Criminal Justice Bill

Debate between Meg Hillier and John Hayes

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes]

Does the hon. Lady agree that perpetual shoplifters of the kind she describes, who intimidate people and make the lives of shopkeepers and shop assistants a misery, should be banged up?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

Again, I find myself breaking out in agreement with the right hon. Gentleman.

If the sanction is too low, people will keep doing it. As with county lines, it is clear that criminal gangs are often using and exploiting vulnerable people to do their dirty work. Those vulnerable people get caught, but we do not get Mr Big. Shoplifting is becoming an epidemic in many of our areas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I absolutely am. I recommend to my right hon. Friend our report of this year and, I am sorry to say, our back history of reports on this issue, because things have moved so slowly that people might as well read the 2017 report as not much has moved on since.

I am going to come on to the issue of how reporting works, because the Bill misses an opportunity there.

[Sir John Hayes]

The right hon. Lady may recall that when I was a Home Office Minister—we are all sharing our Home Office histories here—we set up the National Cyber Security Centre and the national cyber-security strategy. We have made significant progress, but she is right to say that, as with shoplifting, fraud and cyber-crime are at epidemic levels. Part of that is about the way we constructed systems that are interdependent, interconnected and interoperable. Sometimes that adds to vulnerability, so we must change culturally how we go about doing business and interacting.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I do not dispute what the right hon. Gentleman says, but there is a danger that that lets the Home Office off the hook. In the five or six years during which the Public Accounts Committee has been looking at the issue, fraud has got worse. Indeed, I was dealing with some of the issues when I was a Home Office Minister, and we are seeing a growth in the crime but not a growth in the action in response to it. That is not surprising, as the volume and complexity of cases are overwhelming police forces and Action Fraud, the civil body to which people report such crime.

The point that the right hon. Gentleman makes about interdependency is valid. Because the Home Office is dependent on the banking, technology, telecoms and retail sectors to fight fraud, its response has been slow and sluggish, relying on voluntary agreements with organisations in those sectors to deliver change. Frankly, those agreements have not delivered enough. The banks were reluctant to give evidence at all to the Public Accounts Committee—I suggest to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), that she pushes the banks to give more information—and when we suggested publicly reporting fraud levels against the banks, they were apoplectic. We ended up recommending slightly time-delayed reporting as a way of keeping institutions on their toes, so that customers could vote with their feet and know exactly which banks were on top of dealing with fraud. We think that the different sectors where fraud is happening could do more.

Over 70% of fraud has an international element, so whatever we do domestically will not resolve the situation unless we have better relationships with overseas criminal justice agencies. This is immature in the Home Office currently, as we concluded in our report published earlier this year, and the matter is not helped by the lack of capacity in the UK. Only 1% of police are dedicated to fraud, yet it represents 41% of crime. The Home Secretary said that percentage balancing was not possible, but we can all acknowledge that if 1% of police officers are dedicated to fraud and 41% of crime is fraud then the balance is out of kilter.

Some 20,000 new police officers are being recruited, which is a welcome step, but only around 2% of them—some 380 officers—will be focused on fraud. The Public Accounts Committee looked at new officer recruitment; recruiting fast can mean that a lot of junior staff are recruited, not the specialists that are needed, so there has been a missed opportunity. I will not go into that further, as it is outside the scope of the Bill.

Public communications could be improved by the Home Office, working in partnership with others, as campaigns can be effective. When the Committee looked at communications this year, there were 13 public campaigns running about fraud, but fewer than 10% of citizens were aware of any of them. We raised the matter five years ago, when the Take Five campaign was run by the National Crime Agency. However, five years on, that campaign is still being evaluated, so it is not working very well.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North raised the issue of fraud not being reported by people. Only 300,000 cases were reported to Action Fraud by the public, which given the overall numbers is not very many, and another 600,000 were reported by business and industry. Of the 900,000 cases reported annually, fewer than 15% end up with further action and only 1% result in a criminal justice outcome. Action Fraud is set to be replaced in the new year, yet the Bill does not mention the victim experience, which is a missed opportunity. I hope that will be probed further by members of the Bill Committee.

It is sobering that the time taken by law enforcement agencies to take on and tackle fraud is often longer than the sentence that the fraudster receives, so something is going wrong. We need a concerted effort to deal with this wicked issue, which cuts across many areas.

The measure relating to intimate images is welcome. I pay tribute to my previous constituent, Emily, who has now moved back to the United States, who worked tirelessly over a period of years to shift the dial on the issue, after she was filmed naked without her consent. I held an Adjournment debate in April 2018 calling for exactly this issue to be addressed and made an offence. New section 66AA sets out three offences of taking or recording intimate photographs or film, including an offence of “intentionally” taking a photograph or recording a film that shows another person in an intimate state without that person’s consent or a reasonable belief in their consent.

This is a moment to pay tribute to Emily Hunt, who bravely named herself, took on the system and was a force of nature in making sure the issue was tackled. We could not understand why the crime of taking such a photograph was not identified in law. At the time, the fact the person who had taken it had not published it was the issue, but this measure has now been introduced and it would have protected Emily. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) highlighted what happens to many young teenagers, particularly teenage girls, so this measure acts as a protection. In addition, we need to ensure we educate people that such behaviour should not happen. As the Bill makes progress, I hope some of those issues will be picked up in Committee.