Queen’s Speech

Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing today’s debate. It is a privilege for me to respond and open for the Opposition. I remind the House that I sit as a magistrate in London.

I look forward to the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Fleet, who brings unparalleled experience in the arts, particularly music. I look forward to her maiden speech, and I also look forward to that of the noble Baroness, Lady Fullbrook. She has a background as a former MP and in local government, and I note that she went to the same university as my daughter, which is no doubt a good omen.

I shall speak on the justice-related Bills and refer briefly to the DCMS Bills, and my noble friend Lord Kennedy will speak on the Home Office Bills. By way of background, a decade of cuts by the Conservative Government has left our justice system weak and vulnerable—and that was even before the pandemic began. Half of all courts in England and Wales were closed between 2010 and 2019; today there are 27,000 fewer court sitting days than in 2016. The Crown Court backlog, now more than 57,000 cases, has increased from 39,000 before the pandemic. Rape prosecutions are at an all-time low. Victims are being told to wait up to four years to get their day in court, which of course leads many to drop out of the system. Convictions for rape, robbery, theft, criminal damage and arson, drug offences and fraud have fallen to a 10-year low.

The Labour Party has called for the rapid extension of Nightingale courts and war juries of seven jurors, in an attempt to reduce the backlog, but the Government have not accepted our proposals. Beyond the pandemic, we need to increase sitting days to clear the backlog, provide greater support for legal aid, embrace technology where it works and restore victims’ faith in the justice system.

On judicial review and the courts Bill, the Government propose to introduce reforms to judicial review to, as they see it, protect the judiciary from being drawn into political questions. The Government are unhappy that their own panel has not advocated the widespread changes that they wanted, so they have announced further consultations on various aspects of judicial review to get a different answer. I have a specific question for the Minister. Why have the Government announced a further consultation on the use of ouster clauses, when their own review explicitly said not to do this? The Labour Party believes that judicial review is a key part of our constitution since it gives members of the public and organisations a legal forum to challenge the Government and public bodies when they act unlawfully.

On the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which is a carryover Bill, the Government say that this legislation will increase sentences for the most serious and violent offenders and ensure the timely administration of justice. This is a large Bill which is poorly thought through. It is a mess and could lead to unintended consequences; for example, we could have harsher penalties for damaging a statue than for attacking a woman. In recent months and years, the Labour Party has worked constructively with the Government to, for example, increase maximum sentences for front-line workers and increase sentences for terrorists. We would like a similar constructive approach to this Bill, and call on the Government to drop their poorly thought-out proposals and focus their legislation on tackling violence against women and girls. Why not use this Bill, as well as the victims Bill, to enact a more comprehensive strategy to protect women and girls? Indeed, yesterday the Labour Party published a “green paper” with a number of suggested policy proposals to end violence against women and girls, which could be adopted through this and Home Office legislation.

Having said that, we believe there are good and important parts of this Bill. Some of those have come from Labour MPs: Stephanie Peacock on dangerous driving, Holly Lynch and Chris Bryant on protecting the protectors, John Spellar on reform of the DBS system and Sarah Champion on sexual abuse by people in a position of trust—all this as well as reforms taken from the Lammy Review. We believe that the Government are undermining the parts of the Bill that we support through unnecessarily draconian measures on free expression and the right to protest. There is no evidence that I have seen that these more severe measures will do anything to reduce reoffending. The Minister said that many of the protests are misinformed, and I hope that he is right; we will look forward to exploring that when we come to the legislation.

I move on to the victims Bill. It has been a long wait for this Bill, which was first announced in the 2016 gracious Speech. In fact, Keir Starmer, when he first became an MP in 2015, introduced a Private Member’s Bill, co-drafted with the Victims’ Commissioner for London, which in many ways underpins this Bill. Speaking as a magistrate who sits in both adult and youth jurisdictions in London, I rarely see a victim in court, and it is also relatively unusual to have a victim impact statement read out in court—although I acknowledge that this has improved in recent years.

There are many things that we can do to improve the legal rights and the experience of victims, both inside and outside court. I look forward to working constructively with the Government to enshrine victims’ rights in legislation and protect those who suffer persistent anti-social behaviour.

I will briefly refer to the four DCMS Bills. The charities Bill will introduce a range of Law Commission recommendations. We support this Bill; we will be focusing on the issues of governance and transparency and on ensuring that they are not watered down through the Bill.

With regard to the Dormant Assets Bill, the Minister said that he hoped to get £880 million by unlocking further assets. We support that and look forward to working with the Minister on it.

Next is the product security and telecommunications infrastructure Bill. As the Opposition, we would be concerned about reforms to the electronic communications code. There is a lot of detail in this Bill, and we will wait to see it before we consider our approach.

The Telecommunications (Security) Bill is a carryover Bill. While there were some amendments in the Commons, we agree with its general thrust.

Finally, I want to talk about the online safety Bill. The Minister used some expansive language in talking about this Bill: he spoke of setting global standards to which other countries could aspire. However, nobody knows better than the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, the great strength of feeling in this House on the slowness of the introduction of the Bill. During the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act and many other bits of legislation there has been constant frustration at the fact that we are not getting on with this Bill. We understand that there will be pre-legislative scrutiny by both Houses, and that the intention is to enact a statutory duty of care, to be enforced by Ofcom that would require companies to prevent the spread of illegal content and activity online.

The Bill is presented as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for legislation, and the Government’s thinking appears to be a continuation of the self-regulatory approach that we have seen to date. This approach has failed our children. Online crimes are proliferating, and people’s rights online remain confused and unclear. The Government’s decision to water down its legislative proposals and hold back on criminal sanctions for company executives will continue to put children and others at risk.

This will be a complex piece of legislation, and it will be one of the most important in recent years. Although Ofcom has been named as the regulator, it is far from clear that it will have the powers or resources needed to address the issues that it will face. The noble Lord gave a good example of disinformation. We see it on an almost daily basis—in fact we see disinformation being spread about, for example, vaccines and their use literally daily. That is another reason why this legislation is so important.

Keeping children safe is the most important task we have. If children were being abused and put at risk in the same way offline as they are online, people would rightly go to jail. Criminal sanction for senior executives is the most direct way to get large corporations to take their responsibilities seriously.

We routinely co-operate across parties to amend legislation in this House. Sometimes the Government say that they welcome this approach. I hope that we can continue to co-operate with all corners of the House to improve this legislation.