Draft Consumer Rights Act 2015 (Enforcement) (Amendment) Order 2023

Debate between Stella Creasy and Kit Malthouse

Wednesday 5th July 2023 General Committees

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

It is a pleasure belatedly to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms McVey. I am possibly going to shock the Committee in many ways by saying that I agree with much of what the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire has said. He and I might come from different ends of the political spectrum, but we share an interest in local regulation and in doing that in a proportionate fashion, because we have seen at first hand what happens when it does not work.

I am possibly the only person here who served on the Committee that considered the Consumer Rights Act 2015, in that halcyon era in which we in this place were looking at good regulation, rather than having no regulation at all. I want to ask the Minister a set of questions that follow up what the right hon. Gentleman was talking about, and I agree with him that there was a good reason for not including trading standards on the list of bodies that were to have powers under that legislation.

At the time, we felt that the powers were quite strong, and we recognised that the comparator bodies—the others that had the powers, such as the Competition and Markets Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority—were about whole markets. This statutory instrument is very much about a local power and local trading standards. Indeed, it now looks as though trading standards will have stronger powers than local police forces to do searches.

There might be good reasons for that owing to the nature of the trade that trading standards is trying to tackle, and I want to come to that subject, but the Minister did not say anything about, for example, what has been done to monitor the use of the powers over the past eight years. Will he say what we know about when there have been raids, what happened and how the use of the powers is monitored? The difference between market-wide powers and locally applied powers could be very strong.

The next point I want to follow up is the capacity of trading standards to make good on this measure. It is one thing to confer powers, but quite another to have the people to implement them. We know that spending on trading standards fell by 52% between 2009 and 2019. In some areas of the country, there are no trading standards officers at all. Liverpool Council, for example, no longer has a trading standards department because something had to give considering how little money the Government have given the council to run services.

Most local authorities have just one qualified trading standards officer, but if we are to give people stronger powers than the police, we want them to be qualified people who understand the remit and understand why they are being given the powers. Again, I ask the Minister to say something about whether additional funding is going to be given. If this measure generates the impact that we want it to generate in tackling the illegal cigarette trade, revenue will be raised that could go into trading standards.

My colleagues in trading standards do a fantastic job trying to tackle the crimes that, after all, are the crimes that most of our constituents come to us about most of the time, and they would want to see more investment in trading standards. A £16 billion cut in the core revenues of trading standards means that there will not be the officers to use these powers, and certainly not officers trained to use the powers sensitively, unless there is investment.

There is a final point on which I would like to hear more from the Minister, which is the trade we are trying to tackle. We know that 21% of cigarettes sold in the UK are illicit. This is an international trade—gangs, funding and all sorts of criminal activities in our communities. Putting trading standards officers on the frontline of tackling that trade is a bold move owing to the nature of the people with whom they might be interacting. What conversations has the Minister had with the National Crime Agency?

[Kit Malthouse]

There is an unproven statement that much of the trade is organised crime, but I know from my time at the Home Office that this is a low-margin business. I am not convinced that the volume is coming through via organised crime; I think it is coming through in fast parcels—small packages from overseas. That is why I am so keen to see some kind of intervention at the border, and I worry slightly that the more we talk about organised crime and gangs, the more the effort gets put in that direction, whereas a huge volume is coming through orders on the internet.

[Stella Creasy]

We were so close to having unanimity in this place about the nature of the challenge. I think it is both. The right hon. Gentleman says that there are small packages—I was going to ask the Minister to say a bit more about what conversations he has had with Border Force—but the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee investigation into the matter set out that international gangs were involved. One German-Russian gang made £50 million over several years by importing cigarettes into the UK.

We are therefore potentially asking trading standards officers to interact with very serious and dangerous people, and it is important that this House does not ask trading standards to be the blue line in our local communities. If we are to ask trading standards officers to take on this serious trade—packages might be one piece of investigation work—to enter properties and to take on organised crime, they need support. Will the Minister say more about the conversations that he has had with the National Crime Agency or Border Force about how to keep trading standards officers safe? Everybody agrees that we want to tackle this trade and everybody wants more investment in trading standards. We will all support the draft order, but I hope that the Minister understands that those of us who wrote the original legislation have some concerns about what we are asking of a service that has been stripped bare over the last 13 years.

Extreme Heat Preparedness

Debate between Stella Creasy and Kit Malthouse

Monday 18th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend is absolutely spot on. He will be reassured to know that colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are in close touch with water companies, along with other partners, as they seek to get us through this particular 36 hours in good shape. He is quite right that where there is a problem with water supply, the easiest and best thing that can be done immediately is to communicate as much as possible, both when incidents happen and when the resolution and timeframe can be expected.

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

The problem with what the Minister is saying is that he admitted we have been here before. In 1976, we hit a temperature of 36° and in 2003 we hit a temperature of 38.3°. At those points, we had 20% and 59% excess deaths, so we know how dangerous heat is. The hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) asked us all to adapt. He needs to look at the evidence from history for why the climate crisis is so dangerous. We cannot adapt in this sort of heat. We know—the Minister just accepted it—that we will have more extreme weather conditions. Given that none of us wants to see history repeating itself, does he recognise how devastating it is for our communities? Yet again in my constituency today schools are closed, there is chaos with the trains and there is no national resilience strategy. The Minister talks about wanting to keep the lights on, but is it not the truth that he is keeping this country in the dark about the climate we face?

[Kit Malthouse]

One of the critical things we need to bear in mind is that this period of hot weather will be short. It will be 36 hours long. The kinds of effects that the hon. Lady mentions have generally been over longer periods. For example, in 2003 in France, I think it was, there were eight days of 40-plus and, critically, the temperature at night did not drop below 20°. In those circumstances, we need to look at vulnerable groups. I hope she will be promoting the message, through all her very sophisticated and well-followed social media channels, that we should do the neighbourly thing and knock on the door of older people who may be living alone, just to make sure they are okay for the moment, while, as I said earlier, we do our best to lead the world on making the changes we need to address climate change.

Metropolitan Police: Strip-search of Schoolgirl

Debate between Stella Creasy and Kit Malthouse

Monday 21st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

Obviously I have not spoken to every other police chief in the country, since the report came out just a few days ago. As I say, we will eagerly await the IOPC report to establish whether we have a specific problem or a systemic problem. The initial reports of the local child safeguarding practice review are telling us that we may have a systemic problem. If we do, then we will act on it accordingly. Please believe me when I say that the impact of this on any family would be profound. Some of us have children too. Those children may, in time, be subject to something like this, and I hope we are able to prevent that from happening.

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

I think we all recognise that the Minister is waiting for the IOPC report. However, he says that this could have happened to any child and that he thinks of his own relatives. The brutal, difficult truth that many of my constituents have raised with me over the weekend is that it is not likely to have happened to any of his relatives or our relatives—it is young black girls who have read this story and are horrified by it, and who need us to recognise explicitly the disproportionality in how the police work with them.

I hope the Minister can help to answer the question that my constituents have been asking, because they have looked at the data, especially on families of colour in my community, and they can see that strip-searching of children is not a one-off. So will he, ahead of the IOPC report, publish the data about the numbers of strip-searches that have taken place, by borough command unit and by ethnicity, and confirm that if it ever comes to this exceptional circumstance—I think we would all agree that it should be exceptional that a child should be strip-searched, not a matter of course—a parent or carer will always be present? He could do that today. He could start recovering the trust that has been so lost. He could start by being honest that communities of colour in London are looking at and questioning the police. The data is the first point in getting this right. Will he publish—yes or no?

[Kit Malthouse]

If a strip-search is deemed necessary to be undertaken on a child, then an appropriate adult, whether a parent or otherwise, has to be present. [Interruption.] Indeed, they were not in this case, and the question we have to ask ourselves is why—what went wrong? Why did the officers do what they did? Why did they decide to have two present? What were they doing? We will know that from the IOPC report. Once we have that, as I say, we will have the full picture and we will be able to look at it accordingly.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Stella Creasy and Kit Malthouse

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 28th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I acknowledge some of the problems with the amendment that the hon. and learned Lady sets out. I think it is Women’s Aid that rejected the amendment and said that it would do more harm than good on the basis that she outlined: it is not specific about targeting crimes against women in particular.

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

I would like to correct the record, because that is not what Women’s Aid has said.

The Minister highlighted the issue of a carve-out as being the reason why the Government do not believe in adding sex or gender to ensure that any perpetrator who attacks a woman or someone they believe to be a woman can be captured by the offences in question. I think we would all agree that is important, but he argues that the carve-out is not the right thing to do. Does he also make the same argument then that it is tokenistic to carve out offences based on racial or religious hatred, which we already do in our legislation? We have carve-outs. Stephen Lawrence’s killers were not prosecuted for a hate crime, but we recognise the hate behind it. Why does he think that women do not deserve the same protection?

[Kit Malthouse]

I had hoped to avoid the approach that the hon. Lady takes. Of course we believe that women deserve strong protection—we absolutely do—but all I can say to the hon. Lady is that the Law Commission, in looking at the evidence over a three-year period and consulting widely across the sector and society more generally, found that the additional complexity was likely to make it harder to prosecute these crimes. I ask her to reflect on the fact that in proceedings in this House, she put her name to an amendment compelling the Government to adopt the Law Commission’s proposals in full. I am not sure why she has now reversed that position, but I hope she appreciates that we are as dedicated to and interested in the safety of women as she is.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

The Law Commission report is unequivocal about the dangers that it may present. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) is shaking her head, but the report’s conclusion says:

“We recommend that sex or gender should not be added as a protected characteristic for the purposes of aggravated offences and enhanced sentencing.”

That is the specific recommendation in the report. The Law Commission has much greater and more skilled legal minds than mine, and other groups do not support the amendment.

I realise that the issue is of great importance to hon. Members, and we must all reflect on the feelings of insecurity that women and girls feel in the public realm, but we are being told by the experts—by the Law Commission—that the measure is likely to do more damage than good. That is not necessarily a substitute for us not doing anything and I have outlined what more we may do, but the point is that we have to listen to the experts. To be honest, I am quite surprised that a party led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions would seek to ignore the Law Commission.

[Stella Creasy]

I would like to correct the record, because the Minister seemed to suggest that I was against what the Law Commission has said. He is asking all hon. Members whether they have read it so it is worth checking whether he has, because it says that there is a case for there being offences motivated by misogyny—for example, stirring up incitement or public sexual harassment. Those of us who have constituents such as Muslim women who get attacked in the street for being both Muslim and a woman recognise that misogyny is about not just sex but power, so we need offences to tackle that.

Does the Minister recognise that if the Law Commission is saying that there are offences motivated by misogyny, the risk of not including it as an aggravating factor is that we could end up in a whack-a-mole situation? For example, we could end up saying, “In these cases of incitement, what is incitement? In these cases, what might be sexual harassment?” It would be simpler to include it and it would recognise what the police are telling us. I stress that the police are telling us that they want this data and they want the courts to back them. They want misogyny to be treated in the same way as racial or religious hatred, because they see it driving crimes on our streets. I am pleased to hear that he is concerned for women, but women have had concern for donkey’s years. What we now want is action.

[Kit Malthouse]

I can appreciate the hon. Lady’s requirement for action. As I say, action is what we are trying to put in place. To be clear, again, we are not saying that the fact that we are declining to make this Lords amendment means that we should not do anything. As I said to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon, there are further offences that we need to consider.

In fact, the Law Commission’s report went further and said that if we were to introduce that offence, it would complement other work on offences that may be coming forward, such as cyber-flashing, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has raised several times in the House; rape threats; and intimate image abuse. There are several areas where we need to consider interlocking offences, and that work will take time beyond this Bill to get right. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North urged us, we are committed to adopting both recommendations of the Law Commission, and that is exactly the work that we intend to do in the months to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy]

I hope the right hon. Member will understand what I am saying. The Law Commission did not look at this amendment, which has learned from the Bertin amendment. [Interruption.] She shakes her head, but the Bertin amendment, which sets out explicitly the offences we would carve out, did not exist during the time of its work. One argument the Law Commission made was with regard to the difficulty of carving those offences out. The amendment builds on where a carve-out can be made.

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

[Stella Creasy]

I will happily give way to the Minister. I hope he is not going to tell me again to read the Law Commission review.

[Kit Malthouse]

This is an important issue and I am grateful to the hon. Lady, but I just wanted to point out to her that the Law Commission said in its consultation paper that it thought it might be possible to overcome the challenges involved in excluding certain violence against women and girls contexts and there would still be value in including sex or gender within hate crime laws for the remaining criminal contexts. It specifically considered the notion of carve-outs. However, following further reflection and analysis, and with the benefit of detailed and thoughtful consultation responses, it now believes that all the possible models to do so create more problems than they solve. So the Law Commission did look specifically at this model of carve-outs, and indeed it specifically considered the option of the full recognition of sex or gender in aggravated offences, with enhanced sentences on the same basis as for other recognised characteristics.

[Stella Creasy]

I am sorry, but the Minister is conflating two different things here. The Law Commission did not look at the Bertin amendment. What it looked at was whether one might inadvertently downgrade sentencing for rape or domestic abuse by including it within this hierarchy. That is why, for example, Rape Crisis was concerned about a generalist clause. I am sure the Minister has spoken to Rape Crisis since the Law Commission’s report was made. I certainly have. I talked to it about this amendment, and it has been much more positive about it. I hope, if the Minister is quoting Rape Crisis, that he will listen to it when it says that it recognises what is being tried here.

I am not here to say that the Lords amendment is perfect, but I am here to say the because there are other crimes that could be motivated by misogyny, which it is right to recognise within sentencing and to treat as serious—for example, exposure, cyber-flashing, assault or blackmail targeted at disabled women; we see a lot of that in the evidence base—that means that we should dismiss this entirely and say, “Well, we won’t do this at all,” is yet again to ask women to wait for something that will never come. That is the challenge we have here.

The Minister wants to say, “Let’s not politicise it.” I agree. I extend my hand to him to say let us work together to get this right, but let us recognise that misogyny is driving crimes and that the Law Commission has said that. Its arguments were technical ones about how to do the drafting, not about the principle. I hope that the Minister would acknowledge that, because he cannot both argue—

[Kit Malthouse]

I have said that specifically.

[Stella Creasy]

That is not what the Minister has said, but I am pleased to hear him say that—[Interruption.] Great. Wonderful—consensus is breaking out, but consensus will not deal with the fact that women right now are at risk and are being harmed. This proposal is helping to improve conviction rates and to track perpetrators in the areas where it is operating.

The Minister will be aware that an amendment to the Bill that became the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 was withdrawn in the other place because Ministers committed to making sure that all police forces would do the reporting, but they have not. We can agree that the reporting is necessary, but it is not sufficient to give the police the backing that they need or to say, “This is about street lighting”. We have to look at how we tackle violence against women and at why and how we could have a carve-out to make this work. That is essentially what an incitement offence would do—

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

[Stella Creasy]

I will happily give way to the Minister; I can see him shaking his head and I am keen to hear his male voice about my experience of violence.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am sorry, but the hon. Lady seems determined to have a fight about this and I really do not want one. She keeps referring to street lighting, but that is one of a suite of things that we need to do generally in the public realm regarding safety. For clarity, I of course acknowledge that there are offences that are motivated by misogyny—I say that clearly, as I did in my opening speech—but this requires a number of approaches and solutions. We are merely saying that the evidence that the Law Commission and other groups put before us is that this particular approach is likely to cause more harm than good. We have committed to look at the other areas that it has highlighted, particularly the crimes that are motivated by misogyny, which I read out from its report. I reassure hon. Members that we are duty-bound to respond to the Law Commission’s report in six months, and we will do so.

[Stella Creasy]

I hope that the Minister will forgive me if I mention that there are, I think, more than 17 Law Commission reports that have been published since 2010 that the Government have not responded to and acted on—and that is just to look at the Law Commission. He also keeps saying that the Law Commission has looked at this proposal. No—the Law Commission looked at including sex or gender in all instances. It then looked at whether it was possible to have a carve-out, but we did not have the Bertin amendment, which specifically identified the offences in question and helped to shape this Lords amendment.

The Minister has said that he does not want to have a fight about this. Well, he is going to have one, because he is opposing the proposal and not coming up with any alternatives. He is not saying, for example, “We will introduce a proposal in the other place that addresses these issues” or that he will listen not just to all the chief constables across the country who have said that they want to see this happen, but to the organisations that have. Seeing as he is obsessed with major organisations, let us run through them: the Fawcett Society; Citizens UK; Refuge; Stonewall; HOPE not hate; Dimensions; Tell MAMA; the Jo Cox Foundation; and Safe & the City. Many of us have been talking to people who have expressed concerns to identify what those are and learn from them; that is where this amendment has come from.

The Minister will use the Government majority to vote this Lords amendment down, to say that violence against women is a complicated issue and that there are other approaches, and he will wait patiently and in fear that, yet again, there will be another moment as there was a year ago. The trouble is that, for us as women, waiting in fear is our daily experience, because we do not see things changing any time soon. We see the evidence base from Nottinghamshire and from the Met police. We want to know why there is a postcode lottery when it comes to the police taking violence against women seriously. We want to know why our courts want to exclude sex or gender from the protected characteristics that we rightly recognise when crimes are motivated by a hatred of somebody just for who they are, and we will tackle that.

People made many of these arguments 20 years ago on recognising racially and religiously motivated abuse. We now, rightly, all benefit from the protection and the freedom that has been given to people, so that they do not have to live in fear that they will be attacked just because of the colour of their skin or their religious identity. The Minister’s problem is that he says that he listens to and knows women and that he understands this area, but if he understands it at all, he should listen to the suffragettes, who told us that it was “deeds not words” that matter. All we have heard tonight is words.

This proposal is backed by the police. Opposition Members and many Government Members want to back the police and want to see the courts back up the police. If he does not accept this amendment, the Minister has the time and the opportunity in the Lords to come up with an alternative. He will have my support and that of the Cross Benchers to make that happen. However, if he continues to ignore women, to say that he understands the challenge and to blame them for not coming forward and reporting things—[Interruption.] He is right to shake his head, but he can probably go home without looking over his shoulder. Many of us cannot.

Criminal Justice Review: Response to Rape

Debate between Stella Creasy and Kit Malthouse

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I hope that, given his obvious conviction and commitment to this issue, my hon. Friend will volunteer to be on the Committee that considers the victims’ Bill when it enters the House. It will be a critical part of the architecture of ensuring that we build confidence in the system among victims, and I look forward to its passage through the House.

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

The Minister says that justice is being dispensed in our courts. Well, in April this year a convicted rapist who named and blamed his victim on Facebook got a paltry £120 fine. We rightly give victims of rape anonymity for life. What message does he think it sends to victims when this important protection is being abused and the penalty for it is less than someone would get for fly-tipping? And if he agrees that it is not acceptable, what is he doing about it?

[Kit Malthouse]

As you will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, victims of these kinds of offences do have a right to lifetime anonymity. Although I have to admit that that penalty standing alone does seem derisory, the hon. Lady will know that the particular individual—I think we are talking about the same case—received a very significant sentence for the substantive offence. This is an issue that we will be keeping under review, but for the purposes of the rape review my job is to get more cases into court, and that is what I will be focusing on.