Victims of Crime: Rights

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) for securing this really important debate. We have heard many important contributions. Like the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan), I have had to live through the aftermath of child sexual exploitation in my area. She is absolutely right in everything she says. We must never blame the victims. We must stand up and speak out for victims of criminal behaviour. I encourage her to continue to demand that there is proper insight. In the end, all local agencies must demonstrate that they have genuinely, not formulaically, learnt lessons. They must demonstrate a different way of working that makes it more likely that we ask questions when a 14-year-old has a 35-year-old boyfriend.

I will make a few brief points, Mrs Main, because I know you are anxious to bring in the Front-Bench speakers at—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

At 15.29, so you have a while. Ms Huq may or may not wish to speak.

[Tony Lloyd]

I will not take long, in that case. The comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) are really important. Antisocial behaviour matters. Actually, it kills in the worst situations, and even if we are not talking about those extremes it certainly makes people’s lives miserable. It destroys the quality of people’s lives and we must take that seriously. She is right. Obviously, this can be a political point, but the Government must take it on board that it has become much more difficult now for our police to investigate things that fall off the radar, which they simply ought not. It is an important issue to raise.

Like the hon. Members for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) and for Torbay (Kevin Foster), I am a big supporter of restorative justice. I regret that I was not in the House in 2016 to speak on the Select Committee report, but I was aware of its conclusions. Restorative justice fundamentally delivers to victims the sense that their needs are being taken seriously. That is as important in prosecutions as when there is a decision not to take a case forward, which can sometimes be appropriate.

I think of the case of a woman who was a very strong advocate. Other hon. Members might have heard her speak. Her house was burgled and a new camera was taken. Sadly, her daughter was killed in a car crash weeks later and the last remaining photographs of her daughter were lost with the camera. She never saw the photographs but she was prepared to work with the perpetrator, who went to prison. That was important for at least giving her a sense of easement, although you can never reconcile yourself to the loss of a child. It also meant that that long-term burglar effectively ceased his former habit, so it worked in more than one way, but—there is always a “but”—training is absolutely important. We cannot see the process as something to be delivered on the streets, with no training. There must be supervision to ensure that standards are maintained. Importantly, there must be victim volition. The process cannot be forced on a victim, or denied to a victim who is not aware that they could demand it. I support the call for a statutory framework, and of course my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West argued for that.

[Robert Neill]

I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is back in the House after a brief gap. I hope he will take part in further debates. Given what he has said, does he agree on the importance of the point made in the Justice Committee report, that restorative justice must always be victim-led—the victim’s choice at all times—and that there must be proper professional support right the way through? It is important that victims be given full information about what is available in their area, and that something genuinely meaningful should be in place—not simply a leaflet.

[Tony Lloyd]

Absolutely. The hon. Gentleman—let me say my hon. Friend for the sake of this debate—is right on both counts. The second point is fundamental in bringing about the first, because if victims do not have confidence in the process it withers. It is not just victims, in fact, because the community must have confidence, through the victims, that the decisions are not arbitrary, and will deliver something to victims and do something more generally to change behaviour. In the end, the process is about helping victims and changing perpetrators’ behaviour.

Perhaps I may now touch on the rather more aggressive side of what, sadly, happens to victims. Sometimes victims are treated horrendously within the processes. I know that the Minister is sympathetic to these points. Many years ago, I dealt with a grieving family whose son had been stabbed to death at a party. The charge was murder and the case took many months, as such cases do, to come to court. Eventually, on the day of the trial, the family were told that the murder charge could not be sustained, because the prosecuting barrister had said he could not deliver it on the available evidence. No other charge of manslaughter or lesser offences had been brought, and that meant that the two perpetrators went scot-free. The family were left devastated.

That was a long time ago and I would be happy if I could say that those were the bad old days and that things have moved on. However, they have not. Victims still sometimes find that the failure of the prosecution service to examine information in time, or the failure of the courts to process cases, means they face a long journey between becoming a victim and their case coming to court, only to find that when it gets to court they are left frustrated and dissatisfied.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is highlighting important issues to do with the CPS and the rights of victims. Does he agree that one thing that undermines victims of crime is the Crown’s inability to appeal against sentences that are simply too lenient? That can happen only in a very few cases at the moment, and victims of crime feel powerless under the current system to ensure that the appropriate sentence is imposed on an offender.

[Tony Lloyd]

I have a lot of sympathy with that point. The procedure could not be used in every case, but perhaps society should recognise the need to use it more widely than happens now. Sometimes the courts do get things wrong.

I do not want to go into too much detail about the next case I shall mention. A young woman was effectively kidnapped from a bar, and it was believed that she had been raped. She had certainly been sexually assaulted. She faced months of adjournments and new trial dates. In the end, the case came to court more than two and a half years from the original event. The perpetrator had been charged with rape and the prosecution counsel determined only at a late stage that it was not possible, on the evidence, to sustain that charge. Because no other charges had been laid—not kidnap or sexual assault, which are pretty serious charges—the perpetrator walked free, as in my other example. That is human incompetence, and for the victim it was outrageous. I have spoken to her, and had she known what would happen she would never have consented to the case’s going forward.

Those are cases of human error, but such human error is systemic within the present system. Prosecuting barristers often do not come to the cases until late in the process. We must do something about that. We must begin to put victims first in the criminal justice system, rather than treating them as an afterthought. We are not at that point yet.