Preventing Crime and Delivering Justice

Layla Moran Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not give way; the right hon. Lady will have a chance to speak. [Interruption.] The right hon. Lady will have an opportunity to speak shortly. [Interruption.] If I may finish my point, I may come to her.

The other factor in terms of policing is the increase in the volume of digital evidence, and a vast amount of work is taking place across policing and the CPS now looking at how we can have an end-to-end approach across the criminal justice system to assess digital evidence. Also, for the first time the criminal justice system is now going to be held to account through performance scorecards through the crime and justice taskforce and also through the MOJ as well as the Home Office.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. Is she aware, among student victims of sexual assault, of the use of gagging clauses and non-disclosure agreements in university non-contact agreements? I am in touch with various victims, particularly from Oxford university. One college, Lady Margaret Hall, has now signed a pledge to no longer use these but none of the other colleges has. Will the right hon. Lady join me and the universities Minister, the right hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), in asking other colleges to do the same, and will she consider meeting me so that I can relay to her the thoughts of victims in these cases?

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. [Interruption.] I hear calls for more legislation from Labour Members, but, frankly, they also vote against all Government legislation. The hon. Lady raises a serious point. Through the crime and justice taskforce particularly, which is a cross-Government endeavour, the Education Secretary and other parts of Government are working with the MOJ to address and tackle these issues. The CPS has an important role to play here as well. I would be delighted to meet the hon. Lady and to speak to the universities Minister about this, because it is simply not right. Frankly, some of the practices being used are immoral, because they are effectively denying victims their right to have a voice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a free, fair and open society in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance and conformity.

Let us take poverty first. If there was one message that the people of this country sent the Government in the recent council elections, it was that they were struggling and needed help at this time of a cost of living crisis. When we compare that message with the contents of Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech, we see a Government who are not listening to what the people are asking them to do.

This is a Government who are more interested in stoking culture wars and opening past sores than in looking forward to a future on which we can all agree. We need only look at the way in which they are attacking our human rights. Promoting human rights is at the heart of what Liberal Democrats believe: it is in the DNA of our mission. What we have seen in the Queen’s Speech, however, is a replacement of the Human Rights Act with a so-called Bill of Rights that will weaken, limit and undermine our current human rights protections. I do not think that that is what people throughout the country have asked for, and it is certainly not their priority at the moment.

Let us now put aside what is in the speech, which is underwhelming, and look at what has been missed out completely. There is no law to make misogyny a hate crime, there is no reform of the criminal justice system that has failed women and girls in particular for far too long, and there is nothing for the 4.1 million victims of fraud.

I have had personal experience of fraud recently. My official Twitter account was hacked, and I found myself looking at my online self trying to flog PlayStation 5s to my unwitting Twitter followers. Luckily none of them took it on and no one was inconvenienced, but it took an age for me to regain control of my account. When we reported the incident to Action Fraud, I eventually received a phone call from—I must say—a lovely gentleman, who told me that of his team of four who, with him, comprised the entire support network, three were off with covid and the other was on holiday. I am pretty sure that I received the call because I was an MP and we had reported it because we were worried about security concerns.

I think that this omission says a great deal about the emphasis that the Government put on online crime, which is worth £27 billion a year. The Liberal Democrats do not believe that the provision in the Online Safety Bill is sufficient, which is why we are calling for the creation of an online crime agency to tackle illegal online content and activity effectively; but the Government, I am afraid, are not listening.

It is not just new legislation that is missing. I hope that some loose ends from the last Session will be tied up in this one, and I am thinking in particular of the Vagrancy Act. There was much celebration in all parts of the House when we finally consigned that Act to history, at least in theory, because in reality it has not yet been scrapped. The Government’s public consultation closed last week. I sincerely hope that the Act will not be in force this Christmas, and that we will no longer be a country which criminalises people simply for being homeless. I look forward to truly celebrating when that happens.

My campaign began when the issue was brought to my attention by Oxford students. When they were turfed out of clubs at a late hour they would have conversations with homeless people on the streets of Oxford, which was how they discovered that the Vagrancy Act was one of the measures used by the police to move them on.

Those students have now graduated, but another campaign is being run by new students on an issue that is really troublesome. I want to raise it in my speech today, and I sincerely hope it will find its way into one of the 38 Bills. It is a campaign to stop the use of gagging clauses for university students. This applies in particular to young women, because it is mainly young women who are the victims of this, and they are being encouraged to not speak out about their experiences of sexual assault in university. The prevalence of sexual violence among young women and girls is well known, and there are doughty campaigners on this on all sides of the House.

The group It Happens Here supports survivors of sexual violence at the University of Oxford, and it urged one survivor—I will call her Lucy—to come to me with her story. She has given me permission to tell her story today, to show just how widespread this issue is. She was assaulted in her college dorm room by her ex-partner, who lives in the same college. With support from the Oxford sexual abuse and rape crisis centre, she reported the assault to the police during the Easter holidays. On returning to the university, she was terrified that her assaulter would find out that she had reported him to the police and therefore try to hurt her again. On the advice of the crisis centre, she spoke to the principal of her college about putting in place measures to protect her.

Months went by. Eventually, the college set up what is known as a no-contact agreement. This banned both students from entering each other’s accommodations and set out separate times to enter the dining hall. That sounds perfectly sensible, except that the agreement was conditional—and by the way, breach of the condition would result in expulsion—on neither party making any information about the assault, the police case or the college publicly available in any way. That is shameful. These are Lucy’s own words:

“I signed it, feeling terrified that if I didn’t agree to it he would be able to enter my accommodation without any consequence. But I was incredibly upset about the effective gag clause. I was terrified of telling absolutely anyone anything, because what if college interpreted that as ‘publicly available’? I felt I couldn’t talk to anyone, my friends or my mental health support or my GP, because of it and felt very alone.”

This is not an isolated case. It Happens Here, the group supporting victims such as Lucy, has received testimony from survivors across several different colleges who are under similar gagging orders. I am aware of young women who are my constituents who are scared to talk to me directly about this because they are fearful that it would invoke the gagging clause and that they would be expelled. They fear that they have to choose between their voice and their future. The irony of this is that in cases of sexual violence, that discrepancy of power is at the core. It is not just about sex; it is about power. These young women have gone from a situation where they were robbed of their power into another situation where that power is again taken away, this time by the college.

I want to congratulate those survivors on having the courage to come forward to It Happens Here and to congratulate Lucy on coming to me, and I would urge others to do the same. I congratulate the Oxford student union, and especially Ffion Samuels, who have been brilliant at bringing these cases forward. I am pleased to report that Lady Margaret Hall, the college that Lucy attended, has now taken the important first step of signing a pledge committing never to use these types of non-disclosure agreements in cases of sexual misconduct, harassment or bullying. For this, it should be applauded, but it is shameful that it is the only Oxbridge college to have signed such a pledge. Some other universities have done so, but these agreements are rife in many other universities across the country.

I am grateful to the Universities Minister, who has called on all colleges to sign that pledge, and also to the Home Secretary who earlier today condemned such use of gagging clauses and agreed to meet me so that I could relay more stories of these victims. But for the survivors of sexual violence, delivering justice surely begins with allowing them to tell their story. We should be helping those victims to reclaim their power. These gagging clauses in the cases of sexual misconduct do nothing to help that. In fact, they do the exact opposite. They are immoral, they have no place in modern society, and I simply urge the Minister: please can we find a way to address this in this Parliament?