Bernard Jenkin
Main Page: Bernard Jenkin (Conservative - Harwich and North Essex)Department Debates - View all Bernard Jenkin's debates with the Home Office
(2 days, 7 hours ago)
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Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
The House should be generous towards the Home Secretary, as she has travelled a long way since last week by recognising that there is a requirement for far more inquiries into the towns affected, and we should thank her for that. However, one crucial thing still lacking from her statement today is whether these new inquiries will have the power to summon witnesses and require the production of papers.
Only the Home Secretary—or a Secretary of State or Minister—can set up a statutory inquiry. In fact, the Minister specifying an inquiry could set the terms of reference, decide whether it should concentrate on certain towns, set the timeframe and set the budget. She could appoint as many people as she wants to the panel so that different parts of the inquiry could run in different parts of the country concurrently. Is she really ruling out that any of these inquiries should be statutory inquiries? Victims have the real freedom to speak out only in this Parliament, as we have just movingly heard, or in a statutory inquiry, where they are legally immune from consequences for anything they say. Why cannot she provide the victims with those protections?
Yvette Cooper
The strongest protection for victims continues to be through police investigations, and of course the police have full powers to pursue investigations wheresoever they may be found. A series of local inquiries have been held in different ways. The inspector investigation into Rotherham, where Baroness Casey was the lead inspector, did have powers to get to the truth, whereas the Telford inquiry did not have those powers but still managed to uncover serious problems and make serious recommendations.
There are different ways in which to do this. We have made it clear that we want to strengthen accountability powers and the ability to ensure that answers are given to local areas, and that is alongside the work we already have under way as part of the Hillsborough law on the duty of candour that we need to implement across the board.