Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Suffolk)

Debate between Jim Shannon and Sandy Martin

Tuesday 5th November 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

May I, Mr Speaker, add my congratulations to those already given in respect of your elevation, both metaphorically and physically, to the speakership?

Suffolk has a greater than average number of special educational needs and disability assessment cases going to tribunal; poor communication between providers and with parents; a lack of specialist placements; an inadequate resource in the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, which is supposed to provide mental health services; insufficient respite services; a growing gap between the provision described in education, health and care plans and what is actually provided; an acute shortage of autistic spectrum disorder provision; and an overall lack of staff and funding to address these issues, either in mainstream education or in specialist provision.

Since the revisit from Ofsted in January this year, and its report in February, little seems to have been done to hold Suffolk to any action plan that might deal with the failings identified. There has been no increase in monitoring since the failed revisit and no appreciable changes in senior management. Mental health services—or the lack of them—continue to cause distress to young people and their parents, and young people are harming themselves or falling into greater mental health need while they wait for support that does not come.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

First, may I, too, publicly congratulate you, Mr Speaker, on your election as the Speaker of the House? It was a great pleasure to watch that.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that this issue is critical, not only for him and his constituents but for me and mine, and the Minister has responsibility for it. The time allocated for direct contact time with educational psychologists is just 15 hours a year for pupils at one primary in Northern Ireland. For children dealing with anxiety and other social issues, that is simply not enough. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the provision of support and early intervention in respect of social anxiety issues can positively impact lifelong mental health, and reduce the need for further intervention in high schools at a greater cost? In other words: do it now, do it early.

[Sandy Martin]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct; he has put his finger right on the main point.

Two days ago, in response to the news that I had secured this debate, I received an email from a distressed parent. She says:

“My son has been out of school for 3 years in December. He was signed off by our consultant paediatrician as medically unfit for mainstream school. He has an Education & Health Care Plan. He has all the paperwork to state he has autism with a pathological demand avoidance profile but he cannot sit through the formal assessment as it runs for too long and he finds it too difficult to cope in the situation.

I have contacted the local authority so many times with regard to providing my son with an education; I have put in formal complaints and yet he still has no education.

I applied to the tribunal last December as the Local Authority insisted in his Education Health Care Plan that mainstream schooling was suitable for him, but they simultaneously refused to name a school he could go to.

The tribunal have made numerous orders ordering the Local Authority to name a school for my son but these have all been ignored.

We went to the tribunal last Tuesday, 29th October, at which the Judge told the Local Authority that they need to name a school on his education and health care plan and that the tribunal had to be adjourned until 13th December because of this, adding more of a delay to my son getting an education. He is now 12 years old.

My son is still without an education and we are in limbo.

My son deserves the correct education but he has been thoroughly let down by the education system. The strain of fighting the system tires you out but you still have to keep going. It should not be like this—every child has the right to an education. We keep being told that it is not the label that counts, but the child’s needs. Well we know our son needs an education but we cannot access any support for him to get that education because he doesn’t seem to have the right label.”

I had already secured this debate when that message was sent to me. The reason why I applied for the debate was that parent after parent has written to me, emailed me, met with me at my surgeries, and invited me to visit their child’s school or visit the school that their child would be going to if they had enough support in place, or the school that would be ideal for the child, but which has no more capacity.

Criminal Cases Review Commission

Debate between Jim Shannon and Sandy Martin

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered a review of the decision-making powers of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

As always, Sir George, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which I will refer to as the CCRC, was founded in response to the situation in which a number of high-profile criminal cases had led to people being in prison for crimes that the consensus among those who had considered the evidence suggested they could not possibly have committed. Among those cases was the case of the Birmingham Six. Despite the intervention of lawyers, television and the Home Secretary, and the discovery of new evidence, the Court of Appeal managed to reject the appeals of the Birmingham Six on a number of occasions, before the overwhelming evidence that their convictions were unsafe finally prevailed at their third appeal.

As the Birmingham Six case was one of the major motivating factors for the introduction of the CCRC, we should expect that at the very least the CCRC, as it is now constituted, would have been of help in resolving that case. My fear is that, on the contrary, the CCRC’s very existence now makes it less likely that such grievous miscarriages of justice will be resolved in the future.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for bringing this matter to Westminster Hall for consideration. Bearing in mind that just 0.7% of cases received by the Criminal Cases Review Commission were referred to the Court of Appeal in 2017, which was its lowest ever rate, does he agree that there is a bad impression of the effectiveness of the current protocol, which urgently needs to be reviewed?

[Sandy Martin]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention; he is absolutely right and I will expand on that point later in my speech.

I am raising this issue today because the case of Oliver Campbell, my constituent, is a classic example of a devastating miscarriage of justice, for the resolution of which the CCRC appears to be more of a hindrance than a help.

Oliver was convicted of murder in 1991 and spent 11 years in prison. He is here in Westminster Hall today with a friend, so that he can hear this debate. He knows that I am not being rude when I say that he has a low IQ; he also knows that that is as a result of a brain injury he sustained as a baby. This reduced mental capacity should have been evident to everyone involved in this case from the moment of Oliver’s arrest in 1990, some two months after the murder of an Asian shopkeeper in Hackney.

I have known Oliver for about 10 years. I think that anyone meeting him would come to the same conclusion reached by myself and others, including the BBC’s “Rough Justice” team, Michael Birnbaum QC, Oliver’s long-standing solicitor Glyn Maddocks, and the distinguished broadcaster, Kirsty Wark, namely that Oliver simply was not capable of carrying out such a crime.

Oliver was arrested because witnesses identified one of the two men who carried out the robbery during which the shopkeeper was killed as wearing a distinctive baseball cap. The other man, Eric Samuels, was relatively short and the witnesses also described the two men as being of similar height. Oliver is a large man who is 6 feet 3 inches tall.

Oliver was questioned for several hours in a police station without the presence of an appropriate adult, which he should have had due to his impaired mental capacity, or a lawyer. Eventually, a lawyer was found, but it was only after that lawyer had left the police station, having left clear instructions to be called back if there was to be any further questioning, that the police—in direct contravention of those instructions—pressed Oliver, in the presence of his ex-foster carer but no legal representative, to confess. Within half an hour of persistent suggestion from the police, Oliver had confessed to a murder that I do not believe a reading of the evidence could possibly suggest he had committed. Many of Oliver’s answers to the police were bizarre and made no sense whatever, so it is hard to understand how they could ever have been relied upon.

Oliver’s lawyer was then called back, and Oliver immediately withdrew his so- called confession. However, in December 1991 he was convicted, almost entirely on the basis of this very dubious confession, and he served 11 years in prison. There was no forensic evidence linking him to the baseball cap nor to the scene of the crime. None of the fingerprints or hairs that had been recovered from the scene or from the cap match those of Oliver. His co-accused, Eric Samuels, who admitted taking part in the robbery, said in interview that Oliver had nothing to do with the murder and was not at the scene. However, this information was never put before the jury as evidence. Samuels’ statement was never signed and Samuels refused to take the witness stand.

Samuels was subsequently tracked down and interviewed by the BBC’s “Rough Justice” programme for its 2002 episode, “If the Cap Fits”. He was filmed during the show’s investigation and again described how the cap was taken from Oliver’s head by the man who was actually his accomplice—the man who was actually the murderer—and how it had been dropped near the shop. Samuels again refused to sign a statement, this time on the advice of his key worker.

A ballistics expert was also brought in by the BBC, who established that the murderer must have been right-handed; other experts have shown that Oliver favours his left hand for most tasks. Oliver’s bizarre confession apparently includes details of how he made a holster for the gun out of string and how he had practised shooting in a forest or a field, but he could not tell the police the location or even whether it was a forest or a field. He was pressed to identify how many bullets he had had and how many were fired, but he clearly had no idea what the correct answer to either of those questions was.

After the “Rough Justice” programme was broadcast, detailed and extensive submissions were made to the CCRC by Oliver’s legal team, including by his solicitor, Glyn Maddocks, and his eminent QC, Michael Birnbaum, in the clear hope—indeed, expectation—that the Commission would refer Oliver’s case back to the Court of Appeal.

After two long years, the CCRC concluded that there was nothing new to form the basis of a fresh appeal and that therefore there could be no appeal. That was despite a recent change in the law that would have enabled the Court of Appeal to rely on the statements that Eric Samuels had made, in which he completely exonerated Oliver.

The CCRC also ignored the reports of two very eminent psychologists, who explained that Oliver’s acquiescence to police questioning was due to his limited mental capacity, and his eagerness to please and be accepted. As Kirsty Wark reported at the end of the “Rough Justice” programme, this evidence of Oliver’s mental state, which had never been brought before the original jury, constituted

“fresh new evidence which points to a terrible miscarriage of justice”.

I am bringing this case to the attention of the House for two reasons. First, of course, it is because I believe Oliver to be innocent of the crime of murder. Life is not easy for Oliver; life never would have been easy for him, even without a murder conviction hanging over him. Oliver works five mornings a week at a community café as a cleaner; he spends the rest of his time trying to clear his name. Secondly, however, and crucially, the other reason for us to have this debate here today is because the CCRC was established by this House to make it easier to rectify miscarriages of justice, and I do not believe that it has achieved that aim.

State Pension: Women born in the 1950s

Debate between Jim Shannon and Sandy Martin

Thursday 22nd November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) on securing this debate. She has been a stalwart in speaking out for the WASPI women. I was very happy to be a co-signatory to her request to the Backbench Business Committee for this debate, and I am happy to add my support.

I know that I speak for so many others when I say that my constituents in Strangford were gutted to find that no change has been made to the nefarious decision to deny women their hard-earned pension. An email I received said that there was a sense of

“despair amongst our WASPI women with increasingly negative effects on mental and physical health and catastrophic financial situations.”

I cannot underline enough those women’s mental and physical health and their catastrophic financial situations. The people I have spoken to are greatly affected by those three things.

It is little wonder that those women feel like that when it appears that the political route has led nowhere. The Bill supported by the all-party group on state pension inequality for women has been kicked into the long grass. For that reason, the WASPI women have, alongside their political campaign, been progressing on the legal front. They believe that proving that the DWP failed in its duty and committed maladministration is the most cost-effective and quickest way for the 3.8 million women affected by the changes to the state pension age in the Pensions Acts of 1995, 2007 and 2011 to achieve justice and recompense.

I am aware that the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has begun his preliminary inquiry. He is starting with the 1995 Act and is looking at whether the DWP failed in its duty to inform women of the significant change to state pension age, which had been 60 for women since 1948. If he finds that the DWP failed in its duty and committed maladministration, he should make recommendations about what the Government should do to make amends. That would be an important way of addressing these issues. Those recommendations should perhaps include recompense for the losses suffered by all women adversely affected by the changes.

It is time that we did the right thing for those women. In my constituency alone, 5,800 women have been adversely affected. I am not saying that every one of them has come and spoken to me, but a great proportion have. They worked their fingers raw and had their end goal in sight, but the certainty of a pension was removed from them with very little notice. They did not have the ability to change the course of their financial future. They were told the facts of the case and were left to deal with it. The women who have spoken to me include not only civil servants who planned their financial future and are now cast into uncertainty, in doubt about how their well-deserved retirement will pan out, but women who have literally scrubbed on their hands and knees. They are saying, “Jim, I don’t know how I can physically do this anymore.”

[Sandy Martin]

The point is not just that those people worked hard all their lives and then suddenly found that their pension age had been increased, but that they were not given the time to plan their lives in advance. In many cases, they finished work and found that they would not get their pension for years afterwards.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. They thought they had planned for their pension age, but suddenly found that it was grasped away from them at the last moment. The impact on women throughout Northern Ireland is incredible. I have said this before, and I will keep on saying it: we need to do the right thing. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran said that we must do the right thing. I am here to do the right thing and make sure it happens.

This equalisation was initially brought about in 1995, when an EU directive prompted the Government to equalise retirement age for men and women—then 65 and 60 respectively. The Government chose to level it at 65, and it was decided to increase women’s SPA in stages between 2010 and 2020. Women born in 1950-51 would retire at 61, those born in 1952-53 would retire at 62 and so on until 65 was reached for all post-1955 women in 2020.

I am unsure how we got to the stage at which we are asking women to work into their 70s and beyond. People are working longer, but they will not live longer if we make them work longer. I believe that enough is enough. I am not alone in that view. I read an article—the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran referred to it—that said:

“A United Nations independent expert has affirmed the stance taken by campaign groups including the Women Against State Pension Inequality…that certain women have been affected disproportionately by recent pension age changes.”

We cannot ignore the United Nations—we often refer to it.

“Philip Alston’s report Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom on extreme poverty and human rights, out on Friday (16 November), showed the number of pensioners living in poverty in the UK had risen by 300,000 to 16 per cent in the four years to 2016/17. This was despite measures such as the triple lock guarantee. But he found a group of women born in the 1950s had been particularly impacted a ‘poorly phased in’ change in the state pension age.

Mr Alston said: ‘As was made clear to me in a number of submissions and through powerful personal testimony, a group of women born in the 1950s have been particularly impacted by an abrupt and poorly phased in change in the state pension age from 60 to 66.

The impact of the changes to pensionable age is such as to severely penalise those who happen to be on the cusp of retirement and who had well-founded expectations of entering the next phase of their lives”—

as the hon. Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) said—

“rather than being plunged back into a workforce for which many of them were ill-prepared and to which they could not reasonably have been expected to adjust with no notice.’”

Ipswich-London Rail Fares

Debate between Jim Shannon and Sandy Martin

Monday 15th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sandy Martin]

Indeed they do. However, if they are travelling to Chelmsford and getting off at Chelmsford, clearly they are not in the way of Chelmsford passengers who want to travel to London.

The confusion in the fares charged is particularly stark in Ipswich. The next station on the line to London has fares that are so much lower than ours it is usually cheaper to buy a ticket from Ipswich to Manningtree, followed by another ticket from Manningtree to London, than it is to simply buy a ticket to London. This situation has persisted for well over 20 years. Some canny passengers deliberately buy tickets from Ipswich to Manningtree and from Manningtree to London to save significant sums on their fares. It feels wrong. Many passengers will not do it. Many do not realise that they could save money by doing it. It makes the entire fares structure look ridiculous, which it is.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

On the news this morning, it was stated that the number of those travelling by bus had fallen dramatically. There are a lot of reasons for that, relating to investment, costs and incentives. Does the hon. Gentleman feel that, if the Government were to consider reinvestment and making tickets more cost-effective, in addition to incentives, which some parts of the United Kingdom are introducing, that would be the way forward to secure this line?

[Sandy Martin]

I agree. The fact is that, if Governments invest in public transport as a public good, the number of people using that public transport tends to increase. This country has taken the view that passengers should be charged as close to the actual cost as possible. I am not sure that that is necessarily sensible.

I understand that the reasons for the anomaly between Ipswich and Manningtree, and for many other anomalous differences in fares between towns at a similar distance to London, is partly due to the Network Railcard area. The Network Railcard area is a complete mystery to me. Ipswich is outside the area. Peterborough is outside the area.  Swindon, the most expensive place in the country to travel from by train, is outside the area. But Kings Lynn is in the area. And so is Weymouth. And so is Worcester. And so is Exeter. I realise that if there is going to be a Network Railcard there needs to be a Network Railcard area, and that the line has to be drawn somewhere. I just wish it were not drawn in a way that so gratuitously disadvantages Ipswich. Ipswich is the final stop for stopping trains on the Great Eastern main line commuter service. If a line has to be drawn, it is nonsensical to draw it just before the destination of the commuter trains it has been created to facilitate.

On 11 October, the Secretary of State launched a root and branch review of the rail industry. In September, 20,000 people responded to a consultation on fares. Many of the improvements passengers want, such as making tickets jargon-free and improving the availability of smart ticketing, are already priorities for the Government and for the train operators. But I want to take this opportunity to make a plea to the Government to adhere to one or two basic principles in the improvements that they make to the fares structure. First, no single journey should ever be more expensive than the sum of its parts. Secondly, for any journey where the anytime walk-on fare is clearly above the national average cost per mile, those fares should be frozen until they are in line with the national average. Thirdly, the Network Railcard area should be reviewed, with some objectivity involved in deciding where the boundary should be and with a fares structure that does not suddenly penalise those stations that are just outside the area.

The root and branch review will take time. Many of its recommendations may be unpalatable to the Government. Some of them may be unpalatable to me. I, like the rest of my party, would like to see train operator franchises taken back into public ownership as and when the franchises expire or are surrendered. I would like to see rail travel being treated as an investment in our country’s productive capacity and a Government priority to meet our climate change commitments. I would prefer not to have certain regions, such as East Anglia, paying what is in effect a tax on train travel to the Government, although I am not necessarily expecting those recommendations to be in the panel’s report. I would prefer that Ipswich’s rail passengers should not have to wait for that report before they see any change in their fares.

In addition to the principles that I believe the Government should seek to enshrine in any sensible fares structure, and pending any root and branch reform of fares, I call on the Minister—with the co-operation of any agency that he believes needs to be seen to be making this decision—to include Ipswich, possibly the closest point to London that is not in the Network Railcard area, forthwith, so that this historical anomaly can be ended immediately.