Police Conduct and David Carrick

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

Well, here we are again—it feels like groundhog day—questioning one of the Ministers in a Government I support about the culture within the Metropolitan Police Service. What is going to change? I listened carefully to the Home Secretary as she listed the new offences that this Government are putting on the statute book for protecting women and combatting male violence against women and girls, but the real challenge is the culture towards women that exists within our police service and throughout our criminal justice system. Can I just repeat the question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel): when are we really going to fully use statutory power to protect women from male violence?

[Suella Braverman]

My hon. Friend raises a good point about police culture, which is why we need to ensure that we have a good analysis of exactly what that means. We have some important findings from the inspectorate, and also from Baroness Casey—her findings are interim, not final—which set out serious concerns about the police culture that is leading to pockets of this unacceptable behaviour. We have already commissioned the Angiolini inquiries, and we must let those run their course, and on the basis of those robust findings we will be able to take the right action to ensure that this kind of behaviour is rooted out, that these kinds of individuals are not allowed into the police force in the first place, and that we can better protect the public and restore their confidence in policing.

Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 9th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is with great pleasure that I add my support to the Bill of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). I congratulate him on bringing forward what is actually quite a radical measure. There is an outbreak of consensus across the House today, but we should reflect on the fact that these issues have been causing nuisance and misery for women for generations. We have had women representatives in this place for over 100 years, and it is amazing that it has taken us this long to bring forward a measure that, as the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) said, will be liberating, because we as women have all had our freedoms compromised by having to tolerate behaviour that should have been ruled unacceptable a long time ago.

I listened very carefully to my right hon. Friend’s speech, and he presented his Bill in such an articulate and factual fashion that he made it unarguable. That is a great contrast with what I heard a Prime Minister say from the Dispatch Box only this year: that we should not criminalise this as it would cause too much work for the police. That statement on its own tells us that women remain second-class citizens before the law of this country, because women are not the problem here. Women are the victims; the problem is the behaviour, and that behaviour absolutely must be tackled.

It is also great to follow three great champions of women in this place: we wheeled out the star turns today, in no small part down to my right hon. Friend, who helpfully reminded us all that this Bill was coming forward today, but it is great to see them here. I pay particular tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who has been dogged in her pursuit of Ministers on this issue. As she pointed out, only in 2019 she was vilified for making a public claim on this topic, and in that very short space of time this debate has been transformed. So this is a good day for women in Parliament.

I am pleased that the Minister said the Government support this measure. I am, however, slightly concerned by what she said about establishing intent, because the behaviours that the Bill is designed to tackle should be unacceptable in any context. Let me draw an analogy. When the Mayor of London reduced the speed limit on the Embankment to 20 mph, I got two speeding tickets because I did not know. I did not intend to break the law, but I had committed an offence because the law had changed and I was in breach of it. I had no real grounds on which to defend myself, because the behaviour was wrong. That is exactly the standard that should be brought to bear here, particularly as some of these crimes will be committed by groups of men in gangs, cajoling each other and egging each other on. Somebody may feel that they could argue, “Well, it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t intend to cause any offence. We were just having a bit of fun.” That cannot be acceptable; there can be no question of allowing any kind of loophole.

We have heard repeatedly in this House that women have to take decisions every day of the week about their safety. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North outlined, we need to bring those to life to make the whole House realise what we are talking about. She talks about wearing her trainers to walk home, and that is the kind of thing we do. I am sure I am not alone in putting my hood up to make sure that no one can see me. Even now, as a woman in her 50s, I am still making these decisions; these things do not just affect young women. However, I want to speak specifically about young women this morning, because some of the experiences they have during their teens, as they start to become noticed for being women, can cause real harm. Young girls can be traumatised by the attention they attract from men. I have said before in this place that, for young women going through puberty and through changes in their body that they are not comfortable with, it can be traumatising to have uncomfortable male attention overlaid on to that.

Let me relay a conversation I had recently on a school visit. All of us go into schools and talk about being Members of Parliament. Sometimes those visits are really good, and sometimes they are quite hard work and it takes a while to get the students going and asking questions. This visit was for International Women’s Day, when I went to speak to a group of girls who were all 13 or 14 years old. It was hard work; they were not being very forward. Then, I just chucked in, “So, how many of you in this room have been victims of street harassment?” I am not naive about this sort of stuff, but even I was shocked, because every single one of them had a story. One particular girl, bless her, was quite inspirational. She was 14 but could have passed for much older, and she told a story about how she had been followed. She had started to feel threatened, because this man was coming up quite close and he kept making suggestive comments to her.

Bless that girl, at 14 years old, she deliberately walked to where there were a lot of people in a shopping centre, turned round and hollered at him. I suspect that that was not the first time he had done that to any girl. I also suspect he will think twice about doing it again after she did that. This was a 14-year-old girl doing that. If we are expecting our teenage girls to have that degree of courage, bravado and strength, we are expecting an awful lot of them. The reality is that what should be tackled is that aggressive, entitled behaviour. What that man was doing was basically saying, “My entitlement to get enjoyment from ogling you, young girl, trumps your ability to say no.” The fact is that we have allowed our laws to continue to absolutely embed that principle in all aspects of our law. This Bill will help to change that.

The other aspect of that visit was that a male teacher was in the room, and the beauty of it was that, as each one of their girls shared their experiences, you could see the revelation for him. At the end of the meeting, he spoke quite emotionally to the girls and said, “Look, we need to do something about this in school. We need to start telling the boys how you feel when they behave like this.” I thought, “That’s great. I have done a good day’s work here,” and off I tootled. A few weeks ago, I was attending a church service and this girl up to me, grabbed hold of my arm and said, “I just wanted to thank you, because I was in that room when you came to school. I have now become the head girl and we have a project running all the way through the school and we are all talking about it.” I thought, “Fantastic,” but this is the lived experience of teenage girls up and down the country.

There is lots of criticism of the fact that there are too many cars outside schools. We have to get people on to public transport, but for girls it is like a war zone. We talk about how there is not a single women in this House who has not experienced this stuff, and public transport systems are probably one of the worst places to be. When introducing policies to achieve net zero, we need to think about some of the implications of these things. It is why things such as this Bill are so important to make everybody safe.

I am pleased that opinion is changing, and changing very rapidly. One of the reasons for that is that the terrible incident of Wayne Couzens, and the dreadful crimes that he perpetrated, forced everybody to stop in their tracks, and perhaps tell all the men in this House that it could happen to anyone. These are not crimes that are just directed at people in more deprived communities, lower-income groups or people who have been through the care system. They can, and do, happen to anyone.

I remember speaking to a ministerial colleague who told me that he had gone home and expressed his shock at what happened, only to have the revelation from his wife and sister that this was our lived experience all the time. Another colleague, after I had been on one of my regular diatribes on this subject, told me that now when he gets into the lift in Parliament with a woman he feels really uncomfortable in case he is intimidating her. I thought, “Good. We’re achieving something.” When men start to think about how their behaviour affects women, we are doing something right, so I make no apologies for making him feel uncomfortable.

The truth is that society has looked the other way for too long. We have seen these behaviours normalised, and women have been expected to just suck it up, and we have. Some women still think that it is “just bants”. Well, it is not bants; it can do harm. As I said, this is about power. This is about men using their collective accepted powers to reassert their power over women. Again, it comes as something of a shock that, for all our messages of equalities and efforts to get more women into Parliament and to create more equality of opportunity, some men still use low-level behaviours to intimidate women. They would use powers to intimidate other people as well, but women are perhaps the softest target to make inadequate men feel superior. It just is not okay to do that.

Lewd cat-calling, which covers some of the behaviours that we are talking about, can also make women feel very uncomfortable about their bodies. I return to the issue of how uncomfortable it can be for teenage girls. It is no surprise to me that so many teenage girls are exploring new gender identities at the moment, because the attention that they are receiving from men can be so unwelcome. If I think back to my time as a teenager, we did not have the amount of porn, one click away on the screen of a phone, that we do now. In those days, porn was much more restricted. Highly sexual images of women, and women’s bodies, were not as freely available.

The truth is that boys will have seen the kind of stuff that used to be on the top shelf of a newsagent before they reach their teens. It is no surprise, therefore, that a sexualised view of girls starts to materialise much quicker. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North outlined, so much of the sexually aggressive behaviour that girls experience starts in schools. There is a broader behavioural pattern here. One of the most important things about the Bill is that it will send a message to society that this behaviour is not okay—that it is wrong and harmful. As for the idea that we should worry about the volume of work that the police will have to do as a consequence of the Bill, that is not the issue. This is about sending out the message that we are not prepared to tolerate this behaviour any more.

I want to underline the point that the hon. Member for Walthamstow made about the Bill changing the culture of how women view the police in this area, because the crimes that will be escalated and reported are such things as rape and domestic violence. The message will be sent out that the criminal justice system is on the side of women. Culturally, we have to put up with things that cause us harm but which the law trivialises. Automatically, that does not put us in a good position to have respect for the institutions of the law. The fact that the police will have to record incidents will mean that they take the whole issue of gender crime more seriously.

As consequence of the Bill’s implementation, I would like to see, and I am confident that we will see, much more willingness on the part of victims and law enforcement to pursue these serious crimes. I look forward to the rape conviction rate being higher. We all share that objective, but we have never really examined how the wider aspects of the law affect women and get in the way culturally. That is also the reason why so many incidents of domestic violence go unpunished. It has been a long time since women were treated as the property of their husbands and fathers-in-law, but behaviourally, those issues have left a legacy. That means that women are not treated fairly in the criminal justice system when it comes to getting justice.

In summary, I am hugely supportive of the Bill and I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells for promoting it. I am pleased that the Government support it, but we need to challenge much more on the wider issues of the law and the behaviour of all our institutions to make sure that we tackle violence against women—the fact that we call it “violence against women and girls” rather than “male violence against women and girls” epitomises the problem. We have always made it the victim’s problem, a woman’s problem, but it is not; the perpetrators are the problem. The perpetrators are men and we should send a very strong signal that some behaviours will not be tolerated and that we will do all we can to protect women and girls.

International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Ms Elliott. I am very grateful to follow the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth). I reflected on what she said, and I agree with every word. For a number of years, we have heard about how much emphasis this Government place on tackling violence against women and girls, but the statistics that she outlined show that so much of that is talk. It is about time that we started delivering, and making those interventions that challenge men and male behaviour.

Let us not mince our words: this is male violence against women and girls; these are crimes perpetrated by men. In this place, men often take rather too much comfort in talk about great advances in equality, but the day-to-day lived experience of women is still poor. As the hon. Member for Bristol South outlined, we take decisions every day to protect our own safety. It is well documented that female Members of Parliament receive more abuse and harassment than their male counterparts. In 21st century Britain, that is not good enough, and we need collective action to tackle it.

I am pleased to see that some male Members have chosen to participate in the debate. I am not surprised to see my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), who has always shown some support for these issues, but I want to see a few more. It would be nice to know that more of our male colleagues are genuinely concerned about our day-to-day lived experience. I lay that down as a challenge. It is rather a substantial one for the Minister: it means that he perhaps has to compensate for the lack of interest among his colleagues. I hope that he receives my chastisement on their behalf.

In the week that we heard in Parliament from Olena Zelenska about the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, we are told that as many as 30% of the women of Ukraine have been victims of sexual crimes in the conflict. That is a clear reminder that rape remains a weapon of war. We talk about the preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative, which is good work, but what it rather euphemistically describes is the organised process of rape. We hear that in Ukraine the youngest victim is just four years old, and the oldest is 85. That is the brutality of war, but until very recently the experience of women in war was not routinely considered. I am pleased and proud that this Government have taken up that initiative—the conference was this week. However, it is all very well us telling the rest of the world and virtue signalling about the issue, but we still have to sort things out here. I am afraid that sexual violence remains a real challenge and a lived experience for everyone.

It feels a bit “first world” to talk about some of the problems that we face here, but the trauma faced by any woman who is a victim of sexual violence is significant and lifelong. We must ensure that we deliver on our promises. We have enshrined in the NHS a commitment to a lifetime therapeutic care pathway for any victim of sexual violence. In practice, that does not happen. We know that very many women still wait for counselling months and months after an incident, and we know that is a barrier to bringing perpetrators to justice. When women relive what has happened to them, they re-traumatise themselves. They need support, but the NHS commitment is just words. Up and down this country, the local commissioning required to deliver it is not happening. We see victims of sexual violence as items of evidence. Their experience of trying to secure justice is utterly dehumanising.

I could go on much longer, but I will obey your strictures, Ms Elliott. In this place, we too often approach these issues from the perspective of the pointy-elbowed middle classes, and the most vulnerable in our society are left behind. I will not stop beating up Ministers in debates like this one until we have proper protection for women in prisons. We are seeing sex offenders self-identifying as women and being able to enter women’s prisons; we had a rape only very recently. That has to be tackled. And I will not be happy, either, until someone engaged in sex work who is murdered receives as much attention as a nice, pretty middle-class girl. I will leave it there.

Public Order Bill (Fourth sitting)

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Kit Malthouse]

And they have specifically requested a number of the powers in the Bill. The person who, as I hope she will agree, was the most credible witness was the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead for public order and protest, who said positive things about the legislation.

The hon. Lady is perhaps struggling with the notion that while we can define offences and human behaviour in this place, there is an entire industry of lawyers out there who then go on to interpret what we say. There are common terms that might appear that have particular meaning in colloquial English that have developed meaning over time in the courts. “Serious disruption” is the one that the hon. Lady is speaking to, and I will give some thought as to whether we need to think more about that, but “serious disruption” to the life of the community has been an established part of public order policing and indeed general policing for some time—at least, I think, since 1986 and the Public Order Act of that year. That Act has been interpreted through the courts in a number of ways, which means that it is well understood by police, lawyers and indeed protesters.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

As the Minister will be aware, in my constituency, we have significant amounts of fuel infrastructure. Indeed, in the recent Just Stop Oil protests, more than half of the arrests made nationally were made in my constituency. The proposals in this legislation absolutely reflect the conversations that I have had with the local police and with local authorities. I pay tribute, through the Minister, to the great efforts of the local police and local authorities to ensure that the disruption caused did not spill out into the wider community, because the role of Thurrock in the dispersal of fuel across the country is significant, so things could have been much worse. These proposals will make it much easier for the police to act and will make them more fleet of foot.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend; she makes a very strong point and she is quite right; that is my experience of talking to the police officers dealing with those protests. She points to the importance of particular locations in our fuel supply network. A number of key, large, strategic fuel depots take the bulk of the load, and even a small interference with their ability to get fuel out could have a significant ripple effect that would be felt by the public.

The hon. Member for Croydon Central seems to be under the impression, or possibly trying to create the impression, that the police will change their practice and thousands of protesters will be locked up. I am confused; she seems to imply that those who are disrupting High Speed 2, for example, deserve to be arrested. She said that the cost was “horrifying”—I think that is the word she used. She accepts that HS2 has been approved by a democratically elected Parliament, and was voted for unanimously across the House. It was supported by all parties, and those protesters are seeking to frustrate that democratic decision.

All we are talking about is what offence those individuals should be charged with. We are seeking to give the police more of the options that they have asked for, and more tools to use. That reflects the fact that a number of individuals have avoided charges on technicalities, because of the complexity of the operations and the landownerships involved.

Metropolitan Police: Strip-search of Schoolgirl

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

As I said earlier, we await the outcome of the investigation, and we will learn whatever lessons need to be learnt from it. While my hon. Friend the Minister for Equalities said that we cannot prevent all bad things from happening, we can try. What is clear from this case is that the complaint mechanism and the safeguarding practices involved did surface the issue and bring it to light, and have allowed us to examine this appalling—[Interruption.] Hold on. They have allowed us to examine this appalling incident in more detail and to try to learn the lessons, so that as—I assume from what she said—Child Q hopes, we are able to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

I have huge admiration for my right hon. Friend, and I know that he takes these things very seriously, but can he understand the revulsion felt by women to hear that a girl has been strip-searched at her school—and had to remove her sanitary towel—by the very people whom we trust to look after us? What action will he take to make it clear that there needs to be cultural change in the Metropolitan police so that no serving constable could ever think that that was an appropriate course of action?

[Kit Malthouse]

The revulsion is not confined to women. There are many men, including me, who obviously find it a distressing incident to contemplate. I very often find it helpful in these circumstances to put one of my own relatives in a similar situation to bring home the impact. I am not at all denying the fact that it was distressing and appalling and that it should not have happened, as the Metropolitan police have said themselves.

The hon. Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) referred to a number of incidents that have prompted concerns about the culture in the Met, and she, I hope, will be pleased to know that I had a meeting last week with Dame Louise Casey who has obviously been detailed by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to look at the culture across the whole of the Metropolitan police. Her work will dovetail neatly with the work of the Angiolini review, which is looking, in its first stage, at the circumstances surrounding the employment of Wayne Couzens. Following that, stage 2 will look more widely at culture and policing. There is no doubt that there is work to be done here, and we are determined to do that work.

Child Sexual Exploitation: Bradford

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I thank you and Mr Speaker for granting this urgent debate on child sexual exploitation in Keighley and across the Bradford district.

Child sexual exploitation is abhorrent, but I am afraid that the issue is being swept under the carpet. Local government leaders and people in positions of influence have a duty of care to protect the most vulnerable in society—our young children, women and girls. People need to open their eyes to this issue. We know that young children remain at risk. It is about time that we tackled these horrific, vile and criminal activities once and for all.

In my mind, in order to move forward, it is vital that we call this issue out for what it is, hold those authorities that have failed our communities for far too long to account, grasp the scale of the problem, understand its complexities—the hierarchy, the methodology and the chain of command that sits behind these darkest and most vile acts—and get to grips with how and why communities such as the one that I proudly represent in Keighley have been allowed, under the watch of so many, to be haunted by gang-related child sexual exploitation for far too long. If we do not address these issues properly, openly and with a real willingness to deal with them, those at the centre of all this—our young children—will continue to be let down, to be targeted, and to be exploited and sexually abused by the worst individuals our society knows.

It has now been more than 20 years since the former Member of Parliament for Keighley, Ann Cryer, first very publicly raised her concerns about grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation in the Pakistani community in my constituency. Ann deserves enormous credit for her work talking about this very difficult subject, but I am afraid that in that time, nothing has really changed. No real progress has been made in dealing with this issue across Keighley and the wider Bradford district.

I am incredibly conscious of just how delicate this subject is, but we should not be frightened of talking about it. My view is that unless we talk openly, we are failing. So let us call this problem out for what it is: predominantly a small minority of largely Pakistani Muslim men in West Yorkshire—including, I am sad to say, in Keighley and across the Bradford district—who have been sexually exploiting young children for far too long. The Pakistani community are quite rightly outraged that the entire community is being branded with the same accusation. That is not fair and it is deeply offensive.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech and rightly shining a light on, frankly, an absolute abdication of responsibility by the authorities in his constituency. Does he agree that if the Government are serious about tackling male sexual violence against women and girls, it is absolutely imperative that we tackle cultural practices where we find them?

[Robbie Moore]

I absolutely agree with the points my hon. Friend makes so eloquently. Let us be absolutely clear: I have had to bring this debate to the Chamber because, as a representative of Keighley in the Bradford district, I am experiencing those points: failure by our local council and failure by our new West Yorkshire Mayor —who is lucky enough to be in a new position, in charge of West Yorkshire police—to tackle these issues head on.

Violence Against Women and Girls: Police Response

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean]

I am delighted to answer questions put to me by the hon. Lady and I look forward to many more opportunities to do so, but I must start by robustly rejecting her central accusation, which I think is that the Government have done nothing. May I remind her that the Government commissioned the report precisely because this is a priority for this Government? This Government have delivered a number of measures to keep women safer, whether they are legislative measures, funding to essential services to support women, toughening up laws or passing laws to keep more perpetrators behind bars.

Let me point to a couple of key parts of the strategy. We have appointed someone with a lifetime of experience to work with us; following the report published only last week, I am looking forward to working closely with Zoë Billingham. I will take forward what she comes out with very seriously to ensure that the police drive forward her recommendations.

Make no mistake: this issue is a central priority for me. I have been in my role for three days, but the hon. Lady will know that it is a priority for me and for the Home Office as a whole.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

There will not be a single woman in this House who has not been the victim of dehumanising behaviour from men. As my hon. Friend says, addressing that will require societal change, but we are increasingly seeing that women’s first exposure to that violent behaviour is in schools. What steps will she take to challenge the Department for Education to make sure that we have conversations about consent and tackling entitlement at the earliest possible time?

[Rachel Maclean]

I completely agree about the important issue of early intervention, working with families and young people and tackling the root cause of these horrific crimes. That is why, as part of the violence against women and girls action plan, we have commissioned a significant public communications campaign that will tackle many of the issues that my hon. Friend addresses, but it is also vital that I work with my colleagues in the DFE and that we ensure we are working in schools as well.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is a genuine pleasure to contribute to the debate with you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. I welcome you to the Chair and hope you enjoy your time there.

In the little time I have, I want to speak in support of the clauses that create more penalties for those who facilitate illegal immigration and more enforcement penalties. I speak from the perspective of representing ports in my constituency. It is not for nothing that Thurrock’s motto is:

“By Thames to all peoples of the world.”

In particular, the port of Tilbury has been very much at the heart of our island story of migration for many years, from the Windrush and people arriving in this country from what was then the empire right through to today, when arrivals tend to be of a more clandestine nature.

But there is one thing that unites all those people: hope. People want to come to this country because—let us be frank—it is the best country in the world. Why would people not want to come here? The fact is that it is organised criminal gangs who exploit that hope. People get seduced by the fantasy that if they get here, the streets will be paved with gold, and that all they need to do is to get here and they will be fine. They are the victims of crime and wilful criminal activity around our border.

For me, it is all about going after those organised criminal groups that exploit people who only want a better life for themselves. Hon. Members will remember that in October 2019 I was standing in this very spot talking about the fact that Essex police had found a container with 39 poor souls who had died on arrival in this country en route from Vietnam. I issued the challenge then that we had to go after those people and bring them to justice, and that that was the way to really tackle our illegal immigration. I can advise the House that Essex police have been truly fantastic in prosecuting that investigation. There have already been 10 convictions and there are more coming down the track. I have to commend the energy with which officers throughout Essex police have sought to prosecute that investigation around the world.

Let us not say that this is too difficult. We know that these networks operate across many different jurisdictions, but with determination we should go and get them, because once we start to shut down these criminal gangs, they will move away from trafficking people into our country. Right now they think that this is an opportunity for crime. Let us ensure that, instead of demonising people whose only ambition is to come here, we go after the serious criminals who are exploiting their wish to do so.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 5th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am gravely concerned by this legislation, which, frankly, would not look out of place in the world’s most authoritarian regimes. The fact that this legislation could introduce, for damaging a statue, a sentence that is twice the length of that for sexual assault reveals how utterly unserious this Government are about tackling gendered violence.

The legislation will have a disproportionate effect on African, African-Caribbean, Asian and minority ethnic communities. We know that black people already disproportionately suffer from police use of force in the UK, are more likely to be charged and are over-represented in the prison population. Human rights group Liberty has expressed concern about the provision to widen stop-and-search powers because they are used against communities of colour, especially black men, at staggeringly disproportionate rates. According to Roma rights group Friends of Romano Lav, the legislation will also have a devastating effect on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. This Bill therefore threatens to severely exacerbate an already unequal two-tier justice system in which UK residents are treated differently because of their background or the colour of their skin.

It is for that and many other equality reasons that I tabled new clause 54, which would introduce a statutory requirement for the equality impact analysis that is currently missing from the Bill. That would compel the Secretary of State to review the equality impact of the Bill and publish a full report to the House of Commons within six months. The review would include racial and ethnic disparities, income inequality, gender inequities, people with protected characteristics, public sector equality and regional inequality.

Given existing legislation, it is shocking that the Government do not already feel compelled to produce such a report. An equality impact analysis would ensure that it was not possible to ignore the severe inequalities in how the criminal justice system treats different groups of UK residents, and that would lay the groundwork for a fairer and more equitable criminal justice system. It is especially alarming that the Bill gives even more powers to the police to crack down on peaceful protests. Organised peaceful resistance is a force for change and deserving of our full support.

I sincerely hope that new clause 54, as well as all the amendments and new clauses I have highlighted and the many others that there has not been time to mention, will be adopted to curtail this deeply concerning, authoritarian Bill. I will end with this, Madam Deputy Speaker: if the Bill cannot be made considerably more equal, more transparent and more respectful of our democratic rights, it must not be brought into law. If it passes into law unchanged, I fear for the future of our civic life.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

I am very pleased to speak to new clause 18 in the name of the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), with whom I co-chair the all-party group on women in the penal system. The new clause seeks to amend the Bail Act 1976 so that prisons are not used as the care of last resort for vulnerable people. At present, courts can remand an adult into prison for their own protection without them having been convicted or sentenced, or when a criminal charge they face is unlikely to—or, in some cases, cannot—result in a prison sentence. I am afraid it is quite wrong for prisons to be used for secure protection in that way. If we believe in civil liberties and we believe that vulnerable people require support and not incarceration, the power must be repealed.

I will look for comfort from my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor, who I am sure shares my sentiments and does not wish prison to be used in that way. Some of us might argue that, too often, vulnerable people who have been failed by the state end up in prison in any case. The new clause would repeal the power of criminal courts to remand a defendant in custody for their own protection. That, I would add, is entirely consistent with the direction of travel of Government policy in this area. I can attest to the fact that when I was Minister for mental health, we invested heavily in places of safety so that people undergoing a mental health crisis were not remanded in custody for their own protection. We also had the Mental Health Act review by Sir Simon Wessely, who has explicitly recommended the removal of the power.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Robert Buckland)]

May I reassure my hon. Friend that we are conducting a review into this issue and will report by the end of the year? I pay tribute to the work she did as a Minister jointly with me on mental health issues. She did a lot, particularly about those in custody, and she has been heard.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I am grateful for that contribution, but I am like a dog with a bone on this issue, because I do care that we are putting vulnerable people in the wrong place and, by doing so, doing them harm.

There is a real point that I would like to make about this provision. The advice I received from the Howard League is that it is most often used in respect of women with a mental health crisis. I am also advised of a case of a victim of trafficking who was remanded in custody for their own protection. This is another example of women not getting a fair crack of the whip when it comes to criminal justice. It is not really for the criminal justice system to absorb the consequences of failure by other areas of the state. It is up to local authorities to ensure adequate refuge provision for women in a vulnerable position and, of course, the NHS to ensure that there are enough facilities for crises. We have invested in places of safety, and we must make sure we do better on this. As we look at the wide variety of criminal justice issues—we have heard a lot today about violence against women and girls—I make a plea again to my right hon. and learned Friend that we make laws that centre women. When we talk about gender-neutral legislation, that is another way of centring men. Women have a unique set of vulnerabilities because of their biology, and we must make sure we do everything in our law to protect them. We have heard a lot about that in today’s debate. We have had a lot of commitments from the Government to take this more seriously, but I look forward to some positive work, and I know the Government are listening.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, particularly having served on the Bill Committee. Law and order matters enormously to my constituents, as it probably does to all our constituents. One thing I hear all the time, from not just residents, but the police, is frustration with the sentencing system, because people want a system that puts victims and communities first. They want to see a criminal justice system that works for the law-abiding majority. It continues to concern me and local residents that some of the most violent offenders have been serving only half their sentence, so I strongly welcome clauses 105, 106 and 107, which will result in some of the worst offenders staying in prison for longer—violent offenders and child sex offenders. I also welcome clause 102, which introduces whole-life orders for the premeditated murder of a child. I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) in wanting to see us get to a place eventually where no one is released midway through their sentence, be it halfway, or after two thirds or three quarters; a sentence should mean a sentence.

Given that I am short on time, I wish to cover one other thing that matters enormously to me and to many people across Burnley and Padiham—rape prosecutions. I am talking about new clause 89. We would all agree that rape prosecutions are at an unacceptable level. I have seen cases of constituents being failed by not just the police, but the CPS. However, this is not an issue that legislation alone will fix; it needs a fundamental change in how the police, the CPS and victims’ support all work together to support people who make a complaint —to support victims—and to ensure that we get a successful prosecution. The law needs to be firmly on the side of victims, and for too long it has not been.

Support for Women Leaving Prison

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles, and to follow the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). I agree with every word she said. There are some people who, when they come to this place, like to play to the gallery, and there are some who come to do the right thing. The substance of this debate is one where we need to make sure we do the right thing, because the measure of a civilised society is how it treats its most vulnerable people.

Many colleagues on my side of the House have a very “Hang ’em and flog ’em” approach to criminal justice—locking people up and throwing away the key. There is a place for that. However, many people who end up in our criminal justice system or in custody are themselves some of the most vulnerable people, and they are symptoms of state failure. That is particularly true of women prisoners. As we all know, quite often people who have been in the care system are over-represented on the prison estate, as are people with addiction problems, and people with literacy and numeracy issues, and that is the state failing those people.

How we deal with people once they enter that cycle of offending and reoffending is how we should judge our success in rehabilitation and making sure that we give people a second chance. We should not be writing people off forever. We know that if we do not give them the support to be rehabilitated, they will continue a cycle of reoffending. That is not good for society at all, or indeed for the taxpayer, because putting people in prison is quite an expensive solution. We need to grasp this debate head-on. We should not be letting our criminal justice system pick up the price of state failure.

Women who have been let down by the state are particularly over-represented in the prisons system. As the hon. Member for Swansea East has alluded, many are victims of abuse, whether domestic abuse or sexual violence, and trauma is symptomatic. In fact, for some of those women, prison is probably as safe and secure an environment as they have ever been in. What a travesty for our society that we let that happen.

We know that there have been many moves in recent years to recognise that prison is not the right place for people who are vulnerable and suffering the consequences of trauma. For a long time, we had a move towards different, more community-based solutions. In particular, talking about women who are also parents, what good is there to be done by putting women in prison and putting their children into care? What is going to be the positive outcome for society of that? Other solutions can be pursued, such as treatment orders combined with community payback schemes. I think we should look at that.

The direction of travel was very much in favour of this more enlightened way of treating women in the criminal justice system, but we seem to have had a change in emphasis. As the hon. Lady mentioned, the announcement of 500 new prison places comes at a time when the women’s prison population has gone down by 600. We are talking about an increase in capacity of 1,100. We ask ourselves: what signal are we showing about how we are going to deal with people who, frankly, need support to not reoffend?

In not too recent a time, the then Cameron Government had very big ambitions for prison reform and emphasis on rehabilitation, but they seem to have died with that Government. It is easy to be populist and easy to play to a gallery that wants to lock people up and throw away the key, but we need to think about what the best outcome for society is. Surely the best outcome for society is to make sure we do everything in our power to support people to get out of that cycle of reoffending.

I often say in this place that there is no public policy issue that cannot be solved by a housing solution, and that is also true of this. It is clear that some kind of security in accommodation when people leave prison is fundamental to making sure that people do not reoffend. As the hon. Lady mentioned, there are pilots in place to give that support in housing, but I helpfully suggest to the Minister that perhaps we should have more focus on those kinds of step-down solutions for housing for people who leave prison, and that perhaps that might be a better value-for-money investment of taxpayers’ money than simply expanding the prison estate.

As I say, the more we can do to divert women away from simply being incarcerated, the better it will be for society. It will prevent some children from going into the care system, and prevent that generational flow of history repeating itself in families. We also know that, as the hon. Lady mentioned, some of the offences committed by women for which they end up with a custodial sentence are not ones that justify such a sentence. In particular, they can often be with reference to debt, and again, I think we can find much better solutions for supporting people out of that.

I have little more to add, other than to reaffirm my support for everything the hon. Lady has said. We as political leaders perhaps need to give more leadership to our communities, and to be more understanding and more forgiving of why people end up the way they are. It is when people feel excluded from society—when they feel that society is not giving them a chance—that they end up in this cycle of crime and reoffending, in and out of prison. As I say, that is our failing. We need to make sure that when we pick people up for the first time, we do what we can to help them address their problems, whether that is debt, poor literacy, or all the other traumas that they may have suffered. As we know, mental health difficulties are a big characteristic of this prison population too. Let us do our bit and not simply rely on more prison places.