Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

Robert Neill Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

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

It is a pleasure to follow my fellow Select Committee Chair, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson).

This hugely important issue and debate concerns men as much as women, which we need to emphasise. It is not easy, and there is no single silver bullet. A raft of reasons give rise to this appalling level of offending and the difficulties we have in dealing with it. As both Front Benchers said, it needs to be addressed on a wide front.

I will concentrate on the criminal justice issues, as my Select Committee is seized of these matters. As it happens, an interesting and useful report was recently published by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services and Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service inspectorate. In fact, the four criminal justice inspectorates are giving evidence to the Justice Committee next week, which will give us an opportunity to probe a little more into the report’s useful recommendations. I hope that, by and large, the Government will look upon them favourably, although even there we have to recognise some of the complexities.

In my previous life as a barrister, I prosecuted and defended quite a number of rapes and other serious sexual offences. They are the most appalling offences, and most of us rightly regard them as perhaps only a little below homicide in their vile impact on individuals and in how seriously the system must take them. These offences must therefore be handled, at all stages of the process, with particular sensitivity and care, which the system always endeavours to do.

Given the time I spent at the Bar, I can say that the experience of complainants has markedly improved from when I first started in practice. We are much, much more aware of the myths that sometimes abound about why such offences are or are not reported. There is much greater sensitivity in the handling of complainants and witnesses in these cases. In particular, the Judicial Studies Board has produced much more up-to-date and much more sensitive model guidance to judges who try these cases in the Crown court on giving directions to juries to dispel some of the myths and on being alert to the particular sensitivities of witnesses giving evidence on such traumatic events. We have done much more on the use of special measures in courts to make it easier for witnesses in such cases to give evidence.

All those are positive things. That does not mean that we should rest on our laurels and that we should not continue to do more, but we have to recognise that there has been significant change and we must now build on that. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) pointed out one thing to our Committee that had been striking over the years. I am grateful for his support and work in the Committee during his time as a member, which was absolutely outstanding, and I congratulate him on being appointed a Parliamentary Private Secretary. The Committee was struck by the statistic he raised: that some 90% of the attrition of victims and complainants in these cases comes before the case even gets to the CPS to look at. That really has to be addressed most urgently.

The other interesting statistic we found was that when a charge has been brought and the case has gone to the Crown Court, the conviction rate in rape and serious sexual offences cases is not broadly dissimilar to that for other offences of serious violence against the person—section 18s and so on. When we get these cases to court and when they are presented properly, by experienced counsel and with properly trained judges, we can get the same results as we do for other offences of violence. We really need to tackle why we are not getting to that situation in the first place. That is why Operation Soteria and the end-to-end rape review are so important.

We must also deal with specific issues on delays in disclosure, which we have all seen over a number of years in relation to such offences. The Minister rightly refers to the issue of digital evidence and mobile phones in particular. That is much more significant now, and we must get to a situation where the evidence can be downloaded. It has to be disclosed, where relevant, because there is an obligation in holding a fair trial to make legitimately disclosable material available to the defence. I have been involved in cases where the disclosure of material demonstrated that there was a genuine defence and therefore a miscarriage of justice was averted—I can think of two such cases. So that has to be done, but it has to be done sensitively and swiftly, so that the victim can get their phone and material back as soon as possible. That is the key thing: we need to invest in that and make sure it is done consistently, in the same way as we need to invest in making sure that victim support services are consistent in all the courts across the country and that the level of communication between prosecutors, police and the witnesses is consistent in the way that the latter are dealt with.

There is a suggestion in the inspector’s review of specialist rape courts, and I would be interested to see how that works in practice. A suggestion was made for that in Scotland. I am not sure where the evidence base is for that in England, but the real issue is not so much specialist courts, but the delay in listing. That is one thing we could ask the Courts Service to look at. I know that listing is a judicial function, but we need to work with the judiciary on this to give them the resources. I find it shocking that rape cases are listed as what the Minister and I will remember as “floaters”, or back-ups, where they do not have an allocated court and are there to be called on if another case collapses. It is not fair to be listing cases in this way, where victims who have to relive the trauma of a rape or sexual assault are hanging around not knowing whether they will get on that day or not. Surely all such cases ought to be fixtures.

We should also be doing more to avoid the late vacation of fixed dates for trial. As the report details, there have been too many instances where cases were adjourned more than once, with the victim—the witness—having worked themselves up to give evidence only for the case to be taken out of the list, often because there is not judicial availability or because barristers are not available. The point is that these cases have to be tried by “ticketed” Crown court judges: judges who have undergone training in handling sensitive witnesses and such cases, and who understand the issues that have to be gone through. We need to make sure that there is an adequate supply of ticketed senior Crown court judges and, where necessary, highly experienced recorders as well. We also need to make sure that there are enough experienced advocates available.

Unfortunately, I have seen evidence from the Bar Council and others of too many instances recently where cases have had to be adjourned—one or two of the cases have been well publicised, so I am sure the Minister has seen them—because a prosecutor of sufficient seniority was not available to take then on. We have to look at that in the criminal law legal aid review and its implementation, because it is a healthy, independent Bar that provides most of the prosecutors and defenders in these cases. Getting that right is important, too.

There also has to be proper remuneration to make sure that people of sufficient experience and status handle these really serious cases. There are specific things that I hope can be done. The section 28 hearings are certainly important. The one caveat I would enter is that we should keep a careful eye on how that works in practice. It may well have the advantage of getting early guilty pleas, which are particularly important in cases involving offences of this kind, as we save the complainant from having to give evidence and relive the incident, but some concern has been expressed by practitioners that when the case is contested, the impact of recorded evidence can seem more remote to a jury. That may or may not be right, but we should keep an eye on it, because we want these proceedings to work if they can.

It is a pleasure to participate in this debate. We should all be supporting the “Enough” campaign, not only with rhetoric, but with action. That means investing properly in the justice system. There is much good will and expertise, but we need to make sure that there is resource to enable the system to function with consistency and to keep up to date with developments in technology and other matters in the field.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

There is, I suppose, a grim sense of bookending in this debate. We all know that we are very close to the anniversary of a particularly appalling murder—one of the most appalling crimes that I can recall. It was a grotesque breach of trust by a serving Met police officer. Most recently, though, there was the admission of guilt by the murderer of Sabina Nessa, who we now know drove miles from his home, found her at random, killed her in the most brutal and degrading way and pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey last week. There is no doubt that there is an epidemic of violence against women and girls.

I understand why the Opposition have brought this debate to the Chamber, and I respect their reason for doing so. I think it is reflected in the tone that everybody has taken so far that it would not serve well to use this debate as a political tit for tat. The truth is that, when we debate these issues, it is always the same faces who are here, and we know that it will be our collective endeavour, if anything, that will improve the situation.

I want to align myself with the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who said that finding out what is happening and how we improve it is complex and difficult. I think that that was revealed a little bit on Monday night when we debated making misogyny a hate crime. I heard the impassioned speech of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and what she said about women’s safety, but, as a matter of law, she did not engage at all with the issue of whether all violence against women and girls is motivated by hatred, or whether there are other more complex causes, and how, if at all, it fits within the framework of section 28 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which governs all hate crimes. She also could not explain why the reporting pilot that had been conducted in Nottingham had not actually resulted in any more prosecutions or convictions. I do not believe—I say this very respectfully—that there was consensus on the Labour Benches about whether it should be made an offence. Even if I am wrong about that, and there is no desire here to humiliate, it exposes the fact that there are complex questions about causation and legal framework that are not that easy to resolve. Even people whose mission is the same will disagree on the mechanics of how we get there.

Before I get into the substance of the debate, I want to spend a moment talking about what I think the Government have achieved, because it is quite easy to overlook that. I am not just going to give a shopping list of the things that the Government have criminalised, from stalking to coercive control and to revenge porn, because everybody is familiar with that and most people have participated in debates where we have talked about that. One thing that we have achieved in the past 10 years is looking at violence against women through a much more expansive lens. In the old days of domestic abuse, for example, many will recall the shorthand of “knocking her about”—think how far we have come from that. We do not even see it as just a question of violence. We view these crimes as issues of power, control, obsession, jealousy, and a desire for revenge. We recognise that coercive control is a criminal offence, even if the relationship has long since finished. We recognise that revenge porn, something that would have been the shame of the victim for many, many years, is actually the crime of the perpetrator. We have tackled toxic assumptions. It was the Mother of the House who used the phrase for the first time, “the nagging and shagging defence” that used to be frequently and successfully deployed in the criminal courts. We have also dealt with the fact that there is no such thing as consent to rough sex as a defence for sexual violence. I think that we can probably agree that we still have further to go on some of this.

The Centre for Women’s Justice has written very recently that we still have issues around culture. One thing we need to be careful about in the “she was just walking home” labelling is that we are not saying that there are deserving victims and that the woman who was out getting drunk or even looking for sex or doing something that is not seen as ladylike is not a deserving victim. That is all still there, I think.

What we are doing on rape is important. I understand the collective concern on that issue. Section 28 procedures —the ability of a victim to give evidence behind closed doors with counsel and to be cross-examined without having to wait for trial—have made a huge difference. Members of the Home Affairs Committee—I think that this only applies to the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) on the Front Bench—will recall that, when the chairs of the rape reviews for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales gave evidence, they did not agree on everything, but the one thing on which they did agree was how important section 28 procedures are, and I am so glad that the Justice Secretary is now rolling them out nationwide.

I also have to mention criminal justice scorecards. I am not sure whether we are using that official language yet, but, about four weeks ago, I was contacted by a young lady in my constituency who had recently been raped outside the constituency. When she approached the force where it had happened, her treatment was lamentable. The rape statistics of that force had been published and were in the public domain. When I wrote to them—a letter of complaint essentially on her behalf—pointing out their absolutely diabolical rape prosecution rates, they responded to me the next day with an extremely helpful and supportive letter, setting out what they would do and making contact with her, and I think we turned it around.

[Sir Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is making a most important point and I entirely agree with her. Does she agree that that links into the importance of proper, careful and sensitive investigation by the police? We will increase the rate of charging only if, in a sufficient number of cases, there is admissible evidence that affords a reasonable prospect of conviction, and it is the evidence gathering, therefore, that must be tackled. It is the failure to gather sufficient admissible evidence to give a reasonable prospect of conviction that means that a person cannot be properly charged.

[Laura Farris]

I accept that. I also accept the point that my hon. Friend made. Members of the Select Committee will recall Mary Prior QC saying emphatically that we need continuity of counsel, but the judicial listing function is detrimental to that.

There are three points on this issue.