Child Sexual Abuse (Independent Panel Inquiry)

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The hon. Lady raises an important point. In a sense, this inquiry is like no other before it in terms of the subject matter it is dealing with, and it must obviously maintain the confidence of survivors. Information and communication will be an important issue for the inquiry panel, and I certainly intend that to be addressed by the chairman at an early stage.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I thank the Home Secretary for her obvious commitment to getting this inquiry right. People are concerned that there has not been enough co-ordination between the different police investigations around the country—that comes up time and again. In her statement she mentioned Simon Bailey’s work in charge of Operation Hydrant. As she said, his job is to follow up any lead that the inquiry uncovers, and to be responsible for recording all referrals from the inquiry that relate to criminal abuse. Will she reassure the House that Simon Bailey’s job will involve ensuring proper co-ordination between those inquiries, and that there is not just a liaison with the inquiry but between the various police outfits that are already up and running?

[Mrs May]

I can give my hon. Friend that reassurance. At an earlier stage, Chief Constable Simon Bailey raised with me his concern to ensure that investigations are properly joined up between police forces, and that information that might be helpful to an investigation in one force is not held by another force and not passed on. Part of his work in Operation Hydrant will be to co-ordinate all child sexual abuse investigations that concern people of public prominence or institutional settings, and he will also consider the responses from police forces to the inquiry to ensure that they are of suitable quality.

Historical Child Sex Abuse

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

We have heard two interesting speeches, one of them particularly emotional, which is understandable. Anyone who has worked, as I have, for some considerable time in this area will have great difficulty not getting emotional about it. One needs only to hear the stories.

The hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) appeared to start from the 1970s, so I would refer him to a period before that. A film appeared on BBC2—it is still available—called “Hunting Britain’s Paedophiles”. It was produced by a man called Bob Long, who followed the Metropolitan police paedophile unit, tracking a gang that had run its own institution of dance studios and the like since 1959. Members of that gang were finally put away earlier this century. They used manuals and induced the kids, and the number of children involved over 40 or 50 years would have been vast. However, that was the start of a real rethink, resulting in the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which brought grooming into the picture. At that stage, and still to a degree, this country was ahead of anywhere else in the world on that particular aspect of dealing with this problem.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) was involved in that as a Minister, and many of us worked in the background. He talked about the high-profile cases. I am bothered that in concentrating on those cases, we may be missing thousands—and there will be thousands—of children elsewhere who have been abused over many years by gangs. We have got to be broad, and the advantage of dealing with the high-profile cases is that it makes it absolutely sure that it will appear in the media and in people’s minds, which has a positive effect.

Coming right back to the title of today’s debate, I find it interesting that so soon after the commencement of this historical child sex abuse inquiry, today’s debate is looking at progress. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary bravely anticipates an initial report before Christmas. In addition, the Home Office says that it does not expect a full report before the next election.

It is worth looking at the Northern Ireland Assembly, which set up a similar inquiry into child sexual abuse in Northern Ireland’s institutions. The population of Northern Ireland is much less than here, the number of institutions is much smaller and the terms of reference much narrower—perhaps, after recent accusations, too narrow. The inquiry commenced in January 2012. I have not followed its progress carefully but I understand that the first part, interviewing witnesses behind closed doors, will be complete by Christmas. Educated guesses are that the report for this much smaller inquiry will come out in 2016, 2017 or later.

We need to decide whether we want a speedy inquiry that comes forward with possibly predictable things that we already have and with no depth, or exactly the opposite, in which case the inquiry will go on for years. Our inquiry is much broader, potentially involving vast numbers of institutions and others. Many of these will wish to hide, and are capable of hiding, past sexual abuse. We will not catch them all; we will not get to the bottom of it all; but we might get enough from those we look at to bring about some dramatic changes to build on what has already happened.

I first became interested in legislation relating to protecting children from abuse and enabling the better prosecution of abusers, particularly child sex abusers, many years ago. My interest resulted from the shock of a day spent with the Metropolitan police paedophile unit, which would completely shake anyone, unless they had the tendencies. At that time, it was the leading unit in the country and probably still is, alongside the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. CEOP and the Met unit work in the same area of protection, but act differently: one can arrest, the other cannot.

At the time, the head of the Met unit was DCI Bob McLachlan—a very tough character. His unit was small, especially in comparison with the current Met unit, but it had a much broader geographical link, look and vista, including overseas, than one would expect for a Met unit.

Years ago, I asked Bob McLachlan how many active paedophiles he and his team thought there were in this country. He said that, in about the year 2000, he and his team had undertaken an exercise on just that subject, and had estimated that there were 230,000 active paedophiles—enough, he said, for there to be one in every street in the country. He also said that 20% of those paedophiles were women, and that half of them—that is, 10%—were women who actively took part in the abuse, sometimes of their own accord rather than being goaded. In those days it was hard to prosecute female abusers because juries would not believe that females were capable of abuse, but cases that have arisen over the last few years have proved that they are. Predominantly, they seem to act in institutions, but we should be very aware that that is not always the case. Given the huge progress of the internet and the “dark web”, there must have been a large increase in the number of paedophiles since 2000. Bob’s figure of 230,000 was a guesstimate.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a fascinating but also very depressing speech. Does he share my concern about sentencing? A high-profile figure in my community was found in possession of 50,000 of the most extreme images imaginable. He went to jail, but came out after nine months, and received no rehabilitation of any sort. It is inconceivable that he does not now pose a threat to children in my community, and there are probably 200 or 300 people like him on my patch alone.

[Sir Paul Beresford]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The Law Officers in the present Government have chased many of these individuals, and they have a list. However, what we need is an inquiry—conducted by the Attorney-General rather than the Home Office—into the sentences imposed, compared with those that are available.

My hon. Friend spoke of 50,000 indecent images. Judging by many cases that I have looked into, 50,000 is a drop in the ocean. Some of these individuals have hundreds of thousands of images, which may run into the millions. What they do with them is beyond me, but they have them, and we have changed the law so that we can now have access to them. They may not be accessible because they have been encrypted, but another recent change in the law, which I initiated, means that these individuals can be sent to jail for failing to allow the encryption to be broken.

I did not ask Bob, the policeman, for a definition of “paedophile”. Perhaps I should have, because there are various definitions. For the purposes of the inquiry, it needs to be recognised that the vast majority of child abuse, and child sex abuse, happens in families—including extended families—and not in institutions. The inquiry should not forget, and we should not forget, that there is more going on outside institutions than inside them. Having said that, however, I should add that, historically as well as today, predatory paedophiles—both male and female—can and do use institutions in which they are in a position of trust as their field of operations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Zac Goldsmith]

I am sorry to interrupt—I will make a speech shortly—but I have spoken to members of the Jigsaw team in my patch and other areas. My hon. Friend is right to say that there is monitoring afterwards, but talk to any member confidentially and they will say that they are not satisfied with the current regime. They feel that they have an impossible task because of the sheer number of people they have to monitor. There are incidents all the time relating to people who are supposed to be monitored by Jigsaw teams. A tiny number of police officers are monitoring a vast number of very dangerous people. It is not a satisfactory situation at all.

[Sir Paul Beresford]

I completely agree. I have talked to some of the Jigsaw team, too. It is putting together a programme of suggestions that it will bring to the Home Office. Perhaps my hon. Friend can join me and we can use my subtle-ish methods of sliding legislative changes through, so that the Home Office will agree and we can put them through. That is why we have ten-minute rule Bills and private Members’ Bills. It is possible to put such changes through. It does make one vulnerable to accusations from the BBC—recently I put a piece of legislation through that was on the Floor of the House for just 17 minutes because everybody agreed on it, and I think everybody will on this area, too.

It is probable that the inquiry will rehash lessons already learned, but not always acted upon. The legislation that is in place has also not always been acted upon, partly because many of the non-specialist police officers do not know what is available.

I hope we will relax a little over the inquiry, and let it get on with the job. It is a big job that will take a long time, and we should leave the inquiry team alone for a while to get on with it. Having said that, I want to repeat my small inquiry to the Minister, who is half-listening on the Front Bench: that team is excellent, but it does not include a police officer or ex-police officer, and I can recommend one or two if I am asked—and I am willing to be asked.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) for securing the debate, along with the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt), who cannot be here today for good reason. The hon. Gentleman made a powerful case, and I would not want him to be on my case under any circumstances because he is a formidable campaigner.

I do not want to go into too many of the specifics of the abuse allegations, as that would not be appropriate for today, but I do want to emphasise the scale of the allegations. The Westminster paedophile ring, which has now become a murder investigation; Jimmy Savile; children’s homes; the Church; Rochdale; the grooming scandals in Rotherham: it goes on and on and on. There is the Elm guest house, too, which is in my constituency, and the reason why I am here today—and it is also the reason why I became aware of these horrific events.

I also want to emphasise how important this inquiry is and why its nature, form, structure, remit and credibility matter so very much. We now know that there have been systematic cover-ups. Powerful people have done terrible things and they have been protected, and unsurprisingly many of the victims left behind are struggling today to believe that that same establishment is on their side. Frankly, it has not been for many, many years.

We need only consider the Elm guest house in Barnes, which was run by Haroon and Carole Kasir. It was raided more than 30 years ago, back in 1982. The couple were fined and given suspended sentences for running a disorderly house, but at the time there were already questions and allegations around the abuse of young children at the house. Allegedly—we are reliably told this—12 boys gave evidence in 1982 that they had been abused, yet all these allegations simply evaporated at the time, some 30 years ago. They are only resurfacing now.

When Mrs Kasir died a few years after the house was raided, in very odd circumstances, a child protection campaigner from the National Association Of Young People In Care called for a criminal investigation into events at Elm guest house. He said he had been told by Mrs Kasir that boys had been brought in from a local children’s home—Grafton Close, also in Richmond—for sex, and that she had photographs of establishment figures at her hotel. One of them apparently showed a former Cabinet Minister in a sauna with a naked boy. She had logbooks, names, times, dates, pictures of her customers and so on. All that evidence simply disappeared after the raids and no longer exists. That is astonishing.

The Met has since confirmed that Cyril Smith visited the place—the hon. Member for Rochdale has made this point—and at least three other men named in documents as visitors to the Elm guest house were later convicted of multiple sexual offences against children. It is impossible to believe there was not a cover up. This is not sloppiness; there has to be more to it than that.

Then this week it emerged that a former news editor of one of my local papers, the Surrey Comet, had been prevented from making inquiries into the Elm guest house in 1984 after he was issued with a D notice by the Government. It goes on and on and on.

We all know about the famous Dickens dossier, a long list of names of abusers that was handed into the then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, in 1983. That dossier, too, has vanished. The Wanless review was established to look into its whereabouts. It has been inconclusive on many levels, but it refers to a letter that Leon Brittan, then Home Secretary, wrote in reply to Mr Dickens on 20 March 1984. It states that a dossier of letters provided by Mr Dickens was passed to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and that,

“in the view of the DPP, two”

of these cases

“could form the basis for enquiries by the police and have been passed to the appropriate authorities.”

There is no evidence of those letters now. How is that even possible? How is it possible for those trails to evaporate in that way?

Things have moved on, and today the Met is investigating allegations that at least three young boys were murdered by this depraved network of VIP and MP paedophiles. Operation Midland is the name of the investigation. On the back of that, a retired magistrate, Vishambar Mehrotra, the father of eight-year-old Vishal, who disappeared in 1981 and whose body was found a year later in West Sussex, has come forward to say that at the time of his son’s disappearance he was contacted by a male prostitute who told him that his son had probably been killed by VIP paedophiles linked to Elm guest house. He recorded that conversation and took it to the police, but nothing happened. Again, the evidence just evaporated.

Linked to that, two former Scotland Yard detectives who had investigated allegations of the murder of young boys more than 30 years ago have recently said on record that they were instructed to stop their investigations at the time. This all sounds unbelievable, but who now among us or outside this place would want to suggest that there have been no conspiracies? Who would just dismiss this stuff as fantasy? A few years ago, we probably all would have done so, but not nowadays.

[Ian Lucas]

When the Waterhouse inquiry, a judicial inquiry, took place, allegations were made relating to politicians and paedophile networks in north Wales. Does the hon. Gentleman not find it extraordinary that none of the information to which he is referring appears to have been considered by that inquiry?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I have only the patchiest knowledge of the case that the hon. Gentleman has just described, so I cannot really comment on it, but we could sit here for hours swapping examples of important evidence that has disappeared and of leads that have not been followed up.

When we see some of the stories that we now know to be true, it is not hard to understand why there are pockets of conspiracy. I am not convinced that there is a grand, overarching conspiracy, but there are without a doubt lots of pockets of conspiracy and cover-up, and that has been happening over the past few decades. We know, for example, that a former deputy director of MI6, Sir Peter Hayman, was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange. That is not disputed. We know that he was investigated in 1978 for having grotesque images in his possession. We also know that absolutely nothing happened with that evidence.

Thanks to the new Operation Cayacos, we also know about the convicted paedophile, Peter Righton, whom the hon. Member for Rochdale has mentioned in many contexts. He was once regarded as a leading child protection specialist in this country, but he ran a sophisticated network of abusers. When he was raided in 1992, 25 years-worth of correspondence between him and other paedophiles was found, but again the leads just dried up. I could provide endless similar examples—I suspect that many other Members could do the same—but I hope that I have already made my point. I will not dwell on the examples any further.

This is why the inquiry is so important, and why we must bend over backwards to ensure that it is credible even to those who are most suspicious of it, particularly the survivors who have direct experience of cover-ups and are unwilling to blanket-trust the establishment and the authorities to be on their side.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman has only been in the Chamber for a few minutes. The debate has been going on for some considerable time. The normal convention is that Members should be in the Chamber to hear more of the debate—rather than just a few minutes of the current speech—before they intervene. The hon. Gentleman is returning to the House and he should know the courtesies of the House well. He should not need to be reminded of them.

[Zac Goldsmith]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) is welcome to intervene on me whenever the appropriate time comes.

I want to give the House some specific information relating to the inquiry that we are talking about. I also have some questions and suggestions for the Home Secretary and for the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), who is here in her place. First, we need to know that the Home Office has instructed all Ministries and Government agencies—including the security services, the NHS, police forces, local authorities and schools—not to destroy any documents that are even remotely connected to child sex abuse. I might be wrong, but I believe that if this were a statutory inquiry, that would already have been done. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to that important point.

The Home Secretary has been firm about the security services needing to hand over evidence, but she has not explained how that has or will be done. This may not even be necessary, but it is worth considering empowering the inquiry to compel the security services to hand over information in the event that that becomes necessary. The selection of the inquiry chair has been discussed, but it is crucial. I accept that whoever the chair is they will be the chair of a panel and the panel as a whole will have a role to play. I would like to understand better exactly how the chair will be selected, how MPs are going to be consulted on that and how survivors are going to be consulted. I very much hope the panel will have a role in the chair’s selection.

There are fears, some of which have been expressed today, that the police lack adequate resources to carry out the necessary investigations, particularly now that this has moved into a murder inquiry. I know that the police inquiries have already moved up quite a few notches since this inquiry was announced, and I do not think that is a coincidence. I believe that police numbers on Operation Fernbridge and associated investigations have grown from seven to 40 in the past few months, which is very good news. I hope that trend continues and that the police are given all the resources they need to get to the bottom of this, once and for all.

Historically, however, the police have been part of the story, just as MPs, celebrities and everyone else has been, and it is imperative that people coming forward have absolute confidence that they will be heard and that leads will be correctly followed up. So, following on from the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), it must be made clear how the inquiry that will be looking at the processes—the cover-ups—will handle allegations and ensure that they are picked up properly by the appropriate police force.

[Julian Smith]

I have had experience in my constituency recently of working with a victim and the police were asking the victim I was trying to help for details of the conversations she had had with me. We still face a major issue with some elements in the police of interference and of a lack of understanding of the relationship between an MP and others, independent of the work that they are doing.

[Zac Goldsmith]

My hon. Friend makes the point well and puts it on the record.

[Sir Paul Beresford]

I want to intervene on the intervention, because I have been in the same situation as that described by my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), and it was part of the police process of gathering evidence. I saw it in a positive way because the lady may not have told the police what she told me and I gave a full statement which added to what they already had. I saw it positively, not negatively.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I am going to bring my remarks to a close. We have a chance now to put these appalling wrongs right. That is partially thanks to intervention by people in this House and people outside it. Survivors have played a crucial role, but so, too, did the intervention in this House by the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson). That was crucial in shifting this process forward, as was the exposé of Cyril Smith by the hon. Member for Rochdale. Above all, I wish to pay tribute to the extraordinary work by the investigative journalists at Exaro, particularly David Hencke. That organisation has led the campaign on so many fronts. The mainstream press, who have been so slow to pick up on what is really happening in this scandal, have become heavily dependent, and rightly so, on Exaro. I sometimes feel that because it is online and does not have the magazine on people’s desks, it is somehow invisible to people who are not paying attention. But Exaro is crucial; David Hencke has encyclopaedic knowledge of something that I do not ever want to have encyclopaedic knowledge of, and he is an extraordinary figure.

There can no longer be any doubt that powerful people have done terrible things and that they have been protected by the establishment. We know that some of the key figures are alive today, and the measure of success for the police investigations is that those people face justice before they die. This process really needs to happen now. Justice must be done and it must be seen to be done. It is no good waiting years and years for some of these people to fade away and be punished in their absence—that is not good enough. The measure of success for this inquiry is that we and the wider public understand how these conspiracies and cover-ups have been able to happen. Only by understanding how they form will we have any hope of preventing them from forming again.

[Sir Paul Beresford]

My hon. Friend has touched on the key point. The key point we have to learn, which we have been learning, using and considering in the changes to legislation, is that we must be proactive. We have to get the individuals before they get the children.

[Zac Goldsmith]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

Let me end by putting it on the record that I am grateful to the current Home Secretary for having had the courage to initiate this process. She is often described as having been bullied and hectored by a bunch of MPs, but, as someone who has done a lot of lobbying on the subject in the four and a half years that I have been here, I can say that it was not difficult to get her to act. She gets the importance of the issue. I do not doubt her absolute commitment and believe that she will leave no stone unturned in getting to the bottom of the matter.

Wanless Review

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

Yes, it absolutely will. As I have said, the inquiry will be comprehensive when it comes to the institutions it looks at. It will look at state and non-state institutions, because there have clearly been failures not only in state-run care homes, for example, but in other areas of life, such as the Church. The review will be comprehensive.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

The Home Secretary has rightly pointed out that the report identifies no clear evidence of cover-up, but I want to draw her attention to a reference it makes to a letter that the then Home Secretary wrote in reply to Mr Dickens on 20 March 1984. It states that a dossier of letters provided by Mr Dickens was passed to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and that, as the review states,

“in the view of the DPP, two could form the basis for enquiries by the police and have been passed to the appropriate authorities.”

If that is true, it is very hard to understand how there can be no evidence of those letters. That is exactly the kind of loose end that the inquiry will have to resolve if it is to have any credibility at all with victims and the wider public.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. It is precisely those sorts of issues that have led people to query what has happened, question the attitude taken to these matters and ask the very question he raises about why there do not seem to have been any prosecutions off the back of it. Wanless and Whittam were specifically asked to look at how the police and prosecuting authorities dealt with any reference that had been made from the Home Office because, as I said earlier, in my view it is not good enough for the Home Office to say, “Well, we’ve reviewed what the Home Office did.” We need to know what happened to the evidence that the Home Office passed on. It is in looking at what further action was taken that I have gone back to Wanless and Whittam in the letter I sent them today.

Criminal Law

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. He is prescient because it was a point to which I was coming soon in my speech, and it is an important statistic. Sometimes people think that the European arrest warrant is just used to extradite United Kingdom citizens from the United Kingdom, but that is not the case.

Hon. Members have expressed concerns about people being charged with offences over and above those specified in their arrest warrant if they consent to extradition, so we have lifted the requirement that individuals lose their right to “speciality protection” when they consent to extradition. Those changes have been made in UK law, and came into effect earlier this year. They are already making an important difference to the operation of the arrest warrant.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

The concept of proportionality is hard to define and therefore hard to understand. The Home Secretary has already given examples of cases that have been refused on the basis that they are too trivial. Can she give an example of the least serious offence where extradition has been possible since July?

[Mrs May]

I do not have a list of all the European arrest warrants that have been refused, but there are two steps to the proportionality decision. The first is an administrative decision taken by the National Crime Agency as the body that initially receives the request. Then there is the possibility for the courts to make a determination about proportionality, and they will consider a variety of issues. It is not a tick-box approach; the courts will make judgments not just about the nature of the crime but about the nature of the disposal available in the other member state in relation to that crime, so that they can decide whether the arrest warrant is appropriate.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) indicated that the vast majority of people extradited from the UK—more than 95%—are foreign nationals. They include suspects wanted for 124 murders, more than 100 rapes, nearly 500 serious assaults and seven terrorism cases. In the same period, the arrest warrant has been used to return 647 people to this country to face justice. The list includes 51 suspected killers, 80 suspected paedophiles, 46 suspected violent thugs, and one suspected terrorist.

UK Drugs Policy

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on being nominated, and I am sure he will win next time. His point is incredibly important. Until now, politicians often thought that they were reflecting public opinion, but they are now massively behind it, as the poll in The Sun absolutely demonstrates.

It strikes me that a time of austerity, with the Government seemingly looking under every last stone to find money to save, is an odd time not to consider drugs policy, given that so much money is invested in the current drugs regime. Yet drugs policy seems to be completely divorced from the usual considerations about public spending and the good use of taxpayers’ money, and we simply have no proper public mechanism for knowing whether the money spent on the so-called war on drugs has been put to good effect.

No one now buys alcohol in unmarked bottles from the back of a pub—that would be dangerous and unnecessary—but for 40 years we have left our children to do exactly that with drugs. There is no denying that drug misuse has the potential to wreck lives, but surely it is time to be honest about the damage caused by the drug laws, which can cause a proliferation of criminality and public harm. The entire drugs trade has been handed over to the worlds’ racketeers and gangsters. The drugs market has soared, and that has brought untold misery. Essentially, the current market is almost wholly uncontrolled.

From speaking to young people in my constituency, it is clear that many of them can get hold of drugs far more easily than alcohol, which is surely wrong. When someone tries to get hold of alcohol, they at least have to show an ID card if they are thought to be under age. Drug dealers do not care about someone’s ID or anything else; they care only about their profits. I believe that the current policy is based on a deliberate ignorance about the effect of drugs.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate, and on her extraordinary petition, which has 130,000 signatures. I understand that 20% of people who have taken heroin said that they got it for the first time in jail. If we cannot control drugs in jail, how on earth are we supposed to control them on our streets?

[Caroline Lucas]

That is an extremely good point. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his very helpful intervention, which speaks for itself.

If we are to design a better drugs policy that is based on evidence, we need to agree on the objectives of drugs policy. For me, it is about protecting people, particularly the young and vulnerable, as well as reducing crime, improving health, promoting security and development, providing good value for money and protecting human rights. In setting out why that is important, I will say a little more about the impact of the current drugs policy and why I believe it adds to the case for a review; I will talk a little about the growing consensus on rethinking the current approach to drugs policy; and I will say a little about Brighton and Hove, where my constituency is situated, where the approach of following the evidence as far as possible has delivered benefits.

Before doing any of that, I would like to talk about Martha. Martha’s mother, Anne-Marie Cockburn, is in Parliament with us today. Like so many parents, she had always wanted to protect her child. However, on 20 July 2013, she learned that that was not always possible. On that day, Martha swallowed half a gram of MDMA powder—ecstasy—and died. She was 15 years old. Today, 30 October, would have been Martha’s 17th birthday. She is not celebrating that birthday because the Misuse of Drugs Act did not protect her. Making MDMA illegal did not protect Martha. We owe it to her and to Anne-Marie, and to the many other people who have died drug-related deaths and their families and loved ones, to ensure that in future each and every one of us is offered the best possible protection by our drugs laws.

In her incredibly moving blog, “What Martha Did Next”, Anne-Marie writes:

“Had Martha known that what she was about to take was 91% pure, she would probably have taken a lot less, in fact I’d go as far as to say that she might still be alive.”

Anne-Marie argues that, under prohibition, it is impossible fully to educate people such as Martha, because there is no way to tell what drugs contain. Prohibition has not stopped risk-taking, but it has made those risks much more dangerous. Anne-Marie suggests that we are failing to protect children such as Martha—that we are letting them down—and that, alongside deterring young people from taking drugs, we need a regulatory model that reduces the risk if drugs do get into the hands of young people such as Martha.

I agree with Anne-Marie. Perhaps many people in the Chamber will not. However, the fact that Martha is not celebrating her 17th birthday today is surely the first of many good reasons to carry out an impact assessment of our drugs laws. We urgently need to know whether prohibition is an obstacle to education about drugs, and whether our children would be better protected by alternatives, such as strict regulation. Despite all the accusations that are thrown at those who are in favour of drug policy reform, the bottom line is that it is not about being pro-drugs, but about saving lives. The only credible way to do that is to know whether our policies are up to the job.

That is especially important because there is powerful evidence that the so-called war on drugs is making things worse. Far from being neutral, in many instances the current model pushes users towards more harmful products, behaviours and environments. Let me give two examples of what I mean. In doing so, it is crucial to distinguish between the suffering that is caused by drugs and that which is caused by drugs policy.

First, the vast majority of drug-related offending happens not because people take drugs, but because of drugs policy. Users are driven to burglary and theft to buy drugs at vastly inflated prices in an unregulated market. There is enormous potential significantly to reduce such crime and its impact on our communities under a different system.

Secondly, on legal highs, according to research into synthetic drugs by Demos and the UK Drug Policy Commission, 40 new substances emerged on to the market in 2010, compared with 24 in the previous year. By 2014, the figure had grown to 80 different synthetic drugs. Professor Les Iversen, the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, recently admitted that drug control legislation is being forced to play “cat and mouse”. Such substances are routinely banned under the Misuse of Drugs Act, but that simply spawns more substances that, in turn, are banned. The legal process cannot keep up.

The Government have published a report today that recommends that all novel synthetic psychoactive substances, or legal highs as they are more widely known, be banned. I appreciate what they are trying to do with that policy, but I think that it is misguided. It fails to appreciate that many legal highs are the products of prohibition. Synthetic cannabis, for example, would not exist if there were a legally regulated supply of real cannabis. Nor does the policy recognise our knowledge that prohibition—in other words, banning things—does not stop people taking drugs, but simply increases the risks.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hancock]

The hon. Gentleman is for ever bringing us his experience and the House should welcome that. Once again, he has touched on a very important point: careers are being thrown away because of the attitude of the Army, in his case, and of other organisations, which have taken draconian measures against people for the very minor crime of carrying or smoking cannabis. We have to look seriously at this issue. We owe it to the people outside this place because, as other Members have said, they are now ahead of Parliament on this matter. We should not be playing catch-up; we should want to find a way of leading on the issue. The report on comparisons is a step in the right direction, but I hope that the strength of the support in the Chamber today will carry forth that message to our colleagues, including the Prime Minister, who should be continuously reminded of his stance in 2002. He should be reminded of it daily, because when he talks about this issue he seems to forget what he might have said before.

[Zac Goldsmith]

The hon. Gentleman might like to know that today’s Guido Fawkes quote of the day is the one on drug laws that we have heard cited by a number of hon. Members.

[Mr Hancock]

I am delighted to hear that Guido Fawkes is talking about something other than me. We have an opportunity now and we squander it at our peril. We should look forward to this Minister getting the backing of his boss, the Home Secretary, and of the Prime Minister to make sure that we have the opportunity to do something positive, for once, on the issue of drugs. Let us not just continue to know that we have failed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

Most of the things that I wanted to say have been said, so I will be brief. I just want to put on record my admiration for the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for having secured this debate, and for having raised the profile of the issue considerably in recent weeks and months. I also want to pay tribute to the Minister. It is true that the report out today has no clear, firm conclusions, but I have no doubt that it is pushing the discussion in a very healthy direction.

At the risk of being repetitive, I want to quote one aspect of the report, which is essential. It states:

“We did not in our fact-finding observe any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country.”

It goes on to cite recent evidence in the Czech Republic where tough laws coincide with relatively high use of cannabis, but then, dealing with Portugal, it states:

“Although levels of drug use rose between 2001 and 2007, use of most drugs has since fallen to below-2001 levels. It is clear that there has not been a lasting and significant increase in drug use in Portugal since 2001.”

If that is the case, and it certainly syncs with many other reports on the same issues and the same case studies, there is a serious question to answer. If the law is not acting as a disincentive to drugs use, and therefore, logically, drugs use will continue at more or less the same levels, with other factors knocking it up and down in various places, the question is whether we want that trade to belong to the criminals or to be under the umbrella and regulatory regime of some sort of government. For me, the answer is obvious.

There is also a practical issue. This is not an ideological or philosophical issue. According to the figures I have seen, in 2012 14% of people in jail were there for drug-related offences, and last year there were 87,871 convictions on the back of drug offences in this country. Obviously, not all of them ended up in jail, so the question is whether the present policy offers value for money. It comes with a multibillion pound price tag, and the cost goes well beyond the money. We have to ask ourselves who wins from this policy. My hunch, and the hunch of many Members who have spoken today, is that the laws in place have little effect other than to create a black market and therefore opportunities for the very worst people in society. We have laws in place that enrich the bad people while doing very little, if anything, to protect those whom we all have a common interest in protecting.

The present policy does not seem to me to offer great value for money. I know that there is a growing consensus outside this place on this matter, and this debate shows that there is a great consensus in this place, too, which I was not expecting to hear. The motion seems to be unarguable. We need an evidence-based policy system, and the first step is the review for which the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion is calling. I very much support it, and I am thrilled that everyone else in the Chamber today has supported it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

Of course Ministers visit Heathrow and other ports at various times to see the operation of those ports in a variety of circumstances. At terminal 4 today, queues were in fact not over an hour long, as I understand the right hon. Gentleman has said that they were, staff were quickly redeployed and more than 80% of desks were open to process passengers as quickly as possible. That is what we have been doing by increasing the staff in recent days and in a week or so, the Olympic numbers will kick in, which will bring even more staff to Heathrow and ensure that people are processed properly and quickly.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

Will the Home Secretary please review her decision to approve the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer to the US, where he faces up to 10 years for an alleged breach of copyright rules, an offence, if it is one, that our own authorities did not think merited a prosecution?

[Mrs May]

As my hon. Friend will know, that case is due to go to court later this year. The extradition decision has already been taken and, as he will know, I have decided to uphold it.

Extradition

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

Thank you very much, Mr Rosindell, for allowing me to sneak in at the last minute. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing the debate. He mentioned the well-known case of Gary McKinnon, and I want briefly to add my support to his cause.

That case, and some of the figures we have heard in the debate, show that we exist in an imbalanced relationship with the United States. That is reinforced by the fact that the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister were so reassuring on this case while in opposition, but now seem to feel at least that they do not have the power or the authority to follow through with some of those reassurances. That has to be addressed.

I am here to speak about a case that has already been mentioned briefly—that of a constituent of mine, Deborah Dark. She was arrested in 1988 in France, on suspicion of drug-related offences, and held in custody for eight and a half months. She was eventually found not guilty by a French court, and was released and returned to the UK, where she tried to get over the fact that she had wasted eight and a half months in jail.

Nearly 20 years later, in 2007, Deborah travelled to Turkey for a holiday, but instead of being able to enjoy it, as she would have expected, she found herself stripped at gunpoint at the airport by Turkish police. According to the police—whose behaviour, incidentally, was unspeakably disgusting and life-changingly appalling—they were acting merely on a tip-off from Interpol. That was the only explanation she was given; they did not elaborate in any way.

As we would expect, Deborah wanted an immediate explanation when she arrived in the UK. She called the police and was told there was no outstanding arrest warrant; they shrugged their shoulders. She asked the Serious Organised Crime Agency and was told it had no records on her either. Helpfully, it added that her arrest might have been a mistake.

Time passed and, with extraordinary calm, Deborah accepted that explanation. Then, in 2008, she travelled to Spain to visit her father, who had retired there and who was unwell. She tried to return to the UK after her holiday, which lasted a few weeks, but she was arrested at the airport. She was taken into custody by the Spanish authorities and told that she faced extradition to France.

That is when the penny began to drop. Seventeen years before, the French prosecutor had appealed the verdict clearing Deborah. That happened without her knowledge. She had been found guilty, without anyone bothering to tell her. In her absence, she was sentenced to six years. I repeat that she was never summoned to appear in court, never asked to defend herself and never given an opportunity to do so. She was never told that her acquittal had been overturned; these things happened entirely without her knowledge.

That was in 1989. More than a decade later, the French authorities issued their European arrest warrant, meaning that EU member states were compelled to arrest Deborah and send her to France to serve the sentence. As it happens, she refused to consent to the extradition and was granted an extradition hearing. Fortunately, the Spanish court chose not to extradite her, on the basis that so much time had passed and she was unlikely to get a thorough, proper or fair trial. After one month in custody, she was released from prison, and she returned home. However, it was not over.

When Deborah arrived in the UK, she was arrested by the British police at Gatwick airport. Again, she refused to consent to extradition, and she was released on bail, pending another hearing. In 2008, extradition was again refused, for the same reason—the passage of time.

Despite being cleared by two courts, however, Deborah remained subject to the European arrest warrant in other EU states until 2010, when the French finally withdrew it. Until that moment, she was, in effect, trapped in the UK and unable to visit her family in Spain for more than three years, all because of a conviction that she was never allowed to contest.

I have chosen to speak about Deborah not only because her case is horrific and she is my constituent, but because there are hundreds of examples of the European arrest warrant failing. Julian Assange, the boss and founder of WikiLeaks, is a well-known figure. He faces extradition to Sweden, despite the fact that he has not been charged anywhere or for anything, and despite the fact that the extradition is being demanded by a private prosecutor, described as a partisan prosecutor—in other words, they are not a member of the national judiciary or a formal representative of the state.

The system clearly needs changing, and it needs changing soon, because the number of such cases is rising. One thousand people were subjected to the European arrest warrant last year, and the figure grows every month. A remedy suggested by Fair Trials International would involve applying the principle of mutual recognition to the European arrest warrant. That would mean that once one member state had refused to execute a European arrest warrant, as happened with Deborah, it would automatically be withdrawn, along with any alerts on EU and international police databases. That remedy would have prevented Deborah from being subjected to her grim groundhog-day experience.

One alternative that has been proposed—including, I believe, by Fair Trials International—is that we raise the bar to capture only the most serious cases, and I certainly go along with that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton said, that is what this tool was originally designed for. I am sure there are alternatives, but I am no expert, and it is for the Government to identify the most appropriate steps. What is certain, however, is that the system needs radical and rapid reform to prevent such appalling abuses from happening again.