Anneliese Midgley MP: speeches

Speeches

• 19 Jun 2025 · Victims and Courts Bill (Third sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I just want to say a few words about the provisions in this Bill on attending sentencing hearings and related prison sanctions, because this issue is incredibly personal to me. I do not think we would be sitting in this Committee today, with this Bill in our hands, without my constituents Cheryl Korbel and Antonia Elverson, who have fought hard to make this happen. Many of us will know Cheryl’s story: just quickly, for the record, her nine-year-old daughter, Olivia Pratt-Korbel, was tragically shot and killed in their own home in 2022. As if that was not horrific enough, the man who killed her, Thomas Cashman, did not turn up to court and did not attend that sentencing hearing, which meant that Cheryl did not get to read her victim impact statement out to him. There was confusion at the court; she did not know what was happening, and it came very late in the day. This has been a source of pain, because she felt out of control and that she had a lack of agency. In my first surgery, Antonia and Cheryl came in and told me about their case, and I have had the pleasure and the privilege of supporting them. I want to thank the Government and put on record today that I have been in every meeting with them, with the Prime Minister, the Lord Chancellor and this Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd. That was not just consultation; it was Antonia and Cheryl’s suggestion about sanctions and attending the sentencing hearing that put this measure in the Bill. I thank the Government for listening to and acting for people. I know that there were other families on the frontline who were listened to as well. This measure is because of those family members, and I pay tribute to them. This is what a Government can do when they really listen to people and act in that reality. That is why we have this Bill today.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Victims and Courts Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I thank the Minister for listening to my constituent Cheryl Korbel, the mother of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, who was killed by a stranger when she was nine years old. He did not attend his sentence hearing. You listened to her and acted. Another part of her ask, which is in the Bill but not spelled out so much, is for sanctions if the offender refuses to turn up to the sentence hearing. Can you say a bit more about what that would look like? What mechanisms—they are not currently in the Bill—can be used to compel them? The point that my constituent made is that, for someone whose sentence is four years or even 10, a few extra years would be compelling, but if it is life imprisonment, that would essentially be meaningless. Alex Davies-Jones: Thank you for that question. We have built on the previous Government’s measure to compel perpetrators to attend their sentencing hearings. The previous measure was merely an extra two years on their prison sentence. As you have stated, and as victims have told us, for someone serving a whole-life order or life imprisonment, an extra two years on their sentence is not really an incentive to come to court. We listened to the Pratt-Korbels and other families who have been through this horrific situation, and have done something quite novel. For the first time ever in this Bill, judges will be given powers to issue sanctions on perpetrators once they are in prison. We have not listed those sanctions on the face of the Bill because we do not want to be prescriptive. A whole range of measures is available, and we feel that listing them in the Bill would be too restrictive. By not doing so, we enable judges to use every tool at their disposal to issue sanctions in prison. They include, for example, limitations on access to a gym, to work programmes or to television. We are looking at visit restrictions, and salaries can be taken away if the offender is in a work programme. All that can be looked at in the round; those are all available to a judge as part of a sanctions programme. We want perpetrators to attend their sentencing hearings in person. You heard how important it is to victims and survivors to have them there in person to hear justice being done. We have looked at all the practical ways in which that can be done. We have worked with stakeholders, including the judiciary and prison governors, and we felt that this is the best course of action.

• 26 Nov 2024 · Employment Rights Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I refer once again to the most high-profile case that we have seen in recent times, when P&O unlawfully sacked 800 workers, many of whom were your members and were impacted by that. At this morning’s evidence session, Matthew Percival from the CBI said: “In the fire and rehire proposals, there is a risk that we might be making it easier to make people redundant than to change contracts”. Do you agree? Mick Lynch: No, I do not agree with that at all. Defending fire and rehire, or fire and replace as P&O were doing, is defending the immoral. Maybe the CBI knows a thing or two about immoral behaviour—I do not know why they would be standing up against that. We negotiate contract changes all the time, and the great problem with P&O is that they deceived us. They told us that they were going to negotiate change for new technology, new vessels and new ways of working. There probably would have been some job losses, and we would have dealt with that through normal processes. They decided to sabotage that because it was quicker, and they wanted to get imported foreign labour on those vessels at £4 and £5 an hour, rather than a collective agreement. I do not see good employers struggling with that. I do not see decent businesses struggling with negotiating contract changes, staffing level changes or new technology agreements, which we will all need right across business. We will talk to DFDS about that, hopefully in the near future, as well as Stena and all the other good shipping companies. We are talking about it on the railway. Every trade unionist who comes in front of any of you will say that we are constantly negotiating change. At the end of the second world war, my union had half a million members, while the railway employed 1.2 million people—that has obviously changed. We had sectoral collective bargaining all through that, and most employers had never heard of fire and rehire. You can retool an economy inside collective arrangements, and our European partners have shown us that. If you refit your economy based on consensus, change and looking after people who have to leave, you will have a more successful business. If you just guillotine the whole process, your reputation will be in ruins. I do not accept the CBI’s position. It was probably against the health and safety at work Act and the sex equality Act. All those Acts brought impacts on business, and there is no doubt that the Factories Act was a bit burdensome for the mill owners and mining companies of this country. Everything is difficult for a business, but you have to live inside the regulations in a democracy, and that is what it should be about. Martyn Gray: I suppose to some extent it is the difference between doing what is easy and what is right. It is disappointing that there is an attitude among some elements of business in this country to opt for what is easy, as opposed to doing what is right. Negotiating with trade unions is fairly straightforward. To use the example of P&O Ferries in 2020, at the height of the covid pandemic, we negotiated redundancies as it reduced its operations and went through that process. Mr Hebblethwaite did not want to get back around the table with us because we held P&O Ferries to account over its business proposals in 2020, and we ensured that the redundancies it made were absolutely necessary and were to rightsize the business. We fed back on all its proposals and we engaged very heavily in that process in 2020, when we went through two rounds of redundancies with that particular employer. P&O Ferries then said that we could not engage with what it was proposing, because it knew the proposals were wrong and morally reprehensible. It wiped out a long-standing, collectively bargained workforce that offered quality jobs, as well as employment and training opportunities, across many deprived coastal communities. The loss of those jobs is still being felt in Kingston upon Hull, Birkenhead, Liverpool and Dover. P&O Ferries was able to say, “Actually, because what we are suggesting is so wrong, we have just decided to push ahead and do it anyway, knowing that there will be limited repercussions,” and that is to some extent why we are here talking about it. That highlighted just how easy it was for businesses to make the wrong decisions. It is shocking and abysmal, but unfortunately not surprising, that the CBI did not recognise that those easy options are what are putting us in this position, where regulation needs to be developed. I disagree with what the CBI said, and I disagree that this Bill would make it the preferred option to go through a redundancy, or fire and rehire, rather than to engage with trade unions. When negotiating with trade unions, we understand the business operations and we can help, and we have helped. I have been engaged in countless redundancy conversations with employers in the maritime industry where we have been able to look at things differently. We have been able to support what those businesses are going through by talking about the number of redundancies that potentially need to be made, and we have supported them in building jobs back in, in their plans for growth and in their changes to terms and conditions. That has protected jobs, and we have negotiated our way through that for the betterment of the business and the people that it employs. For the CBI and some business elements to take the approach that it is easier to fire and rehire, instead of negotiating, is really short-sighted and problematic for the future.