Success over data-sharing but secret inquests remain
March 26, 2009 12:22 PM
Originally published by UK Liberal Democrats
Originally published by UK Liberal Democrats
David Howarth
David Howarth gets mixed results over attempts to amend Coroners and Justice Bill at report stage
Liberal Democrat MPs, led by David Howarth, the party's Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, have been trying to improve the Government's new Coroners and Justice Bill, which includes measures ranging from data-sharing between government departments to gay hate laws to witness protection.
Use of juries in inquests
During day one of report stage debate on the Bill (Monday 23rd March) David Howarth argued that it was wrong to allow inquests to be held without juries when a person has died at the hands of the state.
David said juries were a crucial part of delivering public confidence in the judicial system but, for some reason, the Government had concluded they were dangerous outsiders. "It is as if the world could be divided into the reliable and the unreliable, and the easiest way, according to the Government, of finding out whether somebody is reliable or unreliable is to ask whether they are a servant of the state. If they are a servant of the state they are presumed to be reliable, and if they are an ordinary member of the public, they are presumed to be unreliable. That has only to be stated to demonstrate how ridiculous the position is."
David said the debate came down to this crucial question: "if the process now proposed by the Government had been in place in the past 10 years, would it have affected important inquests such as the de Menezes inquest? Would the Government have asked for the jury to be removed?" He said he had no doubt that they would have asked for that and that there would have been more inquests held without juries.
David's amendment to remove this proposal from the Bill gained the support of Conservatives and a handful of Labour backbenchers as well as Liberal Democrat MPs, but fell by 263 votes to 229.
Data-sharing
There was better news on day two of debate on the Bill, when the Government performed a u-turn and adopted a Lib Dem amendment to remove from the Bill potentially far-reaching proposals on data-sharing.
Welcoming the Government's backdown, David Howarth said:
"The Government are entirely right to withdraw the data-sharing proposals, which were far too broad for the problem that they were meant to solve. As Ministers repeatedly said, some data sharing can be beneficial. No one denied that; the question was about the power that had been created to deal with that particular point. The Bill proposed... to allow orders from the Secretary of State to permit data sharing between any people anywhere in the world, for the purposes of furthering any Government policy. The orders were capable of overriding the Data Protection Act 1998, the Human Rights Act 1998 and any other relevant legislation. That final point, especially the possibility that the data-sharing orders would override the Data Protection Act, was the key problem and the point at which the Government rightly decided to give way. Clause 154 - or clause 152, as it was - was never proportionate and never had adequate safeguards."
Evan Harris spoke in support of two amendments he had tabled. Pointing out that there was a significant amount of contracting out of public functions to private data controllers, he argued that there should "be no exemption or lower degree of protection in respect of the powers of the Information Commissioner in those cases".
Gay hatred laws
Earlier MPs had debated parts of the Bill designed to criminalise incitement to hatred over sexual orientation and where the line should fall with regard to the right to free speech. The Government is proposing reversing a measure inserted into last year's Criminal Justice and Immigration Act by Tory former home secretary Lord Waddington that amended the legislation dealing with inciting hatred on grounds of sexual orientation to allow for "discussion or criticism" of sexual practices.
David Howarth said the Government were right to be proposing the removal of the 'Waddington amendment' which was "either useless or dangerous". But they were wrong to offer nothing in its place.
To meet this need, David proposed a new clause to the Bill to "meet head-on the problem of mistaken interpretations that lead to fruitless and distressing investigations. It would do so by requiring the Director of Public Prosecutions to issue guidance to prosecutors on the meaning of the offence, and crucially, it would require chief constables to make the content... of that guidance known to police officers. New clause 11 would also introduce a real free speech element by requiring the Attorney-General, whose consent is necessary for any prosecutions to go ahead, to have regard to all the relevant rights and freedoms in the Human Rights Act before giving that permission."
Responding for the Government, justice minister Bridget Prentice said she was "quite persuaded" by David Howarth's argument and invited him to meet with the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider whether it would be necessary to make the guidance statutory. In the light of this offer David withdrew his amendment.
A further new clause, proposed by both David Howarth and Evan Harris, was designed, in David's words, to ensure "that a particularly despicable form of homophobic intimidation comes within the meaning of "threatening" in the Act. That is the disgusting technique employed by certain political groups including the British National Party, alleging that gay people have a propensity to be paedophiles and commit offences against children. That particular form of intimidation is not just unpleasant but literally life-threatening."
The Minister argued that the amendment was unnecessary and this was not ultimately pushed to a vote.
A different amendment, proposed by a Labour backbencher, to keep the 'Waddington amendment' in place was defeated by 328 votes to 174.
Sentencing guidelines
Debate on the proposals in the Bill on sentencing was also led by the Liberal Democrats. David Howarth said that the party supported the Government's basic idea, that "we should provide for strengthened national powers for a body [the Sentencing Council] that includes judges and non-judges and lays down guidelines for sentencing. The underlying idea all along has been more consistency in sentencing and more understanding of the sentences that are passed."
But, said David, the difficulty arose with adding extra understanding to the aim of extra consistency. He said he wanted the guidelines "to help further the aim of turning the criminal justice system around so that its main purpose is to reduce reoffending by imposing sentences that work, as opposed to those that simply sound tough."
"I am fortified in my view by not only members of my party, but members of other parties in the House and members of the Justice Committee. Reducing reoffending should become a central aim of sentencing. Other matters cannot be ignored, but when reducing reoffending is ignored, the result is inevitably that crime is higher. There are more victims. The Government are right that victims and concern for them should be at the heart of the criminal justice system, but that must include potential victims. Only by reducing reoffending - most offending is committed by those who have done things in the past - do we genuinely put victims, especially potential victims, at the heart of the system."
To this end he proposed an amendment requiring the Sentencing Council to have regard to "the relative effectiveness of sentences in preventing re-offending." However this was not pressed to the vote.
Anonymous witnesses
The final part of the Bill to be debated was the part dealing with anonymous witnesses in court cases. David Howarth proposed a new clause to put into the Bill a mechanism under which independent or special counsel would be brought in to advise or help the court as it decided whether to make a witness anonymity order.
"One of the problems is that an anonymous witness might be prejudiced against the defendant in a way that would become clear only if the defence were able to cross examine them with the benefit of knowing who they were. ... In such circumstances, making a witness anonymity order might well be the wrong thing to do, but that point would not come out unless someone other than the prosecution had access to all the papers and could ask pertinent questions. Given the circumstances, that job clearly could not be done by the defence; that raises the possibility and in many cases the necessity of appointing special counsel to assist the court to do it."
The new clause was put to the vote but was defeated by 278 votes to 151.
Third reading
Liberal Democrat MPs voted against the Coroners and Justice Bill at third reading, forcing a division, but the Bill was passed by 283 votes to 62.
Explaining the reasons for the party's opposition, David Howarth said that while it was a better Bill than when it was introduced, especially after the removal of the information-sharing provisions, the proposed secret, juryless inquests were objectionable, and the rest of the Bill had scarcely been scrutinised at all.
Even more important for David was the issue of the law on murder. "The Bill reforms the whole law on murder, and the defences against it, but discussion in Committee revealed important weaknesses in the Government's approach to what is the most serious of crimes. We put forward an entirely different approach that took into account the Law Commission's original recommendations - which the Government ignored - and what was said in Committee. Those proposals have not been discussed at all."
David Heath, also speaking at third reading, welcomed changes to the coroner system being introduced by the Government. Citing the case of a family in his constituency who had to wait four and a half years for an inquest to be held he said he hoped that the Bill would "cure that chronic problem of delay in investigation and delay in inquests being held."
Simon Hughes focused on witness protection. He said that one of the tests of whether the Bill becomes decent legislation would be whether "all those who would like to give evidence but are frightened feel that they can do so." Simon said that information about the protection available to witnesses needed to be "clearly, simply and urgently disseminated - in particular that the witness protection service works, and works well."
The final speech in the debate was from Evan Harris, who said that it was "a pity that they failed on the fundamental question of Members being able to amend and debate important parts of the criminal law such as murder." He asked the Government to reflect on whether programme motions could be better used, in consultation with the opposition parties, to improve scrutiny of legislation.
Howarth
Heath
Hughes
Harris
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