Criminal Justice Bill (Second sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Philp]

Thank you, Rebecca. Those are all my questions.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Q Harvey, do you think that there is the capacity for police forces across the country to drug-test everybody who comes through their doors?

Harvey Redgrave: No, it needs to be attached to more resourcing.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So if this law passes, it will not be able to be enacted?

Harvey Redgrave: I am assuming there is an impact assessment and a cost that has been attached to the Bill.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Never assume, Harvey. So currently, across the policing estate in our country, this would not be able to happen.

Harvey Redgrave: I do not think it would be able to happen if you took current resource levels as the baseline. Some piloting is already going on in some forces, I think. I do not know how much of that has been allocated in future years.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. As the conversation was about Louise Casey’s review, I was remembering some of the highlighted things in that review—testing samples left in fridges with sandwiches and things. I cannot say I have noted that the police estate across the country could cope with anything like this law, so I just wanted to check. Going back to Louise Casey’s review and the issue of vetting and suspension, do you think that what is in the Bill is enough?

Harvey Redgrave: No. It is a good step forward, but not sufficient.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. Have you seen evidence that where police officers are suspected of violence against women and girls or child abuse they should be suspended from duty, not just put on paper-based activities?

Harvey Redgrave: I would agree, yes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q You would agree that they should be suspended, as a teacher would be.

Harvey Redgrave: Sorry—I would agree with the premise of your question.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. But currently that is not in the Bill.

Harvey Redgrave: If I could also add one further thing on violence against women and girls—

[Jess Phillips]

Please feel free.

Harvey Redgrave: One of the good developments that has taken place in the last couple of years is Betsy Stanko’s work on rape and Operation Soteria, which is now being rolled out across the country. As you know, it takes a new approach to the way that rape is investigated. There is a very good case for widening that to look at all violence against women and girls, because some of the same principles apply. I would look very closely at whether that requires legislation, and if it does not, at what is required to broaden that approach.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So you think there might be a legislative solution by writing that into primary legislation or secondary legislation.

Harvey Redgrave: Potentially.

[Jess Phillips]

I will crack on with that, then.

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

Q Rebecca, when you were talking about clause 67 and the CPNs, I think you suggested at the beginning of your comments that this was not a unanimous view from your members. Is that correct?

Rebecca Bryant: Yes, it is.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Good. Thank you.

[Jess Phillips]

Q My first question is to Andy Marsh on the issue of vetting, which he very eloquently said needs to be a constant. Do you not think, then, that there needs to be at least some guideline in law about the regularity of that vetting?

Andy Marsh: Yes, I do. That is a periodic hard stop, let us say, where there is a full review, but there should be a number of different control measures, both automated data searches and a duty—a responsibility to report and self-report—that will occur in real time between those vetting periods.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. What sort of timeframe would you put on that hard period?

Andy Marsh: Whichever timeframe you chose, you could see reasons why it wouldn’t be right.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Ten years is currently the suggested—

Andy Marsh: Ten years is the current one. I think to change that without massively increasing the capacity of vetting units would be to, let us say, write a cheque they couldn’t cash.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So currently, even if we were to legislate that the vetting had to be improved—

Andy Marsh: If you were to legislate then the police would have to find the money, and it is often—

[Jess Phillips]

And it is currently not available.

Andy Marsh: Difficult choices.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Difficult choices would have to be made in order to ensure that vetting was happening. I appreciate your honesty.

Andy Marsh: I would say, “What is the best way of ensuring a trusted, ethical workforce that actually is enforcing highly frequent—I would debate highly frequent—more frequent, hard-stop vettings which would be very costly, with back-office capability?” That might, in my opinion, not be the best way of doing it. I would rather move to a more agile, 21st-century—

[Jess Phillips]

Q Automated.

Andy Marsh: Yes, automated.

[Jess Phillips]

Database, AI and so on.

Andy Marsh: Yes. So many of the searches that are required for vetting can be put into robotic processes, with ultimately the human being making the decision at the end.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Of course. You talk about there being an automated system. I have asked everybody who has sat in front of me today this question. Currently there is no crossover between behaviours found in courts in the United Kingdom; so in family courts, in civil courts in our country, that would not currently be being used in the vetting. Let’s say a domestic abuser was found to be a multiple domestic abuser of various different women, in the family courts in this country. Would that come up in your vetting?

Andy Marsh: To directly answer your question, I don’t know. Possibly not.

[Jess Phillips]

The answer is no. I do know.

Andy Marsh: But actually, if you had a multiple domestic abuser, I am pretty confident that they would be flagging on other systems.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Except that less than one in five people come forward to the criminal justice system.

Andy Marsh: Excepting that.

[Jess Phillips]

Okay. Excepting the four in five that don’t come forward.

Andy Marsh: I take your point.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. But an automated system that had all of that data on it for vetting would be helpful?

Andy Marsh: Yes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q What is your view on the suspension issue? I have unfortunately heard of a case where a police officer was suspended for safeguarding concerns, shall we say, and was put on paper-based duty, and the thing they were doing was the vetting. Do you think that officers who are under suspicion of issues of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse and safeguarding-related crimes should be suspended?

Andy Marsh: Will you permit me a little commentary, rather than a yes to that?

[Jess Phillips]

Go for it, mate.

Andy Marsh: I will tell you an anecdote, which I think will explain why this is dangerous. People can use the police complaints system for reasons other than simply securing justice and fairness for having been treated unfairly. As chief constable of Avon and Somerset, I became aware of two reports that I had in fact—and you will be shocked by this—raped the police and crime commissioner, Sue Mountstevens. I certainly had not, and the lady reporting that was in a mental ill health institution, but the crime recording rules required the police force to record that there was a rape, and I was named as a suspect. I would have thought that it would be farcical, wouldn’t it, for me to be suspended under such circumstances, given that there was not a grain of truth in that? There is a danger—

[Jess Phillips]

Q But it would be very easy for a professional person to initially triage such a case, for example, and do some very clear due diligence about somebody’s mental ill health, the likelihood and the timings. If there were any sort of case to be investigated and answered, do you not think that the person should then be suspended?

Andy Marsh: Fairness and justice are for everyone, particularly victims of violence against women and girls; if you look at everything I have said and done in my career, you will see that that is what I genuinely believe. However, I believe that an automatic suspension would be swinging the pendulum way too far. I have given you a very simple example, which is of course ridiculous. What I have learned through 37 years in policing is that there are many, many different shades of ambiguity around situations.

[Jess Phillips]

I too will give you—

Andy Marsh: Very rarely do we find right and wrong.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Of course, of course. It is funny that often it is only on this issue that there are only grey areas. A police officer in my police force—in West Midlands police—was put on light duties after he was considered a risk to children, and he used that to access the data. He went on to abuse, and has since been convicted of abusing, around 19 teenage boys. He used the powers of being put on desk duties in the police force to do that.

Andy Marsh: That is shocking and disgraceful, and it should never have been allowed to happen.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I am afraid that I could probably come up with many more examples similar to that. You do not think that, in those circumstances, there should be a suspension.

Andy Marsh: In the circumstances that you just described, of course. But I will say to this Committee that I think each case should be treated on its merits, with a very low threshold for suspension.

[Jess Phillips]

Q On the basis of it being currently treated on its merits, which we cannot necessarily legislate for, how many do you think are being suspended, left in police forces on separate duties, such as vetting, or, of those on that sort of suspension—as was the case in I think the Metropolitan police; it was definitely a police force—are training the new officers?

Andy Marsh: I can write to you with that information, but I am afraid that I do not have it to hand.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. That would be very helpful, thank you. Confidence that anything can be implemented is undoubtedly vital. Your eBay example was a good one. You stated that you were confident that all this could be implemented; however, you just said that the police would need to write a cheque, or that a massive cheque would have to be written for some of the ethics and standards things. If everything in the Bill were implemented—I invite you to comment, for example on how you think the drugs testing would be rolled out—how it is possible that everything will be implemented at the same time as prioritising violence against women and girls crimes in every force? How will it be implemented so that confidence is not lost?

Andy Marsh: I do not think I said that I was confident that all the powers in the Bill could be implemented. I was answering the question about traceable property and the power to gain entry—that was the element that I was confident about.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Oh, specifically—apologies. Do you think that everything in the Bill could be implemented?

Andy Marsh: I am supportive of the measures in the Bill. Some will undoubtedly come with a requirement to increase the resource.

[Jess Phillips]

Such as?

Andy Marsh: The drugs testing would be a good example. I do not believe that there is currently a latent capacity waiting to do that.

[Jess Phillips]

There is currently not the capacity available to do that.

Andy Marsh: No.

[Jess Phillips]

I didn’t think there was. Okay, thank you.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

Q Andy Marsh, can I continue with you? I have an observation, following on from Jess Phillips, about what sounds like a nightmare, where you were accused of rape by somebody. Just as an observation, were that to happen to a Member of Parliament, you might find yourself being asked to stay away from the House. You might lose the Whip from the party you are a member of. It is an interesting observation that in this place, there is almost a presumption of guilt before anything else when it comes to this type of crime, where in theory Members of Parliament can have access to vulnerable people. It is an interesting dichotomy, I suppose, that where the police have access to vulnerable people the whole time there could be this same problem. As I say, that is more of an observation than me necessarily asking you to respond to it—

Andy Marsh: Well since you make the observation, I am not sure, as a police officer, that most police officers would agree that the standards of conduct in Parliament are necessarily higher than the standards of conduct for a police officer—if you don’t mind me saying.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

Q On the point about DAPOs and MAPPA, do you think that MAPPA currently covers all those who are suffering serious domestic abuse and then go on to be murdered, for example?

Dame Vera Baird: No.

[Jess Phillips]

Q You have said that this legislation is good—“Yes—do it.” Do you think that it makes any real difference on the ground to the issue of domestic abuse—policing and probation monitoring?

Dame Vera Baird: I think it is a good piece of flag waving, and it ought to be something that ups the attention of the relevant parties. A lot of people do not get protected sufficiently by MAPPA.

[Jess Phillips]

Q The vast majority do not get protected, would you say?

Dame Vera Baird: I do not know about the numbers, but it is not a foolproof system. When it works, it works well, I think, and it can be quite subtly tuned for particular kinds of offender. But I do not know that it works so well with domestic abuse generally. In fact, what does?

[Jess Phillips]

Q You said that you were pleased with the parts about intimate images. Do you foresee that this will increase and encourage victims of that particular crime to come forward?

Dame Vera Baird: I hope so. It is pretty straightforward. It started off with a nice private Member’s Bill, and it was good for upskirting, but it was very taken with the intention of the individual. Taking a photograph and upskirting—frankly, if you do it, it is a crime, I would have thought. Struggling to find out whether they had done it for their own sexual benefit or to sell it online or whatever: I do not think that matters. I think the Law Commission have got to, “If you do it at all—make an intimate image—it’s an offence. If you do it with that intention, it’s worse. If you do it with this intention, it’s worse,” and that looks as if it works well.

I do not know why deepfake is not banned. Everybody knows what that is. The Minister will tell me there is a Standing Order going through. You just gave me a shocked look. Deepfake is not in the Bill, is it?

[Jess Phillips]

No, deepfake is not in it.

Dame Vera Baird: So that is where you could have possibly even a performative person doing deliberately provocative, maybe naked actions. You can take their face off, put mine on instead and put that online. That is dreadfully, dreadfully damaging—every bit as much, possibly more, because of the potential bravado of the act, which would then be blamed on you. That needs making unlawful, and it needs dealing with.

The other problem is that there are no orders to get rid of the stuff that is online already. I asked Penney Lewis—who is coming presently, so she will tell you—why they did not try to tackle the question of taking down stuff. She said that their terms of reference relate to criminality, not the civil orders. My view is that there should be a new look at that, because the pain of being a victim of intimate images is knowing that they are online.

There is a heroic academic at Durham called Professor Clare McGlynn who has done a huge amount of work on this. The impact on somebody of knowing that there is a naked picture of them somewhere online makes them withdraw: they cannot face anybody new, because they think that inevitably they must have seen them online and will have a poor view of them. That is how it gets internalised.

So it is urgent. If the Law Commission was not asked to look at taking stuff down, which I understand is done effectively in Canada, it should be asked to look at it again, or you must find another mechanism for it. The pain is from knowing that it is still up.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Turning to some of the amendments proposed to the Bill, could I ask your opinion on the issues around removing parental responsibility for men convicted of sexual offences against children? What is your view on that?

Dame Vera Baird: Now that I understand that the mitigation relating to being coercively controlled will go into law, at least at a lower level—although I do think it should be in this statute—I am less worried. There is some possibility, isn’t there, if it is about murder or manslaughter, because a lot of victims who have been coercively controlled and strike back are convicted of manslaughter—

[Jess Phillips]

Losing their parental responsibility, you mean?

Dame Vera Baird: Yes. That would be a woman who had been persecuted. You are talking about sex offences?

[Jess Phillips]

Yes, specifically sex offences. That bit of law is in the Victims and Prisoners Bill—the law on murder and manslaughter, which I believe has some carve-out. Not to inform the Minister of this, but that is the reason why it is going through the Lords today: the carve-out, which is in that Bill, not this one. But what I was talking about was a proposal to take parental responsibility away from men convicted of sexual offences against children.

Dame Vera Baird: I am less convinced by that, because the definition of a sexual offence may be quite a wide one. I think it needs some reflection. I appreciate that if there is a sexual risk order, you can have a man who is banned from being in touch with all children except his own.

[Jess Phillips]

I think that’s the problem.

Dame Vera Baird: That is the point, so it needs tackling. But just sex offences—does it apply to flashers or people online? I do not know. I think it probably needs tuning a bit.

[Jess Phillips]

Q There are two amendments on the issue of the criminalisation of women who have an abortion. Do you have any views on those?

Dame Vera Baird: It is long overdue to be decriminalised, as it is in Northern Ireland. This Parliament decriminalised it in Northern Ireland. Why on earth is it still a criminal offence to do what is a tragic thing that nobody wants to do, and have a late abortion? The last time the offence was in play was quite recently: it was about six months ago. The Court of Appeal was amazingly benevolent towards the woman and accepted entirely that she needed support, not criminalisation. The Court of Appeal seems to be ahead of this Parliament on that at the moment. You used to have women from Northern Ireland coming over here for help with abortion; now, women from here go over to Northern Ireland to avoid the risk of criminalisation if they are a week late. It is quite odd.

[Jess Phillips]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

As there are no further questions, may I thank you, Dame Vera, for your evidence? We will move on to the next panel.

Examination of Witness

Jonathan Hall KC gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

I call Jess Phillips. Just be aware of the clock —you have eight minutes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q You are very, very defined in the things that you will say, and I appreciate that. What has the Law Commission suggested of late, in one of the things it has written about, that is not in the Bill? You have been grateful for the things that are in the Bill, but what is missing?

Professor Lewis: Missing from the projects that are implemented or missing from other projects?

[Jess Phillips]

Q For example, just to go to your point about hate crime and the aggravated factor, has that been realised in the law?

Professor Lewis: No. We are still awaiting a Government response on the vast majority of our recommendations in the hate crime report.

[Jess Phillips]

For example, women—

Professor Lewis: No, that is the one they responded to, because we recommended that sex or gender not be added for the purposes of aggravated offences or enhanced sentencing. You may remember that there was a statutory requirement for the Government to respond to that, and they responded accepting our recommendation not to add it. They have not responded to the rest of the recommendations, including our recommendation that there should be an offence of stirring up hatred on the basis of sex or gender as well as equalising the treatment of all the other protected characteristics in relation to stirring up hatred.

[Jess Phillips]

Q For example, that could have been in the Bill, but it is not.

Professor Lewis: I cannot comment on whether it could have been in the Bill.

[Jess Phillips]

You can put anything in it if you want— I am going to.

Professor Lewis: It is not in the Bill, and we await a response from the Government on the vast majority of our recommendations.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So you are awaiting a response. Therefore, although you are pleased to see quite a lot of things in the Bill, there are quite a lot of examples of things that the Law Commission has done pieces of work on that do not feature in a Bill—this Bill, the Sentencing Bill or the Victims and Prisoners Bill, which have all been going through at the same time.

Professor Lewis: I have to accept—in fact, I am pleased to accept—that in terms of projects that I have worked on, more than half of them have been implemented in the last year. The implementation rate of Law Commission criminal law projects at the moment is—

[Jess Phillips]

Q High?

Professor Lewis: Yes. It is fantastic.

[Jess Phillips]

That is good to hear.

Professor Lewis: We are really pleased to be able to work with the Government to implement our recommendations in so many projects; I think it is five in the last year.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay. Going back specifically to the issue of confiscation, how do you foresee this working with the resources on the ground? I speak as somebody who, in the break between the morning sitting and the afternoon sitting of this Committee, received an email telling me that somebody was going to pay me some compensation for perpetrating crimes against me. Like every other time that I have received such a letter, I have absolutely no expectation of seeing a single penny, nor have I ever seen a single penny of that money.

Professor Lewis: Compensation for victims is a really important issue and one of the things that we recommended in the confiscation project, because compensation was not part of that project directly, is that there needs to be a separate review of compensation for victims.

None the less, we made recommendations where there is overlap. For example, we described it as giving priority to the payment of compensation. We recommended that where a compensation order is imposed at the same time as a confiscation order, the Crown court should be required to direct that compensation should be paid from the sums recovered under the confiscation order. At the moment, that happens only if the defendant does not have enough money to pay both orders, but we recommended that, even if the defendant does have enough money, the first lot of money should go on compensation.

Similarly, when multiple confiscation orders are imposed, priority should be given to the payment of compensation and after that to the confiscation orders. Paragraph 11 of schedule 4 basically implements those recommendations, saying that the court “must direct” that

“sums recovered under the confiscation order”

be applied to “ priority order (or orders)”. Priority orders are defined in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 as including compensation orders. Therefore, although you may not see the word “compensation” in that paragraph, it very much is in there, and the paragraph prioritises the application of funds to victims, whether that means that you as an individual victim are seeking compensation funds—

[Jess Phillips]

Q I find it highly unlikely. So, you think there needs to be a further review of compensation for victims.

Professor Lewis: Yes.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank the witness for the time that she has given us today.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Scott Mann.)