Protecting the Public and Justice for Victims

Robert Neill Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lammy]

Nothing in the Bill is specific on crimes that disproportionately affect women; in 296 pages the Bill does not even mention women once. We need an increase in the minimum tariff for those who commit rape and stalking. The Labour party is clear on that. I wish the Secretary of State would get beyond the hot wind—stop talking about time served and talk about minimum sentences. He has been a barrister for long enough; he must know the difference between time served and a minimum sentence. It is surprising, frankly, that I have to re-educate him on what a minimum sentence served is.

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I have a lot of time for the right hon. Gentleman and respect him as a lawyer, as I respect the Secretary of State, but he will know that if we are going to have a discussion about specific nomenclature the truth is that, whether we talk about time served or minimum sentences, to say that we should increase the sentence for rape is not something that can realistically be done because the maximum sentence for rape is, as a matter of common law, life imprisonment. I accept that there is a legitimate debate to be had about how long that should translate to in practice through guidance and other matters, but it is not fair, I respectfully suggest, to talk about failing to increase what is already a life sentence; that is just a matter of law.

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[Robert Buckland]

I have the happy advantage of having spoken, I think, to that very same judge myself last week when I visited our Nightingale court at Cirencester. Indeed, my hon. Friend is right in several respects to highlight the important work being done in the western region to deal with the heavy case load. The proactive work that is being done by dedicated judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and all court staff to come together to resolve cases that are capable of proper resolution and to identify and list those cases that absolutely need a trial has been a shining example of how to do it. Similar success has been achieved in Wales in eliminating and dealing with the so-called backlog, and we see that in other parts of the country too.

That is no reproach to those parts of the country that are facing a particular challenge. There is no doubt—the right hon. Member for Tottenham knows this from his constituency experience—that there is a particular pressure in London and the south-east, where there are still a great number of cases yet to be resolved. However, it is right to say that, in the good work that is being done, supported by investment from Government, we are seeing the sorts of results that my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) talked about. He mentioned potential ways in which—

[Sir Robert Neill]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Robert Buckland]

I just need to finish the point, and then I will give way to the Chair of the Justice Committee. With regard to how the magistrates court and the Crown court can work together, the short answer is yes, there will be some further potential primary legislation changes. One or two visa matters are already dealt with in the current Bill before Parliament, but I am sure that the sort of uncontroversial change that ensures that the interests of justice are served and which allows magistrates to work more in synthesis with the Crown court will be one that the right hon. Member for Tottenham and Labour would wish to look at carefully and possibly support. I imagine that it would command his support, but I will not prejudge the position, obviously.

[Sir Robert Neill]

Returning to the matter of rape and serious sexual offences, does the Secretary of State agree that one key issue is that the best determinant of a successful conviction will be not what happens once it comes into the justice end of the system, but the quality of the evidence file that the Crown Prosecution Service has in deciding to bring proceedings, and ensuring, to avoid delay, that it is full and complete at the point at which it arrives in the Crown court? That is what needs to be tackled. Evidence to our Committee shows that much of the problem is delay at the investigation stage, failures in disclosure, failures to pursue proper leads and, sometimes, the failure to deal with victims, complainants and other witnesses sensitively. Is not that perhaps the area that we really need to concentrate on in a genuinely joined-up approach, as has been said?

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct about the important early stages of an investigation and the particular problem, frankly, of disclosure. Disclosure is a vital part of our system—it ensures fairness—but for many, particularly young women, who are faced with having to give up their mobile phone, in which their lives are stored, it is a very difficult choice. It is almost Hobson’s choice: give up your phone. What substitute do you have? Suddenly it is gone for months. Your life is on your phone. They are these sorts of choices. Women should not be put in that position—it is just wrong—and we are going to do something about that. I will not open up all the details with regard to the rape review, but the House can see my concern about the early stages of an investigation.

The right hon. Member for Tottenham and other Members on both sides of the House rightly talk about the length of time that it takes from a complaint to the outcome of a trial. There is no doubt that while the court process is a part of it, it is by no means the whole part and, very often, the wait has been for many months—and sometimes years—prior to the bringing of the case into court. If a suspect is remanded in custody, of course, the courts continue to work very hard to get those cases dealt with. There are custody time limits. There was a temporary increase to those time limits that I, through the consent of this House, ordered last year, which has now come to an end. It related to the pandemic and, rightly, I ended that, as it is such a serious measure when it comes to deprivation of liberty. However, I assure right hon. and hon. Members that, in cases where custody time limits apply, the courts have been getting on with the cases in a timely and proper way.

The issue has been those complex cases that perhaps involve many defendants—perhaps defendants on bail—which have had to take their place behind custody cases and which I accept have been taking too long to come to court. I watch the numbers, as the right hon. Gentleman knows—I share some information with him, of course, on a proper basis—and I take into particular consideration the length of time that it takes. I truly will not be satisfied until I see a significant drop in the length of time that cases take from arraignment and charge, when they come into the justice system, to final outcomes. But it is right to say that, certainly in recent weeks, there have been some encouraging signs.

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[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I am saddened by some of this debate, because I genuinely like and respect both my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor and the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who are committed politicians and committed lawyers. We missed a bit of the seriousness of the debate in some of the party political knock-around that inevitably happens in these cases. The truth is that this is a really important issue, and both of them have elements of force and truth in the cases that they make. There is actually more common ground than one might read from some of the noise in between. I would have thought that anyone who listened to the very reasonable approach of the Lord Chancellor would say, with respect to the shadow Secretary of State, that he was the wrong messenger to shoot at.

The Lord Chancellor, like me, has immersed his life in the criminal law. Between us, we have clocked up about half a century of doing the publicly funded, the unfashionable, and the rough end of the trade. It is not that we have not seen exactly the things that the right hon. Gentleman talks about on the ground. It is not that I have not seen or experienced the frustrations of victims when I have prosecuted offences that we were not able to bring to a conviction, or the difficulties in sitting in a police cell trying to persuade often troubled defendants who have committed very serious matters to accept the reality of the evidence. Those are things that cannot always be reduced to simple statistics. Behind the statistics of conviction rates and prosecution rates there are individual cases that are all fact-specific in every instance. It is not in the gift of any Government to guarantee a given rate of conviction or a prosecution for any type of offence, because the nature of the system is that an independent jury, properly directed by an independent judge, must come to a decision on the evidence that is put before it.

[Catherine West]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Robert Neill]

I will do, certainly, but this will be the only one.

[Catherine West]

I accept the point being made by the Chair of the Justice Committee, and he is making it very well, but 44% of victims—not 10% or 20% even, but 44%—are walking away from their day in court. Why is that?

[Sir Robert Neill]

If the hon. Lady will allow me to develop my point, it is the point that I made in my intervention on the Lord Chancellor, which is that we need a much more whole-systems approach to this. The justice system can deal only with the evidence that is put before it. It is as good as the evidence that it has obtained. What is required is a much more holistic approach, with an emphasis on the investigation of not just serious sexual offences, but all offences, and that has not always been the case. I can remember when I started at the Bar, when complainants in rape cases and other serious offences often got, I am afraid, an unsympathetic understanding from the police force and the legal system. That has changed hugely. It has changed out of all recognition from when I was in practice, so there have been real changes, but also, as has been observed, the nature of the technology that we all use in our everyday lives makes issues such as disclosure all the more important.

We must not pursue targets at the cost of doing justice in the individual case either, and that balance is not an easy one to achieve or to articulate. We need to make that point really clearly and robustly. What is required, and where I hope that we can share some common ground, is that to achieve that we need systemic long-term investment in the system. Failure has been known to come from this side of the House—the hon. Lady and others know that I am not afraid to speak out and criticise my own party when I think that it has got it wrong. What I have found as Chair of the Select Committee and from the reports that we have done is that, over a period of decades—decades going beyond any Government and probably beyond virtually anyone sitting in this Chamber—there has been underinvestment in the criminal justice system. That is largely because it has never been a politically interesting, dare I say politically “sexy”—horrible word—or politically high-level agenda item. It has always been a Cinderella service that is downstream and has never had the attention that it deserves.

Both Front Benchers—my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor and the right hon. Member for Tottenham—are doing a lot to push the issues up the agenda. The Lord Chancellor has battled hugely and, I hope, successfully—I will continue to support him—to get more reinvestment in the system. To be frank, my own Government, of which I was a part, took out too much at one stage and adopted too transactional an approach. More money is being put back in, but the reality is that we have to have a consensus that it is important to spend money on our court infrastructure and important to ensure that investigation by the police, charging by the Crown Prosecution Service and the work of the courts are properly joined up.

It is also important that we have a functioning court system in which there is proper investment in capital and resources to make sure that the buildings and infrastructure actually work. I welcome, for example, the lifting of the cap on sitting days to deal with the backlog. I hope that the Lord Chancellor will be able to assure us that that will be continued indefinitely, until such time as we reach the sensible and realistic level of backlog to which he referred. We all ought to urge the Treasury to give him the funding to do that.

We then need proper capital investment in the prison system, which we have not even touched on, because if we are really to prevent more victims, we need to make sure that, as well as punishing and deterring, the prison system rehabilitates and reforms where necessary.

This is a massive topic and the time available does not permit us to touch on it all. I hope that this debate is at least a trailer, and I plead for a more consensual, less politicised and certainly longer-term debate. We need a more honest debate with the public about what our justice system has to do, what it should be for and what its objectives are on a much more long-term basis. It would be a real service if we in this House could take a lead on that.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

The time limit will now be reduced to four minutes.