Policing and Crime Bill

Maria Miller Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts]

But the question of resources and how those priorities direct them does indeed highlight again the fact that Wales has different needs, and those resources from central Government do get directed to those priorities which best serve England.

When devolution of policing to Wales was discussed in Committee, the Minister present referred to the Silk commission on devolution in Wales, which was established by his party in 2011 with cross-party membership. Part 2 was published in 2014 and recommended devolution. He made much at the time of the fact that there was no consensus on this recommendation as a result of the St David’s day process and “Powers for a purpose”.

Those involved in that process have told me it was little more than a tick-box exercise: if all party representatives liked it, the power was in the bag; if not, chuck it out, regardless of the implications for the governance and needs and, indeed, people of Wales. I note that in Committee Labour indicated a grudging support for devolving policing, albeit in the distant future: 10 years away. It seems pressure from Plaid is driving the accelerator. This is not a matter of jam tomorrow; we are living in hope of this today.

This opportunity is before the House here and now. The contents of future legislation and future amendments lack this certainty. If this House votes for devolution today, policing will be devolved to Wales, and the Government will then have to amend the Wales Bill accordingly at the very start of its journey. Indeed, surely, the Wales Bill deals first and foremost with constitutional matters, but here is our opportunity to make sure. I urge Labour to grasp the opportunity and support the National Assembly for Wales and all four police and crime commissioners in Wales and vote for the devolution of policing today.

New clauses 3, 4 and 5 relate to aspects of digital crime. I would note that these and new clause 44 are probing amendments. The Government state that resources are already provided to counter digital crime in the form of the National Cyber Crime Unit. I would respond that the National Cyber Crime Unit is relatively small, and that the national cyber security programme concentrates primarily on the security of businesses and infrastructure. Action Fraud addresses crime in relation to online fraud. The priorities are business, financial and serious crime, and do not cover the safeguarding of victims of abuse crimes such as domestic violence, stalking, harassment or hate crime.

The first of the new clauses proposes a review of legislation relating to digital crime and to consolidate the numerous Acts into a single statute. There are now over 30 statutes that cover online crime. Criminal justice professionals, including the police and CPS, believe this to be confusing at best and overwhelming at worst. Victims’ complaints are sometimes subject to delay, and there are times when officers are uncertain whether specific activities are criminal or not. The law has developed incrementally as technology advances, and there is an urgent need to codify and clarify the current situation. Consolidation will save police time and money. It will avoid duplication of officers on cases. Swifter action on victims’ complaints will reduce distress and anxiety.

As regards new clause 4, surveillance and monitoring highlights further issues against which there is currently no redress. The identification of these actions as offences will enable the police to counter activities that are evidently related to surveillance with intention to cause distress, and the law should respond appropriately.

New clause 5 addresses the need for training that is fit for purpose. Even in large police areas, fewer than 5% of officers and staff, including call and first response personnel, are trained in cyber-crime. Victims report being advised to go offline and not to use social media by officers. This defies modern communication media. It is equivalent to telling victims of harassment not to venture outside their own homes. The Home Office believes that training is a matter for individual forces, but in the absence of strong central leadership, this can only perpetuate present inconsistencies and variations from force to force. National training would help to raise the status of victims.

Finally, I turn to new clause 44, which calls for the establishment of a specialist digital unit to investigate online offences against children and young people. As I mentioned earlier, there is a real risk intrinsic in dependency on central units, although I acknowledge the work done by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. But, once again, children’s charities report to us that the scale of abuse of children online in terms of offenders, devices and images is leaving police swamped. There are delays in forensic analysis of devices—delays in some cases of up to 12 months. These delays pose risks to the safeguarding of children.

In Committee, the Minister mentioned the child abuse image database, and praised the accuracy of imagery interpretation and how it aids identification. It is of course to be commended that this database will take some of the load from individual forces. I would argue, none the less, that there is precedent for digital units on a similar model to domestic violence units as a means to ensure that all forces direct proper resources to this serious issue.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Lady for tabling these amendments. Importantly, she talked about the idea of a specialist digital unit within each police force. Does she agree that, if that were to happen, it would be imperative that this would feed back to some central database to ensure the work that was done in each of those individual units had read-across across the country?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Of course, what we need is the expertise of a central unit alongside the work on the ground that individual forces can do, and to ensure that we avoid the risk that the presence of a central unit results in a tendency to treat certain crimes as another agency’s problem. There is also—this is important at individual force-level—a need for specialist approaches to support child victims and their families.

Those are the amendments that I have chosen to discuss, and I reiterate that they are probing amendments, but in closing I repeat my intention to press a Division on new clause 2.

[Mrs Miller]

I rise to speak particularly on new clauses 3, 5, 44, 46 and 47, and note the advisement of the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) that her amendments are set out as probing amendments. Those five amendments tabled by both Liberal Democrat Members and Plaid Cymru Members all have a common theme: to call for reform in connection with the internet and the digital online world.

We all need to get our Government and Governments around the world to wake up to the extent to which crime and criminal activity has now moved online. Our laws are not giving victims the protection they need and our police forces face a revolution if they are to tackle the crime that they face now effectively in the future.

There has been a significant shift in the way people experience harm in this world. New clause 44, as the hon. Lady has set out, calls for the police to have special digital units to deal particularly with child abuse images. Many police forces in this country, including my own in Hampshire, have gone a long way to building up this sort of specialist expertise, but the new clause is an interesting piece of advice on which I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response, as well as the response on police training.

There are serious questions to ask as to whether the providers of online space are doing what they need to do to keep their communities safe. They have not only a corporate social responsibility to do that, but I also think an economic imperative, because it is their brand names that are tarnished, and rightly so, when their products are used for illegal purposes.

Another aspect is not particularly brought up in the amendments today, but I will mention it: the importance of the international implications of all these things. If we are to get a solution to the sorts of crimes that are being committed online in this new digital world that does not respect country boundaries, we need to have some buy-in from international Governments, too. I myself have met companies in the US, but we need to go further than that and see whether we can actually get the sort of action that we need on an international basis by perhaps looking to the United Nations, or indeed the youth part of the UN, to explore how we can get more effective laws in the future that are not constricted by international boundaries.

Our law is struggling to cope. These amendments recognise that. The real need to recognise that online crime is different is a battle that was won when this Government put in place the revenge pornography law a year or so ago. We have already seen 1,000 reports to the police and thousands more people using the revenge pornography helpline, yet two-thirds of those cases that have been reported to the police have seen no action because of problems of the evidence that victims have been able to give or indeed because the victims have withdrawn it. Again, the new clauses are picking up those issues and calling on the Government to consider again. New clause 46 calls for anonymity of victims. That was considered at the time the law was put in place, but the advice then was to wait to see how things progressed. The statistics suggest that now is a time to think again, as new clause 41, which also deals with compensation, also seeks to do.

The myriad amendments before us today show the level of complexity involved and the level of concern among hon. Members from at least three parties represented in the Chamber tonight—I am sure Labour Front Benchers would share in this, too—but I worry that they offer a piecemeal set of solutions. The hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd picked up on that. Surely what is needed is a wholesale review of the law, police training and the development of international support for digital providers to take seriously the importance of keeping their communities safe online. I support the spirit of these amendments, but I am struck by the need for a more comprehensive review, perhaps in the form of the digital economy Bill, which Her Gracious Majesty announced in the Gracious Speech only last month.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is articulating a very serious problem, with which many of us have been involved for some time. Does she acknowledge that with some 70,000 cases of historical child abuse likely to be investigated by the police this year alone and with up to half of cases coming to the courts involving sexual exploitation, many of them historical, the police are overwhelmed in their capacity to be able to deal with this new wave of digital crime against some of the most vulnerable children? Her suggestion for a more holistic overview of this is therefore essential.

[Mrs Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He of course has an impeccable record of campaigning in this area. Perhaps the very scale of this problem is an indication that our regulatory framework within which these organisations work is not quite as good as it needs to be for the future. We cannot expect our police force simply to put down the work it is doing in every other area to focus solely on online crime, but at the moment he is right to say that the scale of what is being seen is, in the words of some police chiefs, “frightening”. We do not yet seem to be seeing a response to that. I hope that the digital economy Bill will provide the Ministers sitting on the Front Bench today, and perhaps their colleagues in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with the opportunity to look carefully at this. It is no longer something that we can simply say is the by-product of a new industry that will settle down over time. Those Ministers will have heard a good deal of evidence this evening to suggest that more action needs to be taken, and I ask them to do what one of them, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), agreed to do today in departmental questions: sit down with me and other hon. Members who might be interested to set out how the digital economy Bill can be used as a vehicle to achieve the objective of making our internet safer, both at home and abroad.

[Ann Coffey]

I wish to say a few words about new clauses 13 and 14, which stand in my name. New clause 13 would make it an offence for adults to groom children and young people for criminal behaviour, and new clause 14 would introduce a new grooming for criminal behaviour prevention order, which I would call a “Fagin order”. The new Fagin orders would ban criminal adults from contacting a child. Just as with children groomed for child sexual exploitation, we must recognise that young people drawn into criminality and drug dealing have, in the first instance, often been groomed and manipulated.

Currently, we have numerous prevention orders available to the police to combat grooming for child sexual exploitation, including sexual risk orders, sexual harm prevention orders and child abduction warning notices. I would like to see the creation of a similar order to be used where children are being groomed by organised crime to act as drug runners. That would be a practical way of disrupting activities including the phenomenon of “county lines”, whereby criminals groom and coerce children and young people into selling class A drugs many miles from home, often in quiet towns. Organised crime is aggressively creating new markets for drugs, in every seaside town and every small country village across the country. Criminals used to do their own drug running, but now they are actively identifying groups of vulnerable children to use, including those living in children’s homes and pupil referral units, to minimise the risk to themselves. As I said in a previous debate, county lines is the next big grooming scandal on the horizon. It takes many forms, but its basis is using vulnerable children and adults to develop new markets for drugs.

One example I saw involved a 15-year-old girl who was offered £500 to go “up country” to sell drugs. She had the class A drugs plugged inside her but was then set up by the original gang and assaulted on the train, and had the drugs forcibly removed from her. She was told she must pay back £3,000 to the group for the stolen drugs, and had to continue to sell drugs and provide sexual favours. The threat of child sexual exploitation for girls in gangs is known, but the added factor of being trafficked to remote locations compounds their vulnerability. Those young people are at risk of physical violence, sexual exploitation, and emotional and physical abuse. That model of grooming arguably involves both trafficking and modern slavery. Children from Greater Manchester are being groomed by criminal gangs and have been found selling drugs in places as far away as Devon. These gang members are rather like modern-day Fagins or Bill Sikes: hard men who groom youngsters and get them to do their dirty work. They need to be stopped in their tracks.

The recent Home Office report “Ending gang violence and exploitation” said that young girls are often groomed for involvement in criminal behaviour and harmful sexual behaviour as part of gang culture. Indeed, the most recent Rotherham trial showed the connection between organised crime and drugs and child sexual exploitation. I have read the recent Home Office report and also the National Crime Agency report on county lines from August 2015, and I think this development is not fully understood or recognised. Someone, somewhere needs to take ownership of a strategy to disrupt this aggressive organised network, and that strategy needs to put the safeguarding children first. I am not pretending for one minute that Fagin orders would be a silver bullet, but they would indicate a change in culture and a recognition that the responsibility lies with the adults who groom the children. We really cannot afford to make the same mistakes as we did with child sexual exploitation, where we let terrible things happen to children because we blamed them for bringing about their own exploitation.

Child sexual exploitation and drug running and involvement with criminal activities are often intertwined, which is why we need a two-pronged approach. Just as we have prevention orders for child sexual exploitation, we should have similar prevention orders for adults grooming children for criminal behaviour. We need a response to county lines that ensures that children are found, safeguarded and supported out of gangs, and that adults are stopped as early as possible from grooming and manipulating children, and are punished to the full extent of the law. Until then, it will continue to be the young victims who are exploited, blamed and then punished as their abusers and puppet masters continue with a trade that nets organised crime millions of pounds a year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Miller]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman for bringing these provisions to the House. He reflected on the importance of the law the Government brought in on revenge pornography. At the time, we talked about the importance of recognising that the impact of online crimes is very different from that of offline crimes. Will he join me in saying that, although it can be easy to say that what is illegal offline is illegal online, that misses the point, because the impact online can be so much greater and so much more devastating to the people involved?

[Mr Carmichael]

Indeed. I will come to the distress that is caused by this conduct in my remarks on new clause 62. The right hon. Lady is absolutely right that, in relation to these offences, we should focus on the outcomes and effects endured by those who suffer the abuse—and when I say “abuse”, I use the term advisedly.

From April to December last year, 1,160 cases were reported, which is quite remarkable, given the period we are dealing with—indeed, those figures are from England and Wales alone. Only 11% of the cases that have been reported have led to charge, with 82 prosecutions and 74 cautions resulting from those charges. That suggests that with regard to the need to see a change in attitude and behaviour, we first need to see it among some of the criminal justice professionals dealing with this—the police officers, prosecutors, and judges.

This takes me back to my early career, when as a trainee and then a qualified solicitor, I worked for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service in Edinburgh, where one of my first bosses—she was then a senior legal assistant—was Elish Angiolini, who became the first female Lord Advocate, and the first solicitor Lord Advocate, in Scotland. At that time, along with other colleagues, she did tremendous amounts to drive forward improvements in how the victims of sexual abuse in general, but child sexual abuse in particular, were treated by the court system. A lot of it seems very rudimentary and basic stuff now, but in the early and mid-1990s, when we were arranging for court visits ahead of trials so that victims of these sorts of offences could give their evidence from behind a screen or by live link, it seemed pretty revolutionary, and it met with substantial resistance from the police—not so much the police, in fairness, but certainly many within the legal profession. We were right to drive those changes, as has been demonstrated by the way in which the law and procedure in that area has developed ever since. A similar attitude and a similar drive is now required in relation to the offence of revenge pornography.

New clause 46 goes right to the heart of this by seeking to extend the protection of anonymity to victims of revenge pornography. That would mean that we would not necessarily have to wait for a review to look further at where cases and procedures will develop in this area. As we have heard, the principle of anonymity is accepted by the Government in relation to victims of forced marriage. I welcome new clause 55, which extends that protection. However, it surely strikes at the heart of the offence that we introduced last year that we should seek to protect those women—they are nearly all women—who are, in essence, subject to an invasion of privacy. No really meaningful remedy is available to them if making complaints seeking to reinforce the criminal sanctions that come as a result of that invasion of privacy only makes them vulnerable to further invasions of privacy. That is why it is important that at some point, by whatever means—I will listen very carefully to the Minister’s response—we should look at extending the protection of anonymity to these victims.

New clause 47 would allow the court to make compensation orders to victims of revenge pornography. Many campaigning in this field would like a full civil remedy to be available, although that would have taken us somewhat beyond the scope of this Bill. However, we ought to be taking advantage of the quite remarkable degree of consensus that we have seen across the Chamber tonight. I hope the Government will recognise that and take full advantage of it, because that sort of consensus is rare enough, and when we see it we ought to make the most of it.

New clause 61 would extend the test from an intent to cause alarm, as in section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, to include recklessness. This strikes at what is required evidentially to provide mens rea in relation to the commission of the offence. It would bring people in England and Wales into line with the protections that are already afforded to people in Scotland through the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm (Scotland) Act 2016.

The offence would also be extended from one that required disclosure of the material to one that required a threat to disclose it. Research indicates that no fewer than one in 10 ex-partners make that threat. If the outcome is to provide meaningful protection, it would make sense to extend the ambit of the offence to include a threat to disclose. That is being pursued by the #CtrlAltDel campaign, which is being led by the Women’s Equality party and which I commend to the House.

The final new clause standing in my name is new clause 62, which brings me to the point made by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller).

--- Later in debate ---

[Karen Bradley]

I know that the hon. Gentleman feels strongly about this. I also accept his apology from earlier; I can promise him that I was not smirking at anything he was saying. The Policing Minister is here and he will be happy to meet the hon. Gentleman again to discuss the specific issue of the helicopter.

The current England and Wales-wide arrangements for policing work well, and the proponents of devolution have failed adequately to address the significant risks that would arise if those arrangements were disrupted. I disagree with the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd when she says that policing in England and Wales is set up for urban areas in England. I represent a rural constituency in England, and the way in which policing operates by devolving power to the police and crime commissioners to ensure that we have the right policing for each area is certainly right for my constituency. However, we are debating the Wales Bill tomorrow, and it will be important to debate these matters fully then, as the hon. Member for Rotherham has also suggested.

I am conscious of the time, and I want to try to get through as much of my speech as possible, so I will turn to digital crime issues. We debated in Committee many of the points that have been raised. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) made very important and powerful points about the law on digital crime. However, I do not accept the premise that the criminal law is defective in this area. It is important to acknowledge that the crimes are the same; the fact that they are committed online does not change anything. I would not wish to create a whole new suite of offences that may confuse the courts and make it more difficult to get convictions.

[Mrs Miller]

Will the Minister take a moment to explain why the police are finding it so difficult to secure convictions, particularly in relation to revenge pornography, if the law in this and other areas of online crimes is so clear?

[Karen Bradley]

My right hon. Friend will understand that conviction is not just about the offence in legislation or the precedent in case law; it is about the evidence that can be gathered and presenting that evidence to a jury. I am not in any way saying that we are perfect in this regard, and we could have many debates about how best to get convictions. As I said earlier, I would very much like to meet her, together with my noble Friend Baroness Shields, who has responsibility for the digital Bill in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, because I want to make sure that we are covering these issues and that we make it as easy as possible for the courts to get convictions. I do not accept that the answer is simply to create a whole new suite of offences that may confuse the law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. I want to discuss this with her and others to make sure we address these points.

New clause 44—I realise that I am darting about, but I am doing my best to get through my speech—is about a specialist digital unit. Again, we discussed this in Committee. The way operational policing decisions are taken is a matter for chief officers; it is not something on which the Home Office should legislate to say that every force should operate in such a way. That is down to chief officers locally and, of course, police and crime commissioners. [Interruption.] I am now coming to the new clauses tabled by the hon. Member for Rotherham.

I want to take new clause 6 and all the points about child protection together. We have had many debates about the issue of vulnerable young people and children, how best we can protect them and how to stop their going missing. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), who, as her Front-Bench colleague said, has been such a pioneer in this area. When she talks, I know that she is talking common sense. The hon. Member for Rotherham and other Members will know that I am determined to tackle this issue, but I think we need to do it in the right way. That is why I have convened the round table in a couple of weeks’ time to look at the overall issue of child abduction warning notices. I am not convinced that a warning notice from the police in relation to a child abduction offence is necessarily the right way to make sure we protect such vulnerable young people. I want to consider all issues relating to child abduction warning notices—I think the hon. Member for Stockport has been invited to the round table, but if not, I now extend an invitation to her—and to look at everything we are doing in this area and at ensuring we have the right tools in the armoury for the law enforcement agencies, because it is so important that the police are able to use those tools and to protect young people with the right tools for those young people.

I am extremely conscious of the time and that I need to leave a moment before 9 o’clock, so I will now sit down. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will agree the Government new clauses and amendments, and that they will not press their own.