Public Health Model to Reduce Youth Violence

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

It is as though the hon. Lady had my speech in front of her, because I am just about to move on to the further work that we have announced in recent months. Of course, having positive role models is key, particularly for young people with the biggest set of vulnerabilities, who perhaps do not have someone at home on whom they can rely. That may be because their home lives are difficult and chaotic, for reasons that we have heard about earlier in the debate. There is already a programme of work: the Home Office supports charities such as Safer London and the St Giles Trust to do innovative work to try to reach and then keep hold of the young people who most need their help.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am not going to, I am afraid, because I must make progress.

It has been a great pleasure for me, as part of my role, to meet youth workers and discover what they think will most help their young people. We in the Government are then in a position to help them in their work.

On 2 October, the Home Secretary announced additional major new measures to tackle violent crime. First, he announced a consultation on a new legal duty to underpin a public health approach to tackling serious violence. This would mean that police officers, education partners, local authority and healthcare professionals would have a new legal duty to take action and prevent violent crime, and fundamentally support our public health approach. The consultation will be a fundamental change in our approach—indeed, it will go further than the often-given example of Glasgow—and I will be very interested to see the results.

Secondly, the Home Secretary announced a new £200 million youth endowment fund, which will be delivered over 10 years and will support interventions with children and young people who are at risk of involvement in crime and violence. It will focus on those who are most at risk, such as those who display signs of truancy, aggression and involvement in antisocial behaviour. It will fund interventions to steer children and young people away from becoming serious offenders. Because we are delivering this £200 million over 10 years, it will provide longer-term certainty to those organisations that are helped through the fund, so that they can develop their programmes.

Thirdly, the Home Secretary announced the independent review of drug misuse, which will ensure that law-enforcement agencies are targeting and preventing the drug-related causes of violent crime effectively. Drugs have been identified as a major driver of serious violence. The review will consider recreational drug use, as well as use by the smaller number of users who cause the most harm to themselves and their communities.

Let me be clear: tackling serious violence is a top priority for the Government. The approach set out in the serious violence strategy, with a greater emphasis on early intervention, will address violent crime and help young people to develop the skills and resilience to live happy and productive lives away from violence. But we cannot deliver that alone, which is why we are supporting a multi-agency public health approach to tackling the issue and investing heavily in tackling the root causes of the problem and consulting on further measures to underpin the public health approach, to ensure that everyone is working collectively to stop this violence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

At the beginning of November, a 15-year-old child, Jay Hughes, was murdered in Bellingham in my constituency. Less than 72 hours on from that tragic event, a 22-year-old, Ayodeji Habeeb Azeez, was murdered in Anerley, just a year on from the murder of teenager Michael Jonas, which shocked the community back in 2017. These murders have utterly shaken our community, and constituents have expressed to me their fear for their family’s safety. No parent should have to harbour such concerns. No family should have to lose their child to violent crime. Similarly, no young person should be so bereft of opportunity and aspiration that they feel that violent crime is a path to follow. But this is the situation that we find ourselves in.

We are in the midst of a youth violence crisis. I will turn to the causes, but before that, I want to say how heartened I have been by the community’s response in Lewisham West and Penge. In the face of such tragic circumstances, they have shown strength and determination to bring our communities closer. I mention not least the work of the Bellingham community project, Youth First, the local police, Elfrida and Athelney primary schools in Bellingham, and Stewart Fleming Primary School and the Samos Road community in Anerley.

But as much as the community has worked to rebuild what has been lost, they cannot do this on their own. Tackling youth violence requires work from an array of public services in co-operation with our communities. Sadly, ever since 2010 we have seen some of the most devastating cuts made to our public services, especially the Metropolitan police, which has faced £1 billion of cuts since 2010, with further savings to be found over the next few years. As a result, we have seen the loss of 30% of police staff and 65% of police community support officers. Our police do a fantastic job, but in the wards that I represent, we have, at most, two ward officers and one PCSO per ward. They are fantastic, but they are overstretched. It is inevitable that with reduced police visibility and presence in our neighbourhoods, relationships with communities deteriorate, trust is eroded, and opportunities for crime arise. The Met urgently needs more funding so that it can work to prevent crime rather than just reacting to it. However, youth violence is not just a question of police funding and enforcement. The causes are extremely complex and involve societal problems such as poverty, adverse childhood experiences and lack of opportunity.

Tackling youth violence therefore requires a public health approach, which means addressing the environments that make people vulnerable to the risk of crime. We have talked about the example of Glasgow, where the violence reduction unit teamed up with agencies in the fields of health, education and social work, and the police force became the first in the world to adopt a public health approach. As a result, recorded crime in Scotland is now at a 40-year low. There are lessons to be learned from that, but it will work only if we join up health, education, youth services, housing, the Home Office and the justice system. Yet all those departments have been cut as part of the Government’s austerity agenda.

For example, the Government spend less than 1% of the NHS budget on children’s mental health, with many children waiting many months for treatment and often being turned away for not meeting the threshold. In the case of education, schools in my constituency tell me that they can identify children who are vulnerable from as young as three years old, because they may have older siblings or other family members in gangs. That is the point at which intervention is really needed, but schools can barely afford to go on as they are, so intervening to carry out that sort of work becomes increasingly difficult. Similarly, we have seen Sure Start centres have their budgets cut, and the loss of things like youth clubs and youth projects across the country.

The Minister mentioned St Giles Trust in her opening remarks, and I pay tribute to it for the work that it does. It was running a fantastic county lines pilot project down in Kent for six months, but then the funding from the Home Office dried up. That is the reality of the situation that we are working in. These projects need funding in order to carry on doing their work. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) for the work that she has done on the Youth Violence Commission—she has campaigned on this issue tirelessly—and also to the Mayor of London, who, despite restricted budgets, has launched the youth violence reduction unit. Such agencies desperately need money so that they can carry out this vital work.

We cannot bring back those we have already lost, but we can take action to prevent more from losing their lives. We can help prevent our vulnerable young people from turning to crime, and we can offer them aspiration and a stake in our society. What is needed is the funding and the political will.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Wednesday 5th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

There can be no doubt that this is a defining moment in our history. Our global economic and political success is at stake. I represent a constituency that voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the European Union and I stand here today to make this speech on their behalf. Although the European Union is not perfect, it is a union that has helped to bring so much peace and prosperity to our nation and to our continent. To dismiss our 45 years of membership diminishes what we have collectively achieved and what is possible.

Turning to the theme of today’s debate, we should not forget the benefits that EU membership has brought to the country through immigration. Could our economy or our NHS thrive without it? Of course not. In England, 63,000 NHS staff are EU nationals—one third of these staff work in London. Across the capital, almost half of the home- building workforce is from the EU, yet over the course of the referendum and subsequent negotiations, I have frequently been saddened by the fact that freedom of movement has become a political football spoken of only in negative terms.

A few weeks ago, when I was speaking at a public meeting in my constituency, a constituent, an EU national, stood up and told me that she had made her life here and now feared that she was no longer welcome in this country. I assured her that she was welcome. Like many others, I am immensely proud of our multicultural community in south-east London, but the Government have provided nothing but uncertainty on this issue. It is irrefutable that immigration has aided our nation and our continent. We should be proud of what it has contributed and what it has helped us to achieve.

Let me now speak of my personal experience. As a teenager, I was given the opportunity to live and study in Italy through the European Union’s Leonardo da Vinci programme. Growing up in south-east London and attending my local school, the idea of being offered, at the age of 18, the chance to temporarily move to Italy was almost incomprehensible. It was a completely life-changing experience, and I consider myself to be a citizen of the European Union. I want my son and all young people to have the same opportunities that I have had to live, work and travel freely within the EU. Instead, young people will be denied the chances of upward social mobility and co-existing with our European partners, compounded by an uncertain future of potential economic gloom as a result of this poorly negotiated deal.

When the withdrawal Bill was before the House this time last year, I tabled an amendment highlighting the work that Europe had done on family-friendly employment rights and gender equality. If my amendment, which lost by 14 votes, had passed, it would have ensured that Parliament was kept informed of changes in European law, making sure that we kept pace and did not fall behind on the equalities agenda. Rights in the workplace have been fought for long and hard, and a large number of employment rights on our statute book come from Europe, including rules on paid holiday, working hours, pregnancy and maternity rights, TUPE and age discrimination, to name but a few. Sadly, some Conservative Members would not think twice about tearing them up, and the workplace risks becoming even more precarious and insecure without EU safeguards.

I respect the outcome of the 2016 referendum, but nobody in the House could argue that things have not changed in that time. The political landscape has changed. The economic landscape has changed. Public opinion has changed. All the while, the Government are trying to force through answers to questions that were not on the ballot paper in 2016, and expect constituents to follow blindly.

When I was elected to Parliament, I vowed to my constituents that I would not support any form of Brexit that would be detrimental to them. London voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the European Union, and by a factor of two to one in Lewisham West and Penge. As my constituents’ representative and voice in this place, it is primarily their future that I consider when casting my vote on this motion.

This terrible deal would result in a miserable Brexit for the UK, threatening business confidence, jobs, our NHS and the future of young people. The biggest issues will remain unresolved while we follow rules over which we will no longer have any influence. I say to those on the Government Benches that these negotiations have been flawed from start to finish, and the results of this catastrophic approach are apparent for all to see. With time still left before the end of March, this does not have to be a binary choice between the Government’s deal and no deal.

I do not believe that anyone voted in the referendum to be worse off or less secure. The people should be given a voice again. They should be empowered to decide whether they want their future to be carved out by the Prime Minister’s deal, on which even her own MPs cannot unite, or whether they want an alternative. Given the shambles of the deal now before us, surely it is now time for the decision to go back to the public, with a people’s vote with an option to remain in the EU. With so much at stake—our prosperity, our success and our security—it is only right that we return the decision to the people and give them their say once more.

Police Pension Liabilities

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

I am grateful, as always, for my hon. Friend’s support. He knows from our previous exchanges that the Government recognise there is a problem in how stretched the police system is, and we took steps last year that led to more money going into the system, which is welcome, even though it was opposed by Labour. He knows my determination to find a solution not just for the pensions issue but for the stretch on the police. There is a need to increase police capacity.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

In my constituency, a 15-year-old child, Jay Hughes, was murdered on Thursday, another tragic victim of knife crime. Then, on Sunday, another young man was stabbed to death in Anerley, just metres from where teenager Michael Jonas was killed last year. This is a crisis. When so many lives are being lost on the streets of London, surely we should be funding the Met properly, not cutting its budget. When will the Government put in place a proper plan to protect our communities? I listened to the Minister’s answer to the urgent question with dismay. What does he have to say to the families affected by these senseless killings?

[Mr Hurd]

What I have to say to the families, and I speak as a London MP, is that the whole country and the whole Government are absolutely appalled and shocked by what is happening on the streets of London. It is not just a London issue, as the hon. Lady well knows; it is a national challenge. We are absolutely serious about getting on top of this, and she will know that we have been here before, 10 years ago, at a time when the public finances were in a completely different place and when people were not asking, “Where are the police?” This is long-term, complex work, and we have to bear down on it.

The hon. Lady asked about funding for the Met police, and there is an additional £100 million going into the Met this year as a result of actions that we and the Mayor are taking. London has over one and a half times the national average for funding per head of population and for police officers per head of population.

Serious Violence Strategy

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

The rise in violent crime in recent months should concern us all. Lives have been needlessly lost and the public are rightly concerned. The position we find ourselves in has many factors at play, and I agree with the serious crime strategy’s assessment that tackling serious crime is not a law enforcement issue alone, but I am firmly of the view that the cuts to our police forces up and down the country are key to the recent rise in violent crime.

The Government must surely recognise the severity of the situation when an apolitical figure such as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police suggests that Government cuts have played a significant part in increasing levels of violent crime. For far too long, the Government’s stock response has been to accuse the Labour party of playing politics. When I raised this issue at Prime Minister’s questions last month, the Prime Minister attempted to dismiss my concerns as hyperbole and even suggested that the shadow police Minister was alone in seeing a correlation between the rise in serious crime and cuts to police numbers.

Cressida Dick’s recent comments have vindicated the sterling work of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) and showed that these are indeed genuine, well-founded concerns. If the country’s most senior police officer is suggesting that we are in the midst of a funding crisis for our police forces, it is high time the Government took note and reversed the chronic underfunding that has gone on for far too long.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is clearly a link between police cuts and violent crime? I represent a seat in south Yorkshire that has seen a 57% increase in violent crime in the last year—one of the highest in the country.

[Ellie Reeves]

I agree with my hon. Friend that there is a link between the rise in violent crime and police cuts, and our concerns cannot be dismissed as playing party political games. As a London MP, I am acutely aware of the damage that sustained central Government cuts have had on our police force. The Met has had to make savings of more than £600 million, and more savings are required. Around my constituency, both safer neighbourhood front desks, in Catford and Penge, have closed, and across the capital officer numbers are dangerously close to falling below 30,000.

Some may argue that the Met gets funding from the Mayor of London. They would be correct, but even after the council tax precept increase, which has already been raised to the highest level by the Mayor, the Met will still need to make additional savings of £325 million by 2021. More importantly, the Met relies on central Government for over 70% of its funding, and this shortfall has been caused by successive Conservative Administrations. The reality is that there is nobody for them to pass the buck to when it comes to the issue of police funding.

Yet while we have seen funding continually fall over the past few years, there has been an irrefutable rise in serious crime. In London, knife offences now total over 12,000 each year, which is a 17% increase since 2013, and firearms offences are up 34% to over 2,000 a year. When I spoke about serious crime in London during Prime Minister’s Question Time, the number of murders in the capital this year stood at 57. Now, five weeks on, the number is approaching 70, and 41 of those murders have been stabbings. Since my election last year, I have met a number of constituents who have been directly affected—most tragically, the families of two young men who were stabbed to death.

Only cross-party efforts can help us to fully rectify the horrendous rise in violent crime. Political decisions can change the situation for the better. The Mayor of London has done his part, allocating an extra £110 million to the Metropolitan police through a rise in the precept, but we have a Conservative Government who are still blind to the fact that chronic underfunding of police forces has its consequences. The serious and organised crime strategy choreographed by the former Home Secretary—the present Prime Minister—raised some important points, but they are meaningless if our police forces are unable to carry out their day-to-day duties because of reductions in central funding. It is another case of the Government’s giving with one hand and taking with the other.

The strategy raised several points about youth involvement that are entirely valid, and the aim of spending £40 million on early intervention and prevention is welcome, but it is set against a backdrop of sustained long-term cuts in youth services and schools since 2010. The cuts in services that may have previously helped young people at risk of being involved in serious crime are symptomatic of the “cuts and austerity” culture that the Government have normalised, with utter disregard for the results of their actions. Moreover, the Government can come up with as many strategies for combating serious crime as they like, but unless our police forces are given appropriate levels of funding and resources, they are wasted exercises filled with hollow words.

The Government can do something, and they should do something. They should do something today. The Conservative party has previously positioned itself as a party of law and order. That rhetoric has long ago worn thin, and it is patently obvious to many in the House and beyond that increasing police funding from central Government is crucially important if we are to deal effectively with serious crime in the long run. More funding would see more officers and better resources. Do it today: do it now.

Windrush

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Thank you for the warning, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to follow a former member of the Anti-Nazi League. I have always thought that the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) was a bit of a closet pinko; she obviously needs to be looked into by the Conservative Chief Whip. I should like to congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on bringing a proper level of scrutiny to bear on this issue, including the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper).

In particular, I want to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who really kick-started this and brought the issue out into the public spotlight. I should like to point out that his predecessor was Bernie Grant, who was a friend of mine. He came here from Guyana—it was British Guyana when he was there—with his head held high, proud of where he came from and proud of where he was going. That is the whole point about this scandal. People like Bernie are now being threatened with deportation. I say “people like Bernie” because he cannot be threatened with deportation; sadly, he passed away some years ago.

I am dealing with between 30 and 40 cases in my constituency. I have a big Windrush community. As a proportion, I am dealing with a very large number of cases. These are people who have been threatened with deportation, and I will give two brief examples. The first is a woman, and she is a classic Windrush baby case. She came to Britain as a baby in the 1960s, and she cannot remember Jamaica, which is where she was born. She has a broad east London accent, and it is pretty obvious that she is as quintessentially British and a Londoner as anyone else, yet when she went to apply for a passport for the first time in her life, having brought up a family and worked here for all these years, she was told not only that she could not have a passport but that she was going to be deported back to Jamaica. As she said, it is a country that she cannot remember.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[John Cryer]

I can’t really say no, can I?

[Ellie Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. A constituent of mine who came to Britain as a child in 1972 was recently detained upon his return from Jamaica after visiting his father, who has dementia. He told me about his humiliation and that he has had no recourse to public funds since then. He now cannot visit his father again for fear of being detained. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a travesty and that my constituent, along with his, should be afforded the same rights as every other British citizen without further delay?

[John Cryer]

Of course, I agree.

My second example is more unusual and involves a woman who came from Jamaica when she was a baby. She was abandoned by her parents and grew up in a nunnery, which—Members can tell what is coming—was closed down and demolished after she left, and its records were lost. Again, this is somebody with a broad east London accent. She is quintessentially British and has the right to stay here, but she was told, after she had been through all that, “We’re going to deport you.” That is the sort of culture that we are dealing with at the Home Office, and I suspect that it goes across Government, which I will come to in a minute.

Vote 100 and International Women’s Day

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

I feel immensely privileged to speak in this debate to mark International Women’s Day, 100 years after some women first got the vote. I represent the borough of Lewisham, where, I am proud to say, 100 years after women got the right to be Members of Parliament, we have three female MPs. I am delighted to serve alongside my hon. Friends the Members for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft), and for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who have given me immeasurable support before and after my election to this place. The borough of Lewisham has been pioneering in gender equality. In the 1970s, the council set up the Lewisham women’s rights working party. I am proud to say that we have no gender pay gap on Lewisham Council, and we have more women in senior council roles than men.

So much has been done over the last 100 years to promote gender equality—the Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999, and the Equality Act 2010 to name but a few—but there is still a great deal more to be done. Having worked as an employment rights lawyer for many years, I all too often saw women demoted or dismissed after returning from maternity leave, and employers putting up unnecessary barriers to flexible working. I saw women being paid less than men for work of equal value, and women who were too afraid to speak out when they were discriminated against, for fear of losing their job.

Those experiences motivated me to try to make a difference. Two years ago, on International Women’s Day, after I had become a mum, I launched my business providing affordable legal advice to women who faced maternity and sex discrimination at work, which I ran until I was elected to this place. I wish there was no demand for such a business, but there was, and that is borne out by the statistics.

In 2016, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Equality and Human Rights Commission undertook a major piece of research on the prevalence and nature of maternity discrimination at work. The results, based on survey interviews with more than 3,000 mothers and 3,000 employers, are quite shocking. More than three in four mothers—77%—said that they had a negative or discriminatory experience before, during or after their maternity leave. One in five mums reported experiencing harassment or negative comments from colleagues or their employer relating to pregnancy or flexible working. Ten per cent. of mums said that their employer discouraged them from attending antenatal appointments, and 11% said that they felt forced to leave their job after having a child. Scaled up, that amounts to 54,000 women a year being forced to leave their job simply for becoming a mum.

According to the Fawcett Society, the mean aggregate gender pay gap for part-time and full-time workers stands at 18.4%. At the current rate of progress, it will take more than 100 years to close the gap, which is just not acceptable. There is a huge amount more that should and can be done to end gender inequality at work. The Select Committee on Women and Equalities has made strong recommendations in this area that have yet to be enacted by the Government.

To start with, all jobs should be advertised as flexible by default, unless there is a strong business case for them not to be. In the age of technology, being sat behind a desk in an office from 9 am until 6 pm, five days a week, is rarely necessary, yet the culture of presenteeism—of staying late in the office but not necessarily being productive—persists. A cultural shift is needed in the way that we work, with compressed hours, home working, staggered hours or term-time working becoming the norm, so that families—both men and women—can better strike a work-life balance, and so that having children does not diminish prospects at work.

We urgently need proper paid paternity leave to be introduced. Shared parental leave has been a step in the right direction, but take-up has been low—it is only at an estimated 2%—and the statutory rates of pay mean that it is only really an option for those in high-income families or those with savings. In addition, the model of transferring leave from mum to dad does not work for all families. Instead, non-transferable paternity leave, paid at a rate closer to actual earnings, should be implemented. Only then will we get the cultural shift at work needed to end stereotypes about women being a burden on business, and the assumption that they alone will be responsible for childcare duties. That would go a long way towards ending the gender pay gap sooner rather than later.

Laws on maternity discrimination and enforcement of breaches also need toughening up. To start with, it should be made harder for women to be made redundant after their maternity leave. Regulation 10 of the Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999 gives women some protection against being made redundant while pregnant or on maternity leave, but the protected period ends when the woman returns to work. That does not make sense, given that very often it is exactly when a new mum comes back to work that they begin to feel pushed out. To strengthen our discrimination laws, the period of protection against redundancy should be extended to 12 months after a women returns to work following her maternity leave.

We also need stricter sanctions against employers who breach discrimination laws or fail to publish details of their gender pay gap. I welcome the Labour policy launched today by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler). It would help to close the gender pay gap by ensuring that all private and public employers with more than 250 staff had to audit their gender pay gaps—and, furthermore, prove that they were taking action to close the gap—or face strict penalties. If employers risk losing money, they are more likely to comply with their legal obligations.

Finally, rights are often far too difficult to enforce. According to the charity Maternity Action, the introduction of employment tribunal fees led to a reduction of 40% in maternity discrimination claims. I am alarmed that there have been suggestions by Conservative Members that fees might be reintroduced, albeit at a lower level. Tribunal fees are a clear barrier to access to justice for women who have been discriminated against at work.

The time limit for bringing a claim for maternity discrimination in the employment tribunal is three months from the act complained of. Both the Women and Equalities Committee and the Equality and Human Rights Commission have said that this is not long enough. Those with a newborn baby at home are likely to be having sleepless nights, not to mention feeding round the clock and endless nappy changes. New mums also often go through a huge period of readjustment, physically and mentally, so the notion that they will engage with a complex legal process is simply unrealistic in many cases. It is likely that far more women would assert their rights if the time limit was increased from three months to six.

Later today, I will be proud to mark International Women’s Day by speaking at an event in Lewisham alongside some of the original members of the Lewisham women’s rights working party. We will reflect not only on how much has been achieved over the past few decades, but on how much more we still have to do: ending the gender pay gap once and for all; making flexible working the norm rather than the exception; and promoting shared caring responsibilities. Only then will we achieve true gender equality at work.

Women’s Suffrage Centenary

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

Yes. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. It is delightful to hear that he took his daughter around to see the great opportunity and stature of this place. I hope it gave her some inspiration. He has put his finger on it. It is all about ensuring equality for women, but there is still so much to do and I hope that he will support some of our plans this year.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

I welcome the Minister’s statement about encouraging more women into Parliament and I am immensely proud to be here today representing my home seat 100 years after women first got the vote. Does she agree that sitting well beyond 10 pm, as we did numerous times in December, is hardly family friendly and hardly encourages women to enter Parliament? Does she further agree that a lot more still needs to be done, including introducing baby leave, as proposed by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), to make this place more welcoming and open to future female MPs?

[Amber Rudd]

I agree in principle with the hon. Lady. This House has come a long way, as Members who have been here a lot longer than me would point out. There are occasionally longer sittings, but I think that they are pretty unpopular with many Members of Parliament. I urge the Chief Whip and shadow Chief Whip to engage in more constructive discussions. It takes both parties to agree not to sit past 10 pm.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

2. What the change in the number of frontline police officers is estimated to be between 2018 and 2020.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

5. What the change in the number of frontline police officers is estimated to be between 2018 and 2020.

[Jo Platt (Leigh) (Lab/Co-op)]

13. What the change in the number of frontline police officers is estimated to be between 2018 and 2020.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ellie Reeves]

In December, I went out with my local Safer Neighbourhood team. Despite the tremendous work they do, two officers per ward is not enough. Added to that, my local police station in Penge recently closed. Met police numbers are set to fall below 30,000. Given the rise in violent crime in London, will the Government now commit to investing in our police and reversing the cuts?

[Mr Hurd]

Police numbers in London have been stable for some time, going back to 2008. Any decisions on future projections are to be taken by the Mayor and the head of the Met. If the Mayor does what we are empowering him to do, this settlement will mean an additional £43 million for the Met on top of £200 million of reserves. The force has made great strides in efficiency but, according to Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, continues to require improvement. Of course, public safety in the capital matters a great deal, which is why the Met police have 1.6 times the number of officers per head than the national average.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point in his particularly distinct way. He is absolutely right—he has put his finger on it—that the police do have a concern and we are having the review to address that concern. I hope that I will be able to come back to him with some progress soon.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Over the past six months, 35 motor vehicle thefts and a rise in moped-related crime have been reported in Penge. Yesterday, it was reported that an acid attack occurred in broad daylight. Many of my constituents are becoming increasingly concerned. What exactly is the Department doing to combat such crimes?

[Amber Rudd]

I share the hon. Lady’s concerns. We take this matter seriously and we must address it, particularly because such crimes tend to evolve and can hold a fashionable attraction for different communities. That is why we are having this review. That is why we are bringing together the different parties, and I urge her to engage with the process.