Monday 28th April 2025
Child Rape Gangs
I agree with the Minister that policy must be victim-centred and that we must put victims at the heart of everything we do. Could she provide more information on when we will know about the remaining four locations? What will she do to ensure that the councils that are reluctant to be part of this work are compelled to do so?
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Monday 31st March 2025
Violence Against Women and Girls
The ambition to halve the prevalence of violence against women and girls is a laudable one, but could the Home Secretary give the House some more information? What number is she taking as a starting point to be halved? When will she be able to provide more information to the House and to my Select Committee?
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Thursday 27th March 2025
Modern Slavery Act 10th Anniversary
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the tenth anniversary of the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
It is an honour to open this debate. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it and thank all right hon. and hon. Members and Friends who supported the application for it. I also want to put on the record my gratitude to the many parliamentarians and former parliamentarians who got us to the point at which we were able to have a Modern Slavery Act 2015.
First and foremost is the noble Baroness May, without whose leadership we simply would not have achieved what we did, but she did that on the back of support from so many parliamentarians who had gone before her, starting, of course, with Anthony Steen. As special adviser to the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee and to the Home Affairs Committee, and as the driving force behind the Human Trafficking Foundation, he has been ever-present and omnipresent in this field. He was very ably supported by Peter Bone, who set up the first all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking and modern slavery, which I am now very proud to co-chair with the noble Baroness Butler-Sloss, another true legend in this area.
I pay tribute to Frank Field, who was a wonderful advocate and with whom I worked so incredibly closely both as a Minister and as a Back Bencher. He led parliamentary efforts as the first chair of the Speaker’s advisory committee on the Modern Slavery Act and how we implement it here in Parliament. In addition, I pay tribute to the noble Lord Randall, who supported Anthony Steen and others and now chairs the Human Trafficking Foundation; Maria Miller, who worked on the review of the Modern Slavery Act, along with Baroness Butler-Sloss and Frank Field; Lord Coaker, who chaired the Select Committee before me; and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) who, through his social justice work, was a real advocate. The final person I want to pay tribute to, who is so sadly no longer with us, is James Brokenshire. He was my predecessor as modern slavery Minister and he really did start the work to get us to the point where we had a Modern Slavery Act.
I cannot quite believe that it was 10 years ago. I think I might be the only person in the Chamber who was here at that time, but 26 March 2015—it was 10 years ago to the day; it was a Thursday—was the very last day before Parliament prorogued for the 2015 general election. We had been working on the Bill. It had undergone every kind of proper scrutiny and was an exemplar for how legislation should be done: pre-legislative scrutiny, a draft Bill and work done with the Select Committee and others. It also had cross-party support.
As is always the case with any comprehensive piece of proposed legislation, there were areas where changes were looked at, and there was quite a lot of ping-pong between this place and the other place. As the Minister, I spent far more time than I ever expected standing at the Bar and hoping that by being there I could convince their lordships to support the Government’s position. We had two real sticking points. One was on the treatment of those in the United Kingdom who were on an overseas domestic worker visa; the other was whether every child victim should have an independent child trafficking advocate.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord Bates, who was the Lords Minister at that time. His powers of diplomacy and skill in navigating the other place are legendary. He got us to the point at which we were the final piece of legislation to get Royal Assent in that Parliament. I remember being in one of the offices in Marsham Street, where we all sat with bated breath. Although we knew that we had got through it, nobody quite believed it until “La Reyne le veult” was finally announced and the Modern Slavery Bill became an Act of Parliament. As well as those parliamentarians, I pay tribute to all the officials in the Home Office who worked so hard. It was a real mission for them, and it would not have been possible without an incredible team effort. I thank everybody who got us there.
It is unbelievable to me that 10 years on, I am still asked, “What is modern slavery?” I sometimes feel slightly cross that I still have to explain it, but it is important that we keep reflecting what it is. It is slavery, plain and simple. We all understand what slavery is. It is slavery happening today. It is a financial crime; it is invariably for financial gain. It is the exploitation of one human being by another human being for financial gain. It is a coercive crime, and it is happening globally. There are estimated to be 50 million victims globally and more than 100,000 victims here in the UK. I hate to say this, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I can assure you that it will be happening in your towns, villages and cities. It will be round the corner, happening to people you come across in your everyday life.
I urge everybody who is listening and everybody who is here—they are here because they care about this, and I am grateful to all of them—to educate wherever they can. One of the things I am proudest of is the posters—many Members here will not see them because they are male—in women’s toilets at airports or stations that say, “Are you a victim of slavery?” We came up with that in the Home Office because we realised that a victim of slavery who is with the perpetrator in the queue at the immigration line at the airport has nowhere to go to get help, apart from the ladies’ lavatory, where their perpetrator will not follow them. As the Minister will know, the perpetrators are very often male, although as we heard in our evidence session on Tuesday in the Home Affairs Committee, there is always at least one woman on every indictment. Women are perpetrators as well, but we needed to find somewhere to get those women the support they need.
This is a crime that is happening everywhere. I have to make the point that it is not a migration crime. There is a laziness in the language used around trafficking, particularly by media commentators who talk about human trafficking when they mean people-smuggling. People-smuggling is a consensual crime. Those people are victims of a crime, but they are almost victims of fraud rather than being coerced into doing something against their will. It is very much like the difference between someone who gets sick from taking drugs because their drink has been spiked against their knowledge and someone who takes illegal drugs they have bought and is sick. There is a policy response to each of those cases, but it has to be different. The policy response for victims of trafficking cannot be confused with the policy response for victims of the crime of people smuggling. People-smuggling is a crime that we need to tackle, and it is right that Governments control their borders, but we must separate the two. That should be done at law enforcement level, at the Home Office and at other policy Departments. These two issues cannot be confused.
What did the Act do? I have a copy of it with me. It is the first time I have looked through the Act for quite some time. I am getting goosebumps but also feeling slightly nauseous at what we went through to get there. I am incredibly proud of it. It introduced the new offences of trafficking and exploitation. I pay tribute to Caroline Haughey KC, who came before the Committee on Tuesday and who helped to write those offences. The offences were very carefully drafted to ensure we could get the maximum number of prosecutions, and they were written with a view to juries being able to understand them.
There is a push at the moment to change the trafficking definition to not include movement. The reason we have an exploitation offence and a trafficking offence is that a jury will think of trafficking as involving movement. That is why there is also an exploitation offence that does not involve movement, so that prosecutors can get successful prosecutions. I am not sure that that change is necessary. The maximum sentence for these offences was previously 14 years, but the Act changed that to life imprisonment, which was a really important move.
Protections for victims have improved. For example, we introduced a statutory defence, to ensure that victims come forward, which is incredibly important. Civil protection orders were also introduced, as were measures to enable law enforcement to more easily access the financial assets of perpetrators, which also included reparation orders. This was done because the only way to break this crime is to break the business model. There were also new duties on public agencies.
The Act introduced the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Independent child trafficking advocates are included in the legislation, although it took a long time for us to get them there. The other piece of landmark legislation was the “transparency in supply chains” measure in section 54. This had not initially been in the Bill. For example, it was not there when I stood at that Dispatch Box and closed the debate on Second Reading, but it was introduced during the passage of the Bill. This was the measure that everybody wanted to see included. Importantly, though, it was not a stand-alone measure; it was part of a modern slavery strategy that had been published the year before. It was based on the “four Ps” approach to tackling crime: pursue, prevent, protect and prepare. There was so much in the modern slavery strategy beyond what was in the legislation. The legislation was landmark, but it was only a very small part of what was being done.
In 2015, when the Modern Slavery Bill was enacted, it was world-leading. We were the first country to have a consolidated Modern Slavery Act, the first country to have transparency in supply chain legislation, and the first country that had this as a priority for Government. But the world has moved on. As we all know, criminals always move more quickly than the legislation. When we introduced the legislation, county lines were not a phenomenon. Although the offences in the Act are very appropriate for the perpetrators of county lines offences, the protections for victims simply do not fit the crimes that are perpetrated in county lines.
The issue of small boats was not a phenomenon. It simply was not there when we introduced the Act. However, I do want to make it clear that there is very little evidence that the people travelling on small boats are victims of trafficking—this was seen in the Home Affairs Committee. They are victims of the crime of people-smuggling. The problem is that the measures taken to stop the small boats have a chilling effect on those who are genuine victims of the coercive crime of human trafficking. That can mean that they do not come forward and that they will not provide the evidence that is needed to stop the perpetrators. That makes it harder to detect the crime and to give the protection to victims. This is a real opportunity for traffickers. Somebody may have paid the people smugglers to get them into the UK, but when they get here, they cannot legitimately work and they cannot find the support that they need. They are also in debt, and that indebtedness and the inability to work legally means that they then become victim of traffickers. But, as I have said, that was not a phenomenon we knew of at the time.
Orphanage trafficking is another issue. It is a global issue that we are only just getting to terms with in the United Kingdom. We do not feel that the issue has affected us, but in reality more than 5 million children, who are not orphans, are currently living in orphanages. They are living in orphanages that have been set up to raise money. They have tourists visiting them and gap year students working there. They are there for the financial gain of those who have set up these orphanages.
Australia has led the way in tackling that issue. I wish to pay tribute to Senator Linda Reynolds, who is standing down from the Australian Parliament in the next few days. She has been a real leader on this. At the Inter-Parliamentary Union, she has passed resolutions that have been adopted. I hope the Minister will look favourably on amendments that I might bring forward to the Crime and Policing Bill, or to a private Member’s Bill, that try to get the issue of orphanage trafficking into our legislation. The people who want to support the orphanages do so with the best of intentions—they want to help the poor children—but this is actually a fraud. These children are not orphans. More than 5 million children from south-east Asia and South America have been taken away from their families and are being used to raise money for fake organisations.
When we brought in the section 54 measure on transparency in supply chains, although California had such a measure, it was the first time that a national Government had introduced one. Quite deliberately, it was a light touch provision—we had to prove that it would work and be effective—but the time has come for it to be tightened. I am disappointed that on Tuesday we were unable to pass the amendment on the use of Uyghur labour in the supply chain for solar panels and so on.
The US has the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act 2021 and its hot goods provisions, whereby items cannot even enter the US market unless the importer can prove that there was no slavery in the supply chain. I urge the Government to look at what we can do on similar measures, because they would be simple wins for the Government that would improve the situation and make it clear that we do not stand for slavery. We will not become green in our energy production on the backs of the poorest and those who are being exploited.
What am I asking the Minister today? First, when will we have a new modern slavery strategy? We desperately need one, as the current one is 11 years old. Will she commit to strengthening supply chain measures? It has been a big disappointment to me that many Queen’s Speeches and King’s Speeches have included promises of new modern slavery legislation on supply chains, but it has never come forward. Will she commit to that?
I have concerns about the Fair Work Agency in the new Employment Rights Bill, because it takes the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and puts it into a new agency that will not sit underneath the Home Office. Vital work was done by the Gangmasters Licensing Authority and then the GLAA, which was brought in for the right reasons—we all remember the Morecambe bay cockle pickers disaster. We need to ensure that there is proper Home Office oversight of that agency and that it focuses on abuse and exploitation, not just on ensuring that employment rights are met.
We cannot continue with two classes of victims as we have at the moment. We need to ensure that everyone who is a victim of modern slavery can access the support that they need. Could the Minister review the national referral mechanism? I welcome the extra caseworkers, but 831 days on average for a decision is not good enough —she and I both know that. I urge her to do whatever she can, and I will support her every step of the way to make it clear that the national referral mechanism needs to make those decisions more quickly. We heard great evidence about this on Tuesday in the Select Committee.
The UK has a duty to put victims front and centre of everything we do in response to this crime. If we do not put the victim at the heart of our policy response and everything we do, we will simply fail to address this issue. But we also need to lead the global effort. We did lead it, and the time has come for us to get back there. We are looked at—people are desperate for the UK to lead on this. They know what we have done in the past and they desperately want us to do it again. That means working in multilateral organisations such as the United Nations. In particular, we need to ensure that sustainable development goal 8.7 is enacted around the world.
Will the Minister make this issue one of those priorities? I know the Government have their missions, and I am sure that I could squeeze it into safer streets or something like that. I could find a way to shoehorn this in, but without that support and leadership from the very top, this matter will not get the urgency it needs. It is the biggest human rights abuse globally. It is happening everywhere, including in the UK. Let us be clear: the highest number of victims in the NRM are UK nationals; it is not a migration crime. We need to ensure that it has the support and the thrust behind it with the leadership that I know the Minister can give it. I urge her to ensure that the whole of Government do the same.
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Wednesday 19th March 2025
Winter Fuel Payment
It is an honour to take part in this debate, and this is an extremely pertinent time for it. We all hope we are through the worst of the winter—although in my part of the world nobody puts their snow boots away until we have got through lambing season, because lambing storms usually bring snow—but we need to know, as we get through the winter and into the better weather, what the impact of this policy decision has been on our pensioners, on our health service, on A&E admissions and on other allowances and benefits. We need to know the overall cost of the decision.
The hon. Member for Makerfield (Josh Simons), who is no longer in his place, suggested that he has more pensioners in his constituency than anyone else. Having checked with the House of Commons Library as I sat here, I assure him that Staffordshire Moorlands has more, because we have 22,197 compared with his 20,909. Of those 22,197, over 20,000 of them have been affected by this decision, and Staffordshire Moorlands, as the name suggests, is not exactly warm. Last winter, we saw a low of minus 14°C; this year, we saw only minus 5°C —it has been a relatively mild winter.
It is incredibly important that we find out exactly what impact the decision has had. At the pensioners’ fair I held in Cheadle back in November, pensioners were terrified. I am holding another fair next week on 28 March in Leek, and I want to hear from my local pensioners what impact the decision has had on them, how it has made them feel and how often they did not switch the heating on.
I am proud that I was part of a party in government that introduced the triple lock. The suspension of the triple lock has been referred to. Those were exceptional circumstances. That was at a point when we had had furlough and earnings had gone down by 20%—that is how the statistics worked. When people came off furlough and the earnings went up by a much higher number, that was the statistical anomaly that meant giving pensioners the increase in line with earnings would not have reflected reality. Earnings had not gone up by that amount; it was that furlough had ended.
Can I be clear in my mind that what the right hon. Lady is saying is that at a tough time, the then Government took some tough decisions, and that resulted in the pension level being £560 lower now than if they had not made that decision—a difference far greater than the winter fuel payment amount? That Government made tough decisions at a tough time that are costing pensioners money today.
What was happening then was once in a generation, and it was not a real increase in earnings; it was merely that people had gone from 80% of their earnings back to 100%. When earnings had gone down by 20%, we did not cut the state pension but continued to increase it in line with the triple lock.
I want to make a point about universal benefits as opposed to means-tested ones. The Labour party seems to think that a universal benefit is bad because somebody who does not really need it might receive it. I take the other view: it is important that we get to as many people as possible who need it, and if that means a few people at the top end of the earnings level get a benefit they might not need—
Given that the right hon. Member’s belief is so strong, will she enlighten me on whether she voted to strip child benefit from certain families, as was Conservative policy? That was a universal benefit.
The hon. Member makes a good point, and that was a difficult decision because it was the way we could ensure that those at the higher end of the earnings spectrum were taxed on their child benefit. That is a different way of dealing with a benefit that some people may not be in need of but are in receipt of. It would have been perfectly possible for the Government to tax winter fuel payments. That would have meant that those on £13,500 were still getting the money they needed and the Richard Bransons of the world would be paying tax on it. That was a choice available to the Government; they chose not to do that. They chose to just take the benefit away.
The fact that child benefit goes automatically to mothers is an incredibly important point, and winter fuel allowance going automatically to pensioners was valuable to them. I ask the Government and the Minister, who I know well and who is an honourable and decent gentleman, whether they might consider putting in some form of transitional arrangements, rather than having the cliff edge that hurts many pensioners. I also ask whether they will give us the information about whether there is fraud and error in the system now. Will the DWP accounts be affected by the fact that the winter fuel allowance has been taken away in this way and more people may be guilty of fraud and error? Will the Minister give us information on the impact that the measure has had on pensioner health? That matters vitally to us all.
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Monday 24 February 2025
Bank Closures, Rural Areas
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. In Leek in my constituency we are about to lose our last two banks. We will be left with a building society with a cashpoint and the post office, yet Link has done a review suggesting that we do not need a banking hub because there are sufficient branches 9 or 10 miles away. That does not take account of rurality. We are a market town with, as he rightly described, a hub-and-spoke model, and it simply is not possible for elderly people to get to those other bank branches that are not easily accessible and are not on bus routes. Does he agree that rurality and topography are incredibly important and should be considered when deciding on banking hubs?
My hon. Friend is so very generous to indulge me a second time during his excellent speech. I am struck by the impact on charities. As any trustee of a charity will know, trustees quite regularly have to prove their identity at the bank that the charity chooses to bank with. When it is simply not possible for trustees to get to a branch of the bank to prove their identity, the impact on rural charities will be devastating.
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Monday 24 February 2025
Domestic Abuse: Gloucester
The recent National Audit Office report on the Government’s response to violence against women and girls, which includes domestic abuse, made a number of recommendations. My Committee will be considering that issue, but will the Minister comment on what the Government’s response will be to those recommendations, and say how she will ensure that domestic abuse is tackled across the country, including in Gloucester?
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Monday 10 February 2025
Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill
It is an honour to follow my fellow member of the Home Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Telford (Shaun Davies). He made exactly the right point in saying there are no easy answers to this problem.
I stand here in another immigration Bill debate—I do not know how many I have attended in the 15 years that I have been in Parliament. Madam Deputy Speaker, you held the brief of Immigration Minister for some time. We have all tried to combat this problem, and we all want to see the same solution. I sincerely wish the Home Secretary and her team of Ministers the best of luck in getting the Bill right, which may mean that there need to be some amendments to make sure that it actually delivers what she wants it to deliver, because there are no easy solutions. There is no silver bullet that will solve this problem, and any politician who dares to stand up and say, “Only one thing is going to make this better,” is misleading the public and making it harder for all of us to do the job that we were elected to do.
It is important to say that the Bill builds on previous work, including on data sharing and returns. These are all matters that Governments of every colour have worked on for many years. I congratulate the Secretary of State on focusing on those, but it is right to say that this is a process rather than an event, that these are things that all parties and all Governments have worked on, and that legislation can only go so far. This is about how enforcement happens, about training and about understanding at the frontline. I praise the NCA, which has done incredible work on this issue globally for many years and continues to do so. We need to remember when people get to the beaches in northern France that an awful lot of others do not make it there because of the work of the NCA and other parts of our law enforcement system.
Illegal migration is a global problem, and we cannot escape that. We have talked about the increase in numbers, which is down to global events. This is happening across the world; we are not the only country suffering from this problem. We might see it acutely on the boats crossing the channel, but this is happening everywhere. May I ask the Home Secretary to use her good offices, and those of the Prime Minister, to raise this issue at all multilateral levels? We need it to be on the agenda for the UN General Assembly, and we need an annual Heads of Government meeting at a UN level to look at this matter. The Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), talked about when the refugee convention was written and what it was written for. Things are different now. We are living in a different world, which means that we need to work together globally to deal with this issue.
In the short time I have, I will make just a couple of points. I welcome the measures on endangering life at sea, but the devil will be in the detail. We will need to make sure that the measures are properly understood by those enforcing the laws, and that they can actually be implemented. The Home Affairs Committee has heard that if a boat gets on to a beach near Calais, it is very difficult for anyone to intervene at that point because of the legal position in international maritime law and other matters.
I also welcome the protection measures and the biometric testing. I met representatives of the British Red Cross last week, and they have some very interesting ideas about potentially expanding where that testing could take place. I hope that the Home Secretary and the Minister can take that point forward.
My final point is about modern slavery. I welcome what the Home Secretary said about the protections for victims of modern slavery, but I want to reiterate that modern slavery is not a migration crime; it is a financial crime. It is the exploitation of one human being by another for financial profit, and we must not confuse the two. If somebody chooses to pay a people smuggler to put them in an unsafe vessel, that is a crime, but it is a consensual crime. If somebody has been forced to get into an unsafe vessel, that is a coercive crime and needs to be treated differently. In much the same way as our policy response to a person who gets ill from having their drink spiked is different from our policy response to somebody who gets ill from taking an illegal substance that they chose to buy, there has to be a different policy response to victims of modern slavery.
May I ask the Home Secretary and the Minister to make sure that, throughout the passage of this Bill and elsewhere, the victims of modern slavery are put at the forefront and can get the protections they need? They should enter the national referral mechanism so that they can be looked after. We owe it to the world to be a leader in this matter, and I fear that if we do not take those steps, we will fail to be so.
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Tuesday 21 January 2025
Southport Attack
I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement, and my thoughts are with everybody involved. The list that she set out of the points where the agencies and institutions could have intervened sooner is truly terrifying. What reassurance can she give the House that this is a cross-Government piece of work and that all agencies and institutions will be involved? Furthermore, as and when the inquiry makes recommendations, which it will hopefully do on an interim basis, will she give a commitment that she will look carefully at them and implement them as soon as possible?
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Thursday 16 January 2025
Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
I welcome the statement, which my Committee will look at carefully. Professor Alexis Jay will be in front of us next Tuesday and I am sure that we will come back with further points, but I have two points today. The first is about the duty to report. In many cases, reports were made but the victims were simply not listened to and not believed, so what can the Home Secretary do to ensure that changes? Secondly, since I am not clear from her answers so far, will the local inquiries have statutory powers to compel witnesses—yes or no?
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Wednesday 15 January 2025
Local Government Reorganisation
I am pleased to see that Staffordshire is not on the list and that we will have our county elections this May. The Minister will know, however, that my constituents do not want to be subsumed into greater Stoke-on-Trent. Will he give them some reassurance—any at all—that they will have the choice and can say no if they do not want to be part of greater Stoke-on-Trent?
I quite like Stoke-on-Trent; I am not sure what the local disputes are there. Maybe that is something not to go into. Focusing instead on process, that change would require consultation, and every area that has had a devolution agreement and eventually a mayoral election has had that consultation take place. There was some recent polling that said that the public were more likely to be supportive of the mayoral model of government if they had a mayor already in place, because they could see the benefit. In the end, how we reconcile the situation England will require compromise in some places. I say that because England is unique, it is diverse and, from an identity point of view, there is much that different areas have in common but there are some contradictions too. It is our job, through the course of building this out, to work at a local level to try and find the right solutions. That commitment is firm.
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Monday 13 January 2025
Neighbourhood Policing
A focus on neighbourhood policing is welcome; we have seen it in Staffordshire for some time. Police leaders have said that if they do not have the flexibility to recruit as they need to, there is a risk that police officers will end up having to fill vacancies in specialist areas. Will the Home Secretary listen to police leaders and give them that flexibility?
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Thursday 9 January 2025
Violence against Women and Girls
I was not expecting be called so early. I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this important debate.
I have taken part in many debates on these topics over the years, and they show the House at its best, because they are when we come together. This House, when speaking with one voice in our determination to tackle these issues, is incredibly powerful. What we say is heard beyond these walls; it is heard by law enforcement, the judiciary, the media and others. I am grateful for this chance to speak together and come together to find ways to tackle horrendous crimes.
As I said in my intervention on the shadow Minister, we are talking about a process, not an event. We are all working towards the eradication of these crimes, and making them socially unacceptable in our country, but that is a massive challenge. Anybody—any Government—who stands still on this issue will go backwards, because the offences change and technology enables new offences. When I was a Minister in the Home Office, the idea of deepfake imagery or even revenge porn was simply not coming across my desk. It simply was not happening; the technology was not there. We all have to be on our guard, and must make sure that we all work towards tackling those crimes.
I agree with the Minister, who made a powerful speech, that this is not a problem that can be solved only by women. Women and girls are predominantly the victims, but we need men to be part of the solution, and I am grateful to see so many men in the Chamber today. There have been too many occasions when taking part in this sort of debate has felt like being in a women-only club. We need men to be part of the solution and to work with us.
I have sat where the Ministers are sitting, and I suspect that I have felt the frustrations that they are feeling. I have probably felt what one of the Ministers—the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips)—is feeling particularly acutely this week, having been through many media onslaughts on social media and otherwise over the years. I have immense sympathy for what she is going through.
There is frustration as well because the levers that can be pulled by a Minister to resolve these issues are really quite limited. We can legislate—of course we can—but the police need to understand what the crime looks like. I refer here to my taking the coercive control offence through Parliament 10 years ago. I remember the media at the time saying, “Why on earth are you doing this? There is no way that this can ever be prosecuted. There is no way that anyone can ever understand it. There is no way that they can ever get the evidence.” I remember saying to one journalist, “So is that your answer—just don’t do it, because it’s too hard?” Surely we need to do these difficult things, but we also need to recognise that seeing the fruits of our labours will take a long time and that these things do not change overnight.
I do agree with my right hon. Friend: I fully support what the Government are doing and I fully support their aims and goals. We might have slightly different ways of getting there, but all of us in this House want the same thing. We need to be supportive. If we scrutinise the Government and suggest areas where they might improve their position or their policies, it is not a criticism of their intent; it is merely that we think there may be other ways of doing things or that there may be improvements that could be made. I took such suggestions when I was a Minister in the faith in which they were intended, and I hope that that will happen here. I am certain that, with the two Ministers on the Front Bench, that will absolutely be the case.
Earlier, I was talking about the levers that can be pulled. When those levers need to be enforced by law enforcement, local authorities, the health service or education, there is a real frustration that there is not a simple direction that can be given so that everyone understands the changes that, as a Minister, one wants to see. That is why cross-departmental work is so important. I believe that inter-ministerial groups are being deployed again, which is an excellent step, and I wholeheartedly congratulate the Government on that. When I was a Minister, such groups were so, so important.
We must also ensure that there is a multi-agency working. We have to make sure—I saw this myself as a Minister—that the police are not the point of last resort. I remember going to visit the A&E at the Royal Stoke, my local acute hospital, 10 years ago and seeing the domestic violence specialists spotting the signs of domestic abuse. That is vital. So, too, is the schoolteacher recognising that when the child is coming to school late every day, or missing their class, something is wrong and action needs to be taken. We cannot always leave this to the police and law enforcement. We must make sure that there is multi-agency working. Having domestic abuse specialists in 999 centres and emergency centres is another a good step.
I introduced a VAWG strategy in 2016 when I was a Minister. Another one was introduced in 2021, and I know that we will get another one soon. I am certain that that will be victim focused. These are crimes that cannot be tackled without putting the emphasis on the victims. But all victims are different. The abuse that one victim has suffered will be different from that of another victim.
Let us be clear: getting someone who has been a victim of one of these most horrendous of crimes to accept that they are a victim is incredibly difficult. To be brave enough to pick up the phone to dial 999 is a really big step, because that victim has probably been enduring the abuse over many, many occasions. She does not believe that she is a victim. She thinks that she is in control. She thinks that she can deal with this problem without involving the authorities. We have to get to the point where victims are able to accept that they are victims and where we give them the support that is needed. That is why the multi-agency approach is so important.
A victim of female genital mutation will be different from a victim of modern slavery, and a victim of domestic abuse will be different from a grooming victim. They all have individual needs. Even within the categories, there will be different needs. It may be better for some victims of domestic abuse to remain in their homes and for the perpetrator to be removed and tackled. [Interruption.] Absolutely. I see the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley doing a thumbs away sign. I totally agree with her. However, for other victims that will simply not be practical. There need to be places of safety that those victims can be taken to. Those places of safety need to be different for each victim. A mother with children needs a different place from a young girl, and that young girl needs a different place from somebody who has severe learning disabilities, mental health issues or addiction. There are all sorts of problems that victims face—often caused by the abuse—and they need different approaches.
I have made the point about multi-agency working, but we cannot arrest our way out of the problem. There needs to be a strategy that looks across all aspects of the four Ps, as they used to be called in my time at the Home Office—the pursuit, protect, prevent and prepare strands. We need to make sure that we take every step possible.
I welcome the ringfencing of funding that the Minister talked about. I am keen to make sure that police, fire and crime commissioners and mayors who have responsibility for these areas have the correct funding to commission the services that they need to support victims.
My final point is on the online world. Not only do new offences get created, but the online world has provided a place of safety for perpetrators. Behaviour that is simply unacceptable offline is something that is normalised, socialised and anonymised online. A person can go online and find somebody who has a similar interest to them in something that is totally and utterly unacceptable. They have some images that they can share. They do not know who they are dealing with, so therefore it is fine. They can look at those images because nobody knows that it is them, nobody knows what they do in the real world, and nobody knows that they are looking at them. It also seems absolutely normal, because everybody else is doing it in this room. This is an incredibly difficult thing to solve. It is really difficult to get normal policing methods to work in this environment.
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Monday 16 December 2024
English Devolution
The residents of Staffordshire Moorlands do not want to be subsumed into Stoke-on-Trent. Can the Minister guarantee that they will not be forced into a devolution deal against their will, and that decisions that matter to them will continue to be taken in the Moorlands and not in Stoke-on-Trent?
I do not want to get myself into neighbourhood disputes—there are not enough hours in the day. I hope that it will be clear from reading the White Paper that this is not a forcing together, but a genuine distribution of power from a centralising state to communities where it really matters. My hope is that local disputes, some of which I am sure are well rehearsed and go back a long time, are put to one side. In the end, the prize is the greater good, which is for the benefit of all.
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