Tackling Child Sexual Abuse

Debate between Jeremy Wright and Jess Phillips

Tuesday 8th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Really working in partnership, and not just saying that we are, is important at the highest level, here in these buildings and in Whitehall. We have set up an inter-ministerial group—I am a member of it, together with the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby)—to ensure that we are working together. The level of engagement from Ministers and Secretaries of State, working through the Cabinet Office, has made it a pleasure to produce these documents. We have to make sure that this work is also happening locally. Measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to improve multi-agency working, and the reform of social work, will be vital to our finally getting a grip on this issue.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

I know that the Minister will join me in paying tribute to child sexual abuse specialist prosecutors, who deploy their considerable expertise to put together cases that can be based on complex and—as we have heard—very distressing evidence. Will the Minister make sure that a fair share of resources reach those prosecutors? She will recognise that just as the public expect child sexual abuse to be detected, they also expect it to be effectively prosecuted.

[Jess Phillips]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman makes a really good point. The legal process is a forgotten part of the system; having worked for many years with Nazir Afzal, for example, who was the prosecutor on the Rochdale cases, I can say that those prosecutors can really be forgotten. We have asked the joint inspectorate to look specifically into the justice system and what needs to be done, but there are undoubtedly cases waiting in the long backlog because the prosecutors, defence and court space are not available. Dealing with that has to be part of a much bigger piece of work, but I will absolutely take away what the right hon. and learned Gentleman has said.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Jeremy Wright and Jess Phillips

Report stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

This has been quite topical this week. When we have things on any platform that is on our television, people absolutely have to have signed forms to say that they are a willing participant. It is completely regular within all other broadcast media that people sign consent forms and that people’s images are not allowed to be used without their consent.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

Yes, I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that useful addition to this debate, but it tends to clarify the point I was seeking to clarify, which is whether or not what the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North has in mind is to ensure that a platform would be expected to make use of those mechanisms that already exist in order to satisfy itself of the things that she rightly asks it to be satisfied of or whether something beyond that would be required to meet her threshold. If it is the former, that is manageable for platforms and perfectly reasonable for us to expect of them. If it is the latter, we need to understand a little more clearly how she expects a platform to achieve that greater assurance. If it is that, she makes an interesting point.

Finally, let me come to amendment 56, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie). Again, I have a practical concern. He seeks to ensure that the pornographic content is “taken as a whole”, but I think it is worth remembering why we have included pornographic content in the context of this Bill. We have done it to ensure that children are not exposed to this content online and that where platforms are capable of preventing that from happening, that is exactly what they do. There is a risk that if we take this content as a whole, it is perfectly conceivable that there may be content online that is four hours long, only 10 minutes of which is pornographic in nature. It does not seem to me that that in any way diminishes our requirement of a platform to ensure that children do not see those 10 minutes of pornographic content.