Violence Reduction, Policing and Criminal Justice

Paul Beresford Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

I am very supportive of the policing and criminal justice aspects of the King’s Speech, but being very aware of the time limit on Members, for the benefit of Ministers—from my point of view, at least—I will just touch on one aspect of the Sentencing Bill. The Government press release for that Bill states:

“The Bill will also make sure vile criminals who commit rape and other serious sexual offences face the full consequences of their actions and spend every day of their sentence behind bars”.

To me, and to most people in the street, that is common sense. If a judge says that someone’s sentence is 10 years, that is what is expected, not five years just because that person has behaved quite well in prison.

However, I would like to file that quote down a little more. It refers to

“vile criminals who commit rape and other serious sexual offences”.

Having some experience of the legislation around child sex offences, I rank very many of those convicted of child sexual abuse as criminals so vile that they should be included in that category. Legislation in this country took a big step to protect children against those criminals in 2003, and since then this country’s child protection legislation has been world leading. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 and subsequent developments and improvements have been agreed on a cross-party basis, including the grooming aspects of that Act.

The Act introduced for the first time the biggest step in child protection: the innovation of making child grooming a crime. Even today, few members of the public and probably very few MPs have any real knowledge of just how vile the actions of many paedophiles towards children often are. In Committee on the Sex Offenders Bill in 2003, I became aware that some Members, on both sides of the House, were oblivious to the vile actions that many paedophiles apply to children. Consequently, I arranged an informal cross-party meeting of the Committee with some of the top police from the Met paedophile unit. One MPs asked the superintendent to describe the worst he had come across. He did, and it shattered the Committee members—they were aghast and shocked—and that part of the Bill then went through seamlessly. I will not repeat what the policeman described, suffice it to say that to call it vile is a gross understatement. Those and virtually all other child sex offenders, male or female, can only be described as vile—or worse.

Some years ago, I was saddened to read a short article in a quality UK weekly by a journalist who partially absolved people who collect child sex abuse material. The article’s reasoning was that viewing the photos did not involve their actually touching children. It was appalling. Individuals who collect such photos create a market that induces others to produce them by abusing children. At the other end of the camera is a child being abused.

I hope the Secretary of State for Justice and his Ministers will consider including convicted child abusers among those who should spend every day of their sentence in prison without early release. That includes those who may not have touched a child but who, by collecting what are not infrequently thousands or tens of thousands of images of child abuse pornography, are also culpable, and should hence spend every day of their sentence behind bars, as the judge may decide is appropriate when they are convicted.