Child Support Agency

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) on securing the debate. I will not repeat the excellent points made by the speakers so far, but will simply use a couple of examples from my casework to illustrate two recurrent problems from which the CSA suffers and which need to be addressed as part of the reform process, as we move to 2013 and that all-important change.

More than 4,000 families in Swindon use the CSA to recover maintenance payments. In my constituency, £6.9 million is owed in arrears—the highest figure in the south-west—so the number of parents, either with care or non-resident, who come to me, as a last hope in many cases, because of the problems they are experiencing, is no surprise. I will use two examples: one of a non-resident parent and one of a parent with care.

First, Mr D, the non-resident parent, was on tour with the Army in Afghanistan for six months. Prior to his tour of duty, he informed the CSA that it meant that he would be away and therefore would technically not be a shared carer, because he would see the children for fewer than the required 52 days. By way of a court order, he has the children for approx 70 days a year with split holiday time. He told the CSA, went on his tour of duty and came back to find that the CSA had finally acted and presented him with a large bill for arrears.

That is not acceptable. The least courtesy we can offer to serving members of the armed forces is to deal promptly when they provide information to the CSA, rather than reward them with a massive bill on their return. Mr D accepts that his tour of duty means a reduction in shared care and that consequences follow, but really, more must be done to improve the quality of how we deal with cases such as his. I do not believe that he and many others should be penalised in that way for serving and representing their country. Active service should be taken into consideration when such issues are being determined.

There is a broad-brush approach that does not help anyone. I find it hard to believe that no mechanism can be found to deal more sensitively with payment changes for serving military personnel. This is an ongoing problem, not just for Mr D but for countless serving military personnel, because they never know when they might be redeployed. I urge the Minister to consider a more flexible approach in those circumstances, so that we can do better by our armed forces. I have already raised Mr D’s case with the Minister and I am grateful to her for corresponding with me about it. Today I make a heartfelt plea, not just on Mr D’s behalf, but on behalf of thousands in the same position.

My second example illustrates what I regard as a poor use of enforcement powers. Miss C is a parent with care of a young child. She first contacted the CSA in 2006, but is yet to receive any money. She has had liability orders and has had the non-resident parent taken to court on two occasions, but still she has received nothing. Her bitter experience has taught her that the powers available to the CSA are not being used strongly enough. Those powers include the removal of driving licences and, yes, imprisonment. At the moment the maximum sentence for non-payment is six weeks, but there are clearly cases where that is an insufficient deterrent and maximum term, and it seems the courts are slow to remove driving licences or impose such sentences. There must be stricter penalties for evading responsibilities. More people are being imprisoned for animal cruelty—itself a serious offence—than for non-payment of child maintenance.

Miss C’s former partner is of no fixed abode, as in the example cited by my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray), and works in what I shall describe as an irregular way, for cash payment. I understand that it is proving very difficult for the CSA to trace and track activities of that nature, but other powers are available in such circumstances and they are not being adequately used. I urge that a different approach be taken with persistent non-compliance of this nature—we are talking about six years. There should be more automatic powers available to the successor body to the CSA to freeze and remove money from bank accounts, where available, and to impose restrictions on holding passports and driving licences, without the need for costly and cumbersome court proceedings.

In the years since its creation, the CSA has become an organisation that, despite the best efforts of many of its employees, is still failing far too many parents with care and non-resident parents. I urge the Minister to do everything she can to ensure that the reforms address some of the issues raised today.

Disability Hate Crime

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

It is an honour and a pleasure to take part in this debate. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) and congratulate her on securing it. I was present in the main Chamber when she managed to secure the important concession from the Lord Chancellor on schedule 21 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. I pay tribute to her and to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) for their work. They will be glad to know that, as well as the Members present, those in another place, particularly Lord Touhig, have played a key part in changing the Government’s mind. We met the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt), only some 10 days prior to that concession, to press the case on schedule 21, and I am delighted that the Government have moved so swiftly to regularise the position.

That, of course, gives rise to the question: why not move in other areas? Why not regularise the law so that disability hate crime is treated in the same way as an aggravated offence, as is the case with race or religion? That would require an amendment to primary legislation, and yes, I know it would be a big step, but it would be an important one. If we are making concessions elsewhere, we should regularise the law in that area as well. We treat equalities as a single concept now and we have an Equality and Human Rights Commission.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Surely moving beyond schedule 21 means that, as a society, we should ensure that we do not seem to treat disabled people as a people apart, almost saying that different attitudes, legislation and approaches are required for them. The more we treat disabled people like those of us who are not disabled, the more likely society as a whole is to follow that example and move away from treating them as almost subnormal or abnormal.

[Mr Buckland]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for dealing with a point that I was about to address and that has been alluded to by other Members. The focus needs to be shifted away from always analysing a case’s evidence by looking at the victim, and towards the wrongdoing and what the offender has done. That welcome shift of emphasis was displayed in guidance issued by the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecutors in England and Wales in March 2010. It is similar to the shift in focus that occurred some years ago in relation to domestic violence. People used to ask of the victim, “Why did she stay with him?”, instead of focusing on the behaviour of the perpetrator, which, I am glad to say, is what is now happening in cases of domestic abuse. The same must happen in relation to disability.

The danger we face in focusing on the victim and their behaviour is that in assuming that all disabled people are vulnerable just because of their disability, we start asking dangerous questions, such as, “Why don’t they avoid these situations? Why do disabled people put themselves in that position in the first place?” By asking those dangerous questions, we are at risk of driving disabled people back into their homes and into institutions, and away from mainstream society. That is wrong and I hope that today’s debate will give a clear message to the Government that we must avoid it. We are in danger of being as bad as the people in ages past who used to apply the dunce’s cap to disabled people in the classroom.

Such attitudes lead to other dangerous assumptions, such as that of some involved in the criminal justice system that disabled people are somehow unreliable or incredible witnesses, simply because of their disability. That is another dangerous and fatal assumption, which, I am afraid, has played far too great a part in the criminal justice system and has prejudiced and stopped cases involving disabled people. It has ended in miscarriages of justice involving disabled people.

I have mentioned the guidance, which was welcome. It followed a speech made by Lord Macdonald when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, which I think helped to clarify the CPS’s position and its understanding of disability. I welcomed his comments about the concept of hate. We have to be careful when using the word “hate”; we must make clear what it covers. The danger with the word is that hate is an extreme concept, so we think that there cannot be many people in our society capable of it. The definition, however, is a wider one, and includes hostility or prejudice. What does that mean? There are other words for hostility, such as unfriendliness, antagonism, meanness and sheer ignorance. That is particularly important when we consider that many acts are perpetrated over a long period. We have heard about many sad cases, both today and elsewhere, that involve the victims of a crime finally suffering the last straw that broke the camel’s back. It is important to remember that “hate” has a wide definition and involves a whole section of attitudes that I believe are bred from ignorance and sheer lack of understanding of the needs of disabled people. That leads to offences that take place on many levels; low-level offences can cause so much misery to the lives of disabled people.

We have been rightly reminded of the provisions of section 146 of the 2003 Act. To be fair to the drafters of that welcome provision, it says that the court “must” treat the fact that the offence was committed in an aggravating way when the offender, immediately at the time of the offence, or before or after it, demonstrated hostility based on the disability or presumed disability of the victim. The provisions are there; they are mandatory. The problem is with the previous stage, because there must be evidence of hostility beforehand, which is where the work of prosecutors becomes extremely important.

The guidelines include a welcome set of considerations that all prosecutors should consider when reviewing cases involving disability. They are the sort of factors that we have discussed today, such as previous incidents involving the victim and the offender. Are the incidents escalating in severity or frequency? Is the targeting becoming systematic and regular, rather than opportunistic offending? On the status of the offender, we have heard about so-called “friends” who befriend people and then manipulate the circumstances. A lot of proper questions are being asked in the guidelines. The key now is to ensure that in every case, those considerations are applied, looked at and checked in each case file.

Key actions could be taken now to help both prosecutors and sentencers. For example, section 146 should be flagged up as a consideration in every case file, so that when prosecutors assess and prepare the evidence, any sentencer is aware of it. In open court, the prosecuting solicitor or barrister should remind the court of their powers under section 146. Such nuts-and-bolts practical measures could see the sort of increase in the use of section 146 that was rightly referred to by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke), and which we all want to happen.

Court practitioners and judges need more training on disability issues, most notably the use of section 146. The key point that I found, depressingly, time and time again is that the equation between disability and reliability has to be broken. We have to break that link in the hearts and minds of those involved in the system.

[Mark Durkan]

In respect of the whole question of sentence uplifts, the ECHR report stated that sentence uplifts have never been applied to any prosecution of rape or sexual assault where the victim was a disabled person. Is the point about the question of unreliability of people as witnesses, which the hon. Gentleman has just made, a factor in that?

[Mr Buckland]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I will address his point directly. There is no doubt in my mind that prosecutors who face a case where the victim has disabilities feel that somehow the prosecution will be an uphill struggle. Far too often, the use of special measures is not considered as much as it should be. For example, in a case that I was involved in, a person with a moderate learning disability was the victim of a rape. Through the help of an intermediary, the person was able to give evidence through a video link and a conviction was secured. The intermediary was a speech and language therapist. She was not only able to give confidence to the victim, but was there to assist the court if there was any ambiguity or lack of clarity to the jury in what the victim was saying. It was a most encouraging exercise, not only in achieving a fair result, but in making sure that the voice of that person was heard.

The role of intermediaries should be expanded and encouraged, not viewed as an unusual event in our courts. I think that there was an instinctive suspicion among practitioners that somehow the use of an intermediary would dilute the victim’s evidence, or would in some way interfere with the process of giving evidence. Those concerns are unfounded. People should think of intermediaries as officers who help the court, rather than people who somehow manipulate or interfere with the evidence. That is not my experience, nor that of many other people who have successfully used intermediaries. To put it bluntly, if the intermediary had not been there to assist the witness in that very serious offence of rape, I do not believe that we would have secured a conviction. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point.

It has already been said that in the past four years, despite the fact that there are 10 million disabled people in the UK, only 1,200 cases of hate crime have been prosecuted. On the basis of a recent Scope survey, conducted in May 2011, that is an incredibly low figure. The survey revealed that almost 60% of disabled people had experienced hostility, aggression or violence due to their impairment, and that half of disabled people said that they experience hostility on at least a weekly basis. Almost 40% of disabled people said that hostility had got worse in the past year. If we extrapolate those figures, we see that millions of people are suffering in silence or, when their voice is heard, that the situation is not being effectively dealt with by the authorities.

We have come a long way since society wished to institutionalise disabled people and wholly shut them out from the mainstream, but we still have a long way to go to ensure that when disabled people, rightly, access mainstream life, they do not become vulnerable because of the circumstances in which they put themselves. We must all, as a society, stop asking these dangerous questions: why do they come out into the mainstream and why do they put themselves in those positions? Let us focus on the offender. Let us focus on the offending. With that approach, we can achieve real results in the field of disability hate crime.

Oral Answers to Questions

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I will publish the full details of the contractual arrangements for the Work programme in a few days’ time, but I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that we will not be paying up front as the flexible new deal did. Last year, the flexible new deal paid providers £500 million for 16,000 starts. That is £30,000 per job start, and in my opinion it was an inefficient use of public money. Even as the programme becomes more mature, the previous service fee arrangements would still mean a huge up-front cost. We will do things differently: we will pay providers when they succeed, and not before they have done so.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

9. What steps he is taking to help disabled people into employment.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

10. What steps he is taking to help disabled people into employment.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

The Government are committed to increasing the employment rate for disabled people by giving them the help that they need to follow fulfilling, mainstream careers whenever possible. The Work programme will provide more personalised back-to-work support for unemployed people, including disabled people, from next year. Work Choice, which began on 15 October, provides specialised support for disabled people who face more complex barriers, and the access to work programme provides financial help with reasonable adjustments for the workplace above and beyond what the employer could reasonably provide.

[Mr Buckland]

Does the Minister agree that for far too many disabled young people, both in my constituency and elsewhere, the transition into adulthood and the jobs market can be very challenging? What steps are her Department taking to ease the process into adulthood and jobs?

[Maria Miller]

The transition from education to work can be difficult for all young people, but particularly for disabled people. I am impressed by the work that has already been done by employers whom I have visited in recent months, who are already focusing on the importance of disabled young people in their work forces, but the specific support that the Government have provided through Work Choice and the Work programme will help—particularly the differential pricing that is available through the Work programme, which will enable more organisations to work with disabled young people to get them into work.