Alberto Costa MP: speeches

Speeches

• 18 Nov 2025 · Reconsideration Mechanism and the Parole Board Rules 2019 · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered the reconsideration mechanism and the Parole Board Rules 2019. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. In 2018, the Parole Board decided to release John Worboys, the so-called “black cab rapist” who drugged and raped women between the years 2000 and 2008. It is believed that he assaulted more than 100 innocent victims. That was the wrong decision, and the Parole Board clearly made an error in assessing the level of risk that Worboys posed to the community, and particularly to young women. At the time of that decision, the then Secretary of State for Justice had no means to ask for a review, because he would have had to apply for judicial review proceedings against a public body over which he had ministerial responsibility. His hands were therefore tied. He had to wait powerlessly—those of us who were in the House will remember it—for the outcome of a separate third-party judicial review, which thankfully led to the quashing of that irrational Parole Board decision to release John Worboys. To avoid this happening again, that same Secretary of State for Justice, David Gauke, rightly considered and introduced the policy that became—I think under Sir Robert Buckland—the reconsideration mechanism in 2019. Those changes created a specific route, the reconsideration mechanism, that allows the Secretary of State to apply for an internal review of a Parole Board decision to release, on the grounds of either an error in law, irrationality or material procedural error—in other words, grounds similar to those for an application for judicial review. The so-called reconsideration mechanism is effectively a form of internal review, giving the Secretary of State an element of authority over the Parole Board, without in any way compromising its independence, but merely to request that it review a potentially flawed decision. The right to apply for reconsideration was also extended to prisoners. It is now clear, however, that what was intended as a safeguard to prevent dangerous prisoners such as Worboys from being wrongly released while a Secretary of State watched from the sidelines is now being deployed by such prisoners to mount effectively limitless, cost-free internal appeals against decisions they do not like. One example is the high-profile, nationally renowned case that occurred in my South Leicestershire constituency involving one Colin Pitchfork, who brutally raped and murdered two young girls, Lynda Mann in 1983 and Dawn Ashworth in 1986. For those who did not live in South Leicestershire at that time, as I did not, it is impossible to comprehend the anguish and worry felt in the areas of Narborough, Enderby, Blaby and beyond between 1983 and the day when Pitchfork was caught in 1987. Those were four whole years when parents were terrified to let their daughters out of their sight, women were scared to walk home alone and suspicion was rife, while families and friends grieved for the lives of those two young women, who would be around my age today had their lives not been taken so early and so brutally. Before Colin Pitchfork was caught, he forcibly manipulated one of his colleagues into giving DNA evidence on his behalf, to deceive police into thinking that his DNA did not match that of the killer. Pitchfork was eventually caught and the case was of national significance for English criminal history, because it was the first in which the embryonic DNA fingerprinting technique was used. Pitchfork received life imprisonment for the two offences of murder, with a minimum term of 28 years, and concurrent terms for rapes and perverting the course of justice. That is just one of the high-profile cases in which a dangerous, violent sexual predator and murderer has served their sentence and the Parole Board has had the unenviable job of deciding whether that prisoner is safe to be released into the public. On its website, the Parole Board explains that its role is “to determine whether prisoners serving indeterminate sentences, and those serving certain determinate sentences for serious offences, continue to represent a significant risk to the public.” The Parole Board has an incredibly important role in protecting us all, and our constituents the public, from the most dangerous offenders in the criminal justice system. The public and victims’ families need to know that when the Parole Board makes a judgment, it is definitive. If the Parole Board’s work is disrupted by repeated or opportunistic applications for reconsideration, the public understandably lose trust in its ability to deliver timely and conclusive decisions. Victims, their families and the wider public want clarity and finality. That is all they ask from the reconsideration rule and it is what they deserve. That is why I have raised concerns over many years about Colin Pitchfork, and over the last few years particularly about the reconsideration mechanism rule, with successive Ministers of different governing parties. Pitchfork has already once successfully used the mechanism to request reconsideration of an already reconsidered decision. After Pitchfork’s successful application for reconsideration last year, I wrote previously to my right hon. Friend the Member for Melton and Syston (Edward Argar), then the Minister responsible for justice and sentencing. He confirmed to me: “There is no limit to the number of applications for reconsideration which may be made.”— I repeat that statement; it is what the Minister said— “There is no limit to the number of applications for reconsideration which may be made.” He went on to state: “Consequently, there will be a final decision only where a provisional decision is not subject to an application for reconsideration (from either party) or where an application for reconsideration is made but then rejected by the Reconsideration Assessment Panel.” That is a problem, because there is no finality. Imagine the pain that my constituents and the victims’ family members have to go through when Colin Pitchfork, every couple of years, makes a bid for parole. That is his right, but none of us expected that the reconsideration mechanism rule would be used for never-ending challenges by the prisoner, repeatedly calling for a Parole Board decision to be reconsidered until effectively they get the decision they want. That potentially never-ending process has created legal uncertainty in the parole system, delaying finality and causing ongoing distress to victims’ families and friends. The public understandably feel that justice is now always hanging in a fragile balance, where a murderous sexual predator can exploit a loophole in a way that was never intended by David Gauke or Sir Robert Buckland when the rules were first introduced. The Parole Board—rightly, in my opinion—decided recently that Colin Pitchfork is not safe to be released to the public at present, but my South Leicestershire constituents are now in the unpalatable position of waiting to see whether Mr Pitchfork will challenge the board’s latest provisional decision, made only on 27 October. Pitchfork has until this Thursday to do so; if he does, not only will it be one of the first cases in English history where a prisoner who has committed such offences has asked for reconsideration, but it will effectively mean that he is being given the opportunity through these rules to request that a reconsideration of an already reconsidered decision is once again reconsidered. That is a farce. While I fully accept that there must be a route for prisoners to challenge genuinely flawed decisions, my view is that there must be a right to apply for just one reconsideration, whether by the prisoner or by the Secretary of State. I note that the Parole Board rules were updated last year to strengthen the system, for example by tightening the criteria for claiming a procedural error under rule 39. Those were welcome changes, and I would be grateful if the Minister could update the House on their impact. If he is unable to do so today, I invite him to write to me on that point. I will raise two related further points. First, those changes, while welcome, do not change the fact that a prisoner can still apply for the reconsideration of an already reconsidered decision, as Mr Pitchfork did in 2024 on the grounds of irrationality. Secondly, the changes introduced last year were made through secondary legislation, just as the reconsideration mechanism itself was created through secondary legislation in 2019. It follows that, if the Government seriously consider limiting the mechanism to one application per parole decision—and I very much hope the Minister will take it into account, given the high profile nature of this case and the cross-party involvement in my campaign to highlight the issue—that too could be achieved through secondary legislation without the need for primary legislation. That is why I ask the Minister whether he agrees that the reconsideration mechanism should be limited to one application per parole decision, which would still allow a prisoner to apply to reconsider a decision, and would in no way detract from that prisoner’s having the right to issue an application for judicial review if the decision was generally irrational or unlawful. We must remember that the reconsideration mechanism is relatively new, and making this change would restore it to what it was always intended to be: a targeted safeguard against wrongful release, ensuring that the Secretary of State could respond to significant public pressure, as we witnessed with Worboys. It should not be, and was never intended to be, an open-ended appeal system for dangerous offenders. I end with the comment made by the former Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Melton and Syston: “There is no limit to the number of applications for reconsideration which made be made.” That is the mischief—but, if the Government are serious on this, they can attend to that mischief and rectify it.

• 29 Oct 2025 · Privileges · Hansard source

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  I support the motion proposed by the Leader of the House and thank him for his kind words about me and other Members involved in this matter. The motion is, of course, about the report drafted by the Committee of Privileges. The task the House gave the Committee was, in essence, a simple one: to consider whether to release a document to the Omagh bombing inquiry. Throughout our work, the Committee has had in mind that the Omagh bombing was one of the greatest atrocities committed in Northern Ireland during the period known as the troubles and afterwards. In Omagh, on 15 August 1998—a summer Saturday in the centre of a busy town where people were going about their everyday business—a 500 lb car bomb exploded, taking the lives of 29 people and two unborn children and injuring hundreds more people, with repercussions for thousands of relatives, friends and people across Northern Ireland. In short, we felt from the beginning that there was an overwhelming public interest in our helping the Omagh bombing inquiry in any way we could. The inquiry is charged with considering an allegation made by a former senior police officer that police investigators did not have access to intelligence materials that might reasonably have enabled them to disrupt the activities of dissident republican terrorists before the Omagh bombing. That allegation was made to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on 11 November 2009. I thank the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), who chairs that Committee today, and commend the words she has said previously about this matter and the work she has done. I also put on the record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), who moved the original motion on behalf of the hon. Member for Gower, as the former Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. Part of the evidence taken by the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee was not reported to the House, and so has never been published. We were asked to make a recommendation on the desirability of releasing that evidence to the inquiry. There were procedural and, perhaps, constitutional difficulties in that. The terms of reference drawn up by the then Government enabled the inquiry to consider the allegation made by the now retired police officer. The unreported transcript of his evidence was not, however, the property of that or any Government; it belongs to the House of Commons. As it is unreported, it has not been seen by current Members of the House, other than those who sit on the Committee of Privileges; nor will this motion make it available to the House of Commons. In short, in proposing that we provide the transcript to the inquiry, we are giving control of the transcript to that inquiry. This, so far as we are aware, is an unprecedented procedural step. However, I praise the inquiry for its careful, helpful and co-operative approach to the matters of parliamentary privilege raised by this step. I also thank the inquiry for the assurances it has given my Committee about how it will handle the material, and in particular what steps it will take to ensure that any national security concerns have been fully discussed with the security services before it shares the document or relies on it for its own conclusions. Those assurances may be found in the appendix to our report. Thus, given the assurances received from the inquiry and in the light of the overwhelming public interest in providing aid to an inquiry into the murder of so many people, I trust that the House will feel confident that my Committee has recommended an appropriate course of action. We have added to our report a recommendation that the Government remind Ministers and officials, when drawing up terms of reference for future similar inquiries or for public bodies, that more care might be taken when it comes to intruding on matters that fall within the exclusive cognisance of Parliament. That is not in any way intended to be a partisan point; the terms of reference for this inquiry were drawn up by the previous Government. We would wish all Governments to take more care in future to recognise the rights of the House of Commons. I hope that the Minister can provide some reassurance on that point. I also place on record my thanks not only to fellow members of the Privileges Committee—I see one or two in their place this evening—but to the Clerks of the Committee and the advisers who helped us to navigate what is a challenging constitutional point. To conclude, the Committee believes that the House should do all it can to help the Omagh bombing inquiry in its work. We wish the inquiry well as it continues to seek the truth behind the terrible events of 15 August 1998. We should always remember that truly dreadful human tragedies lie behind what we are doing this evening. I commend the motion to the House.