Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Luke Evans and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

On my hon. Friend’s last point, of course we must constantly be having an intelligent, constructive public debate about these matters. On the question of capacity, projections change, and there are many complex factors at play. I look forward, as ever, to being scrutinised by his Committee on that point.

It is important to note that crowding—doubling up in cells—has for a very long time been a feature of our prison system. Crowding overall is 2,000 fewer than it was when we came into government in 2010.

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

8. What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to reduce the number of foreign national offenders in the prison system.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Damian Hinds)]

Between January 2019 and December 2022, we removed 13,851 foreign national offenders from the country. As my hon. Friend rightly suggests, that is all about close working with colleagues, including in the Home Office.

[Dr Evans]

We have all seen the stories of convicted foreign criminals being pulled off planes at the last minute. The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 was brought in to improve the process of returning criminals—to speed up that process and increase the window for removal of foreign national offenders from prison under the early removal scheme. Could my right hon. Friend comment on how that scheme is working, how he expects it to affect the numbers, and how he expects the process to be sped up?

[Damian Hinds]

As my hon. Friend mentions, under the Nationality and Borders Act, we expanded the FNO early removal scheme window from nine months to 12 months, allowing for earlier removal. We are working closely with the Home Office on that. In May, we also agreed a landmark new deal with Albania, and we are working to negotiate new prisoner transfer agreements with EU member states and other countries.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Luke Evans and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I join the hon. Lady in paying tribute to the men and women who work in the probation service for the absolutely vital work that they do tirelessly. It is very important that we make sure we have the right levels of staffing; I can report to her that in calendar year 2022, the number of staff in post rose significantly, from 17,400 to 18,600. In her own area of the south-west, covering Bristol, we had 210 joiners for the year, but it is obviously very important that as those people come through, we carry on having the pipeline of talent coming in. It is also very important that we are investing suitably in senior probation officers for their oversight, which we are doing.

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

12. What recent progress his Department has made on taking forward the proposals for reform in its root-and-branch review of the parole system.

Online Harms

Debate between Luke Evans and Damian Hinds

Wednesday 26th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered online harms.

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Dowd. This is the first time I have had the opportunity to serve in Westminster Hall under your chairmanship—[Interruption.] In a debate about technology, this was always going to happen. It is great to see the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), in his place. He is enormously respected by Members on both sides of the House. He came to this role with more knowledge of his subject than probably any other Minister in the history of Ministers, so he brings a great deal to it.

This is an important and timely debate, given that the Online Safety Bill is returning to the Commons next week. Obviously, a great deal of the debate will be in the House of Lords, so I thought that it was important to have more discussion in the House of Commons. The Online Safety Bill is a landmark and internationally leading Bill. As a number of people, including my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), can attest, it has been a long time in gestation—five years, including two consultations, a Green Paper, a White Paper, a draft Bill, prelegislative scrutiny, 11 sessions of the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe, and nine days at Committee stage in the Commons. It is complex legislation, but that is because the subject that it addresses is complex.

Some want the Bill to go further, and I have no doubt that on Report and in the Lords there will be many attempts to do that. Others think it already goes too far. The most important message about the Bill is that we need to get on with it.

Technology is a big part of children’s lives—actually, it is a big part of all our lives. The vast majority of it is good. It provides new ways of keeping in touch, and ways of enhancing education for children with special educational needs. Think of all the rows in the car that have been done away with by the sat-nav—at least those rows. My personal favourite is the thing on my phone that says, “The rain will stop in 18 minutes,” so I know when to get my sandwich. Technology changes the way we live our lives. Think about our working lives in this place. Thanks to Tony Blair and new Labour, the pager got all MPs on message and disciplined, and now WhatsApp is having exactly the opposite effect.

In particular, in the Bill and this discussion we are concerned about social media. Again, most of what social media has given us is good, but it has also carried with it much harm. I say “carried with it” because much of that harm has not been created by social media, but has been distributed, facilitated and magnified by it. In the last couple of weeks, we have been reminded of the terrible tragedy of Molly Russell, thanks to the tireless campaigning and immense fortitude of her father, Ian, and her family. The coroner concluded that social media companies and the content pushed to Molly through algorithmic recommendations contributed to her death

“in more than a minimal way”.

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I entirely agree that the Bill needs to come forward now. The algorithm is the key part to anything that goes on, in terms of dealing with online problems. The biggest problem I have found is trying to get transparency around the algorithm. Does he agree that the Bill should concentrate on exposing the algorithms, even if they are commercially sensitive, and allowing Ofcom to pull on those algorithms so that we do not get into the horrible situation that he has described?

[Damian Hinds]

I absolutely agree about the centrality of the algorithms and about understanding how they work. We may come on to that later in the debate. That brings me on to my next point. Of course, we should not think of Molly’s tragedy as a single event; there have been other tragedies. There is also a long tail of harm done to young people through an increased prevalence of self-harm, eating disorders, and the contribution to general mental ill-health. All of that has a societal cost, as well as a cost to the individual. That is also a literal cost, in terms of cash, as well as the terrible social cost.

Importantly, this is not only about children. Ages 18 to 21 can be a vulnerable time for some of the issues I have just mentioned. Of course, with domestic abuse, antisemitism, racist abuse, and so on, most of that is perpetrated by—and inflicted on—people well above the age of majority. I found that the importance and breadth of this subject was reflected in my Outlook inbox over the past few days. Whenever a Member’s name is on the Order Paper for a Westminster Hall debate, they get all sorts of briefings from various third parties, but today’s has broken all records. I have heard from everybody, from Lego to the Countryside Alliance.

On that subject, I thank some of the brilliant organisations that work so hard in this area, such as 5Rights, the Children’s Charities Coalition, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, of course, the Carnegie Trust, the City of London Corporation, UK Finance, the Samaritans, Kick It Out, and more.

I should also note the three e-petitions linked to this subject, reflecting the public’s engagement: the e-petition to ban anonymous accounts on social media, which has almost 17,000 signatories; the petition to hold online trolls accountable, with more than 130,000 signatories; and the e-petition for verified ID to be required to open a social media account, with almost 700,000 signatories.

Such is the interest in this subject and the Online Safety Bill, which is about to come back to the Commons, that someone could be forgiven for thinking that it is about to solve all of our problems, but I am afraid that it will not. It is a framework that will evolve, and this will not be the last time that we have to legislate on the subject. Indeed, many of the things that must be done probably cannot be legislated for anyway. Additionally, technology evolves. A decade ago, legislators were not talking about the effect of livestreaming on child abuse. We certainly were not talking about the use of emojis in racist abuse. Today, we are just getting to grips with what the metaverse will be and what it implies. Who knows, in five or 10 years’ time, what the equivalent subjects will be?

From my most recent ministerial role as Minister of State for Security, there are three areas covered in the Online Safety Bill that I will mention to stress the importance of pressing on with it and getting it passed into law. The first is child abuse, which I have just mentioned. Of course, some child abuse is perpetrated on the internet, but it is more about distribution. Every time that an abusive image of a child is forwarded, that victim is re-victimised. It also creates the demand for further primary abuse. I commend the agencies, the National Crime Agency and CEOP—Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command—and the brilliant organisations, some of which I have mentioned, that work in this area, including the international framework around NCMEC, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, in the United States.

However, I am afraid that it is a growth area. That is why we must move quickly. The National Crime Agency estimates that between 550,000 and 850,000 people pose, in varying degrees, a sexual risk to children. Shall I repeat those numbers? Just let them sink in. That is an enormous number of people. With the internet, the accessibility is much greater than ever before. The Internet Watch Foundation notes a growth in sexual abuse content available online, particularly in the category known as “self-generated” imagery.

The second area is fraud, which is now the No. 1 category of crime in this country by volume—and in many other countries. Almost all of it has an online aspect or is entirely online. I commend the Minister, and the various former Ministers in the Chamber, on their work in ensuring that fraud is properly addressed in the Bill. There have been three moves forward in that area, and my hon. Friends the Members for Hexham (Guy Opperman) and for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) may speak a bit more about that later. We need to ensure that fraud is in scope, that it becomes a priority offence and, crucially, that advertising for fraud is added to the offences covered.

I hope that, over time, the Government can continue to look at how to sharpen our focus in this area and, in particular, how to line up everybody’s incentives. Right now, the banks have a great incentive to stop fraud because they are liable for the losses. Anybody who has tried to make an online payment recently will know what that does. When people are given a direct financial incentive—a cost—to this thing being perpetrated, they will go to extraordinary lengths to try to stop it happening. If we could get that same focus on people accepting the content or ads that turn out to be fraud, imagine what we could do—my hon. Friend may be about to tell us.