Jess Phillips: Obviously, this is not a situation that anyone would want to be in. I want to understand exactly how the commissioners will work. While everyone is making party political points, it is actually the people of Birmingham who vote for the council and who have put those people in place. Will the citizens of the city get any intervention in this process? How are their feelings going to be heard,...
Jess Phillips: Obviously, this is not a situation that anyone would want to be in. I want to understand exactly how the commissioners will work. While everyone is making party political points, it is actually the people of Birmingham who vote for the council and who have put those people in place. Will the citizens of the city get any intervention in this process? How are their feelings going to be heard,...
Jess Phillips: Rapes at knifepoint are at a record high this year. The number of cases has more than doubled since 2015. I am currently supporting a case of a woman violently raped using weapons, and the detective on the case told me that he is the only detective in his team working on serious sexual violence. The Police Foundation describes the current number of detectives as a “chronic shortage”,...
Jess Phillips: Rapes at knifepoint are at a record high this year. The number of cases has more than doubled since 2015. I am currently supporting a case of a woman violently raped using weapons, and the detective on the case told me that he is the only detective in his team working on serious sexual violence. The Police Foundation describes the current number of detectives as a “chronic shortage”,...
Jess Phillips: I want to lend my voice to what has already been said by Members, especially by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller). She and I came to the issue of NDAs together in one of the most egregious cases—the case of Zelda Perkins, who has already been mentioned and who suffered for years in silence. In that case and others that I have seen, certainly, around Oxford...
Jess Phillips: I did not say that it did.
Jess Phillips: I did not say that the law said that, although incidentally Zelda Perkins’s NDA did say that. I do not know what is written in all the NDAs in the country, although I have quite a lot in my inbox, so I have an idea of some of the things that people get asked for. Of course what the Minister describes is illegal, but it is not illegal to say, “You can’t speak about this. You can’t...
Jess Phillips: Hear, hear. The data laid out by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke made it very clear not just the gender imbalance in those affected by NDAs, but that black women are much more greatly affected.
Jess Phillips: The right hon. Lady is absolutely right. I have met women who said, “I can’t tell the police. I can’t speak to people.” I am, like, “You can.” I had to get the Speaker to write a legal letter saying that people could speak about this to their Member of Parliament. My time is up, but I think I have made my point. I finish with this: we rely on media organisations to do the work of...
Jess Phillips: I believe Birmingham is quite badly affected, if the Secretary of State would like to come and hang out with us. I have a number of schools in my constituency that have RAAC confirmed, and some where it is suspected. One particular concern of the headteachers is that they are this week expecting Ofsted to come in, having had to completely redo all their timetables and change all their...
Jess Phillips: I believe Birmingham is quite badly affected, if the Secretary of State would like to come and hang out with us. I have a number of schools in my constituency that have RAAC confirmed, and some where it is suspected. One particular concern of the headteachers is that they are this week expecting Ofsted to come in, having had to completely redo all their timetables and change all their...
Jess Phillips: Again: please see other debates from the past eight years about how important this issue is. At least my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham and I do not have to keep redrafting the amendments. I thank the people in the drafting office for all their help over the years with drafting the same amendment over and over again to put into Bills. The Government’s response to this amendment, based...
Jess Phillips: It is good that the Minister is referencing European human rights law, which parts of the Bill seek to undermine. It is good to see that he does not want to dissociate from this part of that law. I cannot bear to hear the excuse that this is going to take more time. The first case of a murderer who was given parental responsibility was raised in this House in 2016 by my hon. Friend the...
Jess Phillips: Does my hon. Friend agree that if we were to walk up to anybody in the street and ask them whether a murderous father could decide whether his children could go on holiday, they would think we were mad? Yet that is so clearly the case.
Jess Phillips: I just gently point out the reason that I think nobody has been detained or deported in that period. It is because there is nowhere to detain them; there is no space in the detention estate.
Jess Phillips: He is aware.
Jess Phillips: I do not really need any notes, because I am about to make a briefer than normal speech that I have made what feels like a hundred times. One day, what we are asking for will happen. I cannot stress enough the importance of the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham about the need for a firewall between immigration services and the police. At the moment, we say, largely to women,...
Jess Phillips: Has my hon. Friend, like me, found that when councils and sometimes health authorities are dealing with adult victims of domestic abuse, they feel they should commission specific services, yet when children are victims of domestic abuse, sexual abuse or other crimes, the authorities feel that responsibility should immediately fall to children’s safeguarding, which provides absolutely no...
Jess Phillips: I cannot stress enough how disappointing it is that somebody has to stand up in this place every single time and say that there is not the data to tell us about these sorts of abuses. There is almost no proper data. In every inquiry, every domestic homicide review, every serious case review and every child sex abuse inquiry where we have all been through the wringer, the same thing gets said...
Jess Phillips: I absolutely agree. So much attention is given in our country to who exactly the perpetrators of sexual abuse are, but it is often not based on data. We need to know where our children are safe. I want to know where my children are safe. I just want to know where the best places are for me to allow them to go— institutions, for example. No one is asking for it to be historical; we are all...
