Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kit Malthouse and Giles Watling

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

T6. Last weekend a young man sadly lost his life in my constituency, and a county lines drug operation was peripherally involved. What are the Government doing to bring a stop to these county lines drug operations, which are ruining constituencies such as mine?

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

I am extremely sorry to hear about the event in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and I am pleased that he has raised it on the Floor of the House. He will know that, for the last two years, we have made dismantling the county lines business model a key priority of our work between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. He will be pleased to know that, following significant investment in the key exporting forces of London, the west midlands and Liverpool—Merseyside police—we have made significant progress. We reckon that we have managed to dismantle about a third of the county lines, but there is still significant work to do. He will be pleased to know that some counties, such as Essex and Norfolk, are showing significant success, but there is still a lot more to do to overcome this pernicious and particularly unpleasant business model that focuses on exploiting young and vulnerable people as part of its way of making money. I assure him that we will not stint over the coming years in trying to eradicate county lines from our country.

Policing (England and Wales)

Debate between Kit Malthouse and Giles Watling

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I know Belgravia police station very well indeed—[Laughter.] It was not through having spent any overnight stays there. During my time in policing in London, I visited it on a couple of occasions. The Met will be in receipt of a further 1,369 police officers, who will need to be accommodated somewhere. As I have said in the media in the past, perhaps to some hilarity, their lockers will need to go somewhere, and an expansion of the size that London will see over the next few years means that a general review of the property strategy is sensible.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

In Clacton, we led a campaign to increase the precept for policing, it spread across Essex, and I am very glad that we have more police officers in Clacton and we have town centre teams. However, like many parts of the rest of the country, we have a lot of knife crime and it needs to be dealt with. What is my hon. Friend thinking of doing to stop young people getting drawn into that sort of crime in the first place?