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Mr. Rooker: The hon. Gentleman is right and the Government must address the issue. Local task forces of enforcement agencies are set up to tackle the problems. They can involve the police, together with enforcement officers from the immigration and nationality directorate, the Department for Education and Employment, the Department of Social Security and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The focus must be to catch the operators, and we need to consider what more can be done.
All the produce ends up on the shelves of our shops and supermarkets, so the food sector has a responsibility. The great supermarket chains are sensitive to bad publicity when they are accused of exploiting workers in the third world. The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness has described third-world conditions for the people who work on the land and the local population in Lincolnshire. Those who buy from the farmers have a responsibility to ensure that farmers use good gangmasters and not spiv gangmasters. I will ensure that the food industry addresses that issue.
Sir Richard Body:
It has failed so far.
Mr. Rooker:
Yes, but we have a new broom and a fresh mandate. Our instincts are different and we want to solve the problem. The British Retail Consortium has approached the National Farmers Union about the introduction of a code of practice to control the activities of gangmasters. I am in favour of codes of practice, but I will review every code of practice issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to ensure that they do not undermine the regulations approved by the House. Codes of practice can be of benefit, but they can be used to avoid enforcement.
The NFU issues guidance already to farmers on the employment of casual labour. Not every farmer is a member of the NFU, and we must try to reach those non-members too. The NFU has also set up a working party that is addressing the issue of gangmasters more directly. It will propose a code of practice and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food will comment on that.
There are many anecdotes about abuse of the system. The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness has given hard evidence of such abuse, but it is always difficult to provide that hard evidence in a court of law. Legislation is available to deal with the problem, but the question is whether it is being used. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for highlighting the issue in the early days of this Parliament. The problems caused by some gangmasters have long been known, but the nature of gangmasters has changed. We must examine whether the existing legislation covers the new type of gangmaster.
As a first step, I will consider the existing laws and whether they meet the current situation. I will ensure that they are enforced in as concerted a manner as possible. Voluntary codes of practice may have a role
to play. The issue reached my desk only in the past 24 hours, but I will also inquire why the old gangmaster licensing system was abandoned in 1951. People then had prospects of full employment and nobody envisaged people being bussed from Birmingham, Manchester and Wolverhampton to the fields of Lincolnshire. The problem of the exploitation of illegal immigrants and people from eastern Europe was also non-existent. Harvesting was a family and community affair to get food into our shops.
I will give the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness a commitment that I will discuss the matter further with my ministerial colleagues in the Home Office, the Department for Education and Employment, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Social Security and the Inland Revenue. When I have concluded those discussions, and--I hope--found a way forward, I will be in touch with the hon. Gentleman. I am grateful to him for requesting this debate.
Mr. Hugh Bayley (City of York):
I start by thanking Madam Speaker for permitting me to raise the subject of this Adjournment debate.
Over the past three years, I have corresponded with several Government Departments and executive agencies on behalf of my constituent, Mrs. Moira Windass, whose son, Peter Windass, was murdered in York in January 1994. That correspondence reveals serious shortcomings in the criminal justice system. It also reveals an inability on the part of Ministers to give accurate answers to clear, factual questions about the operation of the criminal justice system. I would have liked to put some questions to the Ministers concerned in an Adjournment debate, but I was prevented from doing so by the sub judice rule. I do not hold the present Minister responsible for the actions of the previous Government, but I was anxious to have this debate because I want the new Government to consider the administration of the criminal justice system and to improve it.
Peter Windass was a young man with his whole life ahead of him. He was an honest, upstanding and hard-working person; a qualified stonemason who worked on repairing and restoring York's city walls. When he died in January three years ago, it was as a result of an unprovoked attack. His attackers were arrested by the police within 24 hours. One has subsequently been convicted of murder and another of affray. From the point of view of the criminal justice system, it might appear that the case was dealt with satisfactorily. The crime has been solved, the criminals have been convicted and both have been sentenced to prison. However, from the point of view of the victim's family, the conduct of the case was far from satisfactory. The way that it has dragged on has prolonged and intensified their anguish.
It is impossible to describe the pain endured by the family of a murder victim. The family's feelings should be the primary concern of a criminal justice system. Instead, their feelings, questions and needs are treated as almost incidental to the judicial process. The family received good support from friends and voluntary bodies, including the Victim Support scheme in York, and from the police, but the courts appeared distant. The members of the family had to mingle in court with witnesses appearing for the defence, including people they knew from their neighbourhood who were threatening to them.
Various promises were made to the family by different parts of the justice system, but they were not kept. For example, the police promised them that they would be told of the date on which one of the accused would be sentenced, so that they could be in court to hear the sentence passed. That did not happen.
The justice process itself is painfully slow. My choice of the word "painfully" is careful. I do not use it as a figure of speech. I mean that the slowness causes pain for victims' families. It is almost three years since the murderer was convicted, yet still the tariff--the time that he will have to serve in prison--has not been confirmed, so the case has not ended. The family are still waiting to find out what penalty will be imposed on the man who murdered their son.
When justice is delayed, justice is denied. We need a justice system which, while allowing a defendant his rights in court, does not unnecessarily prolong proceedings.
When the family asked questions about the case, the answers they received from different parts of the justice system were sometimes contradictory and sometimes simply wrong. The police did not know what the Crown Prosecution Service was doing. The CPS and the Court Service were at sixes and sevens. The Court Service, the Prison Service and the probation service failed to work together, so the family received different answers to their questions from different parts of the system.
The criminal justice system has become fragmented. The problem is faced not by the Windass family alone, in one isolated case, but by many families of the victims of murder and manslaughter. Since the murder of her son, Mrs. Windass has played a prominent part in a voluntary body called SAMM--Support After Murder and Manslaughter. She knows that what happened to her family is, unfortunately, all too common.
We need a better co-ordinated criminal justice system, and I can give a few examples that illustrate that need. First, I wrote to Baroness Blatch, the former Minister at the Home Office, about the failure of the system to advise the family of the date of sentencing. The family were promised that they would be notified by a police officer, but that did not happen.
The Baroness replied:
Secondly, at the time of the murder, one of the two accused, a man called Eaves, was supposed to be under curfew in Blackburn as a result of bail conditions imposed for a string of other offences. In a letter to me dated April 1995, another former Home Office Minister, the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean), said that Eaves's bail was subject to four conditions, one of which was that he had to report regularly to the police in Blackburn.
In January 1996 the former Minister retracted that statement, saying that Eaves was not on bail but subject to an arrest warrant, and that the bail conditions before he absconded and the arrest warrant was issued did not stipulate that he should report to Blackburn police.
I raised that matter with the chief constable of Lancashire, and it turned out that the bail conditions applied had required Eaves to report to the police. The chief constable wrote to me:
I have a third example. Eaves has a long record of repeatedly breaking bail conditions and absconding while on bail, yet when, part way through the criminal proceedings against him, the charge against him was reduced from one of murder to one of affray, the court offered him bail again, despite objections by both the police and the victim's family. Eaves was granted bail again, and he absconded again.
In a letter to me dated April 1995, the former Minister, the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border--whom I have told I would raise the matter in the House today--said:
In the same letter, the right hon. Gentleman said that Eaves
It is hardly surprising that the family feel let down by the criminal justice system. Moreover, the former Government's mishandling of their changes to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board regulations meant that, on top of everything else, the family lost out on compensation payments. They received funeral expenses only. I shall write to my hon. Friend the new Minister separately about that matter, because it has undoubtedly compounded the family's feeling that the justice system was working against them.
I believe that the criminal justice system needs radical change, and I have four specific proposals for the Minister. First, the Crown Prosecution Service should have a duty to keep the victim--or, in the case of murder, the victim's family--informed about the progress of criminal proceedings.
Secondly, the CPS should co-ordinate its proceedings better with those of the police. I should like an assurance from my hon. Friend that the Labour party's election manifesto proposal, that the Crown Prosecution Service should appoint a dedicated senior prosecutor attached to each police force, will address those two problems--the duty to keep the victim informed, and co-ordination between the police and the prosecution service.
Thirdly, tighter bail rules need to be introduced. If imposed by a court, a residential restriction to a particular address or a curfew at a particular time of day need to be enforceable and enforced. If they are not, there is no point in making them.
1.25 pm
"it has never been a Crown Prosecution Service function to inform the police of new hearing dates in the Crown Court."
Well, that should be a Crown Prosecution Service function, and the CPS should also have to tell the victim--or in the case of murder or manslaughter, the victim's family--the dates of new hearings.
"The bail conditions were initially imposed by Blackburn Magistrates' Court on 1st October 1993"--
about three months before the murder.
"The Police are informed, routinely, by the Courts of any bail conditions. However, there are insufficient Police resources to individually monitor whether or not someone is residing at a particular address or complying with curfew conditions."
If a court imposes bail conditions to protect the public from a violent or potentially violent offender, we need to ensure that those conditions are met and enforced. Indeed, we must first ensure that the conditions are enforceable.
"The Government is determined to see that the courts grant bail only in those circumstances where it is safe to do so".
That policy is right, but in Eaves's case it was not applied. He had absconded from bail on the night that the murder was committed.
"will be appearing at Preston Crown Court in due course when he will be sentenced. Under amendments to the Criminal Justice Act 1991, when deciding what sentence to pass on Eaves, the court will have to take into consideration the fact that the offence was committed on bail as a factor aggravating the seriousness of the offence."
Quite right too--but when Eaves was sentenced, the judge was not informed that the offence was committed when he had absconded while on bail, so the penalty that he suffered, the prison sentence, did not take account of the aggravating factor that the Minister had said would be recognised.
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