Oral Answers to Questions
Stephen Phillips Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
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The Attorney General
The hon. Gentleman should pay close attention to what the CPS is saying now, as much as to what it said then. Let me tell him what it said yesterday in response to the settlement. It said:
“This settlement will allow the CPS to respond to a changing caseload and the significant increase in complex and sensitive cases, such as terrorism, rape and serious sexual assaults and child sex abuse.”
The CPS is making the same point that I am making today about this settlement: it is a settlement that recognises the need to deal with precisely the type of increase in case load that he is talking about.
Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
10. What estimate he has made of the annual cost to the public purse of avoidable errors by the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)
The CPS does not maintain a central record of the number or value of wasted costs orders, but I can tell my hon. and learned Friend that the total value of costs awarded against the CPS in the last financial year, of which wasted costs orders are a mere subset, amounted to just over £1 million, which was about 0.18% of overall expenditure.
Stephen Phillips
I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for that answer. Terry Boston, a solicitor in my constituency, said the following in an email to me last week:
“I am becoming more and more concerned about justice in this country. The reason for this is the blatant failure of the CPS and their one line cover all excuse, ‘We are short of staff.’”
I appreciate, as does Mr Boston, that savings have had to be made, but can my hon. and learned Friend assure the House that the CPS does have sufficient staff in place, both nationally and in Lincolnshire, to perform its functions?
The Solicitor General
I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for his question. I can assure him that the CPS does indeed have sufficient staff in place to properly do its work. The CPS conviction rate in his region last year was 84.2%, which is slightly higher than the national average.
Caroline Dinenage
The fact that a subject is a statutory requirement does not mean that it is taught well, and we want all schools to put high-quality PSHE education at the heart of their curriculum so that all young people leave school prepared for life in modern Britain. The majority of schools and teachers already recognise the importance of good PSHE education and naturally know that healthy, resilient and confident pupils are better placed to achieve academically and fulfil their potential in life.
Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
As the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) will know, it is frequently thought that this problem only affects young women, but it affects boys and young men as well. Will my hon. Friend the Minister assure the House that she has not lost sight of that and tell us a little more about what the Government are doing in that regard?
Caroline Dinenage
My hon. and learned Friend makes an excellent point. There is even a name for the problem; it is called “manxiety”. We are not blind to the fact that this issue affects an increasing number of young men and boys, which is reflected in the worrying increase in the use of steroids. That is why the Government’s body confidence work is blind to gender and tackles the problem by dealing equally with boys and girls.
Oral Answers to Questions
Stephen Phillips Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
Question 11 plus Question 13, Mr Speaker.
Mr Speaker
Ah, the usual dexterity of a QC. We are grateful to the hon. and learned Gentleman, who is also an Arsenal fan, so he has many reasons to celebrate.
Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
24. What steps she is taking to prevent girls being taken overseas to undergo female genital mutilation.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
Female genital mutilation is a barbaric act, for which there can be no excuse. It is child abuse. Girls may be particularly at risk during the summer holidays. We are introducing FGM protection orders on 17 July this year. An order could, for example, require a passport to be surrendered to prevent a girl from being taken abroad for FGM. Border Force and the police will also carry out joint operations over the summer, targeting outbound and inbound flights.
Stephen Phillips
We are coming to that time of year when girls are trafficked abroad for this barbaric practice to be undertaken. Does the Minister agree that it is critically important in this area to ensure that health care and safeguarding professionals have full and proper support to tackle FGM? What is she doing to ensure that that is the case this year?
Karen Bradley
My hon. and learned Friend makes a very good point. The Government recognise the importance of equipping those on the front line with the tools they need to tackle FGM—and that means across the board. The Department of Health has funded a £3 million FGM prevention programme to support NHS staff and the Department for Education has provided £2 million to support a national programme, backed by Barnardo’s and the Local Government Association, that will create a highly specialised team of skilled social workers.
Voting by Prisoners
Stephen Phillips Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
Notwithstanding the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) and for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), the motion on the Order Paper in my name and that of right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House has been carefully crafted in light of the judgments delivered by the Grand Chamber in the Hirst case. For that reason, and given the limit on Back-Bench contributions, I shall confine my remarks to demonstrating why the motion is correct and why it is important that it receives support from hon. Members on both sides of the House.
The previous Government’s decision to refer the Hirst matter to the Grand Chamber is something that we have to live with because of the rule of law. We have to respect the judgment that the Court handed down, whether we agree with it or not, but it is important to bear in mind that the decision in Hirst was far from unanimous. A powerful dissent was delivered by the president of the Court, in which he was joined by four other judges. I add that Judge Costa, who is now the president of the Court, also delivered a dissenting opinion. Those dissenting opinions correctly recognised the importance of the Court not interfering or being seen to interfere in domestic political issues.
Jeremy Corbyn
I am listening intently to the hon. and learned Gentleman. Does he recognise that those opinions dissented from the majority opinion of the Court? If we are to support the whole concept of the European convention on human rights and the Court, we have to accept its judgment.
Stephen Phillips
I am grateful for that intervention, but I ask the hon. Gentleman to listen to where I am going rather than to what he has heard so far.
The minority stressed that
“it is essential to bear in mind that the Court is not a legislator and should be careful not to assume legislative functions.”
I make this point, in answer to the hon. Gentleman, because although I accept, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General has made clear, that the Government are bound by the judgment in the Hirst case as between themselves and Mr Hirst, in the sense that it is res judicata between them, they are not bound in relation to future cases brought by other litigants. There is every prospect, given the debate that we are having today, that the judgment in Hirst would not be followed by the Grand Chamber in future should it come to consider the matter again. To be clear, if, as I trust will happen, there is a clear demonstration in the House today of the will of the people, through their democratically elected representatives, to maintain the status quo regarding the removal of voting rights from those who are subject to custodial sentences, I fail to see how that could not subsequently be respected by the courts of this country and by the Strasbourg Court should the matter have to be considered again.
As even the majority in Hirst recognised, there is a substantial margin of appreciation in the context of article 3 of the convention, and the fact remains that there is no consensus across Europe as to whether those serving custodial sentences should have their right to vote removed as a consequence of having put themselves outside the law. Indeed, it was notable in the judgment of the majority in the Grand Chamber that significant reliance had to be placed on decisions from Canada and South Africa. The hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) quoted from the South African case. It is true that Canada and South Africa are both common law countries, but they have significant civil law traditions stemming from French law and Roman-Dutch law respectively.
The margin of appreciation in the context that is being discussed in the House means, or certainly ought to mean, that if the House passes the motion, as I hope it will, and if it decides that it does not believe, in the name of the people of the United Kingdom, that section 3 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 entails any breach of the human rights of the citizens of the United Kingdom, that, to my mind, must be an end of the matter. It will have to be recognised in the courts of this country. It will, I hope, be recognised by the Court in Strasbourg.
Ben Gummer
On that point, if the House expresses this opinion today, and if the Court takes that into account, and given that the article protects the totality of the democracy and not an individual right, will the Court not be subverting the convention itself if it persists along the course of action that it has begun?
Stephen Phillips
Yes, it will. One of the difficulties that the Government face, and which those arguing the case in the Grand Chamber faced, was the previous jurisprudence of the Court, where the article had been misconstrued well beyond its original purpose, to give rise to individual rights that the framers of the convention had never intended should come into being.
If there is a change in the approach of the Strasbourg Court, as there ought to be in light of the motion—assuming that it carries if there is a vote tonight—and if the Strasbourg Court were arrogantly and excessively to continue to seek to appropriate to itself the right to legislate for the people of the United Kingdom, the Government and the House would have to look again at the matter. In those circumstances, it would be difficult to see what properly could be done other than to repatriate the right of the United Kingdom to have sole jurisdiction to decide the human rights of its citizens in its domestic courts, as a number of hon. Members have suggested.
For the present, however, what is necessary, and all that is necessary from those on both sides of the debate—from those who support the existence of the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court and those who do not, and from those who believe that we ought to be party to the European convention on human rights and those who do not—is that the motion receives support across the House, so that we make clear the position of the people of the United Kingdom through their elected representatives. For those reasons, I commend the motion to the House. I shall vote for it and I urge hon. Members of all parties to lend it their support.