Points of Order
Debate between Helen Hayes and Chuka Umunna(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Lambeth County Court
Debate between Helen Hayes and Chuka Umunna(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Helen Hayes
I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. I will make the point later in my speech that the impact of the court’s closure on travel time is, indeed, worse than the impact of court closures proposed in many rural areas of the country.
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
I am proud that my hon. Friend and I both represent Lambeth. This is a very timely debate. On travel, does she agree that it is not just an issue of cost? Many of our young people are living in an environment where it is quite dangerous to travel great distances, with serious youth violence affecting a significant minority. There is often an issue of safety for young people when they are travelling about in our area.
Helen Hayes
Indeed; my hon. Friend makes a valid and valuable point. It is some of our most vulnerable residents across the spectrum, including our young people, who will be most significantly impacted by this decision.
I took the opportunity during the consultation period to speak with lawyers from Lambeth and Southwark who represent residents at Lambeth county court about their concerns about the proposed closure. I am grateful to them for the time they took to do that and to the Minister for meeting me during the consultation to discuss those concerns.
The Minister has listened to some of the concerns raised during the consultation, and as a consequence, the proposed closure of Lambeth county court has changed somewhat, such that housing possession hearings will now move not to Putney but to Camberwell magistrates court. I have brought this matter to the House for debate today because that decision will not now be subject to further consultation; because there are important questions about the decision that need to be answered; and because, ultimately, I am not confident that the revised proposal will address all of the concerns raised about the closure of Lambeth county court.
The first area of concern is the impact of the closure on access to justice and the cost of justice for people who will now have to attend court in Putney rather than Kennington. Many people attending court will now be faced with a significantly longer journey, as my hon. Friends have said, and particularly those on low incomes who cannot afford to travel by train or tube. From parts of Lambeth and Southwark, residents will face a round trip of up to four hours on four different buses each way to get to Putney. That is worse than the impact on travel time of some of the court closures proposed in rural areas.
I know how difficult many of my constituents find it simply to get to other parts of Lambeth and Southwark to access services such as the citizens advice bureau. Indeed, I helped to arrange a CAB outreach service on one of my estates because it was so difficult for residents there to travel to other parts of the borough. My worry with a much longer, more complex journey to court is that many residents simply will not make it at all. The attrition in attendance experienced at family courts following a previous closure programme and the subsequent inefficiencies has been clearly documented and was raised with me only this morning by the borough commander in Lambeth. The consequence is that a theoretical cash saving on paper is translated in reality into either cases being delayed, causing additional expense to the public purse, or residents not having the opportunity to give evidence at their own hearing, therefore denying them access to justice.
The second area of concern is the loss of specialism at Lambeth county court. Lawyers who work in my constituency tell me that one reason the court works comparatively well is that it is effectively a specialist housing court. That specialism extends from the judges to the clerks, and means that cases are dealt with quickly and effectively, given the application of expertise built up over many years. The loss of that specialism at a time when the housing crisis is growing in London, the number of evictions in the private rented sector is growing and the Government are reducing the security of tenure of residents in social housing would, in my view, be a terrible shame.
A third area of concern is the potential impact of the closure on the duty solicitor scheme in Lambeth. The current duty solicitor service is staffed by dedicated legal aid lawyers who have chosen to stay in that area of law as legal aid has been cut, earning very modest pay, in order that they can represent the most vulnerable residents and ensure that those residents receive justice. The lawyers I have spoken to who work within that scheme tell me that the margins are so extremely narrow that the significant additional travel time associated with a move to Putney could easily mean the collapse of the current scheme because it will no longer be viable. I am extremely concerned about what that will mean for residents who have been able to rely on representation from trusted local law centres and legal aid firms for many years and, again, the impact on access to justice.
A fourth area of concern is the impact of the move on the public sector, and particularly the social work services of Lambeth and Southwark. If cases involving children are now to be heard in Putney, social workers who have to go to court will face a trebling of their current journey time. Those are the same social workers who have very heavy case loads and who work to support many vulnerable families who are already stretched and on whom the current cuts to council budgets are taking a heavy toll. I do not believe that the impact of the proposal on that area of the public sector has been considered at all, and I would be grateful if the Minister could respond to that point.
A final area of concern about the move to Putney is the heavy reliance in the consultation document on the replacement of physical court facilities with digital services. Of course, there are ways in which new technology can aid the justice system and help to make it more efficient and more transparent. Of course, the use of technology to, for example, avoid the need for victims of crime to come into contact with perpetrators is a good thing.
The consultation document and the Government’s response to the consultation is, however, exceptionally light on detail in that respect. There is no indication of how much of the saving the Government will make from the sale of closed courts and tribunals will be reinvested in new technology. There is no articulation of the services that people should expect to see in their local court. There is no modelling of the anticipated impact of investment in new technology on the Courts and Tribunals Service, and there is no immediate action plan for urgent investment to ensure that technology is in place wherever possible to immediately mitigate the impacts of the closures. Without a detailed plan of action, the statements made about the use of technology are simply warm words.
I turn now to some of my questions about the proposal to move housing possession hearings to Camberwell magistrates court rather than to Putney, which was made in response to the representations made during the consultation process. Although I very much welcome the fact that the Minister has listened and responded to the concerns that have been raised, very little detail has been set out about how exactly the proposal will work. I recently met a number of lawyers from Lambeth Law Centre who confirmed my view that the devil will be in the detail on this proposal, so I ask the Minister today whether he can provide some of that detail.
Camberwell magistrates court is already very busy. It is on a constrained site, and it is not clear how Camberwell will physically be able to accommodate additional housing possession hearings on top of the current volume of cases that are heard there.
Child Abuse Allegations (Police Resources)
Debate between Helen Hayes and Chuka Umunna(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to bring before the House the important issue of the resourcing of police investigations into historical child sexual abuse.
The extent of child sexual abuse that has taken place over many decades in the UK has shocked our country to the core. The facts that have emerged following the death of Jimmy Savile have been on a horrific scale. They speak of a culture in which children’s voices were not heard or believed, and in which children’s dreadful experiences were not recognised: most significantly, a culture in which fundamental wrongs were occurring on a routine basis in some parts of our society, and in which those who sought to raise the issue were ignored or silenced. It is entirely appropriate that an independent national inquiry has been established under Justice Goddard to investigate the extent to which state and non-state institutions failed in their duty to protect children, to understand exactly what went on, and to enable very deep reflection on how a part of our society was able to depart so radically from anything that we could consider right and proper, and good and true.
We talk about historical abuse in order to distinguish it from abuse that is occurring now, but for survivors there is nothing historical about it. They live every single day with the consequences of the torture inflicted on them by their abusers. They also live with the consequences of psychological abuse, having been told that they do not matter, that they would not be believed and that the consequences of speaking out would be worse than living privately with the pain they carry.
My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) and I have met the Shirley Oaks Survivors Association. Shirley Oaks was a children’s home run by Lambeth Council. It was the largest children’s home in Europe. It is known that organised child abuse occurred at Shirley Oaks over many years, and there have been three successful prosecutions of abusers who operated there.
The Shirley Oaks Survivors Association has been established over the past 18 months, and it is striking that more than 200 people have come forward in that time to seek support and to bear witness to their experiences in local authority care. I pay tribute to the Shirley Oaks Survivors Association for its courage in speaking out, the support it is providing to a large number of survivors, and the painstaking investigatory work it is doing to uncover what happened at Shirley Oaks. I have listened first hand to some of the testimonies of former Shirley Oaks residents. It is both heartbreaking and sickening that vulnerable children—who were in the care of the state because they had already been let down in a multitude of other ways—were subjected to such devastating and damaging experiences.
The fact that the full and shocking scale of the trauma experienced by many residents of Shirley Oaks and of other children’s homes remained untold for so long is in itself a scandal, but it is clear that the wider acknowledgement of the prevalence of child sexual abuse is giving new confidence to survivors to come forward. It takes courage to disclose and speak out, and that process involves additional trauma. Reliving events that took place a long time ago can open the scars and make them raw wounds once again.
When a survivor has the courage to come forward to disclose painful past events and to make an allegation of abuse, it is vital that people have the resources and expertise, as well as the necessary time, to investigate with skill and care. That means giving time to police officers to travel to meet survivors in a place of their choosing. Many people who were abused at Shirley Oaks and at other children’s homes no longer live in the local area. People need the skills to engage sensitively and compassionately with survivors, to give them confidence that they will be listened to and taken seriously and that they will be believed. People also need the skills and the time to investigate historical events, to trawl through records and to investigate suspects rigorously and appropriately.
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this very important debate, particularly on behalf of the London borough of Lambeth, which we both represent. The police have admitted to me formally that investigations carried out in the past were “of their time”. Does my hon. Friend agree that that indicates that they did not meet the standards we would expect of police investigations today, and that that is why it is all the more important that the investigations carried out now are properly funded?
Helen Hayes
My hon. Friend makes a very important point about the need for police investigations to be resourced properly. The survivor needs proper support and, in cases where the public sector has played a role, local authority resources should be made available so that they can go through archive records to find all the available evidence and, as my hon. Friend suggests, to investigate with modern eyes the wrongs that were perpetrated in the past.
My hon. Friend and I recently met senior police officers who are responsible for Operation Trinity—the investigation into historical abuse in Lambeth—and the wider police investigations on historical abuse. We were particularly concerned to hear about the resources available to the police. Operation Trinity has only a handful of officers working on it in a dedicated way, and there are 200 survivors of Shirley Oaks alone. As a consequence of the Goddard inquiry, tens of thousands of new allegations of abuse are expected across the country. That inquiry is already under way, and the first truth pilot—the inquiry work stream that enables survivors to give their evidence—started last week.
Senior Met officers told me that they are recruiting additional police officers to Operation Trinity. At the time we met, however, the resourcing plan had not been signed off, and it was not clear to me which parts of the Metropolitan police they would be drawn from or what additional specialist training they would receive.
This is at a time when the police are facing unprecedented cuts. Across the country as a whole, 17,000 police officers have been cut since 2010, and it is estimated that between 22,000 and 30,000 more will be cut following the comprehensive spending review. In London, we are set to lose all our police community support officers and between 5,000 and 8,000 police officers. These are not small cuts that can be accommodated through efficiency savings; they will have a fundamental impact on policing. I am very concerned that, at a time when the police are facing such significant cuts and a process is under way that will prompt many more survivors to come forward, opening up their pain and trauma as they do so, there is not currently a credible plan for resourcing the police investigations.
A further concern is that, although much of the resource for investigations into abuse that took place in the past has focused on London, it is clearly a national issue. Links have been drawn between abuse in children’s homes in Lambeth and locations in Wales and elsewhere. Understanding these connections also presents resourcing challenges. The police do not currently have fit-for-purpose IT infrastructure to enable them fully to evaluate all the information that is gathered and to join up investigations in different parts of the country.
The abuse of children that took place in the past is a national scandal—a national issue—and it demands a national response. It is not sufficient for the police and councils, both of which are experiencing among the greatest cuts of any part of the public sector, to have to find the resources from their mainstream funding to investigate allegations and support survivors. That is simply not a good enough response. The recent consultation on police funding arrangements made no suggestion that the need to investigate historical incidents should be a factor in considering the basis on which funding is allocated, and nor should it be. The need to investigate historical abuse is unique and extraordinary, and it should be treated as such. I am therefore asking the Home Secretary to recognise historical abuse as an extraordinary national issue that demands proper resources on a national scale so that we can understand what happened in full and provide the compassion, understanding and, ultimately, justice for survivors of this shameful period in our history.
The resource to investigate historical abuse should be a separate line in the comprehensive spending review, over and above the resources for individual police forces and, indeed, local authorities. It should include provision for specialist training, in relation to both survivors and investigating past events. It should provide for the co-ordination of investigations and fit-for-purpose IT facilities so that links can be drawn among the abuses that occurred in different areas of the country. I hope that the Home Secretary and the Minister will agree with me that we owe it to the survivors of child abuse to ensure that the investigation into the dreadful crimes committed against them is properly resourced.