New Clause 6
Offender Management Bill
12:15 pm
Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow, Labour)
The new clauses deal with the supervision of people convicted of sex offences, especially those involving children. The Home Office has been conducting a review of how it deals with children sex offenders and as part of that there has been a lot of discussion, over the past year or two, about whether there should be more disclosure. I know that the Minister went to the US to examine what is known as Megan’s law as one way of trying to protect children. In this country, however, most of the organisations involved in child protection, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Barnardo’s, are not in favour of going down that road and are much more in favour of examining other ways to ensure that child sex offenders are properly supervised and do not become a danger to children again. The new clauses are directly relevant to that process.
A pilot project has been run. The new clauses appeared, more or less as they are now, in a Bill that was published by the Government in the 2004-05 parliamentary Session. That Bill began in the House of Lords, but it never completed its passage because of the 2005 general election, which meant, of course, that all the Bills at that time fell. When I examine the current Bill, I do not understand why the new clauses, which were in the Bill that was introduced before the 2005 general election, have disappeared, particularly when a pilot project has been run, using polygraph tests and involving 347 sex offenders who were monitored between September 2003 and September 2005.
Those tests were used to assess the offenders’ compliance with their licence conditions, whether they were behaving suspiciously and whether they were adhering to treatment plans and programmes. It seems that the findings of that pilot project were quite positive. In quite a significant number of cases, the offenders made some disclosures during the polygraph tests that were relevant to their behaviour, supervision or treatment that allowed case managers to make adjustments to their supervision or, in cases where it appeared that there might be an immediate risk, to take some action. It also appears that the probation staff who were involved in managing the pilot and acting as case managers during it found that the information that was gained from the polygraph tests was helpful in assessing and managing risks. It therefore seems right to examine those measures and to determine whether they should be inserted into the Bill. Perhaps the Minister will explain why it was felt appropriate to include them in the Bill that was introduced before the 2005 general election—presumably on the basis that the pilot project had appeared to work reasonably well—and not include them in the present Bill.
Organisations such as Barnardo’s, which has run a number of projects to help children who have been sexually abused or assaulted and their families, support the new clauses and think that they are a much better way of getting better supervision of child sex offenders who are released on license than going down the road of wide disclosure. There is evidence from the US that that process of disclosure does not work particularly well. Not as many child sex offenders in the US stay in touch with supervision as do here. There is also a quite serious risk in disclosure—one that is not often pointed out. Although there are obviously some extremely unpleasant cases where children are sexually assaulted by strangers, often the greatest risk of sexual assault and abuse of a child comes from a relative or someone else who is already known to the child or their family. That risk must be borne in mind, because the disclosure of the identities of offenders could lead, in some cases at least, to the victim also being easily identified. The route suggested in the new clauses is worth considering as a better way of getting supervision, particularly of child sex offenders who are out on licence, than some of the suggestions that have been made.