Tag: Amanda Solloway

The speech made by Amanda Solloway, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, in the House of Commons on 5 September 2022.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) for securing this incredibly important and moving debate. She has worked tirelessly on these issues. Her perseverance has helped to ensure that the report has been published and that the horrendous way in which more than 1,000 children in Telford were failed has been exposed. I am sure that hon. Members will join me in commending her efforts, alongside those of other hon. Members present who are driving change on behalf of victims in constituencies across the country, including my hon. Friends the Members for Keighley (Robbie Moore) and for Blackpool South (Scott Benton). I acknowledge the work of the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) as well.

The abuse suffered by the many victims in Telford is truly sickening. My thoughts are with them. As has been so shockingly detailed, children were failed over and over again by those who should have protected them. I pay tribute to the victims and survivors in Telford and to all those who have shared their experiences. They have suffered unthinkable ordeals. Sadly, we cannot undo what happened in the past, but what we can and must do is take every possible step to ensure that others are not let down as they were.

The independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Telford has produced a thorough and measured assessment of how local services responded to child sexual exploitation as far back as the 1970s. I am grateful to the inquiry for its comprehensive and hard-hitting exposure of the scale of the failures in that response. The inquiry acknowledges that the frontline response of services in Telford has improved in recent years, and it is right that the 47 recommendations made for local frontline services in Telford have been accepted. The mode of offending and the failures of police and other services that are detailed in the report are all too familiar. Shocking though it is, the fact is that what happened in Telford has happened in many other places.

Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)

May I say how much I admire the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan)? She has really battled to get this inquiry, and I know she will keep on battling to get its recommendations imparted.

I ask the Minister about two very specific things. First, I am very glad that pre-charge bail has come back into statute, but it has not really been implemented, which is really hampering ongoing investigations into perpetrators—not least because many have dual nationality, so we do not have the ability to take their passports away.

The other thing is that we are very fortunate in Rotherham because we have the National Crime Agency, but as I realised only very recently, perpetrators who have been brought in for questioning have to come in voluntarily to be charged. I wonder whether the Minister could look into charging powers, particularly in these very challenging cases.

Amanda Solloway

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. If I may, given our current situation, I will get back to her on that point.

As the public rightly expect, there have been significant changes in how local authorities and the police safeguard children since the appalling abuse that took place in Rotherham, Oldham and elsewhere across the country was first exposed a decade ago. Recognition of child sexual exploitation has increased significantly in recent years, with individual police forces taking action to improve their responses. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on the issue, Deputy Chief Constable Ian Critchley, is working to drive up performance nationally. As with any issue relating to public protection and particularly the protection of children, the pursuit of improvement needs to be relentless. We are supporting the police in that effort through investment and thorough strategic impetus.

We are already addressing, at a national level, many of the issues highlighted for the local frontline services in Telford. We are driving up data quality by funding child sexual abuse analysts in every policing region, as well as having made it mandatory since March for police forces to record the ethnicity of those arrested and held in custody because of their suspected involvement in grooming groups.

In July, we published an updated version of our child exploitation disruption toolkit, which highlights the need for police and local agencies to work together to gather and scrutinise data so that they can identify and disrupt offending. In addition, we fund the vulnerability, knowledge and practice programme, which identifies best practice and shares it with all forces. We are ensuring that the complexity and sensitivities of child sexual abuse investigations are understood by policing leaders through the College of Policing’s training for senior officers on issues of safeguarding and public protection.

We are taking steps forward all the time, but we must not lose sight of the fact that things went terribly wrong in the past. Complacency must never be allowed to set in. It has been made abundantly clear to the police that protecting children must always be a top priority. There should be absolutely no doubt that we will keep shining a light on these issues, and where shortcomings are identified, we will take action to address them. That is why Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services has been commissioned to investigate how police forces across England and Wales handle cases of group-based child sexual exploitation. Unlike reviews of historical issues, it will give an up-to-date picture of the quality and effectiveness of forces’ efforts to support victims and bring offenders to justice. We expect the inspection to report by the end of this year.

The failings uncovered in Telford and elsewhere undoubtedly demand a swift and strong local response. The Government are ensuring those lessons are learned right across England and Wales through our strategic national approach. We are working across central and local government, law enforcement and the wider criminal justice system, and we continue to be recognised as a global leader in addressing the threat.

Last year we published the “Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy”, which highlights the vital importance of a joined-up approach and sets out firm commitments to drive action across every part of Government and across all agencies, including education, health, social care, industry, and civil society. More broadly, the “Beating Crime Plan” reaffirms our enduring determination to root out hidden harms and secure justice for victims in these cases. We are delivering on our commitments. We are putting victims and survivors at the centre of our approach, while relentlessly pursuing the perpetrators of these despicable crimes.

Of course, it is not for the police alone to tackle child sexual exploitation and keep children safe from harm. All statutory partners must play their crucial roles. While the inspection into group-based child sexual exploitation is primarily a policing one, we want to include local authorities in the response. The events in Telford have highlighted the importance of an effective multi-agency response. Ensuring close collaboration between key partners is a key part of our strategy.

The Children and Social Work Act 2017 introduced the most significant reforms in a generation, requiring local authorities, clinical commissioning groups and chief officers of police to form multi-agency safeguarding partnerships. All the new partnerships were in place by September 2019. The partnerships have been supported by a Home Office- funded police facilitator, who has engaged with every force in England and Wales to ensure they understand their new responsibilities and are making the most of this opportunity to improve outcomes for children and young people.

In May we welcomed the publication of the independent review of children’s social care, and the national review of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. Both reviews make recommendations on improving multi-agency working to strengthen child protection, with a sharp focus on professional expertise.

Victims and survivors have been failed in the past. That is utterly unacceptable. Through increased investment in specialised services, we are determined to ensure that victims and survivors get the help and support they need to rebuild their lives. Services protecting vulnerable children in Telford and Wrekin have been transformed since 2016, thanks to the work of committed social workers and senior leaders. They are now rated “outstanding” by Ofsted and are helping to bring about improvements in other underperforming local authorities to help to protect more families, as sector-led improvement partners.

Nationally, services include the rape and sexual abuse support fund and funding for police and crime commissioners to locally commission vital emotional and practical support services. The support for victims and survivors of child sexual abuse fund also supports voluntary sector organisations to deliver a range of vital national services, such as support lines and counselling, to children, adult survivors and families affected by sexual abuse.

It is also essential that we send a clear and unequivocal message to all victims and survivors that they should come forward and report abuse. All agencies involved in tackling these crimes have a role to play in making that happen. They must strive every day to secure the trust of victims and command the confidence of the wider public.

Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)

Will the Minister give way?

Amanda Solloway

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) knows how much respect I have for her, but I will continue, if that is okay.

Across the country, there are many amazing charities doing brilliant work to help victims to rebuild their lives. In my own constituency I have seen at first hand how the charity Safe and Sound transforms lives by providing one-to-one support to victims. I pay tribute to all involved with Safe and Sound and the work they do to support victims, and to other charities that do the same.

In closing, I would like to thank all hon. Members who have contributed to this debate for reminding us who is at the heart of this for all of us. The abuse perpetrated in Telford was sickening. The failings that occurred were shocking. We owe it to the victims there and in every part of the country to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again.

The speech made by Amanda Solloway, the Science Minister, on 6 August 2021.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.

Imperial College has an impressive history as a research-intensive institution and an exciting future. I’m thrilled about the opportunity to visit your White City campus and to see what you’ve been building there – I’ve been told I’ll see ‘levelling up’ in action! And of course the work you’ve been doing to make your research available open access has been an inspiration to the whole sector – not just in the UK but abroad.

This government places science, research and innovation at the heart of our plans to build back better from coronavirus. We fully recognise that it has been only through the ingenuity, creativity and courage of our scientists and inventors that we have found a way out of the pandemic. We will learn from this as we forge a better life for ourselves in the years ahead.

So, it is crystal clear to me, to this government, that we can only realise our ambitions by helping brilliant people to flourish and reach their full potential.

And a big part of this means changing the culture of research and innovation.

It was therefore a huge pleasure to publish the UK’s first ever R&D People & Culture strategy last month.

I am genuinely thrilled that the UK government is, for the first time, taking clear and ambitious steps towards tackling some of the longstanding issues that we know we face in research and development (R&D), for example by valuing technical skills, by addressing bullying and harassment, by fixing our PhD training offer, and by embracing diversity in all forms. By working together to follow the path set out in the strategy, we will achieve something amazing.

We’ll grow a stronger, more vibrant and more engaged workforce.

We’ll become the very best place in the world to be a researcher or innovator.

And we’ll lead the future by creating it.

But today I want home in on one specific aspect of research culture, and that is open research.

It has been true for a long time that our research sector has a particular and unequivocal drive towards openness. We have a duty to make the findings of publicly funded research openly available, to make them as useful and impactful as possible to all potential users, for the benefit of everyone.

It was Professor Dame Janet Finch who famously wrote the following words about open access:

The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable.

This was in 2012.

Nine years later, this principle remains unanswerable – even as global threats evolve.

Just take the COVID-19 pandemic.

In just one month, researchers sequenced the viral genome and shared it freely online as an open-access publication in the Lancet. Researchers from around the world went on to build incredible new data-sharing tools, opening up rich new data sources on epidemiology or policy, and posting countless new findings onto preprint servers.

Many journals took the necessary step to make all their papers relating to COVID-19 freely available.

By sharing research as openly and quickly as possible, and learning quickly from negative results and any unsupportable conclusions, we delivered the vaccines and treatments that are our surest way to stopping this deadly pandemic in its tracks.

This should be an example to all of us of what’s possible when research culture changes, and when behaviour changes. And what can be done when open research practices are widely adopted, with no excuses. But this isn’t a new imperative. Open research is an agenda where the UK has long been in the global lead. When it comes to the UK’s position on this agenda – I’m a believer!

And we should recognise that we have made good progress. Significant amounts of publicly funded research have been made free to read and reuse.

Studies show that at least 28% of articles are now free to read – increasing to perhaps half of all articles by some measures. And a recent study of 1,207 universities found that some made as much as 80 to 90% of their research free to read in 2017 – with 40 of the best-performing 50 in Europe being UK universities.

Other nations have been inspired by our courage and our conviction. From the Australian Research Council to Horizon Europe, many other governments, agencies and programmes have introduced open access policies of their own.

And I am thrilled that we were able to get a strong G7 commitment to open science this summer as part of the UK G7 Presidency, with agreement to incentivise open science practices; and promote the efficient and secure processing and sharing of research data across borders that is as open as possible, and as secure as necessary. Publishers, on the whole, have been responding to the incentives – and should be praised for showing leadership and not shying from the challenge we have set. Read-and-publish deals have been struck with Springer Nature, Wiley and the Microbiology Society. The pioneering open access publisher PLOS is piloting a new pricing scheme to eliminate author charges. And the ground-breaking Open Library of Humanities is now supported by over 300 institutions, making research across its 28 titles openly fully available to a wider audience.

Of course, there will be hurdles to overcome as everyone adapts. But the prize of open research is more valuable than any one stakeholder or business model.

The truth is that we must all go further.

There are still far too many articles that end up locked away behind paywalls – being cut off from an unimaginable range of useful applications in industry, in healthcare, or in wider society.

And when articles do become openly available, this is too often after a year or two has passed, when the embargo has finally been lifted and when in all likelihood the boat has sailed, the opportunity has passed, and the research field has moved on.

And there is a further wealth of research in the humanities and social sciences which winds up published in scholarly monographs, often with eye-watering price tags, and available only on the bookshelves of a small number of university libraries – not reaching the audiences it should.

When the most up-to-date record of human progress is locked away behind a paywall – and where those in need of publicly funded knowledge are told to cough up or lose out – you know that the situation has to change.

What I’m talking about here is work which is paid for by us all, in taxes. Work that we make a choice to invest in for our collective benefit.

And it’s work which is quality-assured by researchers themselves, through the network of volunteer peer reviewers.

Arguably, it is the ultimate public good.

In the digital age, where a “paper” is but a microscopically small yet infinitely reproducible string of ones and zeros, we should all see the tantalising opportunity in front of us, to share freely the fruits of knowledge far and wide.

So that is why I am delighted to announce that UKRI is launching its new open access policy. This is a policy that will achieve the government’s ambition, set out in the R&D Roadmap, of full and immediate open access for research articles – so from the day of publication, the results of UKRI-funded research are available for all. This policy will ensure that the results of UKRI-funded research are made as freely available as possible – not just for reading, but for reusing and recombining with other results, and creating the shared repository of human knowledge that will unlock the potential of even more people, in the UK and abroad, to learn, to discover, and find innovative new solutions to our most pressing problems.

And while it seems obvious that this is a necessary move by UKRI, it is not a decision that they have taken lightly. They have consulted and engaged on this policy for well over a year, talking to countless stakeholders and receiving over 350 inputs to their consultation. UKRI have gathered new evidence and engaged closely with other funders such as Wellcome to learn from their experiences and find common approaches.

And I am particularly pleased that the UK has, from the start, been a central player in the major international collaboration, Plan S – a plan to deliver full and immediate open access to the world’s research output. As a global science superpower, it is right for the UK to be at the heart of the global push for open research.

I also know that full and careful consideration has been given to the details in the UK context. I have listened to the arguments and met with many stakeholders myself.

My conclusion is that UKRI are to be applauded for taking this decisive step.

Of course, opening up the findings of research won’t change culture on its own. The open research agenda is about more than what’s written on the pages of journals and books.

The open research agenda is also about improving the very fabric of research, changing the way it’s undertaken as well as the way it’s communicated. This means opening up new possibilities for more creative and imaginative ways of undertaking and sharing research. And increasing transparency and sharing across the research process. As much as possible, we need to apply the principles of transparency and free access to more than just scientific publications. Open research encompasses all aspects of the research process, and research artefacts such as data, code and materials.

That is why it’s so important that we see the continuing emergence of new initiatives like Octopus: an experimental new platform for scientific research to be made available as separate elements – the problem statement, the methods, the data, and so on – all linked together, and all openly available.

Octopus has the potential to significantly disrupt the way that research is communicated, improving research culture. I’m delighted to announce that Octopus will receive £650,000 in funding from Research England’s Emerging Priorities Fund over the next three years, to help develop this prototype into a reality.

And while technology is important, it is critical that we get the incentives right, as we are indeed doing. Open research is already a key feature of the current Research Excellence Framework, as it will be in the next.

And the Global Research Council of the world’s research funders recently agreed that open research should be considered a dimension of research excellence and should be incentivised in assessment criteria.

This is something that funders take very seriously, and it is an area which will be key to delivering the vision set out in the People and Culture Strategy that I launched last week.

Let me conclude. The UK has a proud history at the forefront of research communication.

The Royal Society can proudly lay claim to inventing both the academic journal and the system of peer review that underpins it, way back in 1665.

It’s not hard to imagine our forefathers, themselves striving to build back better from the devastating impact of the bubonic plague, becoming energised by the new scientific discoveries published by the Royal Society – and bringing the Age of Enlightenment blinking into life all over Europe.

And fast forward to 1989, as particle physicists at CERN smashed electrons and positrons together in a huge underground ring, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web – a new tool for connecting scientific knowledge in online web pages, and an invention which has defined the modern age.

And it was Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist from Southampton University, who prominently questioned the very purpose of the printing press in this new scientific digital age, sparking development of the EPrints research repository platform and the world’s first utterance of the term “open access”.

It was then my predecessor David Willetts who recognised the public interest in open research, and kindled those sparks of the early adopters into a flame, with Janet Finch’s report giving research funders the mandate to take those early steps towards a policy.

So, as we strive to build back better from the pandemic of today, now we can take our own step forward.

By unequivocally opening up the UK’s publicly funded research for free and open use and reuse, we will usher in a new scientific digital age – one where the unnecessary constraints on knowledge are cast off.

Today’s announcements are our own watershed moment in our history as a scientific nation.

Together we will develop a new culture of openness and collaboration, as an essential part of building the research culture we need to embrace the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Thank you.