Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Meg Munn and Simon Hughes

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

In the previous Session of Parliament, the Justice Committee identified that under this Government the progress made in implementing the recommendations of the Corston report on women prisoners had stalled. What has happened in the past year to address that and to make sure that the different needs of women, particularly in preventing reoffending, are being properly addressed by this Government?

[Simon Hughes]

There is a list of steps that the Government are taking. I cannot give them all now because Mr Speaker would not allow me. We have legislated to make sure that women’s interests are specifically provided for in the rehabilitation process. There have to be specific programmes to meet the needs of women. We have made sure that in each of the women’s prisons there will be the capacity for women to have spaces outside the walls on a gradual programme, so that they can be rehabilitated more quickly. I am clear that the needs of women are entirely different from the needs of men in prison, not least because of their family responsibilities, and that is written through—as through a stick of rock—all that we are seeking to do in relation to women in custody. I will give the hon. Lady the full list later.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Meg Munn and Simon Hughes

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Simon Hughes)]

It is true that the rate of self-harm is far too high in our prisons and is traditionally higher among women than men. I can reassure my hon. Friend a little, however: between 2004 and 2010, the number of incidents was over 10,000 a year, but that has come down significantly in the last three years to fewer than 6,000 last year. However, this issue is clearly linked to mental health, and the Deputy Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and I have made it clear that we want mental health services to be as good in prisons as in the rest of the country and as good as all other NHS services and that we want to identify mental health issues when people first enter the criminal justice system, so that, ideally, they can be diverted from prison, not sent to prison.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

In a recent court case where a child was being considered for adoption, it was reported that the president of the family division described it as “profoundly disturbing” that the parents did not qualify for legal aid and could not afford legal aid representation. Given the lifelong nature of adoption, will the Secretary of State look again at the issue of legal aid funding for these kinds of cases?

Defendant Anonymity

Debate between Meg Munn and Simon Hughes

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate. I compliment the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) on his speech. I shall come back to the content, but I largely agree with what he said and would like to add to his arguments.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) ticked all the maiden speech boxes, and I congratulate him on that—except for his bigging up of Gillingham. Gillingham regularly play Millwall, and Millwall often win, so he cannot expect my support for the Gills, although as I go to many games I shall look out for him and entertain him willingly if he comes to any games at The Den.

The hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) made a comprehensive speech, on which I compliment her. Like the right hon. Member for Leicester East, she covered the ground well. She combined passion with warnings that we must proceed carefully, as I shall seek to do in my few remarks.

The Government are to be congratulated on having brought the matter to debate early in the Parliament, and I thank my the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt),on doing so. He and his colleagues said they would do it and they have. It is right that the Government are trying to ensure that the voices of Parliament and those who communicate with us are heard, without having to hold a formal, national 12-month or two-year consultation. We can have proper processes of deliberation, and my understanding is that we have plenty of time, because the proposal is not in this year’s legislative programme. It was not in the Queen’s Speech, so we have at least a year to see where we want to go.

I have one more deliberative point. There may be a case for relevant Select Committees to meet jointly to look at this matter, because clearly there is a home affairs issue and a justice issue. I hope that when the Committees are set up, the two Committees might think of doing the work together, instead of doing two separate bits of work. That would be the logical thing to do.

I say very clearly that before I entered the House—now a long time ago—I was a practising barrister and both defended and prosecuted in serious sexual offences cases, including rape cases. That work, my work as a youth worker and my work as an MP—which has included dealing with some of the most horrendous cases of rape of people who have come to see me themselves, or of their daughters—have made me absolutely clear about the need to get the law right, and to ensure above all we achieve the first objective: the perpetrators of these most horrendous of crimes are brought to justice. There have been too many failings in the criminal justice system as a result of which that objective has not been achieved.

I have had to nurse several families through the fact that the criminal justice system has failed and let them down—sometimes with traumatic consequences for the individual, who as an adult has not been able to carry on trusting the system or other people. The hon. Member for Garston and Halewood was right to say that very nearly all the people concerned are women—more than 90%—but occasionally there are men too, and we should not forget that such things could happen to anyone.

[Meg Munn]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very thoughtful speech. Does he agree that when there are repeat offences it is important that people are brought to justice early, because that in itself becomes a protective measure for potential future victims?

[Simon Hughes]

I absolutely agree with that. I was very critical, publicly and in the House, of the fact that it took so long for Ian Huntley to be brought to justice for the Soham murders, given that although he had not been convicted before, he was on the radar of the police in Lincolnshire, I think, and on Humberside, before he moved to Cambridgeshire. I was also very critical of the fact that John Worboys, who lived in my constituency, was not brought to court until he had committed at least 70 offences. I think that the police have gradually learned the lesson and are improving their system, as the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), who has relevant ministerial experience, knows, but it took a lot of work to get the police to change their attitude and to take these issues much more seriously all the time. There have been many cases relating to offences in my constituency and elsewhere—in the latest one, a man who was a serial offender was arrested in relation to offences in south-west London—where the pattern of serial offending was such that clearly there could and should have been earlier intervention; the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) is quite right.

Without repeating what others have said, let me quickly remind hon. Members of how we got to this point. In 1976, we legislated to give anonymity to complainants in rape cases. That was extended to other sex offences in 1992. In 1976 we legislated to give anonymity to defendants in rape cases for the period until 1988, when the law was then changed. After a period of just under 12 years, the law went back to where it was before, and where it remains. Since then, despite the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which was a major piece of legislation, we have not changed the law in this area. The same year, the Home Affairs Committee came up with its recommendation that we should change the law, but we have not done so, and it was against that background that my party—it is not a secret—had a long debate specifically on rape at the 2006 Liberal Democrat conference, because of the concern about the low number of convictions. That was what precipitated the debate, and I want to share its conclusion because, yes, the source of this policy is indeed my party’s deliberation.

We noted that the rate of conviction is only about 5%—a figure that we have often heard and that is much lower than that in many other places in Europe. Reported rape is rising every year, but successful prosecutions are not rising; indeed, they are falling. The number of rapists who are given a caution and freed almost doubled in the previous decade. The health-related costs of rape are phenomenal, let alone the other social costs. The Sentencing Guidelines Council allowed the perpetrators of rape to avoid jail if they showed remorse—not something that I would ever countenance. Amnesty International produced a worldwide report that challenged the perception—this point was made by the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson)—about self-induced offences and said that it was far from the truth in most cases. Clearly, such offences are as far from any other from being self-induced.

We also flagged up the tainting of those who were accused and then acquitted. I want to step back for a second. I am sure that colleagues on both sides of the House know that the people who are most vilified in prison and those in the community who are viewed with most suspicion are those accused and either convicted or not convicted of the most serious sexual offences—more so than other offences of violence, apart from the most horrible ones, such as child murder or domestic violence and the rest.

--- Later in debate ---

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley). I must say that during his speech I found myself wishing that we could go back in time and see Cannock Chase in the days that he described. I regularly travel from Birmingham northwards, as my husband comes from Birmingham, and I have never thought of Cannock Chase in those terms, but I will do so in future. The hon. Gentleman paid a full and correct tribute to Tony Wright, whom we all miss, and who, as he rightly said, has left us with an important legacy. I wish the hon. Gentleman well in his pursuit of home affairs, but, unusually, following a maiden speech, I will be disagreeing with him on several issues, although I will do so in the customary fashion in this House.

I want to make a few points in this enormously important debate. I am worried that the Government’s policy is ill thought out. My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson) dealt well with the issue. The Government should think again, and carefully, about the matter. No one in this Chamber underestimates the impact on a person of a false accusation of rape or any other crime. In my many years in social work, I worked not only with many victims of sex offenders but with sex offenders themselves, and on a few rare occasions witnessed first hand the impact of what subsequently turned out to be an unproven accusation.

Over the years, I have watched the situation for those complaining of rape improve, fortunately. Some Members of a similar age will recall—some Members, happily, are younger and will not—that back in the 1980s some television programmes were made in the Thames valley about police interviewing rape complainants. Many people were rightly horrified to see the general attitude of disbelief, which was one reason for the low reporting of cases. Fortunately, much has changed since that time, although not as much as we might like. However, the successful prosecution rate for rape continues to be of significant concern. In such situations, to protect people from false allegations, we must expect good investigation and evidence gathering. In a number of cases of false allegations of which I have heard, that has not been the case. Adopting a general position of belief, which is essential, does not mean ignoring the importance of good investigation and evidence gathering.

Let us be clear: this crime is not only heinous, but enormously difficult, for many reasons, to investigate. It is difficult for victims to talk about. None of us would welcome having to talk about sexual matters—even those on a consensual basis—but talking about an attack or crime of such a nature to people one does not know, and to have to go into intimate details, is very difficult. Rightly, we have talked about children being involved, and I dealt with that on a professional basis for many years. How do children explain what has happened to them when they might not even have the necessary words? How do they talk about it when they might feel that people are looking at them as if they have done something wrong themselves? We must take that into account.

Even when adults are involved, we are talking about a situation in which perhaps only two people were present and there were no other witnesses. We are talking about one person’s word against another’s. Even when, according to any objective judgment, a woman has done nothing wrong, she will still be asking herself, “Did I do something wrong? Did I invite this in some way?” We as a society must say, “No means no. Rape is not acceptable. Sexual relationships without consent constitute rape, and should be subject to prosecution.” However, the difficulties involved cannot be underestimated, and the situation must therefore be approached very carefully.

It is important that we adopt a position of belief, because, as some of my hon. Friends have pointed out, too many people have not been believed in the past. If it is felt that the first thing victims must do is prove that something has happened to them, even fewer women will come forward, and children will not summon up what is an almost impossible level of courage to speak up and say, “Something happened to me.” I have watched people who have been abused trying to give evidence in court. I shall never forget seeing a young woman who had been abused while in a children’s home, standing there petrified and trembling, almost unable to give evidence. In such circumstances, the position of victims is very difficult.

The issue of offending behaviour involves a great many myths. We talk about rape as if it suddenly appears out of nowhere, but someone who commits rape may well have previously committed other, lesser, sexual offences. I use the word “lesser” in relation to the criminal process, not in relation to the impact on the victim. The offender may have tested a situation, or fantasised about it, before committing the offence. In many cases, a pattern of behaviour has been formed.

That is one reason why those of us who oppose anonymity after charge—anonymity before charge is a different matter—consider it important to do so. Someone who comes forward and says “This happened to me too” provides corroboration of that pattern of behaviour, and leads people to feel that they can believe what is being said. As I said earlier, if just two people are involved it is one person’s word against another’s. If a pattern of behaviour has been established and people provide detailed corroboration, it becomes possible to proceed with a prosecution.

[Simon Hughes]

The hon. Lady is always listened to seriously and with respect. May I ask whether she has reflected on my earlier suggestion to her hon. Friend the. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) that what leads to more women coming forward is not necessarily the information that an individual lives at a certain address, is a certain height or has hair of a certain kind, but may be a pattern of behaviour? That is information that can be shared immediately, and the police often do share it just to get people to come forward, as indeed they should.

[Meg Munn]

I agree. In my experience, it is possible during the investigative process—in which, as I have said, I have been involved on the social work side—to question people who may have been in contact with the person concerned, without necessarily naming that person. For example, it is possible to contact previous residents of a children’s home and ask, “Did anything ever happen to you that gave you cause for concern?” Conducting the investigative process properly protects against false charges, or charges that turn out to be false.

We must look at this situation in the round, and we have to say, “This is too important not to have a formal consultation.” I have been encouraged by the fact that the Government have been prepared to discuss this more, and to accept that the nine words that were in the coalition document are not sufficient, but I plead with them to have a formal consultation. This is a matter that deserves to be addressed with that level of seriousness.

I gently say to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase that this is not a gender issue. Many victims are men and boys. Indeed, one concern is that boys who were abused as children find it particularly difficult to come forward and say they have been abused, because there is still the stigma that means they might be called gay. Sometimes—but not always by any means, as this is not a direct correlation—victims who have had something terrible done to them as children go on to become perpetrators because they do not know the rightful place of sexual relationships in adult situations. We talk about the lifelong effects of sexual abuse—that is one of them, and we should take it very seriously.

That points to another reason why it is enormously important that people have the confidence to come forward early and say they have been abused. The hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) mentioned the impact on families. If people come forward early, it stops there being future victims. We must constantly bear down on this issue to stop there being future victims and to stop the cycle of sexual abuse continuing.

I ask Ministers to answer the following questions again and in greater detail. Why rape? Why not all sexual offences? Also, why has this proposal been put forward at all if not because of the issue of false allegations? The Minister said very clearly that it was not based on the issue of false allegations, but he did not tell us what it was based on.

This debate deserves greater clarity, not more confusion, which is what we got from the Minister today. The matter under discussion is complex and important, and we need to take time over it. We need the Select Committees to take a look at it, and we need a proper public consultation so that everybody who has a story to tell and every agency that has worked with people affected by this can respond and put forward their views.

I understand how the proposal may have emerged. It might, perhaps, have happened without enough thought and late at night when people had not had any sleep during the period when the coalition agreement was put together fast. That does not have to bind us to carrying the proposal through, however, and to making a decision that would be detrimental to the people we should be caring about, whether victims or offenders. I ask Ministers to think again.