Welsh Affairs

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tonia Antoniazzi

Thursday 29th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) for securing this debate—one that I look forward to every year. Even though this year we are here off the back of three defeats so far in the men’s Six Nations, the potential of a young squad under the leadership of Warren Gatland is very exciting. My glass continues to be half full. I am also looking forward to watching the women’s Six Nations and to seeing them run out on to the Principality pitch.

Our national joy of rugby must have a mention, but I spoke about rugby in the last two debates so I will not make hon. Members suffer it again. Instead, I will sing the praises of my wonderful constituency. I make no apologies about stating that I represent the most beautiful constituency in Wales. [Hon. Members: “No!”] I know that other Members may argue for their patches, but that only goes to show that we are very lucky to call Wales home.

As hon. Members all know, the Gower peninsula was the first designated area of outstanding natural beauty, not just in Wales but across the whole of the UK. Over the recess I paid a visit to The View Rhossili, an aptly named hospitality business overlooking the remarkable Rhossili bay, to discuss the issues of hospitality in Wales, especially VAT. Rhossili bay is often included in lists of the best beaches in the world. There is no question for me that it belongs with the likes of Bondi and Venice beaches. My favourite walk is the one to Worms Head. It is only four miles from the car park, but it is an amazing walk with every type of terrain. I pay tribute to the Coastwatch volunteers at the end, as Princess Anne did only a few weeks ago in the constituency. The work of the volunteers there to keep our people safe when walking out to the Worm is second to none.

Other parts of Gower are renowned for other reasons. Last week I paid a visit to Selwyn’s Seafoods, which harvests cockles and laverbread collected from Penclawdd. The cockle industry has been part of the life of Penclawdd since at least the Roman period, with cockles sourced there sold worldwide. History is so important for the Gower families, who have travelled widely to sell their cockles. It really warms the cockles of your heart, to coin a phrase.

I would like to take a moment or two to recognise the boundary changes, which the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire mentioned. They will affect me: should I be successful at the next election, I would lose my constituents in Clydach. I would like to thank them for their commitment to me and for their support. In October last year, I was lucky enough to be at the opening of the restored Clydach lock. I pay tribute to the work of the Canal & River Trust and especially to Councillor Gordon Walker, who handed me an axe with which to open the lock. No damage done, Members will be pleased to know, but it was one of the highlights of my seven years in this place.

The Gower constituency may be losing Clydach, but it will gain Cockett, Dunvant and the rest of Killay, Mayals, and the newer ward of Waunarlwydd, so I thought I might include a few fun facts. I will have to cut them short, but the Cockett ward includes Fforestfach, which used to be home of not one but two greyhound racing stadiums. On Dunvant and Killay, Dunvant is most famous as the home of the Dunvant male voice choir, the oldest continuously singing choir in Wales, founded in 1895. After campaigning for years, the Mayals ward is now home to Mumbles Skatepark, a fantastic addition to the Mumbles seafront. Finally, Waunarlwydd—or “one eyelid” to the locals—is a ward that split out of Cockett. I had the pleasure of playing women’s rugby there for a little bit and I have many, many good friends as a result—I had to get rugby in one more time.

It is a testing time in Wales at the moment, and Tata Steel jobs are having an impact on people in my constituency, but I am always there to support them. It is also a testing time in agricultural communities across Europe, not just in Wales: this is not a singular particular issue. We have to work together cross-party and with our farming communities, and encourage all constituents who want to make their voice heard to respond to the consultation with the Welsh Government before it closes on 7 March.

I look forward to hearing the rest of today’s speeches. I speak better French and Italian than I do Welsh, but I will dust off my famous phrase and say, “Dydd gŵyl Dewi hapus, pawb.”

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I stood for the council in Cockett once. Clearly, I did not get elected, but you are going to enjoy Cockett.

Welsh Affairs

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tonia Antoniazzi

Thursday 2nd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his contribution, because he is right that Noel Mooney, the chief exec of the Football Association of Wales, did say last night that the dynamic has changed and that different ideas have been brought to the table, leading to better leadership and management.

I have a good friend who lives in Australia. She sits on the board of Rugby Victoria, which has imposed 50:50 representation. She has been ridiculed by other people that she is only on the board because of certain body parts, which is ridiculous. It is actually brilliant, however, because she is not a rugby player, but her daughters are, her son is, and her husband was. That is what I am trying to say. We had all-women shortlists to get better representation in the Labour party. That is the kind of thing we need to do in order to move forward. Clubs need to change their perception of what a woman’s place in rugby is. It is a cultural issue that all sports have problems with.

A word that has been said to me is “tokenism”. People say, “It’s just tokenism, Tonia. We don’t buy into it.” I do not buy into tokenism, because this is not about that; it is about being the best we can. However, we did see tokenism, disappointingly, in a knee-jerk reaction from the WRU when it decided to say, “We’re banning Tom Jones’s famous song ‘Delilah’.” I had not heard “Delilah” for donkey’s years, but I went to a rugby match, and everybody in the bar and on the train was singing it, and it was uncomfortable. I am not going to rant on about “Delilah”. It gets sung. We know the words. We all know that the words are wrong, and it would be great if we could change some of them, but hey-ho.

The word tokenism strikes at me. At the time of the WRU decision, Louis Rees-Zammit tweeted:

“All the things they need to do and they do that first…”

It is true; the WRU needs to do better for everybody involved in the sport, be they our little ones playing, the regions—that is a whole other debate—or the elite team. The Secretary of State is well placed to have those conversations, and I know that he has spoken with Nigel Walker, the interim chief executive. I know what a great man Nigel Walker is, and I hope that he and Ieuan Evans can turn this around, but it needs a massive shift.

I think I have finished talking about Welsh rugby union and rugby in Wales, but I hope that everybody in this House will join me in saying that we absolutely love rugby and want to big up our players, and that it represents who we are at every single level, whether we have played, watched or just gone along to help out. It is everybody’s; it is ours.

On another note—still on rugby, but with a different edge—the people who go to rugby clubs are all volunteers. I know that the Secretary of State met Rachel, one of my constituents, at Lancaster House. Rachel runs Tempo Time Credits, which is a brilliant way of getting people to do more volunteering and of encouraging more diverse groups of people to volunteer and support their local community. Rugby is a sure-fire win to get people involved. Our Tempo Time Credit volunteers can provide support to local rugby clubs, and they then get rewarded, perhaps with tickets to go to the Scarlets or the Blues—they could go to the Ospreys, but I suppose it depends. [Interruption.] Definitely. I do not want to cause a war in the Chamber. I just wanted to give a really big shout out to all those volunteers, because they make sport happen, not just in Wales but across the United Kingdom. For us, that is really important.

I will bring my comments to close. I thank everybody who has made this debate happen. I am grateful for the diversity of debate when we talk about Welsh Affairs. I am a very proud Welsh-Italian, and I am proud to have been able to stand up in the Chamber today and speak for those who feel that they do not have a voice.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Diolch yn fawr.

Change of Name by Registered Sex Offenders

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tonia Antoniazzi

Thursday 2nd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

My huge thanks go to my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) for bringing this important subject to the Chamber and to national prominence—her role in this has been extraordinary. I also thank women such as Della who have waived their anonymity to expose the serious failures in the DBS system, and to ensure that the law is changed to keep people safe.

As colleagues will no doubt have seen in their constituencies, most people’s reaction to hearing about this loophole is one of utter disbelief—disbelief that simple changes, such as the deed poll asking if the applicant has a criminal record, have not been made; disbelief that a system that so many of them have encountered—anywhere from their children’s school to local sports clubs—features such a fundamental flaw; and disbelief that, despite years of warning from campaigners, the name change loophole still exists and is treated as an administrative headache, not a serious risk.

I take this opportunity to highlight a concern that the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) and the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) have already mentioned. Good intentions have not been balanced with the risk of leaving another avenue to be exploited and that is so dangerous. The DBS grants enhanced privacy rights to individuals who change their gender when changing their identity. Those are exceptional rights that are granted only to individuals from that group. The result is that identity verification is compromised, meaning that there is no guarantee that the information returned during the check and displayed on the certificate will be accurate or complete.

Those exceptional privacy rights also allow an applicant who has changed gender to request that all their previous names are withheld from the DBS certificate that is issued. That right to conceal previous identities is not given to anyone else: disclosing previous identities is a key component of safeguarding, and DBS certificates issued to all other individuals display all other names that the applicant has used.

Applicants who change their gender are also permitted to conceal their sex, and the DBS certificate issued will display their acquired gender instead. That right is not granted to any other individual: the importance of sex to safeguarding means that the sex of all other applicants is always displayed. There cannot be any exceptions in safeguarding. For the system to work, it must apply the same standards to everyone. Sadly, it is simply naive to think that loopholes in the system will not be exploited.

The system relies on the honesty of sex offenders to ensure that it functions as it should, but as the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) said, they are not to be trusted; they are not honest. Data obtained by the BBC from police forces highlights just how flawed this approach is. Between 2019 and 2021, more than 5,500 offences were committed by sex offenders of failing to comply with notification requirements: offences such as not telling the police they were living in a household with a child. The Disclosure and Barring Service found that 2,190 applicants for checks had criminal records and had supplied incorrect or missed out personal details such as past names or aliases. A total of 6,740 prosecutions began over the past three financial years for offences by sex offenders of breaches of a sexual harm prevention order or interim order. The system is broken and we must fix it. We have plenty of damning evidence as to why we should.

After being released from prison only three years into his six-year sentence for indecent assault, following a string of sexual assault convictions against children, Timothy Cuffy changed his name to Timothy Barnett. His new name allowed him to hide his criminal past, including from his new partner and three children. As Timothy Barnett, he answered the door to 13-year-old Sandy Hadfield, who knocked looking for her friend. After giving her vodka, he lured her to a quiet area of the woods, where he attempted to have sex with her before slitting her throat. Owing to his name change, his background went undetected, even after two encounters with Lincolnshire police and one encounter with social services. A system that means a convicted child sex offender is not identified, despite encounters with the police and social services, is one that is fundamentally broken and that led to the most tragic of outcomes in that case.

Sex offenders are not just changing their name post trial to hide their convictions; they are also changing their name at trial, or just before, to protect their name on their birth certificate. That has been highlighted in the high-profile case of Department for International Development worker Peter Davis, who became James Robert Harris before trial, allowing him to keep all records of his birth name clean should he decide to use it again.

This loophole gives sex offenders and abusers, many of whom rely on their ability to manipulate in order to carry out their crimes, an opportunity to hide their criminal history and pass the very checks that are meant to keep the most vulnerable safe. This loophole renders not only the DBS redundant but the domestic violence disclosure scheme, the sex offenders register and the child sex offender disclosure scheme. It seems absurd that we are discussing this 20 years on from the Bichard inquiry, which identified that the ability of serial predator Ian Huntley to change his name by deed poll to Ian Nixon, successfully severing the link with his existing police records, meant that no alarms were raised, and he was employed as a school caretaker. That this loophole still exists, allowing—indeed, enabling—serial predators to create new identities, is a scandal.

We are in this place to be legislators. We are in this place to make decisions and to ask the questions, “What if?” and “How?” We have to safeguard the most vulnerable people in society from these bad actors in all legislation. I pay tribute to everybody in the Gallery today and my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham for her outstanding work on this issue.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the SNP spokesperson to wind up the debate.