Criminal Justice Bill

Nigel Evans Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tracey Crouch]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady. People who find themselves sleeping rough on the streets are in a desperate situation, and the provisions in the Bill will do nothing to help them. Our local authorities, which often get a bad rap for the consequences of rough sleeping, have many officers doing brilliant work in trying to support rough sleepers. We need a holistic approach to tackling that issue. We do not need to criminalise them through these provisions, some of which, by the way, are laughable, respectfully. We have the idea that a prevention notice can be served to a rough sleeper at their last known address in writing. I am not entirely sure why that provision is even in there.

The point is that we need to be supporting people who are rough sleeping. I get that there is an issue with aggressive begging. In fact, various mayors across our metropolitan cities have said that, but rough sleeping does not need to be criminalised. We got rid of that as part of the Vagrancy Act repeal, which was supported by the Government. All we are doing is bringing that criminalisation in by the back door.

I will support the Bill on Second Reading because of the other measures, but I strongly urge the Government to remove the clauses on nuisance rough sleeping from the Bill. If not, I will certainly lend my name to amendments to remove those clauses from the Bill, on which I hope I would get cross-party support as a consequence. There are other ways of dealing with rough sleeping, rather than criminalising people.

The Bill also contains welcome measures to improve public confidence in policing after significant failings within forces to identify and investigate criminal behaviours. Those are welcome, given the shocking high-profile cases of recent years, but I suggest we reflect on how we protect good officers who do their job in challenging and fast-moving situations from prosecution. The Times on Saturday reported on the prosecution of PC Paul Fisher, who crashed en route to south London, where Sudesh Amman, a convicted terrorist, had stabbed two members of the public. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said that it

“undermines the confidence of all officers using their powers to keep the public safe.”

He is spot on.

A constituent of mine—a frontline Metropolitan police dog handler—was sentenced today having been found guilty of actual bodily harm after apprehending a dangerous criminal, who was subsequently sentenced to 14 months in prison. At the time, he was hailed “brave” and a “hero”. A complaint made from prison was dismissed by every level of the internal standards process, and it was only when the prisoner appealed again that it ended up in court, with the shocking guilty verdict. My constituent’s 21 years of exemplary service are in tatters due to a system that actively works against frontline officers and instead advocates for passive policing. We do need to improve standards of policing across our forces, but, at the same time, we need to protect those officers who are doing their jobs.

I turn to issues that would be helpful inclusions in the Bill. This morning, the first part of the inquiry into the depraved acts of David Fuller in the mortuaries of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust was published. The families of the victims of Fuller are always at the front of our minds when we, the MPs whose constituencies are covered by the trust and where many of them live, are informed about the inquiry. We collectively agree that the Government, the NHS and the trust should accept and act on the recommendations of Sir Jonathan’s report without delay.

Fuller will rightly serve the rest of his life in prison for the heinous crimes he committed, but there are two additional aspects of his crimes that the Government must also act on. First, the woefully short maximum sentence of two years for anyone found guilty of the sexual assault of a dead body needs to be substantially increased to at least 10 years, as per Baroness Noakes’s amendment to the previous Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Secondly, the current legislation applies only to the sexual assault of a dead body that involves penetration. Given the sensitivity of this matter, and on this day when coincidently the inquiry published its report and we are debating the Bill, I do not want to go into further details, but, in short, non-penetrative sexual assault of a dead body is not included under existing legislation, and that needs to be changed. I and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), who is currently abroad on Government business, will table an amendment to the Bill to that end. I truly hope that we will never see such depravity again, but in memory of those who were victims of Fuller’s crimes, we must ensure that the offence covers all acts of assault and that sentences are increased significantly.

I turn to an entirely different point. I am surprised not to see in the Bill a specific offence of tailgating at football matches. The House will have seen Baroness Casey’s report following the violence at the Euro 2020 finals. Tailgating causes significant operational, safety and security problems for major events at Wembley stadium as well as other football matches across the country—I witnessed that as I experienced the surge of those illegally attempting entry to Wembley as I queued to get into the final. I understand that the Home Office agrees with the recommendation for a specific offence and that King’s counsel has recommended to the FA that that can be done through either an update to the Football (Offences) Act 1991 via statutory instrument, or adding it to the Bill. Given that the Bill is in front of us, it feels like a missed opportunity not to include that offence in it, so I will happily table an amendment to ensure that it is in place long before we host Euro 2028.

Finally, there is one other point that I was surprised not to see in the Bill. There are many reasons for us to be disappointed that the Government dropped the kept animals Bill, but one particular reason, which is relevant to this Bill, is that it would have introduced a specific pet abduction offence. Given that there is no debate about the harm and impact of pet theft, I was surprised not to see the offence included in this already wide-ranging bill. There has been an increase in pet theft, and the Government’s pet theft taskforce believes that pet owners should not live in fear of this cruel crime. Since this was in our manifesto, I hope the Government will either table an amendment or support a Back Benchers’ amendment that creates a stand-alone offence and bring reassurance to the millions of pet owners across the country.

I appreciate that I have raised a varied list of points, and that others wish to speak and I am running out of time. In summary, this is an important Bill—our last Criminal Justice Bill before the election. There are things in it that we need to do. There are things in it that we do not need to do. There are still things that we need to put into it. Fortunately, we have an excellent ministerial team responsible for the Bill. I look forward to working with them as it progresses through Parliament.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.

Criminal Justice Bill

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 15th May 2024 Commons Chamber

Maxine told me this week that she knows full well that the new clause may not be accepted by the Government today, but she is thankful for any awareness, and to have the issue raised again on the Floor of the House, because she knows the life-shattering damage that one punch can cause. Before I end, I pay tribute again to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland—I am sure that she will be in her place again very soon—for her bravery and determination in pushing the Government to do the right thing for those who are no longer with us, and for those left grieving for them. As the Minister said in her opening comments, I am sure that the hon. Lady’s dad is looking on with pride.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Chair of the Justice Committee.

[Sir Robert Neill]

This has been a wide-ranging debate, because it is a wide-ranging Bill, and it has touched on a number of difficult, sometimes sensitive and complex topics. However, the tone of the debate does the House a great deal of credit. I appreciate the tone and approach taken by both Front-Bench teams; there is more common ground than not on a number of these areas. Let us see what we can do to improve things. I particularly appreciate the approach adopted by our Minister today, whose engagement has been exceptional on all these matters; I am grateful to her.

Let me deal with some of the amendments. I certainly congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) on his work on cuckooing, which is a real issue; I have seen it in my constituency. We have a gap in the law that we need to plug. I also endorse what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) about new clause 86 and related matters. The concept of consent is perfectly well established in the law on sexual offences, and there would be nothing abnormal in making consent, rather than motive, the gravamen of the offences in question. In fact, that approach would bring them more into line with the rest of the canon of sexual offences. I really hope that the Government will think hard about that. Obviously, I take on board the points made about the amendments that my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) spoke to, and the powerful speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) about the desecration of corpses. That is a vile concept, and clearly the law needs to be amended.

I will concentrate on two matters that the Justice Committee has examined over a period, the first being the provisions on the transfer of prisoners to serve sentences in prisons overseas. I made it clear that I am sceptical about the efficacy of that measure. I do not say it is unlawful, and I do not think the Opposition are saying that either. I accept that it has happened in limited circumstances elsewhere, including in states that are party to the European convention on human rights. The most obvious example is Belgium renting prison space in the Netherlands, but there has also been an example in Norway and Scandinavia. However, our situation is very different. Those two instances highlight the limited value of such arrangements. The prison space that Belgium rented in Holland was very close by—in some cases, it was literally up the road—and there was a similar situation in the Scandinavian countries. In addition, those countries are in the Schengen area. Those instances are not the same as transferring people overseas, some distance away. The practical implications, which the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and others referred to, will get in the way of the proposal achieving anything.

I am grateful to the Minister for recognising some of the concerns raised by Opposition Front Benchers and the Law Society. It is imperative that proper legal advice be available. It is important that there be an inspection regime that ensures parity of standards with those in United Kingdom prisons. Again, I stress the importance of maintaining family ties. The Minister follows these things very closely, so she will know that the evidence overwhelmingly shows, time and again, that the three best things for getting people to turn their life around and not reoffend are a roof over their head, a home, and a family or relationship. If a family relationship or close family ties of any kind are undermined, it makes it more likely that people will reoffend.

Given the number of safeguards that will have to be put in place—to safeguard not just convention rights, to which the Minister rightly referred, but common law rights, which predate the convention and our incorporation of it into our domestic law through the Human Rights Act 1998—it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever end up going abroad. I would much rather we concentrated on more direct measures to deal with the crisis of overcrowding in our prisons. The overseas jail cells measures will not make any difference to the pressures on prison places, or any contribution to long-term demand. If we want to return foreign national prisoners abroad, it would be much better to speed up our prisoner return agreements and get those prisoners to serve their sentence in their home country. That would be constructive. We already have the measures and the legal framework to do that; we just need to be much more rigorous in our use of them.

If we really want to deal with overcrowding in our prisons, the Government and the business managers need to get a grip and bring the Sentencing Bill back to the Floor of the House. That Bill contains valuable, sensible and balanced measures that deal with public protection properly. It provides a far better suite of measures to reduce unproductive forms of imprisonment, and concentrate the very expensive resource of prison where it is most needed: on violent, dangerous and serious offenders. That would be a far greater contribution.

I pay massive tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) for her work in this area. As a lawyer, during my time at the criminal bar, I have both prosecuted and defended one-punch manslaughter cases. I fully understand the impact on families; I have sometimes had to talk to families who have had to accept manslaughter charges. With great respect to my hon. Friend, I do not think the wording of her new clause, as it stands, would meet what is required to deal with this. I am concerned that we are looking at the offence in a piecemeal fashion. Unlawful act manslaughter is a legally complex area. It is often not easy for juries to understand; it is not even easy for judges looking at the factual situation to direct on. That was highlighted recently in the Court of Appeal decision in the case of Auriol Grey, the severely autistic and disabled lady whose actions, tragically, caused an elderly cyclist to fall off her bicycle into the path of a car and be killed. She was originally convicted on the basis of unlawful act manslaughter. A very strong Court of Appeal quashed that conviction, which highlights some of difficulties in such cases.