Criminal Justice Bill

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 15th May 2024 Commons Chamber

Many will never get over the shock and disgust that they felt when that news was imparted to them that evening; it stays with them, even now. Nor, as my hon. Friend says, will the police officers get over having to view every second of hundreds of hours of video showing the most depraved images that they have ever been confronted with. As my hon. Friend said, one of the officers was in touch with us, and called on us to close this gap in the law. He, his colleagues, and the families of the victims will never have restored to them the peace of mind that Fuller destroyed. The families’ memories of their loved ones will be forever tainted by association with the thought of what Fuller did to them. Sadly, we cannot correct that in this House, but we can ensure that the gravity of these offences is recognised. I am grateful to the Minister for supporting our new clause, and giving it the Government’s backing.

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker. I thank the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) for speaking on the issue. For those of us who were on the Bill Committee—many of us are present today—it was in many cases quite distressing to hear of the experiences that so many people had had over the years. It is a tribute to Members present, including those who were on the Committee, that they are here to listen to those experiences.

My new clauses 35 and 36 relate to traffic collisions. New clause 35 is intended to require drivers who are involved in a collision with a pedestrian, cyclist or motorcyclist to remain at the scene of the collision and report it to the police, or face the consequences of their decision not to. New clause 36 would reduce the amount of time that the driver involved has to report the collision from 24 hours to two hours. Technology has moved on. The provision for 24 hours is an old element of the Road Traffic Act 1988. Everybody has the capacity to report things very quickly.

I thank hon. Members who put their names to my new clauses. As I said, I sat on the Bill Committee for several weeks. We went through it line by line, and as I indicated, we listened to harrowing and distressing accounts of the experiences of victims—victims who literally went from the cradle to the grave. We have heard that again today. Colleagues who spoke in Committee will no doubt bring those accounts to the attention of a wider audience of hon. Members today. We have just heard one such example. Those accounts are worth listening to.

For my part, I bring to the attention of colleagues my reasons for tabling my two new clauses; the groups that have supported me in doing so inclue RoadPeace, Cycling UK and Action Vision Zero. There was a Westminster Hall debate on 15 November 2021 about two petitions that had gathered more than 100,000 and 165,000 names respectively, calling for tougher sentences for, as they are colloquially known, hit-and-run drivers who cause death, and for the offence of causing death by dangerous driving to be widened to include a failure to stop, call 999 and render aid on scene until further help arrives. The Department for Transport said in response to the petitions:

“The Government takes this issue seriously. The Department for Transport is looking into the issue of such incidents of failure to stop resulting in death or serious injury, and exploring whether there are further options that can be pursued.”

That was well over two years ago. What have the Government done in response? What has the Department for Transport done? It appears to me to be not a great deal.

I raised the issue of leaving the scene of a collision in the Bill Committee earlier this year. I did not push my new clauses to a vote then, because I understood that either the Ministry of Justice or the Department for Transport were working on the matter, and could be liaising on it, especially as the Department for Transport had already recognised that some assessment of the situation must be undertaken, and had ostensibly committed to doing that. Lord Paddick in the other place withdrew an amendment on 8 November 2021 to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that would have amended the Road Traffic Act 1988 because Baroness Williams of Trafford said that her ministerial

colleagues at the Department for Transport understood the concerns raised and were

“exploring options…including…the available penalties and how the offence operates as part of long-term and wider work on road safety.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 11 November 2021; Vol. 815, c. 1557.]

I wrote to the Minister earlier this year to say that I was not tied to the letter of my new clauses and the penalties therein, but I do not appear to have received a response, which is regrettable. If I did receive a response, I apologise, but I do not believe that I did. I assume there was some liaison between Departments on the matter. In Committee, I set out in a bit more detail why I was pursuing this issue. I go back to the point about how long it has been since the Government have moved on their position. It is 10 years since they said that they would undertake a full review of traffic offences. Regrettably, that has not happened, yet there seems to be an irrefutable case for it. What will it take for the Government to look at these issues affecting our constituents?

I offer hon. Members a few stats, to put this matter into context. Every 16 minutes, someone is killed or seriously injured on the road in the United Kingdom. That is a stark figure. If we average that out, it means that over 10 years, 31,000 men, women and children have been killed or seriously injured in collisions, and there have been a total of 130,000 casualties right across the piece, although I accept that the number includes very minor collisions. In a year, 1,766 people were killed—1,711 in Britain and 55 in Northern Ireland—and 28,941 were seriously injured. Road deaths have increased to pre-pandemic levels, and serious injuries are up 8%. I stand to be corrected on these figures, but that is an average of 85 people killed or seriously injured every year in each of our constituencies.

Meanwhile, many drivers simply leave the scene of the collision—as many as 17,000 people, according to the Motor Insurers Bureau. Not all those cases result in injury or fatality, but there are families who know that their son, daughter, husband, brother, sister or relative was left on the road, dead or dying, by someone who just decided to go off. If a person decides to drive away and leave somebody dead or seriously injured on the road, they must face the consequences of their decision—that seems pretty simple—and explain in due course why they left the scene of the crime. Whatever the reason was, they must face the consequences for doing what they did.

In Committee, I asked whether I needed to give hon. Members examples of what families have had to go through. I did not want to, because it was harrowing and distressing enough to hear about them, as the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells will know from the case he mentioned. There were huge numbers of examples, and I do not want to repeat them. People know; they do not need things drawn out graphically.

I repeat what I said in Committee: how would we reply to a constituent who said that we have the power to take action? Would we say, “It’s a shame, but there’s nothing much I can do about this. I’m sorry to hear that”? What if our constituent said, “You have the power, the capacity and the wherewithal to change this”? Would we just shrug that off and say, “Nothing to do with me. I’m sorry; there’s nothing I can do”? Would we sit there in silence? Would we look at the data and the information? What would we do? Well, I know what I want to do. I want to try to change the law, so that those who leave others dead and dying in the road are held to account, and face up to their actions. It is our solemn duty to protect our constituents. If we cannot protect them from people who decide to leave them dead or dying, we must at least try to send a message, for the sake of their families, who seek not retribution, but justice. That is what I want to do.

I will finish with a study by Dr Matt Hopkins at the University of Leicester, who interviewed dozens of hit-and-run drivers about why they failed to stop. A fair proportion of hit-and-run collisions, as they are called, involved drivers who did not have valid insurance and often did not have a valid licence. Others were banned from driving at the time of the collision. Still others were under the influence of drink and drugs. They were trying to avoid responsibility, not just for potentially killing someone, but for being drunk or on drugs, or whatever it was. I understand that people might leave in a state of panic, but they must none the less face up to their responsibilities.

New clauses 35 and 36 are an attempt to send the message out—not in a super-duper emotional way; I am not trying to threaten—that if a driver, whatever the circumstances, decides to leave the scene of an accident, they must face the consequences. I am not wedded to the sentence being five or six years in prison, or to the amount of the fine; we can debate and have dialogue about that—or I hoped that we would, but regrettably we have not. That is why I brought the new clauses back today. I have not said that I will push them to a vote; I do not want to. I just want people to bear them in mind, and to think about the impact that such actions have on families. Those people must be held to account.

[Dehenna Davison (Bishop Auckland) (Con)]

I know that this place can have a reputation for being home to nothing more than Punch and Judy politics, but in debates like these, we see the best of this House, as people raise their experiences and those of their constituents, and work, often in a cross-party fashion, to bring forward changes to legislation that will have the right sort of tangible impact for everyone across our country. On that basis, I will support a number of amendments, including those of my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), and, of course, the new clause that my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) and my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Dame Tracey Crouch) tabled in Committee, which I am glad the Government accepted.

It will be of no surprise to anybody in the House that I rise today to speak to new clause 9. Before I go any further, I thank the Minister for her kind words about my dad. I hope that she will not mind my saying that her own father—her constituency predecessor—would, I am sure, be incredibly proud of the work that she is doing in her ministerial post and in her constituency.

I hope that the House will forgive and indulge me as I tell—hopefully for one last time in the Chamber—the story of my dad. Dominic Davison was a 35-year-old self-employed stonemason, a brilliant dad, a brilliant family man and a great friend to all who knew him. On a Friday night in 2007, he went to the pub with his friends and never came home. Regrettably, he was involved in an altercation that resulted in his receiving one fatal blow to the head—a blow so significant that he was dead before he even hit the ground. That is why I have dedicated much of my campaigning time since then to trying prevent other families from having to go through the horror and shock that my family had to go through.

However, today is not about my dad, me or my family. As I have campaigned, this issue has transformed from something deeply personal into something much greater; it is about the resilience of all the families who have experienced such horrific tragedies and have pushed through, and who are now campaigning for change. It is only right that I pay tribute to the incredible work of Maxine Thompson-Curl and her partner, Tony, who run the One Punch UK charity, based in the brilliant north-east. That initiative came from another terrible tragedy.

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[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) said that it was uncertain whether this legislation would ever reach the statute book, because of the time available to us in the run-up to the general election. I hope that some of the measures to be dealt with on day 2 of consideration of the Bill do not get on to the statute book. However, across the House today, there has been an interesting setting of the agenda for the next stage of the debate on the Bill in the Lords and perhaps for the period after the general election. Perhaps an incoming Labour Government will have to deal with those issues as well. They reflect a number of concerns that we deal with as constituency MPs.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on tabling his amendments on spiking. It is an issue that affects many of our constituents. I hope that the Government will respond positively and work through the detail. Perhaps we can have something in the Lords that overcomes some of the Government’s concerns about it. I agree that using the expression “spiking” is important, so that people know that we are dealing with it.

[Peter Dowd]

I welcome the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham). It is important to indicate that my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) was also involved in supporting amendments on this matter. I welcome the cross-party agreement on this issue.

[John McDonnell]

The Bill Committee itself also worked hard to try to reach consensus on some of the issues.

The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) is not in his place, but cuckooing has become a critical issue in some of our constituencies, where the most vulnerable people have their accommodation taken over by drug dealers and feel intimidated. Often, they are the most vulnerable, with special educational needs or mental health problems. It is a relatively new issue that has come to light in some of our constituencies, and it needs to be addressed.

On the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), in a dignified way he did not go into the detail of individual incidents, but there have been cases in my constituency. We had three youngsters—one aged 17 and two aged 16—killed by a hit-and-run driver. The drunk driver was eventually caught. The issue was not just that they broke the law but that they did not stick around to help in any way, or even report the incident so that emergency vehicles could get there more quickly to assist those who had been harmed.

The two issues I want to draw attention to are the ones whose campaigns I have been involved in. First, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) tabled new clause 28 on joint enterprise. I think we are all getting long in the tooth on this one. We have been campaigning for years—for decades—for some clarity in the law, so that it does not operate as a dragnet that draws people in. In some instances, we have had cases where the individual drawn in was not at the scene of the crime or was distant from the scene of the crime, yet they have been prosecuted for serious crimes, often murder. For that reason, the significant contribution of new clause 28 reflects discussions and debates within legal circles but also in the courts themselves. It is a simple amendment that would bring some justice to many cases where people have, unfortunately, experienced what I believe is a miscarriage of justice.

Secondly, the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn), who is not in his place at the moment, raised the more effective use of the law to tackle hate crime. I convened a meeting of disability groups a few weeks ago. There is a wave of hate crime against disabled people at the moment, on a scale that we have not seen for a number of years. We have had incidents not just of abuse in the streets, but even people being pulled out of their wheelchairs. I do not want to be party political here, but I have to say that statements by some individual Ministers about lifestyle choices and benefits and so on have not helped. In fact, it has directed some hate crime towards people with disabilities. We need to recognise that that happens—we should not sweep it under the carpet—so we should have an effective legal response to it. New clause 32, tabled by the hon. Member, is an effective way of ensuring the message goes out there to people that hate crime is a serious offence and that if they commit it they will be prosecuted and the sanction will be effective and serious. I hope that the Government will accede to new clause 32, but if he does put it to a vote I shall certainly be voting for it.

I want to raise another issue, prisons overseas, that I just find preposterous, to be frank. The hon. and learned Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), the Chair of the Justice Committee, referred to it and I agree with him. I tend to think it is a stunt. I do not see it as a practical way of dealing with the overcrowding problems in our prisons. We should deal with them in exactly the way the Justice Committee has been saying for a number of years: send fewer people to prison, in particular those for whom prison is inappropriate—those with mental health problems, drug problems and so on. If we do send people to prison, build appropriate prisons so that we can maintain them but, more important, rehabilitate them.

This flies in the face of all we know about rehabilitation and everything we have learnt over the years. I declare an interest as an honorary life member of the Prison Officers Association. Everything we know from the professionals involved—probation officers, prison officers and others working within the system—is that to rehabilitate people one of the best things we can do is, first, make sure they have access to their families. It is their families who urge them to behave, rehabilitate and come out as quickly as possible. Secondly, we can ensure they have full access to training and education to rehabilitate. Thirdly, we can ensure that they have proper legal advice, so they know the situation they are in and come to terms with it, and understand the law as it applies to them.

My fear is that, if we depend on prisons in foreign countries, access to family will be limited—that is inevitable. There is no assurance that I can see that prisoners would receive appropriate training or rehabilitation. Access to legal advice within the UK system would inevitably be restricted. This therefore flies in the face of everything we know about how prisons should work, and it flies in the face of many of the things that the Government themselves say about how the system should operate to maintain safety but, at the same time, rehabilitation.

A number of amendments and new clauses have been tabled on the basis of professional advice from others. I urge the Government to accept that we should not send abroad prisoners who, within a limited period, will face potential release. I also think that prisoners who have been imprisoned for public protection should not be doubly harmed by being sent abroad, and that proper consideration should be given to inspection arrangements. I believe that it will be almost impossible to maintain an appropriate inspection arrangement for both prisons and escort services when they are located abroad, and that if it is maintained, it will be extremely expensive.

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[Sir Robert Neill]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. “Significant” is a good starting point for the work that we need to do. The intellectually rather convoluted approach that we have to joint enterprise at the moment is really not tenable. A jury will understand “significant”. If we are to have an indictable offence, we need a test that a jury will readily comprehend. “Significant” is comprehensible to jurors.

[Peter Dowd]

In light of today’s debate and the discussions that we had over several weeks in Committee, does the hon. and learned Gentleman agree that there is a lacuna in legislation in a whole range of areas? I think he is suggesting that we need a cross-party approach, but time is running out. Does he think that certain things could be pushed through, but not in a rushed fashion; they would be considered carefully in the Chamber?

[Sir Robert Neill]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s sentiments. Many of these matters will require consideration —and, on the homicide angle, the involvement, I hope, of the Law Commission. It could be asked to revisit its report of 2006. In fact, I hope that will be done, whatever the party in government. The same is true in relation to sentencing for one-punch manslaughter. I am cautious about minimum sentences generally. I understand the feeling that sentencing is sometimes too low, but at the moment manslaughter can encompass a huge range of facts and degrees of culpability. Any sentencer has to balance the consequence of the act against the level of culpability of the offender. The huge range in culpability creates a difficulty with minimum sentences. It would be better to ask the Sentencing Council to review the matter. If that is done in the knowledge that there will be a cross-party approach, it will carry more weight and give us better outcomes.