Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Monday 28th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I hope the House will forgive me for beginning with Part 2 and then moving to Part 1. My late brother, Michael Havers, had a dream in the 1980s of a unified family court which he discussed many times with me. In 2012, I therefore welcome very much the proposal for the single family court in Part 2 of the Bill and congratulate the Government on their acceptance of this recommendation in the Norgrove report.

A single family court, however, is the framework or the scaffolding, and it will be important to scrutinise with care the inside of the building and which of the other Norgrove recommendations—all of which I support—are taken forward. The single point of entry will provide a gateway for the direction of cases to their most appropriate tribunal within the hierarchy of the family courts. This will give, I assume, the responsibility for distribution of the family work to judges, district judges and justices’ clerks. This will also give the administration of family justice something of the excellent proposals which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, provided in his seminal report on access to justice in the civil courts in the 1990s.

We would hope, therefore, for greater flexibility in the deployment of judges, improved performance, and more efficient and swifter disposal of cases. I must warn the Government that that desired result may not be so easy to achieve when spouses, partners and parents are fighting their emotionally charged family disputes before judges and magistrates without lawyers, as there will very likely be greater delays and a great deal of clogging, particularly before the district judges and the family magistrates.

A single family court will create the opportunity for a stronger focus on the child’s best interests, welfare and also rights; I remind the House that children also have rights. There is an opportunity for a long-overdue dialogue between family judges and directors of social services, both at national and local level, which is very much supported by the Norgrove report. I encourage stronger emphasis on judicial training and judicial case management, and that the training of social workers include directors of social services who are not trained as social workers. If judges can be trained—and they are—so senior social workers, up to and including directors, can perfectly well be trained too, particularly when they come from the education field. All this will be needed to meet the increasingly demanding work of the family court.

The Magistrates’ Association has a certain concern that, with the reorganisation of the family court, there will be a lesser role for the family proceedings court. I hope that the Minister will give the much needed reassurance when he responds, as they are a crucial part of the family justice system. There is also the requirement for a limitation on the number of days that a family magistrate is allowed to sit in the family proceedings court. I recommend, as indeed the Norgrove report does, that that inhibition be removed, as it inhibits not only flexibility but the continuity of the magistrates’ panel hearing repeat hearings from the same family.

I am delighted by the repeal of media access in the 2010 Act. That is really good news. As far as I could see, it was absolutely incomprehensible. Even the press thought it was not going to work. I recommend that any future legislation on publicity in family courts should have in mind that children have views and ought to be consulted. Older children have already expressed considerable concern that they might have to give evidence—or their parents might have to give evidence—in particularly emotionally charged cases with the public listening.

I support the flexibility of part-time working for judges. It will undoubtedly help women to come back into the judicial process when they have had families. In 1970, when I was first appointed as a district judge—in those days, a registrar—such a thing was inconceivable. However, I wonder a trifle how the listing officer will deal with a long, complicated care case or a long criminal trial if the judge sits only three days a week. The jury may want to sit four or five days a week. Therefore, there will be certain problems for listing officers, but in principle the idea is excellent.

I strongly support diversity when—and only when—it equals merit. It will be very important that women—particularly those from ethnic minorities—who may not be able to bear the strain of the judicial process are not placed in a position where they may find themselves failing because there has been too much enthusiasm for diversity and not enough for merit. This is very important. I have a vivid recollection of a woman judge many years ago who was a very fine pianist. She should have remained a pianist.

I find it slightly difficult to understand the advantages of a single county court. I hope that when the Bill reaches Committee I will learn a bit more about them.

I turn now to Part 1 and the National Crime Agency, which I welcome in principle. However, as the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking and as a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation, I have several concerns. In responding to a question after the Queen’s Speech, the Prime Minister talked about repelling modern slavery. It is not quite so simple, although I commend him for wishing to do so. He may not be aware that 80% of those who are trafficked in this country come here legally and do not know that they are being trafficked until they are caught up in labour exploitation, debt bondage or prostitution. For instance, there was a case in Newton Abbot or Totnes in the West Country of a girl who came in entirely legitimately expecting to be a masseuse, having been trained by her mother. She did not understand that “masseuse” in some areas of this country does not mean what it meant in eastern Europe. She found herself in a brothel in Totnes, from which she was brave enough to escape. Therefore, we cannot repel them all at the border. I hope that the National Crime Agency will be able to bring to bear a very much more sophisticated approach to deal with traffickers in this shocking but extremely lucrative trade.

I am glad that the Minister referred to trafficking. I share the concerns of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Smith, about CEOP. It has just written a letter dated 25 May, which typically I have left behind in my room here in the building. My recollection is that it sets out in some detail all the work that CEOP thinks that it is going to do. There is not a single word about the trafficking of children, which is crucial. I am very concerned about it not being in this two-page letter. Children who are trafficked must be part of CEOP’s remit. I understood that they were, so I was very surprised by this omission.

I also want to ask the Minister about the UK Human Trafficking Centre in Birmingham. Will it be in the National Crime Agency? If not, who is going to gather the data? If the data are not going to be gathered there, what work will the centre be doing? I visited there and it is doing excellent work so I hope that it will be encouraged and not just disappear. If it is not going to be continued, then a national rapporteur or an effective equivalent mechanism is crucial. I suggest to the Government that the current equivalent mechanism is by no means an effective one, by any objective view. The restructuring of the National Crime Agency needs to include a dedicated unit with centralised focus on human trafficking, particularly on the trafficking of children.

Lastly, I have had some dealings with SOCA personnel embedded in various British embassies, particularly in different parts of Europe, and have been very impressed with the work that it is doing, including work on human trafficking. I hope it will continue this admirable work under its new title of the NCA but I would like to be assured of that. Overall, I welcome Parts 1 and 2 of this Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Dear]

My Lords, I am very conscious that we are now four and a half hours into Second Reading and, batting as late as I am, pretty well everything that one wanted to say has been said. I will try to keep my remarks very brief and perhaps put a change of emphasis on some of the points that have been made. I want to address the National Crime Agency—no surprise, perhaps—and say just a little about community sentencing and drug-driving. I had quite a lot written down about courts but I will leave that to the succeeding stages in your Lordships’ House.

I declare an interest in that I served in the police service in England for many years. With particular regard to what I want to say tonight, I had a lot to do years back with the regional crime squads, then the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service—all of which were rolled forward one way or another into SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency—and for a while I worked very closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I want to mention that agency very briefly as well.

As we know, the NCA has four major commands: organised crime, border policing, economic crime and CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, quite rightly made great play of the seriousness of people trafficking, particularly child trafficking within that insidious, growing, serious and very lucrative trade. There is nothing amiss about that not being mentioned in the Bill; I hope that, in winding, the Minister will reassure me that it will be encompassed by the new National Crime Agency. Of course, there is no specific mention either of cybercrime, the trafficking of drugs, arms or antiques and valuable works of art or the moving of high-value mechanical plant and motor vehicles, all of which cause immense distress, are highly lucrative to criminal organisations—

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

Forgive me for interrupting the noble Lord but I was not criticising the Bill, I was criticising CEOP’s letter, which did not refer to trafficking as part of the job it had to do.

[Lord Dear]

Thank you for making that point clear.

All those crimes are not in the Bill. I would expect to find them addressed within the rubric of the National Crime Agency and will look for reassurance on that. The one thing that I raised an eyebrow over was the apparent lack of corporate management or governance procedures in the Bill, and I think we might explore that in Committee. It seems odd that an agency as potentially powerful as this one should be able to operate directly under the Home Secretary without some sort of non-executive agency—can I put it in those terms?—to oversee it.

The press are already labelling the NCA as the FBI. Those of us who know anything at all about the FBI realise that it is a very different body, both constitutionally and organisationally, from what is proposed for the NCA. Yet there is an article, already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, who is not in his place at the moment, in today’s Daily Telegraph, headed: “A British FBI won’t make us any safer”. It is an interesting article, written by John Yates who until recently was head of counterterrorism for the country and indeed a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police. It is a strange article that I commend to your Lordships although they might find, as I did, that it is something of a curate’s egg. What made me really concerned was that it seems to be some sort of plea for the Metropolitan Police to retain the counterterrorism lead in the country.

I should say immediately—having served in the Metropolitan Police and dealt with counterterrorism from a provincial force looking to the Met—that I have the highest regard for everything the Metropolitan Police has done in the past and continues to do in counterterrorism. It has a worldwide reputation for protecting us from terrorists and, if the protection fails, for then dealing with terrorism offences very well and successfully. I hope that this article is not the beginning of a turf war between police forces—some sort of demarcation dispute and parochialism—because we have seen from time to time, not necessarily with the Met but throughout the police landscape over the years, occasional examples of that: “It’s my ground and I am going to defend it”. If in the future, and it may be a long time away, the evidence was there to move the counterterrorism command away from the Met and into another agency, the ability to move it into the NCA might be a very sensible view.

There is a huge threat, and we have talked about it before: cross-border crime in the United Kingdom, cross-border internationally—you could almost call it pan-global and that would be accurate. The threat, as the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, has already said, is far too big for individual forces to deal with, no matter how big some of those forces are. We have seen before, and I think this should go on to the record, examples of police forces that have denied the will for successful operations to crime squads, preferring to look at their own problems on their own ground and not to co-operate across borders for the greater good, although that is not true all of forces. That is rare but it does happen and could in future. The threat will continue to grow, make no mistake about it, and the NCA will grow over the years. There is plenty of scope in the Bill for co-operation between forces and between forces and the NCA. There is a raft of operational powers available but the director-general, as we have seen, has to be able to direct in extremis. The point was made in the Minister’s opening remarks that the powers to direct will be used sparingly but they have to be there, and I would defend that posture very fiercely indeed.

We have heard a lot in your Lordships’ House about the tensions that undoubtedly will exist between the police and crime commissioners and the chief constables on the one hand and the National Crime Agency on the other—localism. I said just a year ago when we were discussing the Bill that launched the concept of PCCs that a constructive tension between the PCC and the chief constable was a good idea; there has to be balance. There also has to be a constructive tension also between the localism of police forces—PCC and chief constable together—and the NCA. I do not see any way around it. It surprises me that nobody else in your Lordships' House has mentioned that every single western democracy—at least to my knowledge—has a two-tier policing system. I cannot think of one that does not have a national organisation of some sort and a local web of organisations as well. How they relate varies, but they still have the two. If one tries to knock down the concept of the NCA, the two alternatives that are left seem equally undesirable. One is to have a purely local police service, taking no account whatever of national and international pressures; the other is a national police force, which I do not necessarily espouse. Scotland will have a national police force shortly, but Scotland is smaller and, if I may say with the greatest respect to Scotland, the range of problems there is probably smaller than it is in England and Wales. If you recognise that there has to be a national entity of some sort, you are three-quarters of the way towards accepting the necessity for the NCA.

We did not mention Clause 23 in the early part of this Second Reading, but several of your Lordships have since done so. The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, gave us a compelling argument for everything around Clause 23. The Bill is of course very light on detail—we are waiting for that to come; there is nothing in the explanatory document to help us on that. I sincerely hope that when we get down to the detail of Clause 23 we will see an enhanced role for the probation service working in conjunction with voluntary organisations. I am sometimes asked by people who believe that I know far more about policing than I really do, “What would you do to really help the police?”. I tend to say, “If you really want to help the police, stiffen up and make really efficient the probation service, because in doing so you will stop the revolving door or slow it down. You will drastically cut recidivism; you will stop repeat offending; and that at a stroke would help policing and society no end”. Out of Clause 23, I hope to see emerge a discussion that takes us somewhere along that line.

I know that the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, is going to say quite a lot about drug-driving. I shall not try to steal any of his thunder other than to say that this matter is long overdue for addressing. It is exactly two years since the publication of Sir Peter North’s report, identifying that the problem was perhaps even more serious than we first thought; pointing out, as we already knew, that it was very difficult to prosecute drug-driving under the existing law; and recommending the creation of the offence of driving with a controlled drug above a specified limit. We should look at the specified limit in Committee, because, in December 2010, the Transport Select Committee put that to one side and recommended zero tolerance. The difference between specified limits and zero tolerance is considerable. It seems to me rather odd that drink-driving, using a legal substance illegally in a car, should be very different from drug-driving, where you are using ab initio an illegal substance before you get into it. We will need to keep our options open on zero tolerance.

I have spoken for too long. I commend the thrust of the Bill, I support the concept of the NCA and I look forward to being involved both in Committee and on Report.