Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Philip Davies Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Commons Chamber

Brought up, and read the First time.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Mr Speaker]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

New clause 31—Tagged curfew on remand not to count towards time served—

‘(1) The Criminal Justice Act 2003 is amended as follows.

(2) In subsection (1B)(c) of section 237, leave out “or section 240A”.

(3) In the italic heading before section 240, after “custody”, leave out “or on bail subject to certain types of condition”.

(4) Leave out section 240A.’.

New clause 37—Open prisons: deportees—

‘No prisoner serving a sentence for which he is liable for deportation can be moved to a Category D prison.’.

New clause 38—Resettlement licence: deportees—

‘No prisoner serving a sentence for which he is liable for deportation can be eligible for resettlement licence.’.

New clause 39—Open prisons: murderers—

‘No prisoner serving a sentence for murder can be moved to a Category D prison.’.

New clause 40—Resettlement licence: murderers—

‘No prisoner serving a sentence for murder can be eligible for resettlement licence.’.

New clause 41—Open prisons: serious offenders—

‘No prisoner serving a sentence for an indictable only offence can be moved to a Category D prison.’.

New clause 42—Open prisons: victims—

‘No prisoner serving a life sentence can be moved to a Category D prison before the views of the victim or the victim’s family have been sought and considered by the Secretary of State for Justice.’.

New clause 2—Meeting a child following sexual grooming etc.—

‘(1) The Sexual Offences Act 2003 is amended as follows.

(2) In section 15(1)(a) (meeting a child following sexual grooming etc.) for “two”, substitute “one”.’.

At present, someone is only considered to be committing an offence if they contact the child twice and arrange to meet them or travel to meet them with the intention of committing a sexual offence. This new Clause would mean that the perpetrator would only have to make contact once.

New clause 3—Offence of abduction of child by other persons—

‘(1) The Child Abduction Act 1984 is amended as follows.

(2) In section 2(1) (offence of abduction of child by other person) for “sixteen”, substitute “eighteen”.’.

At present, there is a disparity between the ages that children must be to be considered to be abducted depending on whether they are in the care system or not. This new Clause would rectify this disparity and set a consistent age of under 18.

New clause 15—Aggravated offences against members of the armed forces—

‘(1) Part 12 (Sentencing) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, is amended as follows.

(2) At the end of section 146, insert—

“147 Increase in sentences for aggravation related to membership of the Armed Forces

(1) This section applies where the court is considering the seriousness of an offence committed in any of the circumstances mentioned in subsection (2).

(2) Those circumstances are—

(a) that, at the time of committing the offence, or immediately before or after doing so, the offender demonstrated towards the victim of the offence hostility based on the victim being a former or serving member (or presumed former or serving member) of the armed forces or army reserve; and

(b) that the offence is motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility towards persons who are former or serving members of the armed forces.

(3) The court—

(a) must treat the fact that the offence was committed in any of those circumstances as an aggravating factor; and

(b) must state in open court that the offence was committed in such circumstances.

(4) It is immaterial for the purposes of paragraph (a) or (b) of subsection (2) whether or not the offender’s hostility is also based, to any extent, on any other factor not mentioned in that paragraph.

(5) In this section “armed forces” means Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force, both regular and reserve.’.

Amendment 20, in clause 18, page 17, line 29, leave out from ‘portrays’ to end of line 42 and insert

‘sexual activity which involves real or apparent lack of consent or any form of physical restraint which prevents participants from indicating a withdrawal of consent’.

[Philip Davies]

New clause 29 stands in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall). I appreciate that with this group of amendments time is of the essence, so I will try to be as snappy as possible. I usually try to accommodate interventions, but I hope that Members will be mindful of the fact that there are amendments in the group that have been tabled by others. In the interests of time, and in order to allow everyone a fair lick of the sauce bottle, I will try to refrain from speaking to the amendments that do not stand in my name, even though there are things that I would like to say about them if time allowed.

New clause 29 would reverse the changes made in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 in relation to those who are eligible to be recalled to prison for just 28 days for breaching their licence. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 amended the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to enable fixed-term recalls in the first place—one of the many shameful things done in the law and order field by the previous Labour Government. However, the 2012 Act further amended the 2003 Act to extend the use of fixed-term recalls to previously denied prisoners. That is another example of the previous Lord Chancellor, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), being even more lax on law and order issues than the previous Labour Government. Many of us might have thought that that would be rather hard to achieve, but he managed it in that particular field.

Most people believe that when someone is let out of prison early, whether it be halfway through their sentence, a quarter of the way through on home detention curfew, or at some other point before they should be let out, if they reoffend during that time or breach their licence conditions, they should go back to prison to serve the rest of their original sentence—at the very least; one might even argue for sending them to prison for longer. Unfortunately, this is not only not always the case; it is often not the case, or may even never be the case at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Wright]

I have a nasty feeling that my hon. Friend is not going to welcome much in the Bill, but may I ask him at least to welcome one thing? He will have noticed, I am sure, that we propose to increase the penalties for those who fail to comply with their licence. Does he at least accept that that is a good idea?

[Philip Davies]

I absolutely accept that the current Lord Chancellor, with the help of my hon. Friend the Minister, is doing his very best to try to undo lots of the mistakes made by his predecessors; I am the first to acknowledge that. My contention is that the Government are not going anywhere near far enough in meeting the needs and expectations of the general public. Yes, of course they are making small steps in the right direction, but they are far too small and I would like them to go further.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

May I reassure my hon. Friend about the views of the public? I spend my weekends out on the doorsteps talking to people in Brigg and Goole, and the one thing they tell me about law and order is that they expect that people who go to prison should serve their full term. The idea that somebody can breach their licence and then in effect have a 28-day all-inclusive holiday is completely and utterly outrageous. I entirely concur with what he is saying, and so do the people of Brigg and Goole.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and, of course, to the people of Brigg and Goole who are so ably represented by him in Parliament. He is absolutely right. Most people think that when somebody is sent to prison for whatever length of time the court hands down, they should be there for that period of time. It beggars belief that even when they are released from prison and commit another offence, they do not go back for the original sentence that was handed down.

There is no licence period for offenders serving less than one year in prison, and that covers about 60% of the prison population at any one time. Many of the remaining prisoners will be released on licence halfway through their sentence. Fixed-term recalls were introduced in 2008 to reduce the pressure on prison places. It was not done because it was the right thing to do, but because the previous Government got completely overwhelmed on the matter of prison places. Unfortunately, not much appears to be known by the public, nor—dare I say it?—by many colleagues in this House about how the system of fixed-term recalls works. A fixed-term recall occurs where the offender breaches their licence and is returned to prison for a mere 28 days, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said—not for the rest of the prison term they were originally given, not even for most of it, but for just 28 days.

When fixed-term recalls were introduced, they excluded certain offenders. However, in his bid to reduce the prison population still further, the former Lord Chancellor, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe, relaxed the eligibility criteria by way of a change in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. I always had my doubts about the fact that the punishment of offenders was mentioned in the title of that Act, because it seemed to do anything but punish offenders, and I was right to be concerned. As of 3 December 2012, fixed-term recalls were made available to previously denied prisoners. These were offenders serving a sentence for certain violent or sexual offences, those subject to a home detention curfew—that is, serving some of their prison sentence at home—and, most shockingly, those who had previously been given a fixed-term recall for breaching their licence within the same original prison sentence. I suspect that not many people realise that, and they certainly will not like it when they do.

One unbelievable thing that I recently found out is that in the nine months from January to September last year, 785 of the prisoners serving sentences of one year or more who had been released on licence before the end of their sentence were not only recalled to serve just 28 days for breaching their licence once, and then released, but subsequently recalled to serve another 28-day spell and then released again before the end of their original prison sentence. In nine months, 785 of the most serious offenders in our prisons were released from prison having breached their licence, returned to prison for 28 days, released again, and then, for a further breach of their licence, returned to prison for just 28 days and then released again. You couldn’t make it up, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is a complete failure of policy that is completely indefensible and unjustifiable. I am not easily shocked when it comes to any matters relating to justice, but this has to be one of the most unbelievable policy decisions of all time, and I doubt there is much support for it among the general public. I would love to hear the Howard League for Penal Reform, otherwise known as the prisoner’s friend, and other do-gooding organisations justify this kind of approach.

In answer to one of my recent parliamentary questions about the Bill, my hon. Friend the Minister said:

“Fixed term recalls will continue to be used in low-risk cases where a short period back in custody is sufficient to deal with the breach and the offender can then safely be re-released to continue with their rehabilitation under licensed supervision in the community.”—[Official Report, 3 March 2014; Vol. 576, c. 641W.]

My new clause would remove those who have committed serious offences from eligibility for the 28-day recall, as well as those who have already been given a chance on a 28-day recall and gone on to breach their licence conditions again. If what the Minister says is really the case, surely he and the Lord Chancellor, who is, I believe, much more in tune with public opinion and more on the side of the victim than the criminal—certainly compared with his predecessor—will do something to rectify this appalling state of affairs and support my new clause. Unless he can offer some sensible measures to address these points, I intend to press it to a vote.

New clause 31 proposes that time spent on tagged curfew would not count as time on remand. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 amended the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to allow periods of time spent on tagged curfew, on bail, to count as credit towards any eventual custodial sentence. As I said on Second Reading of this Bill, I want an end to the ridiculous position whereby time spent on tagged curfew is credited as though it were time spent on remand in prison. The new clause would remove that entitlement. Currently, when someone is on bail on an electronically tagged curfew from, say, 11 pm until 8 am, and they then receive a custodial sentence, the amount of time they have to serve in custody is reduced by half a day for each nine hours or more spent on the curfew beforehand. I have never understood the maths of it. If nine hours is spent on a curfew, how does that equate to half a day in prison, even if the two things were comparable, which, in my view, they are not? I appreciate that some people will have had curfews longer than nine hours, but some of those who had nine-hour curfews will still be getting the benefit of this credit. The credit also inevitably means that some people avoid prison altogether. If they have been on a curfew for a certain period of time and then receive a custodial sentence of a certain length, they will never see the inside of a prison cell despite the court having deemed that only a custodial sentence was appropriate for the crime they committed.

I can do no better than repeat what my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) said as shadow Minister in 2008 when this proposal was first being made by the previous Labour Government:

“One of the greatest concerns of the public is that the current system leads to dishonesty in sentencing. People do not seem to understand that when a person is sentenced to two years in prison, that actually means that he will be in custody only for one year. It provides yet another example of how the Government, in order to overcome the difficulties of prison overcrowding, are guilty of promoting an untruth.”

He went on to say that a curfew

“cannot be considered the equivalent of having spent time in prison awaiting sentence, but the new clause directs the court to take all that time—described as ‘the credit period’—into account in reducing the custodial sentence. I am afraid that the public will find that rather difficult to understand.”

He went on to say, as I quoted on Second Reading:

“If someone has committed an offence that crosses the custody threshold—an offence that is serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence—it will cause a great deal of scepticism, undermine public confidence in the justice system and make the Government look increasingly ridiculous if the court is then required to say, ‘By the way, all the time that you have spent at home in bed is time that can be taken away from your custodial sentence.’”—[Official Report, 9 January 2008; Vol. 470, c. 369.]

As it happens, back in 2008 the Conservative party voted against the then Government introducing this particular measure. Indeed, the Minister voted against it when in opposition. Has he changed his mind about this ridiculous system—if that is the case, he can tell us why—or does he still think it is ridiculous even though he does not accept my new clause? I would be extremely grateful if he could tell us why he intends to defend in this Parliament something that he thought was wrong and voted against in the last Parliament. We can only conclude that he has somehow changed his mind, but I am not entirely sure what caused that to happen.

My other new clauses, 37 to 42, all relate to open prisons and can be taken together. I am sure it will not have escaped anybody’s notice that open prisons have been a hot topic in the past week or two, with the absconding of the “skull cracker” from an open prison. The prison authorities might have thought there was a clue in his name before they decided to release him, but it appears that that was beyond them. This is a multiple armed robber who was serving 13 life sentences and had absconded from prison before—twice, I believe—but who somehow, unbelievably, found himself in an open prison and being released on temporary licence.

I had been looking at this issue for some time before the “skull cracker” case, and the more I learn about it, the more I despair. The actual facts regarding open prisons and the sorts of people being let out on day or night release are shocking. People say that open prisons are an essential part of people’s rehabilitation and that, just before they are released and have gone through all their rehabilitation, it means they can gradually work their way back into the local community. We know that that is clearly not true, because of the police’s reaction when the “skull cracker” escaped from prison. If all of this guff about rehabilitation of people in open prisons were true, when the “skull cracker” escaped from prison the police would have told the public, “Don’t worry about it, because this man was rehabilitated. He was going to be released from prison very soon anyway, so he is of no danger to the public.” Of course, the police did not say that; they said, “This man is immensely dangerous and must not be approached at any price.”

Therefore, we know for a fact that the argument that people in open prisons who are coming to the end of their sentence are being rehabilitated is a load of old nonsense dreamt up by the do-gooders. I can see from the facial expressions of the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) that the do-gooders are ably represented, as usual. He, along with the Howard League for Penal Reform, is the criminal and prisoner’s friend.

[Dr Huppert]

I hope the hon. Gentleman puts his new clauses to the vote so we can see how much of the House rejects what he is saying. Does he really not care about the research done by a huge number of organisations which shows that reoffending rates among those released from open prisons are far lower than the rates for those who are released from closed prisons? Rather than give his own personal opinions, surely the hon. Gentleman would like to see less reoffending and, hence, fewer victims of future crimes.

[Philip Davies]

I suggest the hon. Gentleman goes to speak to the people at the building society who were the victims of the armed robbery by the “skull cracker.” The hon. Gentleman seems to take comfort from people in a Westminster bubble—people who need to get out more—agreeing with him. I am concerned not about whether he agrees with me, but about what the general public think and whether they have confidence in the criminal justice system. He is, of course, a typical arrogant type who thinks that he knows better than the general public about everything. All I can suggest is that he knocks on a few doors in his constituency and asks people what they actually think about the criminal justice system. He may be shocked. It would be better for him not to stick to the people in the ivory towers in his constituency; he should try to speak to people on estates and those who buy their own homes. He might be surprised by what he finds out.

My new clauses 37 states:

“No prisoner serving a sentence for which he is liable for deportation can be moved to a Category D prison.”

New clause 38 states:

“No prisoner serving a sentence for which he is liable for deportation can be eligible for resettlement licence.”

[Andrew Percy]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. On deportation, surely the debate about whether an open prison is key to rehabilitation is completely irrelevant, because these people will not be released back into society in the United Kingdom. He should, therefore, enjoy the support even of those who argue that open prisons are part of rehabilitation, because the people affected will leave the United Kingdom. The argument is completely baseless.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am sure we are all excited at the prospect of hearing what the hon. Member for Cambridge will have to say about these particular two new clauses and whether he thinks it is suitable for people who are about to be deported to be moved into open prisons and released on temporary licence so that they can walk out willy-nilly. Knowing him as I do, I am sure he thinks it is quite right for them to be moved to open prisons and released on temporary licence. We await his comments with baited breath. If he were to agree with me, there is no doubt whatsoever that it would be a red letter day. At that point, I think I would be able to claim that my new clause had the support of the House.

The clue to my new clauses is in the title: if someone is liable for deportation following an offence, I do not understand what grounds there can possibly be for releasing them on resettlement licence. The whole justification for resettlement day and night release is that it is supposed to help prisoners reintegrate into the area by re-establishing links with family and the local community. To be honest, I am not a fan of that at the best of times—given that many offenders spend so little of their sentence in prison anyway, I cannot believe that so many of them are not in prison when we think they are—but giving a resettlement licence to someone liable to be deported is utter madness. I cannot for one second understand the logic of it and I would be amazed if anybody could find any support for the idea from any quarter.

New clause 38 would make those liable for deportation ineligible for resettlement licence, and new clause 37 would ensure they were not allowed to be moved to open prisons. I cannot believe that I even needed to table these new clauses—I would have thought they were basic common sense—but I believe this change is essential to remove the much greater risk of these offenders absconding, knowing that they are likely to be deported at the end of their sentence in any event.

New clause 39 states:

“No prisoner serving a sentence for murder can be moved to a Category D prison.”

New clause 40 states:

“No prisoner serving a sentence for murder can be eligible for resettlement licence.”

There is nothing much more serious than dealing with the case of someone who has been murdered. The individuals who have committed such crimes have shown that they are capable of ending someone’s life, and there has to be a risk that they will do it again. It is all well and good saying that these people should be rehabilitated, but the risk is obviously at the highest possible end of the scale.

According to replies to further parliamentary questions, I was told that two murderers are still on the run, having absconded from open prison a few years ago, and that 106 offenders serving sentences for murder have absconded in less than 10 years. Those are not small numbers. As far as I am concerned, any murderer who absconds from our prison estate is one too many. It is absolutely disgraceful that 106 murderers have absconded from our prisons in 10 years. New clauses 39 and 40 would help to protect the public, who should not be put at risk in this way.

There are real-life, tragic examples of the risk these murderers pose. One of those terrible cases happened when Ian McLoughlin was on day release following a murder conviction, which in turn followed a conviction for manslaughter. He murdered Graham Buck, who had gone to help his neighbour. The offence was apparently committed on his first day on day release from prison after 21 years in custody. One day is all it takes. I believe that putting murderers in open prisons and giving them day release is playing with fire unnecessarily and creating unnecessary additional victims of crime. Such tragic cases should never have happened, and we need to make sure that they never happen again. I therefore hope that colleagues will support the new clauses.

New clause 41 would deny a prisoner serving a sentence for an indictable only offence from being moved to a category D open prison. According to an answer on 1 May to one of my parliamentary questions, there were more than 4,000 offenders in open prisons at the end of last year, including 1,227 who were in for violence against the person offences, 215 for sexual offences, 505 for robbery, 202 for burglary and 1,115 for drug offences. According to other answers, there are 643 life-sentence prisoners in open prisons, as well as 599 other prisoners serving indeterminate sentences for public protection. These are not the type of offenders I was expecting to find in open prisons. I believe that most of the public think that open prisons are for people like Lester Piggott, not people serving 13 life sentences.

Not only are such people in open prisons, but they are allowed to go out by being released on temporary licence. Some 611 prisoners serving life sentences were granted release on temporary licence in the last year for which figures are available, and 1,043 serving indeterminate sentences for public protection were granted release on temporary licence. If people serving indeterminate sentences for public protection were fit to be released from prison, they would have been released. That is the whole point of indeterminate sentences. The fact that they are still in prison means that, by definition, they are not fit to be released. I am at a loss to understand how those who have committed the most serious offences—those which justify a so-called life sentence—are allowed to move to open prisons in such numbers.

I also struggle with the basic concept that someone deemed too dangerous for release, in serving a sentence for public protection, is actually released on temporary licence. New clause 41 would ensure that no one serving the most serious sentences—for murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, section 18 wounding, conspiracy, robbery, rape, aggravated burglary, kidnapping, riot, blackmail and arson—could be moved to an open prison or released on temporary licence.

Finally, new clause 42 would mean that no prisoner

“serving a life sentence can be moved to a Category D prison before the views of the victim or the victim’s family have been sought and considered by the Secretary of State for Justice.”

Victims’ rights should be at the heart of our criminal justice system. A victim can be the person directly involved or the affected family. It is one thing to be a victim of a serious crime and it is another to hear the often far too low sentence handed down to the perpetrator, but it is an absolute outrage for the victim and their family to learn that the person has been released early, or is seen to have an easy life in an open prison or by being released on temporary licence.

One of the most stark examples is that of offenders who are transferred to open prisons, which must be very upsetting and concerning for victims in many cases. It is absolutely right that before considering any application for people to be moved to an open prison, particularly for those who have committed the most serious offence, victims and their families should have a formal input into, and their objections or comments should be heard as part of, the process of deciding whether or not that person should be moved.

I hear Members talking time and again about how they think that victims should be at the heart of the criminal justice system, that their rights should be paramount and that their views should be more carefully considered by the criminal justice system and the courts. This is an opportunity for them not just to come here and spout about the rights of victims and their families, but to do something about it by allowing victims and their families to play a formal part in the decision-making process. New clause 42 would ensure that victims’ voices are heard, with decisions taking into account what the victim has to say as well as the offender’s impact on them and their family.

I genuinely do not understand—I really do not—why anybody would object to this particular new clause. I hope that the Minister will say that he will support it and that the shadow Minister will also do so, so that we can send out a message from this House, on a cross-party basis, that we do not just say that we want victims to be at the heart of the criminal justice system, but have actually delivered something meaningful that will make an awful lot of difference to how victims feel about the criminal justice system.

I look forward to hearing other hon. Members’ views. I have no doubt that my new clauses command the widespread support of members of the public, and I would like to think that they also command an awful lot of support in this House.

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

I will speak principally to new clause 15, which is in my name and those of the shadow Defence Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), and my hon. Friends the Members for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) and for North Durham (Mr Jones). Before I do so, let me comment briefly on the other new clauses in this group.

The Minister will of course address the impact on the Bill of new clauses 29, 31 and 37 to 42, which were tabled by the hon. Members for Shipley (Philip Davies) and for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), but I think that there is agreement across this House that no one who poses a serious threat to the public should be in an open prison. The hon. Member for Shipley has just reminded us of the serious and much-publicised case of a prisoner absconding in recent days. Thankfully, he is now back in custody, but Ministers must explain why he was ever allowed to be in an open prison or granted release on temporary licence in the first place.

I want to make three points on new clauses 29, 31 and 37 to 42. First, we should remain mindful of the role that open prisons have played in our criminal justice system going back nearly 80 years. Except for a small proportion of offenders on whole-life tariffs, all prisoners will return to civilian life at some point, and category D prisons can help that process if they are used in the right way. The Prison Governors Association pointed out last week:

“The use of open conditions is an important factor for effective resettlement. Research suggests that reoffending rates among those released from open conditions are far lower compared to those released from closed prisons.”

Secondly, the point is to ensure that risks are properly managed so that public safety is not compromised, because this is even more of an issue today than it was four years ago. As shown by a written answer last month to the shadow Justice Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), the use of release on temporary licence has jumped by 23% since 2010. Over the same period, the Government have presided over a 57% rise in breaches in relation to those released on temporary licence. Those breaches may well be serious breaches or involve prisoners, such as Mr Wheatley, who have committed serious and violent crimes. It is therefore important that the public should receive assurances.

Thirdly, we should remember that no prisoner can be moved to open conditions without a recommendation from the Parole Board or the National Offender Management Service. Ministers must therefore answer this question: what support are they giving the Parole Board to ensure that it has proper resources to give all cases the careful consideration they need and deserve? The Government have accepted that the Bill will result in an extra 1,100 Parole Board hearings, but the Parole Board is already under severe strain. Nearly one in five staff have been cut since the last election, but although staff numbers are falling, its work load is rising. There is already a significant backlog of outstanding cases, and a recent Supreme Court ruling means that the number of oral hearings the Parole Board will have to hold is set to increase from about 4,500 per year to as many as 14,000 per year.

With that in mind, I am cautious about the blanket approach proposed by the hon. Member for Shipley, but Ministers need to assure the public that resources are in place to ensure that all decisions on moving prisoners to open conditions are properly scrutinised.

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is about to move on, but I have not heard him mention new clause 42, which would give victims the right to have their say before a serious offender was moved to an open prison. Given that his party is talking about a victims’ law, can I take it as read that his party supports my new clause? If not, why not?

[Dan Jarvis]

I am grateful for that intervention. The hon. Gentleman can take it as read that we will look carefully at the detail of his proposal, as we always seek to do. We are consulting on these matters. The Labour party has appointed Sir Keir Starmer, QC to look carefully at these matters and he will report in due course.

I will move on to new clauses 2 and 3.

[Philip Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way again?

[Dan Jarvis]

I will not give way again, because I want to move on to new clauses 2 and 3.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) on tabling the new clauses and on the campaign that she has led on tackling child exploitation. Sexual grooming and child abduction are difficult subjects to talk about in our society, but we must remain vigilant and do all that we can to protect children and correct anomalies in our laws. As a father of three, I applaud the parliamentary inquiry that she led with Barnardo’s. There has been much support for her new clauses from police forces and leading children’s charities. That is reflected in the fact that the proposals have the backing of Members from all parts of the House. I therefore hope that the Government will give the new clauses proper consideration. The Minister said that he was sympathetic to them in Committee, so I look forward to hearing what he has to say tonight.

Amendment 20 was tabled by my hon. Friends the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) and for Hammersmith and myself. There is agreement on both sides of the House about the need to tackle extreme forms of pornography. In recent months, we have heard warnings from the Children’s Commissioner about how violent pornography is distorting our children’s understanding of sexual relationships, including the normalisation of sexual violence in gangs. Research by Rape Crisis South London has shown that extreme material that depicts and glorifies rape is readily available online. We therefore welcome the steps that are being taken by the Government in the Bill.

Our amendment is designed to clarify the proposals to reflect a promise that the Prime Minister made last summer. He pledged, with regard to extreme pornography,

“to make sure that the same rules apply online as they do offline.”

Our concern is that the Bill will fall short of that. We agree that a careful balance needs to be struck so that the standard for criminalising possession is very high and people’s private sexual behaviour is respected. We think, however, that the legislation would be improved by replacing the Government’s description of rape in proposed new subsection (7A) with the text used by the British Board of Film Classification—a well-established test that is already used to judge offline content.

Amendment 20 would improve the law in two ways. First, it would make it clear that the ban on possessing rape pornography extends to all depictions of rape, even if they are staged. Portrayals of actual rapes are very rare. The content that has been identified by Rape Crisis South London and the Children’s Commissioner is primarily commercial pornography with high production values, poor acting and staged violence. It is not clear whether, under the Bill, that would be deemed realistic enough to secure a prosecution. It would certainly be banned offline, which is what the Prime Minister’s promise was based on. Secondly, the amendment would ensure that content was banned if it showed rape, but not the act of penetration. I hope that the Minister will reflect on both those points and consider accepting our amendment. It would not only implement the Prime Minister’s promise, but make it clear that extreme pornography that depicts rape and glorifies sexual violence should not be permitted in our society.

Before I go into the merits of new clause 15, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), who has campaigned so hard on this policy. It is important to recognise that the overwhelming majority of the British public are very proud of our armed forces and hold them in very high regard. We see that right across our country. Just a glance at the latest Ministry of Defence reputation survey shows that the armed forces have a favourability rating of about 85%. That is testimony not just to the way in which those in uniform serve us in theatres abroad, but to the contribution they make to our local communities.

The sad truth, however, is that not all men and women who serve our country receive such a warm welcome when they return from operational duty. I will give three brief examples. The first case was reported by BBC Radio 5 Live and involved a soldier called Lee. He was returning to his home in Bolton from a three-month tour in Afghanistan, when he was set upon by a group of drunken thugs. When the police caught up with them, the attackers said they wanted to prove “how hard they were” by attacking a soldier.

The second example relates to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games—an event that would not have been possible without the help of our armed forces to make it safe and secure. There were reports of troops being advised to travel together in groups after a number of soldiers were

“attacked, verbally abused and harassed”.

In one particularly nasty case, an off-duty soldier was badly beaten by four men not far from Tower Hill tube station, after the attackers noticed that he was carrying a military bag.

Thirdly, let me briefly tell the story of an 18-year-old called Alexander, who was training to be a soldier in the Coldstream Guards. He was assaulted in August last year, when he was jumped by a gang of eight attackers as he walked through an underpass near his home in Exeter. When they saw that he was wearing his military backpack, they stopped him and asked whether he was in the forces. The gang surrounded him, kicked him to the ground and tried to attack him with a screwdriver. Alex later told his local newspaper:

“They kept shouting Lee Rigby—like they wanted to re-create what happened.”

I am sure that the whole House will agree that those cases are appalling, abhorrent and completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, they are far from unusual. I draw the House’s attention to the armed forces and society survey that was carried out by Lord Ashcroft, with the assistance of the Ministry of Defence. The study contacted 9,000 serving personnel across all three branches of the armed forces, and is acknowledged to be the most detailed and in-depth study in the area. The survey contains a number of startling statistics. It found that more than 20% of service personnel had suffered verbal abuse in the previous five years and that about one in 20 had been the victim of violence or attempted violence.

Any attack that is motivated by hate for our armed services is one too many. Our service personnel do not ask for special treatment, but they rightly expect not to be discriminated against because of what they do for our country. That is why we are proposing action through new clause 15. It would make physical or verbal attacks against members of our armed forces an aggravated offence, when the prosecution can establish that a person’s service in the armed forces was a motive for the assault. It is a small change, but one that would send a strong signal that we will not tolerate such attacks as a society. It builds on existing laws that cover assault that is motivated by other characteristics. I hope that the Minister will give it proper consideration and support it today.

I am aware that the Government have expressed two clear reservations with the proposal. Let me deal with them both. The first argument is that the existing laws are adequate. Indeed, the veterans Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), told the House earlier this year that

“the sentencing guidelines make it clear that if somebody is assaulted by virtue of their being in the armed forces, that is clearly an aggravating feature”—[Official Report, 17 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 545.]

That sounds clear, but we do not believe that it is that straightforward in practice. The current sentencing guidelines for assault do not include any specific references to members of the armed forces. They say that it will be an aggravating factor if an offence is committed

“against those working in the public sector or providing a service to the public”.

It is not clear whether that definition would always include members of the Royal Navy, the Army or the Royal Air Force, nor whether it extends to when they are off duty, which is when many such assaults take place. Amending the law so that the armed forces are specifically mentioned would bring much greater clarity.

The second argument was made by the Minister in Committee who noted:

“The current provisions deal with hostility on the grounds of race, religion, disability and sexual orientation, all personal characteristics that are beyond a person’s immediate control. Hostility on those grounds makes the offence particularly harmful, both to vulnerable individuals and to communities… However, hostility based on occupation is of a different kind.”––[Official Report, Criminal Justice and Courts Public Bill Committee, 27 March 2014; c. 518.]

I have three points for the Minister to consider. First, I understand the distinction that has been made, but what a person chooses to do with their life can become every bit as much a part of their identity as who they are or where they come from. That is especially the case for people who dedicate their lives to serving our country across the world. Secondly, I do not think that an attack on a young soldier such as Alexander, because of the uniform he was wearing, is any less harmful to our society than when people are assaulted because of who they worship or the colour of their skin. All our communities hold close connections to the men and women who put their lives on the line for us, and any hateful attack on that can be just as damaging to the bonds of our society as an attack motivated by characteristics already protected in law.

Thirdly, the Minister will know that offences are already in place that specifically cover assaults against people in certain occupations: police constables, prison workers, immigration officers and emergency workers in Scotland. Surely our armed forces deserve the same recognition. That is why my right hon. Friends the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Defence Secretary have committed the next Labour Government to taking action on this matter. We will introduce an armed forces Bill in our first Queen’s Speech, tackling the issue of the assaults that we are debating today and outlawing other forms of discrimination against our service personnel. The Opposition have pledged to do that next year, but Ministers have an opportunity to make a head start and take action now.

I urge Members across the House to support new clause 15 today. Our men and women in the Navy, Army and Royal Air Force serve us with dignity and bravery, and in this important year of remembrance, as we reflect on those who have made sacrifices for us in conflicts past and those who continue to serve us today, it is our duty to ensure that they are treated with dignity in return.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Wright]

This has been a full debate, and I would like to respond to as much of it as I can, while still leaving my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) with a couple of minutes at the end if I possibly can—I know how he loves to have the last word.

Let me start with my hon. Friend’s new clause 29, which seeks to place statutory restrictions on certain categories of offender to prevent them being suitable for fixed- term recalls. I can assure him that it is already the case that no offender who is assessed as a risk to the public—assessed as being able to cause serious harm—can be given a fixed-term recall. Those serving a public protection sentence—the “extended sentence prisoners” referred to in the clause—are already excluded, so it is not necessary to amend the legislation in that respect.

In addition, as my hon. Friend knows, we are taking measures in clause 7 to introduce a new test for release following recall, which will mean that prolific offenders or those who are persistently non-compliant with their licence could also be deemed unsuitable for a fixed-term recall. I share my hon. Friend’s concern and, indeed, that expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), about those who cock a snook at the legal system by persistently failing to comply with their licence. In clause 7, we seek to do something about that.

We already have measures, either in place or pending, to prevent high-risk and prolific offenders from being subject to fixed-term recalls in cases in which it would not be appropriate for them to be automatically released after 28 days. The proposals in the new clause are either unnecessary—because they are already provided for elsewhere—or would go too far in placing a blanket statutory ban on certain categories of offender. We believe that decisions about the type of recall that is appropriate should be decided on a case-by-case basis, and I therefore invite my hon. Friend to withdraw his new clause.

New clause 31 would abolish section 240A of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which, as my hon. Friend explained, provides that when a defendant on bail is subject to an electronically monitored curfew, half the period spent on “tagged bail” may be credited as time served towards his sentence. Incidentally, my hon. Friend said that the same applied to time spent on remand, but in that instance the entire period may be credited, rather than half of it.

We want to ensure that only defendants who need to be detained are remanded in custody while awaiting trial. Tagging on bail helps to ensure that bail periods are completed successfully, and that remand prison places are taken up only by those who really need to be there. Tagging defendants and requiring them to comply with a curfew of at least nine hours each day is a useful tool that we want to continue to use. We consider that when people have had to comply with a daily curfew which restricts their liberty, that time should be taken into account.

[Philip Davies]

Can the Minister explain why he voted against that proposal when the last Labour Government introduced it?

[Jeremy Wright]

That was six years ago. Since then, the criminal justice system has become used to using the provision. Also since then, we have had the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. I do not know how my hon. Friend voted on that, but I voted in favour of it.

[Philip Davies]

I voted against it.

[Jeremy Wright]

My hon. Friend surprises me. As he knows, the courts had been using the provision for some time, and we thought it important to regularise it by means of the Act.

My hon. Friend also referred to what he described as dishonesty in sentencing. He will be aware that my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary and I have considerable sympathy with the move towards ensuring that automatic release is minimised. He knows that our ambitions extend well beyond what we have managed to achieve so far, but I trust he will be encouraged by the fact that we have already reduced the application of automatic early release. We have removed it from those serving extended determinate sentences, and the Bill will remove it from child rapists and terrorists.

New clauses 37 to 42 deal with the use of open prisons and release on temporary licence. My hon. Friend mentioned the case of Michael Wheatley. It is an extremely concerning case, and, as my hon. Friend and other Members would expect, we are looking very carefully at what occurred. When we have completed our investigations, we will consider what further action needs to be taken.

New clauses 39 and 41 seek to prevent offenders serving sentences for murder or for an indictable-only offence from being moved to a category D or open prison. Open prisons provide an opportunity to assess prisoners in conditions more similar to those that they will face in the community, which is vital in protecting the public. To release life-sentence prisoners directly from closed prisons without the resettlement benefits of the open estate might, in certain cases, lead to higher levels of post-release reoffending, and thereby create more victims. That is something that both my hon. Friend and I would wish to avoid.

A period in open conditions for the purposes of ongoing risk assessment and support for resettlement can be particularly important for lifers—a category that includes all murderers—many of whom will have spent many years in prison, and will therefore often not be prepared for release. While those serving sentences for indictable-only offences include some of the most serious offenders, some of those who have been convicted of common-law indictable-only offences will not be dangerous. An example is those who have been convicted of cheating the Revenue—the sort of people, one might think, whom my hon. Friend might expect to find in open prisons. I suggest to him that what he proposes in new clause 41 is not a useful means of determining in which category of prison an offender should be held. That must be determined on the basis of the risk posed by the individual.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Wright]

My hon. Friend is right, but it is important to note that in every case a proper risk assessment must be made to ensure that only the right people find themselves in open prisons.

Currently, in most cases, the decision whether to move a prisoner to open conditions is made after advice has been sought from the Parole Board. The hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) referred to the burden on the board that the Bill will create. We must indeed ensure that the board has the necessary resources, and we will do that. Public protection is the priority, as all Members would expect it to be, and the Parole Board takes account of a range of factors when assessing whether the risk posed by an offender has been reduced enough for that offender to be managed in open conditions, or on licence in the community. Those factors might include the completion of offence-related courses, a sustained period of good custodial behaviour, access to appropriate and stable accommodation, access to education, training and employment—as was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) —and support from professionals, as well as from family and friends. Offenders are returned to closed conditions if their behaviour in open conditions, or updated risk assessments completed in open conditions, indicates an unacceptable risk to the public.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley was also rightly concerned about absconding. Prisons can and do take a variety of actions to try to reduce its incidence. Open prisons operate intelligence systems with the aim of spotting those who might be planning to abscond. Prisoners are screened, and those who are at significant risk of absconding are sent back to closed conditions. Absconders can be criminally charged, and prisons, police and the Crown Prosecution Service are increasingly working together to secure their successful prosecution, which can act as a deterrent to others—as can the increased penalties for which the Bill provides.

New clause 42 seeks to ensure that no prisoner serving a life sentence can be moved to a category D prison before the views of the victim or the victim’s family have been sought and considered. Here I hope that I can offer my hon. Friend some reassurance. We have recently taken steps to enhance the rights to which victims are entitled under the statutory probation victim contact scheme, which covers all victims of serious sexual and violent offences when the offender has received a prison sentence of 12 months or more. Under the scheme, victims already have the right to submit a victim personal statement to the Parole Board when the board is considering whether to direct the release or a move to open conditions of a life sentence prisoner. That allows victims to explain the impact that the offence has had on them, and what the impact of a move to open conditions, or release, would be. Victims have a right to make representations about release conditions attached to an offender's licence, and that includes temporary release from open prison. When there are any concerns about the vulnerability of the victim, the victim can feed into the licence conditions by, for instance, requesting an exclusion zone in the area where they live or work.

New clauses 37 and 38 seek to prevent prisoners liable for deportation from being moved to an open prison or released on temporary licence. When a prisoner is being removed from the United Kingdom directly from prison, a move to open conditions or a temporary release will not serve its key resettlement purposes. That point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole. However, in cases in which the prisoner, although liable to deportation, is not actually deported but is resettled here on release from the sentence, the positive benefits of open conditions and temporary release would, if the new clauses were passed, be lost.

Our current policy seeks as far as possible to ensure that those who will be removed from the UK stay in closed conditions, and that those who will not can be considered for transfer to open conditions and temporary release. In such cases, as my hon. Friend would expect, particular care is taken to ensure that the risk assessment takes into account the potential of removal.

When decisions are made about transfer to open conditions or temporary release, Home Office staff will be consulted so that any information relevant to the risk assessment process can be obtained. That includes the likelihood of removal action, history of failure to comply with immigration conditions, previous absconds, any history of deception with the aim of entering or remaining in the UK or evading removal, and any failure to comply with the directions of the Home Office. We are actively reviewing our policy to ensure that it can meet those aims, but we are satisfied that a statutory ban on the transfer to open conditions or temporary release for every prisoner liable to deportation would not be in the interests of reducing reoffending.

My hon. Friend expressed concern about the use of temporary release. New clause 40 would prevent any prisoner serving a sentence for murder from being released on temporary licence. Temporary release contributes to public protection and reducing reoffending by helping those who are due to be released to prepare for life outside prison. For prisoners serving an indeterminate sentence, it also provides evidence for the Parole Board of how an offender complies when in the community. Making this change would lead to offenders who had rightly been away from ordinary society for years being suddenly removed from a strictly regulated regime where most decisions are made for them into the community where they will make most decisions for themselves. Temporary release allows this transition to take place gradually, using short releases, over many months, for the impact of each temporary release to be assessed over this time, and for the risk management plan to be tailored accordingly, while the offender is still in custody.

We have already acted to ensure that public protection is placed at the heart of the temporary release scheme. Changes were made to risk assessment requirements last year following three serious incidents involving temporary release, and on 10 March we announced a package of measures to further improve decision making, monitoring and enforcement of the thankfully rare temporary release failures. To reassure my hon. Friend, I should put this into context for him. There are about half a million releases on temporary licence every year: roughly 0.1% of them result in a failure of any kind and a much smaller proportion of that small proportion involve the suspicion of further offences. None the less, we take all those failures very seriously and we intend to do something about them.

Specifically, from the autumn we will have a new scheme of restricted release on temporary licence for serious offenders. In those cases, there will be more stringent risk assessment procedures, with greater involvement of psychology and probation professionals and more restrictive licence conditions involving probation professionals. As soon as suitable equipment is available, we will be able to tag offenders on temporary release, and we intend to do so. Improving risk assessment and management in individual cases is the right response to concerns about temporary release; a blanket ban on all offenders serving a sentence for murder would be counter-productive. As other Members have said in this debate, this is about a balance of risks. For all those who are released from custody—the vast majority of those serving sentences—it is important to reduce the risk of reoffending as much as we can, and many of the things we have talked about in this debate help to do that.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the Minister for the work he has done in trying to toughen up on some of these issues and on the rights of the victim. On that basis, I am inclined not to press new clauses 29 and 42 to a Division as I understand that some progress is being made. However, on new clause 38 about people liable for deportation being eligible for a resettlement licence, this should not even be negotiable or needed, and on the basis of the Minister’s answer on that, which I have to say was wholly inadequate, I intend to press new clause 38 to a Division, as there is no excuse for allowing those people out of prison at all.

[Jeremy Wright]

I am naturally disappointed to hear that, but let me have one more go. The point I am making in relation to new clause 38 is that there is a distinction between those who are liable for deportation and those who are actually going to be deported. For those who are going to be deported, my hon. Friend is absolutely right that there is no justification whatever for release on temporary licence or transfer to open conditions. For those who are not going to be deported or where there is a reasonable chance they will not be, however, we have to think about the same balance of risks I described to him earlier. That is the logic for making the distinction I sought to make, and explains why I cannot accept the blanket way in which his new clause is phrased.

Let me now deal with new clause 2. The hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) has again tabled her amendment to reform the “grooming” offence at section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. As she said, the amendment would reduce the number of times the defendant needed to meet or communicate with the child in order to satisfy that element of the section 15 offence from two to just one. As she knows, I have much sympathy with this proposal, as I know many other Members do. I am grateful for the work she has carried out with Barnardo’s, and I join in the tributes that have already been paid to her not just for highlighting this particular issue, but for the part she has played in the wider fight to tackle the sexual abuse and trafficking of children.

Our laws in this area are robust and strong. We can be proud that we are among the world leaders in the fight to protect children from sexual abuse. However, as the hon. Lady knows, I remain open to suggestions for improvement in this aspect of the criminal law, and in Committee I promised to look carefully at the issues this amendment raises. I do, however, believe it is vital that before we proceed with such a reform, we ensure that we have first considered all the issues and evidence fully. With that in mind, my officials recently met Barnardo’s to ascertain the full extent of the problem. Barnardo’s has now reported to my officials with some supportive evidence and we are expecting further material from them shortly.

As well as examining this evidence, we are considering how such an amended offence would interact with the existing offences in the Sexual Offences Act 2003. We will then be in a better position to consider how this reform can be taken forward. I can assure the House that this Government remain committed to the protection of our children from sexual abuse, and we are looking seriously at the proposed amendment and will report our position as soon as possible.

On new clause 3, as the hon. Lady knows, section 2 of the Child Abduction Act 1984 makes it an offence for someone other than a certain person such as parents or guardians to take or detain a child under the age of 16 so as to remove or keep him or her from a person’s lawful control. The point here is that the offence can be committed irrespective of the consent of the child concerned. I understand the hon. Lady’s intention is to bring the section 2 offence in the Child Abduction Act into line with the abduction offence in section 49 of the Children Act 1989. My right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice) made the same point and I understand it entirely, but, as I explained in Committee, such a change would lead to difficulties. Young people of 16 or 17 are lawfully able to be married, are generally deemed capable of living independently of their parents, and are otherwise able to make decisions affecting their way of life, not least in sexual matters. The amendment would make it a general offence with a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment to take a person of that age who is capable of exercising his or her own free will in that regard away from his or her parents. I therefore hope the hon. Lady will understand that the position on new clause 3 is different from the position on new clause 2.

I will now turn to new clause 15. As the hon. Member for Barnsley Central knows, we debated this amendment in Committee so I hope he will not be too surprised to find that not much has changed since then. He did make some additional points that I want to pick up on, however.

I repeat that the Government are firmly committed to the protection of members of the armed forces, veterans and their families who, as the hon. Gentleman and others have said, make a valuable contribution to our society. They deserve the full protection of the law, but I am not convinced that his proposal is necessary to achieve that. His amendment would attach a statutory aggravating factor to assaults and other offences committed against members of the armed forces. I will not repeat everything I said in Committee about personal characteristics, and he has highlighted that that is a different matter. He added two further points to what he said in Committee, however. He mentioned the fact that special provision is made for police constables and prison officers. The reason for that is the nature of their work—we talked about that a littler earlier—and the likelihood that they will be assaulted in the course of their work. That does not apply to many other professions, including, I would suggest, the armed forces. He is right of course that someone’s profession, particularly if they are in the armed forces, can be a large part of their identity, and he has already highlighted the fact that there are sentencing guidelines in place, which the courts are required by law to follow, which make it clear that it should be considered an aggravating factor if the victim is serving the public.

The hon. Gentleman also raised the question of what happens when someone is off duty. It is probably worth looking back to the case of Lee Rigby. This was a soldier who was not on duty at the time. The hon. Gentleman will, I am sure, have seen the sentencing remarks of the sentencing judge for the killers of Lee Rigby; it is clear from them that the fact that this was an off duty soldier was taken into account by the court. In the light of that, I hope the hon. Gentleman will see fit not to pursue his amendment.

Amendment 20 would replace the Government’s proposed targeted extension to the extreme pornography offence with a much broader provision. It would capture any sexual activity that involved real or apparent lack of consent, or some form of restraint which prevented a person from indicating withdrawal of his or her consent—for example, a gag. I absolutely understand the good intent here of the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson). I know what she is trying to achieve, but I have to say to her that this would be far too broad an extension to a tightly drawn and deliberately targeted offence. It will always be a matter of judgment as to whether we have gone far enough, and I quite understand that she will want to return to these arguments. However, I hope she will accept our argument—she may want to look again at the Hansard record of our proceedings in Committee, because I am about to run out of time—as to why the provision should be drafted this tightly. I therefore hope that, on that basis, she will not press the amendment to a vote, but I quite understand that she will want to return to the subject another day.

[Philip Davies]

This has been a rather disappointing debate, as we might have predicted. Although I would have liked to have a vote on all my amendments, which are all worthy of a vote, in order to test the will of the House, on the basis of the Minister’s response I will withdraw new clause 29 and instead press new clause 38 to a vote.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am happy to share the hon. Gentleman’s tribute to, I assume, his constituent, Mr. Lockie, but I do not share his worries because I know that independence and feistiness are still more than fully available in the Victims’ Commissioner’s office in the form of the Victims’ Commissioner, whom I look forward to both working with and being held to account by in the coming years.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Does the Minister accept that most of the public think that open prisons are for people such as Lester Piggott rather than people serving 13 life sentences? Given that in a recent parliamentary answer that I received it emerged that 643 people are serving life sentences in open prisons, will he go back and assess each and every one of those cases to ensure that the open prison is the appropriate place for those prisoners, because I do not believe it is?

[Jeremy Wright]

I assure my hon. Friend that proper reviews of each of those people are carried out, not just by us but, on a great many occasions, by the Parole Board too, to ensure that people are suited for open prisons. For those offenders who will be released one day, we have a choice to release them either straight from the closed estate or from the open estate. The objective here, which he and I will both agree on, is to ensure that when someone is released from custody the risk to the public is as low as it can possibly be. In each and every case, that is what we seek to do. In the particular case that has been raised already this afternoon, as he knows we will look very carefully at the circumstances of this temporary release.

Prisoner Escapes

Philip Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Ministerial Corrections

[Philip Davies]

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice whether any prisoners serving a sentence for murder are still unlawfully at large following an escape or abscond since 1 April 2004.

[Official Report, 10 March 2014, Vol. 577, c. 116W.]

Letter of correction from Jeremy Wright:

An error has been identified in the written answer given to the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) on 10 March 2014.

The full answer given was as follows:

[Jeremy Wright]

Escapes have been falling for over a decade with the current low levels having been sustained for some years now. This is despite considerable increases in population over the same period. Despite a slight increase in 2012-13, absconds have been falling for nearly two decades.

The following table shows the number of absconders still unlawfully at large who have an index offence of murder. There are currently no prisoners unlawfully at large with an index offence of murder who have escaped from prison or prison escort. This information was correct as of 3 March 2014.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

No, I would not say that at all because among our other innovations is a Victims Commissioner, whose basic role is to ensure that the code of practice is taken seriously by the police and by all other parts of the criminal justice system. Victims have much greater protection under this Government than they ever had under the previous Government.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Every year, about 3,000 burglars with 15 or more previous convictions are not sent to prison. How does releasing these people back on to the streets to continue their crime spree help victims of crime? Is it not time that legislation was introduced to ensure that persistent burglars must be sent to prison?

[Damian Green]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will welcome the “Transforming Rehabilitation” proposals, which will mean that those receiving even sentences of under 12 months will for the first time receive help in prison, which will ensure that they are much less likely to reoffend when they come out.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Philip Davies Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

That question raises so many concerns about the Justice Secretary’s lack of knowledge that it is really worrying. Citizens should be able to challenge the decisions that are made by Ministers, including him and Labour Ministers. That might mean that the courts find that some Government decisions are wrong. For example, they might find against plans to expand Heathrow with a third runway. We have to accept that decisions made by the Executive should be able to be challenged by the judiciary. He should accept the important concept of the separation of powers. We provide checks and balances for the judiciary, the Executive and the legislature. We are not a country in which the Cabinet can do whatever it likes.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I am slightly perturbed by what the right hon. Gentleman has said. These are not decisions that my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary has said the Government would take—he was talking about decisions that Parliament would take. What is essential in a democratic system is that the will of the people exercised through Parliament is sovereign, not judges who have been elected by nobody.

[Sadiq Khan]

I do not subscribe to the view that citizens have a role to play only once every five years. They have a role to play in an active democracy between elections as well. That is the difference between the hon. Gentleman’s majoritarian view and mine. The irony is that the Foreign Secretary gets it. If the hon. Gentleman had listened to the Foreign Secretary in the statement on Ukraine and Syria, he would have heard what he had to say. It is a shame that the Justice Secretary and the hon. Gentleman did not listen to what the Foreign Secretary said about the importance of the rule of law.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I am in a slightly unusual position this evening, in that I rise to support the Government on this Bill. It is a particular pleasure to be able to support them on matters relating to criminal justice and courts, because that was not always the case when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice’s predecessor, the Minister without Portfolio, was in place.

I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on reversing the trend that we saw under his predecessor, which seemed to go against every Conservative principle on law and order. He was trying to send as few criminals to prison as possible, culminating —as the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) made clear in his remarks, with which I agreed—in his treatment of indeterminate sentences for public protection. That was the particular low point of this Government in criminal justice matters. I suspect that, as the right hon. Gentleman hinted at in his speech, if the current Secretary of State had been in place all the way through this Government, indeterminate sentences would still be in place. I do not think that he would ever have got rid of them, and some of the measures in this Bill are trying to undo the damage that was done by getting rid of those sentences in the first place. I am delighted that he has had the courage to revisit some of the issues that his predecessor failed on.

I say that I support the Government, and I do; I support this Bill wholeheartedly. However, as we have heard from other speakers, when we have legislation as extensive as this Bill—it is quite a wide-ranging piece of legislation—there will always be areas where one thinks the Government could have gone further, areas where there are missed opportunities and areas where one might have a few reservations. I am no different from other hon. Members in all those respects. I hope not to take too long, but I will go through a few of the areas where I particularly support the Government, where there have been missed opportunities, and where I have reservations, many of which I hope can be dealt with in Committee or on Report, so that in the end we have a much better Bill.

On clauses 1 to 3, anything that toughens up sentencing for criminals, particularly dangerous criminals, will always have my full support, so I am very pleased that the maximum sentence for certain dangerous offences is being increased to life imprisonment. Terrorists are a great threat to our national security, and measures to prevent them from carrying out their terrible crimes certainly have my full support.

With regard to clauses 24 to 28, I see no real problems with single magistrates dealing with very simple matters that do not require a bench of three to deliberate over. Should anyone object to the measure, I note the safeguards that are in place. I am pleased that single magistrates will deal only with straightforward and minor offences, such as television licence evasion. That should not be a criminal offence anyway, because a licence should not be forced on people; paying for a subscription should be a matter of personal choice, but that is a debate for a different day. Single magistrates will also deal with things like road tax evasion cases.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman talks about road tax evasion; he is presumably aware that road tax was scrapped in the 1930s.

[Philip Davies]

I am not entirely sure what the hon. Gentleman is on about, but people do evade their road tax.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill]

Their vehicle excise duty.

[Philip Davies]

Their vehicle excise duty. I am afraid that the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) has reinforced his reputation for concentrating on the things that are not important, and not concentrating on the things that are.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

I certainly will not give way to the hon. Gentleman again. We have wasted enough time on his nonsense; we will not waste any more on it. I have learned a lesson tonight: not to give way to him. Many people learned that lesson a long time ago, but in my naivety I had yet to learn it. I have learned it now.

I was making a point about single magistrates. The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) expressed a reservation about the provision being extended to cover more than just the most basic and simple crimes. I share that concern. A system of single magistrates will never be appropriate for cases such as shoplifting, because magistrates have very different ideas about what should happen to offenders, particularly persistent offenders, in those types of cases. I hope that the power will not be extended. I sometimes worry that when a power is granted, it will be the thin end of the wedge and the power will be rapidly extended to other areas. I hope that will not be the case for this power. It will be introduced for very basic offences, and I hope it will stop there, and not be extended.

On clauses 37 to 39 and 40 to 48, I understand the concerns that have perhaps influenced the introduction of the new offences relating to jurors, especially given changes in technology. We already have the Contempt of Court Act 1981, so I am not entirely sure how necessary some of the measures are, but they may well be necessary.

I note the reasons given for increasing the maximum age of jurors from 70 to 75. I could not agree more with the rationale for that change, but I am tempted to table an amendment—my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) mentioned this—to extend the change to magistrates and judges. I cannot see any difference between a juror of that age being able to determine the guilt or innocence of somebody in a serious criminal trial, and a member of a bench of magistrates or a judge of that age passing sentence. I do not really see why a person is capable of doing one of those things between the ages of 70 and 75, but not the others.

As the Ministry of Justice helpfully explained,

“According to the latest figures published by the Office for National Statistics, the healthy life expectancy of both men and women at age 65 is at least 10 years in England and Wales.

The existing age limit for jury service, which was set in 1988, does not reflect the current health of older people. Official figures show that healthy life expectancy of 65 year olds in England and Wales has risen since 2000.

We believe the selection of jurors should reflect that fact.”

If that is the case for jurors, presumably the case is exactly the same for magistrates and judges. There would be a cost saving if we extended the measure to magistrates, as they can claim for loss of earnings when they sit, and clearly magistrates who are aged 70 to 75 are less likely to be earning, or concerned with covering their loss of earnings, than those who are younger. Magistrates would still be subject to appraisals, so their competence would not be an issue. I have raised the issue of increasing the age limit before in this place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) once pointed out, it was ironic that the then Lord Chancellor, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), was past the retirement age for the magistrates of whom he was in charge. The amendment that I would like to see would rectify that anomaly.

I very much welcome the changes relating to judicial review. I hope that they mean that we will have less interference with decisions by judges who hear such cases. Parliament should set the law. Very often, as people will know, I do not particularly agree with Parliament’s decisions, but that is the price of democracy: sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. Parliament should set the laws of the land, and judges should implement the law as it stands. I do not like—we have seen this far too often in recent years—judges thinking that they should determine the law. If judges want to decide what the law is, they should give up being judges and put themselves up for election like everybody else. If they are not prepared to do that, they should accept the will of Parliament, whether they—or I—like it or not.

On clauses 29 to 31, I certainly understand the principle in the Bill that criminals should contribute to the costs of running courts. I note that the proposed criminal courts charge means that in future, somebody could be ordered in court to pay the following financial penalties: a fine; a victim surcharge; compensation; prosecution costs; and now this extra courts charge. The victim surcharge, which is basically a tax on offenders, has been a rather unhelpful development, particularly when it applies to people who are being sent to prison for long periods of time. When it was first introduced, for most offences, it was levied in cases where there was no victim. It seems bizarre that the victim surcharge was paid by offenders solely in cases where there was no victim. If the courts charge replaced the victim surcharge, that might make more sense. I certainly agree with the principle of making offenders pay; I just have reservations about how these things tend to work in practice.

[Kate Green]

I am slightly puzzled by what the hon. Gentleman says. My understanding was that the victim surcharge was applied on a case-by-case basis—

[Philip Davies]

indicated dissent.

[Kate Green]

I advise the hon. Gentleman that when I was a magistrate sitting on the bench, we applied the surcharge, as part of our sentencing decision, with regard to individual cases. Does he agree that there should be a pecking order when it comes to how payments are applied? We should put the victim surcharge and compensation payments to particular victims ahead of recompense for the cost of the court.

[Philip Davies]

I am all for making sure that the victim is at the head of the queue when it comes to payments, but the victim surcharge was specifically targeted by the previous Government at offences in which there were no victims. That is the fact of the matter, whether the hon. Lady recalls it that way or not.

I welcome the sentiment behind the changes to release on licence. I am pleased to see any proposals that mean that more of the sentence given by the court is served by offenders. In fact, I have long argued that the sentence given by the court should be served in full by offenders, and that people should not be released early for good behaviour—they should be kept in longer for bad behaviour. At the very least, offenders should not be released automatically halfway through their sentence. That was an absolute scandal that was introduced by the previous Government. I would like to see the Bill go further to rectify that, but I appreciate the point made by the Secretary of State that even though he cannot rectify it in full, he wants to make a start in doing so, and I support him in that.

According to research carried out by Lord Ashcroft, more than 80% of the public think that sentences should be served in full. I cannot improve on the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who spoke earlier today. On Second Reading of the Bill that became the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, he said, as shadow Secretary of State:

“We have said that there should be a policy of honesty in sentencing. The fight against crime depends on integrity in the criminal justice system and on courts that deliver swift, effective justice, with punishments appropriate to the crime and the criminal. In the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the Government introduced automatic release on licence halfway through the sentence for all determinate sentences of longer than 12 months…If this were our Bill, we would introduce provisions to restore honesty in sentencing, in order to reassure victims and leave criminals in no doubt that justice is done.”—[Official Report, 8 October 2007; Vol. 464, c. 79.]

I think that many people went out and voted Conservative at the last general election on the basis that we would restore that honesty to sentencing. The provision is a small step in that direction, but a welcome one. I should like the Government to make clear their intention to remove early release altogether. I appreciate that coalition restraints often do not make such things possible, but I am bound to say that this does not go far enough.

I am pleased that, under clause 6 offenders could be ordered to be subject to compulsory electronic monitoring. I am a big fan of electronic monitoring, particularly monitoring that uses tracking technology, which I hope will have an effect both as a deterrent against future crime and as a means of convicting and punishing those who reoffend while on licence. Similarly, I welcome the changes to the recall of prisoners released on licence, but with some reservations, as the changes do not go nearly far enough. The fixed-term recall, in which the offender is returned to prison for breaching their licence for just 28 days—not, as most people would expect, the rest of the period of their original sentence—is a very bad law. It means not only that offenders are released early but that they are released extremely early again if they fail to abide by their licence conditions both the first time round and if they reoffend. That is outrageous, and the Government need to clamp down on it.

For life sentences, the proposed changes could be going in the right direction, but I still believe that life should mean life. I have highlighted that many times: in my view and that of most of the constituents I speak to there should be no release of a prisoner sent to prison for life. We would not have to deal with the issue of release after the recall of a life prisoner if we did not release life prisoners in first place. The issue of prisoners absconding or not returning to custody is something I have been concerned about for a while. As I mentioned earlier, anything that increases sentencing or toughens up the current position is something I shall happily support. The new offence created by the Bill and the increased penalties for the existing offence are changes that certainly have my support. I only wish we were not releasing people who went on to reoffend or breach their conditions.

Figures I obtained from parliamentary questions show the alarmingly high number of absconds and people not returned to custody after recall. The most persistent are murderers and attempted murderers. Not only my constituents but people up and down the country are asking why on earth we release so many of these murderers on licence.

Cautions were mentioned by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), and I agree with him. For some time, I have highlighted, along with him, the use of cautions for very serious offences. I am pleased that the Bill seeks to address the issue. It is worth repeating that a caution is given only when an individual accepts responsibility for the crime—they admit that they are guilty—so their use for serious indictable offences has naturally concerned me and many others. I welcome the curbing of the use of repeat cautions, which has always seemed bizarre to me. A person is given a warning for doing something, they do it again, and instead of being sent to court to face the music, some people are given yet another warning, and yet another warning, and even another warning after that. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, recent Ministry of Justice figures apparently showed that 62,000 offenders given a caution in the 12 months to March 2013 had already received a caution previously. The figures also showed that 8,800 criminals who were handed a caution last year had accepted at least one caution for the same offence previously. Perhaps more staggering is the fact that an offender in Northumbria had been given cautions on 50 occasions, and over 50% of persistent offenders do not receive immediate custody. This is an absolute scandal and makes a mockery of the criminal justice system, so I welcome these changes.

I will not detain the House on the issue of young offenders, but I would like some clarification that the proposals will apply equally to boys as well as girls. I would not want to support any proposal that treats them differently, particularly when they have committed the same offence.

I will certainly be tabling an amendment to extend the time limit for an appeal by the Attorney-General against an unduly lenient sentence. I am concerned that the strict 28-day deadline has been, and could be in future, missed in some serious cases. Victims and the public in general need to have confidence in the judicial system, and in the case of an unduly lenient sentence, if the deadline is missed simply because the victim was not made aware of it in time and so did not ask for it to be referred, that confidence could be undermined. I understand the desire to have these things treated quickly, so I would not be looking for an extremely lengthy extension of time. I pay tribute to Jean Taylor and the campaign group Families Fighting for Justice, who have done a lot of work campaigning on this issue. I hope that the Government will be responsive to an extension, perhaps to 90 days, for the most serious offence where people are in custody for a long time, but perhaps not long enough given the seriousness of the offence. I hope that the Government will look favourably upon such an amendment.

I would also like the Bill to end the ludicrous position where time spent on a tagged curfew is credited as if it was time spent on remand in prison. In 2008, on the subject of allowing a curfew whilst on bail to count as credit towards a prison sentence, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), speaking as the shadow Minister said:

“If someone has committed an offence that crosses the custody threshold—an offence that is serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence—it will cause a great deal of scepticism, undermine public confidence in the justice system and make the Government look increasingly ridiculous if the court is then required to say, ‘By the way, all the time that you have spent at home in bed is time that can be taken away from your custodial sentence.’”—[Official Report, 9 January 2008; Vol. 470, c. 369.]

I agreed with his comments then and I still agree with them now. He was absolutely right to say that when the last Government introduced this ridiculous rule. I hope that the Government, even if they will not do it in this Bill, will seek the earliest opportunity to scrap that ridiculous state of affairs.

I would also like to have seen magistrates allowed to sentence people to prison for up to 12 months for one offence, instead of the current six-month limit. The Conservative party was committed to that at the last election and it is something that I certainly still support. Magistrates have the power to sentence offenders to prison for 12 months for two or more either-way offences and nobody seems concerned about that. There is a possibility that this measure may also cut the cost of our judicial system by allowing more cases to be dealt with in the cheaper magistrates courts compared with the more expensive Crown courts.

I would also like to see consideration given in the Bill to making judges accountable for their decisions, particularly where they do not hand down custodial sentences that would be perfectly justifiable and possibly even expected, and where the offender then goes on to re-offend. I do not think I need to say now what the consequences of the collection of this information should be, but it should be quite clear to many that there should be consequences for a judge who consistently allows offenders to avoid prison, if those offenders go on to make others suffer as a result of their continuing crime sprees. At the very least there should be some assessment of their ability to perform their role.

I talked about boy and girl offenders earlier and I would also like to place on record my continued interest in seeing male and female offenders treated in the same way, particularly when they are convicted of the same offences. That should apply not just for sentencing purposes but for all aspects of the criminal justice system. I am pleased that it is becoming increasingly accepted that women are treated far more leniently than men in the criminal justice system, and that needs to be addressed.

I would like the Bill to have included the principle of a sentencing escalator. The principle was proposed in a private Member’s Bill introduced by my hon. Friends the Members for Kettering and for Bury North (Mr Nuttall). It is extremely popular with the public. Thanks to polling carried out by Lord Ashcroft, we know that it has the support of at least 67% of the British public. The British public clearly think, as I do, that if someone commits an offence and then does it again, the punishment on the second occasion should be more severe than the punishment on the first, and that the punishment on a third occasion should be more severe than the punishment on the second. I would like the Government to make progress on that.

Despite those omissions, on which I would like to see the Government make progress, either in this Bill or in future, the Bill can still be seen as a substantial step forward for the criminal justice system in this country, and the Government and the Secretary of State should be commended for that. Even when the Bill reaches the statute book—hopefully with some of the amendments I propose—I will still be here on the Back Benches urging the Government to go much further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me in this important debate. For far too many years we have had a tradition of Governments—Conservative and Labour—trying to talk tough on crime and repeatedly aiming for the tabloid commentary, rather than dealing with the underlying causes of crime. That is why I am pleased that we are taking a different approach now, ensuring that we work on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending and initial offending, and tackling the causes of crime together with other Departments. That is an important process and it is good to have restorative justice and various things such as that in the proposals.

The mark of a good and functioning society is low prison numbers and low crime, not how many people we can fit into prison. In 1980, the prison population was 44,000. The then Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, described that as “dangerously high”, yet we saw numbers continue to rise year after year, helped of course by the previous Government’s 3,600 new criminal offences. We saw a huge 54% increase in the prison population under the previous Government, who wanted to increase capacity to 96,000—almost two and a half times the number described by Willie Whitelaw as “dangerously high”. That is deeply alarming.

It is not just me who thinks that the previous Government made a huge mistake. It is good to see the shadow Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) back in his place. He has said:

“in office…it was a mistake to not focus more on the issue of reducing reoffending. We became hesitant in talking about rehabilitation and the merits of investment in bringing down re-offending rates. We got into the position whereby a focus on rehabilitation and reducing re-offending was seen as being soft on crime when in fact it is effective in reducing crime.”

He was right then—he clearly had not been previously—and it is good that this Government are acting on that, because it does make a huge difference. What we saw was a Government who jailed more people than anywhere else in Europe just to sound tough. We can take a better approach that will reduce crime, and that makes a big difference.

That applies to young people in particular. It is astonishing to look at the figures for young people. We have managed almost to halve the number of children serving custodial sentences, from 2,136 in May 2010 to 1,168 in December 2013. I am incredibly proud of that. In 2009, 600 children aged between 12 and 14 were locked up, some for summary offences. There may well be rare cases where somebody as young as 12 should be locked up, but they should be incredibly rare and I find it bizarre that hundreds of children suffered in that way. The Howard League for Penal Reform states:

“the refreshing approach of police forces across England and Wales to reduce the number of unnecessary child arrests, has allowed a renewed focus on crime prevention and alternatives to custody. Youth justice reinvestment pilots in Manchester and inner London boroughs have also shown how investment in diversion rather than criminal justice can yield benefits in terms of public safety.”

We can make the public safer and not lock children up.

[Philip Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Huppert]

No. We heard enough from the hon. Gentleman in his rather long speech earlier. I know he disagrees with Churchill. He probably finds Churchill far too liberal for his own tastes, as he probably was when he criticised road tax.

What I do not want to see is children and young people languishing in detention and coming out and reoffending. That is absolutely not the right thing to do. It is not right for anybody—the Offender Rehabilitation Bill aims to help people with short sentences, which will help—but it is particularly the case for young people. I was pleased to hear the Justice Secretary and the Deputy Prime Minister say that we will double the time that young offenders spend in education from 15 hours a week to 30 hours a week by 2015. That was a manifesto commitment we made in 2010—the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) very much remembers that—and something that we are delivering. It makes a difference. Education is a really important thing for these people, so that they can leave custody with skills and an education they can build on.

The secure college has to have an educational focus and that is what makes it good and worthwhile. By making it progressive rather than punitive, we will really engage with people, give them skills and help them to have a life later that does not involve going into crime. Many of these young people are vulnerable and damaged. We have to provide them with care and support in a safe and secure environment to help turn them back into citizens who will reintegrate into the community on release.

That is all very good, but I have some concerns that I will explore in Committee. Schedule 4 allows restraint to

“secure good order and discipline”.

That sounds worryingly Victorian. The courts have already said that that is not appropriate. I hope we can have clarity from the Government on what exactly is intended. I hope that that is not the intention of this Government.

Before I leave the subject of the number of people in prison, it is worth highlighting the changes in the female prison population, which has declined substantially. It was more than 4,000 when we came into office; it is now substantially below 4,000. That makes a big difference. Women’s prisons will become resettlement prisons, so that offenders serve their sentences as close to home as possible to maintain crucial family relationships, especially with children. There are times when women need to be punished in this way, but we need to help to ensure that afterwards they are able to engage better into society and do not suffer the problems that they could be left with.

I am concerned about the criminal courts charge. I heard what the Justice Secretary said, but I am still concerned that it will end up being unenforceable and skew the way our system works. Justice has made it clear that it is

“concerned that the imposition of a charge may have an unfair bearing on the exercise of a person’s right to plead not guilty, and therefore the presumption of innocence.”

How will it apply to appeals? Will people not be able to take advantage of their right of appeal because of concern about cost?

I was interested by what the Justice Secretary said about the £1.4 billion that was owed to the Courts and Tribunals Service. He talked a lot about dead people; I did not fully understand what he was saying. However, if another charge is added to the list, given that he said that that this would be the lowest priority, far less of it will be collected than the 80% that goes to the top priority. That seems obvious, because it will decay faster and faster.

The Justice Secretary said that if people did not reoffend, the charge would be written off. I should like to know more about how that would operate, but, again, far less would be collected. I am also very concerned about how the charge could be recovered without disproportionate enforcement costs, particularly in relation to the contractors involved. I am also worried about whether there is sufficient discretion in the process.

I am still concerned about tagging. I believe that there have still been no successful prosecutions for violations of tagging curfews when people have challenged the prosecutions and pleaded not guilty. Professor Ross Anderson of the University of Cambridge and others have been expert witnesses in cases that have been dropped on the basis of their evidence, because the tags have been proved not to be sufficiently reliable. I should have thought that there were better ways of spending money, especially given that the tags are not satisfactory.

I am very pleased that the Justice Secretary has given ground on judicial review. Many of us have been pressing him on that for some time, and I am glad that he has now taken some sensible steps. It is really important for ordinary people to be able to challenge the Government. We need transparency, and the Government are pushing for it; shielding the Government from legal challenge by clamping down on judicial review would run completely contrary to that. However, I am still concerned about the changes in relation to interveners. Third parties add important value and expertise to cases, at great cost to themselves and in the wider public interest. I did not think that the Justice Secretary addressed my concern about cases in which people intervene, as opposed to cases involving the “human shield” that he described. That is not the only kind of case involved.

Courts already have strong powers to control interveners. They accept only interventions that are in the public interest. Baroness Hale, the deputy president of the Supreme Court, has said:

“Once a matter is in court, the more important the subject, the more difficult the issues, the more help we”

—the judges—

“need to try and get the right answer… interventions are enormously helpful… . They usually supply arguments and authorities, rather than factual information, which the parties may not have supplied.”

Interveners play a very important role, but the Bill would require them to bear not just their own costs—which are not recouped, which I understand—but those of other parties whose involvement results from their intervention. The application of that could be incredibly broad. If someone intervened and that person’s intervention generated extra work to be done by someone else, the intervener would be billed for all of it. That would deter experts from giving useful and potentially instrumental evidence. We would shoot ourselves in the foot: court decisions would become worse, as the courts themselves have said.

The courts already have discretion to control who intervenes, how people intervene, and for how long they can intervene, and they can fine interveners whose interventions are unreasonable. That strikes me as a sensible balance. I think that the Bill goes too far in clamping down on interventions, and I hope that the Government will look at it more carefully. I understand that there may be cases in which intervention is inappropriate, but the Government must protect appropriate and important interventions,

There is much else that we shall need to consider in Committee, because the Bill contains a great deal of detailed material, but I think that the focus is right. I welcome much of what the Government are doing, but I think that they should concentrate even less on how many people can be locked up, and more on how much crime can be reduced.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Slaughter]

Indeed, but the Lord Chancellor has at least managed to make both of them happy, and he should be praised for that, if for nothing else.

I want to make specific mention of the contributions from my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd), who made robust defences of judicial review and of open justice. They correctly echoed the view expressed in the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s briefing that judicial review is

“used rarely by community groups in relation to planning decisions because it is costly and a significant and daunting undertaking.”

No one would imagine that, from what the Government have said today.

I shall take my cue from my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington and the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd in dealing first with the most contentious and objectionable part of the Bill—part 4, which covers judicial review. What is it about this Lord Chancellor and judicial review that the mention of it makes him behave in an irrational and unreasonable way? He has taken to the columns of the Daily Mail to denounce one of our most important constitutional safeguards as

“a promotional tool for countless Left-wing campaigners.”

It is unclear whether those left-wing campaigners include the Countryside Alliance, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, UKIP’s Stuart Wheeler and numerous Conservative councils, all of whom have initiated judicial reviews in recent times. However, the senior judiciary’s response to the Lord Chancellor’s consultation shot that particular fox when it stated that it had seen no

“evidence of inappropriate use of judicial review as a campaigning tool, and it is not the experience of the senior judiciary that this is a common problem.”

The Lord Chancellor has already taken bites out of judicial review by imposing additional fees and limiting the time for bringing a claim, in some cases to six weeks. He is also going to restrict the use of legal aid by statutory instrument, rather than through primary legislation. He would wish to hobble applicants more by restricting the recovery of costs until beyond the permission stage and allowing defendants to intervene at that stage with the prospect of recovering their costs. The Bill contains a variety of additional ways to discourage judicial review by increasing applicants’ costs or putting them at risk of paying defendants’ costs. Protective costs orders will not be abolished, but they will be available only in narrow circumstances and once permission is granted.

The worst aspects are in clauses 50 and 53, attacking both the raison d’être of judicial review to correct Executive error in decision making and the ability of third parties to intervene in the public interest and to assist the court. Already heavily criticised, the new test in clause 50 refuses permission where it is “highly likely” the outcome for the applicant

“would not have been substantially different if the conduct complained of had not occurred”.

This confuses unlawfulness with remedy. It will encourage bad decision making and it is likely to lead to a full trial of the issues at permission stage. Lord Pannick, in an article that has already been quoted today, has said that the clause will give the Government a

“get out of jail free card”,

and allow public bodies to

“avoid a hearing and judgment on the legality of their conduct.”

Under clause 53, third parties—often non-governmental organisations, charities and human rights organisations—that intervene in judicial reviews to clarify issues that often assist the court will now be severely discouraged from doing so by cost penalties. Yet Lady Justice Hale of the Supreme Court has said that

“interventions are enormously helpful…The most frequent are NGOs such as Liberty and Justice, whose commitment is usually to a principle rather than a person. They usually supply arguments and authorities, rather than factual information, which the parties may not have supplied.”

In aggregate, these proposals mean that only applicants of substantial means will be able to bring a claim or risk the costs of losing it. In a country without a written constitution, judicial review is one important way of holding the Executive to account. This Government want to insulate their bad decision making from legal challenge and place themselves outside the rule of law. They are strengthening Executive power and weakening a critical check on the power of the state. This Lord Chancellor, for misguided party political motives and as part of a sustained attack on access to justice, is undermining our civil liberties, and these changes should be against everything the Liberal Democrats stand for. Under this Government, seeking justice is getting harder and these proposals show them on the side of their corporate friends, not of individual citizens and communities. Politicians in power might find judicial review an awkward irritant, but that is precisely what it is intended to be. Combined with the cuts to legal aid, limitations on no win, no fee cases, and threats to the Human Rights Act and European convention, this proposal amounts to a sustained attack on the rights of individual citizens to hold those in power to account. As the President of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger puts it,

“one must be very careful about any proposals whose aim is to cut down the right to judicial review”.

He has also said:

“The courts have no more important function than that of protecting citizens from the abuses and excesses of the executive.”

We have serious concerns about other parts of the Bill. As they stand, the plans for secure colleges may prove damaging to thousands of young offenders in our criminal justice system. The Bill leaves a question mark over the future of secure children’s homes, which cater for the most vulnerable young people. Such homes typically house small numbers of children, provide intensive support and are staffed by highly qualified specialists in social care. The homes have good educational outcomes and are recognised as the preferred model of youth custody, but they look set to lose out to the Lord Chancellor’s new and untested pet project. It is untested according to the Government’s own impact assessment, but still £85 million is needed to build just one secure college.

The Justice Committee pointed out in its report last March that the average time in youth custody is only 79 days, so most young offenders would not be in a college long enough to improve their basic skills. What levels of training or qualification would the college staff have? Why will college custody officers be empowered to use “reasonable force” for the maintenance of “good order and discipline”? That may well be unlawful under the European convention on human rights, according to a Court of Appeal 2008 ruling and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which stated in 2007:

“Restraint or force can be used only when the child poses an imminent threat of injury to him or herself or others, and only when all other means of control have been exhausted. The use of restraint or force, including physical, mechanical and medical restraints, should be under close and direct control of a medical and/or psychological professional. It must never be used as a means of punishment.”

As regards part 3 of the Bill, we support the use of single justices, given that their jurisdiction will apply only to summary, non-imprisonable offences where an adult defendant pleads guilty. However, we object strongly to taking these cases out of the courtroom and into offices away from public view. Such an approach damages the principle of British justice that cases are heard and the results made known in public. This Government are too fond of secret courts, and even in minor cases the principle of open justice should be rarely departed from. We agree in principle that convicted criminals could contribute to the costs of trial, but the substantial amount of uncollected fines from criminals already totals more than £1 billion and it is likely that this proposal will just add to the total of uncollected moneys from criminals. We have no objection in principle to leapfrog appeals, for example, on issues of national importance, though they are most likely to be used by government trying to hurry the process up. The danger is that this simply overloads the Supreme Court and that the issues it has to deal with are insufficiently refined by earlier hearings.

It is a good idea to update the jury room process and the rules on reporting cases to accommodate the social media age. The Attorney-General is to be commended for taking a personal interest in the limitations on reporting and in discouraging jurors from using social media to research or publicise details of trials. However, the Government fail to provide any support to juries in explaining their roles and remit as part of any new offences, and it is not clear whether they have considered the full implications of the numbers of people using social media and the variety of methods available. We have no objection to raising the age of jury service to 75.

There are two glaring problems with part 1 of the Bill. It does not do what it says on the tin, which is to protect the public adequately from violent and dangerous offenders, but it does incur costs and prison resources that the Government do not have in place. I fear that the hon. Member for Shipley may have been slightly taken in by the rhetoric rather the actuality of what is in part 1. The changes to sentences for the most serious and violent criminals are a poor substitute for indeterminate sentences for public protection, which this Government abolished in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012—[Interruption.] I do like to mention that, because it is the one thing that we both agree on.

[Philip Davies]

Absolutely.

[Mr Slaughter]

I am afraid that the Government have been playing catch-up ever since IPPs were abolished, but none of what is proposed offers the same level of public protection. The Government’s own impact assessment states that the sentencing changes will require 1,050 additional prison places, but there are fewer than half that currently available. It also states that the costs of additional custody are not quantified. We noted with concern the Lord Chancellor’s inability to answer any of the questions about his Department’s budgets. Proposals in part 1 will also see a greater work load for the Parole Board, with an additional 1,100 Parole Board hearings a year, according to the Government’s impact assessment. However, no additional resources are being made available, at a time when Parole Board staff numbers have already been cut by nearly one in five.

We support the ban on the possession of extreme pornographic images depicting rape and other non-consensual sexual penetration. That is a welcome victory for campaign groups such as Rape Crisis South London and the End Violence Against Women Coalition. We support the restrictions on the use of simple cautions.

Criminal justice Bills have a reputation for being Christmas tree Bills, and this one is no different. It is a mixture of the minor and non-contentious with some major, damaging and poorly thought-out measures, such as those in part 4, which, if they survive here, will be butchered in the other place.

This is also quite a mean little Bill, reflecting the character of its author. It further limits the rights of the citizen against the state, and it scratches around to find some more savings because the Treasury has been overpromised. Desperate to impress the Prime Minister, this is the best that the Secretary of State could come up with. Much of it is unexceptional or unobjectionable. It is legislation for legislation’s sake, and is designed to fill an intellectual and actual void in the Government’s programme. It is irrelevant to the big issues being played out in our justice system. It reinforces the growing view in the country that it is time for this failing Lord Chancellor and this Government to move on.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Gentleman is right to focus on this issue. Every one of those cases is a very real personal tragedy and a worrying sign for the system, but that does not mean that we should react in the wrong way. I think it is appropriate that we think very carefully about what level of investigation is necessary. I can tell the hon. Gentleman, as he may already know, that, in relation to each death, a variety of different investigations take place both internally within the prison system and from the coroner, and, in many cases, from others too. That does not mean, however, that there is not perhaps a case for looking more broadly at what wider lessons can be learned. That is exactly what we are considering at the moment. It is what I am applying my mind to now. I will let him know as soon as I can what we think the right conclusions should be.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

4. What recent discussions he has had with judges on the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights on whole-life tariffs.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)]

I have had no recent discussions with the judiciary about the Strasbourg Court judgment in Vinter and others about whole-life orders. The reason for that is that the Government have been arguing in the Court of Appeal that whole-life tariffs are wholly justified in the most heinous cases. That process is continuing and we await the Court’s decision with interest.

[Philip Davies]

Mr Justice Sweeney has already refused to give a whole-life tariff to a murderer due to a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, and he has deferred the sentencing for the murderers of Drummer Lee Rigby, who most right-thinking people think should get a whole-life tariff. When are we going to withdraw from the European convention on human rights and the increasingly barmy European Court of Human Rights, so that we can ensure that a life sentence means a life sentence for the murderers of Lee Rigby?

[Chris Grayling]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s sentiments. We have gone to the Court of Appeal to ensure we can continue to give whole-life tariffs in this country. My view is that this should always be a matter for Parliament, but as he knows, while we have good collaborative relationships across the coalition and while we agree on many things, there are some things we do not agree on, and this is one of them, so I am afraid that wholesale change to our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights, which I personally think is urgently needed, will have to await the election of a majority Conservative Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Damian Green)]

I will happily discuss that issue with the National Crime Agency, which is in overall charge of that area, and will write to the hon. Gentleman with the results of my investigation.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

T6. Does the Secretary of State agree that prisoners released on licence who reoffend or breach the terms of their licence should serve the remaining part of their original sentence in prison in full? If he agrees, what is he doing to ensure that that always happens? If he does not agree, why not?

[Chris Grayling]

As my hon. Friend knows, I have a lot of sympathy with him on these matters in areas such as breach of licence and automatic early release. For resource reasons, I cannot do everything that he would like me to do, but when he reads the Bill that is due to be laid before this House tomorrow, he will find things in it that are at least a step in the right direction.

Women Offenders and Older Prisoners

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I rise rather apologetically to my feet again, but taking the two reports together at least spares the Chamber a third speech from me this afternoon. I shall present the two reports in this speech. I do so with a heavy heart in one sense, because one or two Members who would have spoken in the debate are not able to do so, as they are at the funeral of our late colleague, Paul Goggins. He took such a close interest in criminal justice and had so much experience of it that I regularly tried to persuade him to join the Justice Committee, but he was already committed in a number of other ways, including as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Our Committee missed out on having the benefit of his considerable wisdom, which we would have greatly appreciated.

This debate is on two reports that we produced this Session on groups of people who are minorities in the criminal justice system, but whose circumstances and needs place particular demands on that system, which is really geared towards dealing with young men. We wanted to examine the extent to which policy and practice are responding effectively to the needs of women offenders and older prisoners.

Older prisoners are the fastest growing group in the prison population, and our inquiry focused primarily, but not exclusively, on their treatment in prison. In our inquiry on women offenders, we looked at provision in the custodial state, where there are 3,845 women in a total prison population of 84,000, and more widely, including community provision for offenders and ex-offenders, and for women and girls at risk of offending. The Minister, whom we are glad to have here, will respond to the debate and cover both subjects. I shall return later to ministerial responsibility, particularly for women offenders, because that has been an issue.

All this goes back to 2006, when Baroness Corston was commissioned by the Home Office to examine what could be done to avoid women with particular vulnerabilities ending up in prison. That was prompted by the death of six women in Styal prison. Her report, published the following year, identified three categories of vulnerabilities for women: those relating to domestic circumstances and problems, such as domestic violence, child care issues and being a single parent; those relating to personal circumstances, such as mental illness, low self-esteem, eating disorders and substance misuse; and socio-economic factors such as poverty, isolation and employment.

The Corston report made 43 recommendations. I shall not go through all of them, but they included improvements to the way in which the issue was dealt with at Government level, the reservation of custodial sentences and remand for serious and violent women offenders, and the use of small local custodial centres within 10 years. They also included improvements to prison conditions, making community sentences the norm, and improvements in health services and support for women offenders. The then Government accepted 41 of the 43 recommendations.

There is much common ground on policy on women offenders. There appears to be fairly wide, although not universal, agreement that the majority of women offenders pose a limited risk, or no risk at all, to public safety, and that imprisonment is frequently an ineffective response. That is not about treating women more favourably or implying that they are less culpable, but about how to respond appropriately to the kinds of problems that women bring to the criminal justice system, and about what action is required to be effective in addressing their offending behaviour. In many cases, that is different from what is required to achieve the same thing in men.

It should be recognised that important progress has been made on the Corston recommendations. As has been illustrated by reports from the Howard League, the Prison Reform Trust, the prison and probation inspectorates and the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system, that includes better prison regimes, the ending of strip searching, reduction of self-harm, the establishment of a network of women’s centres, and acknowledging the need for differential treatment. However, levels of imprisonment for non-violent female offenders remain high, as do levels of self-harm by women. A study published before Christmas showed that there is still 10 times more self-harm among women prisoners than among their male counterparts.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I wonder on what basis the right hon. Gentleman claims that the majority of women offenders in prison are either not violent or not dangerous. Let me give a snapshot of the prison population. There are 3,477 women in prison, and murder, manslaughter, other violence against the person, sexual offences, robbery, burglary, arson, blackmail and kidnapping account for half the female prison population. Which of those categories is he saying is not a serious offence and involves people who are not dangerous to the public?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I chose my words carefully. I said not that women were put in prison for offences that were not serious—courts would normally regard either the offence or the fact that they are repeat offences as a serious matter, underlining their decision to give a custodial sentence—but that many of the women, if they were not in prison and were otherwise effectively supervised, would not constitute a danger to the public. That is not true of them all, which is why there will always be some women in prison, some for very long periods, but those numbers will be relatively small.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The first report to which the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) comprehensively referred surveyed the provision for female offenders within the system in England and Wales, with the particular aim of finding out what had happened since the landmark report by Baroness Corston in March 2007. By and large, the Justice Committee was disappointed to learn that the Government were still not investing enough resources in tackling the causes of female offending, as opposed to helping women already involved in the system. The Government have made progress in several areas, but the Committee warned that

“there is little to signal a radical shift in thinking”

about what generating a whole-system approach actually meant for tackling female offending.

As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has said, since the inquiry was announced the Government have appointed a ministerial champion for women in the criminal justice system, announced a review of the female custodial estate and published their priorities for women offenders. That is all to the good, except that we are now suffering a hiatus because the former member of our Committee who held that post of ministerial champion has moved on. I have no doubt that the current Minister will respond in due course to the points that the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has made. I say in passing that the Minister must have been a very bad man in a past life, considering all the briefs that he has had to deal with this week. I am pleased to see him in his place.

There is a fear that progress may be undermined by the reforms—here we go again—to offender management and rehabilitation in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill, which is currently passing through Parliament. In the debate on Report on Tuesday evening, we had a short debate about Government amendment 7, which introduced the need to comply with the Equality Act 2010 and the need for the Secretary of State to identify anything in the arrangements that was intended to meet the particular needs of female offenders. As I said on Tuesday evening, I think that is all to the good. That triggered a response from the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) that stunned the Chamber into complete silence. He said, in effect, that he thought women were treated more leniently in the system than men.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will make his own speech, and we will listen intently to what he has to say, but I have to tell him that there is little support for what he says. He seems to have missed an important point, namely, that sentencing a woman to custody has profound consequences that may not arise in cases involving men. There are questions about housing and care for children; there is the possibility of children being taken into care; and, overall, a huge wave of anguish surrounds such families. It should be noted that those additional and serious consequences will present even when a woman is given a very short sentence. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has said, often that is the case, but the damage is still done.

I believe that we must treat women differently for those and other reasons. That was the basic ratonale for our research and report. We are seeking not necessarily the soft option but the appropriate option, which I for one would like to see implemented. I am sure that there are ways of doing it, and if we concentrate on the special problems that arise when women are sentenced to custody, I am sure that we will be able to improve the situation drastically.

I am not going to deal with the whole report, obviously, but I would like to highlight one or two issues arising from it. On trends in women’s offending and sentencing, the Committee agreed that women required a distinct approach from those who engaged with them in the criminal justice system. As I have said, we found that women tended to be the subject of shorter community orders and were less likely to be sentenced to custody than men. In 2011, 3% of females were sentenced to immediate custody, compared to 10% of males. That is partly to do with the types of offence commonly committed by women. Our report states:

“In the 12 months to June 2012, 81% of women entering custody under sentence had committed non-violent offences, compared with 71% of men.”

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I have here figures from the Ministry of Justice that were provided in a written answer to a parliamentary question I asked, so I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will accept them. Does he accept that for every single category of offence, a man is more likely than a women to be sent to prison? The figures on that point are laid out starkly by the Ministry of Justice.

[Mr Llwyd]

If the official figures show that, I am not in a position to argue with the hon. Gentleman, but does he accept that 81% of women entering custody under sentence have committed non-violent offences and are therefore not a danger to the community? Perhaps he will address that when he makes his speech.

[Philip Davies]

I will.

[Mr Llwyd]

Okay. Our report goes on to state that

“over half (52%) of women sentenced had committed petty offences”—

relatively petty—

“related to theft and the handling of stolen goods, compared with one-third (33%) of men. In addition, over a quarter (26%) of women sentenced to imprisonment had no previous convictions, more than double the figure for men (12%).”

The Select Committee agreed that the majority of women offenders posed very little risk to public safety and that imprisonment was usually an ineffective response. After all, women have a very different experience of custody from men. Unfortunately, in their response to our report, the Government said:

“there should be one justice system for all offenders who commit crimes.”

The Government would do well to recognise that one size does not fit all when it comes to tackling offending.

Since 2008, the gender-specific standards in custody have provided gender-specific programmes, recognising the fact that female offenders’ needs are usually very different from male offenders’ needs. For example, female offenders are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to suffer from anxiety and depression and are more likely to report having used class A drugs in the four weeks prior to custody. Female offenders are also more likely to have suffered abuse in childhood or in their adult lives.

Our inquiry found that the Government’s gender equality duty had not been implemented robustly enough and was not persuading enough commissioners to provide gender-specific services for women offenders. In their response to the report, the Government conceded that there were problems with the public sector equality duty.

The Government also refer to female offenders in their document, “Transforming Rehabilitation.” I was glad that they amended the Offender Rehabilitation Bill on Tuesday, but, as a member of the Justice Committee and a barrister of some years’ experience, I still have serious concerns about the potential effect of the proposals on provisions for female offenders, or the lack of them in future. I believe it is more likely than not that the private companies that win the contracts for supervising the under-12-month cohort will have little interest in investing time and resources in rehabilitative programmes, but we will wait and see, as no one has a definitive answer on that yet.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. It is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). He is a good man. I cannot think of anything that I agree with him about, although I am sure that we would find something if we struggled long enough, but he is a good man who argues his corner very effectively. I guess that this is a subject on which he has been particularly effective in arguing his corner.

My sole purpose here in Westminster Hall today is to try to give people the facts, which often appear to be lost in these debates. People can make of the facts what they will, but it is important that we have the facts because there is no excuse for people being misinformed. Rather than the report on older prisoners, which I will leave for another day, I shall concentrate on the report on women offenders. I have been studying this subject closely for quite some time, and it is important that the House knows the background.

I take a close interest in justice issues and sentencing. I spend a lot of time on them, visiting prisons, and so on. I used to attend Justice questions month in, month out, to be told time and again how terribly and unfairly women were treated in the criminal justice system and how so many of them who were in prison should not be there. From questions and speeches that I listened to, this problem seemed to be particular to women. So effective was this constant—week in, week out, month in, month out—lobbying in the House that I became rather agitated by it.

I believe passionately in equality, in the sense that people should be treated the same, across the piece. I believe that, whether determining people’s pay or opportunities, or in this case the way people are sentenced when they commit a crime, everybody, including the courts, should be gender-blind, colour-blind, religion-blind and sexual orientation-blind. People should be treated equally, irrespective of any of those things. I believe in that passionately.

When I was steamrollered with all the information in Justice questions and debates about how terribly women were treated in the criminal justice system and how unfairly they were treated by the courts, I was so irritated that I decided that something should be done. I decided that it was terribly unfair if women were treated so badly by the criminal justice system, so I looked into it in greater detail. The Minister will confirm that, as will all his predecessors. I praise the Minister, because I probably bombard him with parliamentary questions, seeking out lots of information and the statistics on all these things. I must put on the record that, to my mind, the Ministry of Justice is probably the best Department for providing relevant information. Far too many Departments will say that it is too difficult or expensive to find information. The Ministry of Justice never does that; in my experience, it always provides the information that is required.

There are reams of statistics and information out there, so there is no excuse for anybody to be misinformed, yet it appears to me that many of my colleagues in Parliament go no further than reading briefings from the Howard League for Penal Reform or perhaps, at a push, sometimes, from the Prison Reform Trust. Those organisations have their own, perfectly legitimate, reasons for producing figures and statistics in a particular way. They have an agenda: they do not like people being sent to prison; they particularly do not like women being sent to prison. I do not blame them for trying to influence policy along the lines that they feel are right when the door is left open to them. What is not acceptable is the misuse of figures in the House of Commons when we are debating serious information, so I want to try to redress that balance today. I have tried to do it in the past and I will continue to do it in future.

Today, I feel that I have been making some headway, because the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd seemed to concede—the first time I have heard it conceded—that, yes, men are more likely to be sent to prison than women. That tends not to have been heard before. Listening to questions and debates in Parliament, people would be forgiven for thinking that that was not so. I am pleased that that at least has been acknowledged. The right hon. Gentleman set out why he thinks there are good reasons to treat women differently in the criminal justice system and not to send them to prison as often as men. To me, that is a perfectly legitimate point for him to pursue. I do not necessarily agree with it, although I may agree with him on certain points. I am pleased that we are at least starting to have that kind of honesty in the debate, with people saying that, yes, men are treated more harshly by the courts when being sentenced, but there is a reason for that. I believe that I am making at least some progress in this debate. I hope to make further progress later today.

The fact is that, at any time in recent history, about 5% of the prison population has been female. In 1900, according to the Library, 17% of the prison population were women, but since the 1950s onwards, it has hovered around 5%. Therefore 95% of the prison population is male. That might surprise many, given the focus on female offenders. What might be a bigger shock to people, if they follow these debates as I do, is that, according to the Library, in the past 10 years the female prison population has decreased by 3%, whereas the male prison population has increased by 24% over the same period. People could be forgiven for not realising that when they see all the reports and all the focus on the number of women being sent to prison, when men being sent to prison is never covered in the same way. With all the reports, action plans, working groups, campaign groups, strategies and special interest groups, who would have guessed that those were the facts about the numbers of men and women in prison and the trend over the past 10 years?

The confusion arises because so many myths surround the debate about female offenders. I have mentioned some of these points before. The premise of the Justice Committee’s report seems to have missed the point about the reality of the situation. In fact, in recommendation 7, the Committee rather bizarrely states:

“We welcome NOMS’ intention to accelerate work on the specific needs of women, but we are extremely disappointed that over six years after the Corston Report there is still not sufficient evidence about what those needs are, or how best to address them.”

This whole debate and report seems to have been compiled on the basis that it is accepted that women offenders are a special case, that they have special needs and that something must be done to reduce the female prison population. This view is not based on any evidence that I have seen and this section of the report seems to suggest that no such evidence has been seen by the Committee, either.

[Nick de Bois]

I do not often take issue with my hon. Friend, which probably comes as no comfort to some Committee members, but he is concentrating on the numbers of people going to prison. Should we not be talking about whether measures that make it less likely for any offender—in our report, women offenders—to reoffend must be the greater prize than competing about numbers of people in prison?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I will come on to that in a second, but the point is that surely that applies equally to male offenders, yet there is not the same focus on what matters to male prisoners and what will reduce male reoffending as there is on what would reduce female prisoners’ reoffending. That is bizarre, given that women make up only 5% of the prison population. If my hon. Friend is so concerned about reducing reoffending and reducing the crime rate per se, one would have thought, given the sheer weight of numbers, that he and his Committee, and the Minister and the ministerial team at the Ministry of Justice, would think it more important to get to grips with male offending and reoffending, but that is not what we hear.

[Nick de Bois]

My hon. Friend is, of course, well aware that we are concentrating on one specific issue that the Committee looked at. Of course, we have equally looked at the effectiveness of transforming rehabilitation and the great prize that we will win from that by bringing down reoffending. Is my hon. Friend really saying that, although he wants justice to be blind, it should also be stupid? If there are special points of difference, surely we should examine those, even if they are based on sex.

[Philip Davies]

I do not accept my hon. Friend’s premise that not sending women to prison—I will come on to why in a second—will make the kind of difference that he thinks it will. I want to examine the types of people who are in prison.

[Sir Alan Beith]

May I recommend for the hon. Gentleman’s bedtime reading a report that we published just before the general election—a long report, much longer than this one, called “Cutting crime”, which deals almost entirely with male prisoners?

[Philip Davies]

I suspect that I have already had it as bedtime reading, because I seem to have read almost every report going on these matters. We can have an argument on the effectiveness of prison per se at another time. I am a big fan of sending more criminals to prison: for example, each year some 3,000 burglars with 15 or more previous convictions are not sent to prison, which is a national scandal, and I suspect that most of my constituents think so too. We can discuss that on a different occasion, and perhaps the Select Committee might want to consider why so few persistent burglars are sent to prison. My constituents would welcome that.

One point that crops up time and again is the idea that women offenders are, by definition, more vulnerable than male offenders and therefore need special protection. I want to address that first because I believe that much has been made of the special case of women offenders, but next to nothing has been said about the problems that men face. I have been interested to discover that some of the facts show that much of what is being said could apply equally to men. The House of Commons Library, for example, says that almost the same proportion of sentenced male prisoners as of sentenced female prisoners ran away from home as a child—47% compared with 50%. The Library also states that, although a third of female prisoners were excluded from school, a larger half of male prisoners were excluded from school. A quarter of both male and female prisoners are thought to have been in care when they were growing up. Although about one third of female prisoners admit to hazardous drinking, it seems that the figure for men is more like two thirds.

When we talk about those figures, we have to bear in mind the overall prison population figures. For the record, as of last Friday, 10 January, there were 3,845 women in prison and 80,413 men. Clearly half of the male prison population is a very large figure and half of the female prison population is a relatively low figure, so if campaigners are really concerned about the personal circumstances and vulnerabilities of individuals, they perhaps ought to be clear that far more men than women are in the position they describe of being vulnerable prisoners. On sheer numbers alone, one would therefore think male prisoners would be given far more attention than women prisoners.

Of course, the favourite subject among some campaigners is mental health, which is also mentioned prominently in recommendations 1 and 2 of the Select Committee report, and it is addressed in the Government response. Of course the figures in the report are only for women offenders, so in the interest of ensuring that we have the real picture, and not the one that some would like us to be left with, I will compare female offenders with such problems with male offenders in the same position.

In 2011, two women committed suicide in prison. I do not know the circumstances of those cases, but one might conclude that they were clearly vulnerable individuals. In the same period, 55 men took their own life. That is a stark example of the most serious end of the argument and it shows why it is unbelievable that so much time is spent compiling reports about vulnerable women, yet so little time is spent considering the hard facts about the deaths of male prisoners.

Even more recent figures show an alarming trend of which I hear little mention. Although the number of female self-harmers decreased from 1,429 in 2005 to 1,065 in 2013, the number of male self-harmers increased in that period from 5,692 to 6,823. Perhaps more starkly, over the same period the number of female self-harm incidents decreased by half, from 12,014 to 6,236, while the number of male self-harm incidents increased from 10,109 to 16,741. Again, according to the Ministry of Justice, 145 female offenders who self-harmed in 2013 required hospital treatment, whereas 10 times as many male offenders who self-harmed had to be taken to hospital. If people are concerned—and it may well be a legitimate concern—that women are vulnerable in those circumstances, surely men in such situations must be of equal concern. If that is the case, why do we have Select Committee reports simply on female offenders? Why do we not have the same reports on male prisoners, which we never seem to get?

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is an intelligent man, but his last point is rather stupid. In our report we were considering the circumstances of female offenders. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) told him, there have been other reports on the male occupants of the prison estate. Saying that because we are considering the situation of women, we could not care less about men, is absolutely ridiculous.

[Philip Davies]

I am afraid we hear that time and again in the main Chamber. Questions focus on female offenders, female offenders, female offenders; there is never the same focus on either offenders overall or male offenders. All I am trying to do is introduce some balance to the debate. Actually, all of the things that people mention also apply to male offenders and, just because of the sheer numbers, in many more cases. I would like to see the same focus—arguably, a greater focus—on all of those issues in relation to male offenders.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend find it as surprising as I do that, whereas the female figure for self-harm incidents has been going down not just in total over an eight-year period but in every single one of those eight years, the male figure has been going up every single year? We might think that it is flying in the face of the facts to concentrate on females rather than males.

[Philip Davies]

One would have thought that, if the Select Committee was just considering the evidence, it would have wanted to focus on why the problem appears to be getting worse for male prisoners when it is getting better for female prisoners. Perhaps that would be a worthwhile thing to consider, but it appears that the Select Committee has glossed over that fact in its obsession with appealing to the politically correct lobby that wants to make out that women are treated far worse in prison than men.

One of the myths that I want to address is the idea that women are very likely to be sent to prison. The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd gives the impression that many women should not be in prison, for reasons that apply only to women. He says there is a unique problem for women, and I want to nail that myth once and for all—I suspect that I will not, but I will give it my best shot.

Going back to my starting point, which is that I was appalled by what I was hearing about how women are treated so badly by the courts, I asked the House of Commons Library to provide the evidence that a higher proportion of women are being sent to prison. Not only could the Library not provide that evidence, but it confirmed that the exact opposite is true. I repeat that, for every single category of offence, a man up before the courts is more likely than a woman to be sent to prison. For violence against the person, for example, 35% of men and 16% of women are sent to prison; for burglary, 45% of men and just 26% of women are sent to prison; for robbery, 61% of men are sent to prison and 37% of women. It applies in every single category of offence: men are more likely than women to be sent to prison.

A Ministry of Justice publication called “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System,” which is produced to ensure that there is no sex discrimination in the system, states:

“Of sentenced first-time offenders…a greater percentage of males were sentenced to immediate custody than females (29% compared with 17%), which has been the case in each year since 2005.”

[Nick de Bois]

In all my hon. Friend’s bedtime reading of the report’s 150-odd pages, did he see that on page 7 the Committee does state that women are less likely than men to be sentenced to custody? It is there in black and white, so I am not sure what we are arguing over.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

It is there, but it is hidden away; it is never mentioned by any member of the Select Committee in their speeches. They would like to give the exact opposite impression. They know exactly what they are doing.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

I tried to stop myself intervening, but I am afraid that I cannot sit any longer. Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that the question of whether someone is sentenced to prison is a matter for the judge of the sentencing court? The defendant’s personal circumstances will be considered and mitigation will be put forward. The reality is that women’s circumstances are often different from men’s. It is wrong for him to suggest that the figures in the report are in any way hidden; they are clear. If memory serves—I read the report late last night—it states that 10% of male offenders and 3% of first-time women offenders are sentenced to custody. The figures are not hidden.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Later, I will discuss whether it is justified for special circumstances to apply when deciding whether to send women to prison.

[Mr Llwyd]

For clarification, I said in my speech that women are less likely to be sentenced to custody than men. In 2011, 3% of females were sentenced to custody, compared with 10% of males. I know that the hon. Gentleman is obsessed with his own argument and does not want to listen to the other side of the argument, but that was said, and it is on the record.

[Philip Davies]

If the right hon. Gentleman is listening to my speech, he will have heard me say at the start that I thought I was making some headway because this debate is the first time that I had heard him acknowledge that fact. It is not that I am not listening to him; it is a question of him not listening to me.

[Mr David Amess in the Chair]

I am grateful, however, because we are starting to make some progress. Everyone appears to be falling over themselves to say that men are more likely to be sent to prison than women. When I made that comment the other day and in previous debates, I have been told that that clearly is not true. Now, everyone is falling over themselves to say that what I am saying is right, and that they were there first. I do not want to be precious about this, and do not want it to seem that I was there first; if people want to claim the credit, I am happy for them to do so. I am just pleased that we are making some headway, and that the facts are for once beginning to rear their ugly heads.

The Ministry of Justice answered a question that I asked in September about pre-sentence reports and its recommendations for sentences in court. It was confirmed that probation staff are twice as likely to recommend custody for male offenders due to be sentenced in Crown court cases than for female offenders. For men, the figure is 24%, while it is just 11% for women. Even repeat offenders are more likely to fare better if they are women. For those who have committed more than 15 offences, pre-sentence reports recommend custody for 39% of men, compared with 29% of women. All that shows that it is wrong to say that women are more likely to be sent to prison than men. We seem to have agreed among ourselves that men are more likely than women to be sent to prison for committing exactly the same offence. That is the reality.

It is also true, however, that men will be sent to prison for longer than women. I refer again to the Ministry of Justice’s published figures, which state that women given an immediate custodial sentence for indictable offences receive shorter average sentence lengths than men. It is 11.6 months for women, compared with 17.7 months for men. That is not a minor difference. That figure shows that the average male prison sentence is over 50% longer than the average female sentence. That is something that those who allege that they are keen on equality may want to think about.

Not only are women less likely to be sent to prison and more likely to be given a shorter sentence, but they are more likely to serve less of the sentence in prison than men. The Ministry of Justice helpfully points that out in its offender management statistics:

“Those discharged from determinate sentences…had served 53 per cent of their sentence in custody… On average, males served a greater proportion of their sentence in custody—53 per cent compared to 48 per cent for females”

in the same period. It continues:

“This gender difference is consistent over time, and partly reflects the higher proportion of females who are released on Home Detention Curfew.”

Other published Ministry of Justice figures confirm that. In fact, there is quite a disparity. In the past few years for which figures have been published, women have had 50% more of a chance than men of being released from prison early on home detention curfew. I hope that we have finally nailed the idea that women are treated more harshly by the courts than men. Men are clearly treated more severely by the courts when it comes to being sent to prison.

The other myth that we hear—the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd hinted at it earlier—is that most women in prison are serving short sentences for petty, non-violent offences, and that they would be better off being dealt with elsewhere. Let us take a snapshot of the sentenced female prison population at a moment in time and look at the detail of all these “poor women” who are serving prison sentences and who should—apparently—be out and about in the local community. Which women prisoners do those who advocate reducing the female prison sentence want to let out? I asked that question of the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who has been good enough to come back again today, for which I am grateful. The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd gave the impression—although he perhaps would not want to subscribe to this—that as much as 80% of women prisoners should not be in prison. That was the impression that he wanted to leave us with when he made his comments.

I have the latest Ministry of Justice figures on the female prison population, and I want to know which of these people the right hon. Gentleman and others think should not be in prison. Is it the 231 who are in there for murder? Is it the 61 who are in there for manslaughter? Perhaps it is the 73 who are in there for other and attempted homicides. Is it the 391 who are in for wounding? Is it the 52 in for assault? Perhaps it is the 56 who are in prison for cruelty to children, or the 85 who are in for other violence against the person. Maybe the 83 who are in there for sexual offences should not be in prison. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman has in mind the 328 who are in prison for robbery. Is it the 208 who were unlucky enough to be sent to prison for burglary? They must have been persistent burglars to have been sent to prison.

The right hon. Gentleman probably does have in mind the 508 women who are in prison for theft and handling stolen goods, but maybe it is the 574 who are in for drug offences; perhaps they are the ones who he thinks should not have been sent to prison. Maybe it is the 86 women who are in prison for arson, the 24 for criminal damage, the 12 for blackmail or the 37 for kidnapping. Maybe the right hon. Gentleman has those people in mind when he says that these women, who apparently pose no danger to the public, should not be in prison. When those numbers are added up, they make up far more than half of the female prison population. Let us hear which ones should not be in prison. I would like to know.

[Sir Alan Beith]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

The Chair of the Justice Committee will tell us.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I have a suggestion for the hon. Gentleman. I would like him to take a trip to Texas to meet some right-wing Republicans who have decided that there is no point in spending so much money on putting so many women in prison on short-term sentences for drug offences when they could be got off drugs and restored to a decent life through methods in the community. It is right-wing Republicans who are saying that.

[Philip Davies]

I am delighted that the Chair of the Justice Committee is leading with his chin on this issue. He fails to acknowledge that the prison population in Texas is far higher, so it is starting from a much higher base. I would be delighted if we could agree that the prison population in the UK should be the same as Texas’s. If he is suggesting that we should emulate Texas in our criminal justice and sentencing system, consensus will have broken out in this Chamber. If that is the direction of travel that he thinks we should go in—Texas—I am all for it, and more power to his elbow.

At least the Chair of the Justice Committee had a bash at answering my question, for which I give him credit. He seemed to indicate that it was the 574 women in prison for drug offences who should not be in prison. That number includes 166 for supplying drugs, 113 for possession with intent to supply, and 140 who were importing or exporting drugs. They are the ones who he believes should not be in prison. I give him credit for putting his head above the parapet, but no one else who says that all these women should not be in prison is prepared to identify which should not be there. The reality is that these women are not in prison for minor offences, and it is an absolute disgrace that people try to suggest otherwise.

I want to emphasise how serious the offences are for which some female offenders are in prison. The argument is made that all these women are in prison for short sentences and perhaps should be serving community sentences instead. That is an absolute myth. According to the prison population figures, just under 16% of women in prison have sentences of less than six months. That is clearly quite a minority. If some do not class six months as a short sentence, I will be charitable and go up to a year; a further 6% of women are in prison for between six months and a year, so 22% of female prisoners are sentenced to less than a year in prison. Some 78% of female prisoners are sentenced to more than a year, and who can say that they are not serious offenders, when we already know that they are given shorter sentences than men? These are clearly serious or persistent offenders, and I hope that we can start nailing that particular myth too.

Sentences of more than a year mean that the magistrates court felt that the offenders’ crimes were so serious that they were not capable of sentencing them. They had to send the cases to the Crown court, otherwise the offenders could not have got those sentences. Let us end the myth that all those women in prison are in for short sentences and for not very serious offences.

[Karl Turner]

Will the hon. Gentleman at least accept that the needs of women in prison differ from those of men? He will be aware of the tragic case that was raised recently by the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman), with the Justice Secretary. A woman prisoner miscarried in a prison cell and was apparently told by prison officers to clean up the cell afterwards. Does the hon. Gentleman want to comment on that?

[Philip Davies]

I appreciate that the shadow Minister has probably got a wasp in his trousers and is itching to get on with things, but if he bears with me, in a second I will come on to say why I do not necessarily accept his premise that women should be treated differently from men. As it happens—I have made this clear already—if people want to make the point that women should be treated more favourably by the courts than men, that is perfectly legitimate. I do not have a problem with that, so long as we are having an honest argument about what the facts and figures are.

If people are saying that the 2,789 women who are sentenced to prison each year for theft and handling should not be sent to prison—I suspect, given that they have been sent to prison, that they must be serious and persistent offenders—I presume that they think, though they never say so, that the 16,501 men who are sent to prison for that offence each year should not go to prison either. Perhaps that is what people secretly think, but they do not want to be seen to say, “We want to cut the prison population by the thick end of 20,000 each year.” No one ever seems to say that.

I want to move on to another myth, which I hope will deal with the point the shadow Minister raised. The myth is about how prison separates mothers from their children, which unduly punishes them. That goes to the point made by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd on why he believes it is right that men are more likely to be sent to prison than women. I want to instil some seldom-offered facts into this side of the debate. It is said that 17,000 children are separated from their mothers, and that 60,000 women in custody have children under the age of 18. Those are the figures, as far as I am aware, and I am not sure that anyone would dispute them. As I have said before in a Westminster Hall debate, a senior Ministry of Justice civil servant helpfully confirmed that two thirds of the mothers sent to prison

“didn’t have their kids living with them when they went into prison.”

People use the figures to say, “X per cent. of mothers are sent to prison.” Well, yes, they are mothers—no one can deny that—but in two thirds of cases, they are not looking after their children when they are sent to prison. Why should they become a special case at that point, when the children have already been taken away from them because the mother is presumably considered not fit to look after them? Why do we still consider them to be a special case, simply because they are mothers?

When it comes to the minority of mothers sent to prison who are still looking after their children, it is wrong to assume that they are all fantastic mothers. Many will be persistent offenders with incredibly chaotic lifestyles. Some, no doubt, will end up dragging their children into their criminal lifestyles, and some will scar their children for life along the way. Others will have committed serious offences. Sarah Salmon from Action for Prisoners Families said:

“For some families the mother going into prison is a relief because she has been causing merry hell.”

To most people, that would be a statement of the obvious. Why should those women be treated as a special case, when they are clearly not providing a great role model to their children or having a great influence on their upbringing? If anything, they are having a negative influence on their upbringing. Let us not forget those mothers who are in prison for abusing their children and being cruel to them. I am not entirely sure that anyone would think they should be a special case either.

If we are so concerned about the children of women offenders, what about the estimated 180,000 children who are separated from their fathers, because their father is in prison? In the age of equality, should we not be at least equally outraged about that? If we are not, why not? I thought there was a growing acceptance that a father was just as important to a child’s upbringing as a mother. Why are we treating mothers as a special case in all these cases? I do not see any justification for that when we know for a fact, thanks to the Ministry of Justice and the figures it produces, that two thirds of mothers are not even looking after their children when they are sent to prison. I hope we can nail the myth that that is a reason for treating women differently when they are sentenced in the courts.

Another myth is that women are generally treated more harshly in the justice system than men. Yes, we have now accepted that men are more likely to be sent to prison, but if we go underneath the prison regime, the myth is that women are treated more harshly by the courts before being sent to prison, but that, again, is not true. Even when they are not sent to prison, men are more likely to receive a community order than women. You would think it was the other way round, Mr Amess. So few women are sent to prison, one would think that most of them would get a community order, but no. We do not have any of that. Some 10% of women sentenced are given a community order, compared with 16% of men. The Ministry of Justice confirmed that the

“patterns were broadly consistent in each of the last five years.”

That is not all. The Ministry also points out that the average length of a community sentence is longer for men than it is for women. It said:

“For women receiving a community order, the largest proportion had one requirement (46%), whereas the largest proportion of men had two requirements (41%).”

So the pattern is complete: men are more likely to be sent to prison than women, they are more likely to be sent to prison for longer than women for the same offences, and they are more likely to serve more of their sentence in prison than women. Men are more likely than women to get a community sentence, and to have a community sentence that lasts for longer, and they are likely to have more requirements added to it. It is a full house; that is the picture of how men and women are treated in the courts and the criminal justice system.

I return to where I sort of began. Many of those who take part in these debates are the self-confessed equality issues addicts. They want equality in this, that and the other. It is a perfectly laudable aim; I believe in equality, too. People should be treated the same, irrespective of their gender, race, religion or sexual orientation, so why should that not be the case when it comes to sentencing people for committing the same crime? We are dealing with the “equality when it suits” agenda. The argument is that women and men should be treated the same, unless we can get better treatment for women, which we are all in favour of. That is not equality. It is very selective, and in my view sexist. Courts should sentence people on the basis of the crime, not whether they are a man or a woman.

The Select Committee would do well to consider the prison population as a whole and why the male prison population is so large. If it wants to strike a blow for the rights of women, it should argue for men and women to be treated the same by the courts, and that it is the crime committed, not gender, that should count. If we were considering the same phenomenon in relation to race, religion or sexual orientation, it would be considered an outrage. I consider it an outrage that women are treated so much more favourably in the criminal justice system than men. People may think it a good thing for them to be treated differently—some clearly do—but at least let us be honest about the facts and acknowledge them. I am pleased that some right hon. and hon. Members have begun to do that today, so we can draw our own conclusions. If we do nothing else today but set out the inconvenient—to many—facts, the debate will have been useful after all.

[Mr David Amess (in the Chair)]

Order. I am minded to start the winding-up speeches at 4 o’clock, which will leave half an hour for the two Front-Bench spokesmen and the Chairman of the Select Committee to make some closing remarks. I think there are three or four hon. Members who want to catch my eye, so perhaps they can share the 40 minutes between themselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Nuttall]

I am sure that that is absolutely right: the first thought of any victims of crime would be that they do not want anyone else to suffer in the same way. That brings me to my next point.

[Philip Davies]

If we all agree with that point, presumably the best way to ensure that someone is not a victim of crime is to ensure that offenders are in prison, because while they are in prison they cannot go out and commit another crime.

[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend leads me nicely on to the point I want to make about a concept that is rarely heard of—we have hardly touched on it in the debate—which is punishment. We have hardly heard anything about punishment. Sentencing is also about imprisoning people as punishment for the crime that they chose to commit—whether a man or a woman, they chose to commit the crime. That goes to the heart of the matter.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I apologise that I was not here for the start of the debate. I was speaking in the debate on Bangladesh in the main Chamber. As a member of the Justice Committee, however, I have taken part in all the inquiries, and I invite the hon. Gentleman to consider for one moment that societies that obsess solely about punishment end up with large prison populations and a very high rate of reoffending. Countries that go in for a combination approach, including a rehabilitation process, often end up with smaller prison populations, less reoffending and less crime.

[Philip Davies]

Garbage.

[Mr David Amess (in the Chair)]

Order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Nuttall]

I entirely accept the reason of the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) for not being present earlier in the debate. That matters not; it was appropriate for him to be speaking in the other debate in the main Chamber. I also accept that, as a member of the Committee, he has spent some time looking into the subject, but I was not suggesting that rehabilitation should play no part in the justice process. Clearly, rehabilitation will have a part to play in most cases, although some cases are so heinous that offenders will not let be out of prison. If I had my way, of course, we would see the introduction of capital punishment—that would go some way towards dealing with the number of older prisoners in our prison estate.

[Philip Davies]

And with reoffending.

[Mr Nuttall]

And with reoffending, for that matter.

I am conscious of your guidance on time, Mr Amess, so I will not digress too much, but does it really matter whether someone is young or old, or male or female? A victim of crime who has suffered wants to see someone punished for that crime. The facts show, however, that male offenders are more likely to be sentenced to immediate custody than a female offender. Taking robbery, for example, 61.7% of male offenders but only 37% of female offenders are sentenced to immediate custody. Furthermore, when they are sentenced, the average sentence length for men is much more—34.1 months on average, compared with 25.5 months for female offenders. That is the same across the board, whichever sector we look at, for all offenders: thus, for burglary, 44.9% of men receive immediate custodial sentences, but only 26.6% of women.

Whichever category we look at, therefore, we see the same result—that cannot be right and it cannot be excused. We should not be looking for all sorts of socio-economic reasons to explain why people have committed crime. The introduction to the report on women offenders mentioned categories that should be taken into account, including a variety of “personal circumstances” and

“socio-economic factors such as poverty”.

I grew up in straitened circumstances and I find it extremely insulting when people suggest that people living in poor circumstances should somehow be excused for committing crime. That is simply not right. I was brought up in difficult circumstances, but we were all taught the difference between right and wrong; that it is wrong to commit crime, to steal from a neighbour or to hit someone else. We need to get back to a society in which, from an early age, people are taught the difference between right and wrong and that offenders are punished, and punished severely, so that they do not want to commit more crime or go back to prison. That is how we will cut crime in this country.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I apologised to you in advance, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I apologise to you again for missing the beginning of the debate on this group of amendments. I extend my apology to all hon. Members. I had an important meeting with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and I got here as soon as I could. I did not intend any discourtesy, and I hope that no one will think that I have been discourteous.

I want to speak briefly about my amendment 7, which would delete clause 10. I do not want you to remind me that today is not a Friday, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I intend to be as brief as possible. Therefore, I will not read out exactly what is in clause 10, save to say that it makes special provision for the arrangements for supervision and rehabilitation of female offenders. As far as I am aware, the clause did not appear in the original draft, but was added to the Bill at some stage in the other place. Perhaps the Minister will expand on the reasoning behind the Government’s keenness to accept the clause, given that they do not appear to have been keen to introduce it in the first place.

The reason I object to clause 10 and therefore seek to delete it is that it is absolutely unnecessary. I suspect that it was put in—I hope that the Minister can help us here—to appease those whose whole mission in life is to keep virtually everybody, but female offenders in particular, out of prison. They have perpetuated a myth, which has built up a head of steam over recent years, that—bizarrely—women are treated more unfairly than men in the criminal justice system.

I pressed the Minister during Justice questions not long ago—I think it was just before Christmas—on whether he accepted, agreed with and stood by the figures produced by his Department on rates of offending, reoffending, sentencing and all the rest of it in relation to male and female offenders. I got the impression that he was prepared to stand by the Ministry of Justice figures. If so, and he still stands by them, he should clearly know that not this bizarre claim that women are treated more harshly in the criminal justice system but the exact opposite is the truth.

As it happens, as I am sure that the Minister knows, for every single category of crime, men are more likely than women to be sentenced to prison, to be given longer custodial sentences and to serve longer proportions of their sentence in prison. Yet clauses are still introduced to Bills to try to give even more preferential treatment to women in the criminal justice system, which is totally and utterly unjustifiable. There is this sort of politically correct myth that women offenders are currently hard done by and need special protection.

I am not a big fan of the equality agenda. In the previous Parliament, not only did I introduce an awful lot of amendments to the then Equality Bill, but I voted against it. This clause is a perfect example of why the equality agenda is such a sham. It should not really be called the equality agenda. It should be called the “equality but only when it suits us agenda”. All the people who campaign so vehemently on these issues argue, quite rightly, that men and women should be treated the same. There should be no difference in their pay, the way they are treated in the workplace and so on. I agree with the premise that we should be gender blind in all matters. That, to me, is true equality. It should not matter what somebody’s gender is. It should not matter what their colour is, what religion they are or what their sexual orientation is. Those are all irrelevances when it comes to anything, whether it is what they are paid or what opportunities they are given.

It therefore seems to me that gender should also be irrelevant in how the criminal justice system treats offenders. It should not matter whether the offender is male or female—they should be dealt with on the basis of the crime they committed, the seriousness of the crime, the persistence of their offending and their likelihood of reoffending. I do not see what on earth their gender has to do with any of those factors. Their treatment should be gender blind.

I believe that the view I have set out, which is that everybody should be treated the same, irrespective of their gender, is what most people would sign up to. If that is the case, perhaps the Minister and the other Members who support clause 10 will explain—because for the life of me I cannot see it—why they believe that everybody should be treated the same, apart from when it comes to sentencing and the treatment of offenders. Perhaps when he winds up, the Minister will explain why he thinks that women should be treated far more preferentially in the criminal justice system. If anybody doubts that, I have all the figures to hand. In the interests of time, I will not bandy them about the Chamber, but I have them here and am happy to share them with anybody. They are the figures from the Ministry of Justice itself and the evidence is striking.

Women are treated more favourably than men not only when it comes to being sentenced to prison, although that is particularly stark, but in the recommendations of the probation service. In a recent parliamentary question, I asked on how many occasions the probation service makes a recommendation of immediate custody for sentencing in the Crown court, which considers the most serious offences, for men and for women. The probation service recommends immediate custody for 24% of men who are up before the Crown court, but only 11% of women.

People would be forgiven for thinking, on the basis of that statistic, that the probation service is already bending over backwards to treat women more favourably than men in the criminal justice system. It recommends prison twice as often for men as it does for women. And yet there is a clause that seeks to make the probation service go even further in giving preferential treatment to women. That seems to me to be completely unnecessary.

The Minister might have been better served finding a way to ensure that men are treated more fairly in the criminal justice system, because that is where the problem lies at the moment. The figures on that are stark, and yet the Minister wants to go further in the opposite direction. The argument I have heard is that women should be a special case because they are often more vulnerable, but that ignores the fact that there are plenty of men who come from vulnerable backgrounds as well. Why are we not interested in those people? Why are we not giving them a fair lick of the sauce bottle, as they say in Australia? Why is it only vulnerable women offenders that we are bothered about?

Not only is what I have said about prison sentencing true, but men are more likely than women to be given the highest level of community order. More men than women go to prison, so we might therefore expect women to get more higher level community sentences than men because of the shortage of numbers going to prison. Even at that level, however, more men are sentenced to the highest level community orders than women—10% of women compared with 16% of men. At every possible level in the criminal justice system, men are already treated far more harshly.

So that the Minister is aware of this I will quote the latest report from the Ministry of Justice, “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2011”, which makes it clear that on average, women receive shorter and less onerous community sentences:

“The average length of a community order and Suspended Sentence Order for women (12.9 and 17.8 months) was shorter than for men (at 15.0 and 18.3 months respectively). The average length of both orders was also shorter for women in each of the four preceding years.

Women beginning the most common types of supervision orders in 2011 generally had fewer requirements with which to comply than men. For community orders, 43 per cent of women and 51 per cent of men were given more than one requirement with which to comply. For Suspended Sentence Orders, the corresponding proportions were 55 per cent for women and 63 per cent for men.”

Women were also more likely than men to be given supervision as a requirement, and regarded as a lower risk category when being assessed.

There are already sentences run by probation services that women cannot be given, even if they fit into the offending type. The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) referred to his new clause 12, and the sad thing about that is that it perpetuates the problem I am trying to highlight. It states:

“It shall be the responsibility of the National Probation Service to provide all Building better relationships rehabilitations programmes for male perpetrators of domestic violence”.

As it happens, there are an awful lot of female perpetrators of domestic violence. They may not be a majority, but there are an awful lot of them and in some age groups I think they are the majority of offenders. The new clause states that only male offenders are required to go on treatment programmes, and there is nothing about female offenders. I would have supported the new clause if it also included a requirement for female perpetrators of domestic violence to go on those courses, but the hon. Gentleman has spectacularly failed to mention that, for reasons best known to himself.

[Lady Hermon]

I have listened patiently to the hon. Gentleman, but with increasing exasperation. Has he made equal efforts to obtain statistics from the Department of Health about the impact on the mental health of women who have been sent to prison or had custody orders imposed on them and—just as importantly—on the welfare and health of the children of women who have been sent to prison? I would be interested if the hon. Gentleman read out those statistics to the House.

[Philip Davies]

I am delighted; I am trying not to go off the scent, so to speak, but perhaps you will allow me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am sure these facts are a terrible irritation to the hon. Lady and may not suit her particular agenda and the world she would like to portray, but I am merely stating the facts as produced by the Ministry of Justice. If she does not agree with the statistics, she should feel free to contact the Minister. I can do no more than ask questions and get the answers.

The hon. Lady asks about children, and there may well be a case there. I would not mind so much if people said to me, “Well, of course women are treated more favourably in the criminal justice system, but there is good reason for that because they might have to look after children.” If somebody wanted to go down that line of argument I would at least have some respect for that; the point may or may not be valid, but that is not the argument that is made. The argument is that women are treated more harshly in the criminal justice system, but—quite frankly—they are not. It is no good people pretending they are when the facts are perfectly stark: they are not.

As the hon. Lady mentioned children she might want to bear it in mind—again, the Ministry of Justice made this clear—that two-thirds of mothers who are sent to prison are not even looking after their children at the time. In two-thirds of cases the children have already been taken off those mothers because they are not deemed fit to look after them. The people we are talking about are hardly great role models for their children. In fact, some prisoner organisations have made it clear that it is actually a relief when the mother is sent to prison—in one case they described those mothers as causing “merry hell” in their families. Therefore, the idea that it is to everybody’s advantage, including the children, to keep persistent and serious offenders out of prison to look after children is a bizarre one by anybody’s standards.

[Lady Hermon]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for taking a second intervention so promptly. When did he last visit a women’s prison? Will he do me the great courtesy of accepting an invitation to Northern Ireland to see the conditions in which women prisoners in Northern Ireland exist? I would be grateful for a response on both points.

[Philip Davies]

I would be delighted to visit Northern Ireland. As it happens, I have been a regular visitor to prisons around the country, including women’s prisons. I have visited 12 or 13 prisons in the UK, including two female prisons. I have also visited prisons in America and Denmark to see how they treat offenders. My point is that there is no justification for the new clause and no evidence to justify it.

[Mrs Moon]

I, too, have listened with great patience to the hon. Gentleman and have considered whether it is worth bothering to intervene. However, I must reiterate the point on community sentences and the selective passage he has read out. The fact is that eight out of 10 women who receive prison sentences have committed non-violent offences. That is why they have less onerous conditions in their community sentences. I draw his attention to the Corston report and the Prison Reform Trust report, “Lacking Conviction”. Instead of getting out more, he needs to stay in and read more.

[Philip Davies]

To be perfectly honest—I am trying to think of the polite way to describe that—what the hon. Lady says is utter garbage. It is utter rot. The idea that women are sent to prison for short sentences and non-violent offences is a myth—it is a big myth, but it is a myth. At any one time, there are about 3,700 women in prison. Perhaps she will tell the House which ones she believes should not be there. Perhaps it is the 211 who are in prison for murder; the 135 in for manslaughter or attempted homicide; the 352 in for wounding; the 142 in for serious assaults or other violence against the person; or the 58 in for cruelty to children. Perhaps she means the 58 who are in there for cruelty to children; or the 83 who are in for rape, gross indecency with children or other sexual offences. Perhaps she means the 272 women in prison for violent robbery. Perhaps she means the 151 who are in there for burglary. Perhaps she thinks the 398 drug dealers should not be in prison. Perhaps she means the 91 arsonists; the 24 convicted of violent disorder; the 45 in there for kidnapping and blackmail; or the 192 in there for serious fraud and forgeries. Perhaps she means the 320 in prison for importing drugs into the country, which end up being sold on our streets. She might mean the 111 others serving time for other serious drug offences. The hon. Lady might believe those people should not be in prison, but they are not non-violent, minor offences. It is a disgrace for her to suggest to the victims of those crimes that they are the victims of minor, non-violent offences. She should be absolutely, utterly ashamed of herself for suggesting that. That is the type of nonsense we have had to deal with in the debate for many years. I am delighted that I can shine a light on the utter rot that people like her have spouted year after year.

[Rory Stewart]

I am interested in what my hon. Friend says, but some of those figures on female offending seem relatively low. Does he have comparative figures for men in those categories?

[Philip Davies]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend is making my point for me. Some 95% of people in prison are men. If 95% of either men or women were treated in what we might call a harsh manner in any other walk of life one would think there would be uproar on behalf of the 95%, but, would you believe it, all the uproar is that 5% is too many women prisoners. It is a nonsensical argument to suggest that women are treated more harshly than men. My hon. Friend is quite right that a lot more men are in prison for those same offences. My point is that men and women should be treated the same, irrespective of their offence. For the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) to suggest that they are non-violent, non-serious offences is utterly disgraceful. Perhaps she would like to go to each of those victims of crime and tell them that they are the victims of non-violent and non-serious offences.

In conclusion, clause 10 is unnecessary because the facts are already stark: women are treated more favourably than men when it comes to sentencing. Men are more likely to be sent to prison, more likely to be given a longer sentence and more likely to serve more of that sentence in prison than women for every single category of crime. For every single category of crime, men are also more likely to be given a serious community order and a longer community order, and are more likely to have more requirements made. Why is it, then, that the Government are not satisfied with that and want to go further to make the criminal justice system even more imbalanced and even more in favour of female offenders?

[Mr Llwyd]

The previous speaker should not read anything into the silence in the Chamber. It was not acquiescence; we were stunned into silence.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) on being the driving force in bringing forward new clauses 2 and 3 on veterans to which I would like to speak briefly. I also welcome Government amendment 5 on the extension of restorative justice, which is a positive step. We had a debate on that in Committee. The Minister said that he would go away and consider the matter and he obviously has done so. I am sure we are very grateful for that.

I was glad to read in the papers over the weekend that there will be a Government review of how to improve the rehabilitation of ex-service personnel who are in prison, and that it will be led by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). I wish him well in that work. I have a feeling that it will be done consensually and that we will all be able to muck in, as it were, and do our best to come up with some good answers for the Government, because the work is long overdue.

As the House may be aware, I have campaigned for a number of years for greater recognition of the welfare needs of veterans of the armed forces, and I have raised the issue in this place and elsewhere since 2008. In January 2010, I published a paper that contained detailed recommendations for increasing the support available to veterans, in particular to those who come into contact with the criminal justice system. I have also had the privilege since 2010 of chairing the veterans in the criminal justice system parliamentary group, which meets under the auspices of the justice unions parliamentary group. The group comprises parliamentarians and representatives from criminal justice trade unions and charities, including the National Association of Probation Officers, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Prison Officers Association, the Royal British Legion and several military charities. The group is able to disseminate good practice to ensure that it is available throughout the British isles, and I think that that is coming together and is working. I hope that at some point the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border might care to attend, to contribute and to perhaps pick up on a few points.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

A crucial part of the reform plan and the contracts that we are putting together will be to require an element of co-location between the members of the national probation service who carry out risk assessments and the teams in the new providers to ensure that there is a simple process that happens in the same office so that risky offenders can be transferred to multi-agency supervision as quickly as necessary when the circumstance arises.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

According to Ministry of Justice figures, for every single category of offence, men are more likely than women to be sent to prison. Does the Secretary of State accept his own Department’s figures, or does he think they are wrong?

[Jeremy Wright]

I always try to accept my own Department’s figures, but I think my hon. Friend will accept that it is always in the minds of sentencers to try to avoid sentencing female offenders, in particular, to custody. As he will agree, however, that is sometimes unavoidable, which is why we need to provide the necessary places in the female custodial estate.

EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

That is very much the legal view of the Government at this moment in time. Were we to discover that that was not to be the case—the law has had a habit of moving around in recent years—I hope that all parties would come together and say that it is not acceptable and put in place measures that would prevent it from happening.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

This development is likely to trump the excellent work that the Lord Chancellor is trying to do in rolling back the tide of human rights legislation. Is it not the case that it does not really matter what he or other Members in this House think? It is what the judges rule that counts. We are used to EU mission-creep extending its reach beyond what was ever envisaged. Is not the only protection from that to withdraw from the European Union altogether?

[Chris Grayling]

My view is that we should seek to renegotiate our membership and to address some of those issues, but it is a matter that will have to wait for a majority Conservative Government. I share many of my hon. Friend’s concerns and believe that we cannot go on in the way we are.