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  • Laura Farris – 2023 Speech on Arts Council Funding for England

    Laura Farris – 2023 Speech on Arts Council Funding for England

    The speech made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons on 18 January 2023.

    I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) on securing this debate. I recognise all the things that he referred to in his opening remarks—a lack of transparency, accountability and engagement with the sector—in a decision that was reached on a treasured regional theatre in my constituency, the Watermill Theatre. It was truly a bolt from the blue for it to learn that there has been a 100% cut in its funding for the next three years.

    One thing that has been frustrating in the process since then is the fact that the Arts Council did not really substantiate its decision with reasons, and it was so reluctant to produce written reasons when we invited it to do so. I had to remind the council that it is a public body and susceptible to judicial review. When the decision came, it was impossible to discern why the Watermill did not meet the relevant criteria. It had met them all in every previous round of funding and was not alerted to the fact that any criteria had changed. The Arts Council was unable to explain why, if it was a regional decision based on levelling up, the other theatre in Newbury, which we also love, was successful when the Watermill was not. Eliciting the final decision was like getting blood out of a stone, and when it came it simply set out generalities, such as the assertion that the Watermill lacked ambition.

    The Watermill is an 18th-century watermill that has been converted into a theatre. I cannot improve on the description written in The Mail on Sunday, which said:

    “What a location! Forget the glitz of the West End: try walking up a country lane, past waddling ducks, to this lovely little theatre in a converted mill.”

    Its aesthetic beauty as a venue is absolutely treasured by our community, but we also treasure the quality and diversity of its productions. It is not just a standard repertory theatre that takes shows on tour: it produces its own work and pumps it around the country. It most recent touring production of “Spike” went from the Watermill to Blackpool, Glasgow, Cardiff and Darlington. It is also an artery theatre through which West End productions come and other productions flow on to international destinations, including Broadway.

    The theatre takes its commitment to diversity and improving access seriously. It is in the heart of a tiny village, so in 2022 it did a rural tour. “Camp Albion” took its productions to villages, which are often completely neglected in the consumption of the arts. Overall, the theatre reaches 20,000 people annually through its various community engagement programmes, including children with autism, deafness and many other special needs. It has a deep commitment to the Arts Council’s outcomes, which the council even acknowledged in its decision letter.

    We have been confronted with a deeply disappointing decision. We have found it incredibly difficult to know what mandate the Arts Council was working to, or why. I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was capricious decision making, which undermines the status of the Arts Council as a guarantor of our national arts output. If the council is watching, I respectfully request that it reverse its decision because it has devastating consequences for the future of the Watermill Theatre in Newbury.

  • Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on the Child Support Bill

    Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on the Child Support Bill

    The speech made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in the House of Commons on 9 December 2022.

    I will speak very briefly on the Bill. The non-payment of child maintenance is an issue that disproportionately affects women, who make up more than 90% of single parents, but more importantly, it is a principal driver of child poverty. Victoria Benson, chief executive of the single parent charity Gingerbread, said:

    “Research shows that 60% of single-parent families living in poverty and not receiving child maintenance would be able to escape the poverty trap if they were paid the money they’re owed. Parents have a legal and moral duty to contribute to their child’s upbringing whether they live with them or not, and where this money isn’t paid willingly the CMS needs to step in.”

    I know that the CMS does its very best, but if we look at the statistics for the collect and pay service for the quarter ending June 2022, we see that it remains the case that more than a third—36%—paid no maintenance at all, and only 44% of all the people using the collect and pay service paid 90% or more of the child maintenance owed. That creates a huge poverty hole through which some of the most vulnerable families in this country are falling again and again.

    My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) has set out beautifully all the mechanisms that exist, but there is a persistent problem with the amount of time it takes for them to be activated. This year’s National Audit Office report says that

    “it can take years before payments are made to receiving parents if the paying parent refuses to comply”.

    That was certainly echoed in what I heard when I visited the family centre at Hungerford Nursery School in my constituency, which deals with vulnerable families. In every single case, it was a woman that I met and, without exception, they were not receiving the child maintenance payments to which they were entitled. I heard really grim anecdotes about one woman who tried to enforce but had hit a wall because her former partner was still paying off a car loan, which apparently took priority over what was owed to his children. I do not know whether that was the case, but it was certainly the perception and there was also a sense that there was no point in pursuing it any further.

    Even if that was only perception, it is to some extent mirrored by the conclusions of a recent Mumsnet survey, which illustrates the despondency with which some parents view the current system. Eighty-three per cent. of respondents told Mumsnet that they never expect to receive what they are owed in arrears, and nine out of 10 respondents said that they thought it was too easy for their former partners to evade paying child maintenance.

    I welcome any Bill that will give the CMS more teeth—this Bill does so through liability orders—and, in particular, that reduces the wait that families face to get the money to which they are properly entitled.

  • Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill

    Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill

    The speech made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in the House of Commons on 9 December 2022.

    It is almost two years since Maya and Gemma Tutton from Our Streets Now first approached me in Parliament. I pay tribute to them for their campaigning. As the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) points out, there have been many voices along the way, but those two are notable because they are among the youngest campaigners and have been among the most persistent over the past two years. This Bill is in no small part a product of their efforts.

    I have asked for laws on public sexual harassment a number of times in this place and have been met with two objections, both of which are legitimate and which I want to deal with at the outset. The first is the point about wolf whistling. Are we creating a de minimis criminal offence that will result in the police going on a wild goose chase after builders who have happened to wolf whistle at somebody? Gemma Tutton was asked that question when interviewed on the “Today” programme this morning. I will return to it later in my speech, but her answer was no and that what we are talking about is “really sexual intrusive abuse”. When we mention that in any roundtable we conduct in our constituencies or when we meet women’s groups, everybody knows an example of what is being referred to. The language used in that context would be completely unacceptable to repeat in this place, but such behaviour is pervasive and serious and the purpose of the offence is to address it.

    The other objection that I have encountered in the past is that it is already a criminal offence under the Public Order Act 1986. The truth is that that is true in principle, but it is not really true in practice. Very rarely do women even know that they would have a right to go to the police to report public sexual harassment if someone said something really obscene to them in the street. On the very few occasions that I have encountered somebody who has been to the police, they tell me that they have been met with a really inconsistent and imperfect response by police officers who—and I say this respectfully—sometimes do not really know that there is such an offence and are unfamiliar with what they are required to do under the Public Order Act. I think that creates two imperatives to look at this.

    I was very glad to hear the Minister respond positively at the Dispatch Box. I am going to expand on why the Government need to be enthusiastic about the Bill. It is right that the Government are responding to the recommendation of the Law Commission. I know that, when the Government have developed their work on tackling violence against women and girls, they have always wanted to do so following consultations and with a proper evidence base. After the comprehensive work the Law Commission did, it is difficult to say now that that has not come forward.

    It is true to say that, in the last two to three years, the Government have increasingly shown that they are willing to enter the public sphere—the public, rather than the private—in the treatment of women. An example of that is when they outlawed upskirting. We are currently discussing the Online Safety Bill and the sharing of intimate images. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) is leading the charge on this, but the Government have made positive indications, and downblousing, another form of intrusive imagery, is likely to be included.

    It was this Government a decade ago who created a distinct offence for stalking. I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not suggesting stalking is comparable to public harassment. It can be a much more serious offence, but at its inception, the first time someone acts, there is the idea of fixating on somebody and thinking about how to encroach on their public space in a way that will humiliate them, cause them fear or have a predatory impact. That offence has something in common with what we are trying to achieve today.

    The purpose of this commendable private Member’s Bill from my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) is in some way to draw all these strands together. I would respectfully say that it is far better that we talk in the wider language of public sexual harassment, rather than in a piecemeal way, where we deal with individual acts and offences as they arise, such as upskirting and downblousing. Even those slightly contrived expressions show that we are dealing with the issue in a piecemeal way, rather than looking at it in a more cohesive sense.

    There is also an important point to be made about consistency with the law. Since 1975, there has been a prohibition on sexual harassment in the workplace and in educational settings. That was set out in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, but it now appears in section 26 of the Equality Act 2010. It is clear that the 2010 Act has informed this Bill, because I notice that some of the statutory language is replicated. It is not as if the Government are unfamiliar with the law of sexual harassment, or that it does not exist anywhere. It does and it has been borrowed a bit here.

    The whole sense of sexual harassment is something that has been brought into sharp focus since #MeToo particularly. We talk about sexual harassment in the workplace, but in the last year or so, particularly in educational settings such as universities, we have talked about non-disclosure agreements. That has been a big topic, and it is another part of what we are discussing today.

    Another point, which we have all been tiptoeing around a bit, is how we draw the line at reasonableness and find the minimum threshold at which it would not be appropriate to criminalise somebody’s conduct. I would respectfully say that that already exists in law. I refer the House to section 26(4) of the Equality Act, which sets out a reasonableness condition that is necessary to establish, whatever the conduct complaint in the workplace, that it meets the threshold for unlawful harassment. It is not simply enough for somebody to assert that something has happened and on proving those facts establish that a civil tort has been made out. They must meet the reasonableness threshold set out in the Act, and I see no reason why equivalent terms could not be transposed into the criminal law, because the law is already used to looking at this.

    It is true to say that there is a pervasive problem about women’s safety in public places. When I did a women’s safety survey in my constituency, 85% of respondents gave me an example of somewhere in the town of Newbury where they had felt unsafe. When specifics were given, they were much analogous to the kinds of harassment this Bill seeks to proscribe. Nearly every incident that I was given detail about had occurred in Newbury and at night, and I note that there have been two sexual assaults reported to the police in Newbury alone.

    I want to pick up on another point that many MPs have made. I represent a market town in Berkshire; it is a low-crime area. None the less, in the three years since I was elected, the area has seen one violent murder of a woman by her partner, for which Christopher Minards was sentenced to life at Reading Crown court last September; a rape, for which Mark Tooze was sentenced to five years at Reading Crown court last July; a former Newbury police officer given a three and a half year sentence for abusing his position by coercing vulnerable women into sexual relationships; and a number of sexual assaults. Even in a low-crime area, very serious violence against women is happening, and therefore I do not take gateway issues, which I believe public sexual harassment can be, lightly.

    As my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) said, public sexual harassment is particularly directed at younger women and girls. Like her, I did a roundtable with some schoolgirls, and the girls at Park House, a big secondary school in Newbury, told me about being particularly targeted when wearing their uniforms and the men who kerb-crawl at the end of the day or wait at certain junctions, saying obscene things out of the window. The girls definitely thought that there was a link to wearing the school uniform and felt more vulnerable when wearing it. My constituency of Newbury is far from alone in this. Plan International gave me some data when I was preparing for the debate, and it shows that 75% of girls and women aged 12 to 21 have experienced some form of sexual harassment in a public space.

    This is a very important and helpful Bill because it creates for women a clear set of contours so that they know when their rights have been infringed. It is also helpful to the police, because the words “public order offence” are quite vague, and if there is a public sexual harassment offence and police have training on it, it will be much clearer to them what they are expected to do and how they are expected to act when it is drawn to their attention. We can probably all agree that there has never been a more important moment for the police to reinject confidence in their relationship with the public, particularly in terms of how they are prepared to deal with violence against women and girls.

    I want to end by agreeing with my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price): I cannot bear the expression “tackling violence against women and girls”. I regret that we use it and that we tolerate it in the passive voice. It is male violence against women, and as lawmakers, we should call it what it is; I really feel strongly about that. Overall, this Bill is an important and valuable tool in our long battle to completely overhaul women’s safety.

  • Laura Farris – 2022 Comments on Rishi Sunak Becoming Prime Minister

    Laura Farris – 2022 Comments on Rishi Sunak Becoming Prime Minister

    The comments made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, on Twitter on 20 October 2022.

    I’m backing ⁦Rishi Sunak⁩ for Prime Minister.

    He has demonstrated exceptional economic skill in a crisis before & is the only one who can restore our fiscal credibility, tackle inflation & resolve the serious national challenges we face.

  • Laura Farris – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

    Laura Farris – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

    The tribute made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in the House of Commons on 10 September 2022.

    It is with profound sadness that I rise to pay tribute to Her late Majesty the Queen on behalf of my constituents in west Berkshire. She was the lodestar of our national life, and in west Berkshire she was treasured for her passionate engagement in racing, our signature pastime. She was a frequent visitor to Newbury racecourse, sent multiple champions for training in Lambourn and even purchased her own racing stables in West Ilsley. The legendary Lambourn trainer Nicky Henderson told me that when a foal of particularly promising parentage was born in the spring of this year, she said, “Nicky, when this one runs for the first time as a four-year-old, I’ll be 100, you’ll be 75 and we’ll be the oldest owner-trainer combination in the world.”

    In the end it was not to be, but it was at Newbury racecourse that Her late Majesty saw some of the greatest triumphs of her racing life. In April 1958, six years into her reign, she was there when Doutelle gave her a first winner in the John Porter stakes. It was the year when Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister, Sputnik 1 was launched into space, Elvis topped the charts with “Jailhouse Rock” and Vietnam stood on the brink of war.

    She saw victory again in August 1967 with Hopeful Venture in the Geoffrey Freer stakes. It was the era of Harold Wilson and the Beatles, when NASA was putting the finishing touches to its preparations for launching man on to the moon. Just after Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election landslide, she was there again with Rhyme Royal, which came home for her in the London gold cup. It was the year of the Iran hostage crisis and the assassination of Lord Mountbatten at the hands of the IRA. She saw Phantom Gold cruise to victory in 1996—the year of the Dunblane massacre and just months before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Her last visit to Newbury was in 2017. She entered the winners enclosure just one day after her 91st birthday, when Call to Mind was victorious in the Dubai Duty Free maiden stakes. The country was in the midst of a general election campaign, and was reeling from terrorist attacks in Westminster, London Bridge and Manchester.

    Through her reign—war and peace, triumph and disaster, Presidents and Prime Ministers—she was our strength and our comfort, and we in Newbury will always be proud that she derived moments of pure joy from the place that we call home. I send my sincere condolences to the royal family, and also to the family of the Princess of Wales, who are my constituents. May she rest in peace.

  • Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on Transport

    Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on Transport

    The speech made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in the House of Commons on 19 May 2022.

    Last week I had the pleasure of joining the all-party parliamentary group on Crossrail for my first Crossrail trip across London’s city centre, and it is a triumph of engineering and creativity. From the cloud atlas ceiling as I descended into Paddington station to the pinstripes that inspired the entire construction of Liverpool Street station, the design tells the story of our city.

    Crossrail’s construction also revealed more of the city’s history. Some of the construction workers told me of discovering more than 3,000 victims of the black death, buried at haste and without dignity, beneath the old Bethlem Hospital when they excavated the tunnel at Liverpool Street. Of course, Crossrail also plants a flagpole in our national story, having been unveiled in the year of the Queen’s platinum jubilee and been christened in her name.

    Crossrail has not all been plain sailing. It is overbudget and overdue, and it would not have made it without significant Government intervention. I have repeatedly cursed it over the years for the chaos it caused at Reading station and, as I crawled through on the bus, for the way it carved up Tottenham Court Road. Despite that, I have had a Damascene conversion. Crossrail is an extraordinary new piece of infrastructure.

    It is incredible that we can travel from Paddington to Liverpool Street in 10 minutes, and even more incredible that we can get from Newbury station in my constituency to Canary Wharf, in the heart of the London docklands, in exactly one hour. Everyone who worked on Crossrail should feel proud. It will change our city and transform rail transport across much of the south-east.

    Crossrail comes at a bittersweet moment for west Berkshire, because it is only two months since we learned that Great Western Railway is withdrawing three intercity express trains between Bedwyn and Paddington, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger), who is not in his place, and I have been talking to Ministers ever since it was decided.

    I thank the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), who is also not in her place, for her help in reinstating the 19.07 route from Paddington to Bedwyn, which is popular with commuters. She will understand that my predecessor, who now sits in the other place, worked very hard on the route’s introduction, and it meant people moved to villages such as Kintbury and Hungerford because they believed those places were commutable from London. GWR is doing a great job of trying to improve connection times, and it has said its ambition is to reinstate the intercity express trains. I hope Ministers will understand if I keep up that conversation and keep knocking on their door in the months ahead.

    Finally, and I will be brief, I strongly differ from the hon. Member for Ilford South (Sam Tarry) on Bus Back Better, as we have had generous indicative funding. It has perhaps not enabled us to realise all our plans—we have lots of creative ideas in west Berkshire—but it has enabled us to realise some of them. Bus funding is often siloed in individual counties, and it is rare for counties to correspond on securing bus routes that travel between them, so Ministers will understand why I raise it.

    For close to 18 months, I have been campaigning for a bus that links Newbury to Oxford, with stops along the way, not just because these two great metropolises ought to be joined, although they should, but because I think it meets the Department’s BSIP criteria to maximise passenger growth. The A34 route between west Berkshire and south Oxfordshire is home to some of the most exciting technology and science enterprises in the country, if not the world.

    The Harwell science park, just north of my constituency border, is creating 10,000 jobs over the next five years and is already heavily recruiting talented apprentices from Newbury College. The same can be said of the science parks at Culham and Oxford, and of the business park at Milton. They are all on the same route, but the only way one of my constituents can access these places, if they get a job, is by taking two trains and a bus, with a journey time of about an hour and a half for a distance of less than 20 miles. Of course, most of them get in their car, which is something we want to limit.

    I am grateful for the energy and enthusiasm that Oxfordshire County Council, West Berkshire Council, the Thames Valley local enterprise partnership and many others have shown for my proposed direct bus route, recognising that we need to give people a cheaper, greener and faster way of getting to work in these important growth destinations. West Berks and Oxfordshire both made this request of the DFT in their BSIP proposals, but the decision ultimately rests with Ministers, and I strongly encourage them to approve it.

  • Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on the Down Syndrome Bill

    Laura Farris – 2022 Speech on the Down Syndrome Bill

    The speech made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in the House of Commons on 4 February 2022.

    I begin, as others have, by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) on this truly groundbreaking Bill. I will add a few reflections of my own, the first of which dovetails with his remarks on Second Reading.

    Our understanding of and respect for people with Down syndrome and equivalent conditions have evolved so much in my lifetime. Forty years ago, people with Down syndrome or something similar were viewed as problems to be managed, rather than people with potential to be realised. Employment, if it existed at all, was seen as an act of charity, rather than an opportunity for a person to be productive or to be in a role in which they could develop and thrive. The idea of someone with Down syndrome having a personal intimate relationship was taboo. It is amazing to think how far we have come. We have a far greater understanding not only of developmental conditions but of how they can exist on a spectrum.

    There are far more opportunities for education, employment and training. So many excellent employers in Newbury employ somebody who has a learning disability, but I want to give a particular mention to a young lady with Down syndrome called Karen who is doing a fantastic job and loving life at Nando’s in Newbury. The Bill recognises the specific challenges, particularly with health and care, but squarely places them alongside recognition of the dignity of people with Down syndrome and the idea that their families should not be scrubbing around for care and that that should be dependent on the provision of their local authority.

    While I was preparing my speech, I thought about how far we have come in Parliament in what we say about disability. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Equality Act 2010, particularly the latter, contained important provisions about disability, such as the duty to make reasonable adjustments, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson). It is notable that the focus in the interpretation of both Acts was on physical disability, long-term health conditions such as cancer, or mental conditions such as schizophrenia or depression.

    I know that I am right, because I refreshed my memory of the statutory guidance published to go with the Equality Act to see what it said about disability. It is an extensive body of work on just the subject of disability, running to 60 pages and giving example after example of how society should respond, and there is not a single reference to Down syndrome and scant reference to any form of learning disability. I mention that not to minimise the significance or value of the Equality Act, but to point out that we as a society have been reluctant to confer on public authorities, employers or anyone else much in the way of positive duties on learning disabilities. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that we would be nervous to say very much about learning disabilities at all. I applaud my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset for taking the bull by the horns and presenting the Bill.

    I want to conclude with remarks on two points that have been made by other Members but are important. The Bill will receive Royal Assent, but it is right that we should not ignore all the other people with learning disabilities, particularly when there is an intersection with health concerns and a need for ongoing adult social care. I have a niece who falls into that category, and she was in special needs education throughout her younger years. The majority of her co-pupils had Down syndrome, so it is fair to say that she was considered by the authority to have something similar. She is now a young adult who has had significant challenges with her health and some of her communication abilities, but she has a job and a very busy social life and she is living a really productive life. A lot of the issues the Bill seeks to address apply equally to her and to thousands of others. The difficulty is in the definition, and finding statutory language that would correctly encompass all those conditions is technical and challenging—I do not resile from that. Of course I respect the ambit that my right hon. Friend chose for his Bill, but I must put on record my ambition that it will go wider and that we will see soon progress from the Department.

  • Laura Farris – 2020 Speech on the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

    Laura Farris – 2020 Speech on the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

    Below is the text of the speech made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in the House of Commons on 2 June 2020.

    I rise to support the Bill knowing that I may well be a turkey voting for Christmas. I am a new MP, but I am reliably informed by my predecessor that when the boundary commission previously turned its attention to my seat, of its various proposals, none helped. Perhaps that enhances the force of my support for the Bill, because I give it without much to gain.

    In the six months I have been a Member of this House, I have thought carefully about what it means to represent and what it means to be represented. Before consideration of this Bill, I had not been fully aware of the extent of the population disparity between the various seats. It is striking how closely the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey) resemble my own. I did not know that the seat of Ashford, with its 90,000 constituents had more than double the constituents of the Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross seat. I acknowledge the sensible remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Fay Jones) that there are important geographical considerations, but we cannot avoid the fact that a vote in Caithness has twice the value of a vote in Ashford, and to me that distorts representation. When he wrote “Of true and false democracy”, John Stuart Mill said that in a “really equal democracy” every community is represented in equal proportion. Without this, he added, there are those

    “whose fair…share of influence in the representation is withheld from them…contrary to the principle of democracy, which professes equality at its very root”.

    For that reason, it seems right to me that we equalise seats based on number and that the margin for variation is deliberately circumscribed.​

    My second point relates to the retention of 650 seats, rather than the reduction to 600. All the way through, three issues concerned me. First, I had grave concerns about whether the new super-constituencies could offer the sort of quality of representation that people deserve, just at the time we were losing the Members of the European Parliament. I was glad to see that reflected in the impact assessment prepared on 4 May. Secondly, one thing I knew about my own seat is that the 600 seats proposal lacerated some of our communities, cleaving villages from towns that had deep historical links. I hope—I will make submissions as the Bill proceeds—that we can use the preservation of 650 seats to put that right.

    Thirdly, I welcomed the coalition Government’s intention to manage the cost of Parliament, but I felt it was directed at the wrong Chamber. The other Chamber comprises 783 Members and costs the taxpayer less but almost as much as our Chamber. If the Members of this House spoke honestly to their constituents and asked them how many Members of the Upper Chamber they could name, they might find that some could name none at all. I know that some Members of that Chamber are brilliant and bring expertise; I know that some of them serve in the Government and in the shadow Cabinet, and are very active in that Chamber; and I know that the vast majority adhere to the highest standards of professional conduct. But when they fall short—and some do—there is absolutely nothing the public can do, and to me that conflicts with the whole principle of parliamentary democracy.

    As Ted Heath once said, those who have been appointed to or inherited seats have done in the main

    “a tremendous task and we owe them a great deal”,—[Official Report, 2 February 1999; Vol. 324, c. 761.]

    but I hope that in this Parliament, we will make the move—

    Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)

    Order. I am terribly sorry, but we have to move on to the next speaker.

  • Laura Farris – 2020 Speech on the Domestic Abuse Bill

    Laura Farris – 2020 Speech on the Domestic Abuse Bill

    Below is the text of the speech made by Laura Farris, the Conservative MP for Newbury, in the House of Commons on 28 April 2020.

    This legislation has been a long time coming, and for those on the Front Bench on this side and across the Floor of the House it ​has been a labour of love. I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) and the Lord Chancellor and his ministerial team for all their work.

    There is so much that the Bill will achieve. I start by praising the creation of the post of domestic abuse commissioner. The Home Affairs Committee had the benefit of hearing from her a fortnight ago when she gave evidence on the impact of the lockdown on women with abusive partners. The cogency of her evidence, and her understanding of the pressure points and the unique challenges for women seeking escape, left no doubt in my mind about how vital her role will be.

    Then there is the simple act of creating a statutory definition that expresses domestic abuse in all its myriad forms, which is what I think makes the Bill so much more than the sum of its parts. When the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in 1975, it was on the face of it a law that gave women the right to bring cases to employment tribunals, but in fact it was a piece of great social reform that said to women, for the first time really, “We understand the wrong that you experience. We give it definition as a statutory tort and we give you a right of enforcement.” The Bill has many of those features. It shines a spotlight in the darkest corners, and it puts women centre stage.

    It is with the darkest corners in mind that I speak in support of the amendments jointly proposed by the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), and my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) on the rough sex defence. Through that defence, acts of extreme violence are given a different complexion because they occurred during sex, and it is said that the victim wanted it—something that the Prime Minister himself has said is unacceptable. I know that there are big brains on the Front Bench giving this serious thought. Their task is technical, and it must avoid unintended consequences.

    The Lord Chancellor was correct when he said that rough sex is not a defence. That is true, but it does not prevent a defendant from establishing that there was consent when the victim is not alive to tell the tale. The Natalie Connolly story is a case in point. I cannot imagine how hard it was for her family to hear how John Broadhurst inflicted more than 75 catastrophic injuries on their daughter, sprayed bleach in her face and left her in a pool of blood. And yet he established in court that one of the most extreme and violent of those acts—the intimate insertion of a bottle of carpet cleaner—when he had beaten her black and blue, and she was very close to death, was done with her consent. In fact, at paragraph 31 of the sentencing remarks, the court found that it was done at her instigation. It is easy to see why her father, Alan, told The Sun in an interview last month that at times, it felt like Natalie was on trial. That is why I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest for affording Natalie the dignity in this Chamber that she was deprived of in her death.

    Natalie’s case is by no means an isolated example. Take Laura Huteson, who in 2019 had her throat slit by her partner, or Anna Banks, who was throttled to death by her partner a few years earlier. In all these cases, what is really just extreme violence against women is given a veneer of complicity through the sexual element. The victim has no voice. The lurid details of a private encounter are made public in circumstances where, had she lived and the case proceeded as one of rape or ​sexual assault, she would have been anonymised, and the man receives a derisory sentence on a manslaughter conviction.

    We must recognise that violence of this nature is becoming normalised. ComRes undertook a survey last November of a large group of women aged between 18 and 39. Of them, 70% said that they had experienced strangulation during sex, and of that cohort, more than half said that the man had not sought their consent before doing so. They had not wanted it, and some of them gave moving interviews to the BBC in which they said they thought the man was going to kill them.

    This landmark legislation offers an opportunity for the Government to show cultural leadership. I hope that it will look to the horizon and build in statutory protections that will keep women in relationships safe for the future.