Victims and Prisoners Bill

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th December 2023 Commons Chamber

The Home Office, as the lead Department, recently relaunched its antisocial behaviour case review, formerly known as the community trigger, and raised awareness of the tool throughout ASB Awareness Week 2023. Additionally, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is working on a one-stop shop reporting system for ASB, which will ensure that victims of ASB have easy and flexible ways of reporting antisocial behaviour and will receive an update on what has happened as a result. It is also important to remember that a large amount of antisocial behaviour is in fact criminal. While it may not be categorised as antisocial behaviour, the individual offences that are criminal often apply to many of these cases.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

The Minister is aware of the debate we had around child criminal exploitation. Does he believe that that part of the Criminal Justice Bill could cover that definition?

[Edward Argar]

The point that the hon. Lady raises does not directly relate to antisocial behaviour, because often what she is talking about is criminal in many ways. As I set out in Committee, we believe that where ASB is criminal, it would already be captured under this legislation. I suspect that she may develop that point in her remarks later.

Another area that has been raised, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) will speak to, is non-disclosure agreements and how they may prevent victims from being able to seek the support they need. I particularly thank her for her constructive engagement on this important topic. I also thank the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), although she is not her place. I recognise that non-disclosure agreements are misused if they prevent someone from speaking about what they have experienced, whether it is criminality or equivalent. While this Government recognise that NDAs, also known as confidentiality clauses, can and do serve a valid purpose to protect commercially sensitive information and deliver finality, they should never be used to stop victims of crime getting the support they need. I also note changes in this respect in higher education, if memory serves. I reassure the hon. Lady and my right hon. Friend that we continue to work closely with the Department for Business and Trade, which holds overall policy responsibility for NDAs, to carefully consider how best to address the issues they have raised, including, where appropriate, through legislative options as this legislation progresses.

I will touch on some of the concerns raised by Members that do not require legislation, which we will address by bringing forward non-legislative measures. On code compliance, we will set out a non-legislative notification process that shows clear consequences for non-compliance in guidance. We will publish more detail on that shortly. We will also make updates to the victims code, including adding further information on how victims can access pre-trial therapy and get more timely information about, for example, restorative justice and how victims of crime overseas can access support.

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[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I have a bit of a poorly chest, so if my voice goes, that is the reason. I thank the Minister for the tone in which he introduced the debate and the changes that he has tabled around domestic homicide reviews regardless of the reason why somebody died, whether that be suicide, sudden accidental falling or substance misuse and overdose. Those are things that we see all the time that could be put down to domestic abuse. I pay tribute to Jhiselle from the Killed Women network, who has fought tirelessly for some justice for her sister Bianca, who fell from a tower block in Birmingham. Nobody has ever paid the price for what happened to her. Certainly she has not been, to date, allowed a domestic homicide review; we hope that that will change.

Obviously I am pleased to see the changes on Jade’s law. My right hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) has worked so hard, as has my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who tabled the amendment on the need to carve out parental responsibility from those who are convicted of child abuse. All children in this country are protected from being near a child abuser—a paedophile—apart from the abuser’s own children. The other parent has to go through the family court process in order to keep their children safe.

While I agree with both amendments, and fought very hard for Jade’s law, the reality is that we cannot keep carving out little bits where parental responsibility is gifted. It is not just gifted, actually; currently the family courts in our country collude with perpetrators of violence and abuse to a degree that is frightening to anyone who has sat in on those proceedings, as I do regularly.

The Government have had the outcome of the harms review for three years, and have been working towards another review. The presumption of contact for violent parents should not be on our statute book any more. We should not call for victims to fight again and again to keep their children and themselves safe, yet we do.

I am afraid that I will point to another delay that the Minister has referred to: the delay on non-disclosure agreements. I know that he has to sit there and say that the Department for Business and Trade is working on it. Well, I am sorry to say, “Read it and weep,” because that is the answer we have been given for five years. For five years, since the recommendation to end the use of non-disclosure agreements in cases of sexual harassment, the Government have repeatedly said, “We’re looking at it.” Have they lost it? Where are they looking? Look harder!

I want to make it clear that, while I welcome the Bill, there are gaps in it around adult sexual exploitation. If you are a child who is sexually exploited—you might have been repeatedly raped from the age of 10—from the day you turn 18, suddenly the Government have no definition of you and no policy to do anything about you. That is problematic.

This week, the Home Office has announced that it will bring forward emergency legislation on the Rwanda situation. Where is our emergency legislation for the things that we have waited years for, the things that people have died waiting for—including those in the infected blood inquiry? If only we were the emergency.

[Sarah Champion]

I start by thanking the Minister. He has worked cross party, particularly with me, to turn what was a good, well-intended Bill into something much better, although there is still a lot further to go. I am delighted that the Government have accepted my argument that a victim does not have to report a crime to access support through the victims code, and therefore I will not press amendment 8.

There are victims who are not explicitly listed, but who need recognition. That would be provided through my amendments 5, 6, 157 and 158. When the definition of child sexual exploitation was introduced in 2009, it genuinely transformed services and people’s understanding. We now need the same for both adult sexual exploitation and child criminal exploitation. It is bizarre to me that, as soon as someone turns 18, sexual exploitation is seen as their making poor lifestyle choices, rather than as grooming, coercion and abuse. Likewise, child criminal exploitation is often unrecognised and the child is seen as a perpetrator. At the very least, I hope the Minister will ensure that there are statutory definitions of those crimes in guidance.

Amendment 7 relates to children whose parents are paedophiles. We need to ensure that those children are treated as secondary victims, in the same way that children born of rape will be once the Bill passes. I urge the Minister to consider rolling out a specialist type of IDVA, as Lincolnshire police are doing so brilliantly. Amendments 19 to 23 would ensure that there is also guidance for all specialist community-based services.

Elder abuse is often under-reported. Hourglass states that the elderly require specialist support due to the nature of the abuse, which often targets their finances, and because they are often digitally excluded. My new clause 6 would require the Government to carry out an assessment of specialist support services across the country to end the postcode lottery.

Amendments 4, 17 and 18 would include stalking in the Bill. Given that there were 1.5 million stalking victims in 2021, it is imperative that they have advocates. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust has shown that victims not supported by advocates have a one in 1,000 chance of their perpetrator being convicted, compared with one in four if they have a stalking advocate.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case for stalking advocates. Does she also agree that now is the time for a stalking register, to stop this crime in its tracks?

[Sarah Champion]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, who I know has tabled amendments on that point. We need to do much more about stalking.

One in five referrals through the national referral mechanism in 2022 were for a British child. It is essential that we get the support for that group of victims right and that we improve support for all victims of modern slavery, which is why I have tabled amendment 16, supported by the Centre for Social Justice. Clause 12 is positive, but as drafted it will fail to fully meet the needs of victims and survivors. Amendment 149 seeks to address that.

Another concern is that the Bill will not fully support all migrant victims, especially those facing domestic abuse. Many victims and survivors with insecure immigration status do not report to the police for fear that their information will be passed to immigration enforcement. And that fear is not unfounded: the Domestic Abuse Commissioner recently published Home Office data showing that every single police force in England and Wales had shared data of a victim of domestic abuse with immigration enforcement over a three-year period. To protect migrant victims and survivors, as well as the general public, we need to implement a data-sharing firewall that bans statutory services from sharing the data of a victim with the Home Office. My new clause 36 seeks to do that.

I have worked with Southall Black Sisters to develop new clause 8 so that all those with no recourse to public funds can be guaranteed access to support. The Government must extend the domestic violence indefinite leave to remain and the destitution domestic violence concession model for those on partner and spousal visas to all migrant victims of domestic abuse, regardless of their immigration status.

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[Stella Creasy]

I associate myself with the amendments in the names of the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), my right hon. Friends the Members for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) and for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) and, of course, my incomparable hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). In the time available to me, I will focus on the three amendments that I have tabled to flag issues with the Government.

Amendment 147 is about vicarious trauma. We are in a perverse situation right now—the Minister knows this—where we have to hope that a victim dies if we are to access support for our communities when traumatic things such as stabbings happen. I hope that the Minister will change that so that every child can be supported.

Amendment 148 is about overseas victims. It would simply restore the right that our constituents had when we were members of the European Union to have their rights as a victim upheld if they or a family member were a victim of crime overseas. I hope that the Minister will look at the victims’ rights directive, because so many people experience that.

New clause 32 is about a victim’s rights in relation to data. I was not sure that I would be able to table the new clause, because the court case that it refers was heard last Thursday. A year ago, a man started emailing my office with his concerns about my politics and the issues that I was working on. Like all Members when we get correspondence from non-constituents, I read the emails and filed them but did not respond. I was then called by my local social services because that man had decided that, because he disagreed with my views, I was not a fit mother for my children. He had reported me, an investigation had taken place, and while it cleared me, my children and I now have a social services record. When I went to the police about the matter, they said that he had a right to express his opinions in that way. I challenged it because, due to my work on stalking, I understood that somebody who could use a malicious report to harm someone was clearly dangerous. When I came forward, further reports came out revealing that this man had continued his campaign of harassment.

I am deeply grateful for the cross-party support for new clause 32, because although that man has now been convicted of harassment, his ability to target my family continues because the record continues. At present, there is no way of removing from someone’s record a clearly malicious and false accusation made to a third-party organisation. In tabling the new clause, I recognised that it is not just those of us in the public eye who may be targeted in this way; in many cases of stalking, we see people who fixate and use reporting mechanisms to damage their victims.

I have had no support or help from Parliament or anybody within the parliamentary process for my welfare or that of my children, but now I want to stand up for everybody who has been through this process. I ask the Minister to look at this, because victims of clearly malicious reports must have the opportunity to have the record corrected. Too often, people will say, “There is no smoke without fire.” I want to stand up for safeguarding —it is clearly a very important process—but if a court recognises that a report is malicious and a victim is being targeted but we cannot act to remove that report, the harassment will continue.

[Sarah Champion]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for using a personal case to speak so powerfully. I know that she does so from a position of wanting to change things for people who do not have the platform that she has. I commend her for that.

[Stella Creasy]

I thank my hon. Friend for that, and yes, the new clause would go much further than tackling the abuse of people in the public eye. I hope that, in other legislation, we will look seriously at what we can do about those who target our families and staff members as a way of intimidating us, because that is not free speech; it is a way of silencing people.

In tabling the new clause, I hoped also to speak up for those who have been targeted through third-party organisations. I know that there are colleagues in the other place who wish to take up that matter up. I hope that cross-party support continues and that the Minister will consider the proposals, which have already secured the support of London’s Victims’ Commissioner. I apologise to the House for not being able to bring them forward before, but I hope that Members can understand why.

I hope that we send a message today. Many of us do not block people, and many of us engage in robust parliamentary debate, but surely there is a line not to be crossed. That line is our children, our family and our staff, who do not ask to be put in harm’s way but will be if we do not act to protect our democracy and protect ourselves from those who would seek to use third-party mechanisms to abuse.