Debate on the Address

Debate between Keith Vaz and Thomas Docherty

Wednesday 4th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. If he has not been to Calais, I suggest that he goes there. The problem is that the French clock off at 5 pm, so it is easy for people to know when the French authorities are not doing their job. He makes the case for better co-operation with the French authorities and for ensuring that our Home Secretary and the French Interior Minister can work together to deal with the problem.

The Gracious Speech always talks about other measures and I hope that those will include a toughening up of our policy on foreign national offenders. Currently, there are 10,695 foreign national offenders in our prisons costing us £300 million a year. The top three countries are Poland, Ireland and Jamaica. Two of those are EU countries; I cannot understand why an EU country cannot deal with these issues in a more productive way. I know that the issue is a concern to the Prime Minister because he said so when he gave evidence recently. It is vital that these countries take back their own citizens as quickly as possible. We must initiate legislation to make it a requirement that, at sentence, people produce their passports and declare their nationalities. What the Home Office says—there is a slight problem between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice—is that it does not know about nationality until much later. If we know about nationality at the beginning, we can start the process not of removal, but of looking at removal, much earlier.

I am sorry that no legislation is proposed on extradition. The hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) has led a brilliant campaign to protect two of her constituents, Mr and Mrs Dunham—British citizens who should not be in the United States of America and are there only because of a flawed extradition treaty. They are currently in detention and they are in great difficulties. There was an attempted suicide before they left the country. Despite the fact that America is our closest ally, I really think we should be talking to the Americans about ensuring that we can change this treaty, because what is going on is just not fair.

As for policing, I welcome the Bill on serious crime. Some £500 million of confiscation orders imposed on criminals in the past five years remains unpaid. The Mr Bigs—or Mr and Mrs Bigs—are getting away with not paying fines imposed by the courts. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has put forward some very reasonable suggestions, and I hope they will be included in the Bill. We should not allow criminals who benefit from the proceeds of crime to leave prison, and certainly not allow them to leave the country. We need to make sure that our system is joined up to prevent them from going before they pay out what the court has imposed on them.

The Government have radically changed the landscape of policing. I am not sure whether, at the end of the process, it will be as uncluttered as it was when they started. I know it is the Home Secretary’s wish that she declutter the landscape. I welcome the National Crime Agency and the College of Policing, which are incredibly important changes. I was present at the Police Federation conference when the Home Secretary made her speech which means that there is no need for legislation on the federation. After that speech, I decided that I would not want to meet her on a dark, wet night in Leicester, because it was certainly extremely brave. I was sitting next to Sir David Normington, and we thought it was too brave a speech to make, but in fact the Police Federation has shown that it can change. I hope that it will continue with the reform agenda and ensure that it becomes much more democratic. As the House knows, the Select Committee suggested that every police officer should get back £130 because there is £70 million in the bank accounts of the Police Federation and the local federations.

I am sorry there is not a health Bill to deal with sugar. Sugar, as we know, is a killer. I am glad to see that in the Tea Room we have now replaced some of the sugary biscuits with fruit at the point where we go to pay for our food. As a diabetic, I think it is extremely important that we save the Government some of the £10 million that we spend every year on dealing with this.

I welcome what is being done on violence against women. The Home Secretary has done a great job in trying to ensure that this work takes place. However, I feel that we missed an opportunity on female genital mutilation. The Prime Minister’s summit is on 22 July, and the Select Committee will probably report at the end of June. There are 24,000 women and girls at risk of FGM, and 66,000 have been subjected to it. I would have liked to see a Bill toughening up the responsibility on doctors to report this. I hope that the Select Committee’s report will be useful for the summit. The Government should look at their guidelines. Only yesterday, a woman was on the tarmac ready to be deported to Nigeria even though she said that if her children returned there they would be subject to FGM. In these cases, we should be very careful to make sure that people are not returned to a position that we would not like in which they are subjected to violence of this kind.

As the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition said, the whole House will welcome the modern slavery Bill. This practice is a curse that blights our society. As a modern state and the fourth richest country in the world, we should take a lead in dealing with it. When we did our inquiry into human trafficking, it was difficult to find victims who were prepared to come out and say they were victims. We must make sure that they are immune from prosecution under the Bill, because if they report what is happening we do not want them to then be prosecuted for being in that position. I am sure—because the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), has spoken often about this—that the Opposition will support what the Government are doing so that we can have a benchmark Bill that will truly be something of which the whole House can be proud.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This morning, the Downing street press office made available to the British and, indeed, international press a 100-plus page document that sets out in great detail every item in the Queen’s Speech, but Downing street is not making it available to Members of Parliament and it is not in the Vote Office. Is there anything you could do, Mr Speaker, to bring to the urgent attention of Downing street office holders the need to share the information with Parliament?