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3.23 pm
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough): Because of the lack of time, I will not engage in a trawl. However, I will engage in a brief bit of dip sampling.
Before I do so, I want to congratulate the hon. Member for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas) on her speech. I am sorry that she did not have more time to tell us a little more about her concerns, as I know that she has pursued the matter with great passion and dedication. She has done so with no expectation or hope of political reward. It is unusual for a modern Member of Parliament to take up an issue that will do her precisely no good at all, although the hon. Lady's work has enhanced her reputation in the House, and outside it.
I should also like to congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), who, as the former Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, persuaded that Committee to take up the inquiry last year. He is a doughty fighter on behalf of people who have suffered miscarriages of justice. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Walsall, North (David Winnick) was able to present, in a thoroughly dispassionate and reasonable way, the conclusions of the Committee of which he is the acting Chairman.
David Winnick: I am the temporary Chairman.
Mr. Garnier: The modern parlance used by the Prime Minister is "during the transitional period".
I promised to be brief and to sample dip, so I shall make only a few comments. First, like my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell), I want to begin by looking at paragraph 10 of the Government's response to the report. I do not blame the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing, and Community Safety, who is new to her post and was not responsible for the political oversight of the report, but paragraph 10 states:
- "The Committee's conclusions would appear partly to have arisen from a combination of assumptions",
- "respects the views of the Committee, but does not share its belief in the existence of large numbers of miscarriages of justice."
I do not want to be entirely controversial all of the time. For example, I agree with the Government's response to recommendation 13, which appears in paragraph 62. The Government state that they see no reason to interfere with the ability of the CPS to prosecute ancient cases if the evidence exists. I see no need to get special permission from the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Attorney-General to pursue ancient cases, if the evidence is there.
However, I take issue with paragraph 66, which responds to recommendation 15 in connection with the anonymity of people charged with allegations of the sexual abuse of children. There are perfectly respectable arguments both ways when it comes to the anonymising or otherwise of defendants in such cases, but there is no justice to be found in the Government's answer that they
- "will continue to listen to the arguments of those who feel strongly on the matter."
Mr. Mark Francois (Rayleigh): On a directly related matter, I had a good friend who was a teacher. He suffered allegations similar to those being discussed today. It took two years for the matter to go to the Crown Court, where the jury threw the case out in less than 30 minutes. However, my friend's life was ruined for two years. He suffered a great deal of harassment by the local press, and he was so traumatised that he was unable to return to the classroom afterwards. We lost a very good teacher as a result. Does my hon. and learned Friend believe that a case can be made for anonymity in some of these cases, so that we do not lose good public servants?
Mr. Garnier: Yes, I think that there is a case for anonymity, but the Government's response does not deal with the matter adequately. Indeed, I am taking part in this debate, and I am following the hon. Member for Crosby in dealing with the issue, because I, too, had a constituency case similar to that described by my hon. Friend. In that case, a man and his female partner—they live together as husband and wife, although I do not think that they are married—were both accused of vile and disgusting acts by people who were once, years before, in their charge. They were the victims, if I may say so, of a trawl.
Despite what the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) says, the couple in the case that I have described were not victims of the same type as people involved in the children's homes cases, but they were victims none the less. Perhaps I shall have occasion to speak up for people who suffered genuine sexual abuse in children's homes, but that is not what I am talking about today. Today, I am talking about the other side of the coin—wholly innocent people who are the victims of police trawling. Such people are subjected to appalling social and employment consequences, as happened in the case cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois).
The two people in my constituency were never brought to court, because the police withdrew the case about 18 months to two years after the couple were originally suspended from work, brought in for interview and bunged into a police cell. Their lives are now effectively ruined. I shall not dwell on their case, because I dealt with it in the Westminster Hall Adjournment debate initiated by the hon. Member for Crosby.
Mr. Dawson: I accept all that the hon. and learned Gentleman says about miscarriages of justice: no one wants them to happen. None the less, are there not dangers in trying to protect the rights of people who are accused of child abuse in that one might make it more difficult for victims to come forward and tell what they know about that most heinous of crimes?
Mr. Garnier: I am not sure that we are in an either/or set of circumstances. We need to protect the rights of those who are abused and those accused of abusing. Even those who are guilty of abusing children, even if they have been convicted of heinous crimes, have rights. There is no argument between us on that. Miscarriages of justice occur not only in cases to do with the sexual abuse of children in homes. When an innocent man is convicted, the miscarriage is just as great as it is when a guilty man is acquitted, but the consequences for the individual may be hugely different.
I want to touch on one or two recommendations made by the Committee and responded to by the Government. I can broadly agree with what the Government say in response to recommendations 1 and 2 on page 7 of the report. However, we must ensure that the police exercise greater care and forethought before they set upon a collection of individuals whom they believe—I do not think that the police go into these matters dishonestly—may have committed the most appalling crimes against children, either recently or, more dangerously, some little while ago.
The problem that the police have faced, certainly in my county of Leicestershire, is that they are terribly under-resourced. On the constituency matter to which I referred a moment ago, one police superintendent, with only a sergeant and a detective constable to help him, had to trawl—I use the word deliberately—through documents that had been distributed between Leicester city social services and Leicestershire county council social services following the fairly recent split in the local government set-up. He had no assistance from either social services department in locating documents. One can imagine the difficulty that that small team of police officers had. Leicestershire constabulary was under
pressure to achieve a result, not least because Leicestershire had suffered the terrible trauma of the Beck case, which will be well known to all who have followed social services policy over the past 15 years.I am not for one moment suggesting that the superintendent, whom I have met and for whom I have huge respect, deliberately set out to manufacture or to cut corners in order to provide evidence that would get his group of accused people to trial and conviction. That simply is not how he was thinking. He was, however, under huge pressure to achieve something, and as a consequence of the absence of manpower and resources—and assistance from civilian authorities that ought to have helped him better—a wholly unsatisfactory inquiry was put in train, which damaged a huge number of people's lives. Those lives are still being damaged.
Ms Munn: Does the hon. and learned Gentleman accept that there are reasons other than those of the police for finding out whether there may have been more victims of an alleged abuser? In my experience of being involved in investigations of the type referred to, my social services department felt that it had a duty to former residents to check whether they had suffered abuse, not just in the interests of criminal prosecution but because those people would be entitled to compensation, help and support.
Mr. Garnier: As was the case with the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson), I do not disagree for one moment with what the hon. Lady has said. There is no dispute between us. What the police must be careful about, however, is that when they interview alleged victims, they are aware that they are talking to damaged people. The mere fact that those people have been in children's homes leads me to believe that they must feel rejected. They have been abandoned by their parents. They may not even know their father. They have been abandoned from all the normal family circumstances and environments that many of us take for granted. They have, as it were, been dumped in public sector oubliettes. I am exaggerating, and I do so in order to truncate the range of words I want to use.
Imagine what it would be like to be a child of 11, 12, 13 or 14 in a children's home. There is not much going for that child, in spite of the fact that those who run the homes do their best to provide the nearest thing to normal family life. Such children are ripe, it may be said, to the temptations and difficulties of the criminal world. Often, I am afraid to say, children from residential homes go into crime. Many of those who appear in front of me as adults when I sit as a Crown court recorder have been brought up in children's homes. I want to make it clear that I am not criticising those who run children's homes, but that is a fact of life.
When those people go to prison or to young offenders' institutions, they are desperate for approval, love and some form of attention. The next source of attention may well be a policeman coming in to ask for a statement about the terrible things that happened to them in the children's home 10 years ago. There is a danger that auto-suggestive people will give statements that they think are required of them, rather than the unvarnished truth. That is another fact of life, and it leads me to exercise some caution about the trawling
system. The Select Committee was entirely right to draw that to our attention, and to that of the Government. I do not care whether the Committee found it convenient or otherwise to use the word "trawling"; it happens accurately to describe the exercise that the police so often, for reasons good or bad, undertake.During last year's Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall, I urged the then Minister to look carefully and vigorously into videoing interviews. "Resources, resources, resources" is always the cry, although the Minister, at least on that occasion, did not say that the time was not right. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 has been in place for nearly 20 years, and it is pretty well standard practice for interviews of defendants to be taped. It cannot be beyond the wit of man or Government to push that forward with rather greater vigour.
I shall pause now so that others may speak. I urge the Government to listen carefully to the Committee and to what is said in this debate. I urge them not to brush the matter under the carpet as though it were some inconvenient and unfashionable item while they get on with destroying the constitution.
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