Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Part of Orders of the Day – in the House of Commons at 7:36 pm on 8 October 2007.

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Photo of David Lepper David Lepper Labour, Brighton, Pavilion 7:36, 8 October 2007

I shall be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wish to confine my remarks to clauses 64 to 66 in part 6, which deal with extreme pornographic material.

Jane Longhurst, my constituent, was a respected and dedicated teacher at a school for children with learning difficulties in my constituency. It happens to be the last school where I taught before I retired from teaching, but we did not work there at the same time. Obviously, Jane's murder caused concern throughout the whole community. During the trial of Graham Coutts, there was horror at the revelations about how she had died and the circumstances surrounding her death. Everyone was shocked.

I believe that it is because of the determination of Jane's mother, Liz Longhurst, and other members of her family and the responsiveness of Ministers of this Government that those clauses are before us tonight. I welcome that. Liz Longhurst decided that her daughter's death should not go unmarked and that the extreme pornographic images that had fuelled the fantasies of the man who was twice tried for Jane Longhurst's murder—the family had to go through the horror of a trial twice—had to be dealt with. She launched a campaign, which, I am glad to say, received the backing of Amnesty International as part of its campaign against violence against women.

The campaign, aspects of which I am sure my hon. Friend Martin Salter will want to discuss if he has the opportunity, received the backing of local newspapers. I must pay tribute to The Argus newspaper, published in my constituency, and particularly to Phil Mills, who was its chief crime reporter, although sadly no longer.

The campaign led to a 50,000-signature petition calling for action being presented in the House. There has been determination on the part of Mrs. Longhurst—the fact that we are discussing the issue is a tribute to her—and on the part of many of the predecessors of those on the Government Front Bench. I pay particular tribute to the former Home Secretaries, my right hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) and for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) for the sympathetic way in which they listened to the case for legislation that we put to them. I also pay tribute to other Ministers who have dealt with the matter—in particular my hon. Friend Paul Goggins and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend Mr. Coaker.

We were determined that something should be done to tackle the pernicious trade in violent internet pornography. I welcome the way in which the Government have responded to the campaign. The provisions before us tonight do not go as far as many of us want, but they tackle an important aspect of the issue: the possession of those awful images. In doing so, they fulfil one of the requirements that the Lord Chancellor said in his opening remarks is an underlying principle of the Bill: to make sure that the law keeps pace not only with changing patterns of crime, but with technology and the way in which it affects patterns of crime. I wish we had proposals before us tonight to tackle at source the internet sites that purvey this material. However, that needs a degree of international co-operation which, sadly, despite the determination of Ministers, we have not yet been able to achieve—in the same way as we have achieved international co-operation to tackle child pornography. That is a further stage of the campaign.

The provisions do tackle possession. I ask the House to consider the comments of Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and, at the time he made the comments, the lead for the Association of Chief Police Officers in this area of criminality. He said:

"Legislation is only truly effective if it develops step by step with technological advances."

The provisions start to address the issue of how the internet can be used to supplement this area of criminality and build on the fundamentals of obscene publications legislation.