Oral Answers to Questions
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Lucy Frazer
We are working hard to ensure that we succeed in Wales. As the right hon. Lady mentioned, it is the first of our operations. I met representatives of Napo, GMB and Unison at the end of last month to discuss that very issue, and we are working hard to ensure that matters are in place by the end of the year.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lucy Frazer)
I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady that finding accommodation for prisoners at the end of their sentence is vital. That is why we have already started pilots to help offenders released from three prisons—Bristol, Pentonville and Leeds—to secure and maintain accommodation, with £6.4 million from the Government’s rough sleeping strategy.
Kerry McCarthy
My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) mentioned today’s report which says that young offenders are being set up to fail when they are released. One concern raised in the report is about the quality of unregulated supported living, which is a real concern in Bristol. May I urge the Minister to talk to her counterparts in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to see how we can regulate supported housing?
Lucy Frazer
The hon. Lady makes an interesting point. I would like to assure her that we do liaise with MHCLG. In fact, on Thursday I am going with my counterpart from MHCLG to visit one of the pilots in Leeds, and I will raise that point with him.
Oral Answers to Questions
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Far too many people on short sentences—almost 35%—struggle to find suitable accommodation. That is why we are now focusing on a pilot in Bristol, Pentonville and Leeds. We not only want to get ex-offenders into accommodation, but are putting £6.4 million into ensuring that they have right kind of support, with up to five hours a week on life skills and financial management skills, and access the right services.
Rory Stewart
First, I pay tribute to Revolving Doors, which is a very impressive charity. I am afraid those are not the figures we have in the MOJ, but I am very happy to sit down with Revolving Doors and understand how it is arriving as such figures. Broadly speaking, sadly, the level of homelessness among people on short sentences has remained, in our terms, relatively static over the past decade, but I respect Revolving Doors, and I am very happy to look at that evidence with it.
Kerry McCarthy
When prisoners fall on that fine line between being criminals and actually being victims of crime themselves—I am particularly thinking of young people who are caught up in gangs and county lines-type drug dealing—what support is being given to them to make sure that if they are rehoused, they are rehoused away from the scene from their offending, so they are in a safe place and do not get dragged back into gang activity?
Rory Stewart
This is a very good challenge. We can use licence conditions to try to ensure that somebody does not return to the scene of their offending. The problem, as the hon. Lady will be aware, is that we of course have to balance that against the importance of family relationships for rehabilitation. We want to try to locate someone in a place where they will not be tempting into further reoffending, but we do not want to locate them in a place where they lose all contact with family and community.
Oral Answers to Questions
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Mr Gauke
I am very happy to look at what is happening in Bristol. Clearly it is right that debt collection measures are proportionate, and the hon. Lady raises an important point about that. One of the best ways to ensure that living standards increase and debt levels do not rise is by making sure that we get more people into work, and we are succeeding in that.
Oral Answers to Questions
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(7 years, 11 months ago)
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Rory Stewart
As the hon. Lady mentions, the situation at Liverpool Prison was very disturbing. I have visited Liverpool Prison, and mental health provision is now significantly better than it was at the time of the inspection—I spent quite a lot of time with the mental health staff there—but there is a broader issue. Although we are reducing suicide, there is still far too much of it happening. A lot of this will be about making sure not only that we deal with drugs, but that we have the right kind of purposeful activity in prisons, so that prisoners do not feel the temptation to take their own life.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Lucy Frazer)
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to highlight the value of early legal advice, which is why the Department spent £100 million in legal aid on early legal advice for civil cases last year.
Kerry McCarthy
Citizens Advice has estimated that for every £1 of legal aid spending on housing advice the state would save over £2, and that if the advice was on debt and housing, it would save even more. Will the Minister commit to commissioning research into the cost-effectiveness of reintroducing early legal advice in the housing sector, so that we can save money in the long run?
Lucy Frazer
Advice can already be taken through a telephone hotline in relation to housing. Legal aid is available where homelessness is a risk, and debt leads to homelessness. A whole variety of early legal advice is available through legal aid at the moment, but as the hon. Lady will know, we are conducting a review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and this issue will be considered.
Prisoners: Parental Rights
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hosie. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) on securing the debate. We have had some excellent speeches, and Westminster Hall comes into its own in debates on such topics with cross-party consensus.
I want to turn the debate around slightly and focus on the 200,000 or so children a year who will have a parent in prison, in England and Wales. That is a rough figure—a Government estimate—and it is difficult to be more precise. We have heard various figures about women in prison. It is estimated that 66% of women in prison have a child under the age of 18, and that a third of them have a child under five, although I have also seen the figure of 51%. Far more children have a father than a mother in prison and there are likely to be a disproportionate number of black and minority ethnic children with a parent in prison, because of the make-up of the prison population. The statistics on young offenders institutions show that there are also many young parents in prison. I have visited young offenders institutions as an MP and before that as a lawyer working in the criminal field, and those who do so will have seen young mums turning up with their babies, to visit fathers who are themselves children. A freedom of information request from Barnardo’s in connection with its report of December 2015, “Locked out: Children’s experiences of visiting a parent in prison”, found that children make almost 10,000 visits to public prisons each week.
Those are the things that we know about the number of children affected, and the make-up of that group, but we do not know anywhere near as much as we should. There is limited published practice knowledge about working with children of prisoners, and a lack of systematic recording and information-sharing. Prisoners will not always reveal that they have children. In many cases it is a child’s step-parent or the partner of their parent rather than their own father who is in prison, but the child will still clearly be greatly affected. As we have heard, courts, Governments and local services do not routinely ask about the children involved; that information is not reported or recorded. Pressures on the probation service and the lack of sentencing reports also mean that the issue is less likely to be picked up. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) pointed out that people facing custody are not routinely asked about the situation with respect to their children.
When there were riots and looting in London boroughs after the death of Mark Duggan, in quite a few cases women were immediately thrown into custody and no one asked any questions. Single parents were put into custody and no one asked what would happen to their children left at home.
Kate Green
Does my hon. Friend support the suggestion that when a parent goes into custody—and particularly if they are the sole parent—there should be a period of perhaps five or seven days after the sentence is imposed and before custody commences to allow them to make arrangements for the care of the child?
Kerry McCarthy
That is absolutely the case, although there will always be exceptions, such as when the parent is seen to be a danger to the public. I used to work at a magistrates court, where women would be sentenced to jail because they had not paid television licence fines. It could be said that they knew they were coming to court and might face custody, but sometimes those people had chaotic lives and were not facing up to the seriousness of their situation, and it would be sensible to give them a chance to make arrangements. In America there is a tendency to use a system that gives people time to prepare for a prison sentence; I do not see why we cannot do that here.
Quite often parents going to jail, and their families, keep quiet about the fact that children are involved. That might be because of stigma and shame, or the fear of having their children taken into care. Informal kinship care is often arranged, with friends or family stepping in if the parent with caring responsibilities is sent away. There has been some progress in recognising the role of kinship carers in recent years. Edward Timpson, the former Children and Families Minister, took the issue seriously and did some good work on it, which we need to continue.
I recently wrote to the Children’s Commissioner about the matter. She had launched a very good report that identified about 15 categories of vulnerable children, and I wrote to her flagging up the fact that the categories of children of prisoners and children in informal kinship care should have been listed but were not. There would have been some overlap as, for example, one category was children in local authority care, which could include the children of prisoners; but there was not a specific focus on them. I received a good reply this week, in which the commissioner said:
“I am very keen to include children of prisoners in the next iteration of the work, but identifying the number of such children is a significant challenge. We are currently working with the ONS to link census data with Dept for Education records of children, this should then enable us to estimate the number of children in families where a parent is in prison. Doing this poses some serious challenges, but if we can do it, then we will be able to use this to get lots of additional information.”
Things are not ideal. The information should be available without the need to do various calculations to put together a picture; but it is excellent that the commissioner realises the importance of the work.
It is important to know how many children are affected by parental imprisonment. Such children can face multiple disadvantages, as has been said. Family life is disrupted and it may be necessary to move home. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned that half of such children have to change schools. In many cases family income will be lost. For children with a parent in prison there is twice the likelihood of poor conduct and mental health problems, according to a 2008 study. Those children are less likely to do well at school and three times as likely to offend: 65% of boys with a convicted father will go on to be convicted. When Hazel Blears was a Home Office Minister we had conversations about work she was doing to try to identify boys, in particular, who were at risk of offending because of their parents’ situation. There is a need to be careful about that, because we do not want to stigmatise or label children—“Because your father was a bad lot and ended up in jail you are going to go the same way.” A sensitive approach is needed, but we must recognise the particular risk for those children.
Trauma can also arise directly from the experience. Children may have seen a parent arrested, sometimes in violent circumstances. They may not have known anything was going on, only for the parent to go off to court one day and disappear. Some children may not even be told that the parent is in jail, and may find out because word has spread around the neighbourhood. Also, visiting a parent in prison is not a pleasant experience. In today’s debate there has been a focus on the importance to prisoners of maintaining contact with their children; and the reoffending figures suggest that that is important. It is estimated that 45% of prisoners lose touch with their families and that prisoners are 39% less likely to reoffend if they receive visitors. We also need to look at the impact on the children, as Barnardo’s has tried to do, because what is good for the prisoners is not necessarily good for the children.
I will briefly mention fathers’ rights. We have spoken about women receiving visits in prison, but male prisoners are treated differently from female prisoners in the system. I entirely accept the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East that in some cases the father clearly should not retain any influence over the children’s lives.
At the moment, in male prisons, children’s visits are classed as a privilege under the incentives and earned privileges scheme. The scheme allocates the duration, frequency and quality of visits according to the behaviour of the offender. That can have quite a severe impact on the frequency and length of visits. Basic status prisoners would be entitled to see their children for a two-hour visit every four weeks, but family visit days are restricted to enhanced prisoners who have displayed exemplary behaviour, for example by studying for qualifications. Therefore, quite a lot of prisoners do not get to have family visit days at all. We could say, “Well, they haven’t earned them,” but we are talking about their families losing that right through no fault of their own.
Children in this situation will often have ambivalent feelings toward their parent, because their parent has perhaps done something deliberately that means they have, in effect, abandoned their child. Children will see that their parent has chosen to do something that means they will be locked up and absent from the home, leaving the children to fend for themselves or endure bullying and stigma at school. They should not be doubly punished for the fact that their father is perhaps not displaying exemplary behaviour in prison; they should be allowed that quality time to try to rebuild the relationship with him.
Under the IEP scheme, fathers’ visits with their children can be withheld at the discretion of the authorities, whereas in female prisons the right is protected, on the basis that children should not be restricted from visiting or contacting the mother because of the mother’s behaviour. The number of visits should not be restricted in order to serve the needs of the incentive schemes, and incentive schemes should not be linked to any access to family visits. That is the rule for mothers, and I do not see why it should not be the case for fathers as well. It is important, and Barnardo’s has called for the IEP scheme in male prisons to be brought into line with that in female prisons.
I will say a little bit about the work of Barnardo’s, an organisation that is proactive in this area and doing some excellent work. In England there is a scheme called i-HOP—the information hub on offenders’ families with children for professionals—which was commissioned by the Department for Education and is run by Barnardo’s. It provides a one-stop information and advice service to support all professionals working with children and families of offenders, including frontline staff, strategic managers and commissioners. It is important that this is placed on professionals’ radar and that they are given advice on how to deal with it.
In 2013, Barnardo’s published a report called “Working with children with a parent in prison”, which referred to two pilot schemes called Empowering the Children of Offenders. The pilots were held in Devon and Bristol. They found that parents often struggled to talk to their children about imprisonment and needed support to do so. They also found that liaising with wider family networks, including grandparents, and with schools was vital to provide full support to a child affected by parental imprisonment. The report highlighted particular issues: problems in identifying the children affected, as I have already said, identifying the children’s rights and working out which children need support. The children of prisoners often do not meet the thresholds for children’s social care services to become involved. That means no work takes place with them, and perhaps the thresholds should be reassessed to ensure they are brought into account.
As part of the i-HOP scheme in Bristol, Barnardo’s worked with Bristol City Council to create Bristol’s “Charter for Children of Prisoners”, which recommended that children should be helped to write letters, make phone calls or visit if they want to; that children with a parent in prison should be better welcomed and respected by prison staff; that children should be told where their parent is and how long they will be there; that they should have an adult they can talk to in confidence; and that when police arrest someone they should take into account the impact on the child and ensure the situation is explained to them. Probably most importantly, it recommended that professionals such as teachers and nurses should know how many children in Bristol have a parent in prison and how to support them.
I will conclude by coming back to my earlier point. This discussion should not just be about the prisoners and their rights; it should be about the children. When we look at the children of prisoners, we should not just look at their relationship with the parent in prison. It should not just be about how often they see them and whether they maintain connection. They will face a lot of issues, whether at school, through poverty in the family home, or through informal arrangements where they may be passed from one friend of their parent to another. We need to look at those children in the community, not just in relation to the prisoners.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill
Kerry McCarthy ExcerptsTuesday 21st November 2017
(8 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 View all European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 21 November 2017 - (21 Nov 2017)
Mr Leslie
I want to make a little more progress, if I may, because I need to reference a number of other amendments.
I hope this is not the case, but it seems to me that the Prime Minister, worried that hard-line Eurosceptics and Brexiteers on her Benches are champing and nipping at her heels, had to throw them a bone. There was a need to give them something, and therefore the charter of fundamental rights was the scalp she felt she had to throw in the direction of some, but not all, Conservative Members. I hope that is not the case, because significant protections on data, on children’s rights and on public health—even the protections that the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union himself has used—are rights and privileges that we should jealously guard. It is our job in this Parliament to stand up and point out when the Executive are potentially trying to erode many of those rights. I hope we can keep the charter or, at the very least, have a report on its effect.
Amendment 62 also addresses changes in rights. This is not a pure copy-and-paste exercise, and the amendment seeks to preserve something known as the Francovich rule in our legal system. Essentially, it is a fundamental principle of any democracy that Governments should not be above the law. In EU law, the principle is made real by the Francovich rule, which was established by case law that provides citizens with tools to recover damages when their Government fall short of legal obligations. In this case, again, the Government are trying to do away with those protections, and I tabled the amendment—other hon. Members have tabled similar amendments—to probe the Government and to find out what will be the effect of removing the Francovich protection.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The recent prosecutions of the Government under clean air laws, for example, might not have been possible if the Francovich duty were not enshrined in law. The result of the Bill, as drafted, is that, the day before Brexit, people will have the right to claim damages from the Government for the harm they suffer, but there is a danger they will not have that right the day after Brexit.
Mr Leslie
My hon. Friend makes the point well. We can all imagine circumstances in which the Government could be in part responsible for failures to comply with various legal obligations—as she says, it might well include failure to comply with air quality directives—and those who suffer harm as a consequence of those Government failures may no longer have the right of redress. Those rights exist not only in environmental legislation but in, for instance, equal opportunities legislation. I can foresee circumstances in which a same-sex couple seek retroactively to claim their right to pension arrangements that might not have existed in the past so that they can accrue their pension rights, but they would not have redress to do so under the proposed arrangements.
The other big one is competition law, which relies very much on the right to challenge the Government, particularly on procurement arrangements. Companies that say they did not get a contract for such and such a reason may well feel that it was partly because they were unfairly treated by Government. Under the Francovich arrangements we have protections so that contracts can be let fairly, be it for house building, transport infrastructure or anything else we can name. A number of protections need safeguarding there.
Perhaps the biggest one that has not been addressed by Ministers and where Francovich may still be required is the protection of the rights of EU nationals after Brexit. A number of EU nationals will continue to reside in the UK after Brexit, but what will happen if their residency rights or definitions change, if their children are affected by changes of arrangements with the Government, or if rights to claim various tax reliefs or other things change in an unfair way for them, as EU nationals? There should be some level of redress against malfeasance by Government in that respect, so at the very least we need to hear from Ministers a better justification for the deletion of this Francovich protection.
Theresa Villiers
I can assure the hon. Lady that this Government and, I am sure, all successive Governments will remain strongly committed to the Good Friday agreement and to the protection of individual rights. As she will appreciate, of course, the agreement expressly referred to in the Good Friday agreement in relation to human rights is the European convention on human rights. However, I fully understand her point of view on this matter, and it will always be important for us as a Chamber to respect individual rights. The tenet of my speech is that we do not need the charter to enable us to do that. We have extensive legal frameworks available to us as a Parliament, and through our judiciary and legal system, and that will ensure that we properly protect our citizens, whether in Northern Ireland or in the rest of the United Kingdom.
Let me turn to my final reason for concern. I well remember the clarity of former Prime Minister Tony Blair about the fact that the charter would not be given legal force. As far back as 2000, the Prime Minister and the Europe Minister of the day stated that very clearly for the House. In 2003, the Labour Government’s lead negotiator on the convention, Peter Hain, said there was no possibility of the Government agreeing to incorporate the charter. In 2007, Tony Blair told Parliament that we had an opt-out from the charter, and this approach was supported by a number of pro-EU groups, such as the CBI. Even my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) expressed scepticism about the charter and described it as “a needless diversion”.
While the ECJ may since have ruled that the opt-out secured by Mr Blair was nothing of the sort, we now have the opportunity to see those promises fulfilled. We have a long history of protecting the rights of the individual against the arbitrary exercise of power by the state. We have ample means to do that in the future, with hundreds of years of case law and statute establishing strong principles of accountability in our unwritten constitution. We can legislate in the future if we ever find any gaps in our current framework. We do not need the charter to protect our citizens, and I appeal to Members not to accept the amendments being debated today.
Kerry McCarthy
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hanson. I rise to support amendments 101 and 105, tabled in my name. They relate to the debate we had about environmental principles on day two of the Bill’s Committee stage, and particularly about new clauses 60 and 67, and new clause 28, which I also tabled.
As it stands, UK laws that arise from EU laws such as regulations and directives and that do not comply with the general principles of EU law can be challenged and disapplied. Administrative actions taken under EU law must also comply with the general principles. I say that by way of clarification, because I think a lot of people are trying to follow the debates in this Chamber during the Committee stage, and they are perhaps wondering what on earth we are talking about, so I am trying to make things as simple and as clear as possible for the public out there—and perhaps for some of us in the Chamber as well.
That is the situation while we are members of the EU. Post Brexit, though, schedule 1, as I interpret it, places unnecessary and unjustified restrictions on how these principles will be applied. That is what my amendments seek to rectify. Paragraph (2) states that retained principles will be only those that have been recognised or litigated by the Court of Justice of the EU in a case decided before exit day. Only those principles will be retained in domestic law; others will not, even if recognised in treaties. In the debate on day two, the Minister said in response to new clause 28 that this was because we needed a cut-off point and could not have ongoing interpretation of directives that would affect the situation in the UK. However, I would argue that there is still a real lack of clarity, and a danger that if we allow only principles that have been litigated on to apply after exit day, the non-controversial ones that people do not have a problem with will end up falling away, while only the controversial ones are retained. It is also unclear whether these general principles include environmental principles, as the term “general principles” has not been defined by the ECJ or by the treaties. If environmental principles are not explicitly recognised as general principles, they could be lost entirely. I hope that the Minister can give us a bit of clarity on that.
Paragraph 3 of schedule 1 explicitly limits the legal remedies available when general principles are contravened. Under this paragraph, UK courts will no longer have the power to disapply domestic legislation on the grounds that it conflicts with these general principles. They could only be used like the pre-exit case law of the CJEU to inform the interpretation by UK courts of retained EU law. Paragraph 3(2) therefore appears to narrow the scope for judicial review that currently exists. In the previous debate, some of my colleagues argued very eloquently as to the importance of judicial review in environmental cases but also highlighted the fact that it is often inadequate, and increasingly so, given the cap that is imposed. Paragraph 3(2) would further narrow the scope of judicial review and make it harder for the public to hold the Government to account. As discussed last week, it is vital that the courts are able to enforce the environmental principles.
Amendments 101 and 105 speak to those points. Amendment 101 clarifies that all existing principles of EU law will be retained in domestic law, whether they originate in the case law of the European Court, EU treaties, direct EU legislation or EU directives. It also makes it clear that the key environmental law principles in article 191 of the Lisbon treaty are retained. Amendment 101 therefore expands the meaning of general principles to specifically include the environmental principles. Following on from that, amendment 105 seeks to retain the right of action in domestic law for the public to hold the Government to account for their breaches of the principles.
I know that the Government are proposing an environmental principles policy. I have lots of questions about how that would operate—whether it would be on a statutory footing and so on—but at this stage I ask the Minister to confirm whether they will publish at least an outline version of what that principles policy would look like while there is still time to consider it and its implications for this Bill. So far in Committee, Ministers have been very fond of asking us to take their word for it, but I am simply not prepared to do that: I want to see what these policies would look like.
Will the Minister also explain the Government’s objection to the idea of having internationally recognised principles of environmental law enshrined in UK statute? The Government could include the basic principles in UK law by accepting my amendments. Not least, that would provide us with much needed reassurance that the Environment Secretary will win out against the International Trade Secretary in ensuring that future trade deals with countries such as the US will not lead to imports of chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-pumped beef on our shelves. The Environment Secretary has encouragingly said that the UK should say no to chlorine-washed chicken from the US and that we are
“not going to dilute our high food-safety standards or our high environmental standards in pursuit of any trade deal”.
But as was pointed out during last week’s debate, the environmental principles set out in the EU treaties have been instrumental in decisions such as the EU ban on imports of hormone-fed beef, the moratorium on neonicotinoid pesticides, and the control of the release of genetically modified organisms in the EU.
The debate on day two saw a degree of political consensus emerging around the value of environmental principles such as the precautionary principle, as well as in other areas, particularly the Environment Secretary’s mooted plan for a new independent body to hold the Government to account. I hope that when we consider the governance gap on a future day, we will hear more about his plans for that body. I think we also got confirmation from the Environment Secretary, although it was only a nod from a sedentary position, that he intended to follow the Environmental Audit Committee’s recommendation and introduce an environmental protection Act. I hope that we will hear more about that and the timetable for it. I understand that the much delayed 25-year environment plan may be with us in the first quarter of next year, a fisheries Bill is coming from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the agriculture Bill is due, I think, after the summer recess. If the Government are going to introduce an environmental protection Act before exit day, they will have their work cut out for them. I would be grateful to hear a bit more about that.
Sentencing
Kerry McCarthy Excerpts(8 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Lidington
That takes me on to rather wider territory than the subject of the statement. I thought my right hon. Friend might be about to suggest transportation with penal servitude, but I think the territories are no longer available.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I, too, was one of the 22 who back in 2011 voted against a blanket ban, and I have not changed my view since.
This is a tiny concession from the Government; it is the bare minimum they could get away with. I believe that when we imprison somebody we deprive them of their liberty, but we do not deprive them of their rights. Why does the right hon. Gentleman feel so threatened by that idea?
Mr Lidington
I would have thought that the act of depriving someone of his or her liberty when they are sentenced to custody by definition deprives them of some absolutely vital civic rights. What we have announced today is a sensible and constructive way forward that we believe complies with the requirements on us under international law, and the Hirst judgment in particular, but does so in a way that respects the view repeatedly come to by this House.