Defendant Anonymity

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunt]

The strongest argument is around the balance of harms. The complainant in a rape trial has anonymity, and everyone who has considered this issue in the past has come to a balanced judgment that it is therefore appropriate to give the defendant a degree of anonymity. Because of the way in which rape is reported, these will have been the considerations that have guided previous Governments and Oppositions, and previous parliamentarians, in their consideration of this issue.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The Minister has correctly described the views of the Select Committee, of which the Prime Minister was a member, in 2003. I was not serving on the Committee at that stage. He has set out the Government’s views very clearly today. Does this proposal exclude the possibility of the further research into false allegations that the Stern inquiry suggested? Is he dismissing the idea of further research altogether?

[Mr Blunt]

No, it does not. I am delighted to say that the right hon. Gentleman has provided me with a cue to begin the next part of my speech, which deals with that issue.

In taking our position forward, we will examine the question of section 44 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, which I understand has never been implemented. That section grants anonymity at the pre-charge stage to persons under 18 years old who are involved in criminal investigations, including suspects. It already provides a statutory equivalent for children and young persons to the measures that we have in mind for adults, and as such is linked to the present debate.

Now, for the benefit of the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and other hon. Members, I should add a final note on the question of research. As hon. Members will be aware, the director of analytical services in the Ministry of Justice has been asked to produce an independent assessment of the current research and statistics on defendant anonymity in rape cases. We are aiming to publish this report before the summer recess, in the week commencing 26 July. It will cover all the available research and statistics on the subject and is intended to inform the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is an enormous pleasure for me to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti), which I thought was excellent. I first met the hon. Gentleman on his first day on the House and I did what every old Member does to every young Member—no, not that! I asked him when he was going to give his maiden speech, and I kept asking him week after week. He said that he was going to save it for a really important debate and he was right to do so. He spoke with great eloquence and enormous passion about his constituency. He cleverly named all three local newspapers, the leader and deputy leader of his council and his local football team, and he becomes, of course, the most famous graduate of Chatham grammar school for girls. That kind of story is almost new Labour.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will make a huge contribution to this House. We on the Opposition Benches and, I am sure, Members on his side look forward to his eloquence in future debates. I wish him well in what I am sure will be a long parliamentary career. He was right to mention Paul Clark. Paul—or Mr Clark, or whatever we call former Members of the House—had a very small majority. We would have been delighted if Paul had won again, but the hon. Gentleman has turned the majority into five figures. We wish Paul Clark well in his career; he was a very popular Member and was admired and liked on both sides of the House.

This debate, like all debates in the House, is very important. I am speaking only because the Home Affairs Committee has been mentioned on numerous occasions. The Prime Minister has mentioned the deliberations of the Select Committee in 2003, when he was a member, and Members on both sides of the House have referred to that, so I felt it appropriate to inform the House of what the Select Committee decided when it conducted an investigation into this important matter seven years ago.

The Prime Minister was a member of the Committee at that stage, but I did not know until my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) mentioned it in her intervention that he was not present when the evidence was taken. However, as a former member, she will know that it is not vital to be there when evidence is taken so long as one is part of deliberations on the proceedings. I say that in the presence of one new member of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood). We look forward to the Government’s tabling the order to set up the Select Committee so that we can meet and start to discuss these matters—I know that the Minister is no longer a Whip, so he has no control over these matters. This is certainly one of the issues that we will want to consider.

The hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham came up with the crucial point that was perhaps missing from the Minister’s speech. Why is it necessary to extend anonymity just for those who have been accused of rape up until the time of charge? That is what the Select Committee said and I will read verbatim from our recommendations in the course of my speech. It is necessary for those cases in which people feel that they are falsely accused and turn out to be falsely accused, and the huge level of publicity that occurs as a result of such cases. In a sense, we should include the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport and the shadow Minister in these discussions, because what concerns Members of this House who are worried about the issue is the fact that people can make false accusations and as a result whole lives can be destroyed—not just the lives of the people who have been falsely accused but those of their families, too.

As the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), said in what I thought was the finest speech that she has given in this House on any subject, these are important issues that need to be discussed and explored properly. That is why I think that the Government should pause, having stated their position clearly, as the Minister has. There is a need to pause, because this decision has implications not just for rape cases but for the whole criminal justice system.

I would probably be described as a conservative with a small c, because I believe passionately that those who are falsely accused are also victims. I do not mean those who are acquitted because there is not sufficient evidence, but those who are maliciously—I think that this point was made—falsely accused of rape or any other crime or misdemeanour. It is a terrible thing to be falsely accused when those accusations are not put to the relevant person and they are not given a chance properly to respond. Unfortunately, that is how the criminal justice system works at the moment.

We need to think very carefully before we make any extension. I am not saying that the Government have not made their case, because, as I shall show when I read out the Select Committee’s recommendations, it is entirely in accordance with what the Committee recommended in 2003. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley, who has read the transcripts will correct me if I am wrong, but I understand that the decision was unanimous. Given the personalities who have sat on the Home Affairs Committee in the past 10 years, including our most distinguished former member, the Prime Minister, it is quite difficult to get unanimity, especially on issues of this kind, so we should not dismiss absolutely what the Committee said in 2003. Indeed, we should use it as the basis for a period of wider consultation.

[Mr Blunt]

Perhaps I should be clear about the consultative process. We will not be having a period of formal consultation with all that that entails, but we will have a process whereby people will be able to contribute and listen. When we put out our research analysis, there will be another opportunity for that. If we need to go down the statutory route, there will not, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, be an immediate opportunity to do so.

[Keith Vaz]

That is most helpful. I am not sure whether the Minister has given us a timetable for the consultation period, but perhaps his colleague, the other Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), will do so when he winds up. The Minister has given a timetable for the independent study into research that he is conducting, although I am not sure how independent that research will be if it is done by a director at the Ministry of Justice. If it is to be called an independent inquiry, it might be appropriate for it to be done by a former High Court judge or a serving judge rather than a civil servant—not that I cast any aspersions on the officials in my former Department, who were all fine people. They have all the minutes from previous Ministers’ meetings, so we must never cast aspersions on our former civil servants. The inquiry probably will not be as independent as one would hope, and I hope that the Minister will reconsider that issue.

I am with the Minister, however, regarding the fact that someone will be looking at the research that has been conducted or that will be conducted in the next few weeks. That is what the Stern inquiry suggested—proper, appropriate research into the false allegations issue—and that will be helpful.

[Geraint Davies]

Does my right hon. Friend feel that there is an equivalence between the sort of case being discussed, in which someone is accused and found innocent, and someone being raped? We seem to be making out that there is some sort of equivalence, but surely there is not.

[Keith Vaz]

No, there is not an equivalence—that takes the debate in the wrong way, and we need to be careful and temperate in the language that we use. There is no equivalence, but we should not forget those who are falsely and maliciously accused but have not committed an offence of that kind. The newspapers revel in reporting allegations about offences of a sexual nature because it titillates the editorial writers in our tabloid papers. We should not forget how awful it is for someone to have a malicious rumour spread against them, but that is in no way equivalent to the rape of a man a woman, which is a terrible crime. I think that all hon. Members in the House agree on that.

Let me read the recommendations of the Select Committee in 2003. I shall not read all of them—just the couple that are relevant to what we are discussing. The Committee said:

“On balance, we are persuaded by the arguments in favour of extending anonymity to the accused. Although there are valid concerns about the implications for the free reporting of criminal proceedings, we believe that sex crimes do fall ‘within an entirely different order’ to most other crimes. In our view, the stigma that attaches to sexual offences—particularly those involving children—is enormous and the accusation alone can be devastating. If the accused is never charged, there is no possibility of the individual being publicly vindicated by an acquittal.”

The second relevant recommendation is:

“We therefore recommend that the reporting restriction, which currently preserves the anonymity of complainants of sexual offences, be extended to persons accused of those offences. We suggest, however, that the anonymity of the accused be protected only for a limited period between allegation and charge. In our view, this strikes an appropriate balance between the need to protect potentially innocent suspects from damaging publicity and the wider public interest in retaining free and full reporting of criminal proceedings.”

From what the Minister said today, I gather that is what the Government are suggesting. Even though I was not chairing the Committee at the time, it would be totally churlish for me to say that the Select Committee got it wrong.

[Ms Bagshawe]

Can the right hon. Gentleman confirm that the recommendations he read out referred to all sexual offences, including those involving children, and rape was not in fact singled out?

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, which is why I would be keen for the Committee to revisit the issue. I shall try to make a deal on the Floor of the House with the Minister, if he is open to deals. As a former Whip, I am sure he is used to such things. A member of the Select Committee is in the Chamber. The Committee has not yet met although it will do so for the first time next week if the Government table the motion that sets us up—I cannot think why the Government have not yet set up the Select Committees.

Will the Government please give us the opportunity to examine defendant anonymity again, in the light of what was said in 2003, in the light of their proposals and in the light of the fact that there will not be the all singing and dancing consultation that my hon. Friend the shadow Minister wanted? Will the Government give us the opportunity to look at the evidence that civil servants at the Ministry of Justice are preparing? Let us deliberate so that we can come back to the House, perhaps this year—if the Committee agrees; I am not trying to get the Committee to do anything, because it is a Committee decision—with a firm set of proposals that the whole House can discuss, rather than rushing things through. That would allow the whole House to deliberate and would enable us to look at what we said in the past in the light of the evidence of the past seven years.

Others will come to the House in future and say that if we extend anonymity for a particular offence, we must look at the whole criminal justice system and extend it for other offences. There is a powerful argument for doing that, so that such matters are kept before the courts, and not decided by the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Sometimes, newspapers trash people’s reputations in a way that no court proceedings could do—I am not speaking personally of course.

I hope that the Government will think again. Perhaps when the Minister winds up, he will give Parliament the opportunity to examine these matters more carefully.