Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th June 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Cunningham]

I am not. The point I am making is that the Government are driving an agenda that will result in more black, Asian and ethnic minority people ending up in the criminal justice system and suffering even greater sentences.

The Government’s own equalities impact assessment goes on:

“BAME individuals appear to have high representation in the Class A drug trafficking cohort and possession of or threatening with a blade… As a result, the proposal may put people with these protected characteristics at a particular disadvantage when compared to persons who do not share these characteristics since they may be more likely to be given a custodial sentence and serve longer sentences than before.”

The Minister could do no better than looking to America to see how three-strike drug laws have had a horrific impact on disproportionality rates in the criminal justice system. As he will no doubt be aware, the three-strikes crime Bill that was introduced by Bill Clinton in the 1990s has been roundly criticised by all sides of the American political spectrum. Democrats, Republicans and even Bill Clinton himself have spoken of how the Bill was a grave mistake that contributed to overpopulated prisons and a mass incarceration of BAME offenders in particular.

What makes this all the more astonishing is that this Government have gone to some lengths in recent times to state their commitment to reducing racial disparity in the justice system. In his foreword to the latest update on tackling race disparity in the criminal justice system, the Lord Chancellor made it clear that addressing the over-representation of people from ethnic and racial minorities was a personal focus for him—that was very welcome. Will the Minister explain, then, why the Government chose not to undertake a full equalities impact assessment of how measures in the Bill could have a detrimental impact on minority groups? Given that many of the measures in the sentencing White Paper involve serious sentence uplifts, it is absolutely critical that the Government fully understand how those from minority backgrounds could be disproportionately impacted. As I have explained, failing to do so runs the risk of further exacerbating the already horrendous disparities that we see in the system today. Is the Minister content to see such disparities widen even further, or will he outline today just what the Government will do to address this issue?

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that being against this kind of disparity is all well and good, but the only way one can reduce it, which I believe is the Government’s policy, is to be very careful—moving policy initiative by policy initiative, and change in the law by change in the law —that new measures take into account the impact of such changes on that disparity?

[Alex Cunningham]

I most certainly do agree with my hon. Friend. That is why we posed the question: why has there not been a full impact assessment of the impact of these measures on the BAME community? I would go so far as to challenge the Minister and his Government not just to outline the measures they will take to end these disparities but to set themselves some targets to end this injustice once and for all.

The final point I will touch on is how the Government came to a decision on which of the four offences they have included under the scope of clause 100. I remind the Committee that they are trafficking of class A drugs, domestic burglary, possession of a knife or offensive weapon, and threatening a person with a blade or offensive weapon in public. Although those are undoubtedly serious crimes, we have some concerns that focusing on such a small cohort of crimes risks missing the larger criminal forces that are at work in our country.

Take possession of a knife or offensive weapon, for example. All too often when we think of knife crime, the focus of our thoughts is on young men—often young BAME men from a disadvantaged background—carrying knives as part of a gang. Yet this image is deeply simplistic and misses the greater criminal forces at play. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham pointed out, most of the time knife crime is not being driven by youths but by a sophisticated network of veteran organised criminals. As he wrote in The Guardian so eloquently:

“Young people falling into the wrong crowd in Tottenham, Salford or Croydon know nothing about the trafficking of tonnes of cocaine across our borders every single year. They know nothing of the shipment routes from Central and South America that have made London a cocaine capital of Europe. They know nothing of the lorries, container vessels, luxury yachts and private jets that supply our nation’s £11bn-a-year drug market….This isn’t about kids in tracksuits carrying knives, it’s about men in suits carrying briefcases. It is serious criminal networks that are exploiting our young people, arming them to the teeth and sending them out to fight turf wars.”

--- Later in debate ---

But there clearly are issues that the Government want to address. This is a broader topic, and I do not want to dwell on it, because it is probably out of scope. There are obviously wider issues of racial disparity in the criminal justice system, which the shadow Minister referred to. A very good and comprehensive statement was made on this topic by the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), a few months ago. I strongly commend his statement, because he went through the recommendations resulting from the Lammy review—I am probably allowed to say that, given that it is the name of the report, and I am not referring to a colleague by their name—demonstrating in each of the various cases what concrete action was being taken to address the concerns that the review uncovered. As the shadow Minister said, the Government do want to take action to make sure the justice system is always fair and is seen to be fair.

[Maria Eagle]

Does the Minister accept that despite the Government’s intentions, good as they may be, to reduce disparity, the reality is that it is not reducing and has not reduced since the report was published? Does he therefore accept that the Government need to do more?

[Chris Philp]

I have not seen the up-to-date data for the past year, but I accept that we need to pay continuous attention to these issues. We need to make sure that the justice system always behaves in a fair and even-handed manner. Clearly, we accept that we need to be eternally vigilant on that front.

To return to the topic of this clause, it is simply about making sure that the decisions taken by previous Parliaments are reflected in the way in which judges take their decisions. We also need to ensure that departing from what Parliament has specified happens only in exceptional cases. Believing as I do in parliamentary sovereignty, that seems reasonable to me.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.