Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Andy Burnham and Charles Walker

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walker]

The right hon. Gentleman will also know that when being assessed for financial support, it is not just the immediate family who have their finances looked at, but also the extended family, which is extraordinarily unfair.

[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.

Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Andy Burnham and Charles Walker

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend—for that is what I call him—knows that I do not think that the two should be treated differently, which is why he and I have joined forces on so many occasions in the past and will do so in the future to make sure that the reality changes. There is slow progress, but it is progress none the less. My hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis is helping us to make progress, but I do not disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones).

As well as a lack of acute beds, the choice of health-based places of safety for an assessment in many places is incredibly limited. I will now draw on the excellent and concise briefing provided by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. According to the Care Quality Commission map, there are no health-based places of safety for under-16-year-olds in many local authority areas, including Devon, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Bristol or Bath. That is not good and it is not sustainable.

It is not all doom and gloom. There is clear evidence that, where local areas have emphasised long-term preventive measures and put in place crisis outreach and triage teams, they have already improved their services, so they would easily be able to provide the care set out in the Bill. We have heard from the Home Secretary —it is worth repeating—that the crisis care concordat has been a great driver. She also knows that most Department of Health-funded schemes have managed to reduce significantly the number of people being detained under section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. For example, in areas where street triage is operating—this is not in the whole force area, but specific parts of a force’s area—pilots have delivered massive reductions in the use of section 136. I recall my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis having an Adjournment debate on that very subject a year ago.

[Andy Burnham]

I have huge respect for the hon. Gentleman and for his campaigning on these issues over many years. I am listening to his speech carefully. Does he agree with the point that I made that £15 million is not enough, as there is a huge shortage of crisis beds across the country? Does he think that there may be risks in enacting these proposals before major investment is put into mental health crisis services?

[Mr Walker]

I do agree that we need more beds. It cannot be right that children and adults at a point of crisis are sometimes driven hundreds of miles from their homes to receive treatment. The right hon. Gentleman may recall that one of his predecessors, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), had an Adjournment debate a few months ago on how we treat children who are in mental health crisis, and he pointed out that one of his constituents was being treated 200 miles from his family home. That is not acceptable. The right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) did say that, outside the cut and thrust of this place, he had a good working relationship with the Home Secretary. It would be fantastic if, on this matter, the two Front-Bench teams could work closely together, along with the Secretary of State for Health, to make sure we get this right.

Let me look briefly at the successes of triage, of which my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis will be aware. There has been a 20% reduction in Derbyshire; 13% in Devon and Cornwall; 39% in Thames Valley; 31% in Sussex; 27% in the west midlands; and 26% in West Yorkshire. The reductions in the number of people being put under police custody under section 136 in these areas were greater still. For example, there was a 50% reduction in Derbyshire; 85% in Thames Valley; 11% in Devon and Cornwall; and 44% in West Yorkshire. Those are real numbers that have real meaning and that are making a real difference to many people’s lives.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists and other interested parties are calling for the Bill to be amended so that the Secretary of State for Health is obliged to report back to Parliament on the range of crisis responses in each area. That could include street triage teams, availability of acute psychiatric care beds, and health-based places of safety. That sort of information would help the Home Secretary and her team to deliver on their worthwhile pledge, and that pledge needs the support of the Department of Health.

I have spoken for longer than I wanted to, but, in conclusion, I point out that a mental health event is not a criminal event. It is a health crisis. We need to look after people with care and compassion and commitment. It is no good just talking about things. It is no good looking good, as some woman once said to me—it is important that we spend more time being good. We need to be good, not to look good.

Immigration Bill

Debate between Andy Burnham and Charles Walker

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I think that is where the Home Secretary is beginning to cut an isolated figure, as she did last week at her party’s conference. I understand that her own Cabinet colleagues are making the same argument to her—the Chancellor of the Exchequer got dangerously close to making the same argument on his recent trip to China. The hon. Lady is right. If we are looking for an area where there is economic benefit to the country in the long term, it is absolutely that of welcoming to this country students who will then commit themselves to the country for the rest of their working lives.

The critical response to the Home Secretary’s speech last week did not come just from the usual suspects on the Labour Benches. The Daily Telegraph called it

“awful, ugly, misleading, cynical and irresponsible”,

while the Institute of Directors, no less, dismissed it as

“irresponsible rhetoric and pandering to anti-immigration sentiment”—

serious words. They were not alone. The public can spot any attempt to play politics with this issue from a million miles away, and that is why the Home Secretary got the reaction she did. She claimed in Manchester that immigration was undermining social cohesion. I put it to her that legislating in haste without clear evidence and bringing forward half-baked, divisive measures is far more likely to do precisely that.

[Mr Charles Walker]

I know that the right hon. Gentleman is concerned about immigration, but the Leader of the Opposition, his boss, has said that there should be no borders in this country anywhere—forget the European Union. He said during the Labour leadership contest that we should have open borders. Does the right hon. Gentleman share that view?

[Andy Burnham]

I stood alongside him and he said no such thing, so I will move on from that pointless intervention.

A number of organisations—Amnesty International, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Justice, the TUC and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants—have expressed serious reservations about the Bill. They believe it could damage social cohesion, force children into destitution, undermine efforts to tackle human trafficking and modern slavery, erode human rights and civil liberties, and lead to widespread discrimination.

Let me take those issues in turn, starting with the potential for discrimination. Clause 12 in part 2 amends the Immigration Act 2014 to make it a criminal offence for a landlord to rent premises to an individual with no immigration status, punishable by five years in prison. The measure is intended to underpin the national roll-out of the Government’s right to rent scheme, as the Home Secretary said. I am not against asking landlords to carry out reasonable checks of identity documents, as they already do, but there are a couple of points to make. First, landlords are not border or immigration experts, they are not trained in reading official paperwork from around the world, and they are not experts in spotting forged documents, so on what basis are we planning to outsource immigration control to them? Will not the regulatory burden that this will impose on landlords be way beyond the capacity that many can manage? Secondly, given all that, is it really proportionate to threaten them with jail, and will not that have a major impact on the housing market and the way it works?

The House will recall that in the previous Parliament the Government tried to bring forward the same proposals, but given the huge implications, not least for private landlords, they were forced to back down and pilot them. A commitment was given to this House that the findings of the pilot would be presented to us before the Government proceeded any further. That was the commitment given by those on the Front Bench. We learned yesterday that that commitment will not be honoured. Although the Home Office has conducted its study, it will not present its findings until the Committee stage. That is not good enough. This House should not be in a position where it is being asked by the Home Secretary to vote tonight on measures that could have a huge impact in every constituency represented here today without evidence for what those measures might do. It is not just a discourtesy; it is downright dangerous. She is asking us to be complicit in legislating in haste, and this House should have none of it.

Let me explain why. We know that right to rent could cause widespread discrimination, not just against migrants but against British citizens. In the absence of the Government’s study, an independent survey was carried out by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. It found that in the west midlands, the pilot area, 42% of landlords said that right to rent had made them less likely to consider someone who does not have a British passport, while 27% were now more reluctant—as my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) has said—to engage with those with foreign accents or names. Those are very serious findings. Why on earth is the Home Office not presenting its own information to the House so that we can establish whether it is correct?