Angiolini Inquiry

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips]

I can give an example from this morning, when I met around 60 stakeholders from organisations that work with children, with women and girls, and with perpetrators—lots of civil society organisations and businesses. We were in Downing Street with the Prime Minister, but it was not an event that was about drinking warm wine and eating nibbles; it was a working event to look at how we actually implement things. I know that people criticise the delay in the strategy, and that is fair enough, but the strategy is a piece of paper. How we actually make it work is much more important to me, and that is why we are working on it with stakeholders and providers. I genuinely welcome engagement with Members in this House, but I have learned something over the years; if you don’t mind me saying, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have felt slightly gaslit when people tell me that the sky is blue but then every case I handle tells me something else.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The House is rightly united in horror at what happened to Sarah Everard and in sympathy for her family.

Returning to an earlier exchange about vetting, which I understand will be coming up in the next stage of the Angiolini process, can the Minister tell us whether it will examine the effect of extreme pornography online and of toxic masculinity influencers online, and whether there is any prospect that a vetting process would enable people to be, at the time of recruitment, spotted as having watched this stuff and commented favourably on it, even on the dark web?