Criminal Justice Bill (First sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2023 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Before I bring Jess in, four further Members have caught my eye. You have nine minutes between you, so bear that in mind.

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

Q Message received.

To take you back to the conduct questions that you started with, are you satisfied with the current system in policing for finding bad conduct where it has occurred?

Chief Constable Stephens: Once the new provisions are introduced, we will be more satisfied with the system. When the new provisions are in place, we in policing will need to work hard to make sure that we are getting through at more speed. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has talked about the number of backlogs in the Met, for example. That is not just in the Met; it is replicated in our member organisations across England and Wales, so speed is definitely one thing.

Fundamentally—I have had these discussions privately with the Minister and others—we need to reclaim this as an employment process. It has become too legalistic over time.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Okay, but are you convinced that the powers in this Bill and the intelligence that you have currently is enough to identify misconduct such as—I declare a special interest—sexual violence and domestic abuse in offices?

Chief Constable Stephens: Yes, given the right emphasis and the right resourcing.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I know the answer to this question, but I will ask it anyway. Do you know whether the findings in civil courts in our country of a case where, for example, a police officer is found, in a finding of fact hearing in the family court, to have raped his wife, would appear on your intelligence system?

Chief Constable Stephens: I could not give a guarantee that it always would.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I guarantee you that it does not. Do you think that it would be helpful to have a repository of information from all of the courts in our land on safeguarding findings, such as on child abuse, for the police to access to ensure that conduct could be guaranteed?

Chief Constable Stephens: Yes, absolutely.

[Jess Phillips]

Thank you.

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

Q On the issue of rough sleeping, I totally get that the police need to work with partners. By the way, I would just like to say that Essex police are doing phenomenal work on this and many other issues in the Chelmsford city centre, using hotspots and grid policing and so on, but occasionally, even though we are trying to give people support, there are some people with complex needs who are still sleeping on the streets, and we sometimes have the issue that they are sleeping in the fire escape of a large store, for example, which causes danger to others. Are the powers in this Bill the sort of powers that you could use to gently request that that person sleeps in another venue, without blocking a fire escape?

Chief Constable Stephens: Policing can gently request, persuade, cajole and encourage without powers.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Before I call the next question, I remind Members to catch my eye as early as possible. If you do not, I will give leeway to those who caught my eye earlier and you may not get in. I appreciate that points may occur to you as discussions develop, but it would be helpful for timing. I call Jess Phillips.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Specifically to the NCA, what is not in the Bill that would help your work? For example, I take a personal interest in the NCA’s work on people smuggling and human trafficking, and—no offence to the CPS—the woeful levels of conviction in that space. What is missing from the Bill that would help you?

Graeme Biggar: There is nothing missing on people smuggling that we would need at the moment, to answer that direct question. I mentioned child-like sexual abuse dolls. Another issue that you care about is child sexual abuse websites. At the moment, it is obviously a criminal offence to possess or distribute indecent images of children, but it is not a specific criminal offence to be a moderator or an administrator of the dark websites that hold millions of images and videos of children being raped. We often investigate and we prosecute individuals for viewing and distributing the images, but there is not an extra offence for being the person who runs and sets up that kind of website.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Currently, there is no legal definition of adult sexual exploitation in our country, only child exploitation, and there is no strategy on adult sexual exploitation. What work does the NCA actually do in the space of huge grooming gangs, for example, or does it not matter when the people are over the age of consent?

Graeme Biggar: We do work on grooming gangs when people are below the age of consent, as you know, with Operation Stovewood in Rotherham. We also work on sexual exploitation of adults. We have had a number of investigations recently into women from Romania and Brazil being brought into the UK.

[Jess Phillips]

Q What about women from Britain?

Graeme Biggar: We have come across less of that in our investigations, but we will work with the NPCC.

[Jess Phillips]

I’ll take you on a night out, mate. I could show you it in every single part of the country.

Graeme Biggar: We focus on the ones who cross the border; it is the NPCC that focuses on adult sexual exploitation within the UK.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So the NCA would not undertake work on large-scale criminal gangs in our country that are exploiting British adults?

Graeme Biggar: No, we would. If we could see large-scale, organised crime that involves modern slavery, which includes the sexual exploitation of women, we would investigate it. We have not yet come across such a case—certainly not in my time in the NCA.

[The Chair]

Order. I remind you that you need to focus on the scope of the Bill rather than the general work of the agencies, not to in any way diminish the importance of the issue. Do you have any further questions, Jess?

[Jess Phillips]

I am done.

[Anna Firth]

Q Back to knife crime and clause 10 of the Bill. As you know, clause 10 will introduce a higher maximum penalty for manufacturing, importing, supplying or selling offensive weapons such as zombie knives and flick knives, especially to under-18s—to children. Amazingly, at the moment the penalty for that is only six months, and it is a summary-only offence in the magistrates court. Under the Bill, it will become an indictable offence carrying a penalty of two years. Do you think that is a good change, which will lead to longer sentences? Because it is indictable, it will give the police more time to investigate these crimes, particularly when they are online sales using web app groups and so on, and it takes a lot longer to get the data.

Baljit Ubhey: Certainly the fact that it is an either-way offence and you do not have the challenges of the six-month time limits that summary-only offences create —given, as you say, the complexities of how these knives are manufactured, sold and so on—will helpfully close a bit of a gap.

Graeme Biggar: We agree with that point and the points that Gavin made earlier in relation to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

Q My final question is about the minimum age provisions in that. I know that the age of criminal responsibility begins at 10, but based on your work, was that an area where you found that antisocial behaviour was perpetrated a lot by youngsters in their teens?

Baroness Newlove: I have not specifically looked at that. Looking at all the reviews I have done, I have said outside this role that parenting is the most difficult job anybody can do, but you have to be accountable for the actions.

I have concerns: yes, the age is 10, but there could be other areas in which that person is suffering, such as dyslexia or autism. Also, the parents could be suffering domestic abuse. How do you make them pay that fine, at the end of the day? If you go back to that, we had that kind of language in the riots, where we were going to get the parents and take them out of their homes. For me, there has to be accountability, but how would you get that parent, who is probably suffering from domestic abuse or may have mental health and addiction issues, to fully understand the impact that their child is having? They may need support to rectify that. Also, that child could have other issues.

I can see where you are going from that. I welcome anything, but I am just stepping back a little to consider how that would have an impact on the rest of the family to make sure we can get a better solution.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Nicole, give the Committee an idea of the number of domestic abuse incidents a year.

Nicole Jacobs: Well, according to the Office for National Statistics, it is 2.3 million.

[Jess Phillips]

And then those that get reported to the police?

Nicole Jacobs: One in five. Sometimes the research says one in six, but we can say one in five.

[Jess Phillips]

Q One in five of those, so you can all do the maths quickly—because the Prime Minister tells us that that is important. Last year, the conviction figure on coercive control was 564, so we have gone from 2 million down to 564 that will be affected by this Bill. Of course, it only affects those over 12 months, so I think that is 10% of that 564. Is that correct?

Nicole Jacobs: Yes.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So we are getting down to under 100 victims of domestic abuse actually affected by this Bill. I just want to make sure that I have got that right. Is that correct?

Nicole Jacobs: That is correct for that provision, which is really why I was making the point about the wider work required. Or, as the Bill progresses, I am sure you will have people who might put forward other offences that ought to be included. However, that is correct, and I suppose that not every dangerous perpetrator of domestic abuse will be subject to MAPPA, because of the fact of the lack of convictions.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Yes. So, as you have said, the MATAC and Drive programmes, and actually what is going on in the Metropolitan police at the moment, look beyond a conviction rate. Therefore, actually, with this Bill, when we are talking about victims of domestic abuse with regard to MAPPA, I would say that a “drop in the ocean” would be an understatement, numbers-wise.

Nicole Jacobs: Numbers-wise, it would be modest—

[Jess Phillips]

It is about 56.

Nicole Jacobs: But I would not be against the principle of that, because I recognise that coercion and controlling behaviour is a known high-risk factor. Some of the policing risk assessments are really geared to understanding that better. There is obviously no harm in doing that, but I suppose that it is just that the ambition of us wanting to monitor and have a lot more active oversight is more geared towards those other programmes on recency, frequency and gravity—the algorithms that police use.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So would you like to see those in the Bill, rather than just this MAPPA situation?

Nicole Jacobs: I would love to see you consider ways that you could have a more active oversight that could be consistent.

[Jess Phillips]

Q And, just to be clear, on the number of people who go on to murder, is it the group who would currently fall under MAPPA in, to use the Minister’s words, the “most serious” domestic abuse incidents who largely go on to murder their partners and children, or is it other perpetrators of domestic abuse?

Nicole Jacobs: It is usually others.

[Jess Phillips]

Yes.

Nicole Jacobs: I will send the Committee a report that I just published last week, which is a compilation of findings from 300 domestic homicide reviews. We published four reports: one about children’s social care, one about adult social care, one about health-related recommendations, and one on criminal justice. That might be useful for this discussion because, in that report, you can see the numbers of perpetrators who have committed murder, how many had criminal convictions and what the nature of those recommendations were, so I would be very happy to send that.

[Jess Phillips]

Q On the vetting issue—I raised this with the chief constable who was in front of us earlier—you have eloquently said that the vetting of police officers should be taking place every five years rather than every 10 years, and I know that your offices have undertaken quite intricate work into the situation within the family courts. In the vetting of police officers, and, in fact, in the targeting of domestic abusers more broadly, do institutions such as the police or the courts use the evidence—proven evidence and found evidence in British courts, such as the family courts—in our criminal institutions and in the vetting of police officers?

Nicole Jacobs: No. The reason that they would not is that those IT systems would not speak to each other, even to know the fact finding within family court, for example. We are doing that; we are going into three court areas and actually looking at the domestic information. We have done a lot of legal academic preparation to do that. It is not even easy to get that from the family court system itself. In other words, that kind of fact-finding information is not quite readily available, even though it would have been found as fact in front of a judge and used, so that would not factor in.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So there is a situation in our country today where somebody could be found in the family court to have multiply sexually abused a child in that home, and that would not appear on the police’s vetting system.

Nicole Jacobs: Not to my knowledge. There was, for example, Project Shield in North Yorkshire where even orders of protection were having to be manually entered into the police national database. People underestimate the extent to which police have all the information they need at their fingertips to understand the whole picture and risk of a perpetrator of domestic abuse, and there is huge scope for improvement there.

[The Chair]

Do we have any further questions? We have 12 more minutes, if anyone want to take the opportunity.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Baroness Newlove, although Nicole could undoubtedly answer this as well, in your work with victims of serious child sexual abuse, sexual violence, domestic abuse—in fact, any victim of any crime, specifically childhood abuse—what do you think the incidence is of those people ending up in the criminal justice system or, for example, with substance misuse issues, which may lead to homelessness?

Baroness Newlove: I have not done any specific research on that, but there is probably a synergy of reasons. When I spoke to child sexual abuse victims when I worked on IICSA, I saw that there is a reason for survivorship. They have been made to do things—not because they are criminals, but because they are absolutely fearful for their lives. But I have not done percentage research and, as you know, Jess, I am more of a people person in the sense of really putting it as it is. A lot of victims were writing to me before I came back into this role who felt that that is not being recognised. Through no fault of their own, they have had to turn to things they did not wish to do, and they have turned to substance misuse to get them through the absolute harm they have gone through.

Nicole Jacobs: Again, I can send this to the Committee, but there is a really excellent piece of academic work, recently published in the form of a book, that makes a clear link to the anecdotal things we know, which is that it is related to experiences of domestic abuse as a child and how that impacts behaviour into adolescence, particularly with boys. I think that is something that could be considered.

One thing I was hoping to touch on and make the link to earlier was the extent to which we really struggle with registered social landlords confusing domestic abuse with antisocial behaviour, and others reporting it as noise nuisance and that type of thing. There has been a lot of reform over the last five years in particular to really help registered social landlords disentangle those things, so they are not misinterpreting domestic abuse as antisocial behaviour. That is worth considering in the provisions.

On rough sleeping, St Mungo’s will tell you that some 50% of female rough sleepers are there because of domestic abuse. We have to really think and consider how that impacts particular people in the wider context of some of the provisions of the Bill.

[Jess Phillips]

Q For women who are offenders, there is a pattern to the abuse they have suffered—all the research shows that in the high rates of, certainly, domestic and sexual violence in the prison population of women. As the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, how would you feel about those women being sent to a foreign country should they commit a crime?

Nicole Jacobs: I think the Ministry of Justice’s own female offender strategy is much more about diversion from prison, so you see women’s centres undertaking a lot of that kind of work, which I think is right. My view is that people who have been involved in crime who are subject to domestic abuse and that abuse is linked to their offending have very little place in prison, full stop. We have to understand the context of the offending and the extent to which doing so would be in the public interest. I would like to see them not in prison in general, but being supported in the community.

[The Chair]

If there are no further questions, I would like to thank our witnesses, Baroness Newlove and Nicole Jacobs, for their evidence and for their time. That brings us to the end of the morning session, and the Committee will meet again at 2 pm here in the Boothroyd Room to continue taking oral evidence.

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