Major Incident in Essex

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I thank my hon. Friend for her considered and thoughtful remarks. She is right that all MPs feel a strong sense of solidarity with Essex police as they undertake the investigation. I think our police provide a remarkable service and do remarkable work. The chief constable of Essex, BJ Harrington, and his team will deal with this case in the right way in challenging circumstances. My hon. Friend is also right about our continued work with agencies across the European Union. That work is always ongoing—it is part of our way of working and our international collaboration—and that will not change. We work collaboratively to keep our country safe, and we can do more collaborative work to make sure that those who perpetrate such awful crimes are brought to justice.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

To give some scale, there are approximately 39 or 40 Members sitting on the Opposition Benches right now. That gives us a way to measure visually the sheer loss and devastation caused. Without prejudicing the investigations the Home Secretary has announced today, may I ask her to look further into paramilitary and organised crime groups in Northern Ireland, which use unauthorised and illegitimate transport and trade links to carry out their own horrible and despicable crimes, and to see whether additional measures need to be placed both on our existing border in Northern Ireland and, in co-operation with the Garda Síochána, on ports in the Republic?

[Priti Patel]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his questions and comments. There are a number of points to make in response. First and foremost, a police investigation is taking place specifically into the events in Essex today. He is right about criminality, and we work collaboratively across all our agencies, including the National Crime Agency, and with other police forces, including the Police Service of Northern Ireland as a key partner. We will continue to investigate all avenues to make sure we stop this criminality happening—stop it flourishing—and bring its perpetrators to justice.

Public Services

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Lady raises a very important point, and we are in the process of working with the Department for Work and Pensions. I come back to the point about a statutory duty, but also stress that all organisations across Government must work together. That is the right thing to do because protecting victims from abuse, whether it is mental, physical or emotional, and getting justice are important, as is ensuring their wellbeing and their ability to move on with their lives.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Does the Home Secretary welcome the publication of the Bills that will apply to Northern Ireland, specifically the measure on historical institutional abuse in Northern Ireland? It is welcome that at last we will get this awfulness addressed and that the victims will hopefully get some sort of recognition for the problems they have had to face.

[Priti Patel]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s point about getting the right kind of justice and welcome the steps that have been taken.

I have outlined the Government’s response to some of the most shocking crimes. I reassure the House and the British public that we are determined to have sentences that properly reflect the severity of the crime. We want the public to have confidence in the criminal justice system. Too often we are told that the current system is failing victims and the wider public. That is why we have ordered an urgent review of sentencing for the most serious violent and sexual offenders. We will take immediate action to deal with the most serious cases so that offenders sentenced to fixed terms of seven years or more have the time that they serve in prison extended from half to two thirds of their sentences.

Time served must reflect the severity of the crime. Measures to protect and serve victims are also vital because becoming a victim of crime or abuse is often a life-changing experience.

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[Mrs May]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we should have co-operation on these issues. We also need to have great co-operation between Police Scotland and the police forces in the rest of the United Kingdom. When I was Home Secretary, I visited Gartcosh and saw the excellent work that was being done in respect of Police Scotland working not only with other forces in England, but with other agencies throughout the United Kingdom. Excellent work was done as a result of that.

[Ian Paisley]

The right hon. Lady will know that before policing was devolved in Northern Ireland, we had 13,500 police officers. Under the previous Labour Administration, that number was cut to 6,000. In the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee today, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland called for the reintroduction of another 1,000 officers in Northern Ireland. I am sure the right hon. Lady would extend to Northern Ireland the Government’s proposals to increase the policing footprint throughout the whole UK.

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing out the actions of the previous Labour Government. Conservative Governments have, of course, ensured that the Police Service of Northern Ireland has the resources that are available to it. Let me take the opportunity to say that the PSNI does an incredible job in Northern Ireland. In fact, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, all our police officers across the whole of the United Kingdom do an excellent job. We do have the best police force in the world.

The police are, of course, dealing with a variety of new types of crime. One of the other Bills that I am particularly pleased to see in relation to that is the online harms Bill. We know that the internet, great invention though it is, can be used to ill purpose to encourage others into violent activity and extremism. We also know, of course, how our young people can suffer harms from online activity. The approach that we have taken in the White Paper, published in April, sets out at its heart that duty of care for companies. That proportionate approach will not only have an impact, but makes us world-leading in this area. We are the first country to have been willing to dip our toe into this matter and say that we need to find an answer to it.

Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I give way to the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley).

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on the motion that he is bringing to the House tonight. Of course, Members on this Bench need no lecture about the history of Irish terrorism. We have three plaques to Members who were murdered from Northern Ireland or by Irish terrorists. However, with regards to the specific action tonight, will the Secretary of State be prepared to extend this motion to include members of the Muslim Brotherhood?

[Sajid Javid]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that a number of groups are already proscribed—well over 70—including, of course, a number of terrorist groups related to Northern Ireland terrorism. He mentioned a specific group. All I would say is that we keep the whole area of terrorism and groups, and which ones are active, under review. Should we feel that we need to come back to Parliament with a further order, we would not hesitate in doing that.

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[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

At the outset, I commend the Home Secretary’s words and the way in which he introduced this matter to the House. Every time that he speaks, he grows in stature, both within this place and indeed across our nation. I commend him for the strong stand that he is taking on these matters. Indeed, when I walk into this Chamber each day, I walk under an arch that bears a memorial to three Members of this House who were murdered by the Provisional IRA. Robert Bradford, Airey Neave, and Ian Gow were murdered, of course, by its actions, but it was encouraged by the words of those who give succour to such people and those who would pay lip service and be apologists for those gangsters and terrorists. It is essential, therefore, that we send a strong message to the people who would give succour that there is no room for their words and that their words must also be condemned, and condemned thoroughly.

I appreciate the points being made across the House about Hezbollah, which was responsible for the deaths of 85 people in 1994, when it bombed a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. It remains a threat to Jewish communities around the world, launching deadly attacks against civilians in Israel and Bulgaria and planning attacks in other places such as Cyprus. I remember standing in a southern district of Israel holding the remains of a rocket fired by Hezbollah terrorists at schoolchildren. Think of the absolute hatred of these people! They fire at schoolchildren, who are going about their normal lives yet facing attack and threat.

Many have discussed the intentions of Hezbollah tonight. It is not about attacking Israel but world Jewry and an entire community. The organisation’s intentions were made clear in 1992, when it stated:

“The war is on until Israel ceases to exist and the last Jew in the world has been eliminated”.

The hatred behind those words! The absolute condemnation comes from their own mouths.

We entirely support the actions that have been taken, but I ask the Home Secretary to consider adding the Muslim Brotherhood to the list as well. On 7 December 2017, the then Foreign Secretary made it clear in this House that he was considering pushing for the proscription of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is essential that the Home Secretary looks at that organisation and sees whether it must also be proscribed. I believe that it should be. Organisations that encourage and mouth off terrorism and radicalise people should face the condemnation that Hezbollah is facing in the Chamber tonight.

Draft Domestic Abuse Bill: Territorial Extent

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Indeed, I find myself being held to account by him in pretty much all of my portfolio. On the territory of the Bill, I draw the attention of hon. Members to the consultation that was launched last year. At that point, the consultation’s scope was England and Wales. I would not want hon. Members to leave the Chamber thinking there has been some kind of handbrake turn in relation to the territorial decisions made for the Bill. The fact is that this is a devolved matter. That is why I have written to the devolved Government in Scotland and our Northern Irish counterparts to see if we can reach an agreement on whether they want to implement the measures too. I hope he understands that my motivation all along has been to help the victims of domestic abuse not just today, or for the victims I could not help when I was prosecuting in the criminal courts 15 years ago because none of these measures were anywhere near coming into being, but the victims in the future. We all know the impact domestic abuse can have on children growing up in abusive households and we need to break that cycle of violence.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Earlier, an hon. Member said that there were no devolved institutions in Ireland in 1861. Of course, in 1840, under Daniel O’Connell, the first home rule movement commenced and in 1861 the second movement was well under way, leading to devolution and the creation of two Parliaments in Ireland. I think it is important to have that on the record.

It is unfortunate that some Members have tried to conflate a very important domestic abuse Bill here in England and Wales, which we will support, with what is happening in a very confusing situation in Northern Ireland. Does the Minister agree that that confusion means we have a strange arrangement whereby at one moment in this Parliament some Members talk about protecting absolutely the integrity of the Belfast agreement when it comes to some matters that we discuss, namely Europe, but that when we move on to domestic arrangements that are specifically devolved under the terms of the Belfast agreement we can suddenly cast those arrangements aside? That confusion has to go. We either accept devolution and implement it, or we do what the Labour Front Bench seems to be saying and introduce direct rule.

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his history lesson on Ireland and Northern Ireland. He makes the point eloquently that we cannot pick and choose between devolved matters. The mention of the Good Friday agreement reminds us all, if we need reminding, about the particular sensitivities in Northern Ireland, how we have reached where we are today and its broad history. We of course very much hope that those who can get around the table will do so, so we can sort out those and other matters.

Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Shuker]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend.

The Government cannot continue to kick this can down the road. To some degree, all of us are culpable on that. We need comprehensive legislative reform with the aim of tackling demand as its underlying principle. We have a duty as parliamentarians to confront and take action against sexual exploitation, however difficult or uncomfortable that may be. The Government must tackle demand by criminalising paying for sex and decriminalising those who are exploited.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

If hon. Members wish to remove their jackets—including the Clerk and the Hansard Reporters—they are entitled to do so, because of the rudimentary cooling system that we have today. I will, unusually, call Sarah Champion from the same side, because I know that she has been very significant in getting this motion to the House.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is not only a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley; it is also a relief to be able to do so and I thank you for your kindness in enabling it to happen.

We need to recognise that there is a crisis of commercial sexual exploitation in this country. The trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable women and girls around the UK to be sexually abused is taking place on an industrial scale. That is for one simple reason: demand. There are a minority of men in this country who are willing to pay to sexually access women’s bodies. Currently, the law gives them licence to do this. For too long, Parliament has turned a blind eye to the suffering and societal carnage that these men create.

I am here today with two clear messages for the Minister. First, there is a sexual abuse scandal happening right now on her watch. It is enabled by prostitution advertising websites and driven predominantly by heterosexual men who pay for sex. Secondly, there is a solution: making paying for sex a crime to help to stem demand and then helping the women exploited in the sex trade to exit it, by removing penalties for soliciting and providing them with properly resourced support services. The Government and the officials who advise them cannot claim that they did not know what was going on or were not aware of the scale of the problem. To end the exploitation, we have to end the demand.

Let me contextualise the scale of this problem. A recent inquiry into organised sexual exploitation by the all-party parliamentary group on prostitution and the global sex trade, of which I am a member, found that sexual exploitation of women and girls by organised crime groups is widespread across the UK. There are at least 212 active, ongoing police operations into modern slavery cases involving sexual exploitation in the UK. Our inquiry suggests that this represents just a small fraction of the true scale of organised sexual exploitation.

While most police forces do not proactively work to identify all the brothels in their area, some do track them. The scale that they find is astonishing. Leicestershire police visited 156 brothels, encountering 421 women in the year ending 31 December 2017. Some 86% of those women in the brothels were Romanian. Northumbria police visited 81 brothels between March 2016 and April 2018. Of the 259 women they met in the brothels, 75% were Romanian. Over half of those brothels were recorded as connected to other brothels, agencies or non-UK organised crime groups. Greater Manchester police has identified 324 potential new brothel addresses since March 2015. It told our inquiry:

“the majority of those identified reflect the hotspot areas for modern slavery in Greater Manchester.”

Let me quote Detective Sergeant Stuart Peall from Lancashire constabulary:

“From what we can evidence there nearly always appears to be a man or some sort of control involved. The females we encounter very rarely pay for their own advertisements. They also don’t pay for their own flights into the UK. There is clear organisation from what we have seen”.

The methods used by these organised crime groups to recruit women include deception, coercion and the exploitation of women and girls’ pre-existing vulnerabilities.

Let us be clear: women who are trafficked by organised crime groups are being subjected not to forced labour, but to rape. Based on evidence from the Poppy Project, Equality Now calculated that, on average, victims are exploited into prostitution for between eight and 20 months. Most women who are trafficked in the UK reported being forced to have sex six or seven days a week and see an estimated average of 13 sex buyers per day. From that, we can extrapolate that the average victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation is raped anywhere between 2,798 and 6,828 times. Those rapes are committed by men who pay for sex. If we scale that figure up to the 1,185 women referred to the national referral mechanism for sexual exploitation in 2017, we start to see the scale of the problem.

We must recognise that commercial sexual exploitation is part of a continuum of violence against women and girls. Commonly, it begins when they are just girls. Many women who are involved in prostitution experienced different forms of abuse, often sexual, when they were children.

The grooming process, and the beginning of a girl’s experience of the continuum of violence, is worth reflecting on. For many girls, it begins with something seemingly innocent, such as getting a slightly older boyfriend and going for car rides with him. Things then become more risky, and she might drink alcohol or smoke cannabis at the boyfriend’s insistence, and the pressure to return the favour with sexual acts then begins. Very quickly, as happened repeatedly in my constituency of Rotherham, that becomes organised sexual exploitation where the girls are passed between adult men who systematically sexually exploit them in the most horrific ways. Since the events in Rotherham came to light, attitudes in the UK have started to shift towards recognising that those girls are not prostitutes who willingly choose to sell their bodies, but victims who are exploited by men operating in gangs.

Now that child sexual exploitation is viewed as a national crisis, it is time for us to recognise that sexual exploitation does not stop when people turn 18. Instead, the girls who do not get the support they need to escape and repair their lives continue to be sexually exploited, perhaps by the same organised gangs or pimps, into their 20s, 30s and beyond. Finally, after years of campaigning, we consider the grooming and subsequent exploitation of a child to be abhorrent, but we must ask why society’s attitude is that when they turn 18, they are suddenly consenting adults who make a choice about selling sex, even when we are aware of past childhood abuse, trafficking, slavery, coercive control, intimidation, violence or drugs and alcohol dependencies in the background.

Let us confront the fact that the term “free choice” rarely, if ever, accurately describes a person’s path into prostitution and the sex trade. Sometimes we are talking about girls who have not escaped their early life trauma, who were perhaps in and out of care, groomed under the influence of drugs in their teens, or repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted throughout their lives. That may sound emotive, but it is corroborated by the supporting statistics. Home Office research shows that 50% of women became involved in prostitution before the age of 18, and three out of four women involved are aged under 21. Another Home Office study in 2016 showed that 70% of the women had spent time in care, and 45% had previously experienced sexual abuse. Do we really believe that those women and girls can give informed consent when many are inherently vulnerable or trapped in a cycle of abuse?

Commercial sexual exploitation is happening on a staggering scale, and prostitution procurement websites, where women are advertised to sex buyers, are key enablers of it. A buyer can go to sites such as Vivastreet or Adultwork, casually search for women in his area and contact the mobile number provided to arrange an appointment. It is quick, easy and highly profitable for the web companies. The Joint Slavery and Trafficking Analysis Centre, which is hosted by the National Crime Agency, says that those prostitution websites

“represent the most significant enabler of sexual exploitation in the UK”.

Claims that the sites enhance women’s safety are deeply misguided. Prostitution advertising websites significantly increase the ease and scale of organised sexual exploitation in this country.

Thankfully, other countries have started to act. Since the United States signed into law the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 earlier this year, Adultwork and a host of other sites have shut down their prostitution adverts there. In France, the Paris prosecutor launched an official investigation on charges of aggravated pimping into Vivastreet, which has since shut down its prostitution adverts in France. In Britain, our inadequate laws against commercial sexual exploitation prohibit a person from placing a call card for prostitution in a phone booth but allow companies such as Vivastreet to make millions advertising women online. That has to change urgently. This week, Vivastreet claimed that it is

“working closely with the Home Office to help develop an industry-wide approach to identifying and preventing online trafficking.”

That is not enough. The Government must take on corporate pimps, not collaborate with them.

Our law needs to be updated so that it clearly sets out that it is a criminal offence to facilitate or profit from someone else’s prostitution. Under section 53A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, it is already an offence to buy sex from a person who has been subject to force, coercion or exploitation by a third party, which means it does not have to be proved that the buyer was aware of the exploitation of the person they were paying for sex with. Sadly, research by Dr Andrea Matolcsi of Bristol University in 2017 suggested that there was only a low level of awareness of the offence and that the maximum fine of £1,000 did not deter buyers.

Our laws are simply not fit for purpose. To reduce demand for prostitution and sex trafficking, the law has to send a clear message that it is never acceptable to exploit someone by paying them for sex. To do that, the Government should urgently extend the existing prohibition against paying for sex in a public place to make it a criminal offence in all locations.

Although prostitution websites facilitate commercial sexual exploitation, they are not the root cause. The root cause is demand. Only a minority of men pay for sex. A study of 6,000 men by University College London found that 3.6% of men reported having paid for sex in the last five years. The men who were more likely to have paid for sex were young professionals with high numbers of unpaid sexual partners, which quashes the myth that the sex trade is a place of last resort for the lonely few. It is the demand of those men that drives the supply of mainly vulnerable women and girls into the sex trade. It is the money of those buyers that lines the pockets of the pimps and traffickers. The sex trade, and all the harm and suffering it entails, exists because of them.

Let me be clear: someone paying someone else to perform sex acts on them is abuse, just as exchanging accommodation, employment, services or other goods in return for sex is sexual abuse. A man who pays for sex is not a regular consumer, innocently availing themselves of a worker’s services. Offering someone money, goods or services for sex is sexual coercion. It is a form of violence against women.

Globally, 96% of victims of sexual exploitation are women and girls. When people pay for sex, they undergo a convenient act of forgetting. Only 44% of sex buyers who took part in a London-based study thought that prostitution had a very or extremely negative impact on women, which shows that many people who pay for sex ignore the fact that the women they pay for are likely to be vulnerable, may be in desperate need of money to pay off debts to their pimp, and have little or no agency in the situation. They do not think about the life or events that lead a woman to being in a brothel as opposed to working in an office or a shop.

There has rightly been outrage about the recently publicised cases of men working for aid agencies who exploited women overseas by paying them for sex, but where is the outrage when they come back to this country and sexually abuse in our own backyard? Across the UK, men are paying to sexually exploit vulnerable women and girls who they have shopped for online. We need to join the dots between prostitution, modern slavery, sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation. The common thread is men who pay to sexually access the bodies of women and girls.

There is no separate and distinct market specifically for sex-trafficked victims; the market is for sex. Detective Constable Julie Currie of the Metropolitan police’s modern slavery and kidnapping unit told the APPG:

“In the vast majority of cases, males paying for sex would give no thought to where the woman has come from or what circumstances have led her into prostitution.”

As Dr Maddy Coy from Florida University states:

“Policy approaches which presume a distinct market for the purchase of girls’ bodies for sex from that of the adult women are blinkered to the myriad of connections that span the age of majority.”

What links these forms of exploitation is the men who pay to abuse women and girls, their sexist attitude of entitlement and objectification, and the sex inequality that underpins it. Crucially, we need to acknowledge that there is nothing inevitable about this exploitation, and that we can and must take action to tackle demand from men who exploit vulnerable people by paying for sex.

I say to the Minister today that to reduce the demand for prostitution and sex trafficking, the law has to send a clear message that it is never acceptable to exploit someone by paying for sex. To do that, the Government should urgently extend the existing prohibition against paying for sex in a public space to make it a criminal offence in all locations. At the same time, it is vital that people exploited through prostitution are not criminalised, but instead supported to exit prostitution and access the services they need. As a result, penalties for loitering and soliciting should be removed from the statute book.

This “end demand” approach to prostitution is often referred to as the Nordic model, or the sex buyer law. So far it has been adopted in Sweden, Norway, France, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, so it is already in operation on UK soil. We urgently need to extend this legislation to the rest of the UK.

There is extensive evidence of the effectiveness of the sex buyer law in reducing demand. In Sweden, which was the first country to adopt an “end demand” approach back in 1999, anonymous surveys conducted in 1996 and 2008 revealed that the proportion of men in Sweden who reported paying for sex dropped from 13% to 8% in that period. The most recent study of prevalence rates found that 0.8% of men in Sweden had paid for sex in the previous 12 months, which is the smallest proportion recorded in two decades and the lowest in Europe.

Crucially, public attitudes have changed. In 1996, 45% of women and 20% of men in Sweden supported criminalising paying for sex. By 2008, support for such criminalisation had risen to 79% of women and 60% of men. That is the point of the law—it changes attitudes and prevents commercial sexual exploitation from happening in the first place.

Reducing demand also makes countries more hostile destinations for traffickers. A review of the sex buyer law in Norway concluded:

“A reduced market and increased law enforcement posit larger risks for human traffickers... The law has thus affected important pull factors and reduced the extent of human trafficking in Norway in comparison to a situation without a law.”

Similarly, the head of Stockholm police’s prostitution unit has pointed out:

“How will the traffickers survive without sex buyers? The sex buyers are the crucial sponsors of organised crime. The traffickers are not into this because of sex... They are in this because of the money.”

Paying to sexually access another person’s body is a choice—a choice to abuse. The law must serve as a deterrent and send a clear message that society will not stand idly by while a minority of men exploit vulnerable women and girls.

Changing the law around the selling and buying of sex is crucial to prevent sexual exploitation, but there are other ways in which we can reduce demand. We should seek to change attitudes towards women, exploitation and abuse through education. We need to confront the uncomfortable truth that many children are being groomed for sexual exploitation from an early age, so we really need age-appropriate relationship education in primary schools. When it comes to reducing the demand for commercial sexual exploitation, we should also educate boys about respecting women’s bodies, about gender-based violence and about negative gender stereotypes. That is why I am very sad that last week the Secretary of State for Education rowed back on his commitment to introduce relationships education in 2019; now it will hopefully be introduced in 2020.

Providing routes out of commercial sexual exploitation is also important. Solutions are required that provide wraparound care at the moment that a woman presents in crisis. The Modern Slavery (Victim Support) Bill, which proposes the provision of up to 12 months of rehabilitative care, recovery and support for victims, could be vital in ensuring that vulnerable women and girls are fully supported in their exit from prostitution.

In line with that, the Government need to properly fund sexual violence support services, such as Rape Crisis, which are struggling to keep up with demand. As the MP for Rotherham, I have witnessed to what happens when, confronted with the evidence of widespread sexual abuse, those in authority have looked away; when they have described exploitation as a choice; when they have dismissed it, or minimised it; and when they have known about it but failed to do all they could to prevent it.

We have a duty to act now, not to look away. It is time for this Government to recognise that prostitution is a form of violence against women and girls. I urge the Minister to legislate now to end demand by criminalising those who pay for sex and by closing the loophole that enables websites to facilitate abuse. Being abused is not a choice, but our seeming indifference to it is.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Before I call the next Member, Fiona Bruce, I will just say that I do not intend to put a formal time limit on speeches. I think everyone will have time to speak, provided that they bear in mind that I intend to call the first winding-up speech at 3.28 pm. Members therefore have about six or so minutes, without a formal time limit.

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[Victoria Atkins]

I am conscious of the independence of the researchers and of giving the research the weight and respect I hope and expect it to be given. I am a little bit cautious about trying to interfere. With my modern slavery responsibilities, I am conscious of the impact of sex trafficking on people in the NRM. There is that body of evidence there as well, and the hon. Lady is absolutely right to point it out.

I am conscious of time, and I want to give hon. Members time to respond.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

You don’t have to.

[Victoria Atkins]

I am grateful, Mr Paisley.

Members have spoken compellingly about what can be done by criminal gangs who traffic and pimp women. We are looking at whether prohibition is the most effective policy response to that. We know there are some evaluations and research pointing to the benefits and negative impacts of the Nordic model. It is a contentious area, and a lot of conflicting and contradictory evidence is cited on both sides of the debate. That is why I am currently having to tread the path that I am. As I say, we are doing more to develop our evidence base. We have commissioned research from the University of Bristol. We anticipate that it will take a year to complete, with a final report expected in April next year. From that, we can look at the evidence and analyse what the best approach is.

As I have said, we know that the picture on prostitution has changed from what it was even just 10 years ago. We need to understand the nature and scale of the issue, so that we understand the potential consequences, both intended and unintended, of any changes to legislation.

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[Sarah Champion]

I will give my time to the Minister, because I would really like her to answer three questions. First, will she legislate to ensure that websites cannot financially benefit from exploited women? Secondly, will she stop criminalising women who are forced into prostitution? Thirdly, will she criminalise both the buyers and those who force women, and benefit from forcing women, into prostitution?

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

The Minister has two and a half minutes.

[Victoria Atkins]

I am so sorry—I was unable to note all the questions. I suspect and hope that this is the first of a programme of debates that we will have on this issue in the period while the research is being developed. May I take those questions away? The hon. Lady will appreciate that I cannot commit to legislate on my feet in Westminster Hall—would that it were so—but I undertake to write to her on those points. She knows, given the work that she has done in other areas and on other matters, that I am always more than willing to listen; indeed, it is my privilege to do so. I will take away her questions and consider them, and we will see where we get to.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered tackling demand for commercial sexual exploitation.

Harassment in Public Life

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Gentleman refers to the language used. The point I have made in my statement and in answer to questions is that we should all—media companies, too—consider very carefully the sort of language used in our debates. I would also ask him to consider very carefully some of the language used by those on the shadow Front Bench about some of my fellow MPs on the Government Benches. We have to be very careful about the type of language used, not just by media companies but by individuals in this House.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

I welcome the Home Secretary’s comments about language. It was not social media that made, carried or celebrated a massive banner at the Gay Pride celebrations in Trafalgar Square this summer proclaiming—I spell out the word—“F-u-c-k the DUP”, but an identifiable individual, reported to the CPS and the Metropolitan police, whom I could name but will not. The report referred to by the Home Secretary claims:

“We are persuaded that the CPS guidelines are reasonable and proportionate.”

The fact of the matter is that if such a banner was carried in any other jurisdiction of the United Kingdom that person would have met the test and would have been prosecuted and probably fined. I hope the Home Secretary will consider legislative change to lower the threshold, so such crimes can be dealt with properly by the police and the CPS. I hope she will also consider an additional tariff on a person’s sentence if a public representative is attacked verbally or abused physically.

[Amber Rudd]

I am not familiar with the individual case the hon. Gentleman raises, but if he would like to write to me about it I will certainly take a look at his recommendation. It is interesting to hear his view about the requirement for additional legislation. No doubt we will be looking at that when we consider the Committee’s responses.

Health, Social Care and Security

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin), I begin by thanking the good people of my constituency for returning me to this place. I pledge to continue to work as hard for them as I can.

We lost two good people of Walthamstow during the election period, and I want to pay tribute to them for their work in our local community: Eleanor Firman, who was a passionate campaigner, and Councillor Nadeem Ali, who had so much to give the country and whose life was brutally cut short. Both of them would have been joining me to look at this Queen’s Speech and asking what it could do for our local healthcare services. They would both have been passionate advocates for our campaign for the future of Whipps Cross hospital, 40% of whose buildings were built before the NHS came into existence. It treats 450 people every day at its A&E, the highest figure in the country. If ever there was a group of NHS workers who deserved a pay rise, it is the nurses and doctors there. That is why I and many others on the Opposition Benches are rightly furious when we hear the Government saying that they have got the message but see that they are not acting.

Over the past seven years, we have seen how austerity has torn the social and economic fabric of our country, and we can now see how threadbare things are. We look at the Queen’s Speech and see a need to echo the call for investment in policing. We have a massive amount of gang crime in Walthamstow, and the cuts that the Government are talking about simply will not help. Many of my constituents have raised deep concerns about education and school funding cuts, as they see teachers having to buy goods for their schools. They see the rising levels of personal debt and, like my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue), they are worried about that. They also see the sustainability and transformation plans ruining our NHS.

What is missing from this Queen’s Speech is as important as what is in it. The Government say that they are committed to equality, but many of us know that the fight for equality is not just about defending existing rights but about the advances that need to be made. It is women from Northern Ireland who will pay the price for the coalition deal that the Government have made unless we in this House speak up. The ruling in June this year was very clear that those women were being discriminated against as UK taxpayers in their access to abortion rights. The Secretary of State, whatever his personal views on the matter, has the ability to provide the funding to enable those women to access services here. Thousands of women have to travel from Northern Ireland, and I do not understand why a decision made in Belfast should influence what happens in my hospital in Walthamstow or in other hospitals across this country.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

I respect the hon. Lady’s genuine interest in this subject, but it is important for the House to recognise that this is not a matter for Belfast; it is a matter for NHS England.

[Stella Creasy]

The hon. Gentleman and I are on the same side in agreeing that it is for English and Welsh MPs to decide what happens in English and Welsh hospitals. The Secretary of State needs to listen to the opinions of Members on both sides of the House and act accordingly.

Criminal Finances Bill

Ian Paisley Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq). I will take this opportunity to respond to the many points that have been raised in this debate. It is a regret that the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) is not in her place, but it is for fully understandable reasons. I pay tribute to her for the work she has done in campaigning for tax transparency, and I send her my best wishes at this time.

Let me now turn to the main thrust of this debate. What has dominated our proceedings is this question of whether our British overseas territories and Crown dependencies should have public registers of beneficial ownership. I am a supporter of transparency. I was the first Member of this House to publish my expenses—long before that was required. It was not a popular thing to do at the time, but I am a great believer in transparency. I learned that from my time in the Scottish Parliament, because I am also a great believer in respecting devolution and respecting constitutional arrangements.

Let me say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) that we have not changed our ambition. Our ambition is still to have public registers of beneficial ownership in the overseas territories and Crown dependencies. I repeated that to the leaders of those territories and dependencies just two weeks ago, but how we get there is where there are differences. We must recognise that, ever since David Cameron held that anti-corruption summit, we have come a long way—I am not sure whether it is 90%, 89%, or 85%. I do not know the percentage—I did not do the same course as the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton. None the less, we now have a commitment to keep either central registers or linked registers. My hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) needs to recognise that it is perfectly possible to link registers and to interrogate them centrally. We aim to fulfil that commitment by June 2017.

We are also committed to allowing our law enforcement agencies to have automatic access to those registers. We already do that in some of those territories, with requests coming back within hours. As a Home Office Minister, I am charged with ensuring that we see off organised crime, tackle corruption, and deal with money laundering. I believe that our arrangements do allow us to deal with potential crime and tax evasion. If I did not think that, I would not be here making the point that now is not the time to impose that on our overseas territories and Crown dependencies. I have faith that, at the moment, the capabilities of our law enforcement agencies enable us to interrogate those systems and to follow up and prosecute those people who encourage tax evasion not only in this country, but in other countries. This Bill gives us that extra territorial reach that many other countries do not have.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Can the Minister give the House a categorical assurance that none of the money made from ill-gotten gains of criminal activity, through fuel fraud in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, is illicitly put into those countries?

[Mr Wallace]

We find criminals using banking systems all over the world to hide their money, whether that is in Northern Ireland, London, the Republic of Ireland, Crown dependencies or elsewhere. Such places have agreed to work with our law enforcement agencies, and we will allow their law enforcement agencies access to our databases in order to follow up such activity.

The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton underplays the success of the United Kingdom’s leadership role. Without imposing on democratically elected Governments in those countries and without imposing our will in some sort of post-colonial way, we have achieved linked registers and access to registers for our law enforcement agencies across many Crown dependencies and overseas territories. We might compare ourselves with our nearest neighbours, the major economies—with all due respect, I do not mean Christmas Island—such as Germany and other European neighbours such as Spain. We are the ones with a public register and we, not them, are the ones ready to have a unified central register. Perhaps we should start by looking at the major economies, rather than sailing out on a gunboat to impose our will on overseas territories that have done an awful lot so far in getting to a position in which I am confident that our law enforcement agencies can bring people to justice. That is the fundamental point of this principle. We have not abandoned our ambition. We have decided that the way to do it is not to impose our will on overseas territories.

The Labour party’s new clause 17 is probably constitutionally bankrupt, if I may use that phrase. It would certainly cause all sorts of problems, although I am not sure that we can actually impose our will on a Crown dependency like that. All the good words of the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton seem to have disappeared because the new clause leaves out overseas territories and would apply only to Crown dependencies. If Labour Members think that such a provision is right for Crown dependencies, why is it not right for overseas territories? I do not understand why they have left that out, although I suspect it is because, when it really comes to it, Labour Members do not know what they are talking about. If the Labour party wanted to be successful with this, it might have done it in its 13 years in Government.

I respect devolution and constitutional arrangements, and it is important to do that at this stage. Crucially, if we do this in partnership, we will get there. When we see people being prosecuted and the system of information exchange between law enforcement agencies working, we will have arrived at a successful point. I am confident that we will get there. I do not shy away from telling the overseas territories and Crown dependencies that our ambition is for transparency but, first and foremost, our ambition is for a central register that is easily interrogated by our law enforcement agencies.

Police Officer Safety

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch]

We have heard from Members on both sides of the House about the increased complexity surrounding crime, and the different types of crime with which the police are having to deal while also weathering truly staggering cuts. As a result, they are naturally more vulnerable when doing their work on the streets of all our constituencies.

When officers are deployed on their own, are they really equipped to deal with an incident when they arrive? The use of Tasers is probably a debate for another day, but, again, I ask the Minister to think about the package of measures that is needed to give officers every opportunity to manage the risks to which they are exposed on the front line. The provision of more widely available Taser units, with the training to accompany that responsibility, could be one of those measures.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

The extent of the problem is indeed startling. I have obtained some statistics, because we take measurements in Northern Ireland. Between 2014 and 2016, a quarter of all police officers serving there—1,631—were assaulted, and nearly 500 have been assaulted in the current year. Those are atrocious figures. The Government must tell the Northern Ireland Administration, and chief constables throughout the United Kingdom, that they need to recruit more officers, and judges must impose stiff sentences on people who are caught and found guilty of such crimes.

[Holly Lynch]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that staggering and depressing intervention. We have seen what he has described far too often, and the statistics are very serious. I hope that the Minister will respond with what could be easy and effective ways of dealing with sentencing to ensure that the greatest possible deterrents exist. We quite often see repeat offenders, and that cannot be allowed to continue. We must give police officers every protection that we can possibly provide.

What additional protections might officers need? Perhaps controversially, I want to refer to spit hoods. I am all for informed debate about the issue, but the truth is that if people are politically uncomfortable about spit hoods, I can promise them that somewhere, right now, there is a police officer who is being spat at and who is even more uncomfortable. As well as being thoroughly unpleasant, spitting blood and saliva at another human being can pose a real risk of transmission of a range of infectious diseases, some with life-changing or even lethal consequences. We have a duty of care to protect officers from that, whenever possible.

The Centre for Public Safety has published a briefing on the issue, and I thank it for the work that it has done in this regard. The briefing cited a recent occasion on which the Metropolitan police were called to a disturbance and arrested a 20-year-old woman on suspicion of a public order offence. The woman, who had hepatitis B, then bit her own lip and spat blood at three officers who had to be taken to hospital for anti-viral treatment. Anti-viral treatments are not guaranteed to prevent the transmission of infectious diseases, and an officer may have to endure a wait of over six months to find out whether the treatment has been successful.

EU Referendum: UK-Ireland Border

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Dr McDonnell]

I agree with my colleague that there is potentially a pulling apart and a disconnect here; I certainly share that anxiety. We should all work and do all we can to ensure that this does not do too much damage.

My point is that if we fail to plan, we plan to fail. This situation has to be managed meticulously, in the finer detail. My sense over the last week was that in the light of the referendum, there were little or no plans in Whitehall. I mean no disrespect to anybody, because the vote to leave was not the expected result, but there was no negotiation strategy. There was not even a negotiating team.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr McDonnell]

Sorry, I only have 30 seconds. There was no negotiating team and very few with the experience required. The same situation applied in Brussels, where there was no plan A, never mind a plan B. There are various attitudes among the 27 member states left towards Britain and the divorce. Negotiations can work if they are approached constructively and positively, but aggression and insults can be counterproductive. I thank my colleagues the hon. Members for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) and my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan)—