Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Lord Beamish and Andy Burnham

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I totally agree with the points that my right hon. Friend is making. Does he agree that among the problems with Hillsborough were not only the off-the-record briefings that took place later, but the on-the-record briefings to get the narrative right from the beginning?

[Andy Burnham]

I agree on both levels. This was a cover-up perpetrated on the record, off the record and in the Committee rooms of this House. It went to the very top—even to 10 Downing Street, where the head of press at the time briefed that a “tanked-up mob” caused the disaster. This cover-up went to the highest level. What chance did ordinary families have when faced with the might of the establishment seeking to perpetrate a lie on that scale? It has been a 27-year fight, as we now know.

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[Andy Burnham]

That is extraordinarily unfair, although this Government have made things even more unfair with their cuts to legal aid. People are not getting through and they are not getting funding when they apply in the way that they would have done in the past. They are unrepresented at these inquests, which cannot be right.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I accept that cases such as Hillsborough required a lot of input from lawyers. Asking as someone who has a knee-jerk reaction that we should not be feeding lawyers, is it possible for the Chief Coroner to lay down rules in some of these cases so that if a public authority comes forward with banks of lawyers, the other side should be given legal representation, or the public authority told that those lawyers are not needed?

[Andy Burnham]

The amendment is designed to develop the same effect and to state that there should be parity of legal funding. That is an incentive for the public sector not to spend too much on its own. If it has to fund families as well, that might bring down the legal bill—it might not add any further costs.

[Mr Jones]

We now have the Chief Coroner. In the past a lot was wrong—I sat on the Coroners and Justice Bill Committee, and changes could still be made to the coroners service in this country. Some recognition of the parity that my right hon. Friend refers to would be welcome, but as I know from local government and other sectors, the knee-jerk reaction these days is to get a lawyer involved and, in some cases, I am not sure that we necessarily need that.

[Andy Burnham]

We need inquisitorial inquests rather than adversarial inquests. In the case of Hillsborough, the Lord Chief Justice made a specific ruling when he quashed the original inquest. He hoped, given that the police had clearly tainted the evidence, that the new inquest would not degenerate into an adversarial battle, but—I am afraid to say—that is exactly what happened. At public expense, one individual in particular, hired to represent the former officers, a Mr John Beggs, went into the courtroom and repeated all kinds of lies and innuendo about supporters of Liverpool football club. My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and I were there; we witnessed it—and it was a particularly unpleasant thing to witness. It is even more galling to think that we were paying for that.

It is not just the cost but how people are questioned that is gross and unjust. I will give one final example to illustrate. The House will know that, after a long fight by her family, an inquest was recently held into the death of Cheryl James, who died at the Deepcut barracks in Surrey. The QC acting for Surrey police was the same Mr John Beggs. I know, from speaking to Cheryl’s father, that the family were deeply hurt by an intrusive and aggressive line of questioning that focused on several very personal questions. They were particularly hurt by one untrue allegation levelled at them. According to Mr Beggs, Mr James, in making inquiries to Surrey police, had distracted the latter from the Milly Dowler investigation. Can Members imagine how he felt when he heard that? In trying to get to the truth about what happened to his daughter, he found himself the subject of an outrageous, appalling slur, which the Dowler family, such is their decency, stepped in to correct.

It should not be like this. It must not be like this. It is well known that police forces are instructed to hire this individual if they feel in a tight spot, and they pay huge amounts of public money to do so. It should not be allowed to carry on. We should call time on it today.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

My right hon. Friend is making a very good point—that kind of adversarial inquest is wrong—but, to repeat, could not the Chief Coroner lay something down in guidance to coroners to stop such behaviour? Not only is it not good for families; it does not help get to the truth either.

[Andy Burnham]

No, it does not. My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I cannot see why that should not happen. Equally, I cannot see why the Government would not accept the Bill, proposed by Lord Wills in another place, to create a national office to support bereaved families so that each family does not have to reinvent the wheel and go through all the learning needed to get ready for an inquest. That is another good proposal.

To finish, we are seeking to establish a simple principle. In the words of Mr James, this is about “parity of arms”—if it has to be like that. If there is to be an adversarial battle in the courtroom, we should at least give bereaved families the same ability as the public sector to defend themselves. That is an unanswerable principle, and I am sorry the Government have decided they cannot support it tonight. I know they are saying they are waiting for the conclusion of Bishop James’s report, but this is bigger than Hillsborough—it is very much evident in Hillsborough, but it is much bigger—and concerns a number of families facing a similar injustice today.

Is it not the case that public money should fund the establishment of the truth and, in particular, help people to get to the truth at the first time of asking, so that the truth can be used by public bodies to learn—to look at where they went wrong and see how they can improve? Instead, they do the opposite. They go into those courtrooms to defend themselves and reputations, spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money in doing so. I hope that the Government would agree with the spirit of what I am saying tonight. If they do, I would hope for a clear commitment this evening that they support the aim of parity of funding for families at inquests. From there, I hope we might be able to move forward. From what I can gather, however, the Government have not done enough, and unless the Minister is able to provide this level of reassurance, we will press the new clause to a vote.

Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Lord Beamish and Andy Burnham

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

Absolutely. People would expect that terror suspects would be placed on watch lists immediately —the minute they are placed on police bail—but it appears that that did not happen in this case.

The Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee in January that he would look carefully at stronger police bail powers, but the Bill does not deliver them and nor does it close the loophole. The basic problem is that police bail conditions are not enforceable. As such, the Bill misses a major opportunity, so we will press the Government hard in Committee to correct the situation. We need a tougher and targeted police bail regime that, when dealing with more serious offences, can impose enforceable sanctions, such as the confiscation of passports and travel documents in terrorism-related cases.

The proposed reforms on mental health are timely and much needed. Given the levels of stress and insecurity inherent in 21st-century living, mental health will be one of the greatest—if not the greatest—health challenges of this century, so it is essential that the police and the criminal justice system develop basic standards to deal with it. We therefore strongly welcome moves to ban the use of police cells for children in crisis and to introduce limits on their use for adults, and we also support limiting the time for which people can be held. Our concern is not with the measures themselves, but whether they can be delivered in practice.

As shadow Health Secretary, I revealed in the previous Parliament how the Government had not honoured their commitment to parity between physical and mental health, but instead cut mental health more deeply than other parts of the NHS. As a consequence, mental health services in many parts of the country are today in crisis. Only last week, Richard Barber, a councillor from Golborne in my constituency, contacted me to say that he had worked with professionals for two days to help to find a tier 4 bed for a highly vulnerable young man who was close to suicide. Shockingly, no beds were available anywhere in the country. As the Royal College of Psychiatrists has pointed out, banning the use of cells, as welcome as that is, does not solve the problem of why those cells are used in the first place. Similarly, reducing the time limit for assessment does not itself guarantee enough trained professionals to deliver the new standard.

The combination of the changes could put professionals in a difficult position. Assessments to detain under the Mental Health Act 1983 cannot be completed until a bed has been identified, so the Bill could put professionals in the invidious position of having to choose between breaking the law, by going over the 24-hour period if a bed cannot be identified, and not breaking the law but releasing someone who should be detained. It is therefore essential that, alongside the Bill, the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary issue new instructions to health service commissioners to open sufficient beds and train sufficient professionals to deliver these welcome new commitments.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that one omission is that this information is not kept nationally? If we are to monitor whether what is proposed is being put into practice, we will need that information, but at the moment it is not available. Without it, we will never determine whether we are meeting the targets.

[Andy Burnham]

That is the problem. Professionals searching for a bed are in a desperate position because of the lack of information. The risk is that if the new requirements come into law without a plan to commission the extra beds and professionals needed, that could have perverse consequences by putting professionals in a difficult position. I hope that that does not happen, but I say to the Home Secretary that much more than £15 million will be needed to create adequate bed capacity to deal with the problem.

Finally, I come to the proposals that give us the greatest concern, the first of which is for a major expansion in the number of volunteers. The Home Secretary was right to praise the role of specials, but we argue that volunteers should add value, rather than replace core police provision. As we have revealed, police forces in England are facing a decade of real-terms cuts. We lost 18,000 officers in the last Parliament, and many more are set to go in this one. That is the context in which the House must consider the proposal in the Bill to extend the use of volunteers.

The House should not endorse the principle that volunteers can safely backfill the gaps left by cuts to policing. As has been pointed out, the Bill in effect gives police volunteers the ability to use CS gas and PAVA spray, but most people would argue that those functions should be restricted to full-time officers. We are not opposed to the greater use of volunteers, but they should come on top of a protected core of police officers to add value, rather than being replacements.

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[Mr Jones]

Well, yes, but that is not about blurring their roles. I do not think that that is what the public want. They want their police officers to protect them and their streets, and they want their firefighters to respond to house fires and other types of emergencies—road traffic accidents and so on. The public want specialist skills and I would be totally opposed to any blurring of the lines.

There are some positive measures in the Bill that are a step forward. I caution my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh that, while we need to table many amendments, voting against the Bill on Report would not be understood by the public. It would give the impression that we did not care about the things in the Bill that should be welcomed. Instead, we should be highlighting the things that are ideologically driven.

[Andy Burnham]

Just to clarify, I was talking not about voting against the Bill per se—as I said, it is a good Bill, and we like many of the measures in it—but about voting on Report against the proposals on fire, police bail, which, if not strong enough, we will want to strengthen, and police accountability, where we believe that retirement should not free police officers from having to facing up to past wrongdoing.

[Mr Jones]

I apologise to my right hon. Friend for the misunderstanding. I thought he told the House he would oppose the Bill on Report, which I would not, but I look forward to his amendments because there are clear ways that the Bill could be improved and strengthened, as he said.

In closing, I broadly welcome the Bill. I hope that in Committee we can address the issues around mental health so that the Bill can do what the Government want it to do, which is to improve the situation. I suggest that they work with the charities sector and others who have raised some of the concerns that I have mentioned tonight. I hope that we can get to where the Government want to go and avoid the situation of people with a mental illness ending up in police cells. It could also take the burden from front-line police officers, who, although they try hard, are not qualified to deal with such situations.