argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
UK Terrorism Threat Level — House of Commons, 2020-11-05
Topic: Law and Crime
Geraint Richard Davies (Labour, Centre-left): I know that the Muslim community in Swansea will be appalled by and condemn the awful terrorist attacks in France and Austria and stand in solidarity with the victims. Islam, after all, is the Arabic word for peace. Does the Minister agree that we need to ensure all our communities stand together side by side to identify and to root out terrorism, whether it is based in a perversion of mainstream religion or in right-wing violence, and that all our communities deserve the protection the state must apply in that process?
UK Terrorism Threat Level — House of Commons, 2020-11-05
Topic: Law and Crime
Diana Ruth Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): Having recently joined the Intelligence and Security Committee and as a member of the Home Affairs Committee, I have huge respect for the vital work of our police and security services in keeping our citizens safe and protecting our values. However, it is strongly suspected that covid lockdowns have increased the conditions in which largely unknown lone individuals are radicalised online by terror groups, including those of the far right. Can the Minister say what he is doing to review the adequacy of the powers to monitor and take action on potentially dangerous individuals?
UK Terrorism Threat Level — House of Commons, 2020-11-05
Topic: Law and Crime
Rachael Helen Maskell (Labour, Centre-left): I thank both the Minister for his statement and the security services for the work that they do, day in, day out, to keep us safe. We know that many perpetrators of terrorism are isolated and vulnerable individuals and so taking a safeguarding approach is really important. May I ask him what terms of reference will be in the Prevent review to ensure that a safeguarding approach is taken?
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Technology
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I share the hon. Gentleman’s delight at serving together on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. The evidence speaks for itself, to stretch a metaphor when we are talking about evidence. The Science and Technology Committees in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, as well as the Government’s own reviews and the Forensic Science Regulator’s annual reports, have all pretty much concluded the same thing: where standards cannot be enforced by providers and the validity of the forensic process is brought into question in prosecution, miscarriages of justice will have followed. The forensics regulator has been pretty bold in making that case in her annual report to Parliament. That is why, I am pleased to say, there has been broad consensus on the measures brought forward in the Bill to ensure that she can enforce the standards for more providers of forensic services That is why successive Governments have been notionally committed to putting the regulator on a statutory footing for nearly eight years. Many right hon. and hon. Members have called for this for a long time. That is what underpinned the conclusions of the reports from the Science and Technology Committees in this House and the other place that I mentioned to the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) Last year the Science and Technology Committee, of which I was a member, concluded in its inquiry on this issue that "the Regulator—now more than ever—needs statutory powers." A couple of months earlier, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee had said: "It is hard to understand why…the Forensic Science Regulator still lacks powers they need… The Forensic Science industry is in trouble; such action is now urgent." The regulator herself said in the report: "Legislation is urgently required to give the…statutory enforcement powers" needed to do the job properly I therefore appreciate the Government’s willingness to co-operate in seeking to carry the Bill, and the support of the Minister and his officials in producing the Bill and the explanatory notes, and in helping to secure the Bill’s passage through the House today. It is especially important that the Bill does pass today, because the availability of these services on time and to reliable standards is often patchy When the then Government announced the wholesale closure of the loss-making Forensic Science Service in November 2010, the Science and Technology Committee warned that they had failed to give "enough consideration to the impact on forensic science research and development (R&D), the capacity of private providers to absorb the FSS’s 60% market share and the wider implications for the criminal justice system." That warning has proved prescient. Today, many scientific processes are conducted in-house by police forces, but this is piecemeal in its extent.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I think that is an important enforcement question. Of course, this has been one of the bedrocks of the voluntary model: where services are provided that do not meet the accredited standard, either by a private provider or in-house by a police force, that has just been able to continue. How a police force dealt with an in-house service that did not reach the accredited standard would be an issue for that police force, but I suggest that it might either bring its service up to the accredited standard or have confidence in the private sector market to find a provider that met that standard, which would be enforced by the regulator. I have every confidence that every police force across the country wishes to do this in the right way; there has been a huge amount of pressure on them to do so previously.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): The regulator has been able to introduce codes of practice, but where they have not been followed, she has not been able to enforce them, which is one of the main issues today. As I understand it, the codes of practice are published in co-ordination with the Home Office, so perhaps the Minister can give an update on the outstanding codes that the hon. Gentleman mentions The market’s dependence on large or specialised service providers is not an abstract concern. We know that the resulting fragility, which already existed because of a lack of competition in the market, has had damaging effects on people in the criminal justice system. The collapse of key forensic services in 2018 is a case in point. To manage the fall-out from that collapse, police forces contracted other commercial providers to take on the resulting workload, creating system-wide capacity constraints. The appalling consequences that the Forensic Sciences Regulator laid out show that some cases, where forensic science may have provided valuable information or evidence, could not be processed. In addition, there was evidence of an increased error rate during this period, as well as an unsustainable strain on staff working overtime I am sure that all hon. Members agree that that is an unacceptable position for part of the criminal justice system to be in and that we should do our best to try to fix it. At the risk of straying a little beyond the immediate scope of the Bill, I urge Ministers to recognise the systemic issues that such cases highlight. Giving the regulator statutory powers will raise standards but cannot by itself mend a broken market. In the medium-term, the only way to get forensics right is through sustained investment in people, processes and skills I am sure that other hon. Members will have examples on which to draw, but the way in which violent sexual crimes are prosecuted makes an especially clear case for why statutory powers are so important. Such crimes, which are subject to unique challenges in obtaining convictions, often rely on DNA evidence as the critical element of a prosecution case. It is therefore vital that the possibility of contamination, for example, at sexual assault referral centres, is minimised as far as possible, yet the regulator’s 2016 annual report highlighted instances of DNA swabs being contaminated through unrelated case handling of different victims on the same day. Clearly, that is unacceptable Ensuring adherence to the regulator’s quality standards is a basic precaution, as victims and the general public rightly expect. However, the cost of testing to achieve compliance has meant that the commissioners of affected centres are unlikely to co-operate unless the regulator is empowered to require that. That inadequate incentive structure gets to the heart of why the current soft regulatory model is so weak for existing markets. The regulator’s highest aspiration is to create a competitive climate, in which underperforming or corner-cutting suppliers are unable to acquire contracts.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Technology
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I am pleased to hear that from the Minister. I confess that I did not notice that in his party’s manifesto, but on the basis of his confirmation to the House, I look forward to the tabling of comprehensive legislation. I can confirm to the House that, although it may not have been in our manifesto under the previous Labour party leadership, I will do my best to ensure that it is in the next one I believe the Minister when he says that he wants to get this right, and the Government will have a partner in me when they get around to it, but time is of the essence. I sorely hope that the Bill fires the starting gun today on a period of revitalised thinking in the Government about how to regulate technologies in the public interest. I want to be a participant in that effort The Bill is as evidence-driven and task-focused a piece of legislation as it could be. Putting the regulator in statute is a matter of broad political consensus. As I have said today, on a cross-party basis in both this House and the other House, and among experts in the field, the regulator and, indeed, the Minister and the Government, there is consensus that the Bill should be given its Second Reading today. It will make good on a commitment, first made by the Government in 2013, that the regulator says is necessary if it is to do its job effectively. Finally, it will create a basis of quality enforcement, on which we can build a better-functioning market, and is plainly the right thing to do. On that basis, I commend my Bill to the House.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): What a pleasure it is to be called so unexpectedly early in this debate. Obviously your algorithm is working, Mr Speaker, even though the algorithms for other things—testing, exam results—are not. Let us not get into that I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) on coming so loftily in the private Members’ Bill ballot—a sensation I have never experienced and probably never will. He is also the Chair of the Business and Industrial Strategy Committee. He is one Opposition Member who will actually make his mark on our statute book. We all dream of the day we can do that, but from what the Minister says, it sounds like my hon. Friend will I rise to speak in support of my hon. Friend’s Bill. I have taken on board the points against it, but I think they are all refutable. It seeks to right a whole load of wrongs that are going on in our society—we have heard about miscarriages of justice and unreliable evidence—and it also reins in the once seemingly untrammelled forces of the free market. We have seen something of that during the pandemic—yesterday, another financial stimulus was announced. I am glad that the Government are now converts to interventionism, as some of us have always been. It is great to have this Bill at a time when we are all so preoccupied by coronavirus or Brexit. It is something a bit different, but it is badly needed Recently, the word "forensic" seems to be used every Wednesday when Prime Minister’s questions happens and our Leader of the Opposition takes apart the Prime Minister, but we are dealing with "forensics"—plural. The mere mention of that term conjures up images of wily experts solving cold cases long after the fact, dissecting the details and piecing together the evidence from the crime scene. We think of skilful professionals, with high-tech, high-end resources at their disposal, no expense spared, crusading for justice in the public interest. The American drama serials—the transatlantic type—have shaped the imagery in the public imagination: programmes such as "NCIS" and "CSI". I know that our previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), is a big "NCIS" fan. At the height of the cross-party talks in her Brexit negotiations, I found myself face-to-face with her at No. 10, and to break the ice, I asked, as you do, "Was being Home Secretary like ‘Bodyguard’?" Instead, she enthused about "NCIS", which was her favourite programme, and said it was more like that Forensics started about a century ago with fingerprinting techniques, and it can stray into things such as taking fragments of carpet fibre and even bite marks. By the ’80s, when DNA profiling of samples was pioneered, the field really got a spring in its step. In today’s world, it is accelerating, and its use is going on and on. With cybercrime rapidly rising, it is needed more than ever.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: International Affairs
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): Goodness me, we live and learn, and we learn a new thing every day. What a gory story. It is sad that we are leaving the European Union, because we had access to all those databases, including Europol’s. I think that is a cause for lament, but that is probably another debate for another day.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): Unfortunately, the reality of Britain’s forensic services is far removed from the glamour of "NCIS". Britain’s Sherlockian sleuths and Clouseauian crime detectives do exist in our police forces, and they do a sterling job, but they have been hampered and held back for years—for at least seven years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West said. There are three reasons for that First, cuts in police and research budgets have adversely affected spending on private forensics. The hon. Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) attempted valiantly in the previous Parliament to raise that issue. Sadly, the election, which not all of us wanted, put paid to that. Whatever happened to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011? I think it is going soon. Anyway, as he pointed out, expenditure on private forensics has come down from £120 million in 2008 to £50 million at the moment. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee uncovered those figures last year Secondly, there is a lack of competitiveness. Even for fans of the free market, this is not a good way of running the system. The forensics marketplace is in a fragile state, because it is not purely one thing or the other. Thirdly, there is the laxity of the regulatory regime, despite the fact that there is a Forensic Science Regulator. The Bill seeks to address that by calling for a new Forensic Science Regulator, so that our justice system is better equipped to deal with modern crime When the regulator itself states that innocent people are repeatedly wrongly convicted and criminals are escaping the long arm of the law due to the failure of the forensic science system to meet basic standards, something has obviously gone very wrong. It is no exaggeration to say that it is positively criminal that the watchdog—currently incarnated as Dr Gillian Tully, who acknowledges this herself—is so toothless, so lacking in cojones, that it is purely advisory. It does not have legal powers to require private providers to meet standards, or to impose fines if they do not meet them How did we get here in the first place? It was actually under David Cameron, another PM who swiftly left the crime scene. Paul Roberts, a Nottingham University professor of jurisprudence who specialises in this field said in 2015: "in a moment of penny-pinching madness that future governments may regard with incomprehension, the UK coalition government closed down the world-famous Forensic Science Service, arguing—quite improbably—that the private sector would fill the gap…this move to free-market forensics is not meeting the justice system’s need for high-quality scientific support and has put in jeopardy long-term forensic research, development and training." He laments the closure as part of what he calls a "landscape of ‘austerity justice’".
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Macroeconomics
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the hon. Gentleman for the history lesson. I accept that there was some tinkering under the Brown and Blair Governments, but he must admit that it was under this Government’s previous incarnation that full-on privatisation occurred. That needs addressing. As I said, I do not want to have a fight with him, but I did want to put that on the record.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Technology
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I share the hon. Gentleman’s enthusiasm for debating the opportunities and risks of data and technology in this space, about which he is clearly very learned. I am sure he also welcomes the Minister’s comprehensive legislation on the issue. Does he agree that my Bill is—to coin a phrase—specific and limited in its scope, as it merely seeks to give enforcement rights to the regulator to accredit standards? I congratulate him on leading on the issue, but we will be able to have this debate, in which many hon. Members are clearly interested, in greater detail when the Minister brings forward his legislation.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Wesley Paul William Streeting (Labour, Centre-left): I am very grateful to the Minister for that intervention because it underlines the point I am making. There can be nothing worse for victims of serious crimes than knowing that the perpetrator has gone free because the forensics were not handled appropriately or sensitively, so we absolutely have to get this right.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Wesley Paul William Streeting (Labour, Centre-left): I absolutely understand. I was referring to victims whose crimes are not punished, but it is important that the justice system gets it right. Sometimes people will be wrongly accused, and contaminated evidence giving a misleading impression is not a good outcome for anyone either The Forensic Science Regulator’s 2020 annual report also raises concerns about levels of compliance on the classification of firearms: "It is unlikely that there will be a significant further move towards compliance while the Regulator has no statutory enforcement powers." Efforts have been made to incentivise police forces to seek accreditation, but that process is made more challenging by the regulator’s lack of statutory powers, particularly in the context of rising cost pressures. The 2019 "Forensics Review" found suggestions that that deficiency meant the police "de-prioritised investment and meeting deadlines for accreditation" and "described difficulties in achieving accreditation for inhouse services digital functions. In some cases, accreditation was seen as an additional cost pressure amid a number of competing priorities." At this point, it is hugely tempting to talk about the cost pressures on police forces, whether the Metropolitan police, who cover my constituency, or Essex police, who cover yours, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will not go there, because you will very quickly rule me out of scope on the Bill, but it is none the less beyond question that if police forces are thinking about cost pressures and where to deploy resources for officers and the kit they need, there is a real risk. There have been occasions where police forces have not invested in forensics to the extent that they should have done because they had other, arguably more important priorities. Frankly, they should not be forced to choose. It cannot be right that police commissioners, commanders and senior officers are placed in that position. That is about the Government ensuring the police receive the resources they need and about having the regulatory framework in place to ensure resources are directed to the right place.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Wesley Paul William Streeting (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister makes a very good financial case for investing in forensics. It will lead not only to better outcomes in criminal justice but potentially to cost savings from resources. That does not mean that he should wander away from the manifesto commitment to replace almost all the police officers the Government have seen away in the past decade.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Wesley Paul William Streeting (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful for that useful insight into the practical consequences of the system not working correctly. I wish I could see it for myself: I was booked for jury service in the next two weeks, only to be told this week by the jury officer that I am on standby. If I may say so, that is good news for criminals across east London and Essex, because I come from the "tough on crime" school of the Labour party.
Forensic Science Regulator and Biometrics Strategy Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Wesley Paul William Streeting (Labour, Centre-left): That is so important for victims. Most people would not like the experience of going before a court, even if it is to testify against someone whose wrongdoing consists of fairly minor infractions, because there is a time cost and inconvenience. In really serious cases—for example, if someone is the victim of a serious sexual assault or serious violent crime—the knowledge that the ordeal of having to appear before the court and recount the story may well not need to happen because the forensics arrive and the offender knows they have no chance of getting off, can not only deliver the justice that victims deserve but prevent victims from enduring further pain as a result of a lengthy trial at which they have to relive their experiences in a court room of strangers. That is one of many reasons why the Bill and a forensics system that works well is really important Police services consistently remain far behind schedule in respect of gaining accreditation for the quality standard for crime-scene investigation. Significant improvements —for example, to reduce the potential for DNA contamination—can be made during preparation for accreditation, but without full compliance the risks remain. Without enforcement powers, it is difficult for the regulator to ensure that, among all the other policing pressures, sufficient priority is given to attaining compliance. Forensic collision investigators have discovered, in the process of adopting quality standards, that some of their methods gave results with a large amount of uncertainty. They have been able to get small and innovative companies to develop new equipment that can make a significant improvement, but there is further to go. That momentum will only be supported by a regulatory framework with sufficient incentives and enforcement powers.