Dr Kieran Mullan

Family Justice System: Domestic Abuse and Safeguarding

I have asked the Minister about this before, and she did not answer. Maybe I will get an answer this time. One thing she might set those additional support services to do is let people know when perpetrators will get out of prison earlier because of the Government’s decisions. Can she at least commit to writing to victims to let them know in advance that their perpetrator is going to be let out of prison earlier?

Family Justice System: Domestic Abuse and Safeguarding

It is all very well to send people on training. As a doctor, I have sat in on training sessions. People can be in a training seminar together, and some will pay attention and some will not. Some will take it seriously, and some will not. If there is not a system of accountability at the other end, training can become a tick-box exercise if we are not careful.

Family Justice System: Domestic Abuse and Safeguarding

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for securing this debate on domestic abuse and safeguarding within the family justice system. Members in the Chamber will not be alone in having regularly encountered this issue in constituency casework. I expect all MPs across the House have constituents who are struggling with these issues, and perhaps even they are in their private lives. This subject demands seriousness

Lord Mandelson: Government Response to Humble Address

One thing this sorry episode has achieved is to make the Minister an absolute expert on warm words and platitudes. I want to go back to the issue of disappearing messages, which was raised earlier. Obviously, those messages are not retrievable, but the very minimum we should get is a detailed breakdown of all those who were asked to supply information and said they could not do so because they had disappearing messages on their phones. We are entitled to know which Ministers’ communications and

Lord Mandelson: Government Response to Humble Address

Further to that point of order, while I do not have the same experience as my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis), the Minister has said that the documents are ready to publish and that the only issue is securing Government time to do that on 1 June, the first day back after recess. What advice can the Speaker provide to the House on what other mechanisms are available to ensure that there is time on that day, if the Government are unwilling to allocate it?

Violence against Women and Girls

I welcome the new Minister to her post. For all the policies she might be glad to inherit, she is also inheriting a plan later this year to let out potentially thousands of the worst offenders against women and girls, including rapists and those responsible for sexual assault. The Government are refusing to be transparent about this and are not answering freedom of information requests and written questions about how many rapists and sexual assault offenders will be allowed out of prison earlier

Violence against Women and Girls

I ask the Minister to think about a situation in which a victim of rape comes to her constituency surgery whose rapist is currently in prison but will now get out of prison earlier. I wonder what that victim would think about the answer the Minister has just given to a serious question about a serious issue. If she refuses to tell the House that information, will she—at the very least—commit to writing to all the women and girls whose offender is currently not due to come out of prison for two o

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

I have just one remark to make. I draw the Committee’s attention to the submission we received from the circuit in Wales. Clause 25 is about the territorial extent of the Bill, and the circuit pointed out that it feels the Welsh system has been unfairly caught up in these reforms, which it does not think are applicable in terms of the need to reduce waiting times. It is important that the Committee makes note of the evidence that was submitted to us. I join the Minister in thanking everybody for

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

The Minister is in danger—there is a bit of a pattern here—of wanting to have things both ways. She is suggesting that waiting for Brian Leveson’s review, and the parliamentary time and effort going into the legislation, has had no impact or delay on the measures regarding specialist rape courts, which were in the Government’s manifesto and they could have just got on with from day one. That really stretches credibility. The Government must accept the consequences of their decisions. If they hav

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Will the Minister give way?

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Thank you, Sir John. I just want to make a simple point. The Minister said that what the Government want to do does not require primary legislation, but in the same speech referred to primary legislation that we are considering today as part of introducing specialist rape courts. It is obvious to anybody that there is a requirement for primary legislation. We waited a year for Brian Leveson and we are two years into the Parliament. There are uncontroversial clauses that we have not opposed; the

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

It is all very well for the Minister to make that statement. Why does she think that?

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

I intervened when the Minister said she thought that extending sitting hours would make things worse. When I asked her to explain that, she then said that she thought the benefit would be minimal. That is a different point. Given that we have said there should be an extensive consultation to figure out all those things, so that it appeals to people, such that that they will want to take part in these extended sitting hours, why would it make things worse? If people are willing to do it, I just d

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

I wish to speak briefly in support of the principle that different approaches to case management and ways of working are making a difference in a number of areas. The Committee has had extensive back and forth about the fact that backlogs are actually coming down in certain locations. There has been debate about whether that is just a seasonal trend that we see at some points in the year; we will have to wait to see whether that is the case. We have also spoken about the approach to case managem

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

As I have alluded to several times, the Conservative party is considering more broadly how we tackle judicial accountability in all its different elements. It would be premature for us to settle on this new clause if, as the hon. Member for Chichester pointed out, it had to be necessarily narrow to fit in the Bill. On that basis we will not vote for it. We are not against it as an idea, but we need greater time to think about accountability and performance in the justice system in a more compreh

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

The Minister opened her remarks by saying that the scheme applies only to certain cases in the Crown court. The point that the Opposition make is that it will no longer apply to some of the cases to which it would apply now. The Minister has given figures. If the scheme is configured in the right way, and sufficiently constrained to just pick up those cases that are moving, it should not necessarily lead to any increase in the number of cases referred, so I do not accept her argument. I would no

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. If you will indulge me, Dr Huq, I want to congratulate the hon. Member for Rugby on the news that he has been appointed as a trade envoy. We can all recognise that he has put an enormous amount of work into that. The Opposition think that he is amazing at selling the unsellable; he does it all the time. If he has British products to sell, he will be amazing at it. He should just double check that he is going to the south of Korea, rather than

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

My new clause 24 and new clause 18 in the name of the hon. Member for Chichester seek to achieve a similar outcome. Although there is broad agreement that the backlog is a challenging issue that must be addressed, we believe that any measure that curtails jury trial rights in such a significant—and, I would say, unprecedented—way should be proportionate to the problem it seeks to solve and be used only for as long as absolutely necessary while we are presented with this problem. Therefore, we pr

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

I rise to speak briefly in support of the new clause. Whenever we talk about narrowed elements of a transcript, I always think to myself that, in giving these remarks, the judge will hopefully have written them down and not be doing these sorts of things off the top of their head. That is why I struggle to understand why these more limited elements are not more meaningful and easily available. If a judge does not happen to write these sorts of things down, I do not think it will be much to ask t

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Interestingly, we have been told all along that this is about the complexity of cases, yet the evidence is that the number of hours that things have been looked at has shrunk. To me, that is a much bigger issue. If we have fewer hours in a day to operate, of course it is going to take longer to get through complex cases.

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

The Minister is correct. That is the only time I have referred to it more broadly; I have been consistent throughout in saying that it is a system with significantly less access to jury rights than there is at present. There is a third way: to take the path towards operational excellence and better placed resourcing. We should not trade a centuries-old right for a 1.5% efficiency gain on a Government spreadsheet.

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

I rise to speak in support of amendments 59, 35 and 36 tabled in my name, and the amendments outlined by the hon. Member for Chichester, all of which enjoy our support. Our amendments seek to ensure that efficiencies and improvements to the system are made, increasing the maximum of sitting days to 130,000 and, in a different way, addressing the issue of sitting hours. We are debating the fundamental restructuring of our criminal justice system, and the Government’s central argument—the Minister

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. We are all here because we recognise that the current state of our criminal courts is untenable. Complainants and defendants alike are facing unacceptable delays, and victims and innocent defendants are suffering as a result. The Government’s response, as set out in the Bill, is a radical restructuring of our trial processes, most notably in the removal of the right to a jury in a vast number of cases—around half, in fact. We believe t

Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting)

I wish to make some brief remarks. I am keen to see suggestions of alternative approaches, but we have to be careful when it comes to discounts for guilty pleas, because there is a balance to be struck from the perspective of victims and complainants. We do not want to be in a situation where they feel that justice is undermined, particularly given the many other things the Government are doing to reduce the punitive element of the justice system. I am sure the Committee will know that thousands