House of Commons Hansard Debates for 27 Jan 1997 (pt 11)

Mr. Thurnham: Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

Mr. Mellor: I should like to develop my argument. I shall not take a long time.

As the Minister so eloquently said, the problem with paedophilia is that so deep-seated is the paedophile's predilection that he is likely to think that society is wrong.

How many of us remember trying to outlaw the Paedophile Information Exchange some years ago? In countries such as the Netherlands, these people are still allowed to move about freely, which has caused the problems that have emerged in Belgium. Allowing them to spread and proliferate suddenly brings a dreadful day of reckoning. Anyone who has seen the national outpouring of grief and concern that followed the discovery of the activities of the paedophile ring in Belgium will know that we must not allow our country to deteriorate to that extent.

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Against that background, I should like to make one detailed point. Because of the difficulties of getting children to give evidence on oath and obtaining convictions based on the uncorroborated evidence of a child--even though the Government have been able to make significant changes to prevent the evidential burden from being heavily against the child, some of them during my time at the Home Office--no more than 5 or 10 per cent. of paedophile cases come to the attention of the courts. Few experts would disagree with that--my right hon. Friend the Minister will have access to more experts than I do. When cases come to court, we should not create artificial barriers to prevent the full weight of the Bill from being brought to bear on paedophiles while they are likely to remain active.

I mentioned in an intervention that may have gone on too long the important point--at least, I think that it is an important point, and I hope that I can persuade others to agree with me--that it is profoundly unlikely that a person just dabbles in paedophilia. Once a paedophile, always a paedophile, is a much more certain saying than once a burglar, always a burglar, or even once a rapist, always a rapist.

I appreciate that there is a tendency not to go too far, and to offer a few concessions to those who oppose a measure. I understand why the barriers at 10 years and six or seven years have been introduced, but where is the opposition to the measure? I do not see it.

I do not know whether my right hon. Friend is involved in the Home Secretary's discretion on life sentence prisoners, but when he considers dreadful child sex murders and looks at the previous convictions, he will realise that rarely does the tendency come out of the blue--there is normally a sign. It is rarely an equally serious matter, but lurking somewhere in the past is the clear evidence that the person in question has that particular intent.

We are being asked to legislate on the basis that judges--almost as fragile a breed as politicians, as likely to get things wrong as right--pass the right sentence. My experience does not suggest that that is invariably--or even very often--the case.

I know from reading more than 1,000 life sentence prisoner cases when I was at the Home Office, many of which involved the sexual or sadistic murder of children, that the difference between a nasty sexual assault and murder is not great. A child protests at the indignities that it suffers. The clumsiness and crudeness of the attempts to suppress that child's resistance will often make the difference between an offence that can be written off as indecent assault, punishable by a few months' imprisonment, and a murder, punishable by life imprisonment.

Mrs. Llin Golding (Newcastle-under-Lyme): I strongly support what the right hon. and learned Member is saying. He has identified the same issue as I picked out. Is it not true that many judges are not trained to deal with sexual cases, and pass too many lenient sentences, even when the children get caught? Only a fortnight ago, a case was brought up in the House. That case has gone back to the Court of Appeal because of the leniency of the sentence. The barrier of seven or 10 years seems artificial.

Mr. Mellor: I am glad that the hon. Member has mentioned that point. She was an indefatigable

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campaigner on these issues back in the 1980s when I was doing the job that my right hon. Friend the Minister is doing now. I welcome her further intervention.

I found myself on television this morning discussing the case of Myra Hindley with someone who took the view that she should be released, and who thought that politicians should not intervene in such cases because they were a matter for the judiciary. However, I well remember how in 1983, when Leon Brittan, with my assistance, decided that the minimum period of imprisonment for those who were convicted of the sadistic or sexual murder of a child should be 20 years, there was an outcry from the judiciary. I regularly saw cases in which the Lord Chief Justice of the day would recommend only 14 years of imprisonment for such a murder.

Against that background, I ask my right hon. Friend the Minister to put into practice the conviction he so eloquently expressed about the deep-seated nature of paedophilia. Given that, to use the old cliche--I suppose that cliches become cliches because they are true--we are dealing only with the tip of the iceberg when we deal with the cases that come before the courts, I ask my right hon. Friend please to make the law apply to all these people. In the sexual lifetime of an adult, seven years is the twinkling of an eye, and 10 years is not much more. We would have cause to regret somebody escaping the full force of the recommendations merely because their conviction became time-expired. That is one change to the Bill that it would not be difficult to make.

I now move on to matters that are probably too difficult to deal with at this time, but which relate so directly to the Bill that it is worth at least pointing ahead.

Having decided that it is right that the police should be able to keep tabs on people and that their addresses should be notified, we shall have to confront the problem--I am slightly surprised that the point has not been raised already in this debate--that is already quite commonplace in America. The problem is that, if the police have a right to know, why do the public not have the right to know? If someone with a string of convictions for sexual offences against children moves into a house, why should the nice young family living next door not be told about him? Why should the community not be told?

I understand all the points about vigilantes and about people taking the law into their own hands. We need, however, to consider carefully the right way in which to deal with the problem. If we believe that paedophiles are in a category entirely on their own, we should consider whether it would be appropriate to take the exceptional step of saying that, when a paedophile lives in a neighbourhood, all those living in the neighbourhood should know.

My right hon. Friend the Minister is right. One reason for requiring registration with the police is that it becomes easy for the police to trace someone who may have been responsible for a terrible offence. The other reason is deterrence; someone will feel that he is under pressure. It is a way of putting likely persistent offenders under pressure and telling them that they are unlikely to get away with the crime if they give way to their urges in a way that causes serious harm to young and vulnerable children. I believe that, in the longer run, we shall be hard put to resist the claims, which will undoubtedly come, that something should be done so that the public are let in on the secret about who is living in their street.

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It is important that, although we see the Bill as a significant step forward, we do not make too many large claims for it. I want to draw attention to two recent cases which show how much further we shall have to go if we are serious about tackling the problem of paedophiles.

I refer first to the murder of Sophie Hook. Sophie's father Christopher is someone I know well; I have discussed these matters with him, and I know that he has also discussed them with my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary. Indeed, he discussed them with him back in November, and he raised with him the question whether the public should be told where convicted sex offenders lived. My right hon. and learned Friend undertook to talk to the Association of Chief Police Officers about the matter. Two months on, it would be interesting to know whether there has been any response. I am sure that not only Christopher Hook but some of the rest of us would like to know what the Home Office's latest thinking on the matter is.

Sophie Hook was a nine-year-old. She was not one of the "streetwise" children we are told about--poor little mites who are left to wander the street by parents who do not care about them, and who are therefore in a vulnerable state. Sophie Hook was a cherished child, who illustrated the fact that good parents are as vulnerable as bad parents to having their children abducted; that is a salutary lesson for all of us.

On a hot night two summers ago while on holiday, Sophie Hook was sleeping in a tent with her two cousins in a garden in north Wales. From there, she was abducted by a creature called Howard Hughes. He was notorious in his neighbourhood for his paedophile and other anti-social tendencies, and was regarded as a ticking time bomb. He was 6 ft 8 in tall, and wandered round the town dragging his rottweiler behind him; everyone was afraid of him. Sophie Hook, aged nine, was taken out of the tent, sexually abused, battered, beaten, tossed into the sea and left to die.

The Bill will do nothing about Howard Hughes. We have to ask ourselves a question which came up, strangely enough, on television; television stations are usually the least likely places to find a real insight rather than a soundbite. I appeared on "Heart of the Matter" with Chris Hook to discuss the issue. One of the foremost forensic psychiatrists dealing with the problems of paedophiles put in a nutshell the dilemma we face as legislators, when he said that the trouble was that we were concerned with punishment and not with dealing with dangerousness.