Serious Crime Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2015-02-23
Topic: Law and Crime
John Mann (Labour, Centre-left): I welcome various sensible and positive suggestions. I shall speak to new clause 2, which I trust the Government will accept. If not, we will give the House the opportunity to decide whether it should be accepted. I am sure, Mr Speaker, that in today’s rather confused timetable you will indicate the appropriate time at which to do so I wish to make three substantive points in relation to the new clause. I thank those in every part of the House who have added their name to it. The abuse in Rotherham has been described as the tip of the iceberg. It is a rather easy phrase to use. I do not think that the majority of people out in the country, if they have thought about the language used, believe that that is true. They think they have seen the bad side and that there may be a bit more of it, but that it cannot get worse than that. My experience is that Rotherham is no different from anywhere else, except that it has had a detailed inquiry which has quantified the problem better than in other places. There are some specific and uncomfortable elements to the problem there that certainly differentiate it from my area, but I know that my area is no worse than anywhere else When I have used the opportunities I have in my weekly newspaper columns to suggest to victims, current or past, that they should come forward, I expected a few people to come forward. What I did not expect is somebody new to come forward every week. I did not expect people to fly back to my constituency from across the world, as they have done and as more wish to do, to give me precise evidence that they have given to nobody in 30 years. They know that that will never lead to a prosecution, but when they spoke out before they were not believed. They speak of individual, specific, single incidents of sexual violence, on different scales, of differing natures, yet every week new people—my constituents—are coming forward It is almost as if the process began with the easier cases—easier in the sense that the people were more prepared, and the cases were more specific, more identifiable and more prosecutable—and, as the weeks go by, the bigger ones come. I have a brand-new case now. People do not make up such allegations. One cannot make up what I was told by somebody younger than me. The sexual violence and other violence is not even the most horrific part of it. At the age of 11, that person was put into slavery in a workplace and location that I can identify. I am not going to name it as that is the prerogative of the person involved. I think he will name it, then everybody in my area will be able to identify it. He mentioned witnesses whom he could identify and names that I know. That went on year after year, and what did my constituent and other kids of 11 or 12 do? They ran away. What happened when they ran away? They were returned time and again to the same perpetrators by the police and the social workers, until one heroic social worker rescued my constituent, unlike the other kids living in that foster home, who were not rescued. He has got on with his life and had spoken to nobody until he came to me. The report is being prepared in great detail and will go to the police. I do not know whether those who covered up for the school by falsifying its records in saying he was there when he was not—the employer and those working there alongside an 11-year-old, then a 12, 13, 14 and 15-year-old, during those years—are all still alive; presumably some of them will be. There will be a major investigation That is just a single example; I have not mentioned the other victims. If it happened in my constituent’s time, what about the kids before or the kids after? I make a few discreet inquiries and vast amounts of things immediately come out that people know about—a huge web. This was just one foster family among many. It was horrendous, systemised abuse. The system was at fault, and everyone within it, because these kids were regarded as commodities. They were to be sold, and they were sold—in this case, into actual, technical slavery. It was a money-making activity.