Independent Office for Police Conduct
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(4 days, 5 hours ago)
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Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, over the last year, the IOPC has made a range of recommendations to the police about things such as strip-searching children and suspicionless stop and search. All the recommendations have been accepted by the police. Who is responsible for making sure that the recommendations that were accepted will be implemented? Will the Government publish the information so that we can all be sure that when recommendations are accepted, they are carried out in practice? As the Minister will know, this is not always the case. A lot of recommendations are accepted and then totally ignored.
Police Officers: Recruitment
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
We will hear next from the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, please.
Lord Paddick (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I declare my interest as set out in the register and apologise for not doing so the last time I spoke. The current Metropolitan Police Commissioner says that the force has survived over the last decade or so only by selling property and running down reserves, of which there are next to nothing left. What is the Government's response to what he has said?
Probation Services: Prisoner Early Release Scheme
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
Come on, it is Labour’s turn. We have not had a question.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)
My Lords, I think my noble friend would agree that the role of a probation officer is complex and requires a high level of skill. He has talked about recruitment. Can he share with the House a bit more about how that recruitment process is being conducted, where the search is going on and what the minimum requirements are for people who might apply for it?
EU Settlement Scheme
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
We have plenty of time. We will have the noble Baroness first and then the noble Lord.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, the previous Government issued EU settlement scheme status to people yet later denied that they had any rights under the withdrawal agreement. Will my noble friend the Minister provide an assurance today that the Government will ensure that everyone with status under the EU settlement scheme is a beneficiary of the withdrawal agreement?
Illegal Migrants
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
I thank the noble Lord. I ask the Minister, in all seriousness, whether anybody in the Government has talked to the French authorities about the conditions that many of those migrants are living in just across the sea. Anyone in this House would realise that, if they are living in those kinds of conditions and they know what is going to happen in terms of their living conditions if they manage to get to the United Kingdom, that is a huge pull factor. Surely the French Government have to take into consideration the human rights of those migrants, as we do in this country.
Operation Conifer
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, both noble Lords can get in; we have plenty of time. Shall we take the noble Baroness’s question first?
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, following the publication of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in October 2022 and the government response a year later, the Government issued a consultation on mandatory reporting by professionals working with children when they suspect possible abuse. The result of that consultation has still not been published a year on. One of the best ways of ensuring that there are no malicious allegations against senior politicians is to see that result and for a government response. When do this Government plan to implement the recommendations of the IICSA report?
King’s Speech
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
How about that? Tuesday. Rewind, delete Hansard, replace with, “We will introduce this Bill on Tuesday of next week”. It is a good thing and we thank the noble and learned Lord for undertaking it.
The noble Lord, Lord Godson, discussed Prevent and the question of extremism. It is a concern I share with him. There are some undercurrents in the actions over the election that I think need to be examined and that is something we will do. Not to jump to any conclusions, but we need to look at doing that and we will undertake it in due course. There will be a cross-government approach to that. The noble Lord will know, as I know, that the Home Office alone dealing with this, or even the MoJ alone dealing with this will not be sufficient to deal with some of the underlying activity: we need to have community resilience through various government departments addressing those issues. It is something I had a responsibility for a hundred years ago, some time around 2007, and I look forward to having that responsibility once more.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, talked about conversion therapy. I give her the assurance that this will be a draft Bill: there will be an opportunity to get stuck in and give a view, and the Government will take a view when we have had a view—if that makes positive sense.
Members also raised the issue of fraud and what we will do on that. Again, I have been given responsibility for that by the Home Secretary and I will be assessing what we need to take forward on it. I have not yet done that because I am two weeks into the job, but it will be done, there will be an assessment and the Opposition and my noble friends can quiz me and hold me to account on what we do over a longer period of time than we currently have at the moment.
As a Minister, I give the House two assurances. If Members wish to see me about a particular issue, my door will be open—it is less trouble to open my door than it is to face parliamentary questions, debate and pressure downstream. My door will always be open if Members wish to have a discussion, collectively or individually. I am happy to engage, as will be my colleagues in the ministerial team. Where we have disagreements, as we will, we will vote on it and see what the outcome is, but I hope to work to the principle I mentioned earlier: to try to reach a consensus on “we can work it out”. I hope we do so in a civil, proactive and productive way.
Finally, this Government are about change. An election was fought on change and change is what the United Kingdom voted for: change to reduce reoffending, improve police performance, increase police numbers and put people back on the beat; change to take long-term action to tackle organised criminal gangs who are exploiting people crossing the channel; change to speed up the asylum system; change to improve outcomes regarding violence against women and girls; and change to tackle the real challenges we will face in this department. We will do so in a way that ensures we meet our international obligations, support communities and deal with our society in civilised, forward-facing way. I do not wish to go back to the debates of the late 20s. We need to go forward to ensure that we co-operate with our European partners, respect the law and deliver for those who elected my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and over 400 Members of Parliament to do a job for my party and, most of all, for our country. I want to work with Members of this House to do that, and I am pleased to commend the King’s Speech to this House.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, before we adjourn, I congratulate my noble friend on a wonderful maiden speech. We look forward to hearing from him many more times—as he is a Home Office Minister, we will be hearing from him every week.
My noble friend comes to the House with a formidable record; he is respected on all sides, respected in the other place, and we are lucky to have him here. I worked with him a couple of years ago. We were both sent to Liverpool to deal with some problems in the Liverpool Labour party. I can assure colleagues that it is an exciting and challenging place, and I am so pleased my noble friend was there with me.
Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2024
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(7 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I will respond to the Minister’s statement by first thanking our intelligence, security and police services, as well as the Home Office staff, for their work in protecting us all. The Government’s first duty must always be to protect national security and the public. The people who undertake the challenging work of making sure we are always one step ahead of those who wish to cause us harm will always find support from these Benches.
We strongly support the introduction of this order. Terrorgram, named for its use of the online messaging platform Telegram, is an online collection of violent neofascists who distribute and promote material that incites right-wing extreme terrorist activity, both in the UK and across the world.
As the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, said, the propaganda distributed by this network targets violence against ethnic minorities, religious groups, women and the LGBT community. Telegram groups promote a dangerous, violent, misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic ideology. They glorify terrorist attacks, such as those committed by Anders Breivik, incite violent terrorist attacks and distribute bomb-making guides and other dangerous instructional material designed to aid would-be attackers. The dangerous consequences of their actions occurred only recently, as the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, said, when people were murdered in the LGBT nightclub in Bratislava by a terrorist who thanked Terrorgram in his manifesto. The Government’s welcome update of the definition of terrorism and this proscription order will provide a much-needed tool to prevent such attacks from being repeated here in the UK.
In the light of evidence connecting right-wing ideologies and violent terrorist acts to misogynistic views, can the Minister expand on what more the Government can do to counter this? Are there plans to update the Prevent programme to include incel ideology and violent misogyny as extremism? How is the Home Office working to prevent young men from being exposed to extreme misogynistic ideologies at a young age? What work is being done with other government departments to combat this threat? More broadly, what are the Government doing to assess and confront the online hate and extremism that form the basis of many terrorism threats?
I would welcome the Minister speaking more about the Government’s counterextremism strategy. Beyond the list of organisations defined as terrorist that the Government have said they will release, will a full, updated counterextremism strategy also be published? The previous strategy was published in 2015. The way Terrorgram uses online networks and platforms and intersects with other violent neo-Nazi organisations across the world demonstrates the growing complexity of the threats we face. As the terrorist threat evolves and becomes harder to predict and prevent, our understanding of the causes, nature and the consequences of the threats we face must also evolve.
The Government’s hate crime strategy has also not been updated since 2015. Terrorgram’s violent, bigoted ideology sits within a context of rising levels of hate crime across the UK. Hate crimes against transgender people hit record highs in England and Wales last year, and the Community Security Trust recorded a 147% increase in anti-Semitic incidents since 7 October, compared with 2022. It is important to have proscription orders in our arsenal of weapons against hate, extremism and terrorism, but they cannot be the only weapon. Can the Minister outline whether the Government plan to publish a new hate crime strategy?
This order is very welcome. Proscription is the right response to a dangerous and complex network that threatens our way of life, our public safety and our national security. This House and the country are united in protecting us all and we fully support the order.
I have one final question for the noble Lord. This clearly is a vile, disgusting group, so why have we waited so long? Why did we not bring this order much earlier? Some of the things they have been involved in, over quite a long period, are things we all abhor. With that, I support the order.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I thank the noble Lord very much indeed for his support and the support of his party. We have covered some ground here and I will do my very best to answer the questions.
Why have we decided to proscribe the Terrogram collective now? I think I explained much of this in my opening remarks but to proscribe an organisation the Home Secretary must believe that it is concerned in terrorism and it is right that any decision to proscribe must be proportionate and necessary. As the House has heard, Terrorgram involves itself in preparing for terrorism through instruction material. It also promotes and encourages terrorism through its publications which contain violent narratives. As proscription is such a powerful counterterrorism tool, cases are scrutinised carefully to ensure that the decisions we take are lawful, consistent and proportionate. Proscription sends such a strong message of the UK’s commitment to tackling terrorism globally and calling out this activity wherever it is committed, but the evidence has to be very carefully scrutinised and that is, in essence, the reason why it has taken a while to get to this point.
The noble Lord also asked me about what is happening with the counter-extremism strategy and what has replaced the old one. The Government remain very much focused on disrupting the activities and influence of extremists, supporting those who stand up to extremism and stopping people from being drawn into terrorism. We keep our response to extremism under constant review, for the reasons the noble Lord laid out, in particular things such as the CREST research that he referred to. We have to make sure that it is best placed to tackle evolving threats. The Government’s current focus is to use existing mechanisms to analyse, prevent and disrupt the spread of high-harm extremist ideologies that can lead from community division and radicalisation into terrorism, particularly those that radicalise others but deliberately operate below counterterrorism thresholds. Where there is evidence of purposeful actions that are potentially radicalising others into terrorism or violence, proportionate disruptive action will be considered.
The noble Lord made comments on incel and misogyny. We will not tolerate the spread of the harmful ideologies that can lead to these sorts of activities. There is a wide range of offences and powers that can be used to counter the threat from these areas and we are working to maximise their use. Of course, we know, as the noble Lord said, that the extremism landscape is constantly evolving and therefore that we have to continually seek to build and refresh our knowledge of the threat it poses. From 1 April 2023, the Government instructed all police forces in England and Wales to identify any violence against the person, including stalking and harassment, or sexual offences where the crime is deemed to be motivated by a hostility towards the victim’s sex. The implementation of sex-based hostility recording illustrates the Government’s commitment to ensuring that we have a better understanding of these abhorrent crimes, and that will obviously assist us in future policy development.
I conclude by again offering my thanks for the House’s consideration of and support for this very important measure. As I have outlined, it is proportionate and necessary in our ongoing effort to tackle terrorism to protect the public and to defend our values. There is no place whatever for the vile ideology espoused by the Terrorgram collective, and we will not stand for it. We will never relent in showing up terrorism for what it is: a poisonous, corrosive force that will always fail. With that, I commend the order to the House.
Asylum Seekers: Rwanda
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(9 months ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I agree in certain circumstances, but we are talking about failed asylum seekers. These people will be offered the opportunity to work, but in Rwanda.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, is it the Government’s position that there will be a finite number of places and that some of the people who go there voluntarily will take some of those places but that will not have any effect on the deterrence of the Government’s policy?
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, as I have also said many times from the Dispatch Box, this scheme and the Rwanda scheme are uncapped, so there is no finite number of places.
Rwanda Treaty
Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
What is a great worry to the Government is that the costs of the migration system, as I mentioned earlier in answer to my noble friend, have doubled to £4 billion this year. As the noble Lord has just rightly referenced, we are spending £8 million a day on hotels. That is clearly unsustainable and I do not think it represents value for money.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Taylor asked the Minister a simple question: have Ministers been required to issue letters of direction to instruct civil servants to proceed with this, because of the issues with this scheme? The answer is either that, yes, they have, or no, they have not. Which is it?
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
The answer is that I do not know. I will have to write to the noble Lord.