Part of Solicitor General – in the House of Commons at on 13 November 2025.
Helen Grant
Shadow Solicitor General
I also welcome the right hon. Lady to her place. She is the third Solicitor General I have sat opposite in the past 12 months, and I look forward to working with her constructively where we can and to having healthy debate in this Chamber in the weeks and months to come.
I associate myself with the right hon. Lady’s remarks on the sad passing of Baroness Newlove. I had the honour of working with her when I was the Victims Minister. She was a great champion of victims and she will be sadly missed.
Violence against women and girls is a scourge. It wrecks families and ruins lives. One of the most sickening aspects of it is cruelty to and abuse of children. There is currently no national mechanism to track down and monitor serious child cruelty offenders after service of their sentences. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, Jake Richards, said this of the Sentencing Bill on Report:
“A problem in the system has been identified, and we are determined to fix it. It simply cannot be right that some horrific child abusers can have access to children—to live with children or work with children—at the end of their sentences without any system of monitoring or notification”.—[Official Report,
Vol. 774, c. 409.]
The Minister went on to welcome the offer of cross-party talks and promised to work “at speed” to establish a child cruelty register. Can the Solicitor General please update the House on what concrete steps have been taken since then?
Secretary of State was originally the title given to the two officials who conducted the Royal Correspondence under Elizabeth I. Now it is the title held by some of the more important Government Ministers, for example the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
Ministers make up the Government and almost all are members of the House of Lords or the House of Commons. There are three main types of Minister. Departmental Ministers are in charge of Government Departments. The Government is divided into different Departments which have responsibilities for different areas. For example the Treasury is in charge of Government spending. Departmental Ministers in the Cabinet are generally called 'Secretary of State' but some have special titles such as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ministers of State and Junior Ministers assist the ministers in charge of the department. They normally have responsibility for a particular area within the department and are sometimes given a title that reflects this - for example Minister of Transport.
