Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Ann Coffey and Maria Miller

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He of course has an impeccable record of campaigning in this area. Perhaps the very scale of this problem is an indication that our regulatory framework within which these organisations work is not quite as good as it needs to be for the future. We cannot expect our police force simply to put down the work it is doing in every other area to focus solely on online crime, but at the moment he is right to say that the scale of what is being seen is, in the words of some police chiefs, “frightening”. We do not yet seem to be seeing a response to that. I hope that the digital economy Bill will provide the Ministers sitting on the Front Bench today, and perhaps their colleagues in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with the opportunity to look carefully at this. It is no longer something that we can simply say is the by-product of a new industry that will settle down over time. Those Ministers will have heard a good deal of evidence this evening to suggest that more action needs to be taken, and I ask them to do what one of them, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), agreed to do today in departmental questions: sit down with me and other hon. Members who might be interested to set out how the digital economy Bill can be used as a vehicle to achieve the objective of making our internet safer, both at home and abroad.

[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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Coffey and Maria Miller

Monday 24th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

Although face-to-face consultations will be an important part of the personal independence payment for most people, I have made it clear throughout all the debates that they might not be appropriate for everyone, especially when there is sufficient evidence on which to make an assessment. It is important, however, to treat everyone as an individual, because there is a coincidence of multiple disability for many individuals.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

15. What recent assessment he has made of the level of unemployment.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Coffey and Maria Miller

Monday 28th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

As my hon. Friend will know, Work Choice was launched in October last year, and concentrates on both pre-employment and on-the-job support. We will support about 13,000 people a year through Work Choice—people who experience the most difficulties in obtaining employment—and I am sure that it will prove to be an important part of the Government’s programme.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

Over the coming months, more than 11,000 people in Stockport will be required to attend a local centre run by Atos Healthcare for reassessment of their incapacity benefit. Disability Stockport is worried about the fact that the centre in Deanery Way does not provide easy access for disabled people on foot, and cars cannot park nearby. Atos has not consulted local disability groups about the choice of site. Will the Minister ask Atos to consult them, in order to ensure that the centre is fully accessible for disabled people before the assessment process begins?

[Maria Miller]

It is vital for such assessment centres to be fully accessible. I should be delighted to take up the point and report back to the hon. Lady.