Sexual Exploitation: Protection of 16 and 17-year-olds

Graham Allen Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

I declare an interest as the founder of the Early Intervention Foundation. It is a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Kelly Tolhurst), who made an eloquent speech. Those who see Members of Parliament from the end of 140 characters on Twitter would do well to follow colleagues such as my hon. Friends the Members for Stockport (Ann Coffey) and for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), and the hon. Members for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) and for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood)—unfortunately she is not with us today. They are exemplars of what Members of Parliament can do when they get their teeth into an issue that they care about, and refuse to let go until something is done. I hope that this debate will be another demonstration of how Members of Parliament from across the House can be effective when we work together as parliamentarians, pushing Governments of all colours in the right direction.

I am not going to talk about 16 to 18-year-olds, because we will help those people by intervening much earlier. If we only help a 16 to 18-year-old, we are firefighting. That has to be done and fires have to be fought, but if we are to get a strategic grip on this issue we must eliminate the causes of child exploitation, as well as tackling the consequences. That, in essence, is the definition of early intervention, and it is important to consider this as an intergenerational problem.

This problem is so big and deep rooted that we must have not merely a set of tactics, but a set of strategies to take us forward. One of the best ways to do that is to consider the example of What Works centres in this country, where people collect together best practice and evidence to discover what kinds of programme work most effectively to help victims, and indeed to help perpetrators from re-offending. We have that all in one place, so that instead of reinventing the wheel, whether in the police, the health service or as a Member of Parliament, there is a place to go where we can rely on other people’s experience and practice that has accumulated over many years. Every instinct in a normal human being to the awful sexual abuse of children and 16 to 18-year-olds is an emotional response, but this is about evidence and science.

I first called for a national institute to consider how to reduce the perpetration of sexual abuse 26 years ago, together with the then right hon. Member for Finchley—the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. I say that only to bring us up to date and to urge us to ensure that our successors are not sitting here in 26 years’ time demanding exactly the same thing. It is now time for us to help the next generation.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)]

In the interests of time, let me put on the record that the Department for Education has recently announced a new What Works centre for child protection. That will build an evidence base to show us the best practice available to help social workers, health workers, the police and other practitioners, and give better support to children and families—something I know that the hon. Gentleman has been calling for.

[Mr Allen]

I was just about to make that point and the Minister has made it very eloquently for me. I have served in the House with Governments of all political complexions. Ministers are concerned and empathetic. We are fortunate to have her as a Home Office Minister as well as having her colleagues, the Minister for Children and Families; the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), who has responsibility for public health; and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara). All of them have been involved in pulling together the idea that there should finally be a national institute or centre of excellence to look at the sexual abuse of children and how to help them and perpetrators.

I raised that with her colleague the Minister for Children and Families in an Adjournment debate in June—I did it as fast as I could after the general election. The Minister has already said as much, but in that debate, the Minister said that there would be a centre of expertise to identify and share high-quality evidence to tackle child sexual abuse. That must include 16 to 18-year-olds.

I am conscious of the announcement, but I will tee this up for the Minister as the willing smasher of volleys over the net that I know she can be: will she tell the House how that is going and when we can expect it to be established? I hope the centre can be productive before the next general election, producing reports on best practice in particular situations and in the field, and producing reports for the agencies—the police and the health service—Members of Parliament and everyone who has an interest. Above all, I hope it can give Justice Goddard a head start by doing an interim report that calls for and supports the institution, so that, before what could be a Chilcotian length of time before he reports, he can influence the necessary political developments and changes.

I hope the Minister will inform the House that, as well as doing valuable work pulling together departmental interests, such an institution will listen to the voluntary sector, which does so much work in the field, and those out in the individual local authorities. There is a great body of work, but it is all over the place and it is never quite there when we need it. I suspect that many colleagues who have been through the awful experience of raising constituency cases are powerless and frustrated for a fair period because they cannot quite lay their hands on what somebody did earlier that would save them a lot of time and victims a lot of grief.

I should highlight the work of the Early Intervention Foundation. It is working closely with the Home Office, as the Minister knows, and has commissioned a review of the evidence on the indicators that suggest that a child under the age of 18 is at heightened risk of becoming a victim, or even a perpetrator, of sexual abuse or exploitation and many other things. The foundation will undoubtedly do a first-class job on that commission but, in the long term, the answer for us all is to get behind what the Government are doing, which I applaud from the rooftops, in putting together a What Works institution. We should ensure that its work is spread far and wide and that there is a connection with local authorities. From the top of my head, I suggest to the Minister that perhaps there should be 30 champion local authorities—they could be health authorities or police services—that can take forward the best measures that are pulled together in that central place.

The House can have an impact, working closely with the Government. The Government have been very receptive to representations made to them and will do something that will resonate and help children—it will also help perpetrators not to offend—in a way that could last several generations. That is an incredibly worth while thing to do. I congratulate all Members of the House who have led us to the conclusions that the Children’s Society has put before us today, and who have led to the Government introducing a national institute for the study and prevention of the sexual abuse of children, including 16 to 18-year-olds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karen Bradley]

I hope they have been listening to the debate, but we will make sure that even those few people who are not watching the House of Commons on a Thursday afternoon are made aware of that piece of legislation. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran talked about a young person’s consent after taking drugs or alcohol. Let us be clear: the law is clear that a young person’s consent to take drugs or alcohol can never be viewed as consent to sexual acts.

I am making sure that I deal with the important points, so let me move on to the issue of mental health. Some children who experience the kind of trauma associated with child sexual exploitation will need support from mental health services. The Minister for Community and Social Care has just joined us on the Front Bench. He is a Health Minister, and I am working closely with him on the crisis care concordat to make sure that mental health services are appropriately delivered. It is crucial that we get this right for children, including 16 to 17-year-olds. That is why we have commenced a major transformation programme, backed by additional investment, which will improve the support provided to vulnerable 16 and 17-year-olds who have experienced sexual abuse and are in need of mental health and wellbeing services. The programme will place the emphasis on prevention and early intervention, which I know to be an issue close to the heart of the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), building care around the needs of children, young people and their families, including the most vulnerable.

May I thank the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) for bringing the details of the WISH Centre to the Chamber today? I welcome the invitation she made and I hope that we can arrange time in my diary for me to visit.

[Mr Graham Allen]

We are all grateful for the Minister’s mention of a centre of excellence to look at dealing with sexual exploitation. Will she make it clear that this will deal not only with what people traditionally look at as the sexual abuse of children, but with programmes to help prevent perpetrators from reoffending? Can she confirm that all that best practice will be in one place?

[Karen Bradley]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that the work will be done not just in the What Works centre, but in the Home Office and elsewhere, particularly on the perpetrator programme. He is absolutely right in that the academic evidence is patchy in this field and we need to get the right evidence, because we will not be able to deal with this otherwise. We talk about conviction rates, but actually a conviction is a failure, as it means that a crime has occurred. We want to stop those crimes happening. That means dealing with perpetrators, stopping the perpetrators and protecting young people so that they understand and know what abuse looks like and how to avoid being abused. The work he has done in this area for many years is incredibly valuable and has helped us in Government to form our views on this issue.

The Government recognise the terrible scale and impact of these crimes, particularly on vulnerable victims. I am proud of the progress we are making in tackling all aspects of child sexual abuse and exploitation, but there is still much to do. That is why I commend the Children’s Society for its invaluable work in drawing attention to particular vulnerabilities and recommending actions. I acknowledge the helpful contributions that have been made in this debate; hon. Members from all parts of the House have advocated wonderfully on behalf of the vulnerable in society, and I commend them all for doing so.

[Kit Malthouse]

With the leave of the House, I thank all Members who have taken part in this thoughtful and important debate, and I thank the Children’s Society for the support it has offered to a number of us in compiling our contributions. I also thank the Minister for her offer of an open door, which I took to mean a meeting to talk about perhaps putting together some clauses in the criminal justice Bill which might close some of these loopholes. More than that, I hope that this can be the start of an examination, before that Bill appears, of what more we can do to protect children, because it is obvious that the evidence is available to us.

As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, the 2012 report of the Children’s Commissioner pointed to things that needed to be done. We now have the Children’s Society report with similar evidence. We also have the appalling cases that we see in the newspapers. Obviously, something needs to change. Much of the legislation around the protection of children is quite old, and has not been looked at since the 1980s, when there was a period of rapid change. I know from my own experience that children have just been through another period of enormously rapid change, and that the legislation has lagged behind. I would welcome working with Members, the Minister, and, hopefully, the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Justice to see what more we can do in the upcoming criminal justice Bill to protect young people.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes the findings of The Children’s Society’s report entitled Old enough to know better? which looked at the sexual exploitation of 16 and 17 year olds; further notes the particular vulnerability of that age group as they transition from childhood to adulthood and the role that aggravated offences and harsher sentences have in deterring crimes against 16 and 17 year olds; calls on the Government to clarify for prosecution and sentencing purposes the role drugs and alcohol, mental health problems, being in care and learning disabilities have in adding to the vulnerability of that age group; and further calls on the Government to give police the same tools to intervene when a 16 or 17 year old is being targeted and groomed for exploitation as they have for younger children.

[Mr Graham Allen]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The brilliant way in which you managed the debate meant that every single person who wanted to speak did speak, and they all kept to within 10 minutes. Can you work that magic again?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

I genuinely thank the hon. Gentleman very much indeed for his excellent point of order. I am pleased to have it noted that the debate ended precisely at 3.15, which is what I intended. The next debate will end at 5pm whether or not I intend it. I do hope that by the same courteous behaviour from Members—

[Mr Allen]

Including those on the Front Bench.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Yes, including those on the Front Bench. I hope to accommodate everyone without the need for a formal limit on speeches.