Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Jonathan Djanogly Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 28th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion]

I want to start with a positive and then I will move on. I begin by welcoming Lords amendment 98, Tony’s law, which increases the maximum sentences for causing or allowing a child or vulnerable adult to suffer serious injury or death. That change to the law follows the tireless campaigning by the parents of Tony Hudgell. As a baby, Tony suffered such serious physical abuse by his birth parents that both of his legs had to be amputated and he nearly lost his life. The sentences for cases such as Tony’s must reflect the lifelong trauma and harm that was inflicted on him.

I campaigned for that change last year, following in the wake of Tony’s parents’ MP, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), and I thank the Minister for listening to me, the hon. Member and to Tony’s family and others who have campaigned for the change in the law. It is so necessary and I am so grateful that that has now been adopted.

And now for the less positive part. I have to speak to Lords amendment 107, which is designed to ensure that local authorities can run secure 16 to 19 academies, either alone or in consortiums. I worked with Article 39 and the National Association for Youth Justice to table an amendment on this in the Bill Committee. I was delighted when peers voted in favour of this vital amendment in the other place, as tabled by Lord German and Lord Marks, and I ask the Minister to please keep it in place. As he knows, I have a huge amount of respect for him because he is very fair and because he listens, but as I said, local authorities are also clear that they need a very strong signal from him that they are eligible. This is not me, but the local authorities asking for that clarity. As I said, I find it illogical that he will not accept this amendment.

In December 2016, the Government committed to phasing out child prisons, young offender institutions and secure training centres and replacing them with a network of secure children’s homes and secure schools—now renamed secure 16 to 19 academies. I welcome that progress, because it is very clear that secure training centres were not fit for purpose, as the Youth Justice Board has conceded. However, when the Government looked for an organisation to run the first secure school, they barred local authorities from the tendering process. That decision was heavily criticised by many organisations that specialise on these issues. I find it illogical.

Excluding local authorities risks repeating the serious mistakes of the past, when private providers were contracted to operate secure training centres despite having no prior experience of looking after vulnerable children. There is clear, tragic evidence of what that can lead to. Two children, Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood, tragically died following restraint in secure training centres run by the private firms G4S and Serco, respectively, in 2004; the High Court later found that an unlawful restraint regime had persisted in the centres for at least a decade. In a 2016 BBC “Panorama” documentary, staff were filmed verbally and physically assaulting children at the Medway secure training centre, managed by G4S. One manager boasted of stabbing a child’s leg and arm with a fork; another recounted deliberately winding up a child so that he could physically assault him. No child deserves to suffer such abuse, no matter their past or present behaviour.

Local authorities are best placed to run secure 16-to-19 academies because they have experience of education, secure schools and, of course, the local social services that manage and support vulnerable young people. As I keep saying, it is entirely illogical to prevent local authorities from carrying out this work: it makes it harder to integrate services for children while they are in custody and when they return to the community.

The Minister has already argued, as Ministers in previous debates have, that nothing in the law prevents local authorities from running secure 16-to-19 academies. However, as Lord German said in the other place:

“At present, local authorities are excluded simply because there is a view that anything called an ‘academy’ in England cannot be run by a local authority, which seems to create an absolute block to the opportunity for everyone in these institutions to have the best opportunities for life and education.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 November 2021; Vol. 816, c. 271.]

It must be clearly stated in the law that local authorities can establish and maintain 16-to-19 academies. I believe—I look to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on the Front Bench—that the Opposition will divide the House on the amendment; that is how strongly we feel about it. If Government Members vote against it, what will the chilling effect on local authorities be?

The Minister could accept the amendment this evening without pressing it to a vote. It would then be very clear to local authorities that they are eligible to apply to run 16-to-19 academies. I plead with the Minister to do so, because his actions tonight will make the difference for local authorities thinking that they can apply to run such schemes. It must be really clearly stated in the law and in this debate that local authorities can establish and maintain such academies. I urge the Minister and his MPs to support the amendment to avoid another generation of children not getting the best wraparound services they all deserve.

[Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)]

May I say how pleased I am to see the Government bringing forward proposals to stamp out illegal hare coursing? It is an issue that I and many other rural MPs have campaigned on for the best part of a decade, not least as a result of the extreme violence shown by coursers in Cambridgeshire and many other rural parts of the country to those who try to stop them—farmers, local people and even police. The coursers show disregard for property rights and cause huge amounts of damage to crops and hedges.

[Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Djanogly]

I give way to my Huntingdonshire colleague.

[Shailesh Vara]

As a Cambridgeshire neighbour, I am well aware of the difficulties that the Bill seeks to put right. When the matter has been raised with the police, one of the main points that they make is that until now the legislation has had no teeth. When the Bill becomes law, hopefully they will have what they have always wanted. Does my hon. Friend agree that what we really need, once the Bill is on the statute book, is for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to ensure that the maximum penalties are inflicted on those who are found guilty, not only as punishment for them but to act as a powerful deterrent to others?

[Mr Djanogly]

I agree with my hon. Friend in every regard. He has made the important point that when legislation is on the statute book, it must be enforced. I think he will agree with me, given the experiences we have both had in talking to local police, that they seek this legislation, they are waiting for it and they will act on it, and no doubt we are both keen to see that happen.

Farmers have been complaining bitterly to me, with good cause. They have a tough enough job as it is without the worry of these coursing criminals. The basic problem is that the provisions of the Hunting Act 2004 often failed to work owing to their complexity, so prosecutors started to use the old 19th-century anti-poaching laws. While those worked evidentially, they failed to have the penalty clout that was required. Fines of tens or hundreds of pounds were pretty meaningless when there were dogs worth tens of thousands and gambling opportunities worth hundreds of thousands. I even heard that the coursing was being streamed into city pubs for gambling purposes. The problem then became worse, because the threat of intimidation was so high for farmers, versus a low penalty risk for the perpetrators, that many farmers did not want to become involved in prosecutions at all.

Now, with this legislation leading to higher levels of fines and confiscation orders, and the ability to charge for the detained dogs and their living costs, I think that we have a much better chance of significantly reducing coursing. Now, armed with these powers, rural police forces will be able to get to work against the perpetrators. I know that in Cambridgeshire they will have the support of all the county MPs, one of whom we have heard from this evening. All of them have been actively involved in this campaign. These anti-coursing measures represent a great example of the Government’s acting in the best interests of the countryside and the farming community to counter rural crime, and they have my full support.

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

I rise to support Lords amendment 1, commonly known as Harper’s Law, and to take this opportunity to welcome a number of key reforms introduced by the Bill while also highlighting areas in which I think we should go further.

Let me begin by commenting on what I consider to be the all too frequent yawning gap between what the public, on whose behalf justice is delivered, see as justice, and what the judicial system delivers. I do so conscious that the debate on sentencing has been polarised and distorted by a sort of intellectual snobbery towards anyone who makes the case for longer sentencing. Anyone who mentions this in polite circles, or to any number of think-tanks or charities involved in justice reform, will be met with variations of what is essentially the same disparaging attitude: “Oh, you must be part of the hang ’em and flog ’em brigade”—as if it were not valid or legitimate to say that justice is a social good, that it is served by punishment as well as rehabilitation, and that in some cases serving the social good is better achieved by an emphasis on punishment.

I noted with interest the comment from the family of Sarah Everard that the fact that the perpetrator was given a whole life term, rather than just a life sentence with a minimum period, was the only thing that gave them comfort. We do not often see that narrative in a documentary or a policy paper about justice. Do we really think that that was because the perpetrator was a policeman, although that was the reason in law that he was given a whole-life order—that if he had not been a policeman and had killed Sarah, her family would have been satisfied with a life sentence without a whole-life order? Of course it was not, I believe that their feelings would reflect those of most people who saw their loved one brutally murdered, whatever the circumstances, although very few of them would see a whole-life order as the outcome.

The term “life sentence” is misleading and is often misreported, and in my view it should be reformed. We must remember that the origins of our justice system were a result of our society saying, “You, as the individual and the family, cannot deliver your own justice. The courts will do it on your behalf.” The courts are therefore a servant of the public, and have a responsibility to ensure, at the very least, a broad alignment with what they would want. At present, when it comes to serious offences and hardened criminals, I do not think that they do. That is not to disparage judges; they operate largely within a framework of precedent which they cannot change, so we must recognise that it will take more intervention from us to break some of those precedents.

I would like to highlight child sex offences as another area where there is a yawning gap between what offenders are likely to receive and what the public would consider to be justice. This is not to say that rehabilitation and diversion are not important, and I welcome the measures in this Bill that will help to achieve that. Ultimately, in the longer term, that will lead to fewer victims of crime, but it will not happen overnight and we must ensure that justice is delivered to families and victims in the meantime. This Bill makes huge gains in that regard.