[Richard Burgon]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that important point. In Justice questions yesterday, the Minister with responsibility for prisons, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), said that he was in discussions with the Department for Exiting the European Union about the matter. We need to hear more about the progress of those discussions.

The Justice Secretary frequently points to the emergence of new psychoactive substances as a major factor in the current crisis. Does she know that in Scotland, where prison policy has been stable for some years and where staffing has remained constant, violence has not rocketed as it has across the rest of the prison estate? Scotland has NPS issues, too, but it did not axe staff in vast numbers.

Our prisons are overcrowded. Armley prison, in my city of Leeds, holds nearly twice the number of prisoners that it was built to house. Wandsworth, Swansea, Brixton and Leicester are not far behind; they are all full to capacity with another 50% on top.

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[Elizabeth Truss]

We are working on a strategy for women offenders that includes looking after women on community sentences as well as custodial sentences. I want more early intervention to deal with issues that lead to reoffending, such as mental health and drugs issues, and we will be announcing further plans in the summer.

We are investing in an additional 2,500 staff across the prisons estate, but we are also changing the way we deploy those staff to ensure more opportunities to engage with offenders, both to challenge them and to help them reform.

[Keith Vaz]

May I put to the Lord Chancellor the question I put to the shadow Lord Chancellor about foreign national offenders? She will know that an easy way to reduce the number of people in our prisons is to follow through on the excellent work of her distinguished predecessors, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who are both in the House today, in signing these agreements to send people back to their countries of origin. Why has progress been so slow?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments, and I am pleased to say that a record number of foreign national offenders were deported in the last year. We are making progress, therefore, but there is more work to do. My hon. Friend the prisons Minister is leading a cross-Government taskforce on this issue.

I return now to our work in recruiting 2,500 new prison officers and changing the role of prison officers. By recruiting these new staff, we want every prison officer to have a caseload of no more than six offenders whom they can challenge and support. Our staffing model aims to ensure that we have enough prison officers to do that. One-to-one support from a dedicated officer is at the heart of how we change our reoffending rates and keep our prisons and prison officers safe.

The hon. Member for Leeds East talked about the prison population, although I was none the wiser about Labour’s policy after he had spoken. The prison population has been stable since 2010, having risen by 25,000 under Labour. As was mentioned earlier, fewer people are in prison for shorter sentences—9,000 fewer shorter sentences are given out every year—but more people are in prison for crimes such as sex offences. Not only are we prosecuting more sexual offenders, but sentences for sexual offences have increased considerably, which is absolutely right and reflects the serious damage those individuals do to their victims.

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow a fellow member of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). He has raised the issue of fixed-term recalls before, and I am sure that by the time the Minister responds to the debate, he will have got a grip on the matter and announced some changes that will satisfy the hon. Gentleman. If he does not, I am sure it will be raised again, not only in the Justice Committee but in the House.

In the short time available, I shall raise just one issue—foreign national prisoners. I agree wholeheartedly with what has been said by other right hon. and hon. Members about the crisis in our prisons. If we are thinking about having a club of ex-Ministers, I should say that I used to be a Minister in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, but at that time, responsibility for prisons lay with the Home Office, so I take no responsibility for what happened in the past. Perhaps a seminar of ex prisons Ministers, chaired by the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), the author of that definitive book on prisons, could meet to come up with the solutions that all Members would like to see adopted to bring the crisis to an end.

To return to foreign national prisoners, I am delighted that the prisons Minister is chairing the taskforce, about which we want to hear more. It remains a mystery to me why 12% of our country’s prison population happens to be foreign national prisoners. Half that 12%—more than 4,000 prisoners—are from EU countries. Bearing in mind the fact that we will continue to be a member of the EU for the next two years, it is extraordinary that we have not been able to send back more foreign national prisoners from our prisons. After all, what is the point of undertaking negotiations and signing transfer agreements with EU colleagues if they are unable to take back their own citizens? It must be a priority for the Government to ensure that, in the two years available before Brexit, citizens from countries such as Poland and Romania, which are top of the list in terms of numbers, should be returned to their countries.

I was surprised to hear in the Select Committee the Minister’s chief officer, Michael Spurr, tell the House that more prisoners would have been sent back to Poland under the agreement had it not been for a mistake. I think he said that 130 should have been sent back but had not been. As the Minister and the House know, the derogation for Poland ended on 31 December, so when the Minister responds I hope he will tell us that the matter is being looked at very carefully and that prisoners are being transferred. I am glad that a record number were removed last year, but the headline figure was so low that practically any additional figure becomes a record. We need to do much better than we are doing at the moment.

We have heard recently that, under the agreement with Albania, only 17 Albanian prisoners have been transferred from our prisons. It is not that we are against foreign national prisoners, we are just in favour of their being able to serve their sentences in their countries of origin. If that happens, it will reduce the prison population by 10,000 and save the taxpayer £169 million, so I very much hope that the Minister will give us some new information that will encourage the House to believe that this issue is being taken very seriously.

HMP Birmingham

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

I should be very pleased to meet the hon. Gentleman.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

If the Secretary of State is looking for some light reading over Christmas, she would do well to acquire a copy of a book by the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), “Doing Time: Prisons in the 21st Century”, which contains a number of ideas. If I heard you correctly, Mr Speaker, you mentioned the hon. Gentleman’s intended marriage. Perhaps, if the Secretary of State were able to buy a copy, that would help with the cost of the wedding.

There are currently 9,971 foreign nationals in our prisons. In order to reduce the prison population, what further steps are being taken to return them to their countries of origin?

[Mr Speaker]

Book sales will no doubt increase manifold.

Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lee]

Every death in custody is a tragedy. We are committed to reducing the number of self-inflicted deaths. We have reviewed the case assessment care in custody and teamwork process for prisoners assessed as being at risk and we are piloting revised safer custody training in response. All prison officers, both new and experienced, receive training to help offenders with mental health issues.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

Statistics show that 50% of those who are in prison suffer from personality disorders. Does the Minister agree that it is important to assess such issues when people enter the criminal justice system—even at the stage of the custody suite—rather than after their incarceration?

[Dr Lee]

Of course the initial assessment is important, as is who does that assessment. In addition to our work on that, the care following the assessment and ongoing care, as well as the observation of prisoners, are being closely looked at.

Foreign National Offenders

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the return of foreign national offenders to prison in their own country.

I am grateful to you, Sir Alan, for your time in the Chair, to Mr Speaker for granting me permission to hold the debate, and to my constituents who have sent me here to articulate their concerns. I welcome other hon. Members to the debate, and declare myself open to as many interventions as they care to make.

My main contention is that there are too many foreign national offenders in prison in this country and that they should be in prison in their country of origin. I invite the Minister to update the House on the latest figures, first on the number of prisoners in our jails. I think it is something like 85,000, which basically means that our prisons are full to bursting. It is good that we catch people who do bad things and lock them up, but my understanding is that more than 10,000 of those 85,000—something like 12%—are foreign national offenders. At a time when our prisons are full to bursting, when we, by the Government’s own admission, do not have enough prison officers and when public expenditure is tight at best, it seems that we need to redouble our efforts to ensure that we send those foreign national offenders back to their own countries.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Hollobone]

It would be an honour and a privilege to give way to the former Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee.

[Keith Vaz]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Earlier today, the Minister gave evidence about this very issue to the Justice Committee and I asked him a question about it. Does the hon. Gentleman think it is inexcusable that there are 4,270-plus EU nationals in our prisons? If there is one group of prisoners we should return to their country of origin it is prisoners from EU countries, because they are costing the British taxpayer £169 million. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is essential, as part of the Brexit negotiations, that we get that problem sorted out once and for all?

[Mr Hollobone]

I do think we should get the situation sorted out once and for all. I pray in aid the excellent report by the right hon. Gentleman’s previous Committee, which looked into the issue. I quote, I think, from that report:

“The public would expect our membership of the EU to make it easier to deport European offenders, but this is clearly not the case, and we continue to keep thousands of these criminals at great and unnecessary expense.”

There is in place an EU prisoner transfer directive, which means that countries can compulsorily return prisoners to their country of origin within the European Union. The last time we managed to wheedle a figure out of Her Majesty’s Government on how many EU nationals we had returned to their country of origin, I think the number was 101—pathetically low. Legislation, in the form of that directive, exists with which to do that, but we are simply not getting on with it. Perhaps the Minister in his response will confirm how many EU nationals are in our prisons, how many we have returned to their country of origin, and why we are not sending thousands more of these individuals back.

I have to tell the House that, beside EU nationals, there are representatives of 160 nations from around the world in Her Majesty’s prisons. Not only are we a cosmopolitan society at large, we are also a cosmopolitan city in Her Majesty’s jails.

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[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Ind)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Keith Vaz]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Hollobone]

I will be delighted to give way to both Members, but I feel I should give way to Rochdale first.

[Mr Hollobone]

That is a very sensible suggestion. I am not aware of all the details of the horrific crimes that that unpleasant gentleman has committed, but I do not see why British taxpayers should pay for him to be in prison—Pakistani taxpayers should. In fact, I would go further. I take the view that if a foreign national in this country commits a crime for which they are potentially imprisonable, they should be deported and banned from ever returning, whether they are in prison or not.

[Keith Vaz]

I felt that I had walked into an early edition of “Top of the Pops” when the hon. Gentleman did the countdown from 10 to one—I suppose that from his point of view it is “Bottom of the Pops”. In respect of that list, with one or two exceptions they are either EU or Commonwealth countries. We would expect, as far as the Commonwealth countries are concerned—Nigeria, Jamaica and the others—that Ministers would be able to elicit a better deal than the one they have. Only yesterday, the Polish Prime Minister was in the country. I asked the Minister this question earlier in the Justice Committee meeting. Should this issue not be the No. 1 concern when our Ministers are meeting the leaders of other countries? It would save the British taxpayer a lot of money and would enable those countries to imprison their own citizens. We would be happy to take back our prisoners who are in their countries.

[Mr Hollobone]

As always, the right hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point. From the list of 10, four are EU countries and four are Commonwealth countries. He is absolutely right. I hope that in the Prime Minister’s discussions with the Polish Prime Minister yesterday, she raised the fact that Poland was top of the list of shame and asked the Poles what they were doing to take their citizens back. I understand that Poland has a derogation from the EU prisoner transfer directive until this month. I hope that the Minister will get on to his Polish counterpart at the end of the month to say that we look forward to triggering the proposals that have become live.

Those top 10 nations account for 5,617 prisoners, but we have imported—I am afraid this is absolute truth—a wave of crime from eastern Europe with the accession of eastern European countries to the European Union. Poland has 951 of its citizens in our jails. In 2002, before Polish membership of the European Union, there were 45 Poles in prison in this country. I urge the Minister to get on with it, but I also urge him to speak to his counterpart in the Department for International Development. My list of shame of 10 countries could be cross-checked with the 28 countries that receive large amounts of aid from DFID. Indeed, I asked a few years ago how much aid we give in total to Jamaica, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, India and Bangladesh, and the answer in that year was almost £1 billion, yet those six countries provide us with almost 3,000 foreign national offenders. It costs us more than £100 million a year to incarcerate those people in our jails, yet we are giving those countries £1 billion in international aid assistance.

I think we should do more things such as those we are doing in Jamaica, where we are using international aid money to build a prison to which we can return its nationals. That is a sensible use of the international aid budget. In Jamaica, we signed an agreement in 2015 to build a 1,500-bed prison. It will be built with British taxpayers’ money, and Jamaican nationals in prison in this country will go back to prison in Jamaica as soon as it is completed. Will the Minister urge DFID to look for similar arrangements in the other five countries that I mentioned?

Perhaps more worrying than those foreign national offenders in prison is the very large number of foreign national offenders who are in this country, but not in prison. Alarmingly, it takes the Home Office 149 days on average to deport a foreign national offender. That is simply too slow. The latest figures I have are for March this year. They show a total of 5,895 foreign national offenders living in the community awaiting deportation. These dangerous people are not even in prison. They are free to go about their business on our streets. Of that 5,895 FNOs, 84% have been at large for more than one year and 30% have been at large for more than five years. That is a national scandal. Very large numbers of those individuals will have committed further offences in this country since they have been outside prison. My contention is that those foreign national offenders also need to be deported. If they are not going to be in prison, they need to be walking the streets of their country of origin, not those of our country.

This is an alarming state of affairs, and I am looking to the Minister—he has a solid reputation for being enthusiastic about his portfolio and being skilled and articulate in arguing the case to get things done—to knock heads together in his Department and the Home Office to say that it is not good enough. The previous Prime Minister said to the Home Affairs Committee that the Government’s performance was not good enough, and I am sure the present Prime Minister would admit that. The issue is costing British taxpayers more than £800 million a year. Almost 5,000 foreign national offenders are at large on our streets. Some 10,000 are in prison in this country when they should be in prison in their countries at the expense of their own taxpayers. My constituents in Kettering are looking to the Minister to get it sorted out.

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[Mr Gyimah]

I thank the hon. Lady for her very forcefully put question. I do not have those data to hand, but if they are available—I look to my officials—I will be happy to write to her with the detail.

There is a huge amount of activity under way on each stage of the FNO process, from the point of arrest to appearance in court, being given a prison sentence and removal back to the home country. For example, the Government have introduced clauses in the Policing and Crime Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, that will strengthen police powers with regard to early identification of nationality and will require anyone appearing in court to state their nationality. Those provisions are designed to help to speed up early identification of FNOs and so assist with their quick removal from the UK.

[Keith Vaz]

Will that include the production of their passport? Telling the court their nationality is very important, but the production of the passport is absolutely critical. Is that included in those measures?

[Mr Gyimah]

I believe that is included in the process that I have outlined. In other initiatives, my Department is currently working on proposals to introduce a new fast-track appeals process that will apply to all detained foreign offenders. That process will make sure that appeals are determined as efficiently as possible, so that foreign offenders may be removed from the UK more quickly.

We have also strengthened our ability to deport foreign offenders through new powers introduced by the Immigration Act 2014, which contains a discretionary power allowing us to deport first—the FNO can appeal later. That means that foreign offenders cannot delay their removal with frivolous appeals and are instead required to appeal from abroad, but only if the Home Secretary certifies that removal pending the outcome of any appeal would not risk serious irreversible harm following their return. More than 4,100 foreign offenders have been deported under that new provision since it came into force in July 2014, with many more going through the system.

In terms of wider cross-governmental work, which I have touched on, I am determined that we make extensive use of the influence and worldwide reach of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development, which my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering so articulately focused on, so that we can bring our relationships to bear in discussions, to make sure that we fast-track the process.

Safety of Prison Staff

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am sure the right hon. and learned Gentleman is keenly interested in the contents of the speech, and it may be a sentiment more widely shared. If that supposition on my part is judged to be accurate, perhaps the Secretary of State will place copies of the said speech in the Library of the House.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

We all look forward to reading the speech; whether or not it is in the Library, we will get a copy. The root cause of the problem is overcrowding, which creates stress on the staff and on other prisoners. Currently, there are 13,000 foreign national prisoners in our prisons, and the prisoner transfer arrangement with the EU has been going painfully slowly so far. We have now decided to come out of the EU. What further steps can be taken to get countries to take back their own citizens?

Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

As opposed to shy shrinking violets like the right hon. Gentleman. I presume that that is what he had in mind; I was sort of reading between the lines.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) has a point. The prisoner transfer arrangement with EU countries has been painfully slow—only 95 have been transferred—and at the end of the year Poland’s derogation will cease. Has the Secretary of State begun the process of looking at what will happen after that?

[Michael Gove]

Absolutely. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee is right to remind us that prison transfer agreements have not always worked as they were originally envisaged, but my hon. Friend the prisons Minister has been working closely with the Home Office, and there are 50 Polish prisoners whom we hope to expedite when the derogation expires.

Policing and Crime Bill

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

It has been put to me that that promise was made face to face with some of the victims of hacking and press intrusion—people such as the McCanns and Milly Dowler’s family. It seems to Labour Members as though the Government have subtly shifted their position in the intervening years. As we heard a moment ago from the Minister, it is no longer a question of when the inquiry will go ahead; it is a question of whether it will go ahead. The Government now say that following the conclusion of the outstanding investigations on the matter, they will take a decision on whether the second stage of the inquiry will go ahead.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

That promise was made not just to the victims and their families but to the Chairs of three Select Committees in the Prime Minister’s room before the inquiry was announced. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that it is important that we get Leveson 2—perhaps not with Leveson, because he has moved on to do other things, but with somebody else. There is nothing wrong with the Government beginning the process, choosing a chair of the committee and getting the mechanics together. We do not really have to wait until the end of the criminal proceedings.

[Andy Burnham]

I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend. There is a huge amount of unfinished business. These issues are present in so many of the injustices that we have seen, where there has been inappropriate contact between police and press. We await the conclusions of the Daniel Morgan panel, for instance, which might best illustrate some of these issues.

That is true of other events as well. We remember the way in which the media were manipulated in the case of the Shrewsbury 24, for example. There have been many examples of this over time. Indeed, part 1 of the Leveson inquiry found unhealthy links between senior Met officers and newspaper executives, which led to the resignation of the then Met police chief and others. The issue cannot be left there. Public officials and police officers have also been convicted of offences related to these matters.

The Minister really needs to provide an explicit answer on this specific point today. He cannot wriggle out of this commitment. It is not the kind of commitment you can wriggle out of, given everything that those people have been through. A promise should be a promise, when it is made to people who have suffered in the way that many of the victims of press intrusion have suffered. I know that the Hillsborough families feel exactly the same. They were the victims of the biggest example of inappropriate police briefing of newspapers—and it was not just one newspaper. People think it was just one newspaper that reported the lies, but many of them reported the lies that were given to Whites news agency in Sheffield, and those lies went round the world. Only this week, I had an email from someone in the United States saying that they were astonished to find out the truth when they watched the recent BBC2 documentary on Hillsborough, and that for 27 years they had thought that the events were the result of hooliganism. It is impossible to exaggerate the harm that those lies caused.

I say to the Minister tonight that we need a better answer. If he were to stand up now at the Dispatch Box and say clearly to the House that there will be a second-stage inquiry into the culture of relations between the police and the press, I would be the first to say that we would not press our new clause 64 to a vote. However, there is growing suspicion among organisations—Hacked Off, obviously, but others too—and campaigners for justice that they are slowly being let down and that this matter is being slowly slid into the long grass. We have had anonymous briefings from people close to the Culture Secretary and others in Government to suggest that it has already been canned. Well, we on the Labour Benches are not prepared to accept that, so I say clearly to the Minister that unless he can provide a much more direct reassurance, we will push the matter to a vote this evening to force the Prime Minister to honour his own promise—it is not our promise; it is his promise—to the victims of press intrusion and hacking.

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[Andy Burnham]

I would certainly say so. I cannot understand why there is any doubt about this, given the clarity of the Prime Minister’s statements, which I have read out, and given that the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), has just said that the promise was made not only to the victims but to senior parliamentarians. I do not see how this commitment can be negotiable.

[Keith Vaz]

The Culture Secretary—he was the Chair of the Culture Select Committee at the time—was in the room, so he was very clear that a promise was made.

[Andy Burnham]

Well, there you go. That says it all really. The right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) seems to be in a different mode these days. One wonders what deals have been done by the Government if they are preparing to unpick this agreement, and we will watch them very carefully.

The Minister makes a fair point that there are ongoing investigations. I take his point that some of the investigations will have a material impact on issues that we are considering. We are not saying that we want the inquiry to start right now. We accept that there are matters to be concluded in the courts before it can proceed. What we are after is the removal of any doubt that it will proceed at the appropriate moment and that the promise the Prime Minister gave to those victims will be honoured. That is what we are seeking to establish tonight. That is what we are asking the Minister to lay down very clearly.

This goes beyond party politics. The victims and their families have suffered enough, and Members on both sides of the House owe it to them to make good on the promise that was given to them. That is why I look forward to Members from both sides of the House joining us in the Lobby tonight, because it clearly looks as though the Government are not going to give way.

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[Mr Walker]

I agree with my hon. Friend, which is why I am delighted that my concerns have received such close attention from Ministers and will continue to receive attention. I look forward to further updates. The Government are working very closely with Black Mental Health UK and its director Matilda MacAttram, and I hope that those conversations will continue.

I said that I would try to speak for only five minutes, but I might have to stray a little bit over that, Madam Deputy Speaker.

New clause 29 relates to access to legal advice before someone is detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. I know that the Opposition have tabled new clause 24, on advocacy, but mine is a probing new clause. The removal of someone’s liberty should never happen lightly. Again, there is great concern among the African-Caribbean community and Black Mental Health UK that a young black male is more likely than other people to have their liberty removed. New clause 29 is a genuine request to address a genuine concern, but I am not sure whether it is deliverable.

At the point of sectioning, the situation is almost always highly stressed. The needs of the individual who is ill should be central to that sectioning. There is very real concern about this situation. I am interested in the Opposition’s new clause 24 in relation to advocacy. Advocacy is often talked about but has not been delivered in the way that it should be. Again, my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench are aware of that issue.

New clauses 42 and 43 relate to the deployment of police officers on wards and the use of Tasers. I am well aware that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) will be speaking to new clause 40 on Tasers. I cannot be absolutist in my approach. I know that Black Mental Health UK never wants to see police officers used on mental health wards, and I share that view, but there will always be occasions where that possibility remains. When police officers are deployed to mental health wards, there should be an almost immediate notification to the police and crime commissioner and the Independent Police Complaints Commission that that deployment has taken place. I know that Home Office Ministers are working closely with the Department of Health on collating better statistics about the use of force and restraint, but we cannot wait 365 days before receiving that information. When police are deployed on mental health wards, that information needs to be made available immediately. Again I have received assurances from Ministers that work will be done on that matter. I know that time is short, but when the Minister sums up, I hope that he will again reassure me and Matilda MacAttram that that work will be done.

Finally, I turn to the use of Tasers on mental health wards. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk will argue, with great justification and passion, that Tasers should never be used on mental health wards. My heart is with him, but my head says that there may be some highly charged situations where a Taser needs to be used. Right now, we know that Tasers are being used, but we are not collating or collecting the information, and there is no way for the House to know what is going on, or for concerned individuals to find out what is going on. When a Taser is used—I hope that they will never be used—a report needs to be made within a week to the police and crime commissioner and the IPCC. I am not suggesting for a minute that any police officer will take the action of using a Taser lightly, but we must remember that we are talking about Tasers and force being used in safe hospital environments. Again, I have received assurances from Ministers in relation to the issue, and I hope that the Minister will refer to those assurances in responding to the debate.

Finally, I draw the Minister’s attention to a trial in Los Angeles, where Tasers are linked to body cameras by Bluetooth, so that the camera starts recording immediately when a Taser is drawn. It does not need to be manually started by the police officer. Perhaps the Home Office would like to look at that.

I apologise for having spoken for a little longer than I said I would, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Keith Vaz]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), who has raised so many important issues. He and the House have insufficient time to discuss all these issues, so I want to confine my remarks to just a couple of aspects of this group of amendments, the first of which relates to the Government’s decision to accept the recommendations of the Home Affairs Committee to place an initial 28-day limit on pre-charge bail.

I am sorry that the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims has left the Chamber, because I wanted to pay tribute to him for being one of the very few Ministers we have encountered who writes back to the Committee and says that the Government will adopt some of our recommendations. He did so in respect of a 28-day limit on pre-charge bail, an issue that we have raised on a number of occasions. Most recently, in our report on police bail, we considered the case of Mr Paul Gambaccini and the need to prevent police bail from going on and on without limit. The limit is very welcome and very important.

I want to concentrate next on new clause 22, which relates to the surrender of travel documentation. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) will speak to that new clause when he makes his winding-up speech, but I support it very strongly. It will go a long way towards addressing in the law our concern about terrorist suspects who can leave the country because they have not given up their passports or even been asked for them.

In the Home Affairs Committee’s review of counter-terrorism, we took interesting evidence from the sister of Siddhartha Dhar. Mr Dhar fled the United Kingdom while on police bail and despite being asked politely by the police to send in his passport. In fact, he never received the polite letter that the Metropolitan police sent to him asking him to hand in his passport, because he left the country when he was released from custody. He was already in Syria when that letter was sent.

What the Government propose in the Bill is welcome, but new clause 22 goes a little further. I very much hope that the Government will change their mind and accept it, because it is in keeping with the evidence given to us by the head of counter-terrorism, Mark Rowley, who said that when someone surrenders a passport immediately, the police and the security services know where that passport is and that, if someone breaches that requirement —in other words, if they do not hand over their passport—they should be in breach of their bail conditions.

[Mike Penning]

I understand that, in my absence, the right hon. Gentleman might have said something nice about me, so it was probably a good job that I was not here.

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the police have the power now to go with an individual when granting bail and physically take their passport or travel document before they release them?

[Keith Vaz]

They do indeed, but they did not do so in the case that I mentioned, which is the problem. We do not know how many other such cases there have been. We know about that case because it came into the public domain, and Mr Dhar ended up on a YouTube video telling us what he was doing. There might be other cases, but people are not very open about admitting mistakes. I accept that the power the Minister mentions may have been used before, but enshrining it in legislation as proposed in new clause 22 would be helpful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

It is a pleasure to follow the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham). He was generous with his praise for those involved in the Hillsborough campaign, but the House should recognise his part in that campaign and the incredible work that he has done. He spoke with great passion on the subject even today, and he should be commended for what he has done.

It is not often that the Home Affairs Committee praises the Government, but they have done quite well in the Bill in picking up a number of the recommendations that we made about detention in police cells, which is to be stopped, and in particular about the seizure of the travel documents of those who have committed or are suspected of committing criminal offences. We would have liked the Home Secretary to go a little further and accept Mark Rowley’s evidence, but she has gone a long way towards dealing with the issues that we were concerned about, and I am glad that that provision is in the Bill.

The third recommendation that the Home Secretary has accepted, for which we are grateful, concerned the time that people spend continuously on bail. We listened to the evidence of Paul Gambaccini and others who came before the Committee, who could not understand why bail kept being renewed month after month with nobody telling them what was going to happen. Reputations have been ruined as a result. Of all the provisions in the Bill, the one relating to that situation will stand out. It does not mean that the police will not be able to do their job; it just means that citizens will not be continuously in limbo, not knowing what is going to happen. We welcome the fact that the Home Secretary has accepted all three of those measures that we put forward.

I want to thank the Policing Minister, who is one of the rare Ministers who write to the Committee and say, “We have decided to take up your recommendations.” That does not happen often, and the fact that he did it shows his courtesy and his willingness to take on suggestions, obviously with the support of the Home Secretary.

I strongly agree with what the shadow Home Secretary says about Leveson 2. I cannot understand the Government’s reluctance to accept that we will have to have a second inquiry. We need that inquiry. It was promised to me and to the then Chairs of the Justice Committee and the Culture, Media and Sport Committee by the Prime Minister in his private office behind the Speaker’s Chair after Mr Speaker had granted the urgent question and an emergency debate under Standing Order No. 24, which resulted in the entire debate on hacking. We should try to ensure that we have a timetable that will give comfort to those who have been waiting for that second inquiry.

At Home Office questions, I mentioned that the Home Secretary was now the third longest-serving Home Secretary in the history of our country. We have to look back to 1822 to find Viscount Sidmouth, who served for 10 years as Home Secretary—longer than the present Home Secretary has done. I do not know whether that will be her fate. It is important to remember that there has been a revolution in the policing landscape under this Home Secretary. Everything has been turned upside down. There have been massive changes. When she came to the Dispatch Box, I thought she would say that the reform agenda was finished, but when she said that it was ongoing, that caused us trepidation in the Home Affairs Committee, because we will have to continue our scrutiny.

There are many good things in the Bill. I am sure we will return to the subjects of policing and crime again in this Parliament, and I hope the Government will be able to accept even more of the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendations.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

Safety in Custody and Violence in Prisons

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend, who is very knowledgeable on these issues as a member of the Select Committee, is absolutely right to point the finger at the terrible damage caused by new psychoactive substances. I agree that rolling out smoke-free prisons across England and Wales will help us to reduce that damage—we know that those psychoactive substances are sometimes smoked openly, with prisoners pretending that they are smoking tobacco. I am with her in wanting to see the roll-out progress, but we will only do that in a measured and safe way.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The independent monitoring board for Leicester prison published a damning report about conditions there this morning. The report pointed to all the matters that the Minister has raised—rising levels of violence, use of drugs and mental health issues. This issue is about increasing staffing. Although the Government have increased the number of prison officers, there are clearly not enough. What further steps can be taken to help the officers at Leicester prison?

[Andrew Selous]

My commitment to the House is to carry on recruiting at the increased level of activity that there has been for the past few years. It is proving successful. It is a challenge, at some specific sites in London and the south-east more than at others, but we are managing to make progress. There is the budget to carry on employing prison officers and I am determined to carry on with our recruitment objectives.