Representation of the People (Young People’s Enfranchisement and Education) Bill
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Cheryl Gillan
Mr Jenkin
We take our children out campaigning with us, but that is not an argument for giving them the vote. Indeed, it is arguable that if we take 16 and 17-year-olds out campaigning with us, we have a duty of care to them because they are not yet adults. I will come to that point in a moment.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mrs Gillan
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and express my pleasure at the fact that he is at least putting an argument out there, which I think is essential. Does he agree that engaging young people in politics is extremely important and that the element of the Bill that is highly significant is the part that covers citizenship and constitutional education? Does he also agree, however, that lowering the voting age to 16 is not necessary in order to bring about what I and many others in this House see as the important engagement with young people about the business of politics?
Mr Jenkin
I wholly agree with my right hon. Friend, who is a colleague on my Committee. The Bill definitely conflates two issues, and I suspect that one is trying to be a carrier for the other.
The point is that the voting age is 18, and in some cases higher, in the vast majority of countries around the world, including the greatest democracies such as the USA and in countries similar to our own such as Canada. The UK’s voting age is therefore in line with the norm, and that does not suggest any need for change.
Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Cheryl Gillan
Mr Jenkin
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. I voted for the Iraq invasion. I still do not know whether I would have voted the same way had we known much more about it. The salient part is the lack of preparation, and I would not have voted for it had I thought that there had been so little preparation. Having said that, I think the jury is still out on whether, in the long term, the invasion of Iraq will have been of benefit to global peace and security.
On whether Parliament was deliberately misled, the Select Committee just did not feel qualified to make that judgment. We do not have the procedures and wherewithal in this House to conduct a fair trial of the facts. Were such a Committee to be established to do that, it would need to be a very different kind of Committee with a different kind of quasi-judicial procedures. We suggest that the House should be prepared to do that if further facts and information emerge, but Sir John Chilcot was clear that he did not hold former Prime Minister Tony Blair culpable in deliberately misleading the House, and we have to accept that view.
Finally, on whether our recommendations are timid, they are limited to what we felt able to make recommendations about. However we organise our politics, I am afraid that there will always be occasions when things go wrong. I do not think that any constitutional structure can protect us from that, although we have made some recommendations that would prevent certain things from happening again.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)
Being a member of the Select Committee, I come at this from a position similar to that of my hon. Friend who chairs it with such distinction, which is reflected in the calibre of the report. I have my doubts about whether my vote would have been different had we had more facts, but we take our votes in this House on the facts that are presented to us and then we move forward; we do not get our time over again to relive our votes.
One concern that we were able to cover in the report was the length of time and the unacceptable delays associated with the Chilcot report. The Cabinet Secretary indicated that the Government would consider further the question of how the Iraq inquiry could have been carried out more quickly. We urge that that assessment comes as a matter of urgency, so has my hon. Friend received any indication of the timescale, or will we be waiting a long time, as we did for the inquiry itself?
Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs committee
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Cheryl Gillan(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Jenkin
I agree with everything the hon. Lady says. There were journalists who tried to get things published, but the editors and the publications that might have carried those messages were also scared of confronting what appeared to be a very powerful charity with very great influence leading to the heart of Government. There is a message there.
There is a message, too, for the Charity Commission. Even when things were published, why were those journalists not invited to the Charity Commission, and why did it not say, “Tell us what you think is going on here, because we probably ought to know”? I hope journalists will feel a sense of obligation, not necessarily to reveal their sources or anything like that, but where they think a big charity is in serious trouble, to offer their advice to the Charity Commission. It would be a public-spirited thing to do. They would do that in respect of a serious risk to national security; they should do so for the security of the charitable sector as well.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)
I join my colleague, the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), in paying tribute to our Chairman, who led the inquiry, and to the staff of our Select Committee, who did some very valuable work in the course of the inquiry. The last tranche of Government money, £3 million, was given to facilitate restructuring, but I was surprised to see in the television programme aired on BBC 1 last night the impression given that the management and the chief executive had other ideas about how that money was going to be spent. Do we know whether the £2 million balance of the unspent £3 million that was given has been recovered by the Government? Will there be any further investigations into that money passing to Kids Company virtually 24 hours before it shut down, or is this report the end of the matter?
Mr Jenkin
That last question is very interesting. There is an ongoing investigation by the official receiver, which should be able to tell us what happened to that money and if any money is due to be returned to the Government. I am not a legal expert, but I think that once the Government handed over the money, it belonged to the charity. It no longer belonged to the Government and, although the Government might be a creditor, they will probably have to queue up behind other creditors. I very much hope that the Government might accept that the employees who lost their employment very abruptly are entitled to some measure of recompense, perhaps out of those funds. The answer is that I do not know. What was evident from that programme last night was how the restructuring was resisted to the very end. I am not sure whether that was known to the Minister who signed the letter of direction.
I, too, would like to pay tribute to the staff of the Committee. They do not usually like their name up in lights—it is not the tradition of the House service—but we are very fortunate in our Committee. We have very good staff.
European Union Referendum Bill
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Cheryl Gillan(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Jenkin
Most of my Committee would certainly agree that this is making the best of a bad job. We will, however, make some progress today if we succeed in restoring section 125 under amendment 4, which the Opposition have pledged to put to a vote should amendment 53 be defeated. I therefore advise my colleagues, very reluctantly, to vote against amendment 53, because while I think the Government have conceded the principle that there should be purdah, they have not accepted the fact of how it will apply. If they want to amend the Bill again in the other place, it would be worth while having that discussion, rather than accepting amendment 53.
Mrs Gillan
May I thank my hon. Friend for all the work he and the Committee have done? Although I am a member of the Committee, I was not able to participate, but he knows my views on the subject. Given that the Government have conceded that their original plans were not acceptable, does he agree that the elegant solution would be for them to withdraw amendment 53 and allow amendment 4 to go through? Purdah would then be reinstated and the Government would have the flexibility, through the solutions provided by the Committee, to produce the regulations for this House to scrutinise. Would not that restore the general public’s confidence in the referendum process?
Mr Jenkin
I wholly agree with my right hon. Friend. In fact, I think that would reinforce the integrity with which the Government have approached the matter. They still have the option of amending the Bill again in the other place and bringing it back for discussion in this House, and of introducing regulations under new clause 10, so long as that happens at least four months before the date of the referendum. I am bound to say that there are plenty of options available to the Government. They do not need to divide the House on amendment 53.
Police Recorded Crime Statistics
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Cheryl Gillan(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to debate the report of the Select Committee on Public Administration, “Caught red-handed: Why we can’t count on Police Recorded Crime statistics”.
The Public Administration Committee’s remit includes oversight of the work of the UK Statistics Authority and the Government Statistical Service. We attach the highest importance to that responsibility. We took a decisive role in decisions leading to the appointment of the present chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Andrew Dilnot. The Committee announced a programme of work for this Parliament that involves a series of studies to examine statistics and their use in Government, their accuracy and relevance, and their availability, accessibility and intelligibility to the public. A full description of that series is set out on our website, along with the reports that we have published so far.
We must ensure that the UK Statistics Authority is doing all that it can to deliver the very best statistics for Government, the public and public services. That helps deliver better policy, improved scrutiny and media reporting and ultimately better democracy. Measurement is a key way of holding Government to account. We can be proud of UK statistics, which are renowned throughout the world and trusted. I pay tribute to the Government Statistical Service and to all statisticians in Government and the public services, on whose professionalism and impartiality we all depend. The Committee’s programme of work aims to ensure that all statisticians and others who work with data and evidence across the public sector have the tools to do so effectively. We made it clear that we remain prepared when necessary to take up issues that might arise concerning statistics and their use in Government.
The process leading to the inquiry on crime statistics started when a Metropolitan police constable—James Patrick, a constituent of mine who worked in the statistics section of the Metropolitan police—walked into my advice surgery. He told me that he had been trying to raise concerns that the crime figures recorded by the Metropolitan police were being manipulated. For example, despite all the attention given to improving the police response to women reporting rape and to other sexual offences, they were still being under-recorded, according to him, by between 22% and 25%. Moreover, his persistent efforts to raise his concerns with his command chain had been met with indifference and then resistance. When he started to blog and write publicly about his concerns, it turned to outright hostility as the command chain resorted to disciplinary measures in an attempt to silence him.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)
Although I am now a proud member of the Public Administration Committee, I was not a member when the report was done. Does my hon. Friend agree that PC James Patrick’s actions were both courageous and in the public interest, and that he has done a great service to this country in ensuring that this matter is highlighted, as the Committee has done?
Mr Jenkin
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is worth emphasising that under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, PC Patrick should have been afforded some protection. I will come to the position of whistleblowers later in my remarks.
Our report, which was published this April, draws on evidence that we took under full parliamentary privilege from James Patrick. However, that was by no means the only evidence on which our conclusions relied. Our witnesses included Paul Ford, secretary of the Police Federation National Detective Forum; Dr Rodger Patrick—no relation—a former chief inspector at West Midlands police; and Peter Barron, a former detective chief superintendent at the Metropolitan police. They all fully corroborated Mr Patrick’s analysis. We heard about the various techniques that have crept into the culture of policing to help police meet crime reduction targets, leading to the corruption of police recorded crime statistics, so that they are less meaningful than they should be.
Those techniques include cuffing, in which multiple incidents are recorded as a single crime, and crimes such as burglary being recorded as less serious offences, such as theft or criminal damage. James Patrick also told us about nodding—offenders admitting to a number of offences in exchange for being charged with a less serious crime and getting a lighter sentence. There is also skewing, which is when more resources are put into the specific areas measured by performance indicators at the expense of other work.
All those techniques are designed to make constabularies look as though they are doing a better job than they actually are, as became evident after a sharper fall in crime was recorded by the police than in the crime survey for England and Wales. It was a statistical indicator that had already raised eyebrows in the UK Statistics Authority. Such things are done to improve individual officers’ job performance appraisals, promotion prospects and, ultimately, salaries.
We also heard about the terrible effect of such practices on the effectiveness of the police. It fails the victims of crime, because the crimes that they have attempted to report are not attended to. It results in the misallocation of police resources, because under-recorded crimes become neglected. Indeed, Mr Patrick believes that it contributed to the Metropolitan police’s failure to contain the London riots three years ago, because the new shift systems established by the Metropolitan police were based on a false understanding of crime patterns across London drawn from police recorded crime statistics. This adds up to a lack of trust, and raises questions about police leadership that must seriously affect police effectiveness.
We also took evidence from police and crime commissioners, such as our own from Essex, Nick Alston, who warned, in my view wisely, that however much police may think they have taken action to address the problems, ingrained attitudes and behaviour can have a long tail and take a long time to change. We also heard from academics Professor Stephen Shute and Professor Mike Hough of the Crime Statistics Advisory Committee, who told us:
“Lack of leadership results in decay in the recording systems.”
They said that there was
“no doubt that there has been dishonest manipulation at one end, through wilful blindness, to misunderstanding and ignorance, to the inappropriate exercise of discretion within a complicated set of rules.”
The Committee found that police recorded crime statistics were unreliable and inaccurate. Lax supervision of recorded crime data meant that police were failing in their core role of protecting the public and preventing crime. This is not just about inaccurate numbers; it is about the long crisis of values and ethics at the heart of our national police force. The poor data integrity that we found reflects the poor quality of leadership within the police. Whether the police comply with the core values of policing, including accountability, honesty and integrity, will determine whether the proper quality of police recorded crime data can be restored. I emphasise that there is much evidence that action is now being taken on that.
We found strong evidence that the police have under-recorded crime, particularly sexual crime such as rape, in many police areas. There remain wide disparities in no-crime rates—that is, where police decide that a crime did not take place—following reports of rape, for example. In January 2014, Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, on behalf of the Rape Monitoring Group, released a compendium of statistics on recorded rapes in each force over the previous five years. I invite right hon. and hon. Friends and colleagues to look at the table showing how wide the variation is among different forces across England and Wales in their no-criming of rape. According to the figures, in Lincolnshire, for example, 26% of all reported rapes were no crimed in 2012-13; by contrast, in Merseyside, only 4% were. The national average was 11.9%.
The main reason for misrecording was the continued prevalence of numerical targets, which create perverse incentives to misrecord crime. A police officer is presented with a conflict. Does he or she record attempted burglary, or downgrade it to criminal damage in order to achieve the target? That creates conflict between the achievement of targets and core policing values. We deprecate the use of targets in the strongest possible terms, because most police forces are still in denial about the damage targets cause, both to data integrity and to standards of behaviour. We found an amazing disparity of attitude towards targets across police and crime commissioners and among chief constables. Our official police witnesses, most notably the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, were somewhat defensive and seemed unready to acknowledge that their statistics were inherently flawed. Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told us that the accuracy of data on rape and sexual offences was
“a lot better than it was, if we took it back five to 10 years.”
However, he did not think that it was entirely reliable and agreed that there was cause for concern.
The UK Statistics Authority has overall responsibility for the assessment of the quality of Government statistics. It designates a reliable series of statistics as national statistics only if they are good enough. As a result of the Public Administration Committee’s inquiry, shortly before the chair of the UK Statistics Authority appeared before us to give evidence on police recorded crime, it stripped police recorded crime data of the quality kitemark of national statistics. What our inquiry had already exposed demonstrated that the numbers produced by polices forces were simply not good enough to rely on. The Home Office, the Office for National Statistics and the UK Statistics Authority had all been far too passive in addressing the problem, even though they had all known about it for years.
Mr Jenkin
It simply means that the raw data, on the basis of which so many decisions about the allocation of police manpower and resources are made, are of questionable accuracy. That cannot be a good thing. It also means that we found that there is a culture and attitude and ingrained behaviours that are in conflict with how we expect our police to behave and how the vast majority do aspire to behave. That is what we must address. A leadership model based on targets is a major cause of the problem and is flawed. I have been told anecdotally that there is a generation of “target junkies” in our police forces who have been brought up on and believe in targets and will find it difficult to move away from them. However, that is the cultural and attitudinal change that police leaders must bring about.
Mrs Gillan
When looking at the Government response to the report, I was delighted to see that the Home Secretary had taken positive steps in making it clear publicly that she has actively discouraged commissioners from setting performance targets, which is a good step. Does my hon. Friend have any more information on that? Failing that, hopefully the Minister can provide some information on how successful the Home Secretary’s public pronouncements have been, without interfering with the police and crime commissioners’ independence, in bringing influence to bear on the subject of targets being quite the wrong way to proceed.
Mr Jenkin
Our inquiry found that, for example, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, through the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, has continued to set targets. It is tempting in our political culture to set high-level and public targets, but I wonder whether the public believe the numbers anyway. It is the first law of science: as soon as one tries to measure something it changes its properties. That is what is happening in this case. Poor data integrity reflects the poor quality of leadership within the police, which the Home Secretary and the Minister here today have understood. That is why the Government have abolished national policing targets. It is for police forces and police and crime commissioners, including the Mayor of London in his equivalent role, to embrace and understand that and to believe it. That is a cultural change to which I hope this report is contributing. Otherwise, we are encouraging what amounts to institutional dishonesty about police recorded crime. What does that say about the police’s ability to comply with the core values of policing, including accountability, honesty and integrity? That is why PC James Patrick felt that it was his duty to speak out against what he found to be going on in his force.
Our report of course came on top of all the other controversies that have raised questions about the values and ethics of the police and their leadership. I will not list them all again now, but the whole question of leadership and values needs to be addressed. I yield to no one in my admiration and respect for so many police officers, chief constables and, indeed, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who has had a distinguished career in public service and whose senior officers and force daily put themselves at risk in the line of duty. Yet those same officers have overseen a deeply cynical culture about the quality of leadership, honesty and integrity by presiding over such a thing. That is why we recommended that the Committee on Standards in Public Life conduct a wide-ranging inquiry into the police’s compliance with the new code of ethics, in particular the role of leadership in promoting and sustaining those values.
I note that the CSPL will now investigate the public accountability structures of the police. I have to say that that is not quite the inquiry which Parliament, through my Committee’s report, has asked it to conduct. We recommended that the CSPL should conduct
“a wide-ranging inquiry into the police’s compliance with the new Code of Ethics; in particular the role of leadership in promoting and sustaining these values in the face of all the other pressures on the force.”
Accountability structures will not of themselves promote the right values in police leadership and in policing. Accountability depends upon effective leadership, which in turn depends upon leadership that is trusting and is trusted by its subordinates, and that in turn depends upon high levels of trust and integrity within the organisation. If the CSPL is to conduct its inquiry effectively, it cannot avoid the issue of ethics and integrity. I am somewhat mystified about why it is not prepared to confront that question directly and openly, even if Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary is already looking at it. After all, CSPL stands for Committee for Standards in Public Life and its remit is ethics and standards. If it avoids the issue of ethics and standards in the police, it will achieve nothing except to mess with a highly charged political debate about whether police and crime commissioners should continue to exist, which does not seem to be so relevant to the remit of the CSPL. Our recommendation reflects our understanding of the need to challenge police operational leadership about how they promote and sustain the values set out in the new ethics code. I am encouraged by the engagement of the new College of Policing and of many chief police officers around the country, but the CSPL’s unique and independent perspective has more to offer.
Turning to whistleblowing, one of the most depressing and saddening parts of our inquiry was discovering how the Metropolitan police treated James Patrick, my constituent. I was not able to address that as fully as I will now, because an employment tribunal was pending. He withdrew from the process. He could not take any more; it had taken too heavy a toll on him and his family and he was forced to resign from the Metropolitan police. Acting as a whistleblower, PC Patrick tried to highlight serious concerns about police-recorded crime and the target culture. We are indebted to him for his courage in speaking out, in fulfilment of his duty to the highest standards of public service, despite intense pressures to the contrary. Paul Ford of the Police Federation told us that his organisation
“was dealing with a lot of stifled whistleblowers…We have lots of anecdotal information but, unfortunately, people are fearful of coming forward and raising concerns. That comes down to the whistleblowing aspect of the lack of protection for people, the peer pressure and the fear factor in terms of their future”.
I am pleased the Minister for Crime Prevention has told me that the Home Office is looking at a range of radical proposals to strengthen protection for whistleblowers in the police, but that has all come too late for my constituent. Nevertheless, I look forward to what the Minister will add in today’s debate.
Our inquiry, the evidence presented to the Select Committee and the reaction of the UK Statistics Authority, which withdrew its approval of the police recorded crime stats, vindicate Mr Patrick and his actions utterly and completely. As I quoted earlier, even the Metropolitan Police Commissioner agrees that
“there is clearly something that PC Patrick raises that we need to get to the bottom of.”
Despite that, I can only describe the treatment of my constituent James Patrick as shameful. By doing his duty and raising the issues, he showed the highest commitment to the core policing values, but as a result he became the victim of the most monstrous injustice. He was in effect hounded out of his job, following a long period of harassment by the Metropolitan police command chain, which, I dare say, used and abused the disciplinary process to get rid of him. It does the police no credit that a whistleblower should be treated in such a way. He was, for example, accused of a conflict of interest for publishing a book about the misuse of police recorded crime statistics, even though the proceeds were paid to a police charity. In an LBC radio programme in December last year, Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said that he would meet PC Patrick. He never did so.
Most shameful of all, the Police Federation saw fit to finance a libel action at the choice of a serving police officer against a former Cabinet Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, but I could not persuade it to fund the legal expenses and representation of PC Patrick in the employment tribunal that he was due to appear before as part of his defence. I find that completely and utterly inexplicable, particularly after the Police Federation itself told us in evidence to our Committee how difficult things are for police whistleblowers in this country.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Cheryl Gillan(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Jenkin
I recognise the sentiment the hon. Gentleman expresses, and I share his outrage at any abuse that he suggests took place, but we have our own rules in this House. We adjudicate on these matters, and in fact we apply very harsh terms to people we believe to be guilty of paid advocacy. For many decades, since 1945 or even earlier, paid advocacy has been utterly abhorrent to this House. No longer do we have MPs sitting in the railway interest, as they did during the 19th century. The important distinction here is that we regulate that from within this House, as proceedings of this House. We do not need or require the courts to interfere in those matters. I do not think we are providing any leniency to Members that the courts would not also afford. Indeed, it might be far harder to obtain a prosecution in court for a matter such as that than to create in this House the right atmosphere of discipline and self-discipline that we expect from all hon. Members.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)
I am following my hon. Friend’s argument closely. Rather than my standing here in the railway interest, I stand in the anti-railway interest in respect of HS2, hoping that the Government will see sense and abandon the project. Will he confirm that there should be nothing in the Bill that would restrict my standing up on behalf of my constituents against HS2, or restrict my constituents in lobbying this place against that project?
Mr Jenkin
I wholly agree with my right hon. Friend. I just want to emphasise that the amendments I am speaking to deal with the narrower question of privilege, although I will return to the risk, which I think the Minister must address, of the wider drawing in of Members’ activities into the scope of the Bill.