Jess Phillips: I absolutely agree. There is undoubtedly a pattern with cuckooing. Funnily enough, one of the other things we do not define in law, which I am hoping goes through in the Victims and Prisoners Bill, is child criminal exploitation. Apparently the really important grooming gangs in those cases we do not consider important enough to define in law. Let us hope that that changes as these many Bills...
Jess Phillips: I will speak to new clauses 27 to 29. I do not disagree on the issue. I worked very closely with the families to get Clare Wade’s review up and running under the then Lord Chancellor, the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland)—who I believe was just speaking in the Chamber, making a nuisance of himself today as well. While we are making these changes, I...
Jess Phillips: I feel I know what grooming is, but, on the Minister’s earlier point about the Court of Appeal reducing the sentence, without a proper definition of grooming or at least a working definition in secondary legislation or regulation, are we not at risk of appeal? I do not know whether she or any of us has sat through a lot of court cases like this, but the idea that there is heavy knowledge in...
Jess Phillips: Continuously, yes.
Jess Phillips: You would be lucky.
Jess Phillips: I will intervene.
Jess Phillips: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship once again, Ms Bardell. I am pleased that the Minister leaned on it being a year on from the child abuse inquiry—not one of whose recommendations, I think it is fair to say, has yet come to fruition. Well, hope springs eternal for this year! There are plenty of recommendations for the Government to crack on with in this regard, and I look...
Jess Phillips: With regard to that particular case, the Minister is absolutely right. It would seem that somebody could use reasonable force to get Lucy Letby there. The fact that she is a woman and the vast majority of the security staff in the court would be men would, I imagine, make them pause with concern as employers. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East just pointed out to me that these court...
Jess Phillips: On a technical point, could this technology also be used to find witnesses on the bus, for example? I do not expect the Minister to know the answer to that question, but just to add a bit more enthusiasm to his love of this technology, I can see that there might be such uses for it.
Jess Phillips: An education, Minister!
Jess Phillips: The point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) made is far more eloquent than mine. The Minister is clearly very enthusiastic and learned about this issue. When he was talking about how live facial recognition does not rely on DVLA data or any photographic data at all, the Minister said that we just need a list. What does that rely on, then? It must rely on some sort of...
Jess Phillips: You shock me!
Jess Phillips: I seek clarity. There is a load of big kitchen knives on the wall in my house, and I can see them when I walk in. I deal with the issue of violence in a domestic setting all the time, but would that count?
Jess Phillips: I believe in so many principles that I know in reality cannot be realised. I believe in the principle that when someone is in crisis with suicide, there should be a telephone line that I can call that means that they get what we used to call—because it used to exist—a safe and well check. I have done that many times myself. I believe in principle that that should happen. If a Minister...
Jess Phillips: I didn’t have those either.
Jess Phillips: I am not offended by the fundamentals of the clause—the idea that everybody is drug-tested. I can foresee possible abuses of the discretion that the Minister described, and I will not be surprised in a couple of years’ time if that discretion is used with black people more than it is with white people, for example, but time will tell. Let us have the triumph of hope over experience that...
Jess Phillips: During the evidence sessions it was made very clear, by both experts in the field and the police officers, that currently there is absolutely no possibility of this resource being available. Will the Minister please outline what resources the Home Office will put in place to ensure that the drug testing that he is rightly outlining will be able to take place?
Jess Phillips: I thank the Minister for that and am fully in favour of more drug support services. What I was asking was whether the police have the resources to undertake the drug testing that the clause outlines. The police said no; this is not about whether somebody then gets referred on—the police, in the evidence session, said no. The Casey review into the Metropolitan police last year found that...
Jess Phillips: Okay. There are just not the clinical resources in police stations currently. Will the Minister outline how the testing will be funded?
Jess Phillips: It is not officers—it’s forensics.
