Dangerous Driving

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 236952 relating to dangerous driving.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mrs Moon. The petition calls for life sentences for causing death by dangerous driving.

To lose a child is the worst thing that most of us could imagine. To lose a child at the age of only four, mown down by a speeding driver, is something we do not even wish to imagine. Yet that is what happened to Mr and Mrs Youens, who started the petition. To listen to their story is to step into a world of horror. To hear about parents called to a hospital knowing that something must be dreadfully wrong; to see their child grievously injured; to have to follow the ambulance transferring her to Alder Hey, unable to go into that ambulance because the doctors were still working to keep her alive; and to hear their story of lying with their daughter until she died is something I do not have the words to describe. I cannot even pretend to plumb the depths of their grief, but I do congratulate them on their courage and tenacity in wanting something good to come out of that grief. They began that process when they allowed some of Violet’s organs to be donated after her death to save other lives. Many of her organs could not be used because her injuries were so severe. Her parents have continued the process with the petition because, as they rightly say, they do not want anyone else to suffer.

Violet-Grace was with her grandmother when a car doing 83 mph in a 30 mph zone mounted the pavement. The car was stolen and had false numberplates. Violet suffered catastrophic injuries and died later. Her grandmother suffered life-changing injuries. The driver and his passenger did not even attempt to help, and they fled the scene. There is evidence that they had to step over the bodies of their victims lying in the road to get out of the car. The driver, Aidan McAteer, fled to Amsterdam to clear his head, as he said later, and smoke some weed. Clearly, he thought it was all about him. Eventually, he returned to this country and was tried and sentenced to nine years and four months. His passenger got six years and eight months. Neither showed any remorse, either at the time or later. In fact, they had their sentences increased while in jail for having illegal mobile phones and posting on social media. That does not seem much for a young life so cruelly taken and other lives destroyed in the process. As Mr and Mrs Youens said to me, the driver and his passenger will be out after serving less time than Violet-Grace lived.

The law does not cope well with such offences. It leaves families believing they have not had justice and the public looking on in amazement at what seem to be unduly lenient sentences. I met some of the families today and heard their stories. They told me that they felt they were treated as though they were the criminals. They were not allowed to show emotion in court and were sometimes told not to sit in the court. They were not allowed to read out all their victim statement in case it upset the perpetrator. They sometimes felt that they were the ones on trial. These cases are not unique. There are a lot of them, and our justice system is simply not working for these people.

I have other examples. In February this year, a driver was sentenced for causing the death of a pedestrian and catastrophic damage to a house when he was driving at twice the legal speed limit. He was a lorry driver—a professional—and he got 10 years and six months. In March, Antonio Boparan was sentenced for causing the death of Cerys Edwards. She was only 11 months old when he hit her in 2008 and she was held to have died later from complications arising from her injuries. He got 18 months, having previously served 21 months for dangerous driving. Families have told me this afternoon of seeing people cheer in court because their sentence was so light and of people who did not go to jail at all. That matters for confidence in our justice system.

It is a long time since I practised law, and I know, from being around the courts, it is very difficult to make judgments on cases unless you have heard all the evidence, but I believe that in the most serious cases we ought to have life sentences available. As Mr Youens said to me, in the wrong hands a car is a lethal weapon.

My hon. Friend is making a passionate and moving speech, and I am pleased to see so many families here. She, like me, will have spent far too many hours in grieving families’ living rooms talking about these issues and their relatives taken away so swiftly. Does she agree that people who hire high-performance vehicles should be held liable if those vehicles that they give to others are then used in criminal acts of murder on our streets?

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We need to do many things to reform the law. We have had numerous petitions on increasing sentences for death by dangerous driving, and on imposing lifetime bans for people convicted of dangerous driving.

I had a letter from Amy O’Connor, whose brother, Andy, was killed on his way to the gym one morning. It took 15 days to find the van and the perpetrator because the van had been hidden. By that time, it was impossible to do drug or alcohol tests, and the only thing the driver could be charged with—she understands why—was leaving the scene of an accident. She very reasonably asks why do we not increase the sentence for people leaving the scene of an accident when they have caused death or serious injury.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on her speech. Although we need a change in the law to make life sentences available for death by dangerous driving, I cannot understand why, in the worst cases of death by dangerous driving, the Crown Prosecution Service does not bring a charge of manslaughter, thereby giving the court the option of a life sentence for the worst types of offending.

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point on something that I will come to later. I understand why it is difficult for people to understand the law in this area, because we often punish the type of driving rather than the outcome. We used to have three offences—dangerous driving, careless driving and reckless driving—but the offence of dangerous driving as it was then was abolished under the Criminal Law Act 1977 because it was felt there was not sufficient distinction between dangerous driving and reckless driving. However, soon after, it appeared to people that the law was not punishing the most serious cases effectively. In fact, a review of the law by Dr Peter North in 1988 showed that many people thought that the law was not dealing with the most serious cases properly. Also, recklessness is obviously very difficult to prove, as it is subjective.

At the time, the Government were focused on dealing with drink-driving, to which I will return, because I think we can learn some lessons from it. The offence of causing death by dangerous driving was not introduced until the Road Traffic Act 1991. Even then, it was clear to many people that the law was still not being used effectively. There were widespread complaints that the Crown Prosecution Service was often charging people with the lesser offence of careless driving, because it felt that it was more likely to secure a conviction.

Attempts were made to address that, with advice to Crown prosecutors in 2007, and revised guidance in 2013 that set out some of the constituents of dangerous driving, such as excessive speed, racing, aggressive driving, ignoring traffic signs or lights, and failing to have regard for vulnerable pedestrians. Most of those elements were present in Violet-Grace’s case. There were also attempts to deal with people’s fears through changes to advice from the Sentencing Advisory Panel.

It is also fair to say that Governments of all colours tried to fill in the gaps in the law so that it operated properly. In the Road Safety Act 2006, the Labour Government introduced the offence of causing death by careless driving, and causing death by driving while unlicensed, disqualified or uninsured. In the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, the coalition Government introduced the offence of causing serious injury by careless driving. In the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, the offence of causing serious injury when driving while disqualified was introduced, punishable by four years’ imprisonment and a fine. Causing serious injury through careless driving was punishable by a sentence of up to five years’ imprisonment.

All those measures were welcomed by road safety campaigners and had widespread support across the House, but they still did not deal with people’s fears that the worst offences were neither being dealt with nor sentenced appropriately, even though, in 2003, the maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving had been increased from 10 years to 14 years. That matters because if the law is to work effectively people have to have confidence in it. It has to do three things: protect the innocent, punish the guilty and deter further offences. There was a widespread belief that that was not happening.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) on an excellent speech; she opened the debate brilliantly. She has done great justice to all those who have travelled a long way to hear the debate in Parliament. It is also a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon.

It is unfortunate that I have been called so early in the debate, because I will talk about something that is slightly different, although important to my constituents. My constituents Tom and Jackie Luxon were involved in a car crash with their then two-year-old daughter. The force of the impact was so great that the Isofix that the two-year-old was travelling in broke, and she sustained life-changing injuries that initially caused paralysis; amazingly, in the two years since, she has recovered to some degree. There is evidence that the person who hit the Luxons that day had been driving dangerously for 16 miles before the collision.

The incident was brought to my attention because Jackie was 26 weeks pregnant at the time and her baby, Grace, was stillborn as a consequence. We are debating whether there should be life sentences when dangerous driving is the cause of death of someone who is alive, but Grace was 26 weeks in gestation at the time of the impact. Obviously, she was killed as a direct consequence of the impact, but the man responsible received three years and seven months in prison. If Grace had been delivered when she was taken to hospital with her mother and had taken just one breath, the situation that we are debating would have applied and we would have been talking about whether that man should have been liable for a life sentence—or, as is the current position, something less satisfactory. Grace did not take a breath, however, so three years and seven months is all that could be served on that man for killing her.

PC Owen Davies, the investigating officer for Avon and Somerset police, wrote to me in despair. I hope he does not get in trouble for that with his chief constable, because he did exactly what a police officer should do—showed how much he cares. He said that he and the Crown Prosecution Service

“looked into charging the driver with death by dangerous driving but we hit a brick wall when we discovered that the Road Traffic Act 1988 does not recognise a healthy 26-week-old unborn baby as a person. Instead we had to charge him with causing serious injury by dangerous driving (x2)”—

for the mother and the daughter—

“with nothing able to be charged for the death of the baby.”

A couple of weeks ago, I asked about the issue at Prime Minister’s questions, and the Prime Minister gave a considered answer. The key thrust of her answer related to the danger that any such discussion about the rights of unborn children could have unintended consequences. That is as far as her answer went; she was obviously talking about abortion law. I agree with her that the impact could be challenging, but there is precedent.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. I compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for her excellent introduction and the work that she has obviously put into the debate. I pay tribute to other hon. Members who have contributed.

I praise the three people who have made the debate happen: Rebecca and Glenn, who are present in the Chamber, and Violet-Grace, whose tragic and senseless death is the reason for it. I praise everyone who has signed the petition, and I praise the St Helens Star and the whole St. Helen’s community for supporting Rebecca and Glenn’s tireless work to get their e-petition signed, to get the debate and to prevent something similar from happening in future.

Rebecca and Glenn are asking for the law to be changed and for a sentence that fits the crime: “Life sentences for Death by Dangerous Driving”, as the petition states. That will hopefully deter others from reckless driving, so that what happened to Violet-Grace does not happen to another child—or, if it does, so that those responsible receive a sentence that fits the crime they have committed and that gives them the time necessary to reflect, to be rehabilitated, and to have proper regard for, consideration of and understanding of their actions.

The law must be improved for victims and survivors. In the case that we are discussing, the defendant’s barrister objected to the parents reading out their full impact statement and argued that the defendants would find it too upsetting. The judge accepted that, so the CPS barrister gave the parents a copy of the victim impact statement with the parts that they could not read out in open court highlighted. The whole purpose of the victim impact statement is the impact on the victims and the survivors, not the defendant. Guidance should be given to the judiciary that the overriding consideration is for the victim and their family, not whether the impact statement may upset the defendant.

I thank my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for her work on this issue. I reiterate what she says about the Youen family. As well as our sympathy and solidarity, and the outpouring of love for the family from our community in Warrington, Wigan and across Merseyside and the whole north-west, there is a deep sense of anger about how they have been treated and a determination to make sure no other family is ever treated like that.

I thank my hon. Friend for saying that.

The current laws on sentencing for dangerous driving are simply not good enough. We need to equip our judges with sentencing guidelines that enable them to provide that key tenet of our judicial system: justice. The Youens actually praised the judge and said his hands were tied. I am sure some will say, “What constitutes dangerous driving? What if I sneeze and lose control of my vehicle? Will I now face those increased sentences?” My simple answer is no. We are talking about giving judges the option through Sentencing Council guidelines to issue a higher sentence where they deem it to be just. A judge will consider all the evidence provided to them and pass a sentence appropriate to the crime committed, whether it be the minimum or the maximum sentence in the guidelines, as with any other crime. I and many others are arguing that the maximum sentence that a judge can issue for dangerous driving is far too low.

For gross negligence manslaughter, judges have the option to issue life as the maximum sentence, with a range of sentencing options below it—one to 18 years. I do not see why dangerous driving should have a lower maximum sentence than gross negligence manslaughter. Both involve a disregard for the lives of others, and as we see too often, both can lead to the death of innocent people. An individual’s direct, reckless and callous actions can lead to the death of another. Stealing a car and driving 83 mph in a 30 mph zone can cause life-changing injuries, and the suffering and death of an innocent four-year-old child. How can we not give our judges the option to deliver a sentence at least on a par with gross negligence manslaughter for dangerous driving?

Another issue that I wish to raise on behalf of Rebecca and Glenn, and that I believe falls within the scope of this debate, is concurrent sentencing. Rebecca, Glenn and many others think it is unacceptable that criminals can serve two sentences at the same time. They describe it as “buy one, get one free”. The crux of this issue is that the current legal system does not adequately explain to victims what is happening, and thus it does not appear to be delivering the justice it is supposed to deliver.

I just cannot imagine the pain that Violet-Grace’s parents feel. As my hon. Friend indicated, two years ago the Government promised to introduce life sentences for death by dangerous driving and create a new offence of causing serious injury by careless driving. Many families across this country—including my constituent Mr Addy from Burscough, whose daughter was mown down in 2016 by a driver who received a fine of £500 and no jail sentence—are waiting for that promise to become law. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need not only appropriate punishment but effective deterrents for dangerous and careless driving, excessive speeding and reckless joyriding? We need it now; everyone has waited long enough.

I accept what my hon. Friend says; people are feeling that.

I call on the Minister to explain to my constituents why concurrent sentences are used, and to investigate how our judicial system explains its practices to victims. I and others are not calling for a knee-jerk change to the law. We are arguing not for punishment for the sake of punishment, but merely for a sentence that fits the crime that has been committed. We are under no illusions about the impact that the change would have on preventing dangerous driving. Changing the sentencing for dangerous driving may only deter a few people from driving dangerously, but those few people changing their behaviour could save lives like Violet-Grace’s. If it saves more lives, surely it is worth it. It will also send a clear message to those who might consider driving dangerously that we as a society see it as morally abhorrent.

Some may not change their behaviour and may cause death by dangerous driving, but by changing the sentencing guidelines we will finally deliver justice for families such as the Youens and others who are affected by such recklessness. It cannot be acceptable that individuals such as those who struck down Violet-Grace and tore open the Youen family can serve sentences shorter than the time she was alive. They have sentenced Rebecca, Glenn and Violet-Grace’s little brother Oliver to a life of grief, and denied them the joys of watching her grow up and experiencing the joyous occasions and events that a maturing daughter gives to a family. That loss can never be repaid in this life.

In October 2017, the Government pledged to increase sentencing for death by dangerous driving to life, but we have not seen any meaningful movement on that issue in nearly two years. I therefore call on the Minister to set his civil servants to the task of getting the laws on dangerous driving changed. That gap in our legislation and our justice system must be filled sooner, rather than later.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairwomanship, Mrs Moon.

First, I want to express my heartfelt sympathy to the family of Violet-Grace—and, indeed, to all the families with us today. No parent should have to endure what they have endured. It is to their credit that they created this very successful petition to try to get some justice for families who have lost loved ones to death by dangerous driving and for those who have endured serious and life-changing injuries.

Sadly, Violet-Grace’s story and the bereaved family’s pain and sense of injustice are all too familiar to me. In 2014, my constituent Joseph Brown-Lartey was killed by a dangerous driver. Joseph was just 25 years old, with a promising career opening up ahead of him, yet his plans and his life were destroyed by an uninsured, unlicensed 18-year-old named Addil Haroon, who chose to drive a hired high-powered car at 80 mph in a 30 mph zone, ran a red light and smashed into Joseph’s car. The impact was so great that Joseph’s car was split in two and, tragically, Joseph was killed outright. Police officers who attended the scene said it was the worst crash they had ever seen on an urban street.

Addil Haroon was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving but was given a jail sentence of just six years, of which he will serve just three in custody: he will be released on licence after serving half his sentence. Joseph’s parents, Dawn and Ian Brown-Lartey, contacted me for help after that derisory sentence was given. I wrote to the Attorney General asking for the sentence to be reconsidered in view of the gravity and tragic consequences of the crime. The reply I received was that the judge had acted within sentencing guidelines, and that the sentence had not been “unduly lenient” and would not be reconsidered. As we heard, the maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving is 14 years, yet few convictions result in a sentence that long. In 2017, the average sentence was just four years and nine months.

Joseph’s parents, with the help of the road safety charity Brake and campaigning journalist Michelle Livesey, launched a petition and a campaign called “Justice for Joseph”, calling for tougher sentences for those who cause death and serious injury by dangerous driving. The petition gathered 20,000 signatures and was handed into Downing Street with support from me and the then police and crime commissioner for Greater Manchester, who is now my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd).

Brake then launched another campaign, “Roads to Justice”. For the launch of that campaign, Joseph’s parents allowed the wreckage of his car to be displayed outside Parliament. Hon. Members may recall seeing the shocking sight of a wrecked Audi split clean in two on their journey into work that day. That wreckage is now used by Greater Manchester police as part of its road safety campaigning and teaching, having been kindly donated by Joseph’s family in the hope that it would serve as a lesson to other drivers.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for opening the debate so eloquently on behalf of the Petitions Committee.

I begin by paying tribute to the family of Violet-Grace, who, tragically, was killed by a dangerous driver in March 2017 aged just four. Her mother and father, Rebecca and Glenn, started this petition when the driver, who mounted the pavement in a stolen car before fleeing the scene and subsequently the country, was sentenced to a derisory nine years and four months in prison.

Violet-Grace’s killer was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. I, along with many other hon. Members and campaigners, have long campaigned for reform of the sentencing guidelines for that offence. As it stands, the maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving—driving that falls far below the expected standard—is just 14 years. As we have seen in this and many other cases, killer drivers too often are given considerably less than 14 years.

It is not right that people who drive recklessly, with no regard for human life, and cause death and serious injury get away with lenient sentences because our sentencing guidelines are not tough enough. That is why I warmly welcomed the Government’s announcement in October 2017 that they would bring in tougher sentences for drivers who kill someone by dangerous or careless driving, as well as a new offence of causing serious injury by careless driving.

My simple question to the Minister is this: it is nearly two years on, so where are those tougher sentences? The Government have said repeatedly that they will bring forward legislative proposals “as soon as parliamentary time allows”. I sincerely hope that we do not hear that phrase from the Minister today. As we all know, there has been ample parliamentary time in recent months for these changes to be discussed, debated and implemented. One could fairly conclude that the Government, having announced they intended to introduce those tougher penalties, have now changed their mind. That is an appalling way to treat families affected by this terrible crime.