Protecting the Public and Justice for Victims

Debate between Toby Perkins and Robert Buckland

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct about the important early stages of an investigation and the particular problem, frankly, of disclosure. Disclosure is a vital part of our system—it ensures fairness—but for many, particularly young women, who are faced with having to give up their mobile phone, in which their lives are stored, it is a very difficult choice. It is almost Hobson’s choice: give up your phone. What substitute do you have? Suddenly it is gone for months. Your life is on your phone. They are these sorts of choices. Women should not be put in that position—it is just wrong—and we are going to do something about that. I will not open up all the details with regard to the rape review, but the House can see my concern about the early stages of an investigation.

The right hon. Member for Tottenham and other Members on both sides of the House rightly talk about the length of time that it takes from a complaint to the outcome of a trial. There is no doubt that while the court process is a part of it, it is by no means the whole part and, very often, the wait has been for many months—and sometimes years—prior to the bringing of the case into court. If a suspect is remanded in custody, of course, the courts continue to work very hard to get those cases dealt with. There are custody time limits. There was a temporary increase to those time limits that I, through the consent of this House, ordered last year, which has now come to an end. It related to the pandemic and, rightly, I ended that, as it is such a serious measure when it comes to deprivation of liberty. However, I assure right hon. and hon. Members that, in cases where custody time limits apply, the courts have been getting on with the cases in a timely and proper way.

The issue has been those complex cases that perhaps involve many defendants—perhaps defendants on bail—which have had to take their place behind custody cases and which I accept have been taking too long to come to court. I watch the numbers, as the right hon. Gentleman knows—I share some information with him, of course, on a proper basis—and I take into particular consideration the length of time that it takes. I truly will not be satisfied until I see a significant drop in the length of time that cases take from arraignment and charge, when they come into the justice system, to final outcomes. But it is right to say that, certainly in recent weeks, there have been some encouraging signs.

[Mr Perkins]

I wish the Secretary of State well with reducing wait times. That is what we all desperately want to see and that is why I am so pleased that we are having this debate. Will he therefore tell us what he considers will be a success in reducing those wait times and when he expects that we will see them come to an acceptable level?

[Robert Buckland]

I will judge success—never “mission accomplished”, but certainly success—when I see the number of cases that take six months or longer dropping to well below 20% of all cases. That is my personal benchmark. I cannot give the hon. Gentleman a date when that will be achieved; what I can say is that there is now a sustained pattern in which the number of cases being dealt with in both Crown and magistrates courts is larger than the number of cases coming in. That, obviously, means one thing—a decline in the overall number.

The Courts Service’s latest published plan is to see the overall number of cases in the magistrates courts reduce back to pre-covid levels by the end of the year. Every sign that I have been seeing over the past few months suggests that that progress is sustained and sustainable. We should pay tribute to the magistrates, judges and all the court staff who are working so hard to make that real.

The pressures that we are under are all familiar to us in the House. I look around in this place and see so few people, and that reminds me of the challenge in courts. Imagine the difficulty of running a busy court where people are coming back and forth and covid coming into the middle of it all. The work done to make our courts safe, in accordance with guidelines from Public Health England and Public Health Wales, has been immense. We invested about £113 million in safety measures —from perspex screens right through to social distancing measures, plus the Nightingale courts programme, which is allowing us to create the sort of capacity needed to deal with the case load. Plus there is the commitment I made, to which the right hon. Member for Tottenham alluded, that there should be no upper limit on the number of sitting days that can be used by the Crown court.

In other words, the Government and I have clearly signalled to all involved in the system that all systems are go and only the inevitable constraints of the current covid pandemic and social distancing rules would hold back the sort of full-throttle progress that I would love to see. If we continue with the common endeavour of the vaccination programme—that race that it is so important to win—and continue to make progress, I am convinced that will be reflected in improved figures at our courts.

Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill [Lords]

Debate between Toby Perkins and Robert Buckland

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 8th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend. I know that he, like me, is a doughty champion not only for the family, but the need to reduce conflict. I know that he makes his point passionately, but I would argue that the way in which this Bill is constructed makes the so-called quickie divorce a thing of the past. The minimum terms that we are talking about provide an equality of approach that will no longer discriminate in favour of those couples who perhaps have the means and the wherewithal to either separate and live separately or to employ the sort of lawyers who can, shall we say, get things done in a more expeditious way.

I stress to the right hon. Gentleman that the six-month term that has been naturally focused upon is a minimum. There will be divorces that take longer than that for reasons of complexity relating to each relationship. The point is that there will not be divorces that can take place in as quick a time as eight weeks, as is currently the case.

Reform of divorce law is supported not only by the lawyers, judges and mediators, but by the Marriage Foundation and, importantly, by evidence from academic research. It is evident that the law does not do what many people think it does. It cannot save a marriage that has broken down, nor can it determine who was responsible for that breakdown. Allegations made in a divorce petition by one spouse about the other’s conduct give no advantage in any linked proceedings about arrangements for children or financial provision for a spouse, yet the current law can perversely incentivise conflict. It requires an applicant for divorce or for the dissolution of a civil partnership to provide details to the court of the respondent’s unreasonable behaviour if their circumstances mean that they need to divorce before a two-year separation period. The incentive at the very start of the legal divorce process to attribute blame can only serve to antagonise parties at the most difficult time in their lives. Moreover, the court in practice has limited means by which to inquire into such alleged behaviour and must often accept what is said by one spouse at face value. This can be a source of real resentment for the other spouse.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on what he has said so far. This is an important Bill that we look forward to supporting. Does he agree that this legislation is needed all the more because of the huge backlog in the court system right now, and that, alongside the important measures that he is introducing, we really need some Government heft to support our legal system and clear away that backlog?

[Robert Buckland]

The hon. Gentleman is right to talk about the caseload, which covid has exacerbated. He will be reassured to know that the senior judiciary and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service are working every day to expand the current capacity, to open more courts as we move away from the peak, and to look at alternative capacity in order to get as many cases running as possible and to deal with what must be an agonising wait for many families and victims. I would say—and I know that the hon. Gentleman would agree—that this Bill is not about the immediate crisis. It has been brought forward after long consideration, and has been dealt with very carefully in the other place. Indeed, it went through most of its stages in this House during the last Parliament, and represents an important milestone in the evolution of our approach to the sensitive and difficult subject of divorce.

I was talking about the perverse position whereby the current attribution of blame does not benefit anyone or serve society’s wider interests. Instead, it can create long-lasting and often bitter resentment at the outset, precisely at a time when couples need to work together to agree arrangements for their children and their finances. Furthermore, the simplistic allocation of blame to meet a legal threshold does not really reflect the reality that responsibility for a marriage breakdown may be shared. Marriages sadly end for a multitude of reasons. Existing law does not reflect that reality, and the truth is that we have stretched the law for a number of years in order to set out behaviour particulars sufficient to satisfy the court and obtain a divorce—a form described by the former president of the family division, Sir James Munby, as intellectual dishonesty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Perkins]

rose—

[Robert Buckland]

I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) first, but I will come back to the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins).

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Perkins]

The Secretary of State is right about the conflict caused by the current system. Does he agree that the old adage is true, that it is a good man who can keep a wife happy, but it is an amazing man who can keep an ex-wife happy?

[Robert Buckland]

I could not put it better myself, and the hon. Gentleman makes his point with characteristic force.

Legal Highs

Debate between Toby Perkins and Robert Buckland

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Toby Perkins]

That is an important point, and the problem has an impact on all those Departments, as my hon. Friend says. We must get cross-Government and cross-party work on it. I pay tribute to him for the work that he is doing in Barnsley to try to rid his constituents of this nightmare, and we will look at that and learn from it.

The owner of Reefers, the store in question in Chesterfield, apparently told the Derbyshire Times that the packets of Clockwork Orange that he sold made it clear that the product was not for human consumption. However, his store has a provocative name, graphics of spliff designs were originally painted on the side and it sells products that are used in the consumption of drugs. It mocks the law by claiming that it does not encourage drug use.

The Minister is on record as saying that we are ahead of other countries in our response, but Ireland, through the Criminal Justice (Psychoactive Substances) Act 2010, has already sought to ban legal highs. I would like councils to be given much greater powers to stand up for their local communities. I would also like us to take a lead and say that we are not willing to try to pursue the problem on a substance by substance basis, because the people involved are always one step ahead of us. They change the compound marginally, change its name and say, “You have not banned this.” I want us to get on the front foot and say that the producers of psychoactive substances know what they are doing and we know what they are doing, and that we will work collectively to get such substances off our streets.

We have rightly, over many years, taken the approach of refusing to legalise illicit and illegal drugs, despite the call from some quarters to do so. It is absolutely right that we treat legal highs, which are just as dangerous in many cases, in the same way. It is no good saying that products such as cannabis are illegal, but allowing producers of legal highs effectively to mock the law by creating new substances that have the same effects while we attempt to chase them item by item. It is time for us all to work together to develop a more constructive approach.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate on an issue that affects the constituencies of all Members, regardless of party. Does he agree that the approach taken by the US in the Federal Analogue Act, which banned substances that are similar to certain chemical compounds, could be a way of dealing with the whack-a-mole approach that he has correctly identified when it comes to proscribing so-called legal highs?

[Toby Perkins]

There is a lot of potential in that, and I think it is well worth investigating. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) has more expertise in that area.

When our communities feel under siege, we must not simply wring our hands and say, “There is nothing we can do. We know that there is a problem, but it is up to you to deal with it.” Our colleagues in local government and in the business world, and those in the police and the health service who are left to deal with the problems caused by legal highs, are looking at us and asking what action we will take. The time has come for us to act, and the steps that have been taken in America and Ireland offer us a potential way forward. There has to be a real sense of urgency. We should not seek to legislate in haste, but the situation is a national emergency. The scale of the response I have received since I secured the debate suggests that legal highs are a problem in communities up and down the land and that communities want action to be taken.

Alongside the potential for legislation, which I hope the Minister will confirm the Government are considering, I would like councils to be given greater powers to stand up for their local community. In the same way as they can deal with antisocial tenants, they should be able to curb the activities of antisocial retailers. We are facing a growing epidemic, and we must stand here impotent no more. It is long past the time for action. We must work together to cleanse our streets of this blight, and to protect our young people and communities. To do anything less would be a dereliction of our duty to our constituencies. The time for hand-wringing is over. The Government need to get back into the driving seat. Let us clean up Chesterfield and Britain, and rid our streets of legal highs once and for all.

Crime and Policing

Debate between Toby Perkins and Robert Buckland

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I would be happy to let the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) intervene for three minutes if she feels that she has been robbed.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Lady’s thoughtful speech. She is right to say that there is a difference in analysis, but none the less, she brings her experience to bear and it was a pleasure to hear it. However, after listening to her speech and many of the other contributions that we have heard, I also felt that there was a bit missing. She says that she has spoken to her chief constable and she is in no doubt that there will be fewer police stations, but with the cuts that we are talking about, the reality is that we will have fewer police officers. Some 80% of the police budget goes on people. We will not save that money simply by shutting a few buildings down. When she says that an excellent chief constable will look at the current situation and create a better service with less money, she is indulging in a myth. It is really unfair to the people in our communities, who rely on the Government and the police to keep them safe, to continue to allow them to believe that the police will be able continually to achieve more with less.

When the hon. Lady says that Labour would have had to face the same choices, she is not quite telling the truth, because the Conservatives have chosen to double the speed with which the deficit is paid off. Now that they have made that decision, we will have extra cuts. The shadow Home Secretary made it absolutely clear that there would have been cuts; he listed some of them for the second time, for the benefit of the Home Secretary, who had missed them the first time round. He was quite specific about them.

We also put in our manifesto that front-line policing would be protected, and that is key. A Government’s first duty must be to do all that they can to keep their citizens safe, and that is a duty that Labour understood well. It was demonstrated by the 17,000 extra police officers—compared with 1997—who are now patrolling Britain’s streets, 350 or so of them in Derbyshire, and by the 16,000 police community support officers introduced by Labour. The PCSOs have moved from being scorned by the press to being greatly valued by the public, who can see the contribution that they are making. As the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice admitted yesterday, the Labour Government were the first in history to preside over a consistent reduction in crime.

In addition to fighting serious crime and tackling the new threats of more complicated terrorist networks, more sophisticated paedophile rings and increasingly complex international drug and crime cartels, the Labour Government also gave the police far more significant powers to reduce antisocial behaviour than ever before. It was interesting to hear the Home Secretary claim that one of the problems was that the police had too many different powers. She implied that they were like joiners with too many tools, standing by a wall unsure which hammer to use, and that the extra powers at their disposal were somehow slowing them down and preventing them from getting on with policing. That was a rather strange thing to say.

The antisocial behaviour powers gave the police the ability to deal in a different and more effective way with the low-level antisocial element that exists in every constituency in the country. The Home Secretary showed us a window into her mind earlier, when she said that there was an increased perception of antisocial behaviour in poorer communities. Was she suggesting that, in regard to antisocial behaviour, the only difference between a poor community and a wealthy one was that poor people felt as though they were suffering as a result of it, and that if the millionaires took the trouble to look out of their castles, they would see all the terrible things going on outside the castle walls? Her reference to the perception of antisocial behaviour was quite revealing about her mindset and her view of the job that she has come into.

Like me, the police I have spoken to were staggered by the Home Secretary’s decision to abandon the antisocial behaviour order powers. They say that those powers have done much to help them to work with community groups, with tenants and residents associations, and with local councils to clean up the streets. It seems incredible that the Government should choose to strip the police of a power that is clearly working, at a time when all parties are concerned about reoffending rates. About 65% of recipients of an ASBO did not reoffend, and 93% desisted after their third one.

We have also heard a lot of talk about the effect on communities of antisocial behaviour orders. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) spoke of the situation in his community. Chesterfield has a different environment, but our antisocial behaviour problems also lead on to low-level crime and, if those problems are not tackled at an early age, people can go on to become serial offenders who will be found guilty of much more serious crimes. I know that that is the experience of Members on both sides of the House. People have been driven out of their homes by vandalism to their car, for example. Every morning, when they come out to go to work, they do not know whether their tyres will have been let down or their wing mirrors smashed, or whether a big scratch will have appeared on the bonnet. Those might be considered lower-level crimes, but if they are not dealt with, the perpetrators will decide that they are above the law and one thing will lead to another and their crimes will become more and more serious.

We need real honesty in this debate about what we expect from the police. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) made the important point that we now have an opportunity to reconsider the role of the police and decide what we want them to do. With the level of the cuts that are coming, the role we expect of the police is going to change drastically. There is no point anyone pretending otherwise.

The Home Secretary said that she wants to strip all the targets away so that the police have just one basic target—to cut crime. That fails to acknowledge the many different aspects of police work where no crime has been committed. If we see a man on a bridge who looks as if he is going to throw himself down on to the motorway, we are going to call the police—but no crime has been committed; it is just a man stood on a bridge. I would like to think that the police of the future would still turn up at such an incident. If not, we would be living in a very strange world.

When I was out with the police, they explained to me another problem they have with the mental health wing of a local hospital. There is a secure unit there and patients from it are sometimes given a pass to go out. The pass might be for three, four or 24 hours. At 23 hours and 59 minutes, there is no problem, but at 24 hours and a minute, the police are called out to find a missing person. Again, no crime has been committed, but the police are called.

We need to be sensible in this debate about what to expect from the police. I would certainly like to think that all Labour Members would join me in assisting the Police Minister in fighting his corner to get recognition for the message he wants to send out about what we want the police to do. Road traffic accidents provide another example. A huge amount of police time is taken up attending them, but no crime has been committed in most cases. If the responsibility of the police is only to stop crime, they might stop going out to road traffic accidents. Again, this shows the simplicity of the message; it might be attractive to the readers of tabloid newspapers, but it does not reflect the complexity or reality of what the police do. I am not advocating that the police should not turn up to road traffic accidents or should not turn up when a man is about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. What I am saying is that if we take the Home Secretary at her word, we need to think about the sort of service that we will end up with.

[Mr Buckland]

The hon. Gentleman, in making his point attractively, risks missing the point of the scenarios he has described. I can think of a number of crimes that might have been or could be committed in the circumstances he describes, particularly in the case of road traffic accidents—starting with dangerous driving, to name but one. Frankly, he is not making a good point; if he has any better ones, I would like to hear them.

[Toby Perkins]

I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman could understand the basic point I am making—that the police do a hell of a lot of work that does not actually involve cutting crime. I simply gave a number of examples.

We also need to look at what some of the backroom people do in the police service. I would not pretend that if we spoke to 100 police officers, none of them would complain about bureaucracy. I have spoken to senior police officers and I know that they do complain about it. Equally, however, I have not met a single police officer who believes that 25% cuts to the budget can be made by cutting the forms. That is not realistic. Much bureaucracy falls outside the Home Office remit and, as some of my hon. Friends said earlier, much of police bureaucracy arises from the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS requires such high evidential standards before it will take cases to court that the police have to provide a tremendous amount of evidence to back the service up. A lot of it takes up time. If we are going to remove such bureaucracy, we will have to accept that the police are likely to achieve fewer prosecutions. The CPS might have to take more cases to court, but that might increase the justice budget, so we would be saving on the one hand and losing out on the other.

My hon. Friends have also referred to other back- office functions—the massive amount of work done on counter-terrorism, for example, or on breaking international drug rings and international crime syndicates. The police also have people whose work is dedicated to the reduction of domestic violence. What often happens there is that the police put in a great deal of work to get the evidence together to achieve a prosecution, only to find that the victim of the violence has subsequently patched up the relationship and decided not to prosecute. The police have specialist teams dealing with child sex abuse. Such people may not be considered to be front-line police officers, but I should like to think that in any civilised society they would continue to work in the police force, and I believe that the narrowness of the new police target will be counterproductive. Far from being a Whitehall diktat, the policing pledge was put together by senior police officers who wanted to specify the standards of policing that people could expect wherever they lived.

I referred earlier to Liberal Democrats’ contribution to the policing policies pursued by the present Government. People ask what the Liberal Democrats are doing, but in this context their influence is clear, whether it involves their wish to get rid of ASBOs, their opposition to the DNA database—without which, as we have heard, 26 more murderers would be out on the streets—or their justice proposals, which mean that yobbos and criminals would not go to prison, but would be out on the streets as well. It is hardly surprising that someone who was on the run decided that it was well worth supporting the Liberal Democrat party financially: he may have felt that there was some benefit in doing so.

I wonder what happened to the Conservative party. I suspect that Lord Tebbit is turning in his crypt at the current Tory policies. The Tories seem not to understand, as he did, how poorer communities and people in deprived areas have been badly affected by crime. The Government are showing a lack of honesty about what will be faced by people on the streets if cuts of this magnitude are made, and a lack of awareness of what it is like to live in a deprived community that is under pressure from criminals. They do not seem to understand what it is like for people to wake up not knowing whether their properties will be left alone that day, or to go on holiday not knowing whether their properties will be broken into.

The current lack of vision about the best way in which to spend police resources leaves our police force, our communities and the value of a law-abiding, decent society dangerously exposed. I urge the Government to think again before pulling the rug from under the feet of our police.