Sir Stephen Timms
MP for East Ham · Labour · United Kingdom
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman. If he would like to send me details of that particular case, I will happily look into it. On the subject of people with hearing impairments, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equalities and I will be meeting the British Sign Language Advisory Board this afternoon.”
“Better outcomes require early identification and support for girls and young women with special educational needs, including dyslexia. That is the aim of the SEND reforms and the development of national inclusion standards.”
“Autistic people and people with ADHD have been struggling to get the right support at the right time. Recommendations from Professor Karen Guldberg’s neurodivergence task and finish group directly informed the SEND reforms that were published earlier this year.”
“The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on public bodies to make reasonable adjustments, so that disabled people are not put at a disadvantage by accessibility challenges.”
“The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. This benefit is there to contribute to the additional costs of disability. Too often, what has happened—my hon.”
“I think we can take the hon. Member’s question as a tacit recognition that in 14 years the previous Government should have done something to fix these problems. The steering group is clear that the provision of cash to meet the additional costs of disability is vital.”
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“I congratulate the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) and his colleagues on the Committee on their work. In particular, as he knows, I warmly welcome the recommendation that paid-for advertising should no longer be excluded from the scope of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) put me in touch with one of her constituents who had some experience of online scamming. He explained that he is an experienced fund manager who used to run his own investment management firm. Last February, he clicked on a link that offered suspiciously high returns because he wanted to see what the scam was. Over the following months, despite repeatedly telling every caller that he was not interested, he was subjected to a daily barrage of calls, which petered out only in October.”
“Will the Secretary of State spell out how the statutory protection he has announced will help leaseholders in developments such as Waterside Park, built by Barratt in my constituency, which does not have a cladding problem, but where apartments have become valueless because of other serious building defects—missing firebreaks and unsafe insulation? How exactly will the statutory protection help them?”
“When will the Minister be able to tell us more about the arrangements for family reunion that she referred to earlier for people at risk in Afghanistan who have family here ready to support them? Will every effort be made to place people arriving from Afghanistan who have close family here wanting to help them in temporary accommodation close to their relatives?”
“As I understand it, the EU has now changed its law. Because we are outside the EU, could we not stick with the retained law? I just want to make that point, because I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman about the damage of being in the EU.”
“Lawyers would not help, because over three years had passed since the assault. She attended the Royal Free Hospital for injections, hoping every time that she would be able to confront her assailant, but she never did; she never saw him.”
“She developed obsessive compulsive disorder, and has had years of nightmares and sleep deprivation; treatments have been ineffective and excessive use of soap led to gynaecological problems. In 2011, Sharifa went back to the Royal Free Hospital for treatment for those problems. What happened then is unclear, but her health problems became worse. Today, she cannot sit comfortably at all and says: “My reasoning ability has decreased over the years due to the struggles I’m going through, loss of enjoyment to life, excessive depression, panic, severe anxiety, chronic pain…I’m tired writing about this trauma thinking about what I have gone through.” In late 2011, Sharifa obtained a UK passport and started to feel more secure. In 2012, she completed a university degree, but her mental health worsened.”
“A surgeon in the ear department, who was a man in his 50s, committed a serious sexual assault on her, in the course of which another doctor came into the room; otherwise, Sharifa is convinced that she would have been raped. The assault was devastating for Sharifa’s mental and physical health. She says: “I came out of that hospital room angry, scared, confused, naive, but I could not tell anybody because I did not have any close friend or anyone to tell, nor did I know of the Police. All I knew was that if I told the hospital doctors, they would not listen to me but put me on the next flight back to Africa. Therefore I had to keep quiet and suffer in silence.” She went home and set about cleaning herself with soap.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered historical allegations of sexual abuse and the justice system. I am glad to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts, and I am grateful to Mr Speaker for selecting this debate. I want to raise issues highlighted by one of my constituents, who I will call Sharifa. In 2003, when Sharifa was 15, her father sent her to the UK to escape political violence in Africa; he was later killed because of his political activities. Newham Council placed Sharifa in foster care. Eventually, she was able to rent a flat on her own. She went to school in Edgware and did BTECs at Barnet College. Aged 17, she attended the Royal Free Hospital for minor cosmetic surgery on an ear because of a burn she had suffered in childhood.”
“The experience of my constituent Sharifa is unique, but it raises concerns affecting a much larger number of women. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.”
“Pathways to seeking justice need to be clearer and more accessible to victims. The violence against women and girls strategy commits to a national communications campaign to raise awareness of gender-based violence. Consultation on that strategy has not started yet, despite calls for it to do so from the Victims’ Commissioner. Can the Minister tell us what the timeframe for that will be? Thirdly, we need to note that reports of sexual assaults in hospital are rising. An article published in September reports, on the basis of freedom of information requests, a nearly fivefold increase in reports of rapes in hospital between 2011 and 2020. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this issue with the Minister, and I am grateful to her for being in her place.”
“Analysis published by the Office for National Statistics in November concluded that: “Violence against women and girls can lead to significant and long-lasting impacts such as mental health issues, suicide attempts and homelessness”. It reported that in the year ending March 2020, around 1.6 million women aged 16 to 74 experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales, which is 7% of the female population, and 3% experienced sexual assault. Women’s Aid has reported that nearly half of women in refuges are depressed or feel suicidal as a direct result of the assault they suffered. It says that the real figure is probably higher, as stigma and fear around disclosing mental health problems, the main injury that Sharifa suffered following her initial assault, discourage women from speaking up.”
“Do the Government plan to follow suit and abolish it for survivors in England and Wales as well? I hope they will. Secondly, Sharifa’s case highlights the difficulty of lay people knowing how to seek justice. On 21 July last year, the Government published their violence against women and girls strategy, which recognises that sexual harassment and assault, both in public and private, is much too common. It found that women often do not report sexual harassment because they do not think it is a crime or that it will be taken seriously by the police. For Sharifa, there was the added uncertainty of a young, vulnerable person, new to the UK, with no friends or family here to support her, and no way to know what she should do.”
“The court would need to consider a long list of factors set out in the Limitation Act 1980. For victims eventually able to summon the courage, support and funds to pursue their case, their chances rest on the decision of a judge. The discretionary process involves both parties setting out legal and factual arguments. With a lot of uncertainty around the likely outcome, a claimant, especially one already suffering the effects of trauma, may well be dissuaded from pursuing a claim. Survivors of sexual abuse, and childhood abuse in particular, are often unable to talk about the trauma they suffered for years. That should surely not disadvantage a claim brought later in life. The Limitation (Childhood Abuse) (Scotland) Act 2017 removed the three-year time limit for childhood abuse victims in Scotland.”
“Sexual abuse inflicts both physical and psychological harm. The law typically treats such cases as personal injury claims. The time limit for bringing a civil claim in a personal injury case is three years from the date on which either the cause of action accrues or, if later, three years from the date of knowledge of the person injured. If the injury was suffered by a child, the three-year period is not initiated until they reach the age of 18. That brought Sharifa one additional year, but not enough, as 10 years later she is only just learning about the potential route to justice that she could have taken. The court has discretion to allow a personal injury claim to be brought if the limitation period has expired, but that happens in only a small number of cases.”
“What are the opportunities in the system for someone in Sharifa’s position to obtain justice? Can she do so even though, for completely understandable reasons, it was a long time after the assault that she reported it? What provision can support her, given her lack of funds? One consequence of what happened is that she has been unable to work and has always had to depend on social security. Is it really the case that someone young and innocent, newly arrived in the country, cannot effectively be protected by the criminal justice system and that someone choosing to abuse such a person will have a very good chance of getting away with it? Sharifa’s case raises a number of wider issues, three of which I will highlight. First, there is the time limitation period. Rules on limitation periods in civil proceedings are pretty complicated.”
“The local sexual assault referral centre said it could not help, as the assault was so long ago. Another sexual assault referral centre said the same. A local legal advice service said that it could not help. Sharifa is stuck. How can she obtain justice over what happened to her? She says—I think with good reason—that her life has been ruined because of what happened to her at the hospital in 2005. She has severe and continuous pain and serious mental health problems, but she is a determined woman. She is finding her voice. She benefits from supportive friendship. Her account is compelling, and I am convinced that it is truthful. She writes clearly and powerfully. There must surely be some avenue available for her to obtain the justice to which she should be entitled. These are my questions to the Minister.”
“One lawyer I contacted took a thorough look but concluded that the case did not meet their risk assessment and was not willing to take the case. Sharifa wrote: “I have spoken to many solicitors. None of them is helping. I am left on my own, as I was in the past.” I wrote to the Health Secretary and received a sympathetic reply from the current Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries), who was then a Health Minister. She made several helpful suggestions. Sharifa has tried all of them. Citizens Advice sent a letter in relation to the subsequent hospital treatment, but that came to nothing. The local Healthwatch secured a meeting with the Royal Free but Sharifa felt that its concern was just covering up what had gone wrong.”
“Due to the passage of time the man in question will undoubtedly have changed somewhat, therefore the photographs should have been from the time of the incident. Can you now show her these?” The police continued to decline to pursue the matter. At the suggestion of Women Against Rape, Sharifa requested a full copy of her medical records. There she found the name of the doctor. That was a major breakthrough. The police confirmed that that was the person they had identified, but were not willing to discuss the matter further. Women Against Rape suggested lawyers, who might take up the case. None was willing to do so. A year ago, Sharifa came to see me again. She is not able to work, has no substantial funds and cannot afford a solicitor.”
“There is no evidence that he ever met Sharifa as no medical records were recovered.” The reply from the police concluded: “I have carefully reviewed all the evidence in this case and find that the decision not to refer the case to The Crown Prosecution Service to be correct.” I went back to the police and made the point that Sharifa had given me a clear and persuasive account of what had happened, but the officer firmly declined to pursue the matter any further. Women Against Rape then corresponded with the police and raised a number of questions, including this point about the identification parade: “The photographs shown to Sharifa were recent and were not from the time of the offence, 14 years earlier.”
“Further enquiries with Maxilofacial Prosthetics confirmed that this doctor, whose name I will not disclose, had registered on 1 May 1983 and retired his membership on 30 th April 2015. During this period of registration, this doctor had an unblemished record and furthermore he was never in receipt of any complaints or allegations. The doctor provided an evidential account completely denying the offence. He stated that he could not recall ever meeting Sharifa.”
“It would also have helped if she had actually seen the people in those photos, because her assailant’s physique and gait have stuck in her mind. The police officer at the parade, unlike the earlier officers, seemed unsympathetic and impatient. Sharifa’s memory and mental health problems made her feel uncomfortable and under pressure. The police concluded that there was no basis for a prosecution, so in late 2019 she came to see me. I asked the police to reopen the investigation. Sharifa did not know the name of the doctor who committed the assault, but she did know the name of the doctor who interrupted the assault. The police had interviewed him, but he could not remember the event. The police reply to me is as follows: “Detectives were…able to make enquiries with a doctor who was named on one of the referral letters.”
“I very much agree with the hon. Gentleman; it is important that, whatever the circumstances, victims should feel confident that they can obtain justice. In Sharifa’s case, eventually a doctor at the Royal Free advised her that the hospital would not help and that she should go to the police, so that is what she did in 2019. She was interviewed by two sympathetic and helpful police officers. However, at a photograph identity parade in Tottenham Hale that year, she was unable to identify her assailant, but she is convinced that her assailant was among three pictures she saw then of people who looked similar to her assailant. They were recent pictures; she did not see a photo of her assailant from 14 years earlier, although the police said that they have one.”
“A single father who is unable to work on health grounds told the Select Committee in September that removing the £20 a week uplift would force him to skip meals so that his children did not have to. Christians Against Poverty, which supports him, says that he now cannot afford the absolute basics: food, heating and bus fares to take his children to school. He certainly cannot afford to buy his children Christmas presents. With prices rising so fast, is not the social security safety net just too low?”
“I very much agree with the point that my hon. Friend is making. Is he aware of the very widespread alarm that clause 9 is creating up and down the country?”
“I am listening carefully to the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but will he take it from me that the alarm about the clause is not because of any stirring from the Opposition, but because of the reality of its content and the Government’s track record?”
“For 10 years, they get no child benefit, even if the children are British citizens; no universal credit if somebody loses a job; and, prior to the pandemic, no free school meals if the family hit hard times. That is the hostile environment for law-abiding, hard-working migrant families, which is why families are so worried about what is in this Bill.”
“Lockdown happened in one of the gaps between two-and-a-half-year periods, and the father’s employer did not know whether it was allowed to furlough him under the new scheme, so it did not. That family had no recourse to public funds, and all they could do was turn to a foodbank to survive. At the Liaison Committee the Prime Minister said that hard-working, law-abiding families in that position should have help of one kind or another. I very much agree with him, but unfortunately they do not, and every two and a half years they have extortionate visa fees. How do people cope with massive fees? For one family I know, we are talking about £14,000 every two and a half years in order to stay in the UK.”
“I know many families on the so-called 10-year route to indefinite leave, which means that two and a half years’ leave to remain at a time needs to be obtained four times, before they can apply for indefinite leave. They pay extortionate fees every time. Sometimes people lose their jobs because they do not have leave to remain between one two-and-a-half-year period ending and the Home Office getting round to granting the next. No recourse to public funds applies throughout that 10-year period—that is the subject of a different amendment that we will debate later. At the Liaison Committee last year I told the Prime Minister about a family I know. Both parents work, the mother as a teaching assistant and the father in a big international company. The mother’s job continued after lockdown, but the father was laid off.”
“I wish to support new clause 8, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy). The “Barriers to Britishness” report was published a year ago this month, and in his foreword, the Conservative hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) pointed out that the cost of citizenship in the UK is the highest in the western world, and that “the combined cost of applying to become a citizen in Australia, Canada, the USA and France still does not add up to the cost of a single application in Britain. The fee of £1,330 is almost four times the cost to the Home Office of processing an application.” This is a hostile environment for hard-working, law-abiding migrant families, and that is why clause 9 provokes such anxiety.”
“My right hon. Friend is talking about the amount of resource we commit to this, but has she seen the statistic that the National Economic Crime Centre put to the Work and Pensions Committee, which is that fraud now accounts for a third of crime in the UK, but for 1% of police resources?”
“They went on to say that the “Government has said it wants to eventually tackle scam adverts through changing advertising regulation—but this will have to go through a lengthy process of legislating in the face of fierce opposition from a powerful advertising industry.” We understand that work to address the problem of scam advertising is going on somewhere—the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, I think—but on a much longer timetable. If that is the track we go down, it will be years before anything changes, and thousands more people will lose their life savings in the meantime.”
“The Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee in July that “one of the key objectives of the Online Safety Bill is to tackle online fraud”. I welcome and applaud that pledge, yet the Bill as it stands entirely misses the major problem of online fraud, which is paid-for advertising. Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com, Sir Richard Branson and Dawn French have all had their name or image used in online scams. They all wrote to the Prime Minister last month calling for the Online Safety Bill to tackle scams, pointing out that the current Bill will penalise someone who posts a scam, but not someone who pays to post the same scam.”
“The City of London police wrote to the Work and Pensions Committee in May that the exclusion of advertisements and cloned websites from the Online Safety Bill “leaves a gap in the protection provided for the public”. The City of London police went on to call for “legislation requiring a duty to protect and/or corporate criminal liability for failure to prevent across all online and telecommunications enablers.” The Financial Conduct Authority told us in evidence to the Committee that “financial harms should be included in the Online Safety Bill to ensure that online platform operators take responsibility for the material which they disseminate which could cause consumers financial harm.” That is absolutely right as well.”
“That needs to be changed, because it is the scam adverts that are the heart of the problem. That is not just the view of my Committee and the Treasury Committee; it is the view of almost everyone outside Whitehall who has looked at this, except for the internet companies. The Governor of the Bank of England told the Treasury Committee that the risk to consumers from online fraud “could be tackled through the Online Harms Legislation, but the experience so far...is that there is strong resistance in other parts of the official sector to extending the legislation to financial services. This is a serious problem.” He is absolutely right.”
“The new Pensions Schemes Act 2021 will restrict the statutory right to transfer, which was given in the pension freedoms, where there are signs of a scam. The High Court recently ruled that the fraud compensation fund could be used to compensate pension liberation scam victims. Those are both welcome steps, but we need to do more. In particular, we must tackle the menace of online scams. The insurer Aviva told the Work and Pensions Committee that in the six months before it gave us its evidence it had found 27 scam websites purporting to be Aviva. Having found them, it takes quite a lot of effort to get them taken down, and there are always victims before the sites are removed. In the Online Safety Bill, the Government are tackling user-generated scams, but not paid-for scam adverts.”
“I have no idea why Google did not take that scam down in May. Was it because the company was disorganised? Was it because it wanted to keep the advertising income coming in? Google will not say, and I do not imagine that we will ever know. What this shows us is that the law must be changed. If it is not changed, crooks will continue to ruin the lives of thousands by advertising scams online. That would be an unforgivable failure of Government. Last year, the Pension Scams Industry Group estimated that £10 billion had been lost to pension scams by 40,000 people since the pension freedoms were introduced by George Osborne in 2015. I welcome some of the recent changes that have been made to help.”
“The Prime Minister has said that tackling online fraud is one of the Bill’s main aims, but the current version, which is undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny, leaves out the major part of the problem. That must be changed. The campaigner Mark Taber gave evidence to our inquiry. He found the compare-uk-bonds.co.uk fake comparison site on Google, and reported it to Google in May last year. An elderly woman who had recently been bereaved contacted him after losing more than £200,000 to that scam site on Google in September. Google finally took it down in December. People think that if they find something on Google, somebody must have vetted it, but of course they have not. Google gets paid by scammers, and then also gets paid by regulators to warn about the scammers people find on Google. It is a pretty good business.”
“I am very pleased to follow the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), and I welcome his collaboration with my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). They both advanced powerful arguments in opening the debate. I want to focus briefly on one specific point. I mentioned, in an intervention on my right hon. Friend, the Work and Pensions Committee’s inquiry into pension scams, which reported a little while ago. This is an important area of economic crime, and our report highlighted in particular the menace of online scams, which the hon. Gentleman has just mentioned. As he said, the Online Safety Bill presents a unique opportunity to address this menace.”
“Member for Thirsk and Malton have argued for, to protect not just the customers of these services but the entire economy.”
“My plea is for Ministers to change course now, face up to the undoubted technical challenges, and legislate in the Online Safety Bill. Finally, I agree with a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking in opening the debate: this is an existential threat to the UK economy. Financial services account for a big part of our economy, and we have a worldwide reputation and provide a great deal of expertise and high-quality services. If people conclude that they can no longer trust our financial services sector because fraud is being allowed to run rife, that is a massive threat not just to that industry but to our entire economy. We really do need to tackle economic crime, face it head on, and make the kind of changes that my right hon. Friend and the hon.”
“That hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. I know that Ministers have been looking into this issue. As I understand it, there is now a very complex infrastructure around advertising. Google is at the end of the chain, but there are all sorts of agencies and intermediaries—a whole industry—in the middle. I imagine that letter is referring to the fact that all those people in the middle would say, “No, don’t touch this because it’s working very well.” It is working well for them, but I am afraid that for the public it definitely is not. If we wait in the way suggested in the letter, it will let crooks and scammers continue to ruin people’s lives for years to come. That would be a catastrophic Government failure.”
“The Financial Conduct Authority, which reports to the Minister’s Department, has made the case for the Online Safety Bill to be widened to include online fraud. Does he accept the strength of that argument?”
“T10. Lease-holders in Kingfisher Court, built by Barratt in my constituency, have just been told that, unlike leaseholders in very similar buildings nearby, their application to the building safety fund has been rejected. They do not know why, and they now face bankruptcy. Can the right hon. Gentleman offer any reassurance that I can take when I meet them later this evening?”
“What happened a couple of weeks ago was an extraordinary failure of moral leadership and, for the first time, it has given rise in the minds of many to serious questions about the character of this Government. With hindsight, why did the Leader of the House and his right hon. Friends not recognise the brazen wrongdoing of their colleague?”
“Of course I understand why the Government have decided not to increase the state pension by 8%, but is it still their intention that the value of the state pension should, over time, at least keep track with earnings?”
“In my intervention on the Minister, I asked if it remained the Government’s intention that the value of the state pension should, over time, at least keep track with earnings. He declined to confirm that it did, so it may be that the Government’s policy has changed. Ever since Adair Turner’s pensions report was published in 2006, Government policy has been that the state pension should keep track with earnings, not just with prices as was previously the case. I suppose we must conclude that there has been a change in approach.”
“Depending on what happens to earnings growth, which will certainly not carry on at 8%, and on inflation rises next year, that fall could well be locked in for good and the pension framework will have been weakened. I hope that I have made it clear why this is actually quite important. It is not just about whether we are being generous enough to pensioners. The question is: are we keeping in place a robust and reliable framework for pension saving based on which people can plan with confidence for the future?”
“We need either a measure, and the Minister needs to reassure us that there will be, such as a catch-up initiative to make sure that the state pension over time—not this year, but by next year or the year after—will keep track with the increase in earnings, or the House needs to accept the amendment agreed with a significant majority in the other place, because that keeps the pension framework in place and keeps it effective. There is a real worry if there is a significant falling behind. If there is a 3% increase in the state pension at a time when earnings have gone up by 8%, that will be a one-off 5% fall in the state pension behind the level of earnings.”
“That is why what the Minister is arguing for is such a threat to the success of auto-enrolment. Auto-enrolment will no longer be a sound basis for pension saving if the level of the state pension is allowed to drift below the level of earnings. People must be able to trust in the state pension under the policies of the Government. They have been able to do so up to now, and now they will not. That raises a pretty fundamental question about the future of the Government’s pensions policy. There is a real danger in allowing, almost by sleight of hand albeit for reasons that we all understand and sympathise with, the state pension to fall permanently behind the increase in earnings and weakening the pension framework that, as far as we all know, is still the basis of the Minister’s policy. We should not allow that to happen.”
“If the state pension slips behind earnings, modest pensions accrued through auto-enrolment will become worthless, because those who claim them in due course will not get above the means-tested threshold and they will still have to depend on pension credit for their income in retirement, and the fact that they have saved into a pension will do them no good at all. That will be a growing problem if the level of the state pension is allowed to slip behind the increase in earnings. If that does happen, people who are looking forward and saving but are going to end up with fairly modest pensions should instead spend the money at the time they earn it, rather than save it in a pension that, in the end, is not going to take them above the means-tested threshold and so will not give them any additional income.”