Sentencing Bill

Helen Grant Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 29th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

I am pleased to support this vital Sentencing Bill, which represents a significant step towards protecting victims and delivering justice.

I would like to draw Members’ attention to new clauses 8 and 31 and amendment 1. The Conservatives claimed to be champions of law and order, yet their record was of lawless disorder. After 14 years in power, they increased sentence lengths without planning the prison places to uphold them, delivering just a few hundred spaces while violence, drugs and chaos spiralled across our prison estates. They left our justice system on the brink, and forced the early release of more than 10,000 offenders in secret, shattering public confidence.

This Government are taking a different path. We are delivering the largest prison expansion since Victorian times; 2,500 new places are already open and we are on track for 14,000 by 2031. We will ensure that we will never again run out of prison capacity. We must also make prisons work. That means punishment that cuts crime through earned release, tougher community sentences, intensive supervision and proper rehabilitation that turns offenders away from crime for good.

Central to making sentencing work is protecting victims, not just at the point of conviction but every day thereafter. I thank the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for highlighting the important issue of domestic abuse in new clauses 8 and 31. The Bill introduces a powerful new mechanism under clause 6, “Finding of domestic abuse”, by ensuring that, once the court is satisfied that an offence involves domestic abuse, it must declare that is the case in an open court, permanently recognising the heightened harm to victims. This activates stronger protections, which can include electronic tagging and exclusion zones, ensuring that offenders can be tracked in real time and kept away from victims’ homes and workplaces.

The “Loose Women” Facing It Together campaign has powerfully shown the real human impact of domestic abuse and the urgent need for continuous protection. The measures in the Bill meet that need, ensuring that abusers cannot return to intimidate or control and that victims are safeguarded, with the full force of the law behind them. These landmark reforms will end the crisis that we inherited, and restore faith in a justice system that protects the public and puts victims first.

Since my election, I have been campaigning tirelessly on the issue of tool theft, a crime that devastates the livelihoods of tradespeople across our country. There are too many to list in this House today, but I expect that we all know someone who has been a victim of this crime. The rate of suicide among construction workers is the highest of any profession—four times higher than that for any other occupation. In December 2024, I laid a ten-minute rule Bill before the House that called for tool theft to be recognised as a significant additional harm and for courts to consider the total financial loss to victims. That would mean considering not just the value of the tools themselves, but the cost of repairs and the loss of work, and the ripple effect on businesses and families.

Having worked closely with Justice Ministers over the past year, I am pleased to see that the Bill recognises the additional protections needed for victims, for which the sector has been calling. This Bill, with its provisions requiring courts to consider the full impact of theft on victims, its new restriction zones that can ban prolific thieves from construction sites and tool retailers, and its tougher community sentences, delivers transformative protections for tradespeople. Although the Government do not support amendment 1, tabled by the hon. Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello), I thank him for enabling a discussion on the wider impact of crime.

I am pleased to note that the Bill requires courts to consider the full impact of crime, including psychological harm. It recognises what victims of tool theft and, indeed, all crimes have been telling us all along: harm does not stop when tools are stolen or a crime is committed. The psychological harm of losing one’s livelihood, the anxiety about future thefts and the mental health impact of not being able to work are real harms that must be considered when sentencing offenders, and the Bill delivers in this regard.

These reforms will protect the public through tougher sentencing and tighter monitoring, cut crime by stopping reoffending before it happens, support victims by recognising harm and preventing future abuse, and build a safer society with less crime and, ultimately, fewer victims.

[Helen Grant (Maidstone and Malling) (Con)]

I wish to speak to new clause 20, regarding the introduction of a child cruelty register. Tony and Paula Hudgell are my constituents, and I have had the honour of getting to know both of them—especially Paula, Tony’s adoptive mum—extremely well. One special aspect of our job as MPs is getting to meet incredible people doing incredible things, often behind the public gaze, but in a decade and a half as a Member—I am showing my age now—I have personally never come across such a courageous, driven and united mother-and-son team. That is what they are: a team, especially given Tony’s young age of 11.

New clause 20 would introduce a child cruelty register, described so eloquently and passionately by the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan), who is also a great champion of victims. It underlines what our job is really about: changing and improving the lives of our constituents, keeping them safe and protecting the most vulnerable.

When Tony was just a little baby—41 days old—his birth parents, Jody Simpson and Anthony Smith, abused him so badly that he had to have both his legs amputated. Tony will have to live with the consequences of his injuries for the rest of his life. Smith and Simpson were sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment by a judge at Maidstone Crown court—at the time, the maximum that the judge could give. They served eight years, and were released quite recently. They will be managed and monitored by police and probation for the remaining two years of their sentences, but after that, there is nothing—zero. There will be no management, no monitoring, and no reporting requirements if they change their names, start a new family, move county or have more children, and their case details will be archived, leaving a terrible and dangerous gap in our child protection system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jake Richards]

We have identified a problem, but it would be wholly irresponsible to legislate when we have not had the opportunity to ensure that public services can complete the task. The hon. Member criticises us for not taking action on this issue now, but what about the last 14 years? What about the recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which reported in November 2022? The last Government did absolutely nothing on those recommendations.

[Helen Grant]

I hear what the Minister has to say. Will he bring forward a Government amendment to introduce a child cruelty register when the Bill moves to the House of Lords?