Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Ann Coffey and Kit Malthouse

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey]

I wish to say a few words about new clauses 13 and 14, which stand in my name. New clause 13 would make it an offence for adults to groom children and young people for criminal behaviour, and new clause 14 would introduce a new grooming for criminal behaviour prevention order, which I would call a “Fagin order”. The new Fagin orders would ban criminal adults from contacting a child. Just as with children groomed for child sexual exploitation, we must recognise that young people drawn into criminality and drug dealing have, in the first instance, often been groomed and manipulated.

Currently, we have numerous prevention orders available to the police to combat grooming for child sexual exploitation, including sexual risk orders, sexual harm prevention orders and child abduction warning notices. I would like to see the creation of a similar order to be used where children are being groomed by organised crime to act as drug runners. That would be a practical way of disrupting activities including the phenomenon of “county lines”, whereby criminals groom and coerce children and young people into selling class A drugs many miles from home, often in quiet towns. Organised crime is aggressively creating new markets for drugs, in every seaside town and every small country village across the country. Criminals used to do their own drug running, but now they are actively identifying groups of vulnerable children to use, including those living in children’s homes and pupil referral units, to minimise the risk to themselves. As I said in a previous debate, county lines is the next big grooming scandal on the horizon. It takes many forms, but its basis is using vulnerable children and adults to develop new markets for drugs.

One example I saw involved a 15-year-old girl who was offered £500 to go “up country” to sell drugs. She had the class A drugs plugged inside her but was then set up by the original gang and assaulted on the train, and had the drugs forcibly removed from her. She was told she must pay back £3,000 to the group for the stolen drugs, and had to continue to sell drugs and provide sexual favours. The threat of child sexual exploitation for girls in gangs is known, but the added factor of being trafficked to remote locations compounds their vulnerability. Those young people are at risk of physical violence, sexual exploitation, and emotional and physical abuse. That model of grooming arguably involves both trafficking and modern slavery. Children from Greater Manchester are being groomed by criminal gangs and have been found selling drugs in places as far away as Devon. These gang members are rather like modern-day Fagins or Bill Sikes: hard men who groom youngsters and get them to do their dirty work. They need to be stopped in their tracks.

The recent Home Office report “Ending gang violence and exploitation” said that young girls are often groomed for involvement in criminal behaviour and harmful sexual behaviour as part of gang culture. Indeed, the most recent Rotherham trial showed the connection between organised crime and drugs and child sexual exploitation. I have read the recent Home Office report and also the National Crime Agency report on county lines from August 2015, and I think this development is not fully understood or recognised. Someone, somewhere needs to take ownership of a strategy to disrupt this aggressive organised network, and that strategy needs to put the safeguarding children first. I am not pretending for one minute that Fagin orders would be a silver bullet, but they would indicate a change in culture and a recognition that the responsibility lies with the adults who groom the children. We really cannot afford to make the same mistakes as we did with child sexual exploitation, where we let terrible things happen to children because we blamed them for bringing about their own exploitation.

Child sexual exploitation and drug running and involvement with criminal activities are often intertwined, which is why we need a two-pronged approach. Just as we have prevention orders for child sexual exploitation, we should have similar prevention orders for adults grooming children for criminal behaviour. We need a response to county lines that ensures that children are found, safeguarded and supported out of gangs, and that adults are stopped as early as possible from grooming and manipulating children, and are punished to the full extent of the law. Until then, it will continue to be the young victims who are exploited, blamed and then punished as their abusers and puppet masters continue with a trade that nets organised crime millions of pounds a year.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I speak in support of new clauses 15, 16 and 18, which stand in my name and those of others. First, however, I wish to add my voice to those of the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller)—my neighbour. It is clear from the amendments in this legislation and elsewhere that the law is struggling with protecting children online; it is old and ineffective, and it really does not appreciate the dangers that are out there for children on the internet. I sincerely hope that my right hon. Friend is right and that the digital economy Bill is used to increase the protection for children online, not least because part of the reason for not tackling this problem in the way we should is that there is big money to be made here. This is a commercial enterprise: pumping this stuff out on to people’s screens and computers across the country, if not the world. There is therefore a certain sloth, an idleness, in the digital community in dealing with it. The truth is that, technically, we could switch off this stuff tonight if we wanted to. We have no problem stopping children getting into our bank accounts and buying things on Amazon or wherever it might be, and yet children can easily access pornography every day, 24 hours a day, without any protection whatsoever unless their parents intervene. That really is a disgraceful state of affairs.

We should use the digital economy Bill to create the offence of living off immoral earnings for these internet providers, because, by turning a blind eye and not interrogating the data that are coming through their pipes, that is effectively what they are doing. They should turn off such material so that eyes below the age of 18 cannot see it. They are living off immoral earnings and they are not living up to their duty to society and to our children. We need to find some way to make them face up to their obligations.

I have three children, two of whom are very small. I feel as if I am in a daily fight for them with the media—whether it is TV, online or whatever it might be. We carefully ration what they get and what they can see. I hope to God that, as they grow and become teenagers, I can protect them from the worst excesses, but I need some help. I need help from the Government. I also need help from those who control the data and our access to the internet. They can do it in any number of ways and they should be forced to do it on pain of significant financial penalties. It is only when the pound is there and their profits are threatened that they will finally focus and come up with the technical solutions that we need.