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Sandra Gidley: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Tim Loughton: In a moment—and the thorny issue of joint enterprise, on which I have campaigned for many years and on which I introduced a ten-minute Bill last year.
Sandra Gidley: The hon. Gentleman has moved on a little from the point on which I intended to comment. He mentioned the Children Bill and access to information. There are growing concerns that the provisions to ease access to information for professionals could make it easier for a violent parent to access the information, and that safeguards are needed to make sure that that does not happen. Is that the hon. Gentleman's understanding, and does he wish to comment further?
Tim Loughton: The Children Bill is currently going through the House of Lords. There are serious concerns about the formulation of clause 8, which I think is the one to which the hon. Lady was referring, and which deals with data sharing. I have some serious concerns about it because it appears to present a blank cheque to the Government to the extent of producing a surrogate ID card for children through the back door.
I am in favour of data sharing. That was clearly the message that came out of the Climbié report, and that is the way we must move ahead. But that can be done only with the relevant safety checks and balances to determine how appropriate information is input into the system and, more importantly, who has access to it. I am sure that the Government would not countenance any system, and we would not give it our support, if there were any question that information about vulnerable children could be accessed by people who might abuse those children.
The hon. Lady may be alarmed, but she can rest assured that the Conservative Opposition will make sure that the Government do not try and sneak in anything like that, if they were so minded. I am sure that they are not, but there is an awful lot of detail missing from that part of the Children Bill, and we will want to be substantially reassured before we give it our support.
I return to the topic of joint enterprise. I have an interest in that first, in my role as the shadow Children's Minister; secondly, because I introduced a ten-minute
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Bill about joint enterprise last year; and thirdly, because of a constituency case. It was the case of a four-year-old constituent of mine, John Smith, who on Christmas Eve 1999 died in hospital from 54 marks on his body at the hands of his prospective adoptive parents, Simon and Michelle McWilliam. Each subsequently denied that they had struck the fatal blow. A charge of murder or even manslaughter could therefore not be brought against either of them and they were both convicted of the lesser charge of cruelty to a child, for which they received an eight-year sentence. That was murder in anything but name. The couple got away with murder, literally.
Too many other cases like that are happening. There is a loophole in the law that will, I hope, at last be addressed by clauses 5 and 6. I wholeheartedly congratulate the Government on having responded to that. The Justice for John campaign in my constituency, arising from the case of John Smith, lobbied long and hard for that, with my support. It will be a testament to that horribly abused child that at last we are getting a change in the law, which hopefully will deter people from thinking that they can get away with it. Too many of the cases of the 80 or so children a year who die at the hands of their carers or parents do not result in the prosecution of those people.
Of those 80 children, half are under the age of one. Contrast that with a halving in the number of children who have died as a result of accidents since the 1970s. Babies are five times more likely to be killed than any other age group, and the prosecution rates are very low. As the Law Commission showed, 61 per cent. of investigations that reached a conclusion resulted in no prosecution for any offence at all—and of those that did result in conviction, only a few were for the serious charges of murder or manslaughter. That was the subject of the excellent NSPCC report, "Which of you did it?", which was greatly informed by a Sussex policeman, Detective Inspector Martin Bacon, who has done so much work on joint enterprise and child killing. I welcome the reforms in the law.
There are a few small points relating to concerns about the way in which the Bill has been drafted, or which might be added to the Bill. I wholeheartedly share the concerns of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Ms Munn) about the age definitions of children in the various parts of the Bill and the grey areas that that causes.
Various outside bodies are concerned about ethnic minorities and asylum seekers, especially women who are subject to domestic violence and whose right to stay in the UK is largely dependent on remaining with the abuser. We must get a little smarter when dealing with ethnic minorities and asylum seekers who are being abused.
There are problems with the definition of domestic violence, as the hon. Lady said. We need consistency between the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and social services. There are a couple of further points that relate to the Children Bill as well. How will the proposal for a register of civil orders to allow police to check for outstanding orders against an alleged offender interact with the database proposed in the Children Bill? Surely that is an essential piece of information that needs to be
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available to the appropriate agencies, under the auspices of the director of children's services, to ensure that children are not vulnerable in that respect.
How will the commissioner for victims and witnesses interact with the children's commissioner proposed in the Children Bill? Which commissioner will promote the welfare of child victims? Unless those inconsistencies are straightened out at an early stage, they may fall between two stools.
Another technicality that may have been addressed elsewhere, but has been mentioned to me, is highly topical given that we have just been through a series of elections. Some women wish to exercise their vote, but remain anonymous on the electoral roll because they are staying in a refuge where they do not want an abuser to find them, or have moved to a new address that is a little distant from their original home address and similarly do not want to be tracked down. Are there measures to ensure that those women are entitled to exercise their right to vote without compromising their safety? Have the Government considered taking that into account?
Finally, I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) regarding the mental capacity measures in the Bill. I hope that the Government will think again about reversing the amendments that were made in another place. In the matter of unfitness to plead, it is right that the decision should remain with the jury. The Government have not made the case for changing that. Such a decision is a matter of public interest, and a jury has the competence to make that decision. A decision that someone is unfit to plead can have draconian results, such as a hospital order without time restrictions. That is as the law stands now—the changes that the Government propose in the draft Mental Capacity Bill, which has been knocking around for two years without any sign of becoming legislation, provide even greater powers to lock up people whose behaviour certain other people do not like. It is essential that there are proper checks and balances over who is deemed unfit. I strongly urge the Government to reconsider that and to consult more widely than before with mental health charities and other organisations, because the Bill has serious implications for those suffering from mental health problems.
Notwithstanding those small points, it is right that the House should give the Bill its support. It is also right that the Government should be scrutinised in relation to the amendments that they are trying to overturn, some of which would improve the Bill. The Bill is long overdue, but its time has finally come. I hope that Members of all parties will give it their constructive support to ensure that, when it eventually becomes law, it will be even better than the version that we are scrutinising today.
6.43 pm
Judy Mallaber (Amber Valley) (Lab):
Like other hon. Members, I welcome the Bill. I am afraid that I must start with a minor point of disagreement with the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), who said that the Bill had been oversold. Other mechanisms are required to deal with the issue—legislation is only one part of it—but we should not accept that the Bill has been oversold. At last, after all these years, there has
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been such a change of culture in the way in which the subject is considered that the House is seriously identifying it as a crime that is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated. That in itself is deeply significant.
When I go to the annual general meeting of the local east Derbyshire domestic violence forum this Thursday, the Bill will be welcomed because several of its measures deal with issues highlighted by forum members in a consultation that I encouraged them to undertake. The same applies to proposals that were made following a consultation that we organised with the Derbyshire-wide forum, when we sat down for a day with Women's Aid and victims to go through the issues that they wanted us to take up on their behalf.
Several of the legal changes in the Bill were mentioned in the course of both consultations. Making the breach of a non-molestation order an arrestable and criminal offence will be broadly welcomed. When a perpetrator comes to someone's home in the middle of the night and is threatening, the victim will feel safer in the knowledge that the police have greater powers to arrest that person and take them away. The importance of making common assault an arrestable offence has been emphasised to me by local police officers who deal with cases of domestic violence and who reckon that people are assaulted 35 times before they go to the police. They will welcome the ability to arrest someone on suspicion of assault without a warrant.
The Bill has been a long time coming, but that is partly because it has been through a huge amount of consultation. That is important, because the issue has to be subject to detailed and ongoing work by all the agencies in our community and a wide range of people. The Bill is just one element of what needs to be done.
I welcome the code of practice, which will ensure that victims have the advice, information and support that they need to deal with the criminal justice system. I also welcome the victims' fund and the commissioner for victims and witnesses. However, I want to highlight a couple of concerns that my local domestic abuse forums have particularly emphasised and which may not be given enough support. I hope that they will be taken on board in developing the code of practice and ensuring that the necessary resources are put in.
First, the local and Derbyshire-wide forums strongly highlighted the lack of facilities and resources for counselling. One of my main local counsellors is a woman who operates through Victim Support and is being taken on board, with some funding, by our community safety partnership specifically to co-ordinate and develop counselling services. She told me that victims need life coaching from the moment they agree to seek help. They need to be taken right through the criminal justice process, which can last for a long time, and sometimes to be assisted over a lifetime. Yet many counselling services offer only a limited number of sessions.
That issue arose many times during the consultations with local victims that we organised as part of the consultation exercise. I could give one quote after another from women saying that they needed advice. One woman said:
"The only problem I face is the isolation and loneliness of not being part of the family."
She said that the refuge staff had been very supportive, but continued:
"I think a woman who has experienced this abuse should be designated a personal mentor, counsellor who has been through the situation herself, maybe for the rest of her life."
"After two years on my own I still think about what it was like. Talking about it helps. I have a support worker but I would like to see her more often."
Counsellors can legitimise the victim's experience by telling them that they were not at fault and talking them through it.
Another woman said that she discovered a huge amount of support when she went to seek it. However, she then said:
"A key reason for my never seeking help in the years before was my conviction that no-one would even start to believe me—to everyone else he was a charming, attractive fireman."
Such support cannot be provided in only a few counselling sessions. A little help in going through the process is not enough. We need to ensure that that point is taken seriously and that the code of practice, the help that we provide and the necessary resources cover the matter.
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