The Labour government’s “mandatory reporting” section of the Crime and Policing Bill is designed to achieve nothing. It’s certainly NOT intended to help abused children.
We know this because of two things.
- It’s an almost word-for-word copy of the bill the Conservatives brought forward just before the general election, and
- The Conservatives published a document saying what effect it would have (almost zero).
Let’s start with the word-for-word copy bit. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two measures.
On the left are the amendments proposed by the Conservatives to their Criminal Justice Bill. It didn’t pass last year because the general election.
On the right are clauses 45 to 54 and Schedule 7 of the Crime and Policing Bill. In the key parts, they are word-for-word identical.
The Conservative bill followed two rounds of public consultation. At the end of the second round, they published their preferred approach, i.e. for the duty to report abuse not to an offence with a criminal sanction (which is what the IICSA public inquiry recommended), and for there to be on offence of “Preventing or deterring” someone from making a report.
When the Conservative amendments were published, we explained why they were useless. This was the actual intention of the Conservative government! Along with the outcome of the consultation, they published an Impact Assessment Statement. The key part of it was Table 1.
The central estimate is that there are about 103,000 child sex abuse reports to the police per year, and this measure will increase that number by just 310. That is about one per year for each local authority in England. It’s nothing.
Labour has copied a Conservative Bill designed to achieve nothing. The only reason to support this measure is if you don’t want to protect children who are being sexually abused.