Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Mike Penning and Maria Miller

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 5th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) was right. In objecting, he has given Parliament the proper opportunity to scrutinise the Bill. If he had not objected, the Bill would have gone through on the nod and the amendments we are debating today would not have been possible. The failings of the private Members’ Bill procedures are not for discussion on Report. No one, least of all me, is denying the need to address swiftly the wrongdoing of upskirting, but that should not be at the expense of proper scrutiny. We have to wake up to the need to jettison antiquated, opaque procedures in this place, procedures that in this instance I believe have left a respected and longstanding hon. Member, my friend and fellow Wessex Member of Parliament, open to hostile attack for acting to ensure that this new law is subject to appropriate levels of scrutiny.

As we have just heard from the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), the issues we are discussing today on upskirting are a part of far broader issues to do with image-based abuse and sexual harassment in public places. It is right that we address upskirting, but it is also right that we reject the piecemeal approach for dealing with these issues. The Women and Equalities Committee is looking at the issue of sexual harassment in public places. The hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) is in her place. We have taken copious amounts of evidence on this issue and we will be issuing a report in autumn dealing with many of the issues that the hon. Member for Walthamstow has raised today. The Government need a cohesive strategy in this area. I believe this piecemeal approach is not the right way forward. Indeed, if we had a cohesive strategy, we would not need this Bill.

In wanting to move so swiftly to change the law, the Government are right to use the existing Scottish legislation as its base. However, the Scottish Act was passed eight years ago, and in that time the Scottish Government have themselves recognised significant shortcomings in their own law and made changes, changes that are not reflected in the Bill before us today. The amendments tabled in my name and in the names of right hon. and hon. Members from across the Conservative party, the Liberal party, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National party and Labour seek to rectify those shortcomings and tackle the emerging problems that we are seeing with the Scottish legislation: very, very low levels of prosecutions and convictions, with legislation that has now been in place for eight years.

Amendment 3 makes all upskirting a crime. At the moment, the Bill is very narrowly defined. There should never be an instance when it is acceptable to take a photo up anyone’s skirt without their consent. The issue should be the lack of consent, not the motivation of the perpetrator. The perpetrator’s intentions can be difficult for the police to prove. Is it to humiliate? Is it to alarm? Is it to distress the victim? They may never know or care who the victim is. The picture may be shared for a laugh, or taken and sold and then sold on again. How do the police track the buyers and sellers of these photographs? The Bill explicitly does not outlaw upskirting per se; it outlaws it in certain circumstances.

[Sir Mike Penning]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend’s vitally important amendments. Looking at the evidence of what happened in Scotland, we see that the very low number of prosecutions—as low as three, I think—was partly because the intent of the upskirting could not be proved. Instead of the offence just being, “This is wrong, let’s prosecute”, the intent had to be proven. That was the problem with the Scottish legislation and why the number of prosecutions was so low. My right hon. Friend’s amendments will address that issue. If they are not accepted today, I hope this issue can be addressed in the other place once the Select Committee’s report comes out.

[Mrs Miller]

We have to make the law work in practice, as well as on paper. Like my right hon. Friend, I believe that because these things have been made so complex, the police are finding them difficult to implement. I am not sure that we have an investigation into that. The Minister may want to talk to us further about what she has found out from her Scottish colleagues, because I think they are looking at it in a lot of detail.

Employment Tribunals

Debate between Mike Penning and Maria Miller

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

I will raise the case of a constituent that has far-reaching concerns for those across the House. I have been joined by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who will probably intervene. The subject of the debate is an unfair dismissal tribunal.

My constituent Anna Hardie came to see me at my surgery. Her husband had been ill for some time. She was very worried because he was really stressed at work—I will not, in any way during this short debate, say who would have been right and who would have been wrong should the case have got to a tribunal for unfair dismissal—so they eventually decided as a family that he would leave that employment.

The family had financial commitments so Anna’s husband, Gordon, first wanted to get back into work. Then, Anna told me, they wanted to claim for unfair dismissal. Anna believed that they had actually submitted a case for unfair dismissal. It was a difficult time as her husband was very stressed and unwell when he came home from work, but she thought that that had happened. Gordon was 40 years of age. In January, he died of a heart condition, which Anna and some of the specialists feel was exacerbated by the stress.

Anna has a family and, as I am sure the Minister can imagine, it must have been an enormously stressful time for them. First they were worried about their finances and Gordon finding a new job, although he then found a new job. But they were still also worried about the tribunal. Then, of course, came the terrible situation of Gordon passing away at 40, which must have been absolutely appalling for the family. The autopsy clearly showed that he had an underlying condition, which is why he had been so tired and stressed when he came home from work.

Once Anna got her affairs together, she wanted to proceed with a constructive dismissal claim on behalf of her deceased husband. But when she went to the preliminary hearings, not only was she cross-examined by the company’s legal team—asking why she did not come forward earlier, whether her husband had really wanted to go for constructive dismissal and so on—at a time when she was still mourning and under a great deal of stress, but the judge also ruled that she was out of time. The time-barred rule had come in because the three-month limit had passed.

The judge did have a degree of ability to decide that the case could be heard and moved on to a tribunal because of the exceptional circumstances. However, I have learned that one of the problems is that there are different rules on exceptional circumstances rulings for judges at different tribunals, even those under the same Department. I would argue that, in natural justice—or just in humanity—someone who had been through such a traumatic time and lost their husband at such a young age would surely fit the criteria. But the judge ruled that Anna could not bring a claim, and the case was dismissed—without the judge hearing any evidence about what could have brought on some of the problems that led to Anna’s situation.

I am not going to say whether Anna would have won or lost if she had got to the tribunal—that is not for us to decide in this House. What we are looking for for our constituents is natural justice, and what Anna wants is not just natural justice for her, although we would like to meet the Minister to see whether there is an opportunity to take her claim forward. She can appeal the decision, but if the appeal is based on the same criteria, and possibly in front of the same judge she was in front of in the first place, the logic is that she will not be successful.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a compelling case for his constituent about the importance of access to justice. However, the case he makes about the time limit on accessing justice involves other groups of people as well, and particularly women who may be subject to discrimination at work and who may need to seek redress through a tribunal, but who have only three months to do that, when they may well be pregnant or have very small children. Does he agree that reviewing the three-month period could be an important thing for the Government to do?

[Mike Penning]

Absolutely. My right hon. Friend touches on exactly what I am coming to.

Because the different tribunals have different rules, it is really difficult to find out whether someone’s exceptional circumstances will be accepted. One thing Anna and I discussed in my surgery is what would happen if someone had had a nervous breakdown, had been sectioned or had been in a road traffic accident and was not well enough to make a claim in time. Would the judge rule that those were exceptional circumstances, or would the person be time-barred?

One thing the Minister should look at is simplifying the process—I had a preliminary conversation with her earlier, and she was very generous with her time with me. We should ask why there are so many different rules on this. I was lucky enough to be a Minister in the Justice Department and the Department for Work and Pensions—I have been a Minister in lots of Departments, although not now—and there are different tribunals in each of them. I thought this was an issue for the Justice Department when I discussed it with my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, but it has ended up with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, because that is the right place for it to be.

However, if we are going to have tribunals and natural justice, and if we are going to get this right, we should move from three months to six months so that people have time to mourn or to get well before they have to bring a claim. Then we should give the judges proper, simple guidance about what the exceptional circumstances would be if someone needed to appeal outside that time.

Six months would limit things quite a bit. I know there are arguments that people might forget what went on or that the company would be left in abeyance, but that is not going to happen a huge amount of times. What we are looking for is fairness and natural justice, and our constituents have the right to feel that justice has fitted them. I am not saying that Anna would have won or lost, but she never had the opportunity to stand up for her husband, and now she wants to stand up for others. I hope the Minister will spend some more time with me after the debate so that I can introduce her to Anna.

More importantly, I hope the Minister can try to change the system. I know how difficult it is to change the system. I have been a Minister—my right hon. Friend was a Secretary of State—and I know how many brick walls will come up. The Chinese walls and everything will come up, and there will be a million and one reasons why we cannot resolve this, but there is one reason why we should—and that is Gordon Hardie, Anna’s husband.