Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Report stage
Friday 24th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

First, let me say how pleased I am to see the Bill finally making its way through the House today. I thank all of the campaigners and people who have worked tirelessly on this issue, including, obviously, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) with all of his engagement, the civil servants who have been working with him, my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and the many other Members who have contributed to discussions on this subject for such a long time.

As we near the end of Women’s History Month 2023, I can say that the Bill is a welcome step in the right direction. I will, if I may, pull us back to the main subject at issue, which is around public sexual harassment. It does remain a major problem in our society. Plan International UK found that three quarters of girls and young women aged 12 to 21 experienced a form of sexual harassment in a public space in their lifetime. Those numbers increase for disabled women and girls, and for women and girls from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background. The impact of this harassment is shocking. Perhaps it is worth reminding the House about that as we discuss the Bill. In 2020, the Girl Guides found out that 80% of girls and young women feel unsafe when they are out on their own, increasing to 96% of young women aged 17 and 18.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. Just a reminder that, at this stage, we are discussing the amendment. There will be, I am sure, a very good opportunity on Third Reading for the wider issues, but at this point we are on Report. If the hon. Lady prefers to wait to Third Reading, that is absolutely fine.

[Anneliese Dodds]

In that case, I will just say that I mentioned those points in relation to new clause 1 and the other amendments. I believe that the right hon. Gentleman has set out very clearly the rationale, as has my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, spelling out why we require guidance—we all hope that it will come speedily—but also why it is important that the legislation is consistent with other Acts in this area. I hope that the House will bear those remarks in mind when deciding how to vote.

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

It is a great pleasure to speak to the amendments before the House on Report. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) for his new clause 1 and amendment 1, and I am happy to confirm formally that the Government support those amendments.

As my right hon. Friend has set out, the new clause would require Ministers to publish statutory guidance for all police forces, to which those police forces would have to have regard. In particular, the guidance would need to include material about the reasonable conduct defence that has been the focus of so much discussion. There has been some concern, expressed by the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and others, that a subjective interpretation of the reasonable conduct defence might be adopted by defendants in an attempt to repudiate responsibility for their actions or to avoid conviction.

It is the view of the Government that what constitutes reasonable conduct can be defined objectively with regard to their conduct, without needing to have regard to somebody’s internal thought processes. However, we agree that guidance would be valuable in order to be completely clear about that point and to remove any ambiguity, so we are happy to support new clause 1 and amendment 1 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells.

It will of course be possible for many other people besides the police to refer to the guidance, including the Crown Prosecution Service, which we would expect to operate on the same basis as the police when prosecuting those offences. To respond to a very reasonable question from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), we want to get this done as quickly as possible. I certainly would not want or expect it to take anything like so long as a year, which he referred to in his speech in a different context; I hope it can be accomplished in a matter of months.

My hon. Friend also said that the guidance should be subject to input and scrutiny to ensure that it is constructed in a way that is proportionate and reasonable, and I am sure the hon. Member for Walthamstow would agree. I would therefore expect opportunities to be provided to interested parties to provide that comment and I will give consideration to whether we should have a formal consultation process on the guidance. We should be mindful that that would introduce additional delay, but, given that the point has been raised, we will give it thought and strike the right balance between getting the guidance done quickly, which everyone wants, and making sure that interested parties both in Parliament and outside have an opportunity to input into its construction.

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells for tabling the amendments and to other hon. Members, particularly the hon. Member for Walthamstow and my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch for offering their comments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anneliese Dodds]

I gave my thanks previously to those who have done such an excellent job in bringing the Bill to the House, so I will be brief, but I wanted to underline an incredibly important point that has been made by a number of speakers. This Bill will be positive for everyone. The evidence for that has already been set out, including by the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). When we look at the evidence about the impact of this kind of behaviour, especially on girls, I know that all of us in the House are incredibly concerned. Girlguiding UK found that a third of girls aged 17 and 18 first experienced harassment at the age of 11. It will be good for girls and women, and for boys and men, to be clear that the atrocious behaviour of a minority is truly rejected by the majority. This is therefore important legislation.

While it is good that the Bill has Government support, it is a shame that some of these important issues seem often to be relegated to private Members’ Bills. It is two years since the violence against women and girls strategy was launched, and we have not seen enough progress. We need to see more. Yes, the Bill is positive, but we need to see misogyny being made a hate crime. We need to see specialist rape courts across the country and domestic abuse specialists in every 999 room. Ultimately, we need to see a cross-Government approach. While it is absolutely right that we focus in this Bill on criminal justice and policing matters, the solution will be found more widely in our schools, hospitals and workplaces. Not delivering that solution will fail women and girls.

Far-right Violence and Online Extremism

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

May I say very gently to the Minister and to colleagues that as we have now been on this matter for one hour and two minutes, there is a premium on brevity, on this the occasion of the 574th urgent question during my time in the Chair? I never like to cut these questions off and I want to facilitate colleagues, but it would be helpful to have questions and pithy answers, rather than orations.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

My city of Oxford saw some truly disgusting Islamophobic graffiti sprayed last weekend. The local police are dealing with it resolutely, but we all know that it comes on top of enormous pressures from knife crime and county lines. Senior police officers have said that they do not have sufficient resources. The Minister is right that this is not just about police resources, but surely that is part of it. Will he be asking for more?

[Mr Wallace]

Last year, when the police and intelligence services came to ask for more, we gave them £161 million more. We made sure that we found the funding, year on year, as the threat increased.

UK Nationals returning from Syria

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend, as we have heard, has long taken an interest in these issues and has contributed greatly in so many ways in trying to fight terrorism. He has raised another important point. In the past, our lawyers have looked at these issues, but he has asked me whether I would be willing to look again. I will certainly do that, and I will write to him.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

When will this Government stop maintaining that they cannot liaise with British citizens until they leave Syria? They know that there are many British citizens, including one of my constituents, who cannot leave Syria because their jailers will not release them unless it is to the home country of that captive. Ultimately, these individuals should surely be taken back to the UK, where they can face justice in our courts, rather than our Government totally absolving themselves of any responsibility.

[Sajid Javid]

First, it is worth pointing out again that the Foreign Office’s advice when it comes to Syria, for many years now, has been that it is very dangerous. No British citizen should be travelling to Syria. If a British citizen has ignored that advice, they will know that there is no consular support there and that we have no diplomatic relations with Syria. If the individual concerned is a foreign fighter who went to join a terrorist organisation to kill, rape and cause enormous damage, there is no way that this Government will risk the lives of British personnel—British soldiers, Foreign Office officials or others—to go and rescue such a person. No way.

Oral Answers to Questions

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Security and Economic Crime (Mr Ben Wallace)]

rose— [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Seen but not heard is the role of the Security Minister.

The Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill, which is currently transiting through the House of Lords, includes new measures to ensure that our statute book reflects 21st-century threats. That is why we have increased sentencing. New offences around online harm and extraterritorial reach of some existing offences will ensure that our law and order and intelligence services have the tools they need.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

T3. Will the Home Department act in line with the Prime Minister’s commitment in a letter to me last month—namely, that EU settlement scheme applicants will not be required to show that they meet all the requirements of current free movement rules, and in particular will not have to show that they have been exercising EEA treaty rights?

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady raises an important issue. I quite agree that we want to make this scheme as easy and simple as possible. I want all 3.5 million EU citizens to feel that they can stay as easily as possible. I want them to stay, and I can give her that confirmation.

Police Employer Pension Contributions

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Wednesday 14th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr McFadden]

My hon. Friend has made an important point about reserves. One thing is clear in any budgeting exercise: the same money cannot be spent twice.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend is making a very persuasive case. The police and crime commissioner for my region, Thames Valley, is a member of the governing party rather than my party, but he wrote to me saying:

“During the debate the Minister may say that Police service can afford to meet this additional pension cost from our reserves, but this is simply not true and should be refuted. We already have plans to use these, and cannot afford a further withdrawal to fund these police officer pension costs.”

Is that not exactly my right hon. Friend’s point?

[Mr McFadden]

It is exactly the same point. The Government cannot expect reserves which—as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham)—are there to cover one-off costs, and which, in most cases, are already committed, to be used also to fund ongoing pension liabilities that will grow year on year.

Policing faces a desperately difficult situation.  Violent crime is rising, and a national crisis of knife crime is unfolding.  That has to be a top priority for the Government.  We have police forces saying that they cannot do what would have been routinely expected of them a few years ago, and we have some forces saying that they cannot respond in person to certain types of crime.  All the while, as funds from central Government funds are cut, the public are being asked to pay more and more for all this through rising precept levels.  In other words, the public are paying more and getting less from their police service. That cannot be right, given that it is the Government’s duty to protect the public. It is bad for police morale, because the police want to do a good job, and it is not a good deal for the public.

No wonder confidence in the police’s ability is being hit.  I believe that we need a change of direction, a halt to the cuts in police numbers, and an acceptance that it is a right of citizenship, wherever people live, to be protected by an adequate level of policing. My contention throughout the debate has been that this is not just a matter of public protection, but a matter of equality as well.

The pension changes that have been announced, should they all be loaded on to existing force budgets, will exacerbate the problems that we now face, and will make adequate levels of policing even harder to achieve. We cannot allow further cuts in police numbers to happen.  The Minister and his Department must work with the Treasury to make sure that the changes are fully funded, so that the police can get on with the job we want them to do, which is protecting the public and ensuring that our constituents can live their lives and go about their business free from the fear of crime.

Modern-day Slavery

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I would like to endorse pretty much everything that everyone has said, but particularly the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). I will not repeat anything he said, but I will make three quick points.

First, we need to be aware that investigating modern slavery is enormously resource-intensive for police forces. We have heard reference to the entirely appropriate use of resources in relation to the disgusting county lines phenomenon, which sadly affects my city of Oxford, as well as many other places. We had a large trial associated with modern slavery in Oxford, Operation Rague, but the processes needed to build up the right evidence for trials involve intensive and expensive use of police resources. We need to acknowledge that, particularly in the context of such significant cuts to policing. In that regard, we also need sustainable funding for innovations such as the independent trauma advisory service, commissioned by Thames Valley police and operating in Oxford and Reading. It is working well but needs to put on a sustainable footing.

Second, we need to spread examples of good practice more widely. Sadly, my city had to learn about some of the problems the hard way. After Operation Bullfinch we learned quickly that agencies had not worked together in the way that they should have done to protect vulnerable people. That has led to the hotel watch scheme in Oxford and extensive training for city council officers. Other places should not have to go through that in order to learn from the experience.

Lastly, we need to acknowledge that private sector reporting is good for the companies that engage in it. The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre has shown that investors want this information and companies such as Marks & Spencer have shown that reporting is good for them and their customer base—people want to know about it. We need to make sure that the public sector is complying too, for example in its uniform suppliers.

[Siobhain McDonagh (in the Chair)]

Order. We have managed to get all the Back Benchers in. I have put a squeeze on the Front Benchers’ contributions, so I would be grateful if they were all mindful of that.

Immigration Rules: Paragraph 322(5)

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree. It is worrying that even the Home Affairs Committee cannot get answers on certain things. This rule is of huge concern, and decisions under it are clearly still being made, as I heard from people I spoke to at the Highly Skilled Migrants demo last week. They are clear upon that.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady is being generous in giving way, and she is making a very powerful speech. Does she not agree that the Home Office was made aware of such issues in letters from me and others present in this Chamber back in mid-March, but no action was taken? Having such a delay in action is simply not good enough when that is affecting people’s lives in such a terrible manner.

[Alison Thewliss]

Yes, I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. For some months, I have been trying to get answers for the constituents who have been to me. The woman I mentioned came to see me in January, and she still has no answers in her case. When constituents come to us, it is not always evident that they are affected under those particular rules, and we often have to see the refusal letter to understand exactly why the refusal has been made, but a growing number of people have been getting in touch with me about finding themselves in this circumstance. Those who are not my constituents I have encouraged to get in touch with their own MP, as I am sure they have done going by the number of people in the Chamber today.

To add insult to injury, The Times reported this morning that a new visa route for migrants who want to start businesses in the UK

“is to be expanded to include non-graduates under efforts to increase technological innovation.”

That is rank hypocrisy. How can the UK Government reasonably expect to attract new migrants to the country when they treat the highly skilled population who are already here, and have been for years, with such utter disrespect?

I have a number of questions, which I hope the Minister will assist with. When will the review that I mentioned be published? How many cases are in process, and how many are awaiting judicial review? I have asked the Home Office how many people have been refused under the provision, and I understand that Channel 4 News also put in a freedom of information request to the Department without getting an adequate response.

Was an instruction issued to start refusing cases under the rule? If so, by whom and when? On 2 May, The Daily Telegraph reported that Home Office caseworkers had discussed using previous amendments to tax returns to cast doubt on current tax returns. How widespread is that practice? Will the Minister allow people caught up in all this the right to work, the right to access NHS services and the right to rent during their appeals? They often lose those rights as soon as the administrative review is refused—that is the first line of appeal after the initial refusal—and, as was mentioned by the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton), that can have a serious impact, in particular on women who are pregnant.

Will the Minister tell me whether compensation is to be offered to those wrongly caught up in this mess, just like Windrush? People affected can be out tens of thousands of pounds, particularly if they cannot get legal aid for their cases, because they have not been able to work and have gone into debt and arrears.

Lastly, what does the Minister have to say about the impact of this policy on individuals? I have been told by many about the strain on their mental health; relationships with their family here and with relatives abroad, who they are not able to visit; the stress of having to report to the Home Office regularly, sometimes on a fortnightly basis; and the loss of employment. Does the policy have a wider economic impact?

The Home Office’s policy of deliberately targeting these highly-skilled migrants is yet another example of this cruel Tory Government’s hostile environment policy in action. The group being targeted here are highly skilled: they are doctors, accountants, IT professionals, teachers and academics, to name only a few. They have put down roots and contributed greatly to their communities.

The UK Government continue to talk about attracting talent, yet their behaviour towards this group shows that they clearly are not interested in retaining much of the highly skilled population who are already here—already well integrated and contributing hugely. I urge the Minister to take swift action now to support highly skilled migrants who have done us the honour of choosing to live here.

Windrush

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George). I pay tribute to her for all the work she has done on behalf of her clearly very vulnerable but incredibly brave constituent. I hope the Home Secretary has listened to what she said and will look into that very worrying case.

I have three brief points. First, we need to understand what has happened and who took which decisions, when and how. We need that information because we need to prevent people’s human rights from being overridden by bureaucratic fiat yet again—I am not convinced that will not reoccur.

My constituent Yvonne Williams is a Windrush generation daughter. She was kept at Yarl’s Wood detention centre for eight months, and she learned just last week that she was due to be put on the plane back to Jamaica that so many Members have talked about in relation to their constituents. Last weekend, the decision was rescinded at the last minute and it appears that my constituent may well be able to stay.

My constituent is very well networked. She is well known in Oxford, and I was on her side as her local MP, but I am concerned about the large number of people who are isolated, who are not backed up by their MP, who have not been picked up and whom the Home Office may be missing. The Home Office will not know about those people if it does not understand why and how these mistakes were made.

Secondly, I want to make a point about the need for the Home Office to liaise with the Department for Work and Pensions. I have another case of a late middle-aged man who came to the UK when he was very young and discovered issues with his status only recently, when he was required to transfer from jobseeker’s allowance to universal credit. I was grateful that the Secretary of State talked before about how he is going to liaise with other Departments, particularly to make sure people’s access to services and to benefit is not compromised. What I want him to do, with the Ministers from the DWP, is make sure they get that message out there to the jobcentres, so that they do not turn around to people and say they will cut off their support. Instead they must say, “Right, we are going to help you because we know you’ve got a right to be here and we need to give you that support, via government and via the Home Office.” Until now, they have been saying they are going to cut off the support.

I want to end by saying that the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) need to remain with us and ring in our ears as we walk out of the Chamber tonight. She set out clearly how the Windrush case is not necessarily anomalous; it is, sadly, a hallmark of a Home Office that has been described by people on both sides of this House variously as operating in an “arbitrary” manner, in an “unfair” manner, in a “punitive” manner and in an “incompetent” manner .That has got to change. This has to be the clarion call that changes that operation of the Home Office.

British Jihadis (Iraq and Syria)

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Woodcock]

I guess I am, but can the hon. Gentleman come up with something that would persuade another Government to take such a UK citizen? I would like them never to set foot back here again, but I know that we would never allow a foreign resident who had committed a terrorist atrocity to stay in our country.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

There are individuals being kept in jails in, for example, the Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria who have not yet been tried for any activity. They are being held there, but the British Government refuse to interact with them on the grounds that they are in Syria, even though they cannot leave. Does my hon. Friend understand that there is also a problem for the people who have not yet been tried but whom the British Government do not seem willing to take any responsibility for?

[John Woodcock]

My hon. Friend and I have spoken about her constituent and the distress caused to her family. It is important that there is due process that is transparent both for the individuals involved and the public.

Lest anyone doubt the relationship between travelling to jihad conflict zones and radicalisation, it is worth noting that research from the Institute for Global Change, which surveyed a sample of prominent jihadis from the middle east and Africa, found that nearly two thirds had fought in one of the three major hubs of jihadi conflict over the past 30 years. Here in the UK, Salman Abedi travelled to Libya shortly before his terrorist attack, which killed 22 people at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester last year. Two of the London Bridge attackers, Khuram Butt and Youssef Zaghba, had expressed an interest in travelling to Syria to join Daesh.

Are more than 400 of those returning individuals in jail or going through the court system? We simply do not know, because the Government will not release the figures, despite repeated requests. There is strong demand from the public to know how many who travelled to fight foreign jihad are currently free in British communities. Those men and women are escaping justice, despite having been prepared to fight British troops in the name of a sickeningly evil cause. If they are not locked up or deradicalised, they are potentially able to import back to British streets brutal killing techniques learned on the battlefield. The Government must know what the figure is. It is simple to collate, and they were prepared to give it back in May 2016 when Advocate General Lord Keen responded to a parliamentary question stating that, at that point, there had been 54 successful prosecutions of returnees from Iraq and Syria, with 30 more cases ongoing.

The refusal to update the number of prosecutions is fuelling the suspicion that in fact only a fraction of returnees are being charged because it is often too difficult to amass sufficient evidence that is admissible in an open court. That suspicion extends to suspected terror suspects who are deported back to the UK. Here, the lack of prosecution cannot be attributed to someone slipping into the country unnoticed, difficult though that in itself should be. Deportees are directly handed back to the UK authorities by another nation. They should be delivered straight into the judicial system and made to pay for their crime, but how many are? Again, at present we do not know because the Government have claimed that they do not hold the information in this form. That is simply not credible.

Last month, I was granted special access to a British woman in a removal centre in Izmir, Turkey. The Turkish authorities wished to deport her back to the UK with her two young children. I hope that the Minister will share my concern over the detention of those children, who are aged just three and one, and will report to the woman’s Member of Parliament about what they are doing on this case.

The Turkish authorities gave me the identities of six other British nationals, two adults and four children, who they said had been deported from the Izmir removal centre in the past 12 months. In speaking to the Security Minister before this debate, I was asked not to name these individuals on security grounds. On this occasion, I am content to agree to that request, but I will say this: it comes to something when a foreign country is prepared to be more forthcoming to a British MP about the terror threat posed by particular British citizens than Her Majesty’s own Government.

Some will claim that this obfuscation is based on a laudable need to maintain a deterrent effect rather than on a desire to save the Government from embarrassment; that it is better to remain vague because future generations are less likely to be deterred from following the next call to global jihad if they know how few of their brothers and sisters have been jailed for previous attempts. Yet such a view surely grossly underestimates the sophistication of the jihadis’ communication capacity. If British justice is falling short, Daesh, al-Qaida and whatever is the next strain of this evil perversion will be able to get that message out to potential recruits. Will the Government take this opportunity to be more transparent on this vital issue?

In her response, will the Minister answer the following questions: how many UK nationals deported back to the UK have been subject to a managed return because of their suspected support for ISIS, as described in the Home Secretary’s response to me here on 8 January; how many of those have been charged with a terror-related offence; how many of the aforementioned “approximately 850 UK-linked individuals” were deported back to the UK; how many of those have been charged with a terror-related offence; and what is the total number of these 850 who have been charged with a terror-related offence?

Finally, rather than attempting to hide the weakness of our legal system in regard to returning jihadis, will the Government consider the following proposal to strengthen it? The Home Secretary has already said that she will consider extending the period of pre-charge detention to allow the authorities more time to prepare a case, but will the Government consider the steps that have been taken in Australia where it has been made an offence to travel without a verifiable legitimate reason to certain designated terror hotspots—as Iraq and Syria were while that conflict was taking place. The declared area offence law is in its infancy in Australia, having only been on the statute book since 2014, yet the independent reviewer of terror legislation there has just recommended that it be extended for a further five years. Surely there is value in following our ally to create our own UK jihadi travel ban, placing the burden on the suspected terrorist to give proof of legitimate purpose if he or she travels to a designated conflict zone.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. He brings his legal learning, knowledge and experience to the House, to great effect. He is right and has hit the nub of the problem, namely the tension that this democratic, liberal country faces when dealing with people who have gone overseas and to whom we require, rightly, the rule of law to apply as it does to any other citizen. The difficulty posed by that, of course, is the gathering of evidence to prove the case to the required standards.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful to the Minister for allowing me to intervene. Does she accept that another part of the problem is that the British Government in some situations do not appear to be willing to do what many other countries have done, which is to repatriate those who are, for example, in Kurdish-run jails in Kurdish-run areas of Syria and require those people to stand trial? That is creating a Kafkaesque situation for some British citizens who have not yet been proven to have engaged in these activities. Will she engage to look at that?

[Victoria Atkins]

I will ensure that the Minister hears the hon. Lady’s concerns. As I said at the beginning, national security is very much at the forefront. I will ask the Minister to write to her on that point.