Women’s Suffrage Centenary

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

Gosh, it has been an interesting day of stories, what with boat clubs and golf clubs and the militant march of women. I hope that that will happen soon. That is why we are taking action on the gender pay gap and insisting that companies report by April this year. In my conversations with companies that are putting reporting in place, it is clear that they are surprised at the revelation of a gender pay gap and they are then proposing action. In one example, after a company discovered that many more men than women were in higher-paid jobs, it put in place training programmes. Those concrete actions will help to eradicate the gender pay gap.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her statement about the grant programme to celebrate women’s suffrage. Will she confirm that the programme will celebrate the sacrifices of the suffragettes and the work of the thousands of women and men across the country who campaigned painstakingly for decades for women to be given the vote? Will she also confirm that the scheme will look not only backwards to celebrate but forward at the work that still needs to be done and which many Members have mentioned today?

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to say that this funding and these projects must be about looking forward. We want to celebrate the past and the achievements to date, but we also want to keep up the pressure and the change and to work with the new generation to ensure that they have the opportunities to come forward. The purpose of these grants is to encourage local organisations to bid, so that they can make such proposals. I hope that organisations from Brentford and Isleworth will do just that.

Police Funding: London

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Hurd]

I will not give way, because the hon. Lady did not have the courtesy to turn up for the beginning of the debate.

The increase in recorded crime is not all bad news, in the sense that, as the Office for National Statistics makes quite clear, it reflects that the police are better at recording crime and people are feeling more confident to come forward in areas that had been murky and complex before. However, undeniably, there is an increase in demand in some worrying areas, which are increasingly complex for the police to police. The right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) was eloquent, as I would expect, about the culture: the worrying, shocking, callous attitude to violence that underpins some of the violent crime that shocks us across the city, and not just in inner London but in outer boroughs, as my hon. Friend the Member for Romford was eloquent in pointing out.

When the threat changes we have to adapt, and when I say “we”, I mean we: not just parties, central Government, local government and all the statutory agencies, but also the private sector and civil society. This is a shared challenge that we have to meet together to understand what is going on—to be frank, in some areas we do not have a good enough understanding—and to ensure we have the right strategy, the right level of resilience and the right resources in the right areas.

In terms of resources to the police, let us state an old, stubborn truth: we live in very constrained times. That is the political reality of the situation. Within that, the Home Secretary and I will have made it clear that we will continue to ensure that the police have the resources they need to do the job, but we will continue to challenge them to modernise and be more efficient and effective, not least in embracing the power of technology to improve the interface that our constituents have with them, but also to help them be more effective in their work. We do that not just because we have responsibilities to the taxpayer, but because we want the Met to be the best police force in the world. That requires a culture of continuous improvement, which is the hallmark of every successful organisation I have observed.

When we look at the Met’s performance—we would not want to let evidence get in the way of a good bit of shroud-waving from the Opposition—the evidence is this. If we compare its performance in 2008 to 2017, we see that in 2017 there were 100,000 fewer recorded crimes and the same number of police officers. The number of police officers in London is by far and away the highest per head of population in the country, at 359 per 100,000, compared with 252 in Merseyside and an average across the country of 200. There are fewer crimes and the same number of police officers, in a police system that costs the taxpayer almost £700 million less than it did in 2008.

The right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington said it was a vapid idea that the police could do more with less; the Metropolitan police has proved otherwise. In that respect, I pay tribute to Commissioner Dick. As she has said:

“I won’t be waving a shroud, I will be just be giving my professional advice. I think we can make some further savings. I am confident that the Met at the end of my commissionership might be smaller but could be as effective, if not more effective, through amongst other things the use of technology and different ways of working.”

That is the leadership we need to see, not least from the largest force in England and Wales.

I do not want to misrepresent Commissioner Dick, who is clear that she wants more resource, as does every police force in the country, but when it comes to funding, let us be clear and present the facts. The Metropolitan police’s budget for 2017-18 is £2.8 billion, up from £2.7 billion in 2015-16. According to the last figures I have, the Met sits on reserves of £240 million, which is 10% of cash funding. The Mayor, who has been the subject of a healthy ding-dong here, was sitting on total un-ring-fenced reserves of £2.3 billion in 2016. To be fair to the Mayor, by stripping out what he has borrowed, he is still sitting on unrestricted resource reserves of about £300 million. There are choices in this process.

Sexual Exploitation: Protection of 16 and 17-year-olds

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Thank you for your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, and a very happy Christmas to you too. I also thank hon. Members for securing this debate and the Backbench Business Committee for allowing it to happen today.

Many Members have mentioned the excellent Children’s Society report, “Old enough to know better?” They have rightly described the situation for already vulnerable children—those in care, suffering mental health difficulties or dangerously exploiting drugs and alcohol, for example—but I shall focus on mobile and online sexual exploitation, to which all young people with smartphones are vulnerable. By not tackling that effectively, we risk setting another set of young people on the path to vulnerability, serious mental health problems and drink and drugs exploitation. We also have to recognise that many young people, while being victims, could also, if we are not careful, be defined as perpetrators. The law has to be right and work in tandem with other approaches.

I thank Kevin Prunty, an experienced headteacher in Hounslow and executive head of the successful Cranford schools partnership, for helping me to prepare for this debate. He has direct experience of this situation and has some solutions I know he wants to share with the Minister.

The Children’s Society report recommendations apply to child sex abuse wherever and however it occurs, but there is justification for further consideration of mobile and online culture and the ways of helping to prevent the abuse, and to reduce the vulnerability to abuse, of 16 and 17-year-olds. In particular, the report does not address aspects of proactive prevention crucial to success in this field. Some important aspects of child online and mobile safety and of the equalities agenda are totally ignored, not just in the report, but seemingly by all the agencies and initiatives that Mr Prunty has come across.

We need to work in key areas, with cross-political support, to help schools and parents to safeguard children much more effectively than is possible merely by amending the law. The guidance says that child sexual exploitation can occur through the use of technology without the child’s immediate recognition. The definition of child sexual exploitation in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 includes merely the recording of an indecent image of a young person. The key findings of “Old enough to know better?” focus on strengthening the law. This age group is particularly vulnerable and inadvertently more vulnerable because of the potential for clumsy, inappropriate or disproportionate use of regulation and legislation.

It is right to strengthen the law to afford these children the same protections as younger children, but it is the continuum with the circumstances prior to the age of 16 that makes them so vulnerable as they mature, particularly online. Tackling offenders and strengthening the law, while important, are only a small part of what needs to be done and are not, on their own, the real solution. Merely strengthening the law will do little good for the majority and will not address those who could become victims. We need to protect children earlier, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) said, and proactively to prevent abuse.

The law in this area is designed primarily to tackle the serious offences committed particularly by adults against young people. The Children’s Society report and the work of most agencies and organisations tasked with online safety, although extremely valuable, focus too narrowly on already vulnerable children and fail to address the context of young people’s lives more widely. The recommendations in the report focus on reaction rather than prevention. I want more resourcing, more strategies and action to provide an appropriate adult presence—not necessarily the police—in the mobile and cyber world, in which many young children spend huge amounts of their time growing up without us.

In this respect, the law must not be used where young people are engaging in unwise activities, which many do, that relate to the expectation and culture of a mobile and cyber environment in which appropriate adults have virtually no presence and where we too often leave the young people abandoned to fend for themselves. Here is a quote from Mr Prunty on the issue:

“In running schools and elsewhere, I always contend that a strong positive culture must dominate any community, including online and mobile, because in its absence there will never be a vacuum and instead street culture will fill the void.”

In strengthening the law for 16 and 17-year-olds, steps must be taken to ensure the system does not end up targeting and criminalising young people who are in fact victims themselves. It will also require significant training and support for the police and others whose response to such crimes appears already to be under-confident and variable. Mr Prunty’s schools subscribe to a restorative justice approach, and this may be appropriate in cases where mitigating factors are considered.

Naïve online activity by 16 and 17-year-olds, which would also be subject to any strengthening of the law, such as online and mobile communication between peers, will be most frequent, is perhaps more detectable and could be easier to prosecute. It is important to remember, however, that in most cases 16 and 17-year-olds will actually remain victims even when they break such laws in the context and environment of the school and the world they occupy.

The vast majority of our young people are already mobile and already online victims in a largely unsupervised cyber world. Although the internet gets considerable attention from safeguarding organisations and in training, mobile activity and mobile-based abuse are, in fact, even more rife yet also more neglected by adults. Parents, teachers and other adults responsible for the routine safety of children are often best placed to supervise and guide young people, but they are largely absent from this dangerous environment. We tend to operate in Facebook, but young people are not on Facebook so much nowadays. The mobile world, and to some extent the dark web, get less attention, yet these are really part of most young people’s experiences—day and night.

I believe that the figures quoted in the Children’s Society report are actually a huge under-representation of the scale of the underlying problem. It is the underlying problem that contributes to a culture and environment that make identified sexual offences more probable and possible. In effect, it normalises them in the minds of young people, especially girls. I contest that a much larger proportion of 16 and 17-year-olds—boys and girls to differing degrees—experiences sexual and other harassment, abuse and pressure, and for many this is regular and unrelenting. Sometimes they take part in it, too. This normalisation, with no appropriate adult presence to challenge it, is what leads to the lack of reporting of sexual and other mobile, online and cyber-abuse. I support all the recommendations in the report, but feel that they are insufficient and incomplete without recommendations aimed at establishing a different online, mobile and cyberculture and skilling up children, parents and other adults.

I am short of time, so in conclusion I welcome the Minister’s announcement of the What Works review and hope that she will consider the specific issues of mobile and online sexual exploitation. I hope she will look not only at the already vulnerable children, but at the policies of all those who work with all our children, so that consistent, deliverable and effective solutions can be achieved, rather than just punishment under the law.