Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Chris Grayling
I do wish the hon. Lady would get her facts right. She just said that the chief inspector’s wife is running half the service at the moment, but of course that is not true. The service remains, as of today, entirely within the public sector, and she might get her basic facts right. Had she read that report, she would have seen that the chief inspector identified a number of long-term systemic problems that predate any change we have put in place and were ensuring underperformance. He said that it was necessary to move to a steady state—in other words, to complete the reforms and get things bedded in for the long term—as quickly as possible.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
7. What his policy is on the constitutional role of judicial review.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
Judicial review plays a crucial constitutional role as an essential component of the rule of law. When used properly, it allows public authorities to be held to account. But it can be misused, with unmeritorious challenges brought simply to cause delay. The Government’s package of reform, in particular the clauses in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill, will limit the potential for abuse without undermining judicial review’s vital role.
Mr Bain
I am grateful for that, but the Secretary of State’s proposals to reform judicial review have been condemned by, among others, the senior judiciary, leading civil liberties organisations and charities, and they have now been forcefully rejected by wide cross-party majorities twice in the other place. Will he now admit defeat, see sense and withdraw these unnecessary proposals?
Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Chris Grayling
We are, of course, at the preferred bidder stage. Clearly, the issue is under discussion and it will need to be addressed. I will give further information to the House in due course. We should also remember that people in public life are sometimes married to other people in public life. Simply put, I hope that the Ministry of Justice, were it to fall under the leadership of a Labour Government, would not be disadvantaged by the fact that the putative Home Secretary is married to the putative Chancellor of the Exchequer. We have to consider these things very carefully and deal with them in a mature and sensible way, and we will seek to do that.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
6. What steps his Department is taking to ensure that the compensation claims of mesothelioma sufferers are handled fairly.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
11. What steps his Department is taking to ensure that the compensation claims of mesothelioma sufferers are handled fairly.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Shailesh Vara)
We continue to work with stakeholders to see how we can improve the claims process for these tragic cases.
Mr Bain
Mesothelioma is an horrific industrial disease and its victims deserve much better than the shameful way in which they have been treated by this Government, with their botched consultations, prevarications and delays. Will the Minister, on behalf of the Lord Chancellor, confirm that he will not waste any more taxpayers’ money in further appealing the recent damning judicial review ruling made against his Department?
Mr Vara
We will certainly consider the way forward on that, but I will take no lectures from the hon. Gentleman on what we have done. This Government are putting provisions into the Deregulation Bill that will enable Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to provide information to legal representatives without a court order. We are liaising with the national cancer registration service and others to allow expedited access to medical notes. We also introduced the Mesothelioma Act 2014, which again benefits sufferers and victims. I will not take any lectures from him on that front.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Shailesh Vara)
My hon. Friend is right to say that the Government made a commitment to have a review, and we will do that. We will be starting it soon, and we will have a consultation. We intend to have the results of the review by the end of the year.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
T3. The Secretary of State had previously been adamant that no further contracts would be awarded to Serco until it had received a clean bill of health from the Serious Fraud Office. Will he therefore explain why he awarded it a contract for the extension of Thameside prison on 20 December? When is a contract not a contract?
Chris Grayling
I can only assume that the hon. Gentleman was not in the House last June when I made the original statement about the electronic tagging situation and said that I had decided, in the interests of justice in this country, to proceed with two extensions at prisons run by the two organisations involved. I was completely clear about it, I explained why at the time and he clearly was not listening.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Damian Green
I entirely share my hon. and learned Friend’s concerns about public confidence in community sentencing, which is precisely why we have changed the system so that in the future every community order must contain a punitive element. Indeed, the Offender Rehabilitation Bill creates a new flexible rehabilitation activity requirement to aid the rehabilitation of offenders while they are doing some community activity.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
T7. Companies such as G4S and Serco have lucrative, multi-million-pound contracts to provide public services. When will the Secretary of State adopt Labour’s plan to extend the Freedom of Information Act to these companies, so that the public have an equal right to know?
Chris Grayling
I said I would not comment—and I will not comment—about the current investigation. I will simply point out that the issues regarding G4S and Serco relate to contracts let by the last Government.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
12. What his policy is on whether the UK should continue to be a contracting party to the European convention on human rights.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
The Government remain committed to the European convention on human rights and to ensuring that those rights continue to be enshrined in UK law. We are also closely involved in the process to reform the Strasbourg Court.
Mr Bain
The Foreign Secretary promised that there would be no downgrading of human rights under this Government, so can the Minister explain why the Justice Secretary and the Home Secretary believe it is right to end 60 years of strong human rights protection drawn up by British lawyers and politicians, which have served both the United Kingdom and Europe so well?
Damian Green
Every member of this Government is concerned with making sure that human rights remain one of the bases of a good democratic society. There is no secret about the fact that the two parties in the coalition Government may have slightly different views about how to enhance human rights in future. I am happy to assure the hon. Gentleman that on behalf of my party I am leading work to make sure that human rights do not get devalued by being exploited, particularly in the courts, by those who should not be exploiting the legislation for their own ends.
Damian Green
I share my hon. Friend’s concerns. He will know that burglars now face sentences of up to 14 years and that those who commit a third domestic burglary face a minimum sentence of three years’ imprisonment. I am also happy to inform him, and those who are chuntering on the Opposition Front Bench, that the number of burglaries is clearly going down. Over the past 12 months, the number of burglaries has fallen by 3,000. That is an example of how our police reforms are working and how crime is falling in this country.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
T7. The Conservative party has always claimed to be suspicious of an over-mighty state. Why, then, do the Justice Secretary’s plans for judicial review reform strengthen the role of the state at the expense of the rights of individual citizens?
Chris Grayling
I do not believe that anyone should just be able to make a case, find a lawyer and have the initial application paid for. That is what we are going to change.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right; there is a balance to be struck in this respect. We want more prisoners to be working, but we also want to make sure that jobs outside prisons are not unfairly undercut. That is why, as he knows, we have a code of practice that we have recently strengthened to ensure that that does not happen and that, where we can, we bring work in from abroad to be done in our prisons or use work in prison to support contracts that provide work outside the prison gate.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
T5. Our criminal justice system is strengthened in its ability to deal with international crime through our co-operation in the EU’s justice and home affairs policies. Does the Secretary of State agree that this is another powerful reason why we should remain a full member state of the EU?
Chris Grayling
I believe that we should co-operate fully internationally, not simply in the European Union, but elsewhere, to combat international crime. I do not want this country to become part of a European justice system. That is what divides us.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Jeremy Wright
They have. We signed the agreement with Albania earlier in January, which is very recently indeed. We hope that we will start making returns under that agreement very shortly. As I have said before, it is important that the agreements, wherever we can negotiate them, are compulsory prisoner transfer agreements so that prisoners do not have the choice about going back.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
16. What his Department’s policy is on reform of judicial review.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
As set out in our recent engagement exercise “Judicial Review: proposals for reform”, our policy is to reduce the burden on public services of ill-founded judicial review applications, while protecting access to justice and the rule of law. We are working with the judiciary to ensure that we achieve that balance.
Mr Bain
Has the Secretary of State not seen Liberty’s response to his consultation on judicial review, which finds no statistical or any other evidence that it impedes growth or stifles innovation? Why does the Secretary of State believe it is right to remove rights from local communities and vulnerable people in immigration cases just to find an excuse for why this economy has not grown in five of the past nine quarters?
Chris Grayling
The problem with judicial review is that it has mushroomed beyond any expectation. It started with a few hundred cases when it was first introduced and there are now more than 10,000 a year. Often, those judicial review processes are based on a public relations exercise or an attempt to derail the reform temporarily by using a technicality. Judicial review should be a genuine process to challenge the public authorities when they get it wrong; it should not be an excuse to fly a kite.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Bain Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
7. According to the impact assessment relating to the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill, 2 million lone parents, 90% of them women, will be affected by this measure. Why does the Minister think it fair for millionaires to be given a tax cut of more than £2,000 a week while 1.8 million women bringing up children lose an average of £5 a week?
Maria Miller
An impact assessment relating to a benefit that is predominantly claimed by women will, of course, predict the impact that the hon. Gentleman has described. We need to ensure that families across the board receive the support that will enable them to get into work that pays, and the support that they require for the future.
Leveson Inquiry
William Bain Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
A free press is one of the essential attributes of a free and open society, and one of the principal means by which other powerful institutions are subject to the transparency and scrutiny on which a plural democracy depends. At its best, the press can fearlessly speak truth unto power, expose and campaign against injustice and hypocrisy, and entertain and enlighten. In those countries where there is no free press and the Government control the media, such freedoms are a huge aspiration of campaigners for democracy and human rights. However, at its worst, as revealed in all 1,987 pages of Lord Justice Leveson’s report, the press has a dark side—of illegal tapping of phone calls, e-mails and texts; and of destroying people’s lives and reputations in the most irresponsible way. The strong message from the Leveson report is that such great freedom in society must be balanced by a more responsible attitude too, with journalism more aware of its obligations to those failed by standards, which in some cases fell well below what society would call acceptable.
The other strong purpose we can discern from the report is to ensure that it is the industry itself, rather than Parliament, the Executive or the judiciary, that should have the primary responsibility of regulating itself, but in a way that learns the lessons from the inadequacies of the Press Complaints Commission, which neither had the clout nor the sanctions to hold the profession to account when required to do so. Such a new regulator must be underpinned by statute.
Lord Justice Leveson has produced a clever and balanced set of recommendations to put in place an enhanced scheme of self-regulation. They will create a powerful press board that is independent from both the industry and the Government, but is underpinned by statute so that its functions and role can be ratified by parliamentarians in a similar way to the model used in Ireland, and with financial incentives to encourage as many publications as possible to join the board. The board would have the power to instruct remedies for breach of the new code and to correct the record in public for individuals or groups of people affected. It would not, however, have the power to prevent or inhibit publication of material. That would rightly remain within the ambit of the courts in limited circumstances. It would be able to receive and investigate complaints from individuals, but also to examine issues on its own initiative, with proper powers over the compulsion of evidence and with the power to fine up to 1% of turnover, or to a maximum of £1 million.
There are some in this debate who claim that any statutory encroachment on the media is tantamount to state control, but that is far from the case. Parliament has already enacted a series of judicially enforceable and recognisable positive rights in law through the Human Rights Act 1998. Section 12 applies the convention to actions relating to the press. As the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), the former Solicitor-General who is no longer in his place, said in his remarks, article 10 of the European convention on human rights provides for freedom of expression, namely the freedom to hold opinions, and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authorities and regardless of frontiers, subject to certain conditions prescribed by law. Lord Justice Leveson calls on Parliament to bolster those freedoms derived from the Council of Europe by legislating specifically for freedom of the press in statute—hardly a revolutionary act.
In Scotland, regulation of the press that are based there is a devolved matter under the devolution settlement. The law on defamation has important differences, which derive from its different historical origins. Scotland’s First Minister—heavily criticised, I have to say, by the report—has said he will seek advice from a commission chaired by a Scottish judge on the implications of the report for regulation of the press in Scotland, and on those matters of Scots law that affect the media and that come within the jurisdiction of the Scottish Parliament.
In the case involving my constituents, the Watson family, I hope to show that simply adopting different regulatory machinery and separate standards for press regulation would merely cause additional grief and complications for people such as the Watson family, who have attempted to secure justice in relation to publications that not only circulate in Scotland, but throughout the United Kingdom. I do not see the benefit to Scottish society of a separate form of regulatory framework. The case for shared regulation across the United Kingdom is by contrast strong, and is centred on the needs of the complainant.
In the time I have left, I would like to acquaint the House with some of the details of the horrific injustices that my constituents have endured for the last 21 years—and which they were happy that Members of this House, wider society and Lord Justice Leveson himself heard when they gave evidence to the inquiry. My constituent’s daughter was brutally murdered in cold blood in 1991. A major newspaper in Scotland—The Herald—published three columns by a columnist called Jack McLean. Marie Claire—a publication circulating throughout the United Kingdom, but not originating in Scotland—also made remarks about the Watsons’ murdered daughter Diane, which caused the family such distress that their son Alan committed suicide. The Herald published the final column by Mr McLean on the day that their son was laid to rest in his grave.
Lord Justice Leveson finds the behaviour of some of these publications to be absolutely outrageous. Where I take issue with the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), who spoke earlier, is that he assumed that the criminal and civil law created redress. However, in her evidence to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, Margaret Watson quite rightly pointed out that the law of defamation does not apply to the dead, so the family of someone who has been defamed cannot sue in the courts for defamation. The criminal law had not been broken either, but the hurt and grief felt by that family have endured for 21 years.
We as parliamentarians have a right to protect freedom of the press, but we have a right to speak up for our constituents. They demand justice; they demand an end to irresponsible media; they demand action; and they demand that Leveson’s recommendations be implemented in full.
Voting Eligibility (Prisoners)
William Bain Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend makes an important point about those in our prisons who vote, including fine defaulters, people on remand and people who are between verdict and sentence. I can give him an absolutely clear assurance that it will be for Parliament to decide whether it wishes to see more prisoners with the vote or simply to retain the number at that level.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
The Secretary of State will know that the Edinburgh agreement devolves the franchise in the forthcoming independence referendum to the Scottish Parliament but that Acts of the Scottish Parliament have a very different relationship with the European convention on human rights from Acts of this Parliament. Have the Scottish Government contacted him to put on record their position about whether prisoners will have the right to vote in the referendum? Should any prisoner decide to sue, will that Government or this Government be liable in the courts?
Chris Grayling
The legal position is very clear: this is a reserved matter for this Parliament and not for the devolved Assemblies. As I mentioned, I have already had a discussion with the Scottish Justice Secretary. Clearly, one issue that will have to be addressed in the pre-legislative process is what will happen with the Scottish referendum. We have already started that conversation and it will continue.