Home Affairs and Justice

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) and her concerns about electoral registration. I have the same problem in my constituency, with postal votes meaning that that ballot is not private in some families, and the people who lose their independence as a result are usually women. In my constituency, we have also seen a corruption of the electoral register, which has been exposed in a legal case and reflects fundamental flaws in the system. The Bill now before Parliament does not take is not taking such matters sufficiently seriously. The main issues that I wish to address have been influenced by what has happened in my constituency in the past 10 days as a series of incidents has shocked the people of Slough. About 100 yards from a poster saying ““Slough against knife crime””—the day before I had had my photograph taken in front of it—a woman was murdered and another person seriously wounded with a knife. That was probably related to a domestic incident. A couple of days later, the deputy mayor of Slough was shot, probably with a crossbow. Just a couple of days ago, a woman who was clearing the ice off her car was run over by someone who was trying to steal it. All those incidents happened within days of each other in my constituency. I can tell my constituents that their chances of being the victim of crime is lower now than at any time in the last 20 years, and that is true—but such incidents make them profoundly fearful about the rarest of crimes. Neighbourhood action groups are an important way for the community to express their concerns about crime to the police, and they are most worried about parking, criminal damage, graffiti and kids hanging about the streets, not the sort of incidents I have described. Those are the issues that get brought up, because they are more common in a community than the more violent ones that I have described, but the latter can create profound fear, and it is important to ask ourselves whether we are doing enough to deal with that. One of the things that would help—this is not a matter for legislation—is faster progress on the outer London allowance for police officers, so that the Metropolitan police stop stealing our officers. I have become a bore about that issue, but it is a serious matter for my constituency. Another thing that would help is effective punishment when people are convicted of crimes. I was glad to welcome the Justice Secretary and the Home Secretary to my constituency earlier this week. My right hon. Friends came as part of the relaunch of the scheme that means that people who are sentenced to serve community sentences can be seen to be serving them. I am confident that that will mean that instead of 12 young lads leaning on rakes and not doing very much in the local park—I know why they are there, but most of the general public probably think that their taxes are paying for them to be there—they can be made to do something other than lean on their rakes. Effective community sentencing is absolutely critical, but we need to deal with other kinds of sentence too. I am depressed about the slow progress being made on the Corston report. Women are, overwhelmingly, not violent offenders, yet they are disproportionately sentenced to jail, which is very ineffective in changing their behaviour and rehabilitating them. Jailing a mother is likely to create a future generation of criminals, so I hope that there will be faster progress on that matter in future. Another crime that we have experienced in Slough over the past year is people trafficking. One of the few convictions in Britain for child trafficking was in my constituency. I am glad that the police and the prosecution authorities took the matter seriously. When I talked to those involved it was clear to me that people trafficking has become the preferred profiteering mechanism for organised crime, over and above drug trafficking. It is more profitable. It is horrifying that a child is worth £100,000 a year to their trafficker for doing nothing more than begging and selling The Big Issue. I am referring to a real case. In a year, the controller of the child made that amount of profit from the child. We have to bear down more comprehensively and effectively on people trafficking, which is one of the reasons why I was glad to hear of the Home Secretary's commitment to sign the convention very soon. However, we need more effective policing, so I was disappointed to learn that the Metropolitan police, having taken taxpayers' money to open a trafficking policing centre, decided to pocket the money—as far as I could see—and close it again. How were the Metropolitan police able to get away with that? A real issue of accountability is involved. The Queen's Speech talked of improving the accountability of policing, but on a matter on which I believe the whole House is united—