Guardianship (Missing Persons) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I have read the consultation, to which there were 40 responses, of which eight commented on the proposal that applications should be made only after 90 days. Some of the responses said that 90 days was too long—I accept that—but practical points on timing were made, including by the Finance and Leasing Association, which had concerns about the 90 days. The consultation response therefore states:

“We accept that the 90 day period may create problems in some cases, but are also conscious that over-hasty applications may result in unnecessary expenses being incurred.”

The period is 90 days and not 60 or 100, so I am seeking the rationale for 90 days. My hon. Friend was helpful in his intervention and has made it clear why he has gone for 90 days, and I am grateful to him for that.

As hon. Members can see, amendment 4 would reduce the maximum period of guardianship from four years to two years. Clause 7 sets out the period of guardianship and requests that the period for which the guardian is appointed be stated in the court order. The maximum possible is four years, and I propose to halve it. Again, I am trying to tease out from my hon. Friend why he believes four years is right, and why the period should not be longer or shorter. I can see the attractions of making it longer to avoid people having to go back time and again, given the cost of doing that. I was not sure whether the primary purpose was to avoid that or there was another rationale as to why four years was the appropriate time.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

My concern arises from the same issue, and it is what happens when a missing person is found. That does not automatically negate the guardianship, as I would have hoped that it would, and is an argument for saying that the guardianship should be for a shorter period. Otherwise, as soon as somebody is found, the guardian will have to apply to the court to end the guardianship before they can again be treated as a normal person.

Merchant Shipping (Homosexual Conduct) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

The amendment moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) is trying to introduce retrospective legislation, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) said. Like my right hon. Friend, I am not naturally in favour of retrospective legislation—it is a bit like rewriting history—and I have opposed it in the past. However, as I think I said on Second Reading, the law should never have been put in place, so in that sense I absolutely understand why my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) wants to make the law retrospective. Many people in the House agree that the law should never have been put in place, so in effect he is neatly correcting that situation.

We should start by looking at the effect of the amendment. I asked the Library, which is always helpful, about its effect. One of its staff said that

“the amendment would have retrospective effect, going back to 1994. The Bill is seeking to repeal law which provides that it would not be unfair to dismiss a seafarer for a homosexual act. The amendment would mean that any dismissal on that basis since 1994 would not enjoy the statutory protection against being deemed an unfair dismissal.”

It went on:

“So far as I can see, the amendment would have no practical effect. Any dismissal of a seafarer for a reason relating to a homosexual act could already constitute sexual orientation discrimination. This has been unlawful, in respect of seafarers, since at least 2011. Claims in respect of the period before 2011 would be well out of time under, among others, the Limitation Act 1980. As such, any seafarer dismissed since 1994 for a homosexual act would, already, have a claim or be out of time for making one. The amendment/Bill would not change either of those things. It would therefore appear that the amendment is intended as a symbolic gesture.”

We are in the rather bizarre situation that, in effect, the Bill makes no real practical change, because equality laws are already in place, and the amendment moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch would have no practical impact either. It must be a first that a Bill going through Parliament would make no real difference to the law and that an amendment to it would make no difference to the law either. There may be some historical precedents for such a situation, but I have certainly not been aware of one during my few years in the House.

I suspect that that is, in many respects, my hon. Friend’s case: as the Bill is only symbolic, there is no harm in his symbolic retrospective amendment, even though we may in essence be against the principle of retrospective legislation. In that sense, the amendment is not retrospective, because it will not change the impact of anything. To be perfectly frank, I am not entirely sure where that leaves us. It seems to me that it leaves us wherever people want to be left: you pays your money and you takes your choice. People may want to be a purist, like my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire, and say, “I will vote against retrospective legislation come what may,” or they may want to take the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and say, “As we are dealing with symbolic legislation, there is nothing wrong with retrospective symbolism in the Bill.” I do not know which is right.

I asked the Library to help me with any other examples of retrospective legislation. Under the heading, “What is retrospective legislation?”, the Library briefing on this subject says:

“Retrospective legislation is generally defined as legislation which ‘takes away or impairs any vested right acquired under existing laws, or creates a new obligation, or imposes a new duty, or attaches a new disability in respect to transactions or considerations already past’.

[Mr Chope]

If my hon. Friend pauses to look at this again, he will see that, under that definition, the amendment would not be retrospective legislation, would it? The amendment would not take away or impair any vested right that has been acquired under existing laws, would not create a new obligation, would not impose a new duty and would not attach a new disability in respect to transactions or considerations already past.

[Philip Davies]

Exactly. My hon. Friend is right. Unfortunately, he is slightly arguing against himself. The explanatory statement, which, as ever, he helpfully printed alongside his amendment, states that it would make the repeal retrospective. Having explained that to the House, he now appears to be arguing that he would not make it retrospective. I am not really sure where that takes us.

[Mr Chope]

The distinction is that this would be retrospective, but it would not amount to retrospective legislation under the terms of the definition to which my hon. Friend referred.

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[Philip Davies]

You are exactly right, Mr Deputy Speaker. I was sidetracking myself. Let me return to the principle of retrospective legislation.

The Alan Turing (Statutory Pardon) Bill is, in many respects, from the same stable as this Bill. During its very short and sweet Third Reading in the House of Lords, the great Lord Tebbit made a pertinent point. He said that he had “no intention of obstructing” its progress, but added:

“As it continues on its journey towards the statute book, though, there is something that should be said. As we know, Mr Turing committed, and was convicted of, an act that would not be a crime today. So have many others, and many other crimes have been committed similarly. I hope that the Bill will not be used as a precedent. Even more, I hope that we will never seek to extend the logic of the Bill to posthumously convict men of crimes for acts that were not criminal when they were committed, but would be if they were committed today. There is a dangerous precedent within this Bill.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 30 October 2013; Vol. 748, c. 1584.]

I think that the warning given by Lord Tebbit then is very relevant to the Bill that we are discussing today, and that is the particular issue that I have with it.

[Mr Chope]

Both the quotation used by my hon. Friend that caused you to intervene, Mr Deputy Speaker, and the quotation that he has just used relate to criminal retrospection. Does he accept that the Bill is not about criminal retrospection?

[Philip Davies]

I do accept that.

Local Audit (Public Access to Documents) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and it is in essence what I have been saying about the position in Bournemouth. If Bournemouth is to take over or merge with Christchurch in a unitary authority, the people in Christchurch need to know the nature of Bournemouth Borough Council’s debts and liabilities and how it conducts its proceedings, particularly in planning. One of the key losses in such a merger would be the loss of Christchurch Borough Council’s control over its own greenbelt and planning policy. That is one of the biggest concerns that my local residents have. They fear that they will lose control over the quality of their local environment, which they currently control through local planning policy.

The amendment seeks to ensure that anybody can get access to such information, rather than just limiting it to journalists. Obviously, the information to which I referred earlier will become available only when the audit for this financial year is conducted, and that may be rather later in the day than most people would wish.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

As my hon. Friend knows, many local papers are stretched financially and therefore deterred from publishing things—perhaps including things about the leader of Bournemouth council—because they fear being sued and do not have the resources to defend themselves. Does he agree that that is why it is so important that not just journalists but the public have access to such material, so that they can make up their own minds and are not dependent on newspapers being able to afford to risk publishing things that may cause them to end up in court?

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We in this place are trying to do the job of holding councils to account. I tabled a parliamentary question earlier this year to find out the level of non-domestic rate arrears in Bournemouth. I eventually got the answer that there were between £10 million and £12 million of uncollected non-domestic rates. To the council’s credit, within weeks it had issued summonses against all those who owed arrears—I like to think I had some influence on that. We are talking about £10 million to £12 million of non-domestic rate arrears, at a time when we are saying that it is absolutely essential to save 1% of turnover by abolishing existing sovereign councils. It is farcical.

Trying to get councils to address these issues themselves is often very difficult. The idea of setting up scrutiny committees, which was part of the Localism Act 2011, has not really worked because those committees are often occupied by people who do not really understand, or are not interested in, genuinely holding the council to account. There is also the problem that scrutiny committees are not entitled to look into planning issues, which are often among the most controversial local issues.

There are lots of other things I could say about neighbouring councils, but I will not trouble the House with all that now. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) is here, and he may wish to add to that catalogue in due course if he contributes to the debate. The essence of the amendment is that everybody should be able to access such information. It should not be limited to journalists and other interested parties.

The idea is very much supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley, who wanted to extend those rights to everybody. I anticipate the probable response of the Bill’s sponsor, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills, to this point. On Second Reading, she resisted arguments to extend the rights by saying:

“If the rights were extended to anyone and everyone, there would be great potential to make mischief through multiple requests to inspect or copy documents, without the accompanying ability to make a meaningful contribution towards raising awareness or improving the accountability of the body concerned.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2016; Vol. 617, c. 1199.]

I implore my hon. Friend to reflect on what she said, because it is a sweeping generalisation and no evidence was adduced in support of it. Where is the evidence that the freedom to look at documents would be abused? Indeed, if it is abused, there are already safeguards to deal with vexatious behaviour. That, in summary, is the case for amendment 2.

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[Mr Chope]

Mr Speaker, I was not actually going to go into that level of detail.

[Philip Davies]

Why not?

[Mr Chope]

Because I am seeking to make quite a lot of points. I am sure that, however many members the society has, it will have even more members if the Bill is amended as I propose.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is beginning to lose me. It seems to me that he made a good case earlier for his amendment 2, which would provide access for as many people as possible—I am absolutely with him on that—but he now appears to be arguing for restricting the number of people who have access to such things, which flies in the face of his earlier amendment. Will he clarify whether he really supports his earlier amendment, rather than what may be seen as these probing amendments?

[Mr Chope]

Yes, I absolutely support my amendment 2. I tabled these alternative amendments 5 to 7 because in the event that my earlier amendment is not accepted by the Bill’s promoter—

[Philip Davies]

That’s very defeatist.

[Mr Chope]

Yes, it is indeed defeatist, and it is uncharacteristic of me to be defeatist about such things. In a sense, this is a case of belt and braces: if we are going to give privileged access to a group of people—my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills wants it to be journalists—they should be accredited, professional or qualified journalists, rather than people who simply call themselves journalists.

[Philip Davies]

I hope that my hon. Friend will not be defeated on amendment 2—I encourage him to strive for it and I think that he will garner a lot of support—but surely if his first amendment fails, the second-best option is for as many people as possible, within the terms of “journalist”, to have access to this information. Surely that is a better fall-back position than trying to restrict it even more?

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[Mr Chope]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

rose—

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[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch (Mr Chope) and for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who have given a compelling and comprehensive account of their amendments. I rise to adjudicate between them. It is a rare occurrence when my two hon. Friends come at things from slightly different perspectives, but I sense that they have their differences on the Bill. I will do my best to be fair to their amendments in my adjudication.

I join my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North in congratulating the Bill’s promoter, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), on getting her Bill to this stage. It is a good Bill, but if it were to incorporate some of the points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch and for Bury North, it would be a better Bill. The whole purpose of the Report stage is to try to improve a Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) is an excellent Minister, and I hope that he and my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills have listened carefully to my hon. Friends, and that they appreciate, on reflection, that the Bill could be better. I will try to set out which of the amendments the Minister and my hon. Friend should be minded to accept. If they are minded not to accept them, I encourage my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch and for Bury North to consider pressing them to a Division to test the will of the House.

My hon. Friends have made compelling cases for some but not all of their amendments, which is where I will focus my attention. Amendment 2 is the lead amendment in the group—rightly so, in many respects. It is my contention that it is the most powerful amendment in the group and if my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is tempted to press any of his amendments to a Division, I hope he focuses his attention on amendment 2, which states:

“Clause 1, page 1, line 5, leave out from ‘after’ to the end of the subsection and insert ‘any members of the public who are registered to vote in local elections in the United Kingdom’”.

In simple terms, my hon. Friend is basically saying that everybody in the country should have a right to know what is going on in local authorities. His compelling case was based on what is happening in his local authority and the neighbouring authority in Bournemouth. Clearly—it seems obvious to me—if two local authorities are potentially merging, a member of the public in one should have the absolute right to full access to all the information from the other to assess whether it is in their best interests for the merger to go ahead. Without access to the information, how on earth can they be in a position to make that judgment? That completely flies in the face of democracy.

It would be perverse in many respects if, in respect of my hon. Friend’s local authority area, the editor of the Evening Standard, who was mentioned earlier, was able to access the documents relating to his neighbouring council by virtue of being a journalist—a fine and leading one, at that, as the editor of a prestigious newspaper—but my hon. Friend’s local residents were unable to get the same information. That would surely be a perverse outcome, and it cannot really be the one envisaged when the Bill was in its infancy. I do not see what possible argument there could be against his amendment. If we believe that, in extending transparency, local authorities can rightly be held to account and the public can have greater awareness of what is going on, why do we not give them all the opportunity to see the information for themselves rather than relying on journalists to do the job for them?

I agree with the principle of extending the range of people who have access to these documents. However, the problem is that this proposal, while a step in the right direction, is not sufficient because, as we all know, the newspaper industry, and local newspapers in particular, are going through a pretty torrid time financially at the moment—I do not think there is any secret about that. With things moving on to the internet, newspapers find it very difficult to adjust and to monetise their content. We therefore tend to find in many local areas that, unfortunately, despite the best efforts of local newspaper groups, they are not increasing the number of journalists who would get access to all these documents and go through them with a fine-tooth comb; they are actually shedding journalists, and they are being spread more thinly. It is slightly naive to hope that, on the back of having given local journalists access to this information, all this stuff will suddenly be in the public domain, because I am not entirely sure that the journalistic trade has the capacity to do that. We will therefore be enabling something that is very worth while but which may not happen in practice. If we want this information to be in the public domain so that the public are able to hold local authorities to account, we cannot just rely on journalists because it is difficult to see how they will have the capacity. We have to allow the public to do it themselves.

I do not see why anybody should not be able to have access to this information. In practice, the chances of somebody in Shipley gratuitously showing an interest in the local authority in Christchurch are very remote. Nobody is going to be inundated with requests for that kind of scrutiny, but residents in Christchurch may well want to know what is happening in Bournemouth, which is just down the road, and they should absolutely have the right to inspect and see whether the council is behaving in the way it should. I was rather shocked to hear the allegations made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch about the conflicts of interest of the leader of Bournemouth Council. Without going over the detail myself, it certainly did not sound very good. It is absolutely right that local residents in adjoining authorities should be able to know what is going on.

I genuinely do not see why my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills or the Minister would want to resist this greater transparency and scrutiny, because surely that is the whole purpose of the Bill. In his amendment, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is, in effect, taking the Bill to its logical conclusion. I am pretty sure that if we do not do this now, there will be another private Member’s Bill further down the road introducing the measures that he proposes, because there is a clear logic to what he is trying to achieve. I believe in transparency, and I think it is very difficult to argue against it. If we are to go down the route of transparency, let us have full transparency so that nobody can claim that they did not have an opportunity to access any detailed information that they wanted to see.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend mentioned the shortage of local reporters and the pressures on local newspapers. Does he recall that only last month the BBC said that it was setting aside £8 million a year to pay for 150 reporters to work for local news organisations across the country? Is not that stark evidence of the plight of many of our local newspapers?

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[Mr Chope]

May I begin by thanking the promoter of the Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton)? She has been assiduous in addressing the amendments that we have tabled. Would that that were always the case. She has also been charming and courteous in how she has dealt with us throughout the proceedings, so it is with some dismay that I say I cannot agree with everything she has said.

Before I go into detail, however, I should like to point out how helpful it has been to hear the views of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce). She supports some of the amendments, which gives me extra enthusiasm and confidence that I am on to a good thing here. I have always been in favour of trying to find consensus across the House and gaining cross-party support. The shadow Minister expressed support for amendment 2 and amendment 10. I am not going to push amendment 10 to a vote, but I certainly hope to do so with amendment 2. We will need to come back to amendment 10, because I think my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills —and indeed the whole House—will agree that there is a strong case for extending those powers to health bodies.

Let me turn to the objection to amendment 2 put forward by the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy). He said that it would place a new burden on local authorities, which would have to be funded by the Government. In fairness to him, however, he made no bones about the fact that he had no idea of the extent of that burden. He has made no estimate of it. In my submission, it would be relatively small and it would tend to be a burden only for those local authorities that were not already sufficiently transparent and accountable. It is those authorities that would, because of their secrecy, prompt people to try to inspect their books and accounts.

[Philip Davies]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this scrutiny of local authorities would probably lead to their saving more money in their everyday business than it would cost them to implement the provisions in amendment 2?

[Mr Chope]

I absolutely agree. As with all such things, the issue is one of proportionality. There is a balance between the burden on local government and the benefit to the public interest. In the case of amendment 2, the benefit to the public interest far outweighs any miniscule burden on local authorities, even if the argument put forward by my hon. Friend was not accepted by those authorities.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills said that the Bill does what it says on the tin and talked about wanting to confine the Bill to extending rights to journalists. However, I remind her of the long title of her own Bill. It is a Bill to

“Extend public access to certain local audit documents under section 26 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014.”

It is not limited to journalists. If my hon. Friend had wanted to limit it to journalists, she could have done so when she put down the long title of the Bill. It is sensible that we should take this opportunity to see whether we can make this Bill a bigger, more substantial piece of legislation than it would otherwise be, so I want to press amendment 2 to a vote.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

Awards for Valour (Protection) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a pertinent point. I will come to that in a moment.

I know that it is not the intention of the Bill to create the outcome I have just described, but it remains a possibility. As my hon. Friend says, the Royal Air Force Families Federation said in its written evidence to the Defence Committee:

“Yes, there should most certainly be safeguards for family members. The key question is who ‘qualifies’! The definition we use is ‘anyone who is a blood relation’ but this may not be ?appropriate in these circumstances and can be difficult to prove on occasions. Interestingly, the MoD is struggling with its own definition of a family member but it may be sensible to align any definition for these circumstances with the MoD definition if and when they decide what it should be. Otherwise, it’s probably a matter for common sense.”

I know that the issue is dealt with differently now, but I believe that it is worth having a definition of “family” in the Bill, in its new sense.

As I mentioned on Second Reading, the Defence Committee’s report states:

“A number of our witnesses emphasised the importance of ensuring that relatives of deceased or incapacitated medal recipients can continue to wear their relations’ medals at commemoration events without risk of prosecution.”

The report also states:

“Mr Johnson indicated that family members would be doubly protected as they would lack the necessary intention to deceive, as well as being able to avail themselves of a specific defence that will be placed in the Bill.”

I agree that a specific defence should be included in the Bill, and that is the reason for this new clause. How we define “family” is an issue. Crucially, the report goes on:

“The term ‘family member’ must however be defined in terms of the proximity of the relations that it is seeking to include in the defence. It is not a legal term of art with a single definition. Acts of Parliament which use the term commonly carry a definition of ‘family’ within them to be used for the purposes of that Act. Mr Johnson suggested in oral evidence that he was minded that this defence should be quite narrow, so that for example a nephew deceitfully wearing medals could not rely on the defence by claiming that they were his uncle’s awards.”

It also states:

“The inclusion of a defence to ensure that family members representing deceased or incapacitated relations who are recipients of medals is vital, but ‘family member’ must be properly defined to ensure that there is no room for uncertainty or abuse. We suggest that the Bill include a definition of ‘family member’ in order to provide certainty over who will be covered by this category.”

That is what I am trying to do in the new clause. I have taken it as read that spouses should be included, as should blood relatives and step relatives. I have also included provision for those who are adopted into families, which slightly extends the basic definition of “family” according to section 113 of the Housing Act 1985. In reality, there will be only one actual award, so we can assume that the closest family member might have it, or that it would be shared by close family members, in which case it is unlikely that a distant relative would use the award.

The new clause would also prevent the situation from arising in which, for example, a son pinches his father’s medal for a bit of fun and goes around bragging that it is his. However unlikely or unbelievable that claim might be, the act of intending to deceive does not take account of the perception of others. They might well laugh out loud at the absurdity of a 17-year-old wearing a medal when everyone knows he has never been in the armed forces, but as the Bill stands that does not prevent the offence from being committed. I hope that the new clause will help with that.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has obviously done a lot of work on defining what he means by a family member for these purposes. Did I hear him correctly when he said that this was based on housing legislation?

[Philip Davies]

I took the basic definition of a family member from section 113 of the Housing Act 1985, although I am conscious that my definition is wider. The 1985 Act’s definition was a starting point, but I would like to think that I have brought it a bit more up to date.

[Mr Chope]

In that case, I congratulate my hon. Friend on his innovative drafting.

[Philip Davies]

From someone as esteemed as my hon. Friend, that is high praise indeed.

New clause 8 would require the Government on, or as near as possible to, the 12-month anniversary of the Bill’s enactment to place before each House of Parliament figures showing the number of convictions, and the sentences handed down, for the offence of wearing medals with the intent to deceive. That would ensure that we monitor the effect of the legislation, both in terms of the number of convictions and the sentences handed down for those convictions. As we have no figures now, we do not know the extent of the problem. When I asked my local police force and the Metropolitan police, they could not tell me of any incidents relating to the existing offences in relation to military uniforms, and so on.

The Defence Committee heard evidence from various sources, and no one could quantify the problem, although people gave anecdotal examples. The problem seems to be very small, from what I can glean from the evidence that the Committee heard, so the idea that we need a law seems like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. If the Bill came into effect, new clause 8 would give us a clearer idea of the extent of the problem and the sentences being handed down.

[Mr Chope]

Under the Fraud Act 2006 it is still an offence to make, or to attempt to make, a financial gain by fraudulently wearing uniforms or medals. Does my hon. Friend have any information on how many times that provision has been applied in law?

[Philip Davies]

I apologise to my hon. Friend for not being well enough prepared to answer his question, but I do not have that information. I do not even know whether anyone has that information. Someone might have it, but I do not.

New clause 9 states:

“(1) This Act shall expire at the end of 2022 unless an order is made under this section.

(2) An order under this section shall be made by statutory instrument; but no order shall be made unless a draft has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament.”

Basically, this is a sunset clause. If it became apparent that the Bill was not doing as intended, new clause 9 would be a nice way for the Bill to fall without any fanfare. Of course if the Bill were enacted and doing particularly well, someone would be able to rehash it.

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[Mr Chope]

The policy background to the Bill was set out in the explanatory notes, which state:

“Since 2009 it has not been an offence for an individual to wear medals or decorations that they were never awarded.”

It does not seem as though the law before 2009 covered the wearing of false medals. I cannot understand—I wonder whether my hon. Friend can—why we are seeking to extend the law beyond even what applied prior to 2009.

[Philip Davies]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. The Bill goes over the top in making these things a criminal offence, potentially with a custodial sentence attached. That is bad enough in terms of going over the top, but when we are dealing with things that have “the appearance of being an award”, we are going way beyond what anybody has ever envisaged before, and we are going too far.

My amendment 3 proposes to delete the words “including in particular” from clause 2. That seems a strange phrase to have in legislation, as it is general and does not strike me as being a particularly helpful legal phrase. How do we define “including in particular”? Does that mean something else is included that we do not know about? I do not really know what definition we have in mind for “including in particular”. How on earth is anyone to know whether they are committing an offence if they are wearing something which is not mentioned “in particular”? It could be interpreted that they did break the law without having any idea that they were doing so because the provision just includes things “in particular”, but not exclusively those things. That is a strange phrase.

We can take amendments 4 and 6 to 15 together, as they all deal with the fact of this being an imprisonable offence. They would remove the custodial sentence for the offence in England and Wales.

As I have said, I do not think we should have this legislation. As I pointed out on Second Reading, the Defence Committee called its report on the Bill “Exposing Walter Mitty: The Awards for Valour (Protection) Bill”, but it would not expose Walter Mitty; it would criminalise him and potentially send him to prison for three months. If it was just about exposing Walter Mitty, probably none of us would have a problem with the Bill, but that is not what it would do.

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[Philip Davies]

No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr Chope]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

I will give way to my hon. Friend.

[Mr Chope]

It is disappointing that anyone should wish to try to use emotional blackmail against my hon. Friend and what he is proposing. In his last intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) referred to people who were wearing medals that they had not been awarded. He did not deal with the issue of them wearing things that had the appearance of being an award. I cannot understand why some of the amendments of my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) are not acceptable to the Bill’s promoter.

[Philip Davies]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Perhaps if the Bill had been drawn as narrowly as my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford is now trying to draw it, it may well have been acceptable to all concerned. Unfortunately, he did not do so, and decided to go way over the top to include all sorts of people who were never envisaged to be included originally. That is why we must try to sort out some of these issues.

Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I do not accept that. Having said that my right hon. Friend is virtually always right, I fear that this is one of the rare occasions when he is not. These things all sound wonderful when one signs up to them, but one does not necessarily understand the full implications of doing so. As an illustration of that, we might focus on the European convention on human rights. It would be very difficult for anybody to disagree with anything in that convention, but we did not realise at the time how it would grow and start to get ahead of itself, interpreting things in a way that could never have been envisaged and getting above its station. That creates all sorts of problems further down the line. In this context, my fear is not necessarily all about what is in the Istanbul convention, although I do have concerns about that—I am more concerned about the way in which a foreign body will interpret its role and start growing to a level that was never envisaged either in the convention or in the Bill. The votes for prisoners issue in relation to the European convention on human rights perfectly illustrates how these things can grow in a way that we never envisaged. I therefore do not accept the premise of my right hon. Friend’s intervention.

New clause 6 is absolutely essential to maintaining our sovereignty in the United Kingdom and to making sure that that is set out clearly in the Bill so that there is absolutely no doubt that we retain all sovereignty in these matters and in what we are implementing.

New clause 10 follows on from that. I would have hoped that the SNP and the campaigners for this Bill would very much welcome it, because it says:

“Any recommendations…by GREVIO…or the Committee of the Parties…must be debated in Parliament before any Government response is given.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North argued that Parliament should be in charge of these matters. If we sign up to this Bill as currently drafted, Parliament will be excluded from anything that goes on. Once we have ratified the convention and the Bill is passed, Parliament will suddenly become redundant. If a foreign organisation is producing reports saying that the Government are not meeting what they signed up to—if that is the view of GREVIO and the Committee of the Parties and they produce a report along those lines—then surely it is only right that the matter is debated in Parliament so that Parliament can have its say on whether it agrees before the Government respond to GREVIO and the Committee of the Parties.

I cannot see why anybody who is in favour of this Bill and is campaigning for it could possibly object to giving Parliament more scrutiny over the process and more power to hold the Government to account. If anybody who supports the Bill would like to intervene and tell me what objection they have to new clause 10, I would be very happy to hear it and try to deal with it. If people do not have any objections to it, they will obviously remain quiet and we can proceed on that basis—we can press it to a vote and hopefully get people’s endorsement. I will give people the opportunity again: if anybody has any objection to new clause 10, perhaps they could speak now. If they do not, we will press it to a Division and hopefully get full support for it. It looks as though we have that.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill as currently drafted includes some provision for parliamentary scrutiny, in clause 3(1)(e), but Government amendment 14 seeks to remove even that modicum of scrutiny?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to the Government amendments in due course. The Government, in cahoots with the SNP in the cosy little deal that they have put together, have removed any post-ratification scrutiny of how the Government are doing. That is quite extraordinary, but no doubt the Government and the SNP will be able to answer for themselves in due course.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend says that the Government have removed it, but so far the Bill has not been amended at all. He will obviously ensure that any Government amendments are tested in this House, because it may well be that quite a lot of the people who were originally supporters of this Bill would not want to see it watered down in the way that the Government wish.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Far from watering down the Bill, he is seeking to strengthen it; I will come to his amendments and new clauses in due course. We have an important role to play in Parliament in making sure that any legislation is fit for purpose. We ought to test the will of the House on any attempts to hoodwink the public. People should know where each MP stands on watering down the convention and on whether Parliament should have any role post-ratification—or whether we should just ratify the convention and leave it at that.

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[Philip Davies]

Of course I am in favour of people reporting crimes, but I am not entirely sure that we need to ratify the Istanbul convention for them to do so. We already encourage people to report crimes. If my hon. Friend wants to send a message today to every victim of violence that it is essential that they report that crime to the police, she is welcome to do so and I will endorse that message wholeheartedly. Any victim of any kind of violence, in any shape or form, irrespective of their gender, should report it to the police. It should be fully investigated and the perpetrator brought to justice and much more harshly punished than they currently are. Let that message ring out from the Chamber today, but we do not need to ratify the Istanbul convention for people to report that they have been the victim of a violent crime—we already have measures in place to deal with that.

The rollercoaster effect in Portugal that I described has also happened in Poland, which ratified the convention on 27 April 2015. It seems that the figures went up after it signed the convention, but that lately they have gone down.

There is no pattern to the figures in the countries whose ambassadors kindly sent me them, but it is important to put it on the record that they show that Sweden, Portugal and Poland clearly take the issue very seriously. I commend those countries for doing so and for laying bare their figures to me. In some cases the figures are good and in others they are not, but those countries have been open and transparent enough to share them with me so that I can share them with the House.

I worry about the countries that did not share their figures. I appreciate that I have no evidence to support this and that I am making an assertion that can be countered, but I fear and suspect that some countries did not supply me with the information because they are slightly embarrassed that the figures have gone in the wrong way since they ratified the convention. I could be wrong, but people can draw their own conclusions.

I have also seen figures from Albania and Austria. In Albania, they show an increase since ratification from 4,599 to 5,281. In Austria, the trend is the same. Its first annual report, which came out last September after the convention came into force in 2014, showed that the number of female victims of violent offences had increased from 37,546 to 37,677—so I think it is fair to say that we are not going to make a massive difference to levels of violence against women by ratifying the treaty.

After Austria ratified the Istanbul convention, the number of women murdered there went from 118 in 2014 to 165 in 2015. That seems quite a significant increase in murders against women a year after the country ratified the convention.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend think that the number of murders of women results from a higher reporting rate?

[Philip Davies]

I suspect that it is harder for a murder victim to report that crime—so clearly not. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that that statistic cannot be explained away by increased reporting of crime. I think it is fair to say that murders are known to the public authorities.

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[Mr Chope]

I commend my hon. Friend for tabling new clause 17. It is effectively a probing new clause trying to find out the Government’s policy on the issue. They say they wish to ratify the convention, but they have made no statement about whether, in ratifying, they wish to have reservations under the powers in the convention.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and I hope that the Minister will make that clear. I have given up the hope that SNP Members know anything about what is in the Istanbul convention. They clearly have no idea. If they bothered to read it, they would know that it contains powers for Governments to reserve some areas—not sign up to them—but still ratify the convention. We have no idea, however, whether we are going to sign up to these things. Before Parliament agrees to something, we should at least know what we are signing up to. At the moment, we have no idea. Perhaps the Minister will be good enough to tell us, before Third Reading, what the Government envisage us signing up to.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is right in one sense about the new clause being a probing measure to tease out from the Government which bits of the convention we will sign up to as part of ratification, but he does it a slight disservice. I am not entirely sure I agree that it is just a probing new clause. To describe it as such suggests that I do not particularly agree with it and am just seeking information, whereas I do agree with it, so I cannot agree with him.

If my hon. Friend was to make the same accusation about new clause 19, however, he might have a point. It states:

“Nothing in the Bill shall prevent the United Kingdom ratifying the Istanbul Convention with reservations as provided for in paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article 78.”

In effect, that would allow the Government to ratify the convention with the maximum number of reservations allowed. It is important to highlight what reservations are allowed and therefore what would be covered by the new clause. The reservations apply to the following outline areas: compensation, which I have just covered on new clause 17, jurisdiction, statute of limitation, residence status and the right to provide for non-criminal sanctions for psychological violence and stalking.

I have talked about article 30 and compensation already. The new clause 19 would also allow the Government in effect to opt out of paragraphs (1)(e), (3) and (4) of article 44, on jurisdiction; article 55(1), as it relates to article 35, on minor offences and ex parte and ex officio proceedings; article 58, as it relates to articles 37 to 39, on the statute of limitation; and article 59, on residence status, especially in relation to spouses. Finally, article 78(3) declares that a state

“reserves the right to provide for non-criminal sanctions, instead of criminal sanctions, for the behaviours referred to in Articles 33 and 34”—

on psychological violence and stalking respectively.

There is a good case for saying that the UK Government and Parliament should be sovereign in all these areas and that where we can leave matters to the UK Government, Parliament and the UK courts, we should take that opportunity, mainly for the reason I outlined in response to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight): we have no idea necessarily how these things will develop over the years, so it is best to reserve as many rights as possible. That would be the most sensible strategy for the Government to adopt, because it would allow them to retain as much control as possible.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In fact, I was just about to come on to that. Of the 22 countries that have already signed and ratified the convention, 11 have done so with reservations attached, and a further four have signed it stating they want reservations too. It is clearly a reasonable approach for Governments to take—it is in the convention that countries can do it, so it must be an accepted approach. It is clearly a reasonable approach, as all countries, Governments and legal systems are different, and it is important that that be recognised as much as possible so that provisions can be to the taste of particular countries. I hope, therefore, that the Government will make it clear where we are with these reservations and what implications there might be. If they are seeking the maximum number of reservations, as I would advise them to do, perhaps the Minister can confirm that she has no objection to new clause 19, which would simply make that clear in the Bill and put the matter beyond any doubt and further debate.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend really think that Parliament should be prepared to contemplate having only non-criminal sanctions against stalking, for example?

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[Philip Davies]

No, I do not. I was going to come to that later, but as my hon. Friend has raised it now, I should make it clear that I absolutely do not think that. In fact, colleagues will remember my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) waging a fantastic campaign trying to double the maximum sentence courts could impose on people convicted of stalking. I was a strong supporter of his 10-minute rule Bill that sought to do that, and I was pleased that the Government agreed to adopt that measure. That was fantastic.

I differ with my hon. Friend, however, in that I do not accept the premise that providing for reservations from the convention means that we necessarily always have to disagree with what is in those articles. It just means that we are free to do what we think is right, rather than having another body telling us its view of the matter. We can be trusted to do the right thing by victims of stalking, as the Government have already done. Not signing up to an article does not mean disagreeing with what is in it; it just means we want to retain sovereignty for our own country.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend understand why, when the last Labour Government were negotiating the convention, they were prepared to allow other countries to have non-criminal sanctions in respect of stalking? Why were they prepared to allow a reservation of that nature, given that only a very limited number of reservations are allowed?

[Philip Davies]

That is a very good point. No doubt the Labour spokesman will be able to explain why Labour thinks it is absolutely fine for other countries to have non-criminal sanctions for stalking, and for psychological violence against women. The Labour Government obviously agreed to that being part of the convention, and people are happy for us to sign up to it on the basis that it is a gold standard for protecting women. Well, I hope people realise what is in this “gold standard for protecting women”. Those who campaign most vociferously seem to be the ones who have read the smallest amount of it. There is a direct correlation: the people who seem to be the most wound up about it are the ones who have read it the least. If some of them take the time to read it, they may be shocked to find what is in this “gold standard”.

I actually think that the UK can do a damn sight better than the Istanbul convention. I think that by signing up to it we will be levelling things downwards rather than levelling them upwards, which is what we should be seeking to do. If the Government want to do something useful around the world, they should be encouraging other countries to adopt the practices in which we engage in this country, rather than our agreeing to adopt their practices, which are much weaker when it comes to dealing with violent crime and, in particular, violence against women.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: Labour Members have a great deal to answer for in this debate. Perhaps they will be able to explain why they think that stalking and psychological violence against women should be subject to non-criminal sanctions in other countries, and perhaps the Bill’s promoter will be able to explain why she would adopt that policy as well. I suspect that it is not something that she tells people about very often when talking about the Istanbul convention.

New clause 20 provides for a requirement to denounce the convention after five years. In effect, it is a sunset clause—I think that more Bills should contain sunset clauses—enabling us to review whether or not the Istanbul convention has been a force for good in the United Kingdom. If everyone is so confident that ratification will indeed be a force for good, they have nothing to fear from a sunset clause, because it will become apparent that the ratification has been a great triumph, and we can all agree to put the provision back on to the statute book in time for it to continue. If, of course, the ratification proves to be a turkey, the Bill will fall, and we shall be able to start from scratch. We shall be able to introduce legislation that is much more sensible and effective. I have no idea why anyone might not support a sunset clause. It seems a very good safeguard, because it requires us to continue to focus on what a Bill is designed to achieve, and to ensure that that is what it is achieving.

Those are my new clauses. I shall now deal with the amendments—14 of the 36—that are tabled in my name. Amendment 22 relates to the report that subsection (1) requires the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament on the timetable for ratification of the convention. The subsection states that the report

“must be laid within four weeks of this Act receiving Royal Assent.”

What is required within four weeks is for the Secretary of State to set out

“the steps required to be taken to enable the United Kingdom to ratify the Istanbul Convention; and…the date by which the Secretary of State would expect the United Kingdom to be able to ratify the Convention.”

I think that is a rather unrealistic timetable. No doubt the Secretary of State could rustle something up to hit that arbitrary four-week target, but I think it would be much more sensible for the report to be meaningful and accurate. Surely we should be aiming for that, rather than sticking to an artificial timetable.

I should love to know why the Bill specifies four weeks. Perhaps its promoter will be able to tell us. Why four weeks? Why not six weeks, or two weeks? What is so special about four weeks? I suspect that there is nothing special about it at all. I suspect that someone said, “We shall have to put in a figure. What shall we put in? Let’s go for four weeks, shall we?” I do not think that that is a sensible way of drafting legislation.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is effectively supporting one of the Government amendments, but may I present an alternative point of view? The Government have had since 2014 to draw up a list of the legislative requirements that will enable the convention to be ratified. The Bill was published on 29 June last year, and we still have not heard from them any indication of what they believe must be done in order to enable the United Kingdom to ratify it.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend seems to have made my point for me. I understand what he is saying: that the Government have had ample time in which to do this, and we should therefore be able to put to them a fixed time in the near future. My contrary point would be that, if after such a long time they still have not been able to do it, how on earth are we to expect them to do it all of a sudden within four weeks? That seems unrealistic to me. Surely the fact that the Government have not managed to do it in all those months suggests that they will not be able to do it in four weeks. My point is that the timetable is unrealistic.

[Mr Chope]

But it is not just four weeks, is it? One of the Government amendments says that the Act should not come into force until two months after Royal Assent, which means, effectively, that after Royal Assent the Government would have three months on top of all the time that they have had up until now.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is clearly right. I cannot disagree with anything that he has said. The points that he has made about Royal Assent are factual. However, I am not entirely sure that that timetable is achievable either, given the delay that we have already seen. My point is that, rather than rushing to meet an artificial target that they are clearly finding it difficult to meet, the Government should be left to set out those steps at a reasonable time.

My amendment 22 would extend the timetable from four weeks to three years, and I should like to think that everyone would agree that it allows the Government ample time to get their ducks in a row and their house in order. I should like to think that the Government would have no excuse for not sticking to that particular timetable. However, my hon. Friend thinks that that would let the Government off the hook too much. My amendment 24 replaces the four weeks with “when reasonably practicable”.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right, and I shall go into that in a bit more detail later. The Government really are selling people a pup. They, and the Scottish National party, are trying to get all the plaudits for putting their shoulders to the wheel to ensure that the Istanbul convention is ratified, but the “filleting” amendments are designed to do the exact opposite. My three-year amendment, as my hon. Friend puts it, may mean a long time in the waiting, but at least it will mean that there is a fixed deadline for the Government to meet. Amendment 24, which says that the report must be laid “when reasonably practicable”, mirrors the Government amendment. It is very similar. Obviously, great minds—mine and the Minister’s—think alike on the matter. However, I concede that the amendment allows for a never-ending timescale. Perhaps that is what the Government, and the SNP, have in mind. I do not know. I am perfectly relaxed about either measure—I will take soundings from colleagues as to which they think is the best. My general point is that the four-week target is never going to be achievable, particularly given all the other things that are going on for the Government at the moment.

[Mr Chope]

On the point about so much else going on, how does my hon. Friend define

“as soon as reasonably practicable”?

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[Philip Davies]

My word, Mr Deputy Speaker! If we were to abolish Bills that were just about gesture politics, that would abolish private Member’s Bill Fridays altogether. However, that is a debate for another day. I do not want to be sidetracked down that line today.

Amendment 29 would delete paragraph (d). The provision says that the Secretary of State shall lay before each House of Parliament a report on

“the measures to be taken and legislation required to enable the United Kingdom to ratify the Istanbul Convention”.

Surely it is clear what legislation is required to enable the UK to ratify the convention. Why on earth do we need an annual report for the Government to tell us what legislation is required to ratify the convention?

[Mr Chope]

It should be the Minister intervening on my hon. Friend because it is the Government’s case that they do not know yet what legislation is required.

[Philip Davies]

rose—

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[Philip Davies]

As ever, you are absolutely right, Mr Deputy Speaker. There have been lots of interventions and I will try to resist the temptation to be as generous in taking them as I normally am—for a bit, at least.

Amendment 54 again addresses clause 3 and the reports on progress. The amendment says that the first annual report should be laid no later than 1 November 2017. That is interesting in itself, because what the Government are leaving in the Bill is all about before ratification, but I want to keep in post-ratification reports, and my amendments say that the first one should be from 2020 onwards—they should be done from 2020 and then every two years. That would be the effect of amendments 53 and 54.

Amendment 55 is my final amendment and it relates to when this Bill, when it becomes an Act, should come into force. The Bill says it should

“come into force on the day on which this Act receives Royal Assent”,

and the Government have amended that, but I suggest it should

“not come into force until 90% of the signatories to the Convention have ratified it and there has been a proven reduction in violence against women in 75% of the countries who have ratified the Convention.”

It seems to me to be perfectly clear that we would want to ratify the convention only if it is actually shown to work. As I made clear earlier, we do not have the evidence at the moment to support that.

Those are my amendments, and I will now touch briefly on the other ones in the group, which I can race through fairly quickly, I hope. All of the new clauses in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch are about making sure that the Government do not apply any of the reservations. I have explained why I think the Government should apply some reservations, however, and that is why I would reject new clauses 14, 15 and 16. If I might be so bold as to say so, I think my hon. Friend’s best attempt here is new clause 18 on psychological violence and stalking. It is inconceivable that those things would not come with a criminal sanction in the UK, so in that sense we have nothing to fear from signing up to that. It might be my hon. Friend’s argument that if we were to make it clear that we would sign up to that—that we would be happy to make sure they would always have a criminal sanction—it might encourage others to do the same. I do not know whether that would work, but I would not be averse to that, and if my hon. Friend were to push new clause 18 to a vote, I would be more sympathetic to that than I would be to his other new clauses, if that is helpful to him.

The Government amendments—which the SNP has endorsed, let us not forget that—are extraordinary. I have made it clear that I am opposed to this convention, but this cosy deal shows that they do not care too much about it either. They pretend—

[Mr Chope]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Philip Davies]

I am going to resist the temptation to give way to my hon. Friend for now, Mr Deputy Speaker, just to show that I always take notice of the Chair.

They are attempting to fillet this Bill without anybody noticing, claiming to be champions of the Istanbul convention while getting the Government off the hook of ever having to actually implement it. These amendments are all about making sure either that the Istanbul convention is never ratified or that its ratification is delayed as much as possible. Only SNP Members will know why on earth they have agreed to this. Only they will be able to explain that, or perhaps they are so embarrassed about it that they will not be willing to explain it at all. I hope they will have the guts to admit to what they have done.

Government new clause 1 would remove clause 1 and therefore would remove the ratification of the convention on violence against women, because clause 1 imposes a “duty” on the Government

“to take all reasonable steps as soon as reasonably practicable to enable the United Kingdom to become compliant with”

the Istanbul convention. The Government want to delete that. They want to leave out clause 1, yet clause 1 is the whole point of the Bill, in that it imposes a duty on the Government

“to take all reasonable steps as soon as reasonably practicable to enable the United Kingdom to become compliant”

with the convention. The Government want to remove that provision from the Bill, and the SNP is quite happy for them to do so. This is absolutely extraordinary stuff, Mr Deputy Speaker! You literally could not make it up.

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[Mr Chope]

Under the rules of the convention, reservations are not put in at the time of signature, but at the time of ratification. I will take the Minister’s remarks as a commitment that there will be no reservations when it comes to ratification.

[Philip Davies]

The Minister asked whether I would be minded to withdraw my amendment. For the benefit of the House, I would like to make it clear, through my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), that I will be very happy to withdraw my amendment and will not push any of my amendments to a vote.

[Mr Chope]

I am glad that my hon. Friend has been satisfied by the Minister’s response.

One reason that I have been interested in the subject for a long time is that I was present at the Standing Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe when this convention was first discussed. I remember vividly the representations that were made to me and my hon. Friend, the then Member for North Dorset, explaining that the United Kingdom Government really wanted the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to pass an amendment to the draft convention—as it then was—to enable a signatory party to the convention to have a reservation in respect of extraterritorial jurisdiction.

The Foreign Office representative who lobbied us in Paris on that occasion— unfortunately, only half an hour before the decisions were to be taken—expected us to persuade everybody to accept an amendment from the United Kingdom Government at very short notice. The Government, through their Foreign Office representative, were very concerned then about the extraterritorial application of the convention, which is why they wanted to allow a participant party to have a reservation. In the end, the convention went through without that power being granted. Everybody who is suspicious about the length of time it is taking for the Government to get their act together on the issue needs to bear in mind that background—that in 2011, on the basis of a convention that had been negotiated by the previous Labour Government, the Government were concerned about the issue of extraterritorial application. We have not heard, even at this very late stage, anything from the Government precisely about what measures need to be brought in to satisfy those requirements before the convention can be ratified. It seems to me that we are owed something from the Government on that because the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan and others have been pressing them to come up with a list of what is required.

Even the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), in her short contribution from the Opposition Front Bench, asked the Minister whether the forthcoming legislation on domestic violence, to which the Minister referred, would incorporate the necessary legislative requirements to enable the ratification of the Istanbul convention, but my hon. Friend—I do not think she is listening, which is a pity—was not even able to respond. That must surely cast doubt on how long it will be before the convention is actually ratified.

One of the Government amendments says that the Government do not want clause 2 implemented before clause 3. Therefore, no report may well have been made under clause 2 by the time we reach 1 November 2017 and the report on progress under clause 3. That seems to show an acceptance by the Government that they will not be in a position to ratify the convention for some considerable time. The strong feeling on both sides of the House is that people want the convention ratified, but the Government seem to be wriggling about when and how they will achieve that.

I have tabled a number of amendments and new clauses. I think I have a commitment from the Minister, in so far as one can tell, that when the convention is ratified, it will not be ratified with any reservations, and I am grateful to her for that. However, I still fear that the impression being given to the world outside is that we are passing today a Bill that will require the United Kingdom to ratify the Council of Europe convention, when, in fact, it does no such thing, and that needs to be made absolutely clear.

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[Mr Chope]

Sometimes one despairs at one’s colleagues, but I will not do that in public.

[Philip Davies]

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the clause.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Prayers

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 24th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. On Wednesday morning, the Order Paper included four Bills whose remaining stages could take place today. However, the remaining stages of a fifth Bill—the Kew Gardens (Leases) Bill—appeared on the Order Paper on Thursday morning. That Bill only completed its Committee stage on Wednesday. I do not attach any blame to my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger) and I have no particular issue with the Bill in general. My particular issue is a point of principle, in that amendments to private Members’ Bills on Friday have to be tabled by the end of play on Tuesday, yet the Kew Gardens (Leases) Bill did not appear on the Order Paper until Thursday morning after finishing in Committee on Wednesday. Therefore, people were given no opportunity to table amendments if they so wished. What is your view, Mr Speaker, as to whether this should be the state of affairs?

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I noticed that the Kew Gardens (Leases) Bill had appeared on the Order Paper yesterday morning, and I tabled some amendments to it, but obviously those amendments are starred because, although I tabled them at the first opportunity, it will not be possible to debate them unless there is a ruling to the contrary. I inquired as to the practice relating to the issue and was told that the convention is that a Member of this House should not put forward their private Bill for Report and Third Reading if that Bill has only come out of Committee on the Wednesday, rather than the Tuesday of that week. That was certainly the practice adopted by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) when he brought forward the Homelessness Reduction Bill, which I had the privilege of chairing in Committee. It was quite clear that that Bill would not be put forward for Report until there had been a clear period in which amendments could be tabled. Would you rule on that, Mr Speaker? If the Kew Gardens (Leases) Bill is heard today, will it be possible to discuss the amendments to it?

Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is going down an interesting route, as he is basically saying that, no matter the injuries a person sustains in a violent attack, all we should be concerned about is the motivation. If the motivation is not what the hon. Gentleman thinks—[Interruption.] That is fair enough. It seems to me, though, that if somebody comes up to a person because they hate them and beats them to a pulp, the nuance of why they hate that person is less important than the scale of the injuries they suffer and the need for the person who perpetrated the crime to be punished. The hon. Gentleman clearly has a different opinion on that. I am more interested in the violence and the punishment of the perpetrator.

[Mr Chope]

In the preamble to the convention there is a reference to the Geneva convention of 1949, which is gender-neutral despite the fact that most of the victims of breaches of the Geneva convention are men.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a perfectly valid point. If we follow the logic of today’s debate, the Geneva convention should have applied only to men, as they were much more likely to be subjected to what it was intended to cover. I think that that would be nonsense, and I suspect that my hon. Friend and most people here think that it would be nonsense too, but it is amazing that when it falls on the other side, everyone is silent. That is the hypocrisy I want to expose today and I am going to press on and expose it.

To highlight the fact that men are more likely to be the victims of violent crime, I will quote the recent statistics from the Ministry of Justice on the representation of females and males in the criminal justice system. They confirm that men are nearly twice as likely to be the victim of violent crime than women. According to the crime survey of England and Wales, 1.3% of women interviewed reported being victims of violence compared with 2.4% of men. My point also applies to children. Again according to the crime survey for England and Wales, in 2015-16 a smaller proportion of girls than boys reported being victims of violence—4.2% of girls versus 7.7% of boys.

It is not just with violence generally that men do worse than women. When it comes to the most serious cases, according to the crime survey for England and Wales, in 2015-16 women accounted for 36% of recorded homicide victims while men were victims in 64% of cases. Clearly, on every possible level of crime, a man is more likely to be the victim than a woman.

Although we have not heard much, if anything, about this today, men are also victims of domestic violence. It is right that in two thirds of domestic violence incidents a woman is the victim, which is absolutely outrageous, but in a third of cases the victim is a man. It may well be that some people in this House think we should only be concerned about the two thirds who are women, but I do not. We should be concerned about all victims of domestic violence equally. They are all victims of domestic violence and we should consider them equally whenever we consider a response to it, not just the two thirds who happen to be women.

According to the Office for National Statistics report “Focus on Violent Crime and Sexual Offences”, which relates to the year ending March 2015 and which was released in February, the crime survey of England and Wales estimates that 8.2% of women and 4% of men reported experiencing any type of domestic abuse in the last year—that is all forms of abuse. That is equivalent to an estimated 1.3 million female victims and 600,000 male victims, all of whom, in my opinion, equally deserve our support. The ONS also confirms that 6.5% of women and 2.8% of men reported having experienced any type of partner abuse in the last year, equivalent to an estimated 1.1 million female victims and 500,000 male victims.

The Bill refers to preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Although the first part is relatively clear, the second bit, about domestic violence, is not so clear, because of the definition of domestic violence. Our definition of it includes non-violent components, so we need to be very careful when bandying around figures about domestic violence. That is inevitably the problem with a wide definition. It has the word “violence” in the title, and people then understandably assume it relates to physical violence, but that is not always necessarily the case and that can be quite confusing. We must also remember that domestic incidents include people in relationships, as well as those in family and other relationships that could be considered domestic in nature. What I am trying to say is that the notion that in every case of domestic violence or abuse the perpetrator is a big, burly wife-beater is just that—a notion, not fact.

I asked the House of Commons Library for some information on what is known as the Istanbul convention, which this Bill seeks to ratify. The Library said that it is a Council of Europe convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. It was adopted by the Council of Europe on 7 April 2011, was open for signature on 11 May 2011 at the 121st session of the Committee of Ministers in Istanbul, and entered into force on 1 August 2014. The UK signed the convention on 8 June 2012, but has not yet ratified it. Some countries have signed the convention, like the UK, and some have signed it and ratified it as well. I will not go through all the countries and give their positions on it, although it is very illuminating and relevant to the debate, but I do not want to test the patience of the House.

Some countries have signed the convention but not ratified it, like us. Sudan was mentioned as an illustration earlier. As my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) rightly highlighted, Germany has not ratified it. Nor has Iceland, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Croatia and Cyprus. They are all members of the European Union, which is apparently such a fine institution that SNP Members are desperate for us to remain part of it, yet their wonderful partner countries have not bothered to ratify the convention either. There was no mention of that, strangely, in the speech made by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan. It is particularly interesting to note that Ireland only signed the convention on 5 November 2015, and has also not ratified it. Perhaps the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) might want to have a word with his friends in the Irish Republic to ask why they have not ratified it.

SNP Members were up in arms earlier about something that they never bothered to read and that they knew nothing about, but I will help them out, as I can tell them what article 1 says. It sets out five purposes, and the first is to

“protect women against all forms of violence, and prevent, prosecute and eliminate violence against women and domestic violence”.

The second is to

“contribute to the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and promote substantive equality between women and men, including by empowering women”.

The third is to

“design a comprehensive framework, policies and measures for the protection of and assistance to all victims of violence against women and domestic violence”.

The fourth is to

“promote international co-operation with a view to eliminating violence against women and domestic violence”,

and the fifth is to

“provide support and assistance to organisations and law enforcement agencies to effectively co-operate in order to adopt an integrated approach to eliminating violence against women and domestic violence”.

Let us consider the first point. Of course we are all united in our opposition to any violence against women and girls. I will repeat that, Mr Deputy Speaker, if you do not mind, because I want to make it clear so that nobody misunderstands the terms of this debate. We are all united in our opposition to any violence against women and girls. I would be astounded if any of us were not. I pride myself on being one of the most hard-line Members on matters of law and order and sentencing, and I always find it rather strange that those who speak passionately about how we should have zero tolerance of violence against women and girls and violence against people—which I agree with—are often the same people who then argue that the perpetrators of violence should do anything but be sent to prison.

[Philip Davies]

My hope is that, by the time I have finished speaking, the hon. Lady will be much wiser about why I wholly oppose the Bill.

[Mr Chope]

May I suggest one answer to the hon. Lady’s intervention? Our legislation in this country has a much broader definition of domestic violence than the one in the convention.

[Philip Davies]

Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he makes a good point. As I made clear, our definition of domestic violence is very different from that used in most other countries. However, there are other reasons, which I will come to, and article 1 contains something I fundamentally disagree with.

We are in the ridiculous situation where 66% of men convicted at Crown Court in England and Wales of violence against the person are sent to prison, compared with 37% of women. If we really want to send out a message—I heard a number of Opposition Members say that that was the purpose of the Bill—of zero tolerance of violence against the person, the first thing, and perhaps the main thing or even the only thing, we should do is press for much tougher sentences for people who are found guilty. One way to prevent and eliminate violence is to send people to prison for longer, because while they are in prison, they cannot perpetrate any violence against anybody in their households, or anywhere else for that matter.

The Labour party, which is apparently so concerned about violence against women and girls, actually introduced a law in a previous Parliament whereby somebody who is sent to prison for committing violence against a woman or a girl has, by law, to be released halfway through their prison sentence, whether or not it is considered that they will go straight back into the household they came from and commit the same crime again. By the law of the land, those people have to be released halfway through their sentence. The last Labour Government introduced that, so it is no good Labour Members coming here today and saying how committed they are to stopping violence against women and girls, when they are the ones who are responsible for these people being let back out on to the streets and back into their houses much sooner than the courts originally intended.

If people want to do something worth while to prevent violence against women and girls and against other people, let us all press for stronger prison sentences. Let us all press for people to spend more of their sentence in prison, rather than being released out on licence. How many people are up for that in the House today? They all go amazingly quiet, because when it comes down to it, they want to huff and puff about being tough on violence against women and girls. When it comes down to the actual thing that most of our constituents would recognise as being tough on violence against women and girls—tougher prison sentences—Opposition Members run away, because they do not like people being sent to prison.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is not rocket science: the more criminals who are in prison, the fewer criminals are out on the street committing crimes. That is not really a massively difficult concept to grasp, although Opposition Members appear to be struggling with it. It is not that difficult to understand that if the people who commit these crimes are in prison, they cannot be committing these crimes. My hon. Friend must therefore surely be right in his suspicion.

The convention does not just cover violence, as article 1b mentions, and that is one of the reasons why I have a fundamental problem with the convention. Article 1b wants

“the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women”,

but I do not see how introducing a specific duty to eliminate all forms of discrimination against just women is not discriminatory in itself—I sometimes wish people could see the irony of their proposals. Surely, we should want to eliminate all forms of discrimination—full stop. Article 1b is, in effect, saying that discrimination against a man is okay because all we want to do is end discrimination against women. Well, it is not okay; no discrimination is okay. If this convention said, “Actually, what we want to do is end all forms of discrimination—full stop,” I would be the first to support it, but it does not say that. It talks about discrimination against women only. Surely, Members cannot support that form of discrimination. It flies in the face of everything we are supposed to believe in if we believe in true equality.

Then we have the phrase “including by empowering women”. This is obviously a legal document, and I am not entirely sure what the legal definition of that is supposed to be. We have some very respected people of the law in the Chamber today, and they may be able to help us out with the legal definition. I genuinely do not know, and I will bow to other people’s superior knowledge. The English dictionary definition of empowering is

“approving having qualities that give a person or a group of people the means to take more control of their lives and become stronger and more independent”,

and we are all in favour of that I would like to think.

Most concerning to me, however, is the fact that this whole strategy seems to be based on the premise that all this violence against women is committed by men. Why else would it link discrimination, stereotyping and violence? That certainly seems to be the thought of many of the people who are supporting the convention and the Bill. The impression people might be under is that the perpetrators of all these crimes against women are men. Indeed, on the website of one of the campaigns endorsing the Bill, women were holding up placards with the slogan:

“Together we can end male violence against women”.

So it would seem that they are not interested in ending all violence, regardless of whether the victim is male or female, or even in ending all violence against women.

Despite what people want to believe, violence against women is not caused only by men. Indeed, there is no evidence to support that underlying assumption. A letter I received from the Crown Prosecution Service said:

“We are unable to provide information on your specific requests of ‘the sex of both the defendant and the victim’... This is because we record the sex of the defendant and victim as separate statistics rather than as a joined statistic.”

So today’s Bill is based on an assumption that can quickly be proved wrong. We only have to look at the individual cases that come to our courts to see that there are plenty where violence has been committed by a female offender against a female victim. Let me just give a flavour of those cases.

How about the case of Samira Lupidi, who stabbed her two young daughters to death in a refuge in November last year? Lupidi had been placed in a refuge with the girls after she called the police to their house, claiming her partner had been violent. Speaking about Lupidi’s relationship with the father, the judge said:

“You reacted to this very difficult situation by saying ‘If I cannot have them’”—

the children—

“‘neither can he’… This is a crime which speaks of rage and I sentence you on the basis that you killed them in anger and out of a desire for revenge.”

A jury of six men and six women found her guilty of murder after only 90 minutes’ deliberation.

What about the case of Sadie Morris, a female paedophile who was sentenced to five years in jail after photographing herself abusing a three-year-old girl? The offences took place between 1 and 31 July 2013, with photographs involving one category A image—the most serious level—and one category B and one category C image. What about the case of a Romanian sex gang led by women who trafficked vulnerable women into Britain and forced them into prostitution? The gang raked in more than £15,000 a month and forced the prostitutes to deposit the cash across 14 separate bank accounts.

Ending male violence against women would not have prevented any of these cases, as the offenders were also female. Crime does not discriminate. We have to get real: instead of speaking of female victims of male perpetrators, we should speak of all victims, regardless of sex, and all offenders, regardless of sex. Why do so many Members find that so difficult to do?

There are many female perpetrators of violence against both men and women, according to official Ministry of Justice figures. Its report, “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2015”, says that violence against the person and theft were consistently the two offence groups with the highest number of arrests for both females and males. In fact, violence against the person accounted for 34% of all male arrests and 36% of all female arrests in the criminal justice system—we have not heard any of that in the speeches so far—while theft offences made up 21% of male arrests and 26% of female arrests.

Again, this is not restricted to women but also applies to girls. In 2015-16, violence against the person was the most common offence group for which juvenile females —10 to 17-year-olds—were arrested. In fact, 40% of arrests of girls aged 10 to 17 were for violence against the person. It is no good people shaking their heads; these are the facts—the official statistics—although they might be inconvenient. I am not surprised that Opposition Members have not heard about it; we never hear any of this in this place because we are so blinkered in only wanting to look one dimensionally at all these issues. I am not surprised that it has come as a shock to Opposition Members.

This is backed up by reports of cases such as that of Katie Neild, a 27-year-old mother of two who was rushed to hospital after a woman bit her and ripped a chunk out of her face, which left the victim with permanent scarring, even after an emergency skin graft. A case heard at my local court, Bradford Crown court, was that of a female who burgled a 79-year-old woman’s house in August last year. In her defence, the defendant’s barrister claimed that she would be extremely vulnerable in prison with a baby due in less than three months, despite her not being pregnant at the time of the burglary. However, Judge Thomas at Bradford Crown court—a fine man—said that his duty was to the pensioner whose life was so significantly affected that she had not left her home since.

This just gives a flavour of the vast array of cases where female offenders target female victims. The discriminatory underlay of this Bill is pointless and wrong, because not all victims are female and not all offenders are male. We should be bringing forward gender-neutral legislation that seeks to help all victims of crime—men and women—and to punish all offenders, men and women. Even in cases where people may assume that all violence is male on female, such as domestic violence, this is not so.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend has been referring to statistics from the United Kingdom. He may be aware of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, which issued a very big report on violence against women—an EU-wide survey—in which it found that 11% of non-heterosexual women in Europe have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of other women.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for alerting me to that fact, of which I was unaware. I was just coming on to that point, because it seems that the figures are worse than that in the United Kingdom.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the subjects of those articles. It was probably remiss of me not to do so myself.

It seems that the Government are hanging their hat on article 44. Perhaps the Minister will be able to explain more about the difficulties that they are experiencing in relation to it and the other articles mentioned in it, to which my hon. Friend has just referred.

[Mr Chope]

Will my hon. Friend expand on the link between article 44 and article 77, under which a party ratifying the convention can specify the territories to which it applies?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, but I am not sure that I can do as he asks, because this is a thorny issue. My hon. Friend has a great advantage over me, in that not only is he experienced in legal matters—which I certainly am not—but for many years he was a member of the Council of Europe. I hope that we may benefit from some of his expertise later, when he may, in passing, be able to answer his own question, which I am not able to do.

The hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North tabled an early-day motion on this subject, which read:

“That this House notes that 8 June 2016 marks the fourth anniversary of the UK Government becoming a signatory to the Istanbul Convention on violence against women and girls; expresses disappointment that the Government, despite outlining their commitment to do so several times, has still failed to ratify this important convention; recognises that women still face a significant amount of inequality, with one in four women experiencing some form of domestic, sexual or psychological abuse during their lifetimes; further notes that ratifying the Istanbul Convention should ensure that a series of preventative policies will be introduced to help tackle and end violence against women, such as non-violent conflict resolution in relationships and the right to personal integrity being included in school curricula at all levels; congratulates the campaign group ICchange for their continuing work in applying pressure on the Government to ratify the convention; and calls on the Government to accede to this pressure and ensure ratification as soon as possible.”

There are a couple of interesting things to note about that motion. First, when I last looked it had 47 signatories, so despite the contention by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan that the House was unanimous in its support for her proposal, that unanimous support does not seem to have found its way there. Secondly, notwithstanding Members’ attempts to do a bit of back-tracking now, and to start saying that they care about violence against men as well—they offered no such views in the speeches we heard earlier— the EDM lets the cat out of the bag. Those Members do not care about violence against men. The EDM makes no mention of violence against men. It is all about violence against women. Let us not try to pretend now, at this late stage, that this is about gender neutrality; it is not, and people obviously know that it is not.

There is an awful lot to the convention—far more than I intend to go into today; I am sure Members will be relieved to hear that. Although I am sure that I would be deemed to be in order if I went into all of it, I want to hear from other speakers. Given that the Bill requires the ratification of the convention, however, it is all very relevant, and I want to put on record some of the key facts that it contains.

The Council of Europe’s website sets out the position. It says:

“In simple terms, preventing violence against women and domestic violence can save lives and reduce human suffering. Governments that agree to be bound by the Convention will have to do the following: train professionals in close contact with victims; regularly run awareness-raising campaigns; take steps to include issues such as gender equality and non-violent conflict resolution in interpersonal relationships in teaching material; set up treatment programmes for perpetrators of domestic violence and for sex offenders; work closely with NGOs; involve the media and the private sector in eradicating gender stereotypes and promoting mutual respect.”

That last bit sounds a bit like media censorship to me, but I am not entirely sure what the Council of Europe has in mind.

“Preventing violence against women and domestic violence should not be left to the state alone. In fact, the Convention calls on all members of society, in particular men and boys, to help reach its goal of creating a Europe free from all forms of violence against women and domestic violence. Violence against women is pervasive because misogynistic attitudes towards women persist. Each and every one of us can help challenge gender stereotypes, harmful traditional practices and discrimination against women. It is only by achieving real gender equality that violence against women can be prevented.”

It is clear that the convention goes well beyond trying to combat violence against women, and has a much wider remit than people would have us believe.

The website goes on to say:

“When preventive measures have failed and violence incidents have happened, it is important to provide victims and witnesses with protection and support. This means police intervention and protection as well as specialised support services such as shelters, telephone hotlines etc. It also means making sure that general social services understand the realities and concerns of victims of domestic violence and violence against women and support them accordingly in their quest to rebuild/resume their lives.

Some examples of measures set forth in the Convention include:

Granting the police the power to remove a perpetrator of domestic violence from his or her home: In situations of immediate danger, the police need to be able to guarantee the safety of the victim. In many instances this may mean ordering the perpetrator for a specified period of time to leave the family home and to stay away from the victim.

Ensuring access to adequate information…victims are usually traumatised and need easy access to clear and concise information on available services, in a language they understand.

Setting up easily accessible shelters in sufficient numbers and in an adequate geographical distribution: Victims come from a wide range of social realities. For instance, women from rural areas or disabled women need to have access to shelters as much as women from big cities.”

There is not one mention of a male victim of domestic violence. In a moment I shall say something about the supply of refuges for men and women, because I think it important to establish the extent to which the Government are fulfilling that requirement.

The website continues:

“Making available state-wide 24/7 telephone helplines free of charge: Specialised helplines for victims of violence against women and domestic violence can direct the victims to the services they need…

Setting-up easily accessible rape crisis or sexual violence referral centres: These centres provide immediate medical counselling, trauma care and forensic services and are extremely rare across Europe. It is important to make these services more widely available.

It should be borne in mind that it is not enough to set up protection structures and support services for victims. It is equally important to make sure victims are informed of their rights and know where and how to get help.”

I absolutely agree that victims should be better protected and have more of a voice in the justice system, but as far as I am concerned that applies to male victims as much as it does to female victims. When it comes to domestic violence, it is actually male victims who have the least support, not female ones.

An Office for National Statistics report from February 2016 on violent crime and sexual offences relating to the year ending March 2015 states:

“Overall, 27.1% of women and 13.2% of men had experienced any domestic abuse since the age of 16, equivalent to an estimated 4.5 million female victims and 2.2 million male victims.”

Those are shocking figures. New data from the ONS for the year ending March 2016 found that, of those who said that they had experienced domestic abuse, 1.2 million were female and 651,000 were male. As I established earlier, of every three victims of domestic abuse, two will be female and one will be male. Yet despite that split of two thirds and one third—we must all agree on that; they are the official figures and I have not heard anybody argue against them—there is absolutely no such funding split. Perhaps the Minister will explain why.

According to the Mankind Initiative:

“20 organisations offer refuge or safe house provision for male victims in the UK—a total of 82 spaces, of which 24 are dedicated to male DV victims only (the rest being for victims of either gender).”

Men have a chance of accessing only 82 spaces, only 24 of which—in the whole country—are guaranteed for them. The Mankind Initiative continues:

“For female victims, there are nearly 400 specialist domestic violence organisations providing refuge accommodation for women in the UK with c4,000 spaces for over 7,000 women and children.”

Two thirds of victims of domestic violence are women and a third are men, but there are 7,000 places in refuges for women and a maximum of 82 for men. How can that possibly be gender neutral or fair? I genuinely want to know why people think that that can possibly be fair, if we are genuinely interested in being gender neutral. Of course, we know that many people are not interested in being gender neutral.

It is interesting, too, that male victims are much less likely to come forward than female victims, which again suggests that it is male victims who need more encouragement. According to the Mankind Initiative:

“Male victims (29%) are over twice as likely than women (12%) to not tell anyone about the partner abuse they are suffering from. Only 10% of male victims will tell the police (26% women), only 23% will tell a person in an official position (43% women) and only 11% (23% women) will tell a health professional.”

On discussing sexual abuse during childhood, the recent Ministry of Justice report, “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2015”, states:

“12% of female victims and 25% of males told someone they knew personally about childhood sexual assault by rape or penetration (including attempts) at the time, usually a family member (18%). Only 10% of female victims told someone in an official position, with 8% reporting the abuse to the police. Only 2% of male victims reported the abuse to the police.”

Although sexual abuse is an absolutely huge issue among girls, with only 30% of victims telling anyone at all, it is also an issue among boys, but it is being massively under-reported, with only 27% of victims telling anyone, and only 2% telling the police.

The convention’s position on the prosecution of perpetrators is interesting, too. The Council of Europe says:

“The convention defines and criminalises the various forms of violence against women as well as domestic violence. This is one of the many achievements of the convention. To give effect to the convention, state parties will have to introduce a number of new offenses where they do not exist. These may include: psychological and physical violence, sexual violence and rape, stalking, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, forced abortion and forced sterilisation. In addition, state parties will need to ensure that culture, tradition or so-called ‘honour’ are not regarded as a justification for any of the above-listed courses of conduct.”

I am not sure how we deal with psychological violence, but most of those offences can have male victims, too. That does not include female genital mutilation, obviously, as that clearly relates only to females, and male circumcision is still considered to be legal. In the case of a forced abortion, which on the face of it is a female issue, if the person doing the forcing is not the father, there is potentially a father who is the victim of a lost child, so it is not just the woman who might suffer in that situation.

According to figures obtained by the Mankind Initiative:

“Of those that suffered partner abuse in 2014/15, a higher proportion of men suffered from force (37%) than women (29%). For emotional and psychological abuse the proportions were 61% and 63% respectively.”

There is not a fat lot in it, as it happens. There is almost exactly the same number of male victims of psychological abuse as female victims.

On the issue of psychological abuse of children, the recent MOJ reports states:

“Of those who experienced psychological abuse as a child, the perpetrator was most likely to have been the victim’s mother (40%) or father (35%). Women were more likely to have experienced this form of abuse from their mothers (42%) than fathers (33%), whereas men were equally likely to be abused by either parent.”

The matter of actual violence and injury is also interesting. The Mankind Initiative states:

“Of those that suffered from partner abuse in 2012/13, 29% of men and 23% of women suffered a physical injury, a higher proportion of men suffering severe bruising or bleeding (6%) and internal injuries or broken bones/teeth (2%) than women (4% and 1% respectively). 30% of men who suffer partner abuse have emotional and mental problems (47% women). Only 27% of men sought medical advice whilst 73% of women did.”

This Bill would ensure the ratification of a convention that does nothing to address domestic violence against men, just women.

I want briefly to mention the other offences that might, on the face of it, seem to apply only to women. Government figures show that one in every five victims of forced marriage is a man. In 2013, there were 234 cases of forced marriage in the UK where the victim was a man. On stalking, which many will no doubt assume involves a man stalking a woman, 2.4% of men and 4.9% of women experienced stalking in 2014-15. Again, of every three victims of stalking, two are women and one is a man.

The Council of Europe says:

“Once these new offenses have found their way into the national legal systems, there is no reason not to prosecute offenders. On the contrary, state parties will have to take a range of measures to ensure the effective investigation of any allegation of violence against women and domestic violence.”

It does not say that state parties will have to take a range of measures to ensure the effective investigation of violence against men. It seems to me that that does not matter to the Council of Europe. It goes on:

“This means that the law enforcement agencies will have to respond to calls for help, collect evidence and assess the risk of further violence to adequately protect the victim.

Furthermore, state parties will have to carry out judicial proceedings in a manner that respects the rights of victims at all stages of the proceedings and that avoid secondary victimisation.”



In February 2015, the Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report, “Violence against Women and Girls”, on the UK’s progress towards ratification of the convention. Again, the report is about violence against women and girls, with nothing about violence against men and boys. I do not know what anybody else thinks, but if the son of somebody in this House is the victim of violence, would they consider that to be less important than if their daughter was a victim of violence? I would like hon. Members to explain why they think violence against their sons would be less important. We may hear about that from other Members later, but we have not so far.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am sure the Minister will get the chance to do so.

It is worth noting that the Equality and Human Rights Commission acknowledges in its briefing that

“most of the Istanbul Convention obligations are implemented through UK legislation”,

and recent steps have been taken on many areas. For example, a prohibition on possession of rape pornography was introduced by section 37 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015. This applies in England and Wales, and brings the offence of possession of extreme pornographic images more in line with that applicable in Scotland. A new offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in intimate or familial relationships was introduced by section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015. An offence of forced marriage is now provided for in sections 121 and 122 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 was amended by section 73 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 to include FGM protection orders, civil measures that can be applied for through a family court which provide a means of protecting actual or potential victims of FGM.

An email I received from the Muslim Council of Britain in support of the Bill quoted the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon:

“Violence against women continues to persist as one of the most heinous, systematic and prevalent human rights abuses in the world. It is a threat to all women, and an obstacle to all our efforts for development, peace, and gender equality in all societies… Let us take this issue with the deadly seriousness that it deserves”.

I do not understand how violence against women can be an obstacle to gender equality—I sometimes think I must be speaking in Swahili—because this would mean that all violence against women is committed by men, and as I have already said, that is patently not the case. Perhaps someone can explain to me how violence by women on women can be an obstacle to gender equality? In relation to making the Istanbul convention law, the Muslim Council of Britain goes on:

“This is indeed a unique opportunity in the UK so that we can show our support to women and girls who should be living free from any form of violence, and the fear of it.”

I agree with the sentiment, but I would agree more if it talked about everyone, not just women and girls.

The Fawcett Society has said:

“This new landmark treaty of the Council of Europe opens the path for creating a legal framework at pan-European level to protect women against all forms of violence, and prevent, prosecute and eliminate violence against women and domestic violence. It also establishes a monitoring body to evaluate implementation and progress.”

There will be more meddling from afar if we ratify this convention.

The Council of Europe provides details of the monitoring mechanisms that must be put in place if we ratify the convention. It says that there would be

“an independent expert body, the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO), which is initially composed of 10 members and will subsequently be enlarged to 15 members following the 25th ratification”,

and

“a political body, the Committee of the Parties, which is composed of representatives of the Parties to the Istanbul Convention. The task of GREVIO is to monitor the implementation of the Convention by the Parties.”

We will not do that in our own country; we will have an international body interfering and telling us how we are doing.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend share my view that such a threat of interference is one reason why the German Government do not wish to ratify the convention? If that was the case, a lot of searching questions would be asked about their attitude to what happened in Cologne on new year’s eve last year.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend may well be right. I am loth to speak up for the German Government—I do not know what their motivation is—but that is entirely possible. It may well be unwelcome to have these meddling, interfering bodies telling us how we are doing when many of those people are doing far less in their own countries than we are doing in ours. We have seen that time and again with international bodies that are supposed to monitor what we are doing. They would be better off monitoring what they are doing in their own countries, rather than monitoring what we are doing in this country.

The Council of Europe also says:

“GREVIO may also adopt, where appropriate, general recommendations on themes and concepts of the Convention.”

This would be a living document, and would not just stick at where we are today. We have seen that with the European convention on human rights. It goes on:

“The Committee of the Parties follows up on GREVIO reports and conclusions and adopts recommendations to the Parties concerned.”

We would be signing up to an ever-moving feast. It adds:

“It is also responsible for the election of GREVIO members.”

There would be two forms of monitoring procedures: a country-by-country evaluation procedure, and a special inquiry procedure. A special inquiry procedure

“may be initiated by GREVIO when there is reliable information indicating that action is required to prevent a serious, massive or persistent pattern of any acts of violence covered by the Convention. In such a case, GREVIO may request the urgent submission of a special report by the Party concerned… After having been examined by GREVIO, the findings of the inquiry are transmitted to the Party concerned and, where appropriate, to the Committee of the Parties and the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, together with any comments and recommendations.”

What an absolute bureaucratic nightmare we will get ourselves into if we ratify this convention.

We have seen how public confidence in the European convention on human rights has been undermined time after time by ridiculous findings and perverse rulings that could never have been intended at the time it was ratified. It is perfectly clear that this convention would end up in exactly the same way: an ever-moving feast, with the goalposts always being changed to suit some politically correct agenda. The Government would be hamstrung because they had ratified something, not really knowing what they were getting themselves into.

There is even a flowchart to explain what happens under the urgent inquiry procedures. I will not say any more about that, other than to note that agreeing to be party to things obviously has consequences, and the procedures to ensure that the obligations are met are clear for all to see. There are integrated policies that parties have to follow. Again, I would like the Minister to put some meat on how he sees the Government implementing those.

The Council of Europe states:

“An effective response to such violence requires concerted action by many different actors.”

These bodies would therefore be interfering in

“law enforcement agencies, the judiciary”—

even the judiciary is mentioned on the website. Some of the people who are today arguing for the convention are the same people who have been most robust in saying that people in this House should not interfere in the judiciary in our country and should respect the independence of the judiciary, yet clearly if we ratify the convention, as it says on the website, these bodies would look for actions from

“law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, NGOs, child protection agencies and other relevant partners”

that they deem should

“join forces on a particular case.”

What on earth would we be getting ourselves into by signing up to the convention? We can sort these things out for ourselves. We can pass any laws we want in this country to sort out any problems we deem it necessary to sort out. We do not have to sign up to some supranational, interfering, meddling body that wants to intervene, potentially, in the independence of our judiciary in order to sort out violence against people—even violence against women and girls.

I oppose the Bill because it would introduce unnecessary meddling from supranational bodies that we can quite do without to sort out problems that we can deal with perfectly well ourselves in our courts if we have the guts and the willpower to send perpetrators of violence and domestic violence to prison and keep them in prison. That is the best thing this House can do, but nobody on the Opposition Benches today seems to want to do it. They would sooner do some virtue signalling with this Bill.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend says that he is against the Bill, but at least we have a Bill. If it had not been for the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) bringing forward the Bill, the House might never have been able to discuss this issue before the Government went ahead and ratified the convention.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I did at the start, I congratulate the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan on bringing the Bill forward, because it is important that the public know the full implications of something with a worthy sounding title and a worthy sentiment behind it, and why some of us are opposed to these supranational bodies interfering in what we do in this country.

I am against the Bill for that reason and because we should have a convention that deals with all violence: violence against men as well as violence against women. Of course we oppose violence against women, but I for one equally oppose violence against men and boys. Having a strategy for one but not the other is just not acceptable to me. It really is as simple as that. I cannot understand for the life of me how political correctness has become so entrenched in this country that people here today can see nothing wrong with a whole policy on violence being based on just one sex, when, unbelievably, the evidence shows that it is the other sex who are more likely to be the victims of violent crime and when there are lots of male victims of domestic violence too. As I find myself saying all too often, you couldn’t make it up.

Foreign National Offenders (Exclusion from the UK) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 11th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) on, between them, ensuring that we are debating the Bill this morning, because it deals with a matter that is of great concern to my constituents.

I want to focus on two questions relating to the Bill. The first is the question of whether it is needed, and the second is the question of whether its provisions are satisfactory. It could be argued, in answer to the first question, that the Bill is extremely timely. Members may have seen, only yesterday, an article in The Times which focused on the fact that five foreign criminals leave UK jails every day and stay in the UK. It stated that nearly 6,000 are waiting to be deported. The number of foreign offenders in the community has risen by 53% in five years, despite Government attempts to speed up deportations.

I think that support for the Bill is more widespread than many Members may imagine. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), was quoted in the article as saying:

“The Prime Minister promised to make the speedy removal of foreign national offenders a priority but these figures show the Home Office has failed…The public will be alarmed that 1,800 offenders are still here after five years. This demonstrates either incompetence, inefficiency or both.”

The number of foreign offenders released from jail pending deportation rose from 3,772 in 2011 to 5,789 in the final quarter of last year, and, as the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee made clear in his remarks—I think that this needs to be reiterated—more than 1,800 of them have been living in the community for five years or more. That is a disgrace. Moreover, a further 1,300 have been living here for between two and five years, and of 416 prisoners who were released in the last three months of last year, only six were deported. That is an absolute disgrace. The Bill is, as I said, very timely.

Probably the most shocking thing of all—I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering will be particularly shocked by this—is that the Home Office figures that were released showed that foreign offenders convicted of 16 murders, 56 rapes and hundreds of robberies and violent attacks were still living in the UK at the end of last year. That is the nature of the beast with which we are dealing. I am afraid that, whatever the Government are doing, it simply cannot be seen as good enough. Those figures should shock all of us, and I hope that they shock the Government.

The widespread support for the Bill is also made clear by an intervention, during questions on an urgent question in 2014, from the former shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), who said:

“When people come to Britain, they should abide by the law, and the whole House wants to see foreign criminals being deported.”—[Official Report, 27 October 2014; Vol. 586, c. 903.]

She said that only a couple of years ago, from the Labour Benches. I look forward to seeing support for the Bill not just from Conservative Members, but from Members on both sides of the House.

Given that the EU referendum is to take place on 23 June, and given that EU national offenders make up an increasingly large part of our prison population each year, I think it right for people to be informed of the realities of our EU membership, and of what control this country actually has over the removal of foreign national offenders, particularly those from the EU.

[Mr Chope]

Is it not depressing that the Government are not even prepared to name and shame the member states of the EU that are not taking back foreign prisoners? Their excuse is that publishing such data could undermine diplomatic relationships with those countries.

[Philip Davies]

I agree with my hon. Friend. In my view, it is the failure of those countries to take back foreign offenders that is undermining diplomatic relationships, rather than the release or otherwise of the information.

The Bill clearly aims to do something that I think most people would consider to be common sense: to deport criminals who are not citizens of this country if they commit an offence that is serious enough to warrant a prison sentence. I think that it is important to establish whether someone qualifies for deportation, but I shall come to that when I go into the details of the Bill.

Governments have not resisted the principle of deporting foreign criminals. In fact, it was the last Labour Government who introduced measures for their automatic deportation in certain circumstances, in the form of the UK Borders Act 2007. I do not propose to bore everyone rigid by quoting from its provisions here and now, but suffice it to say that it made a clear attempt to define foreign criminals and to ensure that, in certain circumstances, they were removed from prison. The key part of that Act, the first condition, was that a person is sentenced to a period of imprisonment of “at least 12 months”—along the same lines as what my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) mentioned in his speech. The Labour Government introduced that provision back in 2007.

There were some exemptions within the Act. I shall not bore everybody rigid by going through every single one, but there were quite a few, if anyone would like to look through the legislation. The exceptions included where deportation would breach a person’s convention rights under the ECHR; where people were covered by the refugee convention; where the offender was under 18 years old at the time of offending; where the deportation breaches the offender’s rights under Community treaties; and where the foreign criminal is subject to the Extradition Act 2003 or to the Mental Health Act 1983.

Herein lies the problem, because the exemptions make it virtually impossible to deport anybody. That is the key issue. It is all very well saying, “We’re going to have an Act of Parliament with this particular provision in it”, but if people cannot be removed because of a potential breach of the Human Rights Act or rights under the Community treaties, which provide for the free movement of people, we are in big difficulties. Given the high proportion of EU citizens who count as foreign offenders, the legislation is barely worth the paper it is written on.

[Mr Chope]

Is that not why clause 1 of this Bill includes the words

“Notwithstanding any provision of the European Communities Act 1972”?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and he explains why that part of the Bill is essential. I shall come on to some of the detail in the Bill later.

Our former colleague and the former Member for Wells, David Heathcoat-Amory, in his book “Confessions of a Eurosceptic”, reminded us of what happened when it was reported that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners were released without being considered for deportation when Charles Clarke was the Home Secretary. That particular scandal cost Charles Clarke his job. The public believed it was a huge scandal, which it is. The release of 1,000 foreign prisoners without being considered for deportation was sufficient for the Home Secretary to resign, yet as a newspaper reported yesterday, 1,800 of them have been here for more than five years. If 1,000 was enough for the Home Secretary to resign, one wonders what the trigger point for a scandal is these days.

A fair deportation system should, it seems to me, treat all foreign offenders in the same way. I do not think there can be any justification for saying that a foreign offender from one country should be treated differently from a foreign offender from a different country. This has become a growing problem. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering said, there have been more than 10,000 foreign national offenders in prison since 2006. This is not a new problem. Given current levels of immigration into the UK, of course, there is no prospect at all of the number going down anytime soon.

EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 26th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend again makes a telling point. I was going to come to it later, but as he has raised it now, let us put on the record, for example, the concern many of our constituents have about TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated between the EU and the United States. A legal opinion has been circulated to a number of us over the last 24 hours saying if TTIP goes ahead as proposed, it would potentially be disastrous for our national health service. I do not know whether that is correct or not, but there is an opinion saying that that could be the impact. Why are we relying on the EU to negotiate a trade deal with the US? Why do not we, as the fifth largest economy in the world—English-speaking, committed to free trade—make our own trade deal with the US? The short answer is that we are not allowed to do so until we leave the EU.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I wholeheartedly agree with what my hon. Friend is saying. On TTIP, does he agree that the following is an interesting factor in any cost-benefit analysis? We are always told that if we want a free trade agreement with the EU, we will have to accept free movement of people. Does he think America will accept the free movement of people—of all EU citizens—into the United States when it signs its free trade agreement with the EU?

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a good point—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

Absolutely. The fall-back position if we did not negotiate such a deal would be that we would have a continuing relationship on WTO rules, which are signed up to by the EU. So any suggestion that there would be a complete curtailment of trade between us and the EU when we leave is absurd. Why would the EU not want to sign up very quickly with the UK? They are selling us more than we are selling them, so it must be in their interests to try to maintain those connections. Tellingly, and disappointingly, in addressing this point in Monday’s statement the Prime Minister did not talk in absolute terms. Instead of facing up to the fact that we sell less to the European Union than it sells to us, he started talking in percentage terms. That is completely misleading because we are but one of 28 countries in the EU, so if we start talking about the percentage of EU exports that come to us compared with the percentage of our exports that go to the EU, we will present a distorted picture. It was very sad that the Prime Minister chose not to use the absolute figures and instead resorted to such misleading percentages.

[Philip Davies]

We are also told that if we had a free trade agreement with the EU, we would still have to have all our laws decided by the European Union. When my hon. Friend had his discussions with his American friends, did he become aware of whether the Americans were going to accept their law being changed for them by the European Union, by qualified majority voting, when they entered into their free trade agreement with it?

[Mr Chope]

We did not get down to that sort of detail, because the feeling was that we are a long way apart on this. There is also a feeling that there is a lot more commonality between the British people and the people of the United States; we share a common language, the common law and a common heritage, and that is very different from the approach of so many other EU countries. On the basis that we have this special relationship with the US, we would be able to prosper and develop our trade together through bilateral open trading arrangements far more effectively than is being done at the moment with the EU. That is an important factor to take into account when assessing the costs and benefits of membership.

I am conscious of the fact that a number of other people wish to participate in this debate, so I will not say much more now. I merely wish to point out that the Bill proposes terms of reference, whereby the independent commission that would be set up to examine the current costs and benefits would be

“taking into account the impact of membership on the UK’s—

(a) economy (including consideration of public expenditure and receipts resulting directly from membership”).

Of course, we know that in round figures we are paying in about £10 billion more than we get back every year. Interestingly, in yesterday’s statement on the EU solidarity fund and flooding the Minister made much of the fact that we would be applying to get some money back from the fund, but he did not think this would amount to anything more, at best, than about the equivalent of one day’s net contributions to the EU. He admitted that even getting back one day’s net contribution would involve an enormous amount of bureaucracy on both sides, which typifies the costs at the moment and how unfair it is that our people should be paying £10 billion net a year to the EU.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes his point well, as always, but we should not be in this situation. Such decisions should be taken in this House for the benefit of our constituents, but they are not.

We are signing up to a treaty, and the EU is saying to us, “You sign the treaty, and if we want to change things against your wishes, we have the freedom to do so through qualified majority voting.” If I said to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, “Let’s sign a deal on something, but by the way, I can change the terms at any time, and there is nothing you can do to stop me”, I do not think you would sign up to it—nobody would sign up to such a deal, but that is in effect what we are being asked to sign up to in the EU referendum if we vote to remain.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend has not mentioned the part of the deal that states that we will now lose the little influence that we had in the past in relation to the deeper integration of the eurozone. For example, we will not be able to argue that Greece would be better off outside the eurozone, or have any influence on the consequences of a sclerotic eurozone being uncompetitive, and the result that that leads to of more people from the eurozone wanting to work in our country.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. I have already covered economic and trade matters and regulations, and I know that other people want to speak so I shall not go on for too long. National security and immigration are crucial issues that are mentioned in clause 5 of the Bill. National security is a key area, and the remain campaign seems to think that it is one of its trump cards, and that we are more secure and safer from terrorist attacks within the European Union. I would love them to go and tell the people of Paris how much safer they were from terrorist attacks as a result of being in the European Union, but I suspect they would not get particularly far.

Last night in a debate at York University we hit a new low in the tactics of the remain campaign. I was making the point that we cannot stop people coming into the UK from the EU if they have a valid EU passport, and that that applied to everybody, whether law-abiding people or criminals. But would you believe what the remain campaign announced last night? Perhaps the Minister can confirm it. I am on the Justice Committee, but I was not aware of it. It emerged last night during the debate that, apparently, when an EU national comes to the UK, our robust border controls mean that we check who people are. Apparently, when passports are scanned—this was a new one on me—it flags up whether or not a person has criminal convictions in their home nation, which enables us to stop them entering the United Kingdom. If only that were the case. The most generous thing I can say about that claim is that it is an absolutely blatant lie, because no system exists across the European Union to scan passports, trigger a huge list of criminal convictions and enable us to stop people coming into the country. That claim is simply untrue—I cannot be any clearer than that. The Minister may want to confirm or deny that when he comments, but let us please have an honest debate about these things. That system does not exist.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

Yes, indeed. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The problem is that there are much richer pickings in the UK than in some of the countries these people come from.

The other aspect of this is that, even if these people run the risk of being caught, they would, I suspect, much prefer to spend their time in a British prison than in a prison in their home nation. So this is a win-win, given their chances of being caught and what happens when they are caught. I am afraid that that does not quite work the same in reverse.

[Mr Chope]

When I visited Denmark with a Select Committee in the last Parliament, we heard directly from the Danish about the problem they have with eastern Europeans coming into Denmark and committing crimes. If those people are convicted of those crimes, they will earn more in prison than they would have been able to earn in their home country, so there is no deterrent.

[Philip Davies]

That is another interesting point I had not factored in. I will bow to my hon. Friend’s superior knowledge. I have visited prisons in Denmark, and that is not something I was aware of, so I am grateful to him for putting that point on the record.

Suggesting that our national security is enhanced by being in the EU, when we let thousands of EU criminals in every year, is fanciful in the extreme. Being susceptible to crime from such individuals is doing nothing at all for the security of my constituents.

[Mr Chope]

May I give my hon. Friend an example of where our security is much worse as a result of being in the European Union? People from outside who come into the European Union at the moment often do not give their fingerprints, as they should. I suggested that we take DNA samples from people coming from outside, but I was told that that is unlawful under the Eurodac regulations, so we cannot take that precaution.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. I very much agree that people wanting to come and live in the EU should have to give their fingerprints and DNA, so that if they do commit a crime, it is easy to track them down, convict them and deport them. As he says, however, that is not what happens. The best the Government have come up with so far is that if somebody comes into the UK and commits a crime, the police can go through some burdensome procedure of asking other EU countries whether they have a fingerprint match for a crime that has been committed there. If those countries ever manage to get back to us, which they probably do not half the time, Lord knows what may happen on the back of that. However, that is not the same as stopping people who are criminals coming into the UK.

Benefit Entitlement (Restriction) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 5th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, but I am not going to go down that route, because my view is that, even if the high watermark of what the Prime Minister said in his recent statement, which is reflected in the documents produced by the European Commission, is maintained, it still falls significantly short of what we promised in our manifesto, and we will still be a million miles away from being able to remove access to benefits, which is what this Bill aspires to achieve and what the British people overwhelmingly support.

The Prime Minister answered questions after his statement to the House on renegotiation on Wednesday.

He said:

“40% of EU migrants coming to Britain access the in-work benefits system, and the average payment per family is £6,000…I think that more than 10,000 people are getting over £10,000 a year, and because people get instant access to our benefits system, it is an unnatural pull and draw to our country.”—[Official Report, 3 February 2016; Vol. 605, c. 939.]

There is a dispute about the extent to which such access brings large numbers of people in, but in any event the British people find it an affront that the money of those who have paid their taxes and into our insurance system for years is being used to fund people from another country who have not made such contributions.

There is a big issue here. Like my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann), I am not convinced that the Government have achieved enough, even at the high watermark, to satisfy myself and others. The only solution is to leave. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) is laughing, but she will see that clauses 2, 3 and 4 of the Bill have to include the words

“Notwithstanding the provisions of the European Communities Act 1972”.

In other words, in each of those clauses I acknowledge that, under current European Union law, we cannot change our own law as we would wish.

In answering the debate that we had two years ago about this issue, the Minister then responsible, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), said that, although he might be tempted, he could not support the Bill because he would be in breach of the ministerial code in supporting a policy that could give rise to infraction proceedings. I fear that the Under-Secretary of State for Disabled People, my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), whom I am delighted to see on the Front Bench today, is in exactly the same position: despite the temptation, he could not support the Bill because in so doing he would be in breach of the ministerial code for raising the prospect of infraction proceedings.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend suggesting that, in a couple of weeks, when it seems that the Prime Minister will allow a free-for-all for Government Ministers, this Minister will be able to say that he agrees with the Bill?

[Mr Chope]

That is an interesting point. Perhaps the ministerial code will have to be adjusted to take account of the fact that those who remain Ministers while supporting notwithstanding clauses, for example, should have an exemption. However, I am sure that there are more important issues at stake than the ministerial code.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

But this country does not really have a contributory system in the same way as other EU countries. That is part of the problem. It is no good the hon. Lady wanting to protect something that does not exist and opposing something that would actually do what she claims she wants to achieve. Her actions on this issue are more important than her words, and if she opposes the Bill, her actions clearly do not follow on from her words. I do not see the need for evidence. This is a Bill about a principle that is important to many people. It is about fairness, not evidence.

I would have some sympathy with the hon. Lady’s opinion if we had to give all these benefits away to secure a free trade agreement with the European Union, and that had a net benefit for our economy. If we had to give away something in order to achieve that, it might be worth doing. Given that we had a £62 billion trade deficit with the European Union last year, and that if we were to leave the EU we would be its single biggest export market, it is perfectly clear that we could have a free trade agreement with the EU for nothing. We do not have to give it access to our benefit system, and we do not need to give it a £19 billion a year membership fee. We can have what we want from the EU—free trade—for nothing. That is the deal that we should be seeking to secure. I do not think anybody can sustain the argument that if we were to leave the EU and stop giving benefits to EU citizens when they came to the UK, Germany would want to stop selling Mercedes, BMV and Volkswagen cars to people in this country. Of course they would not; it is complete nonsense for anybody to suggest that.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend accept that people’s aspirations for retaining control over our own benefit system are gradually being eroded? It is extraordinary that back in 2014, the then Deputy Prime Minister said that he could not understand

“why it is possible under the current rules for someone to claim child benefit for children who aren’t even in this country.”

That was his view then, but he seems to have resiled from even that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that, because the situation regarding child benefit is probably one of the most indefensible in the benefit system. It does not matter how much evidence there is of how many people it applies to; it cannot be right, as a point of principle, that somebody can come into this country from Poland to work and claim child benefit for their children, who still reside in Poland and have never set foot outside Poland. It cannot possibly be right, on principle. We do not need any evidence to know that that is wrong; it is clearly and palpably wrong. It is strange that the Labour party is so wedded to its European credentials that it will inevitably have to see restrictions in benefits for all UK citizens to pay the bill for benefits to European citizens. I am sure that that does not go down very well in many of the estates in the hon. Lady’s constituency.

I do not intend to speak for long, because I appreciate that we need to press on, but I want to make a point about clause 3, which will ensure that nobody is paid a level of benefit above that of the equivalent benefit in their own country. I think I am right in saying that the Prime Minister is trumpeting something similar in his deal regarding child benefit. As I understand it—my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, who is far more knowledgeable on the matter than I am, will correct me if I am wrong—the Prime Minister is saying that under the great deal that he has secured for the nation, Polish people, for example, who claim child benefit will be able to claim only the child benefit rate in Poland, or whichever country the children reside in. That seems very similar to clause 3.

[Mr Chope]

My understanding of the documents that were published this week is that it would not be as simple as that. The amount of child benefit that could be claimed would be related to the difference in the standard and cost of living between this country and the other EU country. That, of course, would be incredibly bureaucratic.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but the Prime Minister is trying to secure the same kind of principle that my hon. Friend seeks in clause 3. For the benefit of not only our deliberations on the Bill but those who are trying to weigh up the Prime Minister’s renegotiation, I want to say that there is a huge danger in this aspect of the Bill. We have said that if somebody comes from Poland, they can claim child benefit at the UK rate for their children in Poland. If that is changed and the amount of child benefit that they can claim becomes only £2 or £3 a week, or whatever the equivalent might be in Poland, there is a danger that rather than saving the taxpayer money, as we all intend—including the Prime Minister, I might add—we may inadvertently increase the bill to the taxpayer. We are working on the basis that people will just carry on doing as they do at the moment. Who is to say, if we limit the child benefit to the rate in the home country, that they will not take the opportunity to bring their children to the UK in order to claim the higher UK rate? On top of that, there is the cost of schooling, any medical care and all the rest of it. We must be very careful about what we wish for.

A much more sensible approach to matters such as child benefit would be that if a foreign national comes to this country but their children still reside in the home country, they should not get anything. Whether it is the UK rate, the Polish rate or any rate whatever, the UK Government should not give them anything. That would avoid the unintended consequence of more and more people bringing more and more of their children to this country at a higher cost to the taxpayer.

Having made those points, I will sit down, because we all want to hear from the Minister. We all know that he is a very good man. The Bill did not find any favour with the shadow Minister, but as he is far more sensible, we hope he will have warmer words to say about it.

Bat Habitats Regulation (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 5th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

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

Madam Deputy Speaker, it is a surprise and a privilege to be able to address the issue of bat habitats again in the House so soon, relatively speaking, since I last spoke about the matter back in January 2015. You may recall that, in the last Session of the last Parliament, my Bat Habitats Regulation Bill attracted a lot of interest. The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice)—I am delighted to see him on the Front Bench today—responded then by promising that various matters would be progressed. I see this debate as an opportunity to find out a bit more about what exactly has happened since he last addressed this issue in the House and about what he thinks should happen in the future.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sorry to cut off my hon. Friend in full flow. This is further to my point of order earlier this morning about the security risk this country faces from a European Court of Justice decision to stop the UK kicking out of this country a Moroccan national whom the Home Office believes to be a severe threat to national security. It now appears that the person concerned is Abu Hamza’s daughter-in-law. Whoever it is, this is a very serious matter, and this country and this House should be aware of it. What can be done to get a Home Office Minister to come to the Chamber as a matter of urgency to tell the House about this matter and about what threat this country faces?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for bringing this matter, which is indeed important, to the attention of the House again. As he knows, I have no power to require a Minister to come to the House, but I am quite certain, now that the hon. Gentleman has raised this matter on the Floor of the House, that those who ought to take note of what he has said will do so. I trust that the matter will be brought before the House in due course, and the hon. Gentleman is of course well aware of the many methods that he can use next week to ensure that it is brought before the House.

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for what you have said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). I share his concern that this is a very important issue, particularly in the light of what has been said about the need for us to be able, as a result of the current EU renegotiations, to improve our own national security.

The EU is of course a significant issue in relation to the regulation of bat habitats. The only way in which my Bill, as currently drafted, can be put on the statute book is either for the Government to agree to exclude it from the application of the European Communities Act 1972 or for us to leave the European Union. If the Bill does not reach the statute book, the need for such a Bill may be significantly reduced if we can leave the European Union. I do not know whether I will be able to draw out the Minister on that matter in this debate. Last year, I described him as one of the leading Eurosceptics. I hope that in the course of the next few weeks or days, he will re-establish his credentials in that respect.

This morning, I received a written answer to my question. I asked:

“what progress has been made…on developing a toolkit for effective and safe management of bats in churches as recommended in the University of Bristol report on Management of bats in churches, a pilot, published in January 2015.”

The Minister referred to that report when he responded to the debate in January 2015.

The answer that I received from the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), stated:

“The Government has invested significant resources into research and development to assess how we can reduce the impact caused by bats in churches. This has included a three year research project that concluded in 2013, as well as a pilot project led by Historic England that focused on churches with significant bat issues. Natural England is currently creating a licensing framework to provide the mechanism through which the impact of bats will be controlled in churches.”

I will pause at that point. Natural England seems to be taking an inordinately long time to create the licensing framework. One can only assume that either the matter is incredibly complex or Natural England is not investing sufficient resources in that objective. I hope that the Minister will put more pressure on Natural England to come forward with the licensing framework sooner rather than later.

The second paragraph of the ministerial response to my written question causes me concern. It states:

“A partnership of five organisations, including the Church of England and Natural England, is seeking Heritage Lottery Funding for a five year project to support the creation of a national support network for churches that have bat related issues. The outcome of the bid for funding will be known in March.”

That is an incredibly long timescale. Why can the funding not be provided directly by the Government now? Why do we need to go to the Heritage Lottery Fund to try to get it? Why will it take a similar length of time to the duration of the last world war to come up with a solution, if indeed that funding is available? Why, for all the talk, are we not able to do more, more quickly, to resolve what is for many churches and places of worship a really serious issue?

The seriousness of the issue is recognised in the material that has been produced by the Bat Conservation Trust and the University of Bristol. The Bat Conservation Trust has identified a number of case studies of churches where the problems with bats have been mitigated, rather than resolved. It also sets out in detail all the problems that bats can cause in churches, such as droppings and urine, health concerns, what happens when they fly inside churches and the problems that they can cause when building and conservation projects are under way in churches.

The Bat Conservation Trust has a helpful brief entitled “Solutions to bat issues in churches”, and it answers certain questions such as “Why can’t I get rid of bats in my church? What can I do about bat droppings in my church? Why do churches have to foot the bill for bat conservation? What help is available to churches with bats?”, and so on. It is clear from the way that those questions are asked that we are a long way short of finding a solution to this intractable problem that is causing an enormous amount of concern to churches.

In the previous debate my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley referred to the fact that it is not just churches that are affected by this issue. The Bat Conservation Trust took up my response to that intervention, in which I said that we should perhaps start with just one small area, such as churches. The fact that I then contemplated the possibility that we might extend that provision to other buildings caused an enormous amount of angst among members of the Bat Conservation Trust, and it placed a riposte on its website. My point is that we have to start somewhere and try to get some urgency into the matter.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for taking up my point about other buildings as opposed to just churches, and in order for progress to be made, I am very happy to drop my wide ambition to see this measure extended further. If it means that my hon. Friend can make progress on churches alone, I am happy to limit my ambition to that.

[Mr Chope]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, and I hope that when he responds, the Minister will accept that dealing with churches would be a good place to start.

One criticism made of the Bill last year was that it contained no definition of a building used for public worship. To address that I have added clause 3, which defines a building used for public worship as

“a building used for the purposes of religious worship by a congregation or religious group whether or not the building is also used for counselling, social events, instruction or religious training.”

I hope that that will overcome the objection raised about the lack of definition in the Bill.

When responding to our previous debate, the Minister said that there were issues that were going to be addressed, and that in light of their vulnerability, bats have been subject to protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. At European level, that was augmented by protection under the European habitats directive in 1994, which was transposed into UK law with the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2010. He said that there would be a review of the relevant European directive, and that

“the European Commission has committed itself to reviewing certain elements of the directive to establish whether they are proportionate. So, in addition to all the work that we are doing nationally, a European-level review is under way.”—[Official Report, 16 January 2015; Vol. 590, c. 1199.]

Will the Minister tell the House where we are with that European level review, and say when he thinks it will reach a conclusion? What sort of conclusion does he think it will reach, and what evidence has been submitted by the Government to that review?

It is a great concern to me, and to a lot of my hon. Friends, that we have European legislation to deal with bats who do not fly across Europe. These are bats who reside in the British Isles. What business is it of the other countries in the European Union to dictate to us how we should look after our own bat populations? This could almost be a starting point for addressing the much-vaunted but totally ignored principle of subsidiarity. If we have a species in our country that does not move from one country to another, it should surely be a matter for domestic, rather than European, law. I would be very interested to know from my hon. Friend the Minister where he thinks we have got to on that.

There is some good news. Last year, I talked about the impact of wind turbines on bats. I put a provision in that Bill largely because of a proposed massive offshore wind turbine project in Dorset. The good news is that the project has now been rejected by the Planning Inspectorate. There will no longer be the adverse impact on bats on the mainland there would otherwise have been if connecting cables had been constructed through forest areas.

In responding last year to the aspect of that Bill concerning the impact of wind turbines on bat habitats, my hon. Friend said:

“That evidence is fairly mixed. Some studies in the United States and Canada suggested that there could be an impact, but, in order to clarify the position in the United Kingdom the Government are conducting their own research, which will be completed later this year.”

The research must therefore have been completed by the end of 2015. I would be grateful if my hon. Friend could tell us the outcome of that research into the wind turbine impacts on our bat populations and habitats. He went on to say:

“If that research establishes that the current approach to planning in respect of wind turbines is insufficient to protect bats, we will review our approach at that point.”

There is a useful purpose to be served by having an almost regular review of progress on issues such as this. The other thing my hon. Friend said last time was this:

“In a changing landscape, where hedgerows and other linear features that are so important to bats have been lost as roosting sites, churches can be important to, in particular, some of our rarer birds. However, the Government recognise, and are sympathetic to, the concern of parishioners who are suffering from the effects of bat droppings on pews, precious artefacts and equipment in the public and private areas of their churches. To address that concern, we have invested considerable resources in research and development to establish how we can reduce the impact of bats in churches.”—[Official Report, 16 January 2015; Vol. 590, c. 1198.]

He then went on to refer to the three-year research project completed in March 2014.

At the beginning of my remarks, I referred to the answer to the question of where we are getting to in establishing a toolkit for effective and safe management of bats in churches. The answer seems to be that it is a long way off. In the meantime, what are we going to do? Something has to be done to make things better for churches and for the parishioners and others who use them. There must be a better solution than their having to put up umbrellas in church to avoid being defecated upon.

Why must our fantastic church monuments be covered with paper—not plastic, because it adds to the adverse impact on the artefacts—so that bats can carry on doing their thing inside our churches to the detriment of that important part of our heritage? It must be possible for bats to co-exist with historic churches. The challenge for the Government, which is reflected in the Bill, is to demonstrate a will to make it happen. For that reason, I ask that the House give my Bill a Second Reading.

Male Suicide and International Men’s Day

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Thursday 19th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for coming to the debate and making that point. I would have preferred the debate to be in the main Chamber, especially given that the International Women’s Day debate is held there, but I am grateful that we have the opportunity to raise these issues, which we have never done before, so it would be churlish of me to be too critical.

I want today to be the day when we in this House start to deal with some of the forgotten men’s issues and realise why the political correctness that underpins issues relating to the differing treatment of the sexes can be damaging to men. It might sound odd for someone leading the debate on International Men’s Day to say this, but in many respects, I would rather we did not have to be here having this debate, because when we think about it, in so many ways, considering men and women separately as if they live their lives in complete isolation from one another is ridiculous. Neither group is isolated. Both sexes have mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. Every woman has related male parties and therefore a vested interest in men’s issues.

The problem is that virtually everything we do and debate in the House seems to start from the premise that everything is biased against women and that something must be done about it. There is never an appreciation that men’s issues can be just as important and that men can be just as badly treated as women in certain areas.

The hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) supported my request for a debate, and I know he is sorry that he unfortunately cannot be here today. Had he been here, he no doubt would have shared the fact that last year, Belfast City Council hosted its first event to mark International Men’s Day. I understand that the event was held in Belfast castle and opened by the First Minister and the Lord Mayor of Belfast at the time, Nichola Mallon, following a proposal by Alderman Ruth Patterson. It seems our Ulster friends appreciate that there are some specifically male issues that should be addressed, with both sexes involved.

I want to be very clear: I do not believe there is actually an issue between men and women. Often, problems are stirred up by those who might be described as militant feminists and the politically correct males who sometimes pander to them. Members do not just need to take my word for it. Before the Equal Opportunities Commission was merged into the Equality and Human Rights Commission, it conducted research that found women had very clear views on these matters. Its findings included the following conclusion:

“There was little support for the idea that women, as a group, are unequal in society today.”

Presumably, that went down like a lead balloon in an organisation dedicated to fighting for women’s interests and rights, so it was pretty much swept under the carpet.

One of the most depressing things to happen recently was the introduction of the Select Committee on Women and Equalities. After everything else, in 2015 we have a separate Committee to deal with women’s issues, on top of the Women’s Minister, Women’s Question Time and the many strategies in this country that only deal with women.

For the record, I could not care less if every MP in this House were female or if every member of my staff were female, as long as they were there on merit. To assume that men cannot adequately represent women is a nonsense, just as it is to say that only women can represent other women. As a man, I can say quite clearly that Margaret Thatcher represented my views very nicely indeed, but I am not sure she would be a pin-up for many of the politically correct, left-leaning women who are obsessed with having more women in Parliament today.

It seems to me that we have an “equality, but only when it suits” agenda in Parliament that often applies just to women. The drive for women to have so-called equality on all things that suit the politically correct agenda but not on the things that do not is a great concern. For example, we hear plenty about increasing the number of women on company boards and increasing female representation in Parliament, but there is a deafening silence when it comes to increasing the number of men who have custody of their children or who have careers as midwives. In fact, there generally seems to be a deafening silence on all the benefits women have compared with men.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Would my hon. Friend add to that list the deafening silence about the shortage of male teachers in primary schools, who are important male role models?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; we hear very little about that. If there were a shortage of female primary school teachers, I suspect we would hear a great deal more about it.

The fight for equality on all things that suit women has ended up in a situation where we are quick to point out that women need special protections and treatment in certain areas but need greater equality in others. Let me give the example of prison uniforms. Men in prison have to wear a prison uniform; women in prison do not. How, I have asked on many occasions, can that possibly be fair? Where is the equality in that? I will come on to the treatment of men and women in our justice system later, but that is clearly an issue. What is the explanation? I am told that it is because women are different. As I have said, it is a question of equality, but only when it suits.

Hospital Parking Charges (Exemption for Carers) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 30th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

That is the point I was making. If I did not make it, I apologise for not being clear. For the avoidance of doubt, those decisions are made locally and I support that fact. Labour Members clearly do not believe that they should be made locally. They believe that the rules should be set nationally. In a nutshell, that is where we have a difference of opinion. I believe the decisions should be made locally; the hon. Member for Burnley clearly believes they should be made centrally. That is a perfectly respectable position to hold, but it happens to be one that I do not agree with. That is the nub of the point on localism.

[Mr Chope]

In Scotland within the past week there has been enormous criticism of the quality of healthcare being delivered by the Scottish Government. Is not that an example of a place that has free hospital car parking but does not necessarily have a better quality of health service?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will say more about Scotland and Wales in due course, because we have seen the impact of this policy in those countries. There is not a never-ending supply of money, and if more is spent on free car parking in the NHS, less will inevitably be spent in other areas. Labour Members seem to think that money grows on trees and that there is a never-ending supply of it, but back in the real world, we have a certain amount of money and we choose how to spend it. If we choose to spend it on one thing, we inevitably have to take it away from somewhere else. The hon. Member for Burnley did not mention the need to make that choice, but it is important that we face that fact.

The hon. Lady has clearly had difficulty in finding evidence to support her Bill, so I thought I would help her out a bit. She has clearly spoken to lots of carers groups, and she has set up the Park the Charges campaign with Carers UK, for which I commend her. For the sake of balance, however, we should not just listen to the views of carers, important though they are. We should also seek the position of the hospitals on this matter, because they would ultimately be the most affected by the proposed changes.

I am not sure what discussions the hon. Lady had with the hospitals, given that her Bill would force them to change their car parking policies. I contacted the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, which I believe is the hospital trust that covers her constituency. I asked the trust what consultations she had had with it on this policy. I put in a freedom of information request to ask what communication Burnley general hospital had received from the hon. Lady on the issue of carers and hospital car parking charges. I received a response on 25 September, which stated:

“I can now confirm that we have not had an enquiry of this nature from Ms Cooper”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I have been accused of many things in my time. A burst of socialism is a first, even for me. I may try and put that out to my left-wing constituents to show them that there is hope for me yet. If I did come out with a burst of socialism, I apologise profusely, not least to my hon. Friend, who always keeps me on the straight and narrow. I apologise for a burst of socialism; it was not intended to be such. I feel chastised.

We should consider why hospital car parks are not already free. There is an argument, I guess, that instead of picking out parking for carers, all hospital car parking should be free. In its 2009 report, “Fair for all, not free-for-all—Principles for sustainable hospital car parking”, the NHS Confederation stated:

“Charging for car parking is often necessary, but needs to be fair – and to be seen to be fair.”

It is important for Opposition Members to recognise that the country and the NHS do not have millions of pounds to spend on covering the cost of parking for a certain section of the population. The Labour Government left this country in a huge financial black hole which we are still struggling to recover from. Policies such as this could severely affect local NHS hospitals and services and their budgets.

There is an analogy that I always give in such situations, which I first heard Lord Tebbit use. I hope that goes some way to restoring my hon. Friend’s faith in me after my earlier lapse. The analogy in this context, which is not necessarily the context in which Lord Tebbit used it, is this: if somebody asked, “Do you think we should have free hospital car parking?”, the chances are that virtually everybody who was asked would say yes. If they were asked, “Should we have free hospital car parking? By the way, that will mean having to get rid of lots of doctors, nurses and essential staff”, people may give a different answer. In the analogy that Lord Tebbit used, the question was, “Would you like a free Rolls-Royce?”, and he suspected that the vast majority of people would say yes. If they were asked, “Would you like a free Rolls-Royce? You’ll have to live in a tent for the rest of your life to pay for it”, people may come up with a different answer.

Of course, in principle, people would love to have free hospital car parking, but we have to think what the consequences would be and whether people would want to face those consequences. When it comes to the crunch, I suspect the answer may be different. If the Government had an additional £180 million to spend, which would be the cost of free hospital car parking, I am sure there would be many other pressures to spend that £180 million on in some part of the NHS. For example, it may pay for another 2,500 doctors or 8,000 nurses for the NHS. If we had a vote on what is the most important thing that we should do with that money, I suspect that the additional doctors and nurses would carry quite a weight of support, not just in this House, but across the country as a whole. It is not just a free-for-all. The harsh reality is that there are consequences of doing these things.

[Mr Chope]

We are talking not just about free car parking, but about car parking? Too many hospitals do not have adequate car parking. That is one of the great complaints that so many patients have—that they cannot find anywhere to park when they go to hospital.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South made the point that people find it very stressful to have to pay after they have been to visit a relative in hospital, but as my hon. Friend rightly points out, it is probably even more stressful if they cannot find a car parking space at all. We need to bear that in mind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I very much agree, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will move on. I will discuss how it might work with my hon. Friend in the Tea Room afterwards.

[Mr Chope]

If there is increased demand for car parking spaces at hospitals and it is desirable that those hospitals provide extra provision, that has to be paid for. How will it be paid for?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I do not think that is our worry for today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Again, I will move on.

As the Torbay scheme is the nearest to the one that the hon. Member for Burnley proposes, I asked some questions through freedom of information requests about the impact and take-up of the scheme. I asked how many people had used the scheme since it was introduced, and the reply from Torbay was:

“We are unable to provide you with the information requested as it is not held electronically or in a central location. We do not record the details of carers, only a verification that they are on the register.”

We do not even know how many people take up the scheme that has been introduced.

[Mr Chope]

Surely that is a good thing, because it shows that there is a light-touch approach without too much bureaucracy and administration.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I agree. This is hard work, Mr Deputy Speaker, and you are right—I am anxious to press on.

[Mr Chope]

Before my hon. Friend concludes, will he address clause 7(2) which states that the Act extends to England only? Does he think that, as with free school meals, there will be Barnett consequentials?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I reassure the hon. Gentleman that we are not going to open that can of worms today. Philip Davies, I know that you want to get beyond clause 7 and to your conclusion.

Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 16th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I will not give way again because time is pressing and I do not want to embarrass the hon. Gentleman further about his record as leader of Croydon Council—[Interruption.] It was Lambeth Council. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman, although I am sure the same principles apply.

It has to be said that a rather broader view came to be taken, under the influence of Lord Atkin, on what was considered fitness for human habitation. In his opinion:

“If the state of repair of a house is such that by ordinary use damage may naturally be caused to the occupier, whether in respect of personal injury to life and limb, or injury to health, then the house is not in all respects reasonably fit for human habitation.”

That definition was approved by the House of Lords in the case of Summers v. Salford Corporation. In that case, a defective sash cord on the only window in the bedroom of a small house was held, in the circumstances, to make the property not reasonably fit for human habitation. Lord Atkin equated the requirement of reasonable fitness for human habitation with habitable repair, which had been defined earlier.

There was an attempt to come up with a specific definition in the Housing Act 1936. It is clear from the definition relating to sanitary defects that this approach was derived from the regulations made under the housing Act of 1925. There have, therefore, clearly been developments in the definition. The Bill proposes to change that definition once again, despite the fact that for all the previous stages of the definition there was not the other legislation in place that is in force now. We did not have all the legislation that came into being in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. None of that was in place, yet even then there was a narrow, if evolving, definition of homes fit for human habitation. There is even more legislation in place to protect the rights of landlords now, yet the hon. Lady wants to change the definition once again.

The report also gives the history of the fitness for human habitation provisions. That is key to understanding why they originally came into being, as they are the subject of the changes proposed in the Bill. I would, if time had allowed, have gone through the origins of the legislation and the definition, because if we are trying to fiddle with a definition, it is very important to know why it was introduced in the first place. I will not test your patience by doing that, Madam Deputy Speaker, because time is precious.

The hon. Lady argued that the Bill will merely do as the law originally intended on human habitation, but I do not accept that. Yes, the Bill seeks to address the original rent limits which exist to trigger the fitness for human habitation provisions in the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, but it does so in such a way that includes nearly all properties, not just those with a certain level of rent. That was certainly not the intention when this was first introduced. It also extends the list of matters in the fitness for human habitation list and ignores the fact completely that there has been so much other legislation covering landlords since. The Bill covers nearly all properties, not just those in a certain rent band. The only exemptions appear to be those—the hon. Lady can correct me if I am wrong—contained in section 14 of the 1985 Act, which states:

“Section 11…does not apply to a new lease granted to an existing tenant, or to a former tenant still in possession, if the previous lease was not a lease to which section 11 applied…Section 11 does not apply to a lease granted on or after 3rd October 1980 to—a local authority…a new town corporation, an urban development corporation, the Development Board for Rural Wales, a co-operative housing association, or an educational institution”—

or housing action trust.

The hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) made a point about the terrible state of repair of houses in the private rented sector. I will make no comment on the back of it—people can draw their own conclusions—but of all the people who have come to me in my surgeries to complain about the standard of their housing, I think I can count on one hand the number who come to me in a year to complain about the standard of housing in the private rented sector. However, the numbers who come to see me about the standard of their housing in the social rented sector by their social housing provider is huge. I get no end of complaints about social housing. People can draw their own conclusions from that fact.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Would my hon. Friend therefore join me in bringing forward a private Member’s Bill directed specifically at social landlords?

[Philip Davies]

Again, I do not want to deviate. I was merely asking whether the Bill addressed the right problem. It seems to me that there are many other problems with many other housing providers that are not being addressed. Labour Members seem to think that social housing landlords can get away with anything and do not need regulating. All they ever want to do is clamp down on private landlords, even though the problem does not seem to exist to the extent they believe—

Access to Medical Treatments (Innovation) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Christopher Chope

Friday 16th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I merely read out, word for word, Cancer Research UK’s response to the consultation; I can do no more than quote its words. I will take my hon. Friend’s point in that regard.

[Mr Chope]

If there is such widespread opposition to this Bill, why was it that the Saatchi Bill made such good progress in the other place during the last Parliament, when I understand it had the benign support of the Government?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend often asks me questions that I cannot answer. He has now asked another that I am not in a position to answer. I often think it is a mistake to give way to him; he is far too clever for my liking. Again, he has stumbled across something that I cannot answer. He raises a very good point, so perhaps we shall leave it hanging there for others to have a crack at later in the debate.

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges said that it applauds the intentions of the promoters of the Medical Innovation Bill:

“The stated purpose of the Bill is to encourage responsible innovation in medical treatment, and accordingly to deter innovation which is not responsible. Those are aims which medical Royal Colleges would wholeheartedly support and welcome.”

That is an important point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is very kind, although it would have been rather better if he had not had to be prompted to say that. Nevertheless, I will take those comments in the spirit in which I know my good friend intended.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend has not responded to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). Surely the point is that if we want to discuss this in more detail in Parliament, the ideal opportunity for that is in Committee when it can have detailed scrutiny.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I have not heard anything so far today to suggest that the Bill should not at least go into Committee for further scrutiny, and perhaps even for some improvement, if I may be so bold as to suggest that may be possible. I do not think I have heard anything today that suggests the Bill should be stopped in principle on Second Reading. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes will appreciate, however, that I am also trying to be balanced in setting out some of the concerns that have been expressed, perhaps so they can be considered if we do get into Committee, which would be a useful exercise.

Another concern raised by some of my constituents is that the database may compromise patients’ anonymity. Innovative medical treatments will be applied on a case-by-case basis with a specifically honed technique for one particular individual. The fear is that a degree of detail will be needed in the register, which would end up compromising a patient’s anonymity. That is a valid concern, and protections would need to be put in place to ensure all information is stored securely within the database to protect anonymity. However, that may be at the cost of using innovative treatments. There may well be a tension between those two factors.

While the information stored in the database should only be accessible by doctors, it will need to remain confidential aside from access for medical purposes and, ultimately, it should be the patient’s choice whether to use an innovative treatment that will be recorded for medical purposes. Furthermore, in an age when we want more doctors to spend more time with patients and not at their desks, we need to be careful to ensure that the register does not become overwhelming to the point where doctors are put off from using innovative techniques for the sake of the amount of paperwork and red tape that would accompany it. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges said

“current experience in the NHS show that establishing an effective register for far more standard procedures is a complex task. Establishing and maintaining a register of innovations would be a costly and potentially burdensome and bureaucratic task.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes made that point. That is another factor that needs to be considered when the database is created. Of course the database and the information gathered should be rigorously checked and regulated. However, that is not always easy when doctors are already busy.

Overall, I believe this clause, originating from an amendment to Lord Saatchi’s Bill, is one of the key clauses. For rare diseases such as some cancers there is a lack of published evidence on which to rely when determining treatments to try. It is also widely regarded that some methods used to treat some types of cancers have remained similar for many years, with only slight modifications to the techniques. With this in mind, a database that allows knowledge to be stored and accessed at a doctor’s level will be not only desirable but probably essential for allowing doctors to innovate responsibly. It will encourage a culture of knowledge sharing, which, importantly, will include both successes and failures. This is a vital part of the Bill, and indeed I do not see how the power to innovate can move forward without the inclusion of a database recording the results of these treatments. I therefore commend my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry on including this clause.

We need to look at what we consider to be a responsible innovative treatment. Clause 2(2) states that a treatment is regarded as

“‘innovative’ if it involves a departure from the existing range of accepted medical treatments”

for a condition. We can therefore assume a wide scope to cover the cases that should be recorded in the new database.

However, concerns have been raised regarding the distinction between innovation and research. While clause 5(2) specifically states that this Bill does not apply to medical research, some medical organisations have raised concerns as to how this would work in reality. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges states:

“We do not understand the distinction between ‘individual patient innovation’ and ‘research’. The distinction seems false and potentially dangerous. As a college president stated ‘Innovation without research isn’t innovation, it’s more often just advertising’.”

Although the Bill uses the two in harmony, it is important to raise these points and for them to be considered in Committee.

One of the main differences that separates the two is that this legislation allows doctors more freedom to modify and specifically cater treatments towards the individual they are treating. That is very important and worthwhile. Although they will not be finding a brand new cure for cancer, it allows doctors to cater treatment plans more specifically to the patient’s needs and wishes. Many patients will benefit from that, and often would prefer it.

We have discussed the Bolam test. By working from the current common law Bolam test, the Bill identifies the steps a doctor can take to show that they have acted responsibly before innovating. The common law Bolam test is defined as the test

“used to determine the standard of care owed by professionals to those whom they serve, e.g. the standards of care provided to patients by doctors.”

Established from the case Bolam v. Friern hospital management committee in 1957, it shows that if a doctor acts in accordance with a responsible body of medical opinion, he or she will not be negligent. Subsequently this standard of care test was amended—the Bolitho amendment—to include the requirement that the doctor should have behaved in a way that “withstands logical analysis” regardless of the body of medical opinion.

This determination of whether a professional’s actions or omissions withstand logical analysis is the responsibility of the court. The Bill, through clause 3, aims to reflect as closely as possible the steps under the current common law which a responsible doctor could be expected to satisfy when innovating. However, clause 3 has caused specific concern for many of my constituents and I would like to raise some of their concerns today.

Most groups and individuals from the medical profession seem to be satisfied with the current Bolam test as a standard for regarding medical innovation, with the Royal College of Surgeons regarding it as “adequate”, so there are concerns that, instead of clarifying the legal position, clause 3 will confuse the current mechanism for judging responsible innovation.

Subsection (2)(a) requires a doctor to

“obtain the views of one or more appropriately qualified doctors in relation to the proposed medical treatment, with a view to ascertaining whether the treatment would have the support of a responsible body of medical opinion”.

This implies that the innovating doctor need only rely on an interpretation of a responsible body, and need not gain the support from a responsible body itself. In practice this might not be a problem, however, as the Bill specifically states that those supporting views must be obtained from “appropriately qualified doctors”—that is, those with appropriate expertise and experience in dealing with patients with the condition in question. It may therefore be taken that the doctor is qualified in the relevant field, which would provide reassurance. It is this clause that many of my constituents are concerned about, however.

This brings me to another point that was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes. Some of my constituents fear that the database could be used as a tool by quacks, crooks and charlatans, giving them the flexibility to use devious experimental treatments. Indeed, that concern has been echoed by the Royal College of Surgeons, which claims, in reference to clause 3(2)(a):

“This sub-clause could also provide post-hoc justification for an unethical treatment from a doctor asserting s/he sought the view of one other doctor.”

We must be sure, therefore, that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect patients from such doctors. I do not think that many of them exist, but I do not know. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes and I might have some disagreement about that. The important point is that there needs to be a safeguard, because it is inevitable that some such doctors will exist.