Victims and Prisoners Bill

Maria Miller Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 15th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dame Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate. I warmly welcome the Bill, and in advance I thank the Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), who I know, together with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, will engage thoroughly with all the issues raised. I thank the Justice Committee for an excellent piece of pre-legislative scrutiny; my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) who chairs the Committee does a great job for us all.

The Bill is complex and covers a great deal, from prisoners and parole to victims of major incidents. We have heard a lot about those two issues already. I will turn my remarks firmly to victims of crime—the first part of the Bill—particularly with regards to the victims code. This is a hugely important piece of legislation for victims. I believe that we have a strong justice system only if it is a deterrent that, yes, provides punishment, but also recognises and supports victims. Otherwise, we risk falling short. To be the victim of crime is not only devastating but can be incredibly disorienting. Attempting to navigate the complex criminal justice system as a layperson is not easy. The perpetrator has numerous agencies telling them what they can and cannot do. Certainly, that has been the way in the past. Largely, victims have been left to navigate life post crime themselves.

I am sure that the House will not mind me saying that quite recently I was a victim of crime, which led to a successful conviction of harassment by my local Crown Prosecution Service in Hampshire. I was listening to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips); I would not want to comment on what she said, but I cannot commend Wessex Crown Prosecution Service highly enough. Unlike the hon. Lady, I was kept thoroughly informed at every step. I will not comment too much on it because, unfortunately, the individual has transgressed and is before the courts again, but it is important to make the point that the CPS in Wessex got it right. It might not get it right all the time, but when it does, it is important for victims. I hope that the Crown Prosecution Service in the hon. Lady’s constituency takes a leaf out of the books in my area.

The 2020 code of practice was a good start and put some important principles in place. What is great about the Bill is that it takes them forward and puts them on a statutory footing. It seems perverse that the justice system could be better explained to perpetrators than to victims. The Bill will help equalise that disparity, by putting the victims code on a statutory footing, making what victims can and should expect even clearer than before.

An important part of the Bill is putting a duty on relevant bodies to raise awareness of the victims code with victims, which will make a big impact and be greatly welcomed. The victims code is a detailed document containing the important rights that victims can expect, but it is of little use if people do not know it exists, so it is right that those with responsibility for aspects of the code can make it clear to victims how they can use it.

We know that services working in isolation miss problems and opportunities for support, which is why I also welcome the Bill’s focus on co-ordinating services across relevant bodies and strengthening local services. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s recent report, “A patchwork of provision”, showed that the level of service and support that victims can reliably expect is not uniform across the country and depends greatly on where they live. I welcome the consistency that the Bill shows. We need to ensure we get that consistency across the whole United Kingdom, wherever people live.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) talked about the role of police and crime commissioners in getting local consistency embedded in our constituencies. I am pleased that my local police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, has put in place similar initiatives to those mentioned by my right hon. Friend, as well as delivering, well ahead of time, an extra 600 police officers in our county. My police and crime commissioner is consulting on a victims hub—the consultation is ongoing—so that victims will know how to get the support that the Bill wants to ensure is available to them. Having quicker and tailored access to support services will be an important step forward in my own constituency. I urge anybody who is able to take part in the consultation to do so; it runs until Monday 21 May.

I add my support to the Bill’s provisions with regard to IDVAs and ISVAs. Indeed, I held a roundtable on Friday on the importance of tackling domestic abuse. We discussed the amazing work done by a number of different organisations in my constituency in ensuring that victims are well aware of the support available, and the hugely important role of IDVAs and ISVAs, particularly when cases come to court, which was underlined by my local police commander. Will my right hon. Friend the Minister help me to ensure that those expert individuals will in future be able to stay with victims in court? That issue was raised with me at the roundtable.

Having someone independent of the police present in the immediate aftermath of a crime can be crucial, but making sure they continue to be involved, when a case comes to court, can help with some of the problems that exist for victims because of the great deal of time it can take for relevant evidence and individuals to be brought to court. IDVAs and ISVAs are often the only people involved whose sole focus is the victim. As much as individual police officers regularly go out of their way to care for victims of crime, the reality is that police priorities will mean that sometimes their focus goes elsewhere.

I highlight to the Minister the section of the Bill about support for victims, because the victims code may go further than he thinks. In addition, I have raised the issue of the role of non-disclosure agreements with him on a number of occasions. They can cover up crimes, particularly those in the workplace and those that disproportionately impact women, such as sexual harassment or other forms of abuse in the workplace.

When it comes to non-disclosure agreements and sexual harassment in the workplace, the Government have been working on strengthening support for victims for a great deal of time. The Government have backed universities in banning the use of non-disclosure agreements to cover up misconduct, and they are looking at how they could go further in stopping non-disclosure agreements from being used inappropriately. Unfortunately, it is increasingly common practice for non-disclosure clauses to be included in settlement agreements, although it is perfectly possible to settle without them.

When victims of misconduct—often sexual misconduct and usually women—make allegations, an all too frequent response is a settlement in which an employer can see allegations dropped in return for a non-disclosure agreement that will stop the victim from speaking out, sometimes lawfully and sometimes not so much. No matter what, victims feeling that they cannot speak out cannot be what we want to see in this place.

An employee can feel trapped. When I chaired the Women and Equalities Committee, we published at least two reports on the impact on victims of non-disclosure agreements and we heard first-hand evidence that people felt not only that they could not speak out about their experience, but that it made them feel even worse and re-victimised. Sometimes, I am sure in error, legal counsel could put a non-disclosure agreement into a contract or severance agreement, but more often that is done by human resources departments, which probably take something offline and give it to an individual to sign. That means that a person who has experienced significant wrongdoing in the workplace can feel that they cannot speak out.

I hope the Minister might want to look at how the Victims and Prisoners Bill could take the excellent work that the Government have done with universities, calling out the appalling impact of non-disclosure agreements, a stage further. I am sure he is not surprised that I want to thank Zelda Perkins for the work that she has done through the organisation she has set up, Can’t Buy My Silence. She is continuing to campaign hard to stop non-disclosure agreements being used in the way they were against her and her colleagues, when she was unable to speak out about Harvey Weinstein and the appalling way that he treated a number of women in his organisation. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister is listening closely to how we could use this excellent Bill to take further the Government’s work on victim support and outlawing the misuse of non-disclosure agreements.

I was pleased to support the then Secretary of State for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), in launching the university pledge to stop the use of non-disclosure agreements in universities. I strongly supported the subsequent ban through the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. I call on the Government to expand the ban on NDAs from educational settings to other workplaces through the victims code in the Bill. In the not-too-distant future, I hope the Minister will have some meetings with me to see how we can ensure that the very real impact that the work done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham had on universities can have a broader impact. That will ensure we protect many more victims, over and above those he was envisaging in his first draft of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Maria Miller]

I hear what the hon. Lady is saying about the availability of ISVAs in her area and about their only being connected with police cases, but should she not push back against that? There are three ISVAs in my local hospital, and they are certainly not connected with crimes; they would be called on by the staff in the emergency department as needed.

[Jess Phillips]

In fact, my area was the first in the west midlands to have ISVAs in a hospital, the Queen Elizabeth. I was one of the commissioners. What I want to see in a Bill such as this is not just a duty to collaborate, but a duty to commission. Every local authority area in the country, and every health provider, whether it is a public health provider, a mental health provider, an independent board, or whatever the bloody hell we call them this week—PCCs, PCGs—I apologise for swearing, Madam Deputy Speaker.