Independent Review of Administrative Law
William Wragg Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Robert Buckland
I can forgive the hon. Lady for reading a stock question as she has not had a chance to see the document. I will repeat the answer that I gave to the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) with regard to publication. With respect, I must, however, take grave issue with her characterisation of the Government. I am sorry, but the public order reforms are in no way comparable to the extreme rhetoric she used. This is a codification of the law; an application of well-established legal practice with regard to mobile demonstrations to those that might be static. This is about balancing the right of freedom of expression with the rights of the rest of society to go about their lawful business.
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
Can we quash this hyperbolic nonsense spouted forth in the Chamber this morning? The incidents on Saturday were because of poor enforcement of badly drafted covid regulations, and nothing more than that. Will the Lord Chancellor take this opportunity to provide an update on the constitution, democracy and rights commission? He will recall with fondness his appearance before my Committee, I am sure, and he might have ample opportunity now to expound further.
Robert Buckland
I thank the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and I do indeed remember my appearance before it. As I explained to the Committee then, the review was one distinct part of a process that I am already undertaking. In January, I announced the creation of an independent review to consider the operation of the Human Rights Act, chaired by Sir Peter Gross, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, with a diverse panel—in terms of geography and, indeed, opinion—across the United Kingdom and Ireland. That is part of an overall process that will result not in a commission trying to deal with all aspects but will demonstrate and reveal the Government’s approach to rebalancing our constitution in the finest traditions of what we do and what we represent in this country.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Wragg Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Lucy Frazer)
I would be very grateful if the right hon. Gentleman could write to us. We are in the middle of a £1 billion court programme, which includes a number of things, such as technology and improving other services such as family rooms, where people can spend time with their families. We are looking at a number of things that I am very happy to talk to him about.
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
Following the Chequers statement, will my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor lay before the House details of what active provisions his Department is making for a deal not being secured with the European Union?
Lucy Frazer
At the Ministry of Justice, we are very much working to ensure that we get the best, and the right, deal for our country, but like all competent Departments, we are also working to ensure that if there is no deal, we are ready for it. We have £17.3 million extra from the Treasury to look into this and ensure that we have the right Brexit scenario.
Oral Answers to Questions
William Wragg Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Lucy Frazer
My hon. Friend raises a technical point about the offences that are available. In fact, there are two: criminal damage; and an offence under animal welfare legislation. Both attract a penalty of up to six months and, as she may be aware, DEFRA has identified that it is looking to increase the sentence to five years.
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
To address education in prison, Dame Sally Coates’s report makes three key recommendations: first, to carry out an individual survey of a prisoner’s educational needs when they enter prison; secondly, to make sure that governors have more control over education provision to reflect the needs of the prison or local area; and, thirdly, to make sure that English and maths are a core part of that curriculum.
Mr Wragg
A 2017 report said that the quality of education in English and Welsh prisons was generally good, but it found that poor attendance and punctuality of prisoners often went unchallenged and that the process of moving prisoners to learning, skills and work activities from the wings was often ineffective and poorly managed. What is being done to address those problems?
Court Closures
William Wragg Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), and I congratulate the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) on securing this important debate. I am pleased to speak in it, and I wish to speak up for the principle of local justice and the vital importance of the courthouse in Stockport for my constituents. I welcome last month’s decision by the Ministry of Justice to keep the Stockport courthouse open, particularly in the wake of my campaign with the Ministry of Justice and having had many productive conversations with the Minister.
As many hon. Members have said, a key principle of our justice system, one that underpins both the magistrates courts and Crown courts, is that justice should be delivered by one’s peers. By extension, that gives rise to the requirement for local justice to be administered by local people within the local area. Those principles have given rise to the patchwork of jurisdictions and local courts that make up the current structure of Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. Those principles, under the current courts system, also give rise to the important practical benefits that help to deliver justice effectively. They provide a shorter distance to travel for the relevant parties in cases, including defendants, victims, and witnesses, many of whom are often accompanied by their families and friends to court, and for the magistrates, clerks and staff of the court. They also give rise to smaller benches having a local identity and a social or team aspect. Finally, the distribution of courts not only contributes to local communities, but serves as a catalyst to small micro-economies—we heard about the pies and pasties in Wakefield—and associated services, as well as to the legal professions that the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) mentioned.
Out of respect for those principles and practical benefits, I also opposed the proposed merger of the local justice area of Greater Manchester, which was considered in a public consultation by the Ministry of Justice at a similar time to the one on courthouses. I made the separate case to the Ministry that in the event of any changes to that local justice area, not all the business of any new merged LJA should be conducted in the Manchester city courts, but rather a significant proportion should still be conducted in courts across Greater Manchester, including that in Stockport.
I made the case some months ago to the Ministry of Justice to urge that Stockport’s court should remain open and retain at least a significant proportion of its current magistrates court and county court functions. Stockport court has 47 staff and was running at only 54% capacity in 2014, with annual running costs of £879,000. Please allow me to explain why I felt the way I did. The first reason was that those impacted by the proposed closure would be the court users, including victims and witnesses in the magistrates courts, and those involved in small claims, bankruptcy and evictions in the county court. All those are groups of vulnerable people who need the security and convenience of local services, at what is an already stressful time for them. The closure of Stockport courthouse could have severely restricted access to justice and may have ended up being a false economy by simply shifting the operating costs to other areas.
Robert Neill
I am glad to hear my hon. Friend mention that Stockport court is not to be closed. That was particularly welcomed by members of our Committee, because it also houses a very successful problem-solving court, which has been recognised by the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor as one area where we could do much more to combine jurisdictions and get a much more effective use of judicial capacity and better outcomes.
William Wragg
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He raises an important point about the innovative work being carried out in the Stockport courthouse building, and I am grateful to him for drawing that to the House’s attention. The closure of the court would have left the town without a court and would have meant that my constituents would have had to travel to Manchester in the quest for justice. That would not only have seen them incurring additional expense, but it would have had potentially negative impacts on vulnerable people, and disabled people in particular. Any such closure could also increase the amount of defendants not turning up for hearings, thus wasting the resources of the court and meaning that more arrest warrants would be issued, with consequential impacts on police resources.
Moreover, from a local economic perspective, if the closure had gone ahead in its proposed form, all cases would have been heard in Manchester and there would no longer have been a magistrates court between Chesterfield and Manchester. The Chesterfield and Stockport case was something my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) mentioned. In addition, the closure of the Stockport court would have had an impact on not only the employees of the courthouse, but local businesses, particularly those in the legal profession.
I understand that in the context of the wider pressures on public finances some savings have to be made somewhere, and I acknowledge that the Minister has a very unenviable task in the difficult decision he is facing. I also have sympathy for other local courts in surrounding areas, many of which can equally apply these same arguments. Other local communities have strong allegiances to their local courts, and I am particularly sorry to hear that the courts at Bury, Oldham and Trafford are earmarked for closure. However, I think there was a stronger case in Stockport’s favour, in particular, because it is one of the most heavily used courts in the area. The stated aim of the reforms to the HMCTS estate is to reduce surplus capacity by closing courts that are unused or underused, or that are simply unsuitable for the services that we now need to provide in them. During the 2014-15 financial year, Stockport magistrates court was utilised at approximately 54% of its capacity—that was the highest level of occupancy of any of the Greater Manchester courts. In addition, Stockport courthouse is a high-quality building, only recently having been refurbished in 2010. I therefore cannot see how the closure of Stockport magistrates court could reasonably have been deemed as a cost-saving exercise.
The Government announcement that Stockport court will now not be closed is good news for people living in Stockport and the surrounding areas, including my constituency. I made a submission to the Ministry of Justice as part of the consultation process, and also attended meetings with the Minister, along with my neighbouring MP, the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), to whom I pay particular tribute for the amount of work that she did, and my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson). I am pleased that we were able to take this cross-party approach and work co-operatively with one another. I am pleased that our arguments were listened to by the Government, in what I felt—I know others may disagree—was a genuine consultation exercise, particularly given the Minister’s intervention in that process.
In summary, I feel that Stockport courthouse should remain open, and I am pleased that my view has been vindicated. Such a decision is important in order to preserve the long-standing principle of local justice being administered by local people within the local area; to provide practical benefits for both the parties in legal cases and the court staff; and to ensure that the court can continue to contribute to the local community and economy. It is also important because the court currently provides a relatively high level of occupancy compared with that of many other courts in Greater Manchester and surrounding districts.
I further urge that the continued operation of Stockport courthouse be incorporated into whichever future model of local justice area structure for Greater Manchester the Ministry of Justice decides to pursue. Can the Minister shed any further light on that matter today? I also welcome the fact that, as part of this reform package, the Government are investing more than £700 million over the next four years to update the court and tribunal estate, installing modern IT systems and making the justice system more efficient and effective for modern users.
As I said earlier, I have sympathy for other local courts in surrounding areas and other areas around the country, and I am glad that many colleagues have been here today to stand up for their local courts. Perhaps somewhat cheekily, may I say that in a week characterised by a refreshingly open attitude on the part of the Government to showing their listening mode, I hope that the Minister will be able to hear some of the important pleas of other right hon. and hon. Members here this afternoon?
Criminal Cases Review Commission (Information) Bill
William Wragg Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
I thank colleagues from across the House who have joined me to support my Bill before it goes to the other place, where it will hopefully complete all necessary stages before we reach the guillotine of running out of parliamentary time. It has been an honour and a privilege to embark on the process of piloting a private Member’s Bill through our legislative process. I was fortunate to be drawn in the ballot in my first year as a Member of Parliament, and when I was elected just nine months ago this Sunday, I never imagined that I would be standing here and leading a debate on a new Bill. At the time I had no idea where the Public Bill Office was, let alone how it performed such a vital role in our legislative process. Neither did I know how skilled, kind and helpful its Clerks and staff would be to me, and I put on record my thanks to the Clerks of that office in particular, because without them this Bill would surely have fallen by the wayside long before now.
The process has proved to be a steep yet valuable learning curve. Before coming here I watched several Bill progress through Parliament and be debated and voted on in the Chamber, and I understandably believed that that was where legislation got made. Only once I went through the process myself did I understand how much work goes on away from the Chamber. Speaking here is the easy part. I know how much of our legislative process relies on negotiating and navigating timetables and calendars, or on running down corridors with five minutes’ notice to get the co-signature of one last Member before the deadline.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) on his Bill passing its Third Reading some moments ago. It is an important piece of legislation, and I am pleased that we have been able to mutually support each other as we muddle through this strange but enlightening process. However, we have made it, and I am delighted and honoured to promote the Third Reading of my Bill today. I do so not only because at several points over the past nine months I feared that it may not come to pass, but because of the Bill’s importance as a valuable piece of legislation.
Following my selection in the ballot, I discussed with colleagues potential topics for my Bill. I wanted to be involved in something that would do good and make a real difference to people’s lives, and improve the justice system in an important way. The Bill seeks to make a small but significant improvement to our criminal justice system, and specifically to the appeals process surrounding miscarriages of justice and the gathering of available evidence and information for such cases to be investigated.
If enacted, the Bill would allow the extension of powers for the Criminal Cases Review Commission to obtain information of evidence, testimony, documents and other material that would assist in the processing of appeals and review cases where a miscarriage of justice is believed to have taken place. In essence, it would allow the CCRC to obtain such information from a person other than one serving in a public body, to which it is currently restricted. That new measure would apply to private sector organisations, persons employed by or serving in private companies, and private individuals. If passed it will strengthen the CCRC’s ability to overturn wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice, and improve further our system of law and order, which is rightly the envy of the world.
To set the Bill in context, I intend to set out the working of the CCRC and the problem that my Bill seeks to resolve. I will then go on to detail what the Bill does and say how the amended law would work in practice. Lastly, I will explain why I believe that the Bill is necessary, how it would improve justice in our country, and—critically—why I believe that it deserves the support of the House today. I shall also attempt to provide some answers to the points raised in Committee. I hope to allow time for other Members who may wish to speak, and I am very open to interventions. The Bill has already demonstrated its cross-party support by its broad range of co-signatories, and it is important that the House now shows its full support for these new measures.
The CCRC was set up as an independent public body in 1997 by the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 to investigate possible miscarriages of justice, and it was the world’s first publicly funded body to review such cases.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
It might not be known outside the House that my hon. Friend had the foresight to secure for his Bill the signature of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who is now the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. That will no doubt aid the Bill’s passage through the House.
William Wragg
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and as he will see by the vast numbers of Labour Members here today, the influence of that signature has been a fantastic achievement.
The CCRC was set up in the wake of notoriously mishandled cases such as those of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six—two high-profile cases where two groups of men were convicted and imprisoned for connections to bombings carried out by the IRA in the 1970s. On a serious note, it was because of those particular cases that the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was so keen to lend his signature to the Bill.
However, some 10 or 20 years ago these convictions and a review of evidence and police conduct during the investigation revealed serious breaches of due process, and, in the case of the Birmingham Six, serious accusations of police brutality. Therefore, the convictions were eventually quashed and ruled as unsafe. Moreover, senior police officers in both cases were later charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and the Birmingham Six were eventually each awarded compensation ranging from £800,000 to £1.2 million for their wrongful conviction.
The consequences of these cases led, in 1991, to the Government setting up a royal commission on criminal justice. The royal commission reported in 1993 and led to the Criminal Appeal Act 1995, which established the CCRC in 1997. Parliament established the CCRC specifically for the body to be independent of Government and, although sponsored and funded by the Ministry of Justice, to operate its statutory functions independently. However, a drafting anomaly in the 1995 Act meant that a key power was omitted from the CCRC, meaning that it could not require evidence to be provided from privately held sources, whether individuals, corporations or other bodies. It is the need to address that anomaly that brings us here today.
In preparing to present the Bill to Parliament, I visited the Birmingham headquarters of the commission to meet its chairman, chief executive, head of casework, some of its case handlers and investigators, and other staff to see its facilities and operation at first hand. I am delighted to say that some staff have been able either to attend the House today or to watch the proceedings from Birmingham. The House should be clear that the commission is very keen for the Bill to pass and to have these powers, for which it has been calling for some years. I want to take this opportunity publicly to thank the staff of the CCRC for hosting me on my visit, and for all the information, support and advice it has provided to me over the past few months. In particular, I would like to thank long-serving staff member and senior case handler Mr Miles Trent, who has been a very valuable help.
I shall go on in a moment to explain precisely how the Bill will address the original anomaly in the law, which has prevailed for almost 20 years. Before doing so, however, I think it is important that the House bears in mind why the Bill is important. I wish to remind Members of the real human stories behind what can seem the rather dry business of legislation and regulation. Anyone who has ever been subject to a miscarriage of justice will attest that it is a deeply traumatic and damaging experience, often taking years away from somebody’s life while they work through the appeals process, trials and retrials, often from the confines of a prison cell. While not an easy or pleasant experience for anyone at any time, the heartache and anguish will be more acute for those who know, in the back of their mind, that they are innocent and that the British justice system has failed them. In such cases, the CCRC is often a victim’s only opportunity of salvation.
Although the number of cases the CCRC takes on is small compared with the overall number of criminal prosecutions each year, and the number of cases referred and quashed is even smaller, for those few victims of a miscarriage of justice in prison for crimes they have never committed, and subject to the abuses of process and powers of the system, it must be a truly harrowing existence for both them and their families. If I may, I would like to illustrate this point with one particular case which, although upsetting, contextualises the importance and seriousness of the commission’s work. I should say before continuing that this case has already been on the public record.
Sally Clark, a solicitor aged 42, was jailed in 1999 for allegedly killing her 11-year-old son Christopher in December 1996 and her eight-week-old son Harry in January 1998. An appeal in 2000 failed, but she was freed in 2003 after a fresh appeal, following a referral from the CCRC. The jury at the trial was told by an expert witness, Professor Sir Roy Meadow, that the probability of two natural unexplained cot deaths in the family was 73 million to one, a figure for which the Royal Statistical Society later said there was no statistical basis. However, despite her eventual release from prison after four years, Sally Clark died at her home in March 2007 from alcohol poisoning. At the time, the chair of the CCRC, Professor Graham Zellick, said:
“Sally Clark should never have been convicted. She should have succeeded at her first appeal. It should never have taken two years’ work by us and a referral before she was released, by which time she was broken in mind and body.”
Our justice system is one of the most respected in the world, but mistakes can and do happen occasionally. When this is the case, the system to right the wrong and to protect innocent people should be strong so that we avert cases such as Mrs Clark’s. My Bill seeks to strengthen that system. I referred to the legislative anomaly in the original 1995 Act, which gave rise to the need for the Bill. Let me explain how the CCRC currently operates.
The CCRC currently has the power to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and to refer convictions and sentences to the relevant courts for appeal. The commission investigates convictions and applications by the offender, or, in the case where the offender has died, at the request of relatives. It has special powers to investigate cases and to obtain information it believes is necessary to review a case. If the CCRC concludes there is a realistic prospect that the Court of Appeal will overturn the conviction, it can make what is termed a referral and send cases back to court so that an appeal can be heard. Applications are free to make to the CCRC and defendants cannot have their sentences increased on account of having made an application for review. However, as the commission usually deals with cases already appealed once, if the commissioners can send cases for a review, it is usually on account of new evidence or a new legal argument that has come to light. This being so, their ability to gather information is critical to a successful operation.
The subject of the Bill hinges on what are commonly referred to as section 17 powers. Section 17 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 gives the CCRC the power to require public bodies and those serving on them to give it documents or other material that might assist it in discharging its functions. This includes the police, local councils, the NHS, the Prison Service and so on. It should be clear how all such bodies could and do serve as vital sources of information in appeal cases: the police provide criminal evidence and interviews; councils often provide CCTV footage; the NHS can supply details of injuries, in the case of violent crime; and the Prison Service can provide vital information about the behaviour or statements of prisoners seeking an appeal.
Those are just the most common examples of public sector sources of evidence on which the CCRC relies to do its work. There are, of course, dozens of others. However, it currently has no equivalent powers to compel private organisations and individuals to provide similar information, and has long found this to be a problem. Incidentally, this is in contrast to its counterpart in Scotland, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has held these powers since its inception. The Bill would allow the CCRC to make an application to the courts to require the disclosure of new evidence held by private bodies and individuals. As I mentioned, it already has those powers for public bodies. The inability to obtain information from private organisations and individuals has limited the CCRC’s actions and can cause unnecessary delay in the review of cases it undertakes and waste its limited resources.
During my visit there, I learned that the CCRC operates with an annual budget of about £5.5 million and employs just under 90 staff, including 12 highly experienced commissioners, among whom were senior lawyers, civil servants, investigative journalists and scientific experts. Each year, it receives between 1,000 and 1,500 appeal applications, and last year, 39 of them were referred back to the Court for review.
Mr Nuttall
Does my hon. Friend expect an increase in the number of applications as a result of the power in the Bill to apply for documents from private sources?
William Wragg
I will come to that in detail later, but the CCRC is a reactive body—it does not proactively seek cases to review—so I suggest that what my hon. Friend alludes to would not take place. However, I will cover that in more detail in a moment, if he will bear with me.
The CCRC’s long-term referral rate—the cases that, following investigation, it believes should be reheard in the Court of Appeal—is just over 3%. However, about half the applications it receives are not taken to the investigation stage, as they must first go through the regular criminal appeals process. For the cases the CCRC goes on to investigate, therefore, a referral rate of about 7% is more representative. Nevertheless, this indicates how uncommon it is to find a sufficient weight of new evidence to overturn previous convictions. That evidence must be relevant, accurate and compelling.
The House will be aware that the current working arrangements and effectiveness of the CCRC were the subject of a dedicated inquiry by the Justice Select Committee in the last Session. The impetus behind the Bill comes directly from some of its recommendations last March. I am grateful to have had the support of Members of both the previous and the current Committee in getting the Bill to this stage.
In its report, the Committee said:
“The extension of the CCRC’s section 17 powers to cover private bodies is urgently necessary and commands universal support. Successive Governments have no excuse for failing to do this and any further continuing failure is not acceptable.”
The report went on:
“It should be a matter of great urgency and priority for the next Government to bring forward legislation to implement the extension of the CCRC’s powers so that it can compel material necessary for it to carry out investigations from private bodies through an application to the courts. No new Criminal Justice Bill should be introduced without the inclusion of such a clause.”
I stand here today with just such a new criminal justice Bill and hope to put right the failure by successive Governments to which the Committee referred.
Let me turn to the new powers in the Bill and how their implementation would work in practice. The Bill would insert a new section 18A in the Criminal Appeal Act 1995, which would enable the CCRC to obtain a court order requiring a private organisation or individual to disclose a document or other material in their possession. As with the current power to require material held by public bodies, the new disclosure requirements will apply notwithstanding any obligations of secrecy or other limitations on disclosure, including statutory obligations or limitations. This will mean that companies will not be able to use excuses such as the Data Protection Act to deny the CCRC information, nor will it be possible to cite information that carries a security classification, including restricted and secret information, as a reason for non-disclosure. This could be particularly important in cases of courts martial, which the CCRC has been involved in investigating since the Armed Forces Act 2006.
Even after the enactment of the Bill, the CCRC should always attempt at first to obtain any information voluntarily before reverting to a court order. Not only would that build a better accord with the private individual or organisation concerned, it is also likely to be more expedient than an application to the court.
I should state for clarity that the provisions would extend to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, in relation to which the Northern Ireland Assembly will be invited to pass a legislative consent motion. Scotland will be unaffected because, as I said, it has its own powers.
I mentioned how low, at 7%, the referral rate was for cases that the CCRC investigates and sends back to the Court of Appeal. The shadow Cabinet Office Minister, the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), asked in Committee—I am grateful for the opportunity to answer some of these points on Third Reading—whether this Bill, by virtue of increasing the CCRC’s powers and therefore its scope for conducting investigations, would increase the rate of referral and therefore the workload, which neatly taps into the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall). I must stress that it is not our job, nor is it the purpose of this Bill, to increase the referral rate per se. Far from it; indeed, the low rate is a testament to how robust and rigorous our criminal justice system is, indicating that no evidence of a miscarriage of justice was to be found in the original case.
We must remember that not all information supplied to the CCRC will necessarily lead to an appeal. The commission’s mandate is not to secure as many referrals and overturn as many convictions as possible; it is to thoroughly investigate alleged miscarriages of justice. In some cases, privately held material might help to identify these miscarriages, and that material may lead to some convictions being referred to the Court of Appeal and subsequently quashed, in circumstances where those cases would otherwise have been turned down. In other cases, privately held material might persuade the CCRC not to refer a case for appeal where it was otherwise minded to refer.
It would be natural to anticipate that the receipt of the proposed powers should lead to an increase in referrals to the Court of Appeal, as the CCRC believes it is sure that there are miscarriages of justice that have gone unremedied because of the lack of power. However, I want Members to be clear that the referral rate is not a direct proxy for the effectiveness of the commission’s work. Increasing referrals is not to be confused with being the objective. Our job as parliamentarians is to ensure that the CCRC—and, more widely, the justice system as a whole—has all the powers and processes it needs to operate in the best way possible.
I want now to elaborate on why this change in the law is necessary, and I thank the House for its forbearance.
During my term in Birmingham, those at the commission explained that, in the 18 years of its existence, the powers under section 17 have been an essential tool of that body. The power extends to the information from public sector bodies, as I explained earlier, but it should also extend to public bodies held at arm’s length. The commissioners also explained that the absence of power to obtain material in the private sector has often operated to the disadvantage of applicants to the commission.
Currently, where material relevant to the CCRC’s work is held outside the public sector, the commissioners are reliant on requesting voluntary disclosure by the relevant individuals or organisations. Although voluntary disclosure is not uncommon, organisations increasingly regard themselves as being unable to assist the CCRC as a result of statutory restrictions on the disclosure of information. Even where voluntary disclosure is made, it will often be after protracted negotiations, causing lengthy—and, indeed, expensive—delays in the case review process.
Solicitors’ firms provide one such example. One would have thought that solicitors would be among the most co-operative of sources, but that is not always so. In the past, the commission has seen a good level of co-operation in respect of its requests for case files from solicitors who represented applicants at trial and/or on appeal. In part, that level of co-operation has been thanks to relevant professional codes of conduct that apply to solicitors. In more recent times, however, and perhaps as a result of increasing pressures on legally aided defence firms, the commission has faced greater difficulties. It is often readily apparent that requests from the commission are placed at the bottom of solicitors’ lists of priorities. On occasion, the commission has been faced with protracted negotiations over who bears the cost of transferring the materials in question.
The commission tends to encounter four typical situations that, as a result of its lack of powers in relation to the private sector, operate to the applicant’s disadvantage. These are, first, the inability to obtain information from a private individual; secondly, the inability to obtain information from private sector organisations; thirdly, partial information or only a summary of information is provided, which the commission is not in a position to scrutinise or verify; and fourthly, information sources are obtained, but protracted negotiations with the private sector create lengthy delays.
Alarmingly, members of the commission told me that, in several instances, with respect to the information it seeks from an organisation, it has experienced significant and repeated difficulties. Against that background, the commission has decided that it would be fruitless to pursue the information in question and therefore does not do so. The current lack of power does not affect isolated cases alone, but can cause a systemic problem relating to a source and a repeated basis, leading to not one but potentially many miscarriages of justice incapable of being remedied.
I know that the commissioners share the view that it is highly regrettable that their inquiries into miscarriages of justice should be impeded by the refusal of a private organisation or witness to provide material. The absence of any compulsion exercised at the instance of the CCRC may result in the victim of a miscarriage of justice suffering continuing imprisonment, with all the continuing social consequences of having a criminal conviction. That cannot be right.
Moreover, the problem has become more acute in recent years, because much of the responsibility for the material held by public bodies when the 1995 Act was envisaged has since been entrusted to private sector bodies. The number of private organisations holding relevant information has increased dramatically, with the contracting out of public services to the private sector becoming more commonplace. Additionally, recent statutory data protection trends have reinforced the issue of confidentiality and have affected the voluntary co-operation of private bodies. There is a real risk that applicants to the CCRC will be at a significant disadvantage unless the CCRC is afforded the facility to obtain material held in the private sector.
Examples of private bodies that may now hold vital information relevant to the review of a case that may once have been in the public sector and within the CCRC’s scope but is now outside it include private health clinics, forensic experts, charities, campaigning groups, law firms, news agencies, probation services—now largely contracted out—banks, private schools, shops, department stores and public transport companies.
Let me illustrate this by using a few examples that the caseworkers from the commission shared with me where they believe the current lack of powers has led to long delays in a case review or even directly to its failure. Private companies can be a vital source of information, as we see in a case I was told about during my visit to Birmingham. The commission was looking into the case of an HGV driver who had been convicted in 2013 of serious sexual offences and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The commission wanted access to some of the data held by an employer which might have supported an alibi. Those inquiries evolved into a search for timesheets within the private company, but the company would not co-operate. It is not really clear whether it even checked its records. The commission was not able to obtain the information and proceeded without it, and the case was not referred.
I mentioned earlier the importance of the Forensic Science Service. A key aspect of the commission’s work is re-examining and re-testing material from crime scenes that was submitted as evidence in the original or earlier appeal trials. The recent closure of the nationalised FSS and its replacement with a contracted-out service has also highlighted this gap in the current law, the result of which is that the CCRC no longer has the power to compel the production of forensic material which it had when the FSS was a public body. This type of material will be held by private companies and may not be available to the commission in future.
Another common source of evidence is CCTV. I learned of another example where an applicant, convicted and jailed for a serious armed robbery in a shop, alleged that the expert facial mapping evidence presented at the trial was flawed. The commission wished to instruct an expert to conduct further tests, but the owner of the shop in question refused to provide information about the make and specifications of the CCTV equipment. Without those details, the commission’s new expert could not consider the issues. The irony is that, had a similar incident taken place on the street in sight of a council-owned CCTV camera, the equivalent information could have been requested under section 17 of the 1995 Act, by virtue of the fact that the footage from a council-owned camera is deemed “publicly held”. Therefore, the information required to properly evaluate the appeal investigation would have been available.
Lawyers here will know that witness credibility often proves to be a vital crux of criminal prosecution or defence cases. To that end, we should consider the case where an applicant was convicted of indecently assaulting three former pupils during his employment as a housemaster at a private residential school. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. For the jury at the trial, the consideration hinged on the credibility of the complainants. The commission requested the files on each of the three complainants in order to address issues raised about their credibility. The private school declined the request and the point remains unresolved, yet a state-maintained school would have been compelled to honour the request for information and the outcome of the review investigation may have been different.
Social work or counselling records are another source of vital information to the commission. Charitable bodies such as ChildLine and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and private counsellors or doctors, often hold vital information relevant to commission reviews, particularly in cases of intra-family abuse. Such organisations may agree to assist when the consent of the individual concerned is obtained. If consent is not forthcoming, such organisations will generally decline to provide the commission with information, on the basis of confidentiality. However, the discrepancy arises in that local authority social workers’ or NHS records are deemed even without individual consent to be admissible by the commission when it considers a review.
I hope the House can see that the distinction between private and public organisations in cases such as these is artificial. Why should the outcome of justice depend on whether key witnesses went to a public or private school, or whether an alleged crime happened in front of a council-owned or privately owned CCTV camera? This false divide is due partly to a drafting anomaly in the original legislation and partly to unforeseen rises in the amount of important evidence generated and held by private sources.
Members should bear it in mind that examples of situations where the commission has been unable to obtain potentially significant information illustrate only a part of the wider issue. At least as important is the extent to which being granted the power to obtain material from private sector sources would allow it to consider new avenues of inquiry that we currently rarely consider because our powers do not allow us to pursue them.
We are unlikely ever to be sure whether the applicants in the cases to which I have referred were truly guilty or innocent, or whether their appeals would have succeeded had the information been provided—truth is likely to be mixed across the cases. But we can be sure that the current law gives rise to question marks over this point, and that is something it is right to change.
As a final but important justification for why the Bill is necessary, it is worth considering the situation of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. The power to obtain information from the private sector is contained in section 1941 of the Crime and Punishment (Scotland) Act 1997. The legislation is framed in a very similar way to the English commission’s existing power under section 17 of the 1995 Act, but it entitles the Scottish commission to apply to the High Court in Scotland for an order requiring a private individual or private sector body to produce, or allow access to, material that it is believed might assist the Scottish commission in the exercise of any of its functions.
I hope that I have established how the Bill will improve the work and thoroughness of CCRC investigations and why it is necessary. I shall now attempt to anticipate and answer some questions that the new measure is likely to raise—questions that I have indeed asked myself, and on which I have consulted both the commission and the Ministry of Justice over the past few months. Indeed, some of these points were put to me in Committee.
I want to address up front one of the largest concerns that Members are likely to have with the extension of these powers: their possible intrusion into the lives of private individuals. Although consent and privacy are to be valued, where information, even of a personal and distressing nature, could make the difference between a person’s further incarceration or their freedom, I believe that it is right that that information can be requested, subject to due process and the provision of strict safeguards. Members should know that there are significant safeguards in place to ensure that this new power is not abused.
The Bill provides that there would be judicial oversight of the process. The CCRC could only compel a private individual or organisation to provide material by order of the court. All the same safeguards that currently operate for section 17 disclosures would apply, and the commission agrees that such a process would be appropriate. The main safeguard against improper intrusion is contained in the Bill itself: namely, judicial oversight. As specified in clause 1(1), a person will be obliged to provide the CCRC with private documents or other material only if ordered to do so by a Crown court judge.
In practice, the Crown court judge may make such an order only if they are satisfied that the material may assist the CCRC in its investigation of the alleged miscarriage of justice. Furthermore, unauthorised wider disclosure of any information obtained will be an offence under section 23 of the 1995 Act. In addition, the person from whom disclosure is obtained will be able to stipulate that any information obtained is not to be disseminated further without their consent, in accordance with section 25 of the 1995 Act.
As with its current practice when preserving public body material under section 17, the CCRC would not seek to exercise its functions in an unreasonable or disproportionate way, and it would remain mindful of the right to a private and family life under article 8 of the European convention on human rights when selecting those cases where an application for a court order appeared justified.
Even so, if there are privacy implications, I believe that any interference by the new measures with that right would be legally justified. The material will only be sought pursuant to a review of an alleged miscarriage of justice, which is a serious matter. Therefore, arguments regarding intrusion into private life must be viewed in the context of the human rights implications of continued wrongful imprisonment, which is itself a breach of article 5.
The hon. Member for Caerphilly asked me in Committee what provisions were in the Bill to bring about any sanctions for private bodies or individuals failing to comply with the court order once issued. I undertook to investigate that point and report back to him. In the intervening period I have made inquiries with the Ministry of Justice, the staff at the CCRC itself and also some hon. and learned Friends in the House, and I am pleased to report back to him.
It is true that the Select Committee’s report, which paved the way for this Bill, included an additional recommendation for a new measure for timely compliance, to apply to public and private sources. The Ministry of Justice considered that possibility and how it could be practically applied. It concluded that the evidence that this is needed, or that its implementation would make a significant difference to the timing of reviews by the CCRC, was weak and that it could not consider “sanctions” to be appropriate for the CCRC to apply if bodies failed to comply with the disclosure. Moreover, however, on reflection, the lawyers whom I spoke to and the CCRC considered that there were no such provisions in the Bill because they were unnecessary. That is because the power to demand disclosure is subject to a judge’s agreement, and the existing rules on contempt of court would provide sufficient protection. If a private body refused to provide material to the CCRC after a request for voluntary disclosure, there would clearly be no penalty. However, if the CCRC has sought and obtained a Crown court order under the new provision, then non-disclosure by the private body would be a breach of that court order, and would place the body in contempt of court.
The hon. Member for Caerphilly also raised a foreseeable objection: that of cost. The Bill has no financial implications and will not impose a financial cost or charges directly on the CCRC or private bodies. However, Members may be asking themselves whether the new power could place an unjustified financial burden on private companies that would be obliged to retrieve material for the CCRC. I suggest that the best answer to the question is to look at where the equivalent powers have been in operation for a long time—namely, the Scottish CCRC, which has not reported such issues.
I wish to recap the main reasons why I believe the Bill deserves the support of the House. First, the important power to request privately held information is currently lacking, and that is hampering the work of the CCRC. The limits placed on the CCRC by its governing statute have occasionally hindered its work and limited its ability to help victims who may be innocent. Richard Foster, the chairman of the CCRC, has said he is confident that miscarriages of justice have gone unremedied because the commission lacks that power. It is impossible to tell in retrospect whether the outcomes of any cases would have been different had additional information been available, but I hope I have made it clear how the problem is fixed by the Bill.
Additionally, the power has been wanted for a long time. The CCRC has long complained of this weakness, and after a thorough inquiry the Justice Committee has said that there has been a failure of successive Governments to right the situation. I tell the House that the time has now come. Crucially, we must also remember that the Scottish CCRC has enjoyed the powers for 18 years. Not only would the Bill fix a discrepancy between the two legal systems—as a staunch Unionist, I believe that is surely a good thing—but we already have a working example of how the powers work. There is no record of abuse or invasion of privacy; the Scottish system is largely voluntary and complied with. Given that the commission has the legal recourse should it need it and that information is provided without great cost, only rarely would a court order be contested.
The House will be pleased to know that I have come to my final point. We must consider the human aspect of this debate. Although the British system of justice works well in the vast majority of cases, mistakes occasionally happen. Prisons are not nice places, and they are not supposed to be—that is why we use them as a deterrent. However, what about somebody who has been convicted of a crime and sent to prison when they know that they are innocent, that the system has made errors against them and that the key evidence that could prove their innocence has been withheld? Imagine how their experience is compounded. Those people are victims.
There are countless cases of people wrongly convicted who, owing to psychological pressures resulting from their experience, end up taking their own lives still protesting their innocence and still, sometimes, locked up in prison. We have a moral duty to help those people to ensure that such incidents are minimised and that mistakes are swiftly and thoroughly investigated without hindrance, so that justice can be served. That is the ideal that the Bill will bring us a little closer to realising. I hope that the House will give the Bill its full support.
Criminal Cases Review Commission (Information) Bill
William Wragg Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I thank colleagues from across the House who have been able to join me today in support of this, my first private Member’s Bill. I am very pleased the House has been able to give a significant portion of time to debate this Bill this afternoon. At one point I feared that may not come to pass when I was allocated the third slot in today’s proceedings. I have discussed with colleagues outside the Chamber how that would have been a disappointment, as not only do I believe this is an important and valuable Bill, but I also believe it is right that it should be given proper debate in the Chamber this afternoon.
Its subject is miscarriages of justice and the gathering of evidence and information to assist in such cases. We have already had two Second Reading debates today, led by my hon. Friends the Members for Dudley South (Mike Wood) and for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), and although their Bills had different fates, we have had two excellent debates, and like an actor waiting in the wings, I watched with a mixture of enjoyment and trepid anticipation.
So I present to the House the Criminal Cases Review Commission (Information) Bill. If enacted, it would extend the powers of the CCRC to obtain information and evidence, testimony, documents and other material which would assist in its proceedings of appeal and review cases where a miscarriage of justice is believed to have taken place. In essence, it would allow the CCRC to obtain such information from a person other than one serving in a public body, as it is currently restricted to doing. This new measure would apply to private-sector organisations, persons employed by, or serving in, private companies, and private individuals. If passed, it would strengthen the CCRC’s ability to overturn wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice, and improve further our system of law and order, which is rightly the envy of the world.
I intend to lay out my proposal of support for the Bill in three sections: first, to set out the context of the Bill, what it seeks to achieve, and the workings of the CCRC at present; secondly, to detail what the Bill does and how the amended law would work in practice; and, lastly, to explain why I believe this Bill is necessary, and how it would improve justice in our country. May I also say at the outset that I hope to encourage a strong debate, and although our time is limited, colleagues are more than welcome to make the odd intervention?
I shall lay out for context the background to the Bill and the journey I have been on to get here today, and the current working of the CCRC. I was very fortunate to be drawn in the ballot of private Member’s Bills in my first year as an MP. I never imagined when I was elected to this place just seven months ago that I would be standing here leading my own debate on a piece of primary legislation.
Following my selection in the ballot, while discussing with colleagues potential topics for my Bill, I decided I wanted to be involved in securing a piece of legislation that would do some good, make a real difference in people’s lives, and improve the justice system.
Edward Argar (Charnwood) (Con)
I commend my hon. Friend on his choice of Bill. Is he aware of the words of Richard Foster, chairman of the CCRC, to the Justice Committee, who said:
“you can be confident that there are miscarriages of justice that have gone unremedied because of the lack of that power”?
Does my hon. Friend agree?
William Wragg
I entirely agree. This is a vital amendment to the law, allowing the gaining of private evidence to assist in those cases of miscarriage of justice. My hon. Friend is right to raise that.
The CCRC was set up in 1997, following the Criminal Appeal Act 1995, to investigate possible miscarriages of justice. It was the world’s first publicly funded body to review alleged miscarriages of justice, set up in the wake of notorious mishandled cases such as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six—two high-profile cases of two groups of men, both convicted and imprisoned for connections to bombings carried out by the IRA in the 1970s.
Both sets of convictions were found, after repeated appeals, to have had serious breaches in the due process, irregularities in police evidence and, in the case of the Six, serious accusations of police brutality. All the men spent between 10 and 20 years behind bars before their convictions were eventually quashed after being ruled “unsafe”.
The royal commission reported in 1993, which led to the Criminal Appeal Act 1995, which established the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 1997. Although none of those may be a household name, as anyone who has ever been subject to a miscarriage of justice will attest, it is a deeply damaging experience and the CCRC is often victims’ only opportunity of salvation.
Before turning to the new powers, I must first explain how the CCRC operates under its current powers. The CCRC currently has the power to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and to refer convictions and sentences to the relevant appeal court for a new appeal. Its jurisdiction was extended to the armed forces by the Armed Forces Act 2006 to cover courts martial and the service civilian court.
Parliament established the CCRC specifically to be a body independent of Government, and although sponsored by, and funded through, the Ministry of Justice, it carries out its operations completely independently. The commission investigates convictions on application by the offender or, in a case where the offender has died, at the request of relatives. It has special powers to investigate cases, and to obtain information which it believes is necessary to review a case. If the CCRC concludes that there is a “realistic prospect” that the Court of Appeal will overturn the conviction, it can make what is termed a “referral” and send cases back to court so that an appeal can be heard.
Applications are free to make to the CCRC and defendants cannot have their sentences increased on account of having made an application for review. In principle, cases should only be examined by the CCRC where all other routes of appeal have failed. Only in “exceptional circumstances” may the commission consider cases which have not previously been appealed. However, as the commission usually deals with cases which have already been appealed once, if the commissioners are to be able to send cases for review it is usually on account of some new evidence or legal argument that has come to light.
Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing this important Bill. As I understand it, the Bill would bring the private evidence position of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in England and Wales into line with the position in Scotland. Would he like to reflect on that?
William Wragg
My hon. Friend is correct. The equivalent body in Scotland has the full powers to subpoena private evidence, whereas the CCRC does not have those powers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. That might have been an oversight in the 1995 Act, but he is right to make that point at this juncture.
The subject of the Bill hinges on what are commonly referred to as section 17 powers. Currently, section 17 of the 1995 Act gives the CCRC the power to require public bodies and those serving in them to give the commission documents or other material that may assist it in discharging its functions. That includes police, local councils, the NHS, the Prison Service and so on. It should be clear how all such bodies could and do serve as vital sources of evidence in such appeal cases. As I said to my hon. Friend, the CCRC currently does not have equivalent powers to get those materials from private organisations and individuals. The Bill contains provisions that would allow the CCRC to do so.
The House should be aware that the current working arrangements and effectiveness of the CCRC were the subject of a dedicated inquiry by the Justice Committee in the previous Session, as my hon. Friend mentioned. The impetus behind the legislation comes directly from recommendations of the Committee’s report from the inquiry, which was published in March 2015. I am grateful to have the support of several current and previous members of the Justice Committee. The Committee’s thorough inquiry ran for two months and collected evidence from legal academics and others.
Julian Knight
My hon. Friend mentions the Justice Committee. Is he aware of comments of the former Chair of the Committee, Sir Alan Beith, who said:
“There has been a failure by successive Governments to grant the CCRC an obvious and much-needed power to require private bodies to disclose documents to it…We could see no good reason as to why it has not been introduced, considering it has universal support”?
William Wragg
My hon. Friend anticipates a remark I was about to make and is absolutely right to quote the then Chairman of the Select Committee. To answer what Sir Alan said, I stand here today with such a new criminal justice Bill. I hope to put right the failure of successive Governments to which he rightly referred.
I am delighted that the Bill has such widespread support from both sides of the House, including from experts in the fields of law, justice and home affairs. The co-signatories and supporters of the Bill may in themselves have grabbed the attention of fellow Members, given that they are drawn from diverse corners of the House, spanning a chasm of political and ideological opinion. They include solid figures of the traditional right such as my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady) and my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), as well as the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition and the shadow Chancellor. Supporters of the Bill are hardly the most natural political allies.
As well as having supporters of diverse political colours, the Bill has the support of those who have a wide range of experience, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry), who is a criminal law barrister, and the long-standing Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). The Bill enjoys the support of both current and past members of the Justice Committee, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) and the aforementioned hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), whose names are listed as contributors to the Justice Committee’s excellent report. As hon. Members will observe, the report is slightly larger than the shadow Chancellor’s more recent preferred reading material, but I will not be tempted to throw it towards the Minister.
The reason for the wide basis of support is not that, in my first six months in this place, I have become an adept and charming schmoozer of parliamentary colleagues and someone who is able to win over a diverse range of unlikely comrades to my cause—far from it. I hope the reason for the wide basis of support is that its merits are clear. What the Bill seeks to achieve is good and necessary. The motivations for legislative change were endorsed unanimously by the all-party Justice Committee from the previous Parliament.
It will be of benefit to the House if I outline what the Bill does and how its implementation would work in practice. The Bill would insert new section 18A into the 1995 Act so that the CCRC can obtain a court order requiring a private organisation or individual to disclose a document or other material in their possession or control. The court will be able to make an order only if it thinks that the document or other material might assist the CCRC in the exercise of its functions and investigations into miscarriages of justice when there is
“a realistic chance of a conviction being overturned by the Court of Appeal”.
As with the current power to require material held by public bodies, the new disclosure requirements will apply notwithstanding any obligations of secrecy or other limitation disclosure. That will mean that companies will not be able to use excuses such as the Data Protection Act to deny the CCRC information, as the CCRC has previously experienced. It will also mean that when information carries security classification, including restricted and secret information, that will also not be able to cited as a reason for non-disclosure. That could be particularly important in cases of court martial, with which the CCRC has been involved since the Armed Forces Act 2006.
Even after the Bill is enacted, the CCRC should always attempt first to obtain information voluntarily before reverting to court order.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend clarify what safeguards will be in place to prevent abuse of these new powers?
William Wragg
The key safeguard is the fact that there must be a court order, with that judicial oversight. That should give assurance to all Members of this House that the appropriate safeguards are in place in the Bill.
Dr James Davies (Vale of Clwyd) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his Bill. In seeking to ensure that the provisions of the Bill apply to England and Wales and, potentially, Northern Ireland, does he agree that the very similar provisions that have been in place in Scotland for 18 years have not resulted in any record of abused power or privacy invasion?
William Wragg
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, which is very helpful. We can use Scotland as a case study. Similar powers have been in force, as he says, for nearly two decades and there has been no recorded abuse of them.
I should state for clarity that the provisions of the Bill will extend to England and Wales and Northern Ireland, as, as we have discussed, Scotland has its own measures in place. The Bill does not contain any provision that gives rise to the need for a legislative consent motion in the Scottish Parliament or the National Assembly for Wales.
I want to elaborate now on why this change in the law is necessary. When I visited the CCRC’s headquarters in Birmingham, I saw how the section 17 powers were used. They are an essential tool in the commission’s work. Provided that the power is exercised reasonably, the CCRC’s ability to obtain public sector information is not restricted by any obligation of secrecy or limitation on disclosure. The power extends, for example, to information relevant to national security and to personal information held by the police, by the Crown Prosecution Service, in previous court material, by the NHS, by Government Departments and so on.
The commissioners have also explained to me that the absence of a power to obtain material from the private sector has often hampered their efforts. When material relevant to the CCRC’s work is held outside the public sector, the commission relies on requesting voluntary disclosure by the individuals or organisations with control of the material. Although voluntary disclosure is not uncommon, increasingly organisations regard themselves as unable to assist the CCRC as a result of statutory restrictions on the disclosure of information. Even where voluntary disclosure is made, that will often be after protracted negotiations have caused lengthy and expensive delays in the case review process.
One such example is with solicitors firms, which one would have thought would be among the most co-operative of sources. However, that is not always so. In the past the commission has seen a good level of co-operation in respect of its requests for case files from solicitors who represented applicants at trial and/or on appeal. In part, that co-operation has been thanks to the relevant professional codes of conduct. In more recent times, however, and perhaps owing to increasing pressures on legally aided defence firms, the commission has faced greater difficulties. It is often readily apparent that requests from the commission are placed at the bottom of a solicitor’s list of priorities. On occasion the commission has also been forced to enter protracted negotiations about who bears the cost of transferring the materials in question. The commission tends to encounter four typical situations that, as a result of its lack of power in relation to the private sector, operate to the applicant’s disadvantage. These are, first, the inability to obtain information from a private individual; secondly, the inability to obtain information from a private sector organisation; thirdly, partial information is provided, or a summary of information, which the commission is not in a position to scrutinise or verify; and fourthly, the information sought is obtained, but protracted negotiations with the private sector create lengthy delays in the case review process.
In the brief time remaining to me this afternoon, I shall deal with concerns expressed to me by Members and offer them reassurance. On privacy, I want to address up front one of the principal concerns that Members may have about the extension of the powers—the concern that the proposed power will be an intrusion into the lives of private individuals. Although consent and privacy are to be valued, where information, even of a personal or distressing nature, could make the difference between a person’s incarceration or freedom, it is right that the information should be requested, subject to due process and provision of strict safeguards.
Members should know that there are significant safeguards in place, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South when he intervened. The Bill provides for judicial oversight of the process. The CCRC could compel a private individual or organisation to provide material only by order of the court. All the same safeguards that currently operate in relation to section 17 disclosures would also apply, and the commission agrees that such a process would be appropriate. The main safeguard against improper intrusion is judicial oversight. As specified in clause 1(1), a person will only be obliged to provide the CCRC with that information subject to the order of a Crown Court judge.
A second area of foreseeable objection is cost. Although the Bill has no financial implications, and will not impose any financial costs or charges directly on the CCRC or private bodies, Members may be asking themselves whether the new power could place an unjustified financial burden on private companies—for example, will the power be damaging for small businesses? The best answer to this question is to look at the equivalent power as it operates in Scotland. The Scottish commission advises that there has been only one case in 15 years where a request to inspect material had led to contested proceedings in court.
Let me recap the main reasons why I believe the Bill deserves the support of the House today. First, this important power to request privately held information is currently lacking and hampering the important work of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The limits placed on the CCR by its governing statute can hinder its working practices and limit its ability to help victims who may be factually innocent. The chairman of the CCRC, Richard Foster, has said on the record that he is confident that there have been miscarriages of justice that have gone unremedied because of the lack of this power. It is impossible to tell in retrospect whether the outcomes of any cases would have been different had additional information been made available, but I hope I have made it clear how that gap is a problem that should be fixed going forward.
In addition, this power has been lacking and wanted for a long time. The CCRC has long complained of this weakness and, as I said earlier, the Justice Committee, after a thorough inquiry, said that there has been a failure by successive Governments to right the situation. The time to right it has come. The Bill is the direct implementation of an unambiguous recommendation of the Justice Committee in the previous Parliament. The proposed new powers are supported across the board, as evidenced by the list of sponsors of the Bill.
Finally, we must consider the human aspect in this debate. Although the British system works well for the vast majority of cases, mistakes do occasionally happen. Prisons are not nice places. They are not supposed to be, which is why we use them as a criminal deterrent. However, imagine the compounding of that experience when someone has been convicted of a crime and sent to prison, when they know that they are innocent of that crime. They are victims themselves, and there are countless cases of people wrongly convicted who, due to the psychological pressures of their miscarriages of justice, end up taking their own lives, after protesting their innocence, and sometimes while still locked up in prison.
Members who have heard me speak in the Chamber before will know that, as I am a former teacher with a history degree, they are unlikely to escape without at least one reference to history. It was the great British legal thinker Sir William Blackstone—considered the pre-eminent English scholar of and most authoritative speaker on common law in his day—who said on the matter of miscarriages of justice:
“It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”
I do not quite agree with that sentiment, because I believe that it would be better if both numbers were closer to zero, and the role of our justice system, and the place of the CCRC within it, is to shrink those numbers. However, I think that it is apt to quote US President Jimmy Carter:
“The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens.”
Who is more helpless than those who have been wrongly convicted and failed by our justice system?
William Wragg
I thank hon. Members on both sides of the House, my hon. Friend the Minister and the Opposition Front Benchers for their support this afternoon. I commend the Bill to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time; to stand committed to a Public Bill Committee (Standing Order No. 63).
Courts and Tribunal Services (England and Wales)
William Wragg Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Richard Benyon
I entirely understand my hon. Friend’s point, because communities in west Berkshire will have precisely the same problem.
The courts service is run according to very strict boundaries. One does not have to go more than a mile south of Newbury before one is in Hampshire, and any cases that are relevant to that part of the community, or indeed to east Wiltshire or south Oxfordshire, cannot be heard in Newbury. It seems crazy that we do not have a more flexible, cross-border system—we are talking about the border between Berkshire and Hampshire, not between Serbia and Hungary. We really ought to be smarter and more efficient by looking at cross-border solutions. If the mistake of closing Newbury court is made, I hope that it can at least be mothballed for a time while we look at the reorganisation of our courts service, and the same might go for other Members’ constituencies.
A journalist working on my local newspaper, the Newbury Weekly News, made the following point: “Surely as important as justice being done is justice being seen to be done.” One local journalist has made a speciality of reporting on court affairs in Newbury, and there is simply no way in which that can continue if cases relating to west Berkshire are to be heard in far-off Reading or Maidenhead. Local people will not see cases for crimes committed in their area being heard in their area.
William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
On the point about local justice being seen to be done, a magistrate put it very succinctly to me—not wanting to sound like a character from “The League of Gentlemen”—when they said, “It is important in order to preserve the long-standing principles of local justice being administered by local people within that local area.” Does that neatly summarise what my hon. Friend is trying to express?
Richard Benyon
It really makes sense. There is a bypass around Newbury, which, as some hon. Members might remember, was quite controversial, and we also have Greenham Common and the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Magistrates, including the Prime Minister’s mother, developed a great expertise in dealing with those situations. I hope that we never have those problems again, but we do have issues relating to rural crime, and accidents and crimes on the M4, so local expertise and an understanding of the dynamic of the local area really help.
I understand that the low-hanging fruit in the Ministry of Justice has already been grabbed and that the Minister now has the difficult job of reaching higher. I believe in what the Government are doing and understand the difficulties when Members like me support what they are trying to do economically in general but whinge about the particulars. But in this case I really believe that it is wrong and unjustified, and I can make a very good case—I have done in my response to the consultation, so I will not detain the House with it now.
I have one final point to make. Two weeks ago a case was deferred in Newbury because there were not adequate procedures in place to hear it. It cannot be heard until January. Not only must justice be seen to be done, but justice delayed is justice denied. That is a principle we were all brought up with. I do not believe that this decision is right for Newbury. I believe that it really needs to be looked at again. I hope that the Minister will have the opportunity to make the same judgment when he looks at the consultation responses.