Home Affairs, Health and Education (EU Sub-Committee F): UK’s 2014 Opt-out Decision (Protocol 36).
Witnesses: (at 11.00am) Keir Starmer QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, Crown Prosecution Service; and (at 12.00pm) Commander Allan Gibson, Association of Chief Police Officers; William Hughes, former Director General of the Serious Organised Crime Agency; Aled Williams, former President of Eurojust; and Mike Kennedy, former President of Eurojust and former Chief Operating Officer at Crown Prosecution...
Steve Rotheram: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin. On 19 December 2012, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, issued interim guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media. It was a welcome move in the right direction and I hope that Parliament and the judiciary will study internet abuse more closely and begin, as I have been urging...
Baroness Northover: ...colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell. The Government are also frustrated, as was the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, by the lack of prosecutions in the past 25 years. We welcome the fact that Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who published a CPS action plan in November, is seeking to improve prosecutions for FGM. As the noble Baroness will know, a major new programme...
Nicola Blackwood: ..., and prosecutions in Rochdale and Keighley and excellent work in Lancashire show that we are getting our act together. That is not, however, always the case and it is certainly not the perception. Keir Starmer made it clear just days ago that traditional tests by the Crown Prosecution Service to evaluate witnesses have the potential to leave this category of vulnerable witnesses...
Edward Timpson: ..., I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon, who has pursued with aplomb the issue with which the new clause deals. I also thank the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, for the work he has done during his tenure. He and my hon. Friend have made a valuable contribution. For far too long, vulnerable victims and witnesses have felt intimidated and...
Jane Ellison: ...years of this being an illegal act, there have been no prosecutions. In recent times—I will return to the mental health aspects in a moment, Mr Deputy Speaker—we have had encouragement because Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has been really good on this issue. He has a new action plan for the Crown Prosecution Service. It has reopened several old cases and is going...
Justice: The work of the Crown Prosecution Service.
Witnesses: Keir Starmer, QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, Crown Prosecution Service
Lord Wallace of Tankerness: My Rt. Hon Friend the Attorney-General (Dominic Grieve) has made the following written ministerial statement. On 26 January 2012, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC announced that he had asked Her Majesty's Crown Prosecution Inspectorate (HMCPSI) to consider the way in which the prosecution team conducted the disclosure exercise in the case of R v Mouncher and others,...
Dominic Grieve: On 26 January 2012, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, announced that he had asked Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Inspectorate (HMCPSI) to consider the way in which the prosecution team conducted the disclosure exercise in the case of R v. Mouncher and others, following the discontinuance of the trial on 1 December 2011. The HMCPSI’s independent review has examined...
Ann Coffey: ...’t want to. I didn’t want to report the abuse but I was told I had to. It just feels like everything’s my fault and I wish I had never told anyone.” I welcome the new guidelines issued by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, on cases involving child sexual abuse, which he said would ensure that the focus was on allegations made by victims, rather than their weaknesses...
David Burrowes: .... They were united in calling for clarity from the Attorney-General about the policy on contraventions of the Abortion Act. We look forward to that clarity coming from the Attorney-General today. Keir Starmer, the DPP, recognised in his article on Monday that “this country has a strong tradition of open and transparent criminal justice, and the probing and debating of prosecutorial...
Lord Giddens: ...’s victims included quite a number of boys under the age of 10, so it will not do to concentrate only on one sex when discussing this issue. Thirdly, we need to hammer home the point made by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, that this is not just a problem for the CPS and the police. That is precisely because it is essentially an institutional problem—an issue, in...
Jim Allister: Going back to the comments of Keir Starmer, does the Minister think that the term of reference that says: "make recommendations on the future actions required to prevent and tackle child sexual exploitation" is adequate to permit a recommendation that, as Mr Starmer suggested, failure to report child sex abuse should be made a criminal offence? Is that term of reference adequate for that,...
Oliver Heald: The Government takes the effective prosecution of rape and domestic violence cases very seriously. The former Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, met with the Home Office, national policing leads and other interested parties in September 2013 to consider the reduction in the number of cases referred by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging decision. The six...
Lilian Greenwood: Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman agree with the recent recommendation made by the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, that teachers and health workers who fail to report reasonable suspicions of child abuse should face criminal prosecutions? Will he produce guidance for schools on what constitutes reasonable suspicion?
Edward Leigh: ...fact that, although Operation Monto revealed that such abortions were taking place on a considerable scale, a derisory number of prosecutions have taken place—only seven in four years? Indeed, Keir Starmer, the former head of the CPS, decided not to prosecute when there was clear evidence on the basis of which he could have done so. Will the Attorney-General now take action to ensure...
Baroness Tonge: ...has campaigned on this issue and constantly drawn attention to this dreadful abuse. Some 18 months ago, my all-party group suggested that we had a meeting with the Director of Public Prosecutions—Keir Starmer, at the time—to discuss why no prosecutions were taking place. He organised a round-table meeting; Jane Ellison, the chair of the all-party group on FGM, came to it, as did many...
Dominic Grieve: ..., for the independent Bar that does their work. I would be happy to write to my hon. Friend with further details of how this monitoring is carried out. The previous Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, made a very particular point in the first year that I was working with him in carrying out an extensive review of the performance of Crown prosecutors. This is monitored and it is...
Oliver Heald: In September the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Keir Starmer, chaired a meeting with the Home Office and national police leaders, the outcome of which was a six-point action plan to investigate and increase the number of rape and domestic violence cases that are referred by the police to the CPS for charging decisions.
Baroness Tonge: ...was one on female genital mutilation, which is more and more common in this country and more and more difficult to spot. There is a lot of work going on, and I pay tribute to the previous DPP, Keir Starmer, who did an enormous amount of work to find ways of spotting girls at risk of FGM before it occurs. Last year, we did a report called, A Childhood Lost, about childhood marriage, which...
