Andy Burnham
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(7 years, 11 months ago)
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Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
I would like to begin by agreeing with the Minister that some good progress has been made in the course of our deliberations on the Bill. There have been improvements, which we will discuss later, on tackling child sexual exploitation and on the police bail regime—particularly as it applies to those suspected of being involved in terrorism activity. As he has just indicated, there has also been progress on police misconduct, which I will come to.
However, the Bill presents an opportunity to do much more to improve police accountability, and that is an opportunity that we in the House now need to grab. Today, I want to present a package of proposals that respond to the historic verdict of the Hillsborough inquest, which finally concluded, after 27 years, that, as the families had known from day one, the loss of their loved ones was not an accident and they had been unlawfully killed, but that that fact had been covered up for all those years.
This package seeks to rebalance this country and to make it fairer. It seeks to rebalance it away from the establishment and in favour of ordinary families. It is a package that will stand as a permanent tribute to the dignity and determination of the Hillsborough families. Knowing them as I do, they would want nothing more than that no other family in the future should go through what they have gone through.
Let me take the House briefly through this package of proposals. New clause 63 would give bereaved families equal funding for legal representation at inquests where the police are involved. It seeks to establish the crucial principle that there should be parity between the two sides. The reason that is important is that it says very clearly that the public interest lies in finding the truth. That is how public resources should be directed: they should not be directed towards creating an unbalanced contest at an inquest, with public money used to protect vested interests in the public sector.
Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)
I am happy to confirm that the Liberal Democrats will support this proposal. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, had it been in place at the time of the first inquest, the truth might have emerged at that stage, and the families would not have had to go through such a dire long wait to get to the truth?
Andy Burnham
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support. He is absolutely right. I will come on to explain precisely how this would have helped to even the playing field and give the families the chance to get truth at the first time of asking. The original inquest catastrophically failed on that account, and that needs to be very clearly understood as we consider this amendment.
Amendment 126 seeks to close the long-standing loophole of retirement being used by police officers as a route to evade misconduct proceedings. New clause 64 seeks to hold the Government to their promise to the victims of press intrusion to hold a second-stage inquiry looking at the culture of relations between police and the press. New clause 66 seeks to legislate for a code of practice with regard to the media relations policy of each police force, and to spell out that attributable briefing by police forces, which was so damaging in the case of Hillsborough, is not permitted unless it is in the most exceptional circumstances. Amendments 127 and 128 seek to strengthen the Independent Police Complaints Commission. New clause 67, which will be considered later, seeks to strengthen the offence of misconduct in public office.
Let me start with the area where there is greatest consensus—police misconduct. I listened carefully to what the Minister said, and I am grateful for the movement that he indicated to the shadow Policing Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), in Committee whereby there should not merely be an arbitrary 12-month period after retirement, because, as we know, police wrongdoing may come to light much later. We are glad that the Government have indicated that they are prepared to move on this matter in the other place and table an amendment to that effect. While I will not press my amendment to a vote, I would still like to press the Minister a little further on this point. He is saying that this should be applied only in the most exceptional circumstances, but that potentially rules out many people who might be guilty of gross misconduct but would not be caught by his “exceptional” test. He needs to reassure the House on this point.
Mike Penning
That is why I offered to work closely with colleagues across the House on the regulations, which will be very important. We do not include everybody, because then there is no point in having exceptional cases, but it is very important to understand what “exceptional” means.
Andy Burnham
That is a good offer and I thank the Minister for it. I think we can move forward on that basis. I hope we all know what we are trying to achieve—that is, if serious wrongdoing comes to light about an individual who is beyond 12 months retired, it must be possible for misconduct or disciplinary proceedings to be initiated against them. Our amendment says that there should then also be sanctions that are able to be applied against that individual. I say to the Minister that we will want to insist on that point as well.
If we can agree to move forward on that basis, that is a considerable example of progress that matters greatly to the Hillsborough families, who, as they were continuing their 27-year struggle, felt very aggrieved when they saw individuals who had retired on a full pension and who they felt were beyond reach and could not be held to account. I believe that this should apply retrospectively. Misconduct is misconduct whenever it occurred, and people should be held to account for their actions.
Steve Rotheram
I thank the Minister for coming partly towards the position that we believe should be taken, but can we clarify one point? We are talking about serious wrongdoing—malfeasance and gross misconduct —by police officers. We have mentioned Hillsborough, so many people will spin that with regard to the conduct of officers—ordinary officers—at that disaster in 1989. There are no accusations against many of the ordinary officers, who performed heroically: it was the senior officers who let people down, and then, in some cases, took the opportunity to get away scot free through the cop-out of using ill health—
Andy Burnham
It was a long intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it was a good one. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) makes a very important point. I do not think that any attempt is being made to blame ordinary policemen and women. That is not the purpose of the amendment. It is important for me to say very clearly to those police officers who are out there keeping the streets safe that this is not an attack on them. The package is about not allowing the misdeeds of the past to taint the present and those police officers who are working today. That is such a crucial point, because if we do not deal properly with such allegations, we allow the situation to contaminate the present and to corrode trust in today’s police service. None of us in this House wants that, so my hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point, which cannot be stressed enough.
Mike Penning
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for being so generous in giving way. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) is absolutely right. If we had not included the point about exceptional circumstances, those sorts of people could have been captured, and that is not what we want. We are not looking at an officer who commits a speeding offence just before he retires; we are looking at those people who should be brought to justice, and that is exactly what we should be doing.
Andy Burnham
That is right. This is about people who have been guilty of serious misconduct in public office, and it is crucial that they cannot use retirement as a means of evading accountability for that misconduct. The change to which the Minister appears to be agreeing closes a long-standing loophole and frustration for members of the public. It exposes the police to a considerably more challenging regime, but rightly so. Any profession needs to be held accountable to the highest standards. We will work with the Minister to get it right. I believe that we can do so, but I stress that this is about upholding the reputation of the vast majority of police officers, who serve the public with distinction.
The issue of police-press relations is the biggest area of unfinished business, although, in fact, we have not even really started to make any changes with respect to putting right the wrongs of Hillsborough. As we know, the briefing of the press in those first days after the tragedy caused incalculable harm and damage, not just to the families who had lost loved ones, but to the thousands of people, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton, who had returned from the match in a state of trauma, only to read a couple of days later that the police were blaming them for the deaths of their friends and family.
That is why feelings are so strong, not just in Merseyside but across the country. It simply cannot be right that a police force is able, unattributably, to brief malicious and unproven information to a newspaper. We need a stronger and more transparent regime for press relations, so that false impressions cannot be put out there with the intention of setting a narrative about a particular incident. Families who are fighting for justice often find that it is very difficult to overturn the false version of events. That was certainly the case for the Hillsborough families.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
I totally agree with the points that my right hon. Friend is making. Does he agree that among the problems with Hillsborough were not only the off-the-record briefings that took place later, but the on-the-record briefings to get the narrative right from the beginning?
Andy Burnham
I agree on both levels. This was a cover-up perpetrated on the record, off the record and in the Committee rooms of this House. It went to the very top—even to 10 Downing Street, where the head of press at the time briefed that a “tanked-up mob” caused the disaster. This cover-up went to the highest level. What chance did ordinary families have when faced with the might of the establishment seeking to perpetrate a lie on that scale? It has been a 27-year fight, as we now know.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
That promise was made not just to the victims and their families but to the Chairs of three Select Committees in the Prime Minister’s room before the inquiry was announced. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that it is important that we get Leveson 2—perhaps not with Leveson, because he has moved on to do other things, but with somebody else. There is nothing wrong with the Government beginning the process, choosing a chair of the committee and getting the mechanics together. We do not really have to wait until the end of the criminal proceedings.
Andy Burnham
I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend. There is a huge amount of unfinished business. These issues are present in so many of the injustices that we have seen, where there has been inappropriate contact between police and press. We await the conclusions of the Daniel Morgan panel, for instance, which might best illustrate some of these issues.
That is true of other events as well. We remember the way in which the media were manipulated in the case of the Shrewsbury 24, for example. There have been many examples of this over time. Indeed, part 1 of the Leveson inquiry found unhealthy links between senior Met officers and newspaper executives, which led to the resignation of the then Met police chief and others. The issue cannot be left there. Public officials and police officers have also been convicted of offences related to these matters.
The Minister really needs to provide an explicit answer on this specific point today. He cannot wriggle out of this commitment. It is not the kind of commitment you can wriggle out of, given everything that those people have been through. A promise should be a promise, when it is made to people who have suffered in the way that many of the victims of press intrusion have suffered. I know that the Hillsborough families feel exactly the same. They were the victims of the biggest example of inappropriate police briefing of newspapers—and it was not just one newspaper. People think it was just one newspaper that reported the lies, but many of them reported the lies that were given to Whites news agency in Sheffield, and those lies went round the world. Only this week, I had an email from someone in the United States saying that they were astonished to find out the truth when they watched the recent BBC2 documentary on Hillsborough, and that for 27 years they had thought that the events were the result of hooliganism. It is impossible to exaggerate the harm that those lies caused.
I say to the Minister tonight that we need a better answer. If he were to stand up now at the Dispatch Box and say clearly to the House that there will be a second-stage inquiry into the culture of relations between the police and the press, I would be the first to say that we would not press our new clause 64 to a vote. However, there is growing suspicion among organisations—Hacked Off, obviously, but others too—and campaigners for justice that they are slowly being let down and that this matter is being slowly slid into the long grass. We have had anonymous briefings from people close to the Culture Secretary and others in Government to suggest that it has already been canned. Well, we on the Labour Benches are not prepared to accept that, so I say clearly to the Minister that unless he can provide a much more direct reassurance, we will push the matter to a vote this evening to force the Prime Minister to honour his own promise—it is not our promise; it is his promise—to the victims of press intrusion and hacking.
Steve Rotheram
In March 2013, the Prime Minister said that Leveson 2 should go ahead without further delay. The Secretary of State told the Select Committee that he was awaiting a further Government statement. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the three years that have passed since the Prime Minister’s promise have been far too long for many of the victims of press intrusion?
Andy Burnham
I would certainly say so. I cannot understand why there is any doubt about this, given the clarity of the Prime Minister’s statements, which I have read out, and given that the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), has just said that the promise was made not only to the victims but to senior parliamentarians. I do not see how this commitment can be negotiable.
Andy Burnham
Well, there you go. That says it all really. The right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) seems to be in a different mode these days. One wonders what deals have been done by the Government if they are preparing to unpick this agreement, and we will watch them very carefully.
The Minister makes a fair point that there are ongoing investigations. I take his point that some of the investigations will have a material impact on issues that we are considering. We are not saying that we want the inquiry to start right now. We accept that there are matters to be concluded in the courts before it can proceed. What we are after is the removal of any doubt that it will proceed at the appropriate moment and that the promise the Prime Minister gave to those victims will be honoured. That is what we are seeking to establish tonight. That is what we are asking the Minister to lay down very clearly.
This goes beyond party politics. The victims and their families have suffered enough, and Members on both sides of the House owe it to them to make good on the promise that was given to them. That is why I look forward to Members from both sides of the House joining us in the Lobby tonight, because it clearly looks as though the Government are not going to give way.
Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)
These families have suffered enough—we in this Chamber are united on that—so does my right hon. Friend agree that a statement from the Minister today saying that the second inquiry will go ahead would put an end to their suffering? They have suffered enough. Let this be the end.
Andy Burnham
My hon. Friend puts it very well. That is what I have seen when working with the Hillsborough families, as have others when they have been fighting for justice. Those people are affected not just by the original trauma they suffered, but by how the system grinds them down afterwards, making them fight for everything, not giving them an inch and slowly draining the life out of them. How cruel is that? It is just wrong—is it not?—that the government machine thinks it can operate in that way. As I will move on to say, I spoke today to a family about going to meetings with 14 lawyers sitting around the table and just a couple of family members. That is just not right. We all know it is not right. Any of us who have been Ministers will have seen that style of meeting, and it is just not right. It is time to change it. We should not make these families fight for everything, but support them, and tip the scales in their favour and away from the powerful. Why not do so?
Mike Penning
May I just tell the right hon. Gentleman that I do not know what has happened with other Ministers, but I have never sat in such a meeting and anyone who has had a meeting with me as a Minister will know, as right hon. and hon. Members know, that that is not the way I operate and that I never have operated in that way?
Andy Burnham
I have a lot of time for the Minister, as he knows, but such people are listening to this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) is not in her place, but if the victims of contaminated blood are listening to this debate, they will immediately recognise what I am saying. If the victims of organophosphates—sheep dip—poisoning are listening today, they will understand what I am saying. If the people waiting for the announcement about the battle of Orgreave investigation are listening, they will understand what I am saying. There are so many people who have not been given justice by the system, and that just is not right. It really is not right, and that is why I keep saying that we must make Hillsborough a moment of change when we can tip the scales in favour of ordinary families and away from the establishment.
Richard Arkless (Dumfries and Galloway) (SNP)
In an attempt to act as a peace broker, given that the positions of both sides have been made perfectly clear, may I ask whether the shadow Home Secretary will accept a commitment to proceed with Leveson 2 after the investigations have taken place and whether, if that is acceptable, the Minister could make such a commitment today?
Andy Burnham
That is a good point. It would be good enough if we got a cast-iron commitment. Ministers have reintroduced a doubt—in media briefings, they have said, “Oh, it probably won’t go ahead now”—and have muddied the waters. If they clarified that tonight, that would be good enough. If they said, “It will go ahead after the proper time has elapsed, given the criminal proceedings that are still outstanding”, that would be fine and everyone would understand it. If they gave that commitment tonight, there would be no need for a vote because we would have done our job, but if they cannot give such a commitment, that would be revealing in itself. If the Minister cannot stand at the Dispatch Box and give such a clear commitment, or rather reaffirm it to the people to whom Ministers have already made it, that would be revealing in itself and we would be right to force a vote in those circumstances. In that case, people will not be strung along and left hoping that there will be a Leveson 2 one day; we will have forced the issue so that Ministers are held to account for their promise. That is what we are doing tonight. Ministers have the chance to do the right thing: to stand at the Dispatch Box and say, “Yes, we will do it. We will honour what we said.” If they do not do so, we will ask Members of decency and integrity on both sides of the House to stand with us and to go through the Lobby with us tonight to hold Ministers to account for the promise they made.
Finally, let me turn to our new clause 63 on parity. The new clause seeks to establish the principle of parity of legal funding for bereaved families at inquests involving the police. In introducing it, I want to say that it is very important that people do not see Hillsborough as a one-off belonging to a bygone era. To be honest, many bereaved families still face a very similar experience when they go to an inquest. They often find themselves pitched into an adversarial and aggressive courtroom when they are still raw with grief. They are unable to match the spending of the police or the public sector in what they spend on their own legal representation. Those families find their lives picked apart. They are made to look like they are perpetrators, not victims. That is a very common experience. Many people who suffer it do not have the huge support that the Hillsborough families had. They are ordinary families battling away on their own, with no one else coming to support them. That is why the principle of parity is so tremendously important.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend’s remarks will be heard by Rachel Gumbs, the daughter of Philmore Mills, who died in hospital while being restrained by the police. Another constituent has raised an issue relating to his mum. Her children were abducted by their father, and she has spent nearly two decades without being able to contact them. My constituent is in litigation against the police, and feels a similar kind of bereavement, as he has been kept away from his brothers and sisters. He hopes that the approach we are discussing could enable people like him, who are taking cases against the police, to get access to some kind of resources. Would that be possible?
Andy Burnham
That is exactly what lies behind the new clause. My right hon. Friend has just made my point. We will all have examples from our experience as constituency MPs. We know families who have been at inquests that have been highly unsatisfactory experiences, and where they did not get legal support. I will come to a few examples, to show how unfair it is. The public sector spends taxpayers’ money like water on hiring the best QCs to line up in the courtroom and defend its reputation. Ordinary families are scrabbling around, re-mortgaging their houses and doing whatever they can to try to put up some kind of fight against that. How wrong is that?
Public money should pay to establish the truth. That means that there should be parity between the two sides in that process. It should not be the case that the public sector packs a courtroom with highly paid QCs. That is such an important principle to establish coming out of Hillsborough—to be honest, if there is to be one lasting legacy from Hillsborough, that should be it. I was tempted by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) to make this point before. The Hillsborough families were represented by Michael Mansfield at the recent inquest. If that had been the case back in 1990, there is no chance on God’s earth that the cruel and inhumane 3.15 pm cut-off time would have been allowed to stand. Have we ever had a situation in this country before where bereaved families have been told that they cannot have information about what happened to their loved ones in their dying minutes? That was the case here. Have we ever had a situation before where only after 27 years are families finally told who gave their loved ones the kiss of life and carried them over the pitch? What an affront to natural justice that is. Yet it was allowed to stand, because those families did not have someone who could challenge it.
A few weeks ago, Margaret Aspinall, chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, came to Parliament to deliver a very personal reflection on what it was like all those years ago. I am very grateful to all right hon. and hon. Members who attended; I am sure they will agree that it was an intensely moving occasion. Margaret described the indescribable pain and hurt she felt when she was sent a cheque of just over £1,000, which was supposedly compensation for the life of her son James. She said she had to put it towards the legal fund that the group was asking members to contribute to. In itself that was not enough because she had the cost of travelling to the inquest in Sheffield every day. She was living on the breadline and having to borrow money from her family and her mum to make it all work. How can it be right that families in such circumstances, who have not done anything wrong, find themselves in that situation? It cannot be right that they should be scrimping, saving and doing all those things, when taxpayers’ money is being paid for the other side to do them down.
Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is entirely right to highlight the inequality of arms between families and the state, and he will know that INQUEST has campaigned tirelessly on that issue. He should also consider the time that it takes for an inquest to happen, and how those delays are recorded. An inquest may not happen for five or six years, in which time all sorts of untruths can flourish, but it will be recorded in the statistics as having taken only a year.
Andy Burnham
That is right, and as has been hinted at, that delay is often used to grind people down even further. It really does not work, and Parliament must decide whether we are prepared to let people carry on going through such an entirely unsatisfactory process. I do not think we should.
In people’s experiences today we can see parallels with those of the Hillsborough families. To give a current example, a young boy, Zane Gbangbola, died in 2014 in the floods in his home in Surrey. The family contest that hydrogen cyanide was brought into the house from a former landfill site that had not been properly sealed. It is a high-profile case, yet the family have been turned down three times for legal aid. This ordinary family were just going about their business, and all of a sudden their son is dead and Mr Gbangbola is permanently in a wheelchair. The inquest starts today, and the only reason that the family have quality legal representation is because they were given an anonymous £25,000 donation on Friday. That cannot possibly be right.
Andy Burnham
That is extraordinarily unfair, although this Government have made things even more unfair with their cuts to legal aid. People are not getting through and they are not getting funding when they apply in the way that they would have done in the past. They are unrepresented at these inquests, which cannot be right.
Mr Kevan Jones
I accept that cases such as Hillsborough required a lot of input from lawyers. Asking as someone who has a knee-jerk reaction that we should not be feeding lawyers, is it possible for the Chief Coroner to lay down rules in some of these cases so that if a public authority comes forward with banks of lawyers, the other side should be given legal representation, or the public authority told that those lawyers are not needed?
Andy Burnham
The amendment is designed to develop the same effect and to state that there should be parity of legal funding. That is an incentive for the public sector not to spend too much on its own. If it has to fund families as well, that might bring down the legal bill—it might not add any further costs.
Mr Jones
We now have the Chief Coroner. In the past a lot was wrong—I sat on the Coroners and Justice Bill Committee, and changes could still be made to the coroners service in this country. Some recognition of the parity that my right hon. Friend refers to would be welcome, but as I know from local government and other sectors, the knee-jerk reaction these days is to get a lawyer involved and, in some cases, I am not sure that we necessarily need that.
Andy Burnham
We need inquisitorial inquests rather than adversarial inquests. In the case of Hillsborough, the Lord Chief Justice made a specific ruling when he quashed the original inquest. He hoped, given that the police had clearly tainted the evidence, that the new inquest would not degenerate into an adversarial battle, but—I am afraid to say—that is exactly what happened. At public expense, one individual in particular, hired to represent the former officers, a Mr John Beggs, went into the courtroom and repeated all kinds of lies and innuendo about supporters of Liverpool football club. My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and I were there; we witnessed it—and it was a particularly unpleasant thing to witness. It is even more galling to think that we were paying for that.
It is not just the cost but how people are questioned that is gross and unjust. I will give one final example to illustrate. The House will know that, after a long fight by her family, an inquest was recently held into the death of Cheryl James, who died at the Deepcut barracks in Surrey. The QC acting for Surrey police was the same Mr John Beggs. I know, from speaking to Cheryl’s father, that the family were deeply hurt by an intrusive and aggressive line of questioning that focused on several very personal questions. They were particularly hurt by one untrue allegation levelled at them. According to Mr Beggs, Mr James, in making inquiries to Surrey police, had distracted the latter from the Milly Dowler investigation. Can Members imagine how he felt when he heard that? In trying to get to the truth about what happened to his daughter, he found himself the subject of an outrageous, appalling slur, which the Dowler family, such is their decency, stepped in to correct.
It should not be like this. It must not be like this. It is well known that police forces are instructed to hire this individual if they feel in a tight spot, and they pay huge amounts of public money to do so. It should not be allowed to carry on. We should call time on it today.
Mr Kevan Jones
My right hon. Friend is making a very good point—that kind of adversarial inquest is wrong—but, to repeat, could not the Chief Coroner lay something down in guidance to coroners to stop such behaviour? Not only is it not good for families; it does not help get to the truth either.
Andy Burnham
No, it does not. My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I cannot see why that should not happen. Equally, I cannot see why the Government would not accept the Bill, proposed by Lord Wills in another place, to create a national office to support bereaved families so that each family does not have to reinvent the wheel and go through all the learning needed to get ready for an inquest. That is another good proposal.
To finish, we are seeking to establish a simple principle. In the words of Mr James, this is about “parity of arms”—if it has to be like that. If there is to be an adversarial battle in the courtroom, we should at least give bereaved families the same ability as the public sector to defend themselves. That is an unanswerable principle, and I am sorry the Government have decided they cannot support it tonight. I know they are saying they are waiting for the conclusion of Bishop James’s report, but this is bigger than Hillsborough—it is very much evident in Hillsborough, but it is much bigger—and concerns a number of families facing a similar injustice today.
Is it not the case that public money should fund the establishment of the truth and, in particular, help people to get to the truth at the first time of asking, so that the truth can be used by public bodies to learn—to look at where they went wrong and see how they can improve? Instead, they do the opposite. They go into those courtrooms to defend themselves and reputations, spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money in doing so. I hope that the Government would agree with the spirit of what I am saying tonight. If they do, I would hope for a clear commitment this evening that they support the aim of parity of funding for families at inquests. From there, I hope we might be able to move forward. From what I can gather, however, the Government have not done enough, and unless the Minister is able to provide this level of reassurance, we will press the new clause to a vote.
Mike Penning
The point has been made on numerous occasions. The Home Secretary has said, and I have said, that we will wait for the inquiries and proceedings to finish and then announce our position on Leveson 2.
Andy Burnham
The Minister has made the position clear, but in doing so he will not have pleased many people who are campaigning for justice for people who have suffered press intrusion. Will he be explicit that what he has just outlined is in fact a weakening of the Government’s position? A couple of years ago, the Prime Minister promised that there would be a stage 2, but tonight we are being told that that is now up in the air and up for grabs.
Mike Penning
I have been absolutely explicit, as has the Home Secretary. There is no weakening and no change. We will wait for the conclusion of the proceedings. If the shadow Secretary of State wants to push the issue to a Division I will have to accept that, but he has to accept that all the way through the process I have been clear, as has the Home Secretary—as I said earlier, no Home Secretary has gone further for the victims of Hillsborough than this one—that we are not ruling anything out but will wait until after the conclusion of the criminal cases that are taking place.
We also disagree on another area—it is a shame, but I respect the view of others in the House, and if we have to go through the Lobby we will. Bishop James Jones is carrying out his review as requested, and we are not going to pre-empt what he will say in that review. There are assumptions about what will be in it, and some will be right and some will be wrong.
Whatever happens in any Division, things will not stop there. If the Opposition win, so be it. If we win the Divisions tonight, we will still wait for the conclusions of the investigations, the court cases and Bishop Jones’s review. Our position will stay exactly the same.
Andy Burnham
The issue of parity of legal funding at inquests at which the police are represented goes beyond Hillsborough. It affects many families fighting many injustices. It goes beyond the work of Bishop James Jones. Could we at least have a commitment that the Government will work with us to seek that parity and equality of legal funding at inquests? That commitment would mean something.
Mike Penning
All the way through, we have worked with Her Majesty’s Opposition and done everything we can. I know this might be playing at semantics, but I slightly disagree with the right hon. Gentleman. Bishop Jones’s work will make a huge difference for future cases, because of the experiences of what people have so sadly gone through for 27 years. His review is not just about Hillsborough; it will give guidance to Governments of whatever colour in the future. That is why we have decided to wait for all of his review’s recommendations. It will affect people now and in the future. I understand the points being made, though, and perhaps we can come to an agreement on this issue. We will continue to work together on it beyond this debate, no matter what the results of the votes, because it is the most important thing to be done.
I will address some of the contributions that have been made about mental health. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) talked about the issue extensively in Committee. When I was Minister with responsibility for disabilities I had long and fruitful meetings with the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), the Minister in the coalition Government with responsibility for mental health, and we agree on 90% on this issue—we speak from the same platform in many ways. Many changes to how the police deal with and look after—I stress look after—people with mental health issues came about because of his work as a Minister. He pushed the Department of Health to places that I am sure, at times, it did not want to go to. Perhaps I have done the same in my new role with the police, with the Home Secretary’s support, by saying that some things are still fundamentally wrong in the 21st century.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) said earlier, my heart tells me that the use of a Taser within a secure mental health facility must be wrong, but my brain and my experience tell me that in exceptional circumstances—it must not be the norm—it could happen. I have met several of the lobbyists who have been referred to, who have campaigned very hard on the issue. The Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), is going to take work forward on it, as promised in meetings with colleagues from across the House.
We are in a really exciting position. This is not just about mental health issues but about social services more broadly, particularly with regard to children. I have been with police on a Friday evening, long before I got this role, getting something to eat before going out on patrol. The constables would be given notes, particularly from the sergeant and sometimes from the community inspector, asking us to go and visit Mary, or John, because social services had said that they had not seen them for a couple of days, and as they were vulnerable people we had a duty. Well, sorry, but social services had that duty first. We—I use the word “we” because I am very passionate about this—must be the last resort. The police cannot be the first port of call.
Work on the issue has been going on for the past couple of years. It is being done in different ways around the country, but street triage has transformed the use of powers under sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. This next point is not simply one of semantics: the use of section 135 or 136 is an arrest. People are not being sectioned; they are being arrested. There is sometimes confusion about that. The power an officer is using at that point is a power to protect and arrest. We need to make that clear. We have seen different uses of sections 135 and 136 in different parts of the country. It has dropped dramatically—the use of section 136 in particular—because of the work taking place. I completely agree that more needs to be done, but we are in a position where we can drive that work forward only because, frankly, we have said that enough is enough.
I understand the reasons behind many of the amendments that have been tabled, particularly on the use of Tasers. I understand the risks that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk alluded to, but Tasers have saved lives. I talked earlier about what my heart tells me and what my brain tells me. I used to volunteer in a mental health hospital before and during my time in the Army, because my mother worked as a mental health nurse. I asked mum—she is retired now—“Is there a case in which you would have to use this sort of force?”, and she said, “Sadly, in exceptional circumstances there is.” However, she also emphasised the quality of training in mental health facilities and how someone can be restrained safely.
Andy Burnham
The fairest thing that we can say about this Bill is that it is a decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand it makes improvements to police accountability, but on the other it undermines the independence of the fire service and the police service by allowing volunteers to replace front-line staff.
None the less, the Bill leaves this House in a better state than it came to us in. I pay tribute to my shadow ministerial team, my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and for West Ham (Lyn Brown), all of whom have played an important part in improving the Bill. I thank the Home Secretary and her ministerial team for the constructive way in which they have continued to debate these matters with us. I also thank all members of the Bill Committee and the Chairmen, the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth).
The Bill makes some real improvements, but we still have some concerns. The issues broadly fall into four categories: measures we support; measures we have helped to improve; measures we oppose; and the missed opportunities in the Bill. I will go briefly through each.
On the measures we support, the super-complaints system is a genuine step forward, and we congratulate the Home Secretary on bringing it to the House. We also support the strengthening of the IPCC and of the regulation of the police in general. The ban on the use of police cells for people in mental health crisis is a crucial step forward, but it needs to be matched with a commissioning strategy in the NHS that ensures alternative places of safety for people who will no longer be held in police cells.
On the measures that we have helped to improve, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham for the work that she has done to strengthen the measures in the Bill on child sexual exploitation, and particularly on the licensing regime for private hire vehicles. There are further improvements to come on child abduction warning notices.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington, the shadow Policing Minister, pushed the issue of police bail in Committee, based on the case of Siddhartha Dhar, the individual who waltzed out of the country while on bail. I am pleased that the Government have responded, although Mark Rowley said in evidence to the Home Affairs Committee that there should be the very tightest of regimes, whereby people have to surrender passports while they are still in police custody at police stations. I believe that the Bill could still be tightened on that point.
We have had a good exchange today on police misconduct. We welcome the fact that the Government have been prepared to extend the 12-month limit for exceptional instances of misconduct. We will work with the Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims on getting that right, but that, too, appears to be a genuine step forward.
There are two main measures that we oppose. First, we believe that the greater use of volunteers in the police service is dangerous in the context of the further cuts being made to police budgets, contrary to what the Government promised in the spending review. Police services in England and Wales are facing real-terms cuts to their budgets this year, which will not be backfilled by the local precept. We believe that it is dangerous to impose those cuts without setting out a vision for policing and saying precisely what the boundaries are for what volunteers can and cannot do, and the Government need to think again before going down that road.
On the fire service, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham made a powerful case that we should not just merge the two services and, in effect, make the fire service the junior partner of the police service. The Bill will allow a hostile takeover of a fire service, authorised by the Home Secretary but over the heads of local people and without their consent. We do not believe that that will strengthen the fire service, which has an important role as a separate statutory service. All the pros and cons of the single employer model have not been fully debated, and we feel that this is a road down which the Government should not go because they have failed to make the case for it.
I will finish with the missed opportunities. I conclude my speech on Third Reading with a sense that Parliament has missed a moment to make some real changes on the back of the historic Hillsborough verdict. Today, we have debated two issues. First, there should be a principle of equality in legal funding for bereaved families at inquests where police are represented. Secondly, we have debated the Prime Minister’s promise to the victims of press abuse and intrusion that there would be a second-stage inquiry into the relationship between the police and the press. On both fronts, we have not made any progress tonight. It was disappointing that the Government chose to oppose the measures that we in the Opposition proposed.
Representatives of the Hillsborough Family Support Group—the chair, Margaret Aspinall, and Sue Roberts—were here today, and I can tell the House that they have gone home disappointed and feeling that Parliament is already forgetting what their fight was all about. It was a monumental miscarriage of justice that now requires a commensurate response from the House. Changes must be made to stop any family in future going through what they have been through, but sadly, families can still go through it. Many families continue to go into inquests raw with grief, face aggressive questioning by Queen’s Counsel hired at great public expense and find the whole experience deeply unsatisfactory.
It is disappointing that the Government were not even able to accept the principle that we should have equal funding. It would have been a step forward if they had been able to do so. I understand that they are asking Bishop James Jones to look at these matters, but of course, this issue goes much broader than Hillsborough. It is about fairness in our criminal justice system, and I believe that the Government are missing an opportunity by not acting on it quickly. Quite frankly, it is obscene for police forces to continue to spend large amounts of money on hiring aggressive lawyers to challenge families in the way that they do at inquests. This scandal should not be allowed to continue, and we in the Opposition will continue to fight against it until there is real change.
In conclusion, the Bill was an opportunity to make this country fairer, to even up the scales and even to tip them in favour of ordinary families and away from the establishment. I fear that we have failed to do that, and it will now be up to the other place to see whether it can make progress. Who can vote against the principle of equal funding for bereaved families at inquests? I cannot believe that anyone would actually vote against it. There is a debate about how to achieve it, but I find it very strange indeed that people can really vote against that principle. How can Members go through the Lobby tonight voting against the Prime Minister’s commitment to the victims of hacking, press intrusion and abuse? The Government have weakened their position tonight. They said before that there would be an inquiry. Now they say that there might be an inquiry once outstanding legal matters are concluded. That is not fair to the families who were given a firm promise by the Prime Minister.
This is my direct appeal to the other place: vote for equality of legal funding for families, and vote for the honouring of the promise to the victims of press intrusion. In doing so, make Hillsborough a moment of real change in this country.