Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Stephen Phillips Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

It is an enormous pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies), who made an incredibly powerful speech. I know the Opposition Front-Bench team have kindly indicated that it does not intend to press the House to a Division, so part of my task tonight is, perhaps, not to detain us all for too long.

I will speak principally about those parts of this Bill, which I support, that address the question of forced marriage. Before I do so, however, I want my hon. Friend the Minister to know that I have listened very carefully to many of the contributions to this debate, and he has a problem. He has a real problem with the measures that are supposed to deal with the difficulties caused by dogs. We have heard incredibly powerful contributions from the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) in particular, the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) and my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh). She made it clear to the Minister—I hope he is listening—that he needs to tell the House why the Government do not think that the measures that have almost universal support on both sides of the House, other than from the Front Benchers, and that are in place north of the border should not be included in the Bill. I understand the desire not to have a smorgasbord of measures dealing with antisocial behaviour, but we are talking about a specific problem, to which a specific solution exists in Scotland and which, from the contributions I have heard this afternoon, is effective. He will need to make it clear to the House, although not necessarily tonight as we are not going to divide, but certainly in Committee, and subsequently, precisely why the Government are not in favour of introducing those measures.

As I have said, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) said, this is a wide-ranging Bill that deals with a large number of things. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) referred to the problem of illegal raves in his constituency. I have to tell the House that my constituency is not too distant from Cambridgeshire, despite what we feel may be frequently thought in the corridors of Whitehall, and it has the same problem. I was speaking only last week to some of my local farmers who have encountered it. Anybody who has seen the aftermath of one of these illegal raves knows that we need to have in place the measures necessary to deal with that problem. In addition to dealing with the questions about dogs that have been put to him by other hon. Members, one thing that I want to hear from the Minister when he winds up the debate is that the measures in the Bill will deal effectively with the problem of illegal raves.

As I said at the outset, the principal issue to which I wish to address my comments is that of forced marriage because I know that the forced marriage provisions in the Bill have support from those on both sides of the House. However, it is important to record precisely the problem with which the Bill needs to grapple and for the Minister to make it clear to the House that it will do that. I say that conscious, of course, that my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins) made an extremely powerful speech, touching on the measures in part 9 of the Bill, which it would be difficult to follow.

Let me begin by identifying what the problem is, because this issue is hidden from the vast majority of Members of this House and our constituents. Every year, thousands of people—principally the young and, therefore, vulnerable—are affected by it. We are talking about more than 1,000, based on the statistics we have from the forced marriage unit, and I pay tribute to the previous Government for supporting it when it was set up in 2005. We know from the research that has been conducted and from anecdotal evidence that the 1,000-plus people who contact the unit every year are simply the tip of the iceberg. We do not know quite how many young men and women are affected, but they deserve the protection of the law and they have not had it south of the border in the way that Scotland has enacted it.

It is therefore right that we welcome the measures in part 9 of the Bill, which address, for the first time, the criminal nature of forcing people to contract a marriage where one, or both, of them does not wish to do so. This intervention that the law requires to be made comes not just in the context of young and vulnerable adults; in the vast majority of cases they are being forced into the situation not only by the people they love, but by the people who are supposed to be looking after them, caring for them and ensuring that their transition from childhood to adulthood proceeds smoothly and in a way that makes them useful, valuable and happy members of our society.

As I say, the measures in the Bill are to be welcomed. The difficulty with the existing law, for which the previous Administration are to be criticised, is that the system to protect those who find themselves confronted with this problem contained in the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007 was simply to have in place civil law measures, which, in effect, led to an order or series of orders against those who might force people into marriage.

The first problem with that—a point that the previous Government failed to listen to—was that it sent out completely the wrong message. Forcing someone into marriage is not only not desirable; given the context in which it occurs, it ought to be a crime. Although some responses to the Government’s consultation indicated that there might be some downsides to criminalising such behaviour, we ought to be absolutely clear that this is not acceptable behaviour in our society, and if it is not acceptable behaviour in our society, it ought to be a crime in England and Wales, as it is in Scotland. Of course, other criminal offences may be committed during the course of forcing someone to contract a marriage, but they may not be, or they may be so serious that there is a reluctance on the part of the vulnerable person affected to instigate a complaint or a prosecution.

The second problem with having only a civil law system of dealing with forced marriage is that it led to a lack of awareness on the part of professionals, certainly in 2011 when the Select Committee on Home Affairs reported on what precisely could be done, as a matter of law, when a young person found themselves in this position. The follow-on point is that once a forced marriage protection order of some description had been obtained, as far as many professionals were concerned that was the end of the problem, but of course it is not necessarily the end of the problem; it is important to see that the order and its provisions are enforced.

The third problem was that in the absence of criminality, there was a lack of effective protection, or a lack of an effective penalty, although of course people were put into custody for breach of orders made by the courts. The deterrent effect of having only civil law remedies, which were difficult to enforce and rarely enforced, was therefore lessened.

It is important to get this point across: none of this is to attack legitimate arranged marriages, which my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) referred to in an intervention on the Home Secretary. None of it has anything to do with proper arranged marriages, or interferes with the customs or culture of minority communities in this country. I understand that the original decision by the previous Administration not to criminalise forced marriage south of the border may well have been based on a desire not to be seen to target minority communities. Nobody wants to target minority communities, or to attack their culture or customs, but I have to tell Opposition Front Benchers that, given the problem of forced marriage, that was an error—an error that this Government propose to rectify, with cross-party support, in part 9 of the Bill. That is very much to be welcomed, as is the entirety of the Bill, subject to the points that I have made, which the Minister will need to deal with, about dangerous dogs. If we were dividing on Second Reading, which we are not, I would of course give the Bill my support.