Oral Answers to Questions

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

12. What steps he is taking to reduce the backlog of cases in the Crown court.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

20. What steps he is taking to reduce the backlog of cases in the Crown court.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mike Freer)]

We remain committed to reducing the outstanding caseload in the Crown court and have introduced a range of measures to achieve that aim. We funded over 100,000 sitting days in the last financial year and plan to deliver the same this year. Thanks to our investment in judicial recruitment, we expect to recruit more than 1,000 judges across all jurisdictions. We are investing over £220 million over the next two years, not just to improve maintenance but to ensure that the number of courts taken out of action for unplanned maintenance is reduced.

--- Later in debate ---

[Giles Watling]

In the light of the Post Office scandal, does my hon. Friend agree that it is imperative that we not only clear the backlog as quickly as possible, because there have been deaths involved, but enable the Justice Secretary to strip the Post Office of its powers to independently prosecute?

[Mike Freer]

My hon. Friend raises a good point. It is vital that the delivery of justice is swift. We appreciate that the wait for trial can be extremely difficult for victims, so we are doing all we can to ensure that cases are heard more swiftly. We are urgently working on the detail of how to clear the names of the postmasters as quickly as possible, and further detail will be announced in due course. There should be no disparity between the standard of justice in private and public prosecutions, and we will carefully consider the findings of Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry.

Oral Answers to Questions

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for raising that important point. As he knows, listing—prioritisation; which case gets called first—is a matter for the independent judiciary, but he raises important issues. I would be happy to look at them and to discuss them with him, if appropriate, in due course.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

4. What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of arrangements on prisoner transfers agreed with Albania.

[Marco Longhi (Dudley North) (Con)]

7. What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of arrangements on prisoner transfers agreed with Albania.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)]

Our prisoner transfer agreement with Albania came into force in May 2022. Between January 2021 and December 2022, 1,441 Albanian foreign national offenders were returned to their home country from custody and the community. To build on that, we announced a new arrangement with the Albanian Government in May 2023 to speed up prisoner transfers, with an additional 200 of the most serious offenders able to be sent back to serve their sentences in Albania—good news for the rule of law and good news for the British taxpayer.

[Giles Watling]

I am very grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for his work on Albania, illegal migrants and returning offenders. We pay £40,000 a year to maintain a prisoner in their cell and we do that for foreign prisoners, too. Will my right hon. and learned Friend seek to make more arrangements with other countries to return their offenders, thus saving the taxpayer money?

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is an expensive business to incarcerate people. The UK has over 100 prisoner transfer agreements. We are working hard to ensure that existing PTAs work as effectively as possible and deliver value for money for the taxpayer by removing FNOs to their home countries. My Department also has ambitions to secure PTAs with new countries. We are engaging with our counterparts in target countries to advance that. I will update the House in due course.

Oral Answers to Questions

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I am always keen, as the hon. Gentleman knows, to make sure that the law in England and Wales is consistent. I will, of course, look carefully at that particular issue. The report is welcome as we particularly looked at a read-across to scrap metal and the way in which we banned cash payments there. The evidence is emerging, and we are gathering it as quickly as possible. We will do everything we can, consistent with an appropriate approach, to deal with this type of illegitimate trade in defenceless animals.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

T6. Last weekend a young man sadly lost his life in my constituency, and a county lines drug operation was peripherally involved. What are the Government doing to bring a stop to these county lines drug operations, which are ruining constituencies such as mine?

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

I am extremely sorry to hear about the event in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and I am pleased that he has raised it on the Floor of the House. He will know that, for the last two years, we have made dismantling the county lines business model a key priority of our work between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. He will be pleased to know that, following significant investment in the key exporting forces of London, the west midlands and Liverpool—Merseyside police—we have made significant progress. We reckon that we have managed to dismantle about a third of the county lines, but there is still significant work to do. He will be pleased to know that some counties, such as Essex and Norfolk, are showing significant success, but there is still a lot more to do to overcome this pernicious and particularly unpleasant business model that focuses on exploiting young and vulnerable people as part of its way of making money. I assure him that we will not stint over the coming years in trying to eradicate county lines from our country.

Fentanyl: Sentencing

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered sentences for supplying Fentanyl.

I am delighted to have secured this debate on the evils of fentanyl. It all came about because of a tragedy that took place one morning in 2016, when every parent’s worst nightmare came true for a family in my constituency. Graeme Fraser was getting ready to walk his dog. He went to ask his son if he wanted to join him. On entering his son’s bedroom, he found his son’s body on the bed, pale, rigid and lifeless. Robert Fraser was just 18 years old. Beside Robert’s body, on a book cover, was a clear plastic bag containing white powder. The police did not know what it was. Only several weeks later did tests identify it as a substance called fentanyl.

Robert was one of the first people in Britain to be killed by this dangerous and incredibly toxic drug. Since that day, at least 120 deaths in this country have been attributed to fentanyl, and since that day I have been working with Robert’s family to raise awareness, to try to save other young lives and prevent other parents going through what Michelle and Graeme have gone through. I am delighted that Michelle, Robert’s mother, is here in the public gallery today.

Ultimately, we are fighting for tougher jail terms for people who are caught supplying fentanyl. We are calling it Robert’s law, in memory of Robert, and I will explain why it is so incredibly important. Fentanyl is a class A drug, yet it is vastly more dangerous than any other substance in that category. Kent’s top drug detective told me that it was more like a poison. It is extremely powerful—50 times stronger than heroin.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that due to its intense potency, when fentanyl is cut with heroin and cocaine those drugs become far more addictive? Fentanyl is therefore ideal for drug dealers, because it is very addictive and their clients become very dependent.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. He is absolutely right. He is a true champion of his constituency, and he will recall that his own constituent, Jed Spooner, who was just 27 years old, died from fentanyl on 2 December 2017 in Clacton. It is an appalling drug and a real, evil poison, 50 times stronger than heroin. It is a synthetic opioid, often produced in China, smuggled out in shipping containers and sold domestically on the dark web. Over in America, fentanyl has claimed 20,000 lives.

Those numbers are remarkable, not because they are so large and rising so quickly but because our top police people at the National Crime Agency say they have seen no evidence that drug users are demanding fentanyl. It is not a drug that people are craving and demanding at all. Robert did not demand it. He was no drug addict. He would get together with friends at weekends and experiment; I would not recommend that young people do that, but we all know that they do, and what happened to Robert could happen to any of our kids.

Other fentanyl deaths have involved even greater deception. In the north-east of England, only last year, heroin suppliers began secretly mixing fentanyl with their usual supplies to increase profits, exactly as my hon. Friend pointed out. There has been a surge in overdoses in the region. In Teesside, at least six people have died. Again, the National Crime Agency said that it has seen no evidence of users demanding fentanyl-laced heroin.

Why do dealers get involved in it? The answer is simple: it is cheap and versatile. It is a great cutting agent, it is difficult to detect and it has extreme potency, which means that drug users believe they have consumed a pure, powerful and strong substance, yet for the supplier it is a fraction of the cost. For most drugs, supply is dictated by demand—people will always supply them because there is so much to gain from doing so —but fentanyl is not being demanded. It is a choice, which until now has been tipped one way by the desire for profit on the part of drug pushers and dealers, not by users seeking that toxic and dangerous substance. Given the lack of demand for fentanyl, its obvious dangers and its capacity to kill, dealers should be punished more harshly for supplying it. Today, they know that they will not be, which is why I am making the case for updating our justice system.

Some will argue that a whole new class should be created for fentanyl, but I do not think that would be the right thing to do. That would send the wrong message about other class A drugs, which are incredibly harmful. Michelle and I want the existing sentencing guidelines to be strengthened. Right now, they mention drugs such as cannabis, heroin and all the rest of it, but they do not mention fentanyl. The result is that we do not send a strong enough message to drug dealers. One recently convicted supplier was handed a jail term of just 18 months, despite the fact that his batch of fentanyl was directly linked to a death. That shows that the existing guidance is not strong enough. Until it is, drug dealers across our country will not be sent a strong enough message. They do not think our justice system will punish them fully for the level of misery they inflict.

Some people will say that tougher sentencing does not work. Again, I disagree. Let us look at gun control. Two decades ago, we introduced legislation to stop Britain heading down the American route of rampant gun ownership. Ten years later, the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006 went even further and introduced still tougher sentences. Today, Britain has one of the lowest rates of gun homicide in the world. We have a history of looking across the Atlantic, taking note of alarming trends, and taking action to stop them gathering pace here. Over there, they know things are already very serious, and a number of states have started bringing in second-degree murder charges against fentanyl dealers. Let us do what we did with guns. Let us look at the fentanyl problems in America, look at the growing numbers here and take action now before it is too late.

I believe that a good start would be to place any quantity of fentanyl in the top of our sentencing categories of harm. After all, a quantity of fentanyl the size of a grain of sugar can be fatal. High or extreme potency should be added to the list of aggravating factors. Purity is already on the list. In terms of danger and capacity to kill, potency is far more significant than purity. The measure that I suggest would increase minimum jail terms from three years to six. After accounting for aggravating factors, most fentanyl suppliers would be looking at a minimum of 10 years behind bars. That is the kind of strong message we want to send to dealers who think nothing of taking the lives of our kids.

I can see that there are arguments against this campaign. People will say, “The war on drugs is lost”—the usual defeatism. They will say, “We can never win the war on drugs. We can never stop drug addicts putting dangerous substances in their bodies. We can never stop dealers trying to make a buck off the back of them.” I say that the war on drugs is not lost. We must fight back. The number of drug deaths in Kent—the county of my constituency—has doubled in the past three years. In Canterbury, two young men recently lost their lives because of fentanyl.

[Giles Watling]

Last year, some 60 deaths were recorded, and that number has now doubled. In comparison with the number of deaths caused by the misuse of many other drugs, that is relatively small. Is it not right that we get on top of this now and nip it in the bud before it spreads even further?

[Charlie Elphicke]

I completely agree, which is why yesterday’s huge step forward on the road to Robert’s law is so welcome, with the Sentencing Council setting out new guidance called “Sentencing of drug offences involving newer and less common drugs”, which specifically related to synthetic opioids. I hope that the Minister will tell us more about the action being taken by the Ministry of Justice, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Sentencing Council. This is a trend that we must reverse. Drugs rain devastation on our families, friends and communities; they drag our young people into gangs and violent crime and they kill those closest to us.

I want to take the House back to the day that Robert died. His mother Michelle, who is sitting in the Public Gallery, was with a friend in Primark that morning when her phone rang. Graeme told her the news and she collapsed to the shop floor, screaming. Her life has not been the same since. I will finish with her words, because her situation could all too easily become anyone else’s in this room. She says:

“Robert was not an addict. He made a bad choice. This poison is costing lives and sitting back, hiding, hoping it will all go away is not an option. My son’s memory is worth so much more — and so is our children’s future. If we bring in Robert’s Law, we will save lives. And it means my son mattered. That can by my boy’s legacy.”

I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay) is able to take a few minutes in the time remaining to make a short speech about the campaign against this evil drug that he has been fighting alongside me for some years.

Oral Answers to Questions

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

I welcome the Opposition’s support for our focus on education and employment, but may I say to the House that Dame Sally Coates noted in her 2016 review of prison education that the National Careers Service was delivering a service in an increasingly crowded environment, with multiple employment advice and support services operating in custody and through the gate? That was why the decision was made to reform this area. It is right that we do so, but I am determined to ensure that we provide the right support to prisoners so that they can get a job when they are released.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

12. What progress has been made on introducing technology to assist with rehabilitation in prisons.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr David Gauke)]

As a pilot, we have introduced basic computers and telephones into prison cells in HMPs Berwyn and Wayland so that prisoners can manage some of their day-to-day tasks such as ordering meals, making healthcare appointments and booking social visits. This technology also gives prisoners access to learning opportunities and basic educational content, and enables them to telephone their families in a private environment. Prisoners are not given access to the internet.

[Giles Watling]

Can the Minister reassure me that digital technology in prisons will allow prisoners to access only educational opportunities, rather than the sometimes murky wider digital world?

[Mr Gauke]

I can provide my hon. Friend with that assurance. The digital technology currently available in prisons provides strictly controlled access to learning and training facilities. It is also used to provide opportunities for prisoners to access services within the prison environment to enable them to manage their time and activities while inside. There is no access to the internet, and strict security control prohibits access to the wider digital world.

Oral Answers to Questions

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

There are of course reasons why larger modern prisons are favoured, and that is partly about how we can manage things at scale. However, if there are communities in Wales that would like to come forward with proposals for smaller local prisons, I would absolutely agree that there is a strong argument for keeping prisoners closer to their homes.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

20. What steps the Government are taking to prevent the smuggling of drugs into prisons.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr David Gauke)]

We have invested in improving security through the use of body searches and metal-detecting technology in every prison. We are also trialling new X-ray body scanners to reveal more hidden items. We have invested £3 million to establish national and regional intelligence units in Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service which, with prisons, probation and law enforcement partners, are building intelligence about the highest-risk offenders.

[Giles Watling]

I thank the Secretary of State for his answer. My local newspaper, Clacton Gazette, recently ran a story about the use of drones to deliver drugs into prisons. Short of shooting the damn things down, what is the Department going to do about that?

[Mr Gauke]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and his suggestion. We are taking decisive steps to tackle drones bringing contraband into prisons. Under Operation Trenton, Prison Service and police investigators intercept drones and track down the criminals behind them. There have been at least 32 convictions to date, with those sentenced serving in total more than 100 years in prison.

Oral Answers to Questions

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Time at last to hear the voice of Clacton.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that it is as much in the interests of the EU 27 nations as it is in the interests of my constituents in Clacton and, indeed, people throughout the UK, for there to be a seamless continuation of civil co-operation between the EU 27 and the UK to provide companies, individuals and families with confidence that judgments can and will be enforced across borders? Will he update me on what is being done to secure that co-operation?

[Mr Speaker]

I was going to suggest that the hon. Gentleman seek an Adjournment debate on the matter, until I realised that in fact he had just conducted one.