Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney General]

My hon. Friend is always interesting—no less so on this point. He is right. Both sides of the House should accept that human rights are important and must be upheld, but our courts, our judges and our Government are perfectly capable of doing that job, which they have done very well for a long time.

[Sir Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

4. What steps the Crown Prosecution Service is taking to support action against terrorism.

[The Attorney General (Jeremy Wright)]

Terrorism prosecutions are dealt with by a specialist unit within the CPS, and there is close working between the CPS, the police and the intelligence services from the launch of an investigation until the conclusion of a trial.

[Sir Henry Bellingham]

While the 400 or so radicalised British Muslims who are still fighting for ISIS in Syria are naive, many of them pose a great danger to the UK. We know their names, so what steps are being taken to prepare for prosecutions?

[The Attorney General]

My hon. Friend is right. We have to pay close attention to each of those individuals. He will understand that prosecutions will not always follow in all those cases, but the number of prosecutions in terrorism cases has increased significantly. There were 79 trials last year, compared with 51 trials the year before, and we are remarkably good at convicting in those trials, which have a conviction rate of something like 86%.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

The institute, with which I am familiar, will comprise all the sorts of people it should have on it—primarily employers, but it will look to work with providers—to make absolutely sure not only that the quality of apprenticeships is good, but that we get everybody and anybody applying for apprenticeships. Whatever someone’s background might be—sex, colour of skin or ethnicity—absolutely does not matter at all. In certain areas, I do not have a problem at all in making a positive case to make sure that more women or more people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds go into apprenticeships, especially the high-quality ones. There should be no barrier.

[Sir Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

9. What steps the Government are taking to support older women with caring responsibilities; and if she will make a statement.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities and Family Justice (Caroline Dinenage)]

Unpaid carers are the backbone of our society. That is why the Care Act 2014 gave carers new rights that focus on their wellbeing and give them properly targeted support. We have also invested £1.6 million in a series of pilots to look at the best ways to support those who have caring responsibilities.

[Sir Henry Bellingham]

I have been visiting care homes and care companies in my constituency that are currently facing unprecedented challenges. Does the Minister agree that this places an even greater onus on older carers, who do invaluable and compassionate work? What measures will she put in place to help older carers get back into employment when their care duties come to an end?

RSPCA (Prosecutions)

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Garnier]

The hon. Lady was in court and clearly knows more about the detail of the case than I do, but it strikes me that anybody who manages to run up prosecution costs of more than £300,000 on a summary case in a magistrates court is rightly subject to criticism for being responsible for a disproportionate piece of activity.

My simple point is that if the RSPCA does so, it cannot expect to escape public criticism, either in this Chamber or elsewhere, and I am entitled to make that criticism. Were such a prosecution brought by the Crown Prosecution Service, whether on the evidence or the public interest test, as it could well have been, there would have been a far greater grip on the management of that case. I do not imagine that, when the cost of prosecutions in magistrates courts are in the low thousands of pounds, rather than the low hundreds of thousands, the CPS would have gone about it in quite that way.

We need dispassionate intervention from the CPS in such cases. This is not to say that the RSPCA should not or may not investigate but, like the police, it should hand the evidence to the CPS for it to make a dispassionate judgment.

[Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

My hon. and learned Friend makes a good point. I am a member of the RSCPA and support its prosecutions, but this was a summary case before the magistrates court, so why did it not, in the first instance, use its own in-house team of lawyers—which I as a member have to pay for—and go to expensive Queen’s counsels only when the case goes to the higher court? Surely, it was an error of judgment on the part of the RSCPA to use up such huge amounts of its members’ money.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I am very fond of expensive QCs, but it is a matter of judgment. The RSCPA, in that case, made a misjudgment. I am not criticising, for one moment, the quality of the representation that it had, but any private organisation, whether a charity or an individual, spending such an amount of money on that sort of prosecution is open to criticism. If I were a member of the RSCPA, I would want to know that my money was going to the purpose that I thought it was intended to go towards, that is to say, protecting animal welfare, rather than—as it appears, from comments made by many—the pursuit of some political agenda.

Last October, I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), an oral question in Justice questions about why the courts rarely seem to make costs orders against the RSCPA when it brings prosecutions that fail, either because it got the law or the facts wrong, and cases collapse. Although the Minister promised to write to me, he did not, but the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), kindly replied with a somewhat opaque letter, which did not contain any information of interest or value relating to the discussion that I intended to have.

Undoubtedly, the RPSCA is fortunate because it is not subjected, as the CPS is, to orders for costs when it makes a mess or fails to bring home a prosecution. The CPS set aside £154,000 in the financial year 2005-06, and more than £1.5 million in 2010-11, in relation to costs awarded against it by the courts. Whether those costs fell under section 19 or section 19A of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 does not much matter: these are big numbers. The CPS has a turnover of some £600 million and I understand that the RPSCA has a turnover of about £120 million. One would think that there ought to be some read-across for the sums paid in response to costs orders, but we do not see that.

Finally, I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire who suggested that Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service inspectorate should, either of its own volition or with the encouragement of the Attorney-General, consider the way the RPSCA conducts its prosecutions, whether thematically or by looking at particular cases. I agree with my hon. Friend, and I encourage my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General to do that. When he and I worked together—it was a joy—we encouraged the Serious Fraud Office to invite the inspectorate to look at its prosecuting activities. That was a beneficial and useful inspection. I encourage my right hon. and learned Friend, in the little spare time that he has, to encourage Mike Fuller to look at how the RSPCA conducts its activities as a prosecutor.

Of course, I respect the right of the RSCPA to conduct itself as an animal welfare charity with all the vigour and all the money that it can lay its hands on, but it needs to be careful that it does not move away from being an animal welfare organisation and becomes a political campaigner, using the state prosecuting system as a weapon to promote its political campaigns.