Intelligence and Security Committee
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I, too, welcome the Intelligence and Security Committee’s annual report and the work that the Committee has done this year, which was comprehensively set out by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind).
It is 13 years since I last spoke in a debate on a report by the Intelligence and Security Committee. That was before the attacks of 9/11, before the London bombings of 7/7 and the damage done by al-Qaeda, before the most recent military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq and at a very different stage in the Northern Ireland peace process. There have been dramatic changes since then in the nature of the threats that Britain faces and in the nature of the work of the intelligence and security agencies to keep us safe. However, many of the principles that we debated then, such as the importance of accountability and managing the tensions between liberty and security and between democracy and secrecy, remain as valid and as pertinent now.
I join the Committee and the Home Secretary in paying tribute to those who work in the intelligence and security agencies, and I place on the record the gratitude of the Opposition and those we represent. Our intelligence officers and agents are not known. By its very nature, their work must go unsung. Some have even died in the course of their work and have been laid to rest quietly with no public tribute. They work tirelessly, sometimes in dangerous conditions, to find a piece of a jigsaw that will never be fully complete, but which could yet save lives.
In this debate, we must pay tribute from the Front Benches to the work of the ISC, as the Home Secretary has done. Its members take extremely seriously their responsibility to provide accountability, even though they cannot discuss or debate in public many of the issues that they pursue privately. There is a long tradition of cross-party working and consensus in the Committee, as indeed there should be, on many issues to do with intelligence and our national interest. I congratulate the Committee on its latest report. I also thank those who represent the Opposition on the Committee, my right hon. Friends the Members for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) and for Knowsley (Mr Howarth), for their hard work on behalf of this side of the House and Parliament as a whole.
As the Committee and Ministers have made clear, the security risks that we face have become more diverse and technologically advanced than at any time in our history. Hostile attacks in cyberspace by other states and terrorist groups have the potential to cause serious damage to the security and prosperity of the UK. The Home Secretary has set out the continued threat from al-Qaeda and rightly paid tribute to the work of our armed forces. The work on international terrorism and counter-proliferation are becoming more closely connected. We are also dealing with new challenges, such as helping new states to emerge from the Arab spring. The older and more established threat from groups in Northern Ireland is now a growing concern.
Our security and intelligence agencies have expanded their work substantially over the past decade, supported by increased resources that were rightly provided over many years to keep Britain safe. The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington was right to point to the increasingly mature debate on security and accountability. As a result, there are large areas of agreement across the Committee and across the House on security and our national interest.
The Committee has rightly welcomed the work done by the Government through the National Security Council and the growing focus on cyber-terrorism. It is right that the Government and the agencies are increasing investment and action in that area. I also welcome the ISC’s continued scrutiny of the Prevent and Contest strategies, which we have discussed on the Floor of the House.
Like the Committee Chair, I welcome the Government’s attempts in the justice and security Green Paper to address the difficult issues of the control principle and the use of sensitive material in civil cases. Those are not easy problems to solve, but they are extremely important given the chilling effect on international intelligence arrangements if sensitive material is at risk of being disclosed. I noted the important points that the right hon. Gentleman made about the detail, practicality and workability of measures, and we stand ready to work with the Government to get that right, because it is hugely important.
We welcome, too, the Gibson inquiry, which is important for maintaining confidence in the work of the intelligence agencies. The Committee may wish to look further at that matter in advance of the Gibson inquiry beginning its work, while there remain legal delays, to ensure that the inquiry can achieve its aims.
A number of concerns are raised as a result of the Committee’s report. In particular, in the face of the ever-changing threats, the Committee’s scrutiny of resources is extremely important. The report rightly identifies areas in which the agencies could make greater savings by, for example, exploring a consolidated approach to vetting. The Home Secretary should also take seriously the Committee’s concerns about the scale of the real-terms cuts that the agencies are facing, particularly in Olympic year. The increases in inflation since the spending review have increased those real-terms cuts. Ministers will be aware that the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service told the Committee:
“It’s quite hard to…maintain the capability of the Service when we face a 10% reduction in staff”.
Clearly all Departments and agencies need to make their share of efficiencies, but in the current circumstances it is vital that the Government accept the Committee’s recommendation that
“Given the importance of national security work, it is essential that the Spending Review settlement can be adjusted if there is a significant change in the threat.”
We are also concerned about the particular pressures surrounding the Olympics. According to figures from the Library, the real reduction in the single intelligence account next year alone will be £60 million. Next year is the year in which the eyes of the world will be on us for the Olympics, and the Home Secretary rightly discussed the Olympics in her speech. The evidence quoted in the Committee’s report shows the pressure that the agencies will face. The Security Service chief has said that
“there will be a large diversion of resource from other things into the Olympics. But I don’t think we’ve got any option about that.”
The Secret Intelligence Service chief has said that the Olympics
“will certainly have an impact on our intelligence operations and intelligence coverage of other targets during that period.”
The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary must take seriously the Committee’s warning that it is
“nevertheless concerned that this will inevitably divert resources from the Service’s other work during this period, and thus expose the UK to greater risk.”
At a time when thousands of police officers are being lost, the Home Secretary and the Treasury should take the opportunity to review the level of resources available for security and policing next year to ensure that they are sufficient for the threats that we will face.
As a result of the Olympics, there is also an additional reason for the Home Secretary to re-examine counter-terror powers, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles has raised. The Home Secretary is aware of our deep concern that she is removing the ability to keep terror suspects out of London in Olympic year through control orders. The director-general of the Security Service told the Committee that under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill and with additional resources,
“there should be no substantial increase in overall risk.”
Frankly, however, it is very hard for the House to understand why the Home Secretary should want any increase in overall risk, let alone one that is entirely a result of her own policies. The Committee is right to warn the Government about that and to raise the concern that the new regime does not offer the same level of assurance as control orders.
We know that the Government have themselves admitted that there are issues to consider in that regard. Indeed, the Home Office has recently written to the House of Lords to say that the transitional period between control orders and TPIMs will be extended from 28 days to 42 days in an amendment to be tabled in the Lords in response, I understand, to resourcing concerns raised by the Metropolitan police. However, would it not be wise to delay the implementation of TPIMs altogether, at least until after the Olympics have taken place? Frankly, it is simply not responsible for the Government to reduce counter-terror powers, as well as resources, at a time when we know the pressures are growing. I urge the Home Secretary to examine the Committee’s report carefully and think again.
Turning to the ISC’s proposals for its own reform, the current Chair called for those reforms even before he was appointed, and I welcome his continued commitment to them. The Committee has certainly evolved since the 1994 Act, as he rightly pointed out. It started with no investigatory resource, which changed after the debates in the late ’90s. Over the years, increasing levels of detail have been provided to the Committee, and also by the Committee to the public, including more information about overall budgets and information from other Departments and organisations. Although many people in the agencies viewed the Committee with a certain suspicion and anxiety in its early years, I believe most now agree about its importance and the benefits that the agencies are provided with by having accountability and independent scrutiny. The Committee can bust myths and counteract attacks on the agencies as well as challenge and explore problems without putting security at risk in any way.
However, it is time to go further, and both the ISC and the Government are right to want reform now. The Government are right to consider strengthened executive accountability and greater scrutiny of the agencies through the executive and judicial routes, and they are right to consider options such as an inspector-general, although I understand that considerably more work will need to be done on that approach. For many years, the tradition of the agencies was one of very little executive oversight. Ministers would decide the overall framework, but they did not have clear accountability for how operations took place. That executive accountability has increased over the years, with the roles of the different commissioners being strengthened, but I do not believe it is yet on a sensible long-term footing, and the Government are right to explore that further.
It is also right that we look further at parliamentary oversight. I believe that we should have gone further on that under the previous Government. It is right to consider creating a statutory Committee of Parliament with much stronger access to information. Of course, the Committee will always have to operate in a different way from other parliamentary Committees. The principle of its operating inside the so-called ring of secrecy is integral to much of its work, so it requires additional safeguards, including on how Committee members are selected. However, I believe that the Government could still go further.
The Home Secretary said that the Government were still cautiously considering the proposal that the Committee’s work should cover operations. Of course, it is not for the Committee to second-guess operations in advance, which is not what the ISC is proposing, but there needs to be parliamentary scrutiny of not only the policies and good intentions of the agencies, but operations. Ministers and the agencies actively resisted that when the Committee was first established in 1994, but in fact the Committee has already gone further in practice than was originally intended in legislation. It is important to support it now and give it the proper underpinnings that it needs to be able to examine operations properly and thoroughly where it is appropriate to do so, and where the Committee believes that a significant issue needs to be investigated. I urge the Home Secretary to make progress in that area and accept the principle of the Committee’s recommendations.
I also believe that there is a strong case for the Committee, or at least its Chair, to see more detail on individual cases. I have seen no convincing reason to deny the Committee, or its Chair, access to the full oversight reports on the agencies by the various commissioners, including the annexes, which are currently often withheld.
It would help the House, too, for the ISC—or, again, at least for its Chair—to have access to the detailed papers on individual control order cases as, for example, the commissioner currently does. Again, that would not be to second-guess current cases, but so that the House could reflect on the implications of those cases for legislation. For example, we may be asked to introduce emergency legislation on TPIMs or on extending pre-charge detention, yet it is a genuine problem for Parliament that the only person who has seen all the cases that justify changing legislation is the Home Secretary who proposes the new legislation. There are too few checks and balances in that system, which is bad for democracy but ultimately also bad for the Home Secretary and for confidence in national security. It would be far better for Parliament and for the Home Secretary to have another independent voice that can come to judgment on the basis of the evidence and advise Parliament. Stronger counter-terror powers can be justified, but I would like stronger checks and balances alongside them. The Opposition would prefer to retain control orders, especially in Olympics year, but we would also prefer greater scrutiny of the control order regime by Parliament, including the ISC.
Finally, I am astonished to find myself in agreement with the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash), who in last year’s debate argued that the ISC Chair should be an Opposition Member. There are significant advantages to the ISC following the example of the Public Accounts Committee, the Chair of which is a senior Member of the Opposition. That is not to cast aspersions on the current ISC Chair, who would make an admirable Chair any time in opposition, nor is it—perhaps more importantly —to cast aspersions on my right hon. Friends who did admirable jobs as ISC Chairs when Labour was in government. They would make excellent ISC Chairs now, but perceived independence and credibility is even more important for the ISC than for other Committees.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind
I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Lady for the additional comments that she has volunteered. The House might like to be reminded that there is nothing to stop an Opposition Member from being ISC Chair. In fact, there is a precedent. Tom King, now Lord King of Bridgwater, was the first ISC Chair and remained for a period after the Labour Government came into power in 1997. It is entirely available to Opposition Members, depending on who they are.
Yvette Cooper
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right that there are precedents. In fact, Lord King was Chair when I was a member of the ISC between 1997 and 1999, and he continued through to 2001. The principle of the Public Accounts Committee is that as a matter of course the Chair is a Member of the Opposition. The value of that is this: exactly because the ISC must operate behind closed doors, it needs to be seen to be independent and authoritative in its conclusions; and exactly because it cannot tell us the evidence on which its judgments are based, it needs to be perceived by the wider public to be independent of Ministers. That is important for the agencies as well as for the public.
In the 1998 debate, the then ISC Chair, Tom King, spoke of the importance of the Committee having a unanimous all-party voice and authority:
“When a situation arises that gives serious cause for public concern…We shall not be able to help matters unless we can say that we have investigated the allegations, with…access to all the relevant information”.—[Official Report, 2 November 1998; Vol. 318, c. 594.]
Those words stand today. When I spoke in that debate, I said that accountability through the ISC lay at the heart of the tension not just between liberty and security, but between democracy and secrecy:
“We have certainly come a long way since the mere existence of MI5 and MI6 was denied. I believe that, sooner or later, we will travel much further. We will have to improve our system of accountability, for the sake not only of democracy but of the very secret agencies that the United Kingdom needs to function and to protect our modern democracy. If we do not improve our system of accountability, those agencies’ capacity to operate in the national interest will be threatened.”—[Official Report, 2 November 1998; Vol. 318, c. 613.]
Those words, too, still stand.
The role of the ISC has become stronger since 1998 and it does vital work. Accountability has increased, but it has not yet gone far enough. The Government’s reforms are welcome, but they should be brave and go further, so that we continue to have effective agencies that have the confidence of the public in a modern democracy. Sooner or later, we will have that.
Border Control Scheme
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
(Urgent Question): To ask for an urgent statement on border control this summer, covering private flights.
The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)
Let me apologise for the fact that the Home Secretary cannot be here; she is attending an important meeting of the National Security Council.
It is simply not true that immigration and customs checks for all private flights were abandoned under this Government. In fact, the controls against high-risk private flights were strengthened, and that is entirely consistent with our overall approach to border security of using more intelligence-led checks against high-risk passengers and journeys. Far from weakening our border controls, those measures were aimed at strengthening our border.
Under the previous Government, it was clear that the UK Border Agency’s procedures for private flights meant that some high-risk flights were missed, and this left our country open to the risk of drug smuggling, illegal immigration and gun running. In fact, the previous Government did not even have agreed definitions of high-risk, medium-risk or low-risk private flights, and there were no standard operational procedures: flights landing in one part of the country might be met by a UKBA team; the exact same flight landing somewhere else might not.
Indeed, under the previous Government, Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation, called private aviation the UK’s “soft underbelly”. To get a grip on that chaotic situation, in January the UKBA developed a new strategy for private flights, with the aim of meeting 100% of all high-risk flights through the use of better intelligence and increased compliance, the greater use of the warnings index and a standardised risk-assessment procedure. It gave us for the first time a consistent national system for dealing with private aviation, and it drew on the resources of the police and other agencies to make sure that all high-risk flights were met.
The strategy makes use of the legal requirement for pilots to submit records of their passengers. Those are checked against the warnings index, and a full, standardised risk assessment is carried out. The UKBA will deploy officers to meet any flight on which police or other intelligence causes concern, or on which there is a warnings index hit. Local UKBA teams, field intelligence officers and the police then work to ensure a high level of compliance with these procedures, which are, for the first time, consistent across the country. In the view of UKBA senior management, the new strategy is finally getting on top of the risk from private aviation.
Everything that Ministers in this Government have authorised has been done to strengthen our borders: resources focused on high-risk passengers and journeys, a new strategy to sort out private aviation, a new National Crime Agency with a border policing command, e-Borders to check passengers in and out of the country, and tough enforcement. Some 400,000 visas were rejected last year and 68,000 people with the wrong documents were prevented from coming to Britain in the first place.
These particular operational changes were made to address a problem that had existed for years and had been identified but not acted on by the Government of whom the shadow Home Secretary was a member. The border is safer now than it was two years ago. I commend this statement to the House.
Yvette Cooper
Last week, the Home Secretary told the House:
“the only incident of which I am aware when passengers were waved through passport control without any checks at all did not occur during my pilot. It happened in 2004”.—[Official Report, 9 November 2011; Vol. 535, c. 324.]
Yesterday, I was shown e-mails from the border agency from June 2011, which show that immigrations and customs checks were stopped on arrivals of private flights, in accordance with a new national general aviation strategy. That and the answer the Minister for Immigration has just given contradict the information given by the Home Secretary last week.
Why, then, does the Home Secretary not feel that she should come to this House to answer the growing number of questions about this borders fiasco? She has refused to come to the House and she has refused to do interviews for nearly two weeks. One e-mail from 14 June refers to the instruction not to see passengers arriving on private charter flights for either immigrations or customs purposes and states:
“we are not allowed to physically see the passengers”.
Does the Minister for Immigration agree that the Home Secretary was wrong to say that no passengers had been, as she put it, “waved through” on arrival? Will he now correct that?
According to Treasury figures, there are 80,000 to 90,000 private flights a year. Will the Minister tell the House how many of those flights went through with no checks on arrival and what the security and immigration implications are of not even checking whether the number of people getting off the plane is the same as had been advised? If there was a new general aviation strategy, why did the Home Secretary not refer to it last week? Did she even know it existed? Was it in the weekly updates we now know went to the Minister for Immigration? How does that strategy relate to the so-called pilot?
There are far more questions than answers in this continuing borders fiasco. How on earth can we have any confidence in what the Home Secretary says is happening at our borders? She will not come and answer the questions. She said that no one was waved through, but it is clear that many passengers were. She said that Brodie Clark went further than she authorised and admitted he had done so, but this morning Brodie Clark has said categorically that he did not. She said that the performance of the border agency improved this summer, but this morning the head of the statistics agency described that as a highly selective use of statistics that may, indeed, be in breach of the ministerial code. Did the Home Secretary knowingly provide wrong information or did she just not have a clue what was going on at Britain’s borders? She cannot keep running away. She must come to this House herself and answer these vital questions about what was happening at the border agency this summer.
Damian Green
It is a shame that the shadow Home Secretary wrote that rant before she listened to what I said in response to her first question. To say that the Home Secretary has not been visible in this House is palpably absurd. She was here twice last week—[Hon. Members: “ Where is she?”] She is attending a meeting of the National Security Council. I am sorry that the shadow Home Secretary does not seem to think that that is an important part of the Home Secretary’s responsibilities. I am sure that the House thinks it is an important part of the Home Secretary’s responsibilities. The right hon. Lady’s basic accusation that the Home Secretary has in any way not answered these questions is, as I say, palpably absurd.
The second question the right hon. Lady asked—indeed, the only substantive one in her rather scatter-gun approach —was about how many people were coming through without being checked. The answer, now, is that every private flight is checked against the warnings index. [Interruption.] I commend Opposition Front Benchers for saying that it is a bit late now. Yes, it is—for 13 years, nothing happened; the right hon. Lady has put her finger on it. There was a shambles in the immigration system, and private aviation was part of it. That was identified by the Government’s own counter-terrorism adviser, but they did nothing about it. We now have done something about it, and that means that every flight is checked against the warnings index and every high-risk flight is met. If there have been changes, as there have been this year, they have been for the better and they have made our borders safer.
Border Checks Summer 2011
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House notes with concern the significant reduction in the level of security and border checks at UK ports of entry in the summer of 2011; and calls on the Government to publish immediately all relevant Home Office submissions to Ministers, together with the instructions from Home Office Ministers to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) regarding passport checks in the summer of 2011 and the relevant operational instructions from UKBA executives to staff and all data collected by the UKBA on the level of checks at each port of entry since July 2011.
We have called this Opposition day debate to discuss the events in border control this summer, because Parliament and the public need answers. I am sorry that more Cabinet Ministers have not joined us for the debate, because this borders fiasco is now escalating. The Home Secretary did not answer all the questions put to her on Monday, she could not answer all those from the Home Affairs Select Committee today, and she and her Immigration Minister are refusing to do television, radio or newspaper interviews on the subject. However, she cannot hide on the important issue of border control. Answers are needed, and her account of what led to the weakening of border controls this summer is now at odds not just with the memos from the UK Border Agency, but with the account of one of her most senior officials, Brodie Clark.
The public need the truth, so let us be clear about the information that the Home Secretary needs to provide. Most importantly, we still need to know the scale of the security breaches that have taken place. Does the Home Secretary yet have any estimate of how many people were affected by the weakening of border controls? The Prime Minister could not tell us today.
On Monday the Home Secretary told us that she was concerned about the routine removal of checks for EU citizens, the suspension of the watch list in Calais and the suspension of fingerprinting non-EU citizens on top of the removal of watch list checks for children, which she authorised. Border agencies have told us of repeated cases in which adults did not have their passports swiped at all, along with no checks against the watch list, not just at Calais but at other ports. The Home Secretary needs to tell us whether that happened.
Yvette Cooper
Before I give way to Back Benchers, I should like to offer the Home Secretary the opportunity to intervene and tell us whether watch lists were relaxed—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The debate is going to continue, so everybody can listen to the debate, and if the right hon. Lady wishes to give way she will do so. We do not need people to keep coming up, one after another.
Yvette Cooper
I should like to give the Home Secretary the opportunity to clarify quickly whether the watch list was relaxed at any ports of entry other than Calais.
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary has not intervened, so let me give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Alok Sharma
Listening to the tone of the right hon. Lady’s opening comments, one would almost think that her party had left immigration in absolutely perfect order. Let me remind her that it left a system which her own Home Secretary at the time said was “not fit for purpose”, with a backlog of 450,000 asylum cases, and that Lord Glasman, her own colleague, said:
“Labour lied…about…immigration and the extent of illegal”—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. The House will come to order on both sides, and if we are going to have interventions they must be much shorter and we must not make speeches. That will come later.
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharman) has obviously got himself into a Whips-induced lather, but if he is concerned about asylum cases he may want to ask the Home Secretary about the 100,000 cases that have now been written off, as identified in the Home Affairs Committee report.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
I am a representative of Dover. This issue is a key concern to my constituents, as is Brodie Clark’s statement that such controls had been relaxed since about 2008-09. Who authorised that relaxation?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman, as a representative of Dover, will I know be concerned by the removal of the watch list checks in Calais. Like him, I certainly look forward to Brodie Clark’s evidence to the Home Affairs Committee next week. I am not sure whether the Home Secretary will be looking forward to his evidence in quite the same way, but I am sure that he will set out at that point—
Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. In view of the fact that the Government deliberately took an hour away from this time-limited debate with a statement that could easily have been made yesterday, will you make it difficult for hon. Members reading out Whips’ questions to intervene on my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)?
Mr Deputy Speaker
Sir Gerald knows as well as I do that that is not a point of order. He has certainly made the point that people were upset by the statement, but it is for the Government to decide the business of the House, and they control the business of the House. I have certainly already recommended shorter interventions, however, and I am sure that that will have been taken on board.
Yvette Cooper
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
The Home Secretary has still not told us the extent of the reduction in border checks throughout the country. She said on Monday that she had no clue how many people walked into the country under reduced checks. On Monday, she did not even know which airports were covered by her pilot projects and her decisions. Yesterday she told the Select Committee that she knew which airports were covered in theory, but she had no idea which ones had taken up her pilot project.
Data exist, however. According to the internal e-mails that I have seen, downgrading checks to level 2 is recorded by terminals. Indeed, one would expect it to be. How could the so-called pilots be monitored if the data were not being collected on what was happening? So, does the Home Secretary have those data? Can she tell us now how many times checks were downgraded at how many airports since her decision in July? Has she even asked to see those data, and if she has not, why on earth not? What have this Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister been up to?
If the Home Secretary does have access to the data and has seen the figures on the number of times that checks were downgraded to level 2, will she step up to the Dispatch Box now and tell us what the data say? The public have a right to know what the downgrade in security was this summer. Again, we hear a deafening silence from the Home Secretary. Again, we do not know what data were collected.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that he shares my concern that we still do not have any clear data on the way in which border security checks were downgraded this summer.
Robert Halfon
I have just a simple question for the right hon. Lady. How many people entered the UK without being checked against the warnings index between 2008 and 2010?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman’s constituents will want to know what is happening now, and what happened this summer. His Government and his Home Secretary cannot answer the questions. They cannot even tell us more about the pilots, or the decisions they thought they were taking—what they thought they were signing up to.
We know that the Home Secretary thought that in theory her pilot covered European citizens, but in practice it routinely did so. That is a funny definition of a pilot. It was not just one Thursday afternoon a month in Luton; it was every airport and potentially every European citizen. Millions of them entered Britain this summer, and they formed the majority of foreign citizens entering the country, so how many of them missed the full checks? How many of them did the Home Secretary expect to face reduced checks when she gave the go-ahead for this so-called pilot earlier this year?
We know, too, from the UK Border Agency’s internal minutes this summer that there was a reference to
“mixed views on the summer pressures work, including the concern that not checking children on the watch list may facilitate child trafficking”.
Officials raised that concern within the UKBA, and I raised it with the Home Secretary on Monday. She will know that the House has repeatedly expressed deep concern about people trafficking across Europe, so did she even consider those risks before she took her decision?
The intention of Labour Ministers and, I had always understood, Conservative Ministers, too, was to strengthen our border checks year on year. We all agree that there were difficulties in the past, but I thought that we all agreed, too, on the remedy—that we should roll out e-Borders, biometrics and new technology; make sure that enough staff were in place so that we could increase checks and cover everybody properly by counting people in and out; and every year extend the technology and strengthen the checks.
This Home Secretary and this Home Office made a conscious decision to turn the clock back and to reduce the checks. What they put in place this summer was a new regime of lower not higher checks, using less rather than more technology.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman if he can tell me whether he believes we should strengthen and extend biometric tests, rather than reduce them.
Sajid Javid
I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. In 2008, the then Government reduced warnings index checks on European economic area nationals, children and adults, on Eurostar services, and they did so on 100 separate occasions between 2008 and 2010. She was a senior member of the previous Government, so can she tell the House whether she supported that measure?
Yvette Cooper
I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman needs to understand that biometric checks increased every year under the Labour Government; his Government have undermined them and rolled them back. What is the point of Britain investing loads of money in biometric technology and passports, if we then switch off the system every time a European citizen goes through it? What on earth is the point of that investment, which our Government supported and were extending and rolling out, but which the hon. Gentleman’s party and his Government seem to have backed off from and ditched, undermining the border controls that are in place?
Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. We are listening with great interest to her rewriting of history. Does she not agree that the Government of whom she was a member left the system in a real mess? This Government are trying to improve things and clear up the problem.
Yvette Cooper
If this is what the hon. Gentleman calls improving things—dearie me. We should be strengthening controls. Those controls had been strengthened, year on year, but in my view they should have gone further. We should be doing more to roll out e-Borders and extend biometrics. He does not seem to realise that his Home Secretary removed the biometric checks. She has been undermining many of the checks that should have been taking place.
Secondly, we need to know who authorised what, because serious allegations have now been made, both by the Home Secretary against a senior civil servant and by a senior civil servant against the Home Secretary. Her advisers seem to have briefed the newspapers that Brodie Clark was a rogue official. She told the House that he had taken responsibility and that she would make sure that “those responsible are punished”. He has said that her statements were wrong. The Home Secretary has a history of high-level spats, but this is considerably more serious than a political row over immigration and the future of cats; this is a dispute over the security of our borders. We need to know what advice she was given. What were the precise terms of the pilots that she signed off? What was communicated to the UK Border Agency about her decision? Was the memo—which I know she is aware of—from the Border Agency saying that it would cease routine biometric checks of EU citizens cleared by her, the Minister for Immigration or Home Office officials? Is it an accurate or inaccurate reflection of the instructions that were sent out from her office, or the description of the pilot in the submission that she received and signed off?
Yvette Cooper
Again, I notice that the Home Secretary is silent, so I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Matthew Hancock
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. However, she has not yet mentioned the fact that Rob Whiteman, Mr Clark’s boss, has said that Mr Clark overstepped and did more than was authorised by Ministers. That is why he had to be suspended.
Yvette Cooper
We now have different accounts from different officials, the Home Secretary and the memos from the Border Agency that have been revealed. What the public want to know is the truth. That is why we need the information to be published. We need to know what information the Home Secretary gave to the Border Agency, what instructions were given to the Border Agency and what instructions were given by the Minister for Immigration. What information was provided to Ministers from the Border Agency? What monitoring did they ask for? What monitoring did her Minister for Immigration do? By the way, it is good to see him here today. He has been completely silent and absent from this entire debate. Indeed, in the light of these revelations, we wonder what job he is in fact doing. What information did either Minister ask for when they decided to extend the pilot just six weeks ago?
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
Is it not crucial that we know Mr Clark’s version of events? We look forward to his giving evidence next Tuesday, because so far we have simply had the Home Secretary. Why should a senior civil servant of 40 years standing wish to mislead us or give a wrong impression to Parliament?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right: we need to hear Brodie Clark’s evidence to the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which will be important. However, we also need to know what it says in the instructions that the Home Secretary’s office gave to the Border Agency. That by itself should clear a lot of this up. What did she decide? What were her instructions to the Border Agency? Has it accurately reflected those instructions or not? She should publish that information and those data. Let us get to the bottom of what has been going on.
Thirdly, the Home Secretary needs to provide us with more information and assurances about resources. It is clear from the internal memo and from the Border Agency that staff were under pressure. One internal management e-mail says:
“If we aren’t using level 2”—
the reduced level of checks—
“the assumption is we won’t be using secondary staff to support any pressures…as you know, this is a message we have put out time and time again…We cannot continue to pull resources from other parts of our business when we are not making use of all the tools available to us”.
In other words, the Border Agency was not allowed to ask for extra staff when things got busy unless it had already downgraded to a lower level of checks.
People do not like queues when they come back from holiday—the kids are crying, it is very stressful, or perhaps they are late for a business meeting—but they stand there, looking at all the empty booths, and thinking, “Why aren’t the extra staff put on? Why aren’t the extra lines open?” Now we know the answer: because the Border Agency has been told that it has to cut the checks that are in place. Some 6,500 staff are going from the Border Agency, with 1,500 going from the border force, including more than 800 this year alone. The Prime Minister told the House with great pride that the level of staff was returning to the level of 2006. Really? I have to say that I do not think that border controls were strong enough in 2006. We were right to strengthen them and to keep strengthening them. [Interruption.] If Government Members really want to roll back the clock and reduce the checks and border controls that are in place across this country, they are completely out of touch with their constituents across the country, who want to see proper immigration controls in place.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
Does the right hon. Lady think that the border controls were ever strict enough under the last Government? Let me tell her that my constituents will never forgive that Government for letting in 2.2 million people, a population twice that of our nearest city, Birmingham.
Yvette Cooper
It was right to increase and strengthen those border controls and to increase biometric checks. However, if the hon. Lady wants to intervene again, I have to ask her: does she agree with the pilot that her Home Secretary introduced, which reduced those biometric checks and removed checks against the watch list for EU children?
Margot James
I will not presume to comment on the decisions that the Home Secretary made, but I will say this. It was quite—[Interruption.]
Yvette Cooper
This is a pilot that covered millions of people over many months and has led to Home Secretary being unable to tell us how many people have wrongly been allowed into this country as a result.
Yvette Cooper
If Government Back Benchers want to declaim their support for the pilot, I will happily allow them to do so.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
I appreciate the right hon. Lady’s generosity in giving way again. Does what she has said about 2006 mean that she agrees with the mea culpa—I think that was the phrase—of the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee when he said that the problem started under her Labour Government?
Yvette Cooper
I agree that Labour Home Secretaries were right to increase the controls and to increase new technology, which is why I am so shocked that Conservative Ministers and the Conservative party are so enthusiastic about rolling back those border checks now. We have seen that the scale of the cuts is putting pressure on the UK Border Agency just as the scale of cuts to policing is putting pressure on community safety. People across the country fear that corners are being cut and that border security is being put at risk by the scale of the Government’s border cuts. This needs to be sorted out. We have had the embarrassing spectacle of a Home Secretary who does not know what she agreed to, how it was being implemented or how great the security risks were.
Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)
It is a question not simply of cuts, but of competence. Whether with Building Schools for the Future or the selling off of forests, this Government are simply not fit for purpose.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. The most shocking thing of all is that the Government do not seem to know what has been happening on their watch.
Time and again, Ministers have blamed the previous Labour Government and civil servants, but the Home Secretary might want to think back to “Question Time” in 2004 and a debate with the then Immigration Minister, Beverley Hughes. The current Home Secretary said at that time that she found it
“absolutely extraordinary that she’s…blamed officials in her department for this decision to be taken…I’m sick and tired of government ministers…who simply blame other people when things go wrong.”
Indeed, Home Secretary.
The House does not expect the Home Secretary to know every detail of what is going on in the agencies for which she is responsible all the time, but we expect her to get on top of things and to sort them out when they go wrong.
Five days on, the public still do not know what on earth has been going on in the Home Office and at our borders. Time and again, this Home Secretary has not been on top of the facts and has not taken action to sort things out. She seems to be making things worse.
We cannot afford a Home Secretary who cannot cope with a crisis or sort out a fiasco. Border security and public safety are too important for us to have a Home Secretary whose authority is continually being sapped. She cannot blame the previous Government and she cannot blame officials. It is her watch. She needs to provide the facts that she has been unable to provide so far and to provide the answers, and she needs to do so today.
Mrs May
The operational instruction did reflect Government policy because it allowed for a risk-based assessment when opening the biometric chip of EEA passports and checking EEA national children against the warnings index when they were travelling with parents or as part of a school party.
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary has just made an extremely important statement. She said that the UK Border Agency’s interim operational instruction did reflect Government policy. That operational instruction says
“We will cease:
Routinely opening the chip within EEA passports.
Routinely checking all EEA nationals under 18 years against the Warnings index” .
If that is Government policy, it is little wonder that, across the country, people have been routinely stopping doing the biometric checks in EU passports and stopping doing the watch index checks. The instruction does not say “Only in exceptional or limited circumstances”. It says “We will cease routinely” to do those checks.
Mrs May
The whole point is that they were allowed, in certain circumstances, not to open the chip—[Interruption.] The whole point is that they were allowed, in certain circumstances, not to check children against the warnings index. And the whole point is that officers were allowed to exercise their discretion.
Where the instruction says that officers should escalate further measures, it refers of course to the warnings index checking policy put in place in 2007 under the Government of which the right hon. Lady was a member. I have to tell the right hon. Lady that the quotes she has been eagerly e-mailing around the Lobby come from a policy put in place by her own Government.
The right hon. Lady referred to staff numbers. What she failed to tell the House was that in April 2010 the Labour Government had already announced that they would cut the budget and the staff of the UK Border Agency.
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary has not answered an extremely important question. She has accused officials of going much further, of using routinely the reduced checks that she wanted in only limited circumstances. That is one of her main allegations—officials going further than her decision and her advice. The interim operational instruction that the Home Secretary says reflects Government policy and was her intention is described as “Trial of risk-based processes at the border,” and states:
“We will... Cease routinely opening the chip within EEA passports.”
The document goes on to talk about discretion, but the discretion is to go further, not to cease the process only in limited circumstances. Will the right hon. Lady now recognise that the document shows that her intention and her policy were substantially to expand the reduction of checks for EEA citizens across the country and to reduce controls at our border?
Mrs May
I answered that point on Monday, on Tuesday and this afternoon. The right hon. Lady knows full well what was in the pilot I authorised.
The right hon. Lady asked what information was given to Ministers when we decided to extend the pilot programme. As I told the Select Committee yesterday, Ministers were provided with four updates on the progress of the pilot prior to the agreement to extend it. The updates provided information about seizures of drugs and detection of illegal immigrants. They did not refer to unauthorised actions; in fact, they explicitly said that officials were sticking to the terms of the pilot and not going beyond them.
The right hon. Lady asked about child trafficking. I answered that question on Monday in the House and before the Home Affairs Committee yesterday. For the information of the House, in 2010, 8 million EEA-national children were checked against the warnings index. An alert came up for one child, and after further questioning the child was allowed in.
Damian Green
I know how strongly the hon. Gentleman feels about the Larne and Stranraer issue, but it is not an international port. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom; boats that come from Northern Ireland to Scotland are not crossing an international boundary. That is a fact that the hon. Gentleman needs to recognise.
The pilot was designed to improve security at our ports and to strengthen our border. Several Opposition Members said they believed that it was not being monitored and that no information was being passed to the Home Secretary or me during the course of the pilot, but of course that was not the case. We were getting regular information from management about what was happening, and it was telling us that there was a 10% increase in the detection of illegal immigrants, a 48% increase in fraudulent documents detected, and that cocaine seizures and illegal firearms seizures were up.
Damian Green
Before I give way to the right hon. Lady, will she answer the following question? If the figures for the pilot had gone the other way—if detections were down, the number of fraudulent documents detected were down, and drug seizures were down—would she not be calling for a debate to argue that the pilot was a failure? Why is she calling a debate now when, as far as we can see, this pilot was a success?
Yvette Cooper
If the hon. Gentleman’s pilot was such a success, he will need to explain why he has now suspended it. There is an important question that the Home Secretary ducked earlier about the management data that were available—I refer to the information about how many times the checks were downgraded to level 2. How many times did that take place over the summer? Has the Minister seen that information? If so, will he publish it? We know that the information exists.
Damian Green
That is precisely the information that the various investigations are looking at, but what the right hon. Lady has to recognise is that, without the authorisation of Ministers, senior UK border officials are alleged to have ordered the regular relaxation of border checks. They also went beyond the pilot that Ministers had agreed. Biometric checks on European economic area nationals and warnings index checks on EEA national children were abandoned on a regular basis, without approval, and adults were not checked against the warnings index at Calais, without approval.
What the pilot was designed to do—I hope that there will be some consensus on this across the House—was to have a risk-based approach. I say that there should be some consensus, because having a proper risk-based approach to immigration control has been the basis of our policy on both immigration and wider security since 9/11. I was grateful for the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) on that point. It is obviously sensible to concentrate our effort and resources in those areas where they are likely to have most effect on making our borders safe. I cannot believe that there is a Member in any part of this House who disagrees with that. That is what we approved.
On the point about queues which was raised by several hon. Members, including the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins), there is of course permanent pressure for shorter queues; there is pressure from Members of this House. I have to tell the right hon. Gentleman that whenever I come back in the autumn—I suspect this was the case for any previous Immigration Minister—I hear tales of woe about queues at Heathrow, but it is absolutely the first responsibility of the Home Office to make sure that we do not compromise security. That is what this pilot—that is what a risk-based approach—is designed to do.
What happened that went beyond authority was that the verification of the fingerprints of non-EEA nationals from countries that require a visa was stopped on regular occasions, without approval.
Oral Answers to Questions
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I welcome the Home Secretary’s decision to instigate an inquiry into border control this summer, which we will discuss shortly, but let me ask her a security question: what is her estimate of the number of people who passed into Britain through our ports and airports this summer under the reduced security and passport regime that the UK Border Agency was operating?
Mrs May
As the right hon. Lady knows, I will make a full statement to the House later this afternoon, and will have a full opportunity to answer her questions then, but I should like to make a few things clear. In the past, under the last Government, some security checks were lifted at times of pressure on the border, including one instance when local managers at Heathrow terminal 3 decided to open controls and no checks were made—not even cursory checks of passports.
To prevent that from happening again and to allow resources to be focused on the highest-risk passengers and journeys, in July I agreed that UKBA could pilot a scheme that would allow border force officials to target intelligence-led checks on higher-risk categories of travellers. We have since discovered that Brodie Clark, the head of the UK border force, authorised the wider relaxation of border controls without ministerial sanction. As I said, I shall make a statement to the House later today and will answer questions on this matter fully then.
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary did not answer my question on how many people went through under the reduced security regime, and I am concerned that she does not know. As she will know, previously, both Labour and Conservative Ministers have committed to the roll-out of e-Borders so that proper screening could be available for everyone entering and leaving the country. She seems to be rolling that system back, not forward. When describing the rolling back of checks for EU citizens this summer, a UKBA staff member told me, “We were told not to check children travelling with family groups. That was ridiculous. Supposing a man…had taken them away from their mother and they were wards of court, they would pass through undetected. I have detected many wards of court simply by running them through the warnings index.”
The Home Secretary took the decision to reduce the checks for EU citizens this summer. Why did she do so?
Mrs May
As I have indicated to the right hon. Lady, I shall set out exactly what decisions were taken in my statement to the House later today. I indicated in my first answer to her that we were looking at targeting intelligence-led checks on higher risk categories of travellers. She referred to e-Borders, but this has nothing to do with e-Borders. When we took office, we had to stop the contract with the contractor that the last Labour Government agreed for e-Borders because it was significantly behind schedule in putting it in place.
UK Border Force
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of her statement and welcome her agreement to establish an independent inquiry. That inquiry must get to the truth, but it should do so considerably more rapidly than by January.
Reports have already reached me from the UK Border Agency today that the shredders are on and that there is a ban on internal e-mails. Will the Home Secretary look urgently into those allegations, and into what documents perhaps are being shredded and what e-mails deleted in the Home Office and UKBA on this issue? It is also important that the inquiry has access to all communications between Ministers, the Home Office and UKBA. The scope must cover the resource pressures facing UKBA. We now know that 6,500 staff are being cut from the agency, including 1,500 from the border force. We need to know what pressures officials were put under to cut corners as a result and keep queues down with reduced staff.
We also need some answers from the Home Secretary now. In questions earlier and in her statement, she could not tell the House how many people came through our ports and airports this summer without proper checks. On average, 100,000 foreign citizens enter Britain every day. UKBA staff have claimed that reduced checks were in place almost daily from August, lasting at least half of the shift. How many people were not checked against the watch list? How many people did not have their biometrics checked? What is the Home Secretary’s estimate of whether anyone from the watch list entered Britain at that time? Did any convicted criminals or security suspects enter? The truth is that the Home Secretary does not know. She says that we will never know. Even now, she seems to be doing nothing to find out and assess who has entered the country and what the security risk might be.
The Home Secretary has admitted that she took the decision to reduce checks for EU citizens in July—not checking under-18s against the warnings index or doing biometric checks on EU passports—yet she will know that cases have been identified by border officials involving EU citizens, including people involved in organised crime, people trafficking, falsifying passports or removals of children who are wards of court. She made that decision—not Labour Ministers in the past: this Home Secretary—and that decision is her responsibility. She cannot run away from it or hide behind cases from 2004, long before new systems were introduced. She knows that the intention of Labour—and, we had assumed, Conservative—Ministers was to roll out e-Borders and to put the technology in place so that everyone could be properly screened entering and exiting the country, and not only at quiet times. In fact, the immigration Minister claimed in May that 90% of non-EU flights and 60% of EU flights were covered, but it turns out that he meant 90% of flights in the winter or at quiet times in the afternoons.
The truth is that instead of strengthening the checks year on year, as all previous Ministers had committed to do, this Home Secretary decided to water them down, as official Government policy, even though she never told the House. She has blamed officials for relaxing the checks further than she intended, yet she gave the green light for the weaker controls. She claimed in her statement that she did not intend it to be routine not to check the biometric chip in EEA passports, yet I have a copy of the interim operational instruction that she has refused to publish, which states:
“We will cease routinely opening the chip within EEA passports, checking all EEA nationals under 18 against the warnings index”.
It adds:
“If for whatever reason it is considered necessary to take further measures, local managers must escalate to the Border force duty director to seek authority for their proposed action.”
So the Home Secretary gave agency staff the green light to go ahead and experiment to meet the pressures from queues, and look how far they went. A member of the Border Agency staff said this morning:
“Every day I let in 10 people who I think there would be a good case against”.
How on earth did Ministers not know about this? How on earth could there be continual complaints from staff for months without the immigration Minister or the Home Secretary knowing what was going on? At best, they were deeply out of touch; at worst, they were complicit in a loss of control at our borders.
This Home Secretary is presiding over growing chaos and corner cutting at our borders: Raed Salah was banned from this country by the Home Office, yet he was allowed to waltz in at Heathrow; 100,000 asylum cases have been written off as just too difficult to deal with; Ministers have now given the green light to an experiment to water down, rather than increase, border controls; and the Home Secretary does not even know how many people entered Britain without proper checks this summer. Thousands of people entered without proper checks, and without the Home Secretary having a clue what was going on. It is no good blaming the previous Government, or blaming officials. This is happening on her watch, these are her decisions, and this is her Government’s mistake. She needs to get a grip and stop passing the buck.
Mrs May
I must say that I regret that response from the right hon. Lady. There is no more serious issue than border security, but, instead of engaging with the facts, she has chosen to play party politics. She knows that the checks that I approved and the relaxation of checks, which I did not approve, are two very different matters.
Let me take her points in turn. She alleges that the pilot scheme and the unauthorised actions were the result of cuts. I explained the basis for the pilot scheme in my statement. I would remind her that the last Government were planning to cut the UK Border Agency and that it remains the stated policy of her party in opposition to cut the Home Office budget. She mentioned in passing that the House had not been informed about the pilot programme, but it has never been the policy of any Government to notify the House of operational matters such as those. Her own Government did not notify the House when they introduced a risk-based warnings index policy, or when they let passengers through Heathrow without even looking at their passports.
The right hon. Lady suggests that the problem was related not to unauthorised official actions but to the measures that we piloted in July. Let me remind the House again that, as I said in my statement, these measures allowed greater intelligence-led checks to be made against higher-risk passengers. Does the right hon. Lady think that was wrong; if so, why did the last Government introduce a warnings index policy that allowed risk-based checks back in 2007?
Let me remind the right hon. Lady of what I said. The pilot allowed officials in limited circumstances to use their discretion whether to check the biometric chip of EEA nationals and whether to run EEA nationals’ children travelling in family groups or school groups against the warnings index. Under her Government in similar circumstances, adults were not run against the warnings index, and on at least one occasion at Heathrow the border was opened up, so no checks were made against inbound passengers. She says that officials at UKBA are telling her that they were suspicious about individuals, yet they were being let through. It was clear in the guidance on the policy that for any EEA national or EEA national child against whom suspicion was felt, the officer should do the necessary biometric chip checks or warnings index checks.
The right hon. Lady asked whether the inquiry should include the decisions of Ministers as well as officials. I have already said that I am happy for John Vine’s investigation to look at what decisions were taken by Ministers and when. She asked about the publication of paperwork between Ministers and officials. We will certainly make all the relevant paperwork available to the investigations. I can assure her and the House that the paperwork will show without ambiguity that the relaxation of checks that occurred was not sanctioned by me.
The right hon. Lady asked whether any dangerous individuals had managed to come to Britain. That is a very serious issue; that is why I addressed it in my statement. I made it clear to the House that we are not in a position to be able to say how many people entered who should have been prevented after being flagged by the warnings index. We would have known, however, if anybody had tried to enter the country during the pilot, as the pilot was due to operate, because all adults were run past the warnings index and all non-EEA passengers were checked against that index. It was only EEA nationals’ children travelling with their parents or in a school group who were not automatically run against the warnings index. That is more stringent than the controls put in place by the last Government, who in similar circumstances did not check all adults against the warnings index.
I have said on a number of occasions that there is nothing more important than the security of our border, and I made clear in my statement the measures we are taking to address the lapse. In addition, we are reforming every route to the UK to reduce net migration; we are clearing the asylum backlog; we are improving removals; we are addressing the problem of article 8; and we are creating a border policing command in our National Crime Agency to improve our border security in the long term.
I will take no lectures, however, from the party that gave us a total net migration of more than 2.2 million people, the foreign national prisoners scandal, Sangatte, widespread abuse of student visas, the botched e-Borders contract, a 450,000 asylum backlog, no transitional controls for eastern Europeans, the Human Rights Act and a points-based system that failed to reduce immigration. My task now is to make sure that those responsible for this lapse are properly dealt with and to make sure that border force officials can never take these risks with border security again. That is what I am determined to do.
Gangs and Youth Violence
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the cross-Government report into ending gang and youth violence. Following the shocking scenes of disorder over the summer, the Prime Minister asked me to lead a review, alongside my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, of gangs and youth violence. Today’s report is not the end of that process. It is merely the start of a comprehensive, long-term programme of work to tackle the violence that blights too many of our towns and cities.
We have visited front-line projects; we have analysed youth violence and street gangs; we have met local authority chief executives, senior police officers, voluntary organisations and former gang members; and we have hosted an international conference of experts. Using this research, we have identified what can be done by Government and other agencies to stop the violence and to turn around the lives of those involved. Today’s report is an important first analysis of the problem, and of the interventions that work. It provides a platform for the intensive support we will provide to the most affected areas.
If we are honest with ourselves, we need to accept that not enough was done over the years to deal with a problem we all knew existed and we knew was not being addressed. But the riots brought home to the whole country how serious a problem gang and youth violence has become. The statistics show that one in five of those arrested in connection with the riots in London were known gang members. Similar figures were recorded by West Yorkshire police, and Nottinghamshire had only a slightly lower proportion. Most other police forces identified fewer than 10% of all those arrested as known gang members, so gangs were not the sole cause of the riots, but they were a factor. The fact that so many young people who are not involved in gangs were still willing to carry out such serious acts of criminality merely reinforces the urgent need for action.
Gang members and young people engaged in violence do not appear out of the blue. Analysis of their life stories shows certain common factors: parental neglect early in life, often linked to drug addiction or alcohol abuse and violence in the home; a history of poor discipline at school, truancy and exclusion; early brushes with the law for more minor offences; and exposure to older gang members, often based around their local estate. Those factors come up time and again, and during the review we heard powerful real-life examples. Our analysis also showed that gang membership itself can be an important driver of criminality and violence. In London, for example, almost 50% of shootings and 22% of serious violence are committed by known gang members.
Our considered and evidence-based approach is designed to deal with each and every aspect of gang culture and youth violence. It will be based on five areas: prevention, pathways out, punishment, partnership working and providing support.
Preventing young people from becoming involved in gangs and youth violence means starting at the beginning. Research shows that early intervention is the most cost-effective way of reducing violence later in life, so we are recruiting 4,200 extra health visitors and doubling the capacity of family nurse partnership schemes, to help 13,000 young mothers. We are providing £18 million to identify and support domestic violence victims and their children, who are at particular risk of turning to violence in adulthood.
In schools, the pathway for young people into crime is all too clear: from low-level absence, to persistent absence and truancy, to low literacy and poor attainment. That is why our education reforms are focused on: early intervention in the foundation years; taking a rigorous approach to eliminating illiteracy; improving behaviour and discipline; and ensuring that every young person is taught in a way that inspires them and prepares them for the world of work.
If prevention fails and young people are drawn into gangs and youth violence, we need to ensure that we provide viable pathways out. Moments of crisis in a young person’s life, such as arrest, exclusion from school or attending an accident and emergency department offer vital opportunities to intervene, so we will work with A and E departments and children’s social care providers to help young people who may be affected by gang violence.
For those who are arrested, we will expand schemes to help young offenders with mental health and substance misuse problems, and we will look to provide ways out of gangs for those who have been convicted and served their time. We will therefore improve education provision in young offenders institutions and ensure that all young people who leave prison and claim jobseeker’s allowance are referred immediately to the Work programme.
We will also establish a new ending gangs and youth violence team of community activists, NHS experts and police officers. It will offer intensive support to gang-affected areas to help them understand their problem and develop their own solutions, which could include rolling out schemes to re-house gang members who want to exit the gang lifestyle and mediation schemes to prevent retaliatory violence.
Our review found some excellent police work to identify and manage the highest-risk gang members through a combination of targeted surveillance, enforcement and arrest for any offence, however minor, and positive offers of training, employment and drugs treatment for those who want a different life. However, those not prepared to break away from violence will face harsher and tougher punishments. That is why we will consult on making a new offence of possession of an illegal firearm with intent to supply, and on whether the penalty for illegal firearm importation should be increased. We are also consulting on whether the police need additional curfew powers. It is why we are extending the new gang injunctions to 14 to 17-year-olds, for example, to stop gang members entering rival territory, prevent them from being in public with dangerous dogs and require them to undertake positive activities; and it is why we are strengthening our laws on weapons possession so that anyone, including offenders aged 16 or 17, convicted of using a knife to threaten and endanger others will now face a mandatory custodial sentence. Any adult who commits a second very serious violent or sexual crime will now face a mandatory life sentence.
This is not, however, solely a police and criminal justice programme. All the agencies that young people deal with, from teachers to health service workers and social services, need to develop better systems for identifying high-risk individuals, sharing information and working together. Simply throwing more money at the problem is not the answer. We need a more intelligent approach.
We know, for example, that there are families on whom multiple Government agencies spend hundreds of thousands of pounds each year, yet their problems persist. That is why Louise Casey is today starting her work as the head of a new troubled families team to drive forward our commitment to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families. We will also deliver our commitment that all hospital A and E departments should share anonymised data on violent assaults with the police and other agencies. Sharing information and taking a multi-agency approach might not sound very exciting, but they work.
Finally, to support local areas, we will target Home Office funds on those places where the most serious gang and youth violence problems exist. We will therefore provide £10 million in funding next year to support up to 30 local areas and invest at least £1.2 million of new resources over the next three years to improve services for young victims of sexual violence in our major urban areas, with a new focus on the girls and young women caught up in gang-related rape and abuse.
For too long, communities have lived in fear of gangs. Many young lives have been ruined; many young lives have been lost. The summer showed that it is time for society to take a stand. It is time for a long-term programme, with intervention at each stage of vulnerable people’s lives; it is time for a locally led approach, with agencies working together and sharing information; and it is time for tough enforcement to be backed up by work to address the root causes of gang and youth violence. That is what our programme will deliver and I commend this statement to the House.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I thank the Home Secretary for early sight of her statement and the Government report.
The Opposition agree with the Government’s aim of tackling gang culture. The Home Secretary is right to point to the devastating impact on the victims of gang violence and intimidation and to be concerned about the damage that gangs do to those who get sucked into them, sometimes even in the search for protection. The violence is horrifying; the long-term scars for young people and society are severe. She is right that gangs played a part in the riots, but also that they have played a part in problems such as knife crime that affect some of our major cities.
The Home Secretary also recognises that the overwhelming majority of young people do not get involved in gangs. Indeed, youth crime fell over the course of the previous Parliament as fewer young people were drawn into criminal activity, but we want youth crime to fall further, not to go back up. That is why action on the pernicious effect of gang culture is so important.
I therefore agree strongly with the Home Secretary that effective action requires prevention, early intervention, working in partnerships, tough action and crackdowns on persistent gang activity, and punishment. Effective action needs to involve the NHS, schools and councils as well as the police. We also need action on domestic violence and to consider the impact on women and girls. She should also consider increasing the focus on housing and on the victims of gangs.
I welcome the Home Secretary’s work to build on Labour’s approach in government, including the family intervention projects and implementing the extension of gang injunctions to 14-year-olds, for which the previous Labour Government legislated before the last election.
I agree with the Home Secretary that we need to go further. I, too, am impressed by some of the work that police and local councils are doing in some areas to target gang members by offering them a way out, but rightly getting tough on them if they will not take it, but I am deeply concerned that the reality of the Government’s policy does not live up to the rhetoric. For a start, there is still complete confusion about sentencing policies. Last week, the Home Office told the papers that there would be longer sentences for gang members; yesterday, the Home Secretary told them that there would not be. Her plans on powers are also confused. She will know that many police forces and councils find that ASBOs are one of the most useful tools in disrupting gang activity, yet her policy still is to abolish them and replace them with weaker injunctions, so she is making it harder and not easier for the police to crack down.
We welcome the emphasis on early intervention in the report, but that sits badly with the 20% cuts to Sure Start and well over 20% cuts to the youth service. We welcome the learning of lessons from successful work in places such as Strathclyde, but here is the real problem: the work in Strathclyde alone required an additional £5 million, but she has announced only £10 million for the country as a whole, and the Home Office has already said that that funding is not new. At the same time, she is halving the local community safety budgets, which councils and the police use for gang prevention work right now—£44 million of cuts over the next two years alone, on top of the cuts to community safety funding in the emergency Budget.
Before the election, Haringey, where the riots started, received £2.2 million for community safety, including the action it was taking, with the police, to target gangs. By next year, that figure will be £200,000—a 90% cut in one borough alone. In Liverpool, the youth offending service, which works with gangs and young offenders, is facing more than £2 million of cuts—an overall reduction in its budget of 34%. All that comes on top of 16,000 police officer cuts, nearly 6,000 of which are in the forces that face the biggest problems with gangs.
The Government are cutting too far, too fast, hitting not only the criminal justice system, but our economy, which risks costing us more. Higher unemployment and higher crime will cost us more. Ministers are right to be concerned about gangs and youth crime and to want action, but what does this really add up to on the streets of Lambeth or Liverpool or for the young people of Birmingham or Brent? Given that the Government are pushing up youth unemployment to nearly 1 million, cutting 16,000 police officers, ending ASBOs, slashing youth services and cutting crime prevention, can the Home Secretary put her hand on her heart and tell the House that during this Parliament the youth crime rate will fall, as it did in previous Parliaments?
We agree with much of what the Home Secretary said today, but when we look at the reality behind the rhetoric—the reality behind her words—we see the truth, which is that the Government are still making it harder, not easier, for the police and communities to tackle gang violence and cut crime.
Mrs May
We have heard a typical response from the right hon. Lady. I shall start with the statements where she agreed with what we were doing, with the need to do more to draw young people out of gangs and reduce youth violence and with the point that this is not just about the police, but about how the NHS, schools and a variety of other agencies need to be involved. As I said in my statement, that is the basis of this first truly cross-Government report. She mentioned good projects by the police. There are a number of very good projects out there in parts of the Metropolitan police, Greater Manchester, the west midlands, Merseyside and, of course, Strathclyde. Those projects are already starting to make a difference.
Sadly, however, having said that she agreed with a lot of what I said, the right hon. Lady then, as she did in August when we were talking about the riots, chose to be party political. I am sorry that she chose to do that, but I shall address her various points. She said that we should not scrap ASBOs, but what good have ASBOs done, given that, as she said, gang culture has been getting worse? We are getting rid of ASBOs and replacing them with measures that will actually deliver for local communities, deter antisocial behaviour and put communities back in charge. She mentioned funding for Sure Start. That funding is provided through the early intervention grant, but, crucially, we are ensuring that Sure Start is focused on the very families it was set up to help in the first place—the very families that most need our help and support.
The right hon. Lady talked about police cuts. She never misses a chance to demonstrate her fiscal irresponsibility, and I knew that today would not be any different. She attacked cuts in police spending, but she did not say that it was the stated policy of her party to cut police spending. On her comments about police numbers, let me tell the House what she said about gangs and police numbers in August:
“Boots on the streets are not enough to sustain safe communities”.—[Official Report, 11 August 2011; Vol. 531, c. 1151.]
I wonder why she has changed her mind.
The right hon. Lady also talked about other spending cuts. Let me tell her what Jacqui Smith, the former Labour Home Secretary, said just this morning:
“You need to be much better at measuring the impact of the money we spend as well as simply spending it.”
I suggest that the right hon. Lady take a lesson from her. The shadow Home Secretary seems to think that gang problems have been caused by this Government and did not exist under the previous Government, but let me remind her what she said in August:
“I agree that more needs to be done about gang culture, which has been getting worse.”—[Official Report, 11 August 2011; Vol. 531, c. 1151.]
Yes: getting worse under the Labour Government. Just this morning, Jacqui Smith said that Labour “hadn’t done well enough” in tackling gang violence”. She has been straight about her record; it is a shame that the shadow Home Secretary cannot bring herself to be straight too.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I join the Home Secretary in thanking all hon. Members who have toiled throughout the passage of the Bill, and pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), whom I congratulate on his appointment to the shadow Cabinet, and my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), who, conveniently, has been moved to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport just in time for the Olympics. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), who has done important work particularly on child protection, and my hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), who has kept us all in order. I thank, too, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), who in the last couple of days have stepped in admirably to steer the debate through its final stages in this House.
There are sensible measures in the Bill that we support, such as removing old convictions for gay sex, removing restrictions on marriage, adding sensible extensions to freedom of information and putting in place tighter restrictions on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and stop-and-search powers. We also welcome the action on rogue wheel clampers, but we would have preferred the Government to go further by taking further action on rogue ticketers. We agree, too, with the principle of moving down to 14 days of pre-charge detention. However, the Home Secretary was unwise not to have made changes as a result of the last debate, in which Members from both sides of the House who served on the Joint Committee that she set up raised concerns that the mechanism that she has put in place to deal with emergencies will be impractical and unworkable. Why did she set up a Committee if she was just going to ignore its expert views?
We have some serious and deep concerns about the Bill, however, which mean that we cannot support it tonight. We agree with making changes to child protection, especially now that Criminal Records Bureau checks can be made portable, but it is vital that as we do so, we make sure this House can reassure parents throughout the country that sensible and strong safeguards are still in place to protect their children.
The Government cannot now do that, as a result of this Bill, because they are creating serious loopholes in child protection. They have been urged to close them not just by our Front-Bench team but by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Action for Children, the Children’s Society, the Government’s own Children’s Commissioner, the Scouts, the Rugby Football Union, UK Athletics and many more sports organisations. The Government have consistently ignored their advice.
I wonder how many Conservative Members realise what they voted for in the Lobby this afternoon. They voted to stop someone who has committed a sexual offence against children being automatically barred from working with them in future. Conservative Members voted today to stand up for the right of convicted child rapists not to be included on a barred list: that is what they voted for. The Bill also means that if someone who has been barred for grooming a child applies for a supervised post working with children, the organiser will not be told that they have been barred.
The Government have chosen to stand up for the privacy of people who have been barred by the experts from working with children, against the concerns of head teachers, sports organisations, children’s charities and, above all, parents who want to know that their children are safe. I say to the Home Secretary very strongly, as a parent, that parents across this country do not want to discover that a voluntary teaching assistant or a supervised sports coach who spends hours with their child has, in fact, been barred by the experts from ever working with children again, but that—thanks to the Home Secretary’s decision to protect that person’s privacy—nobody was told. That is the consequence of her Bill; it is the decision that Government Members have just voted to support.
It is not just on child protection that the Government are getting the balance wrong. The Home Secretary’s decisions on DNA will also make it harder, not easier, for the police to fight crime. She has talked with pride about the 13,000 convicted criminals that she wants to put on the DNA database, but what she fails to point out is that taking retrospective DNA, which we strongly agree with, was made possible only by Labour’s Crime and Security Act 2010, which was passed before the general election and which she opposed. Not only did she oppose the whole Bill then, but she failed to enact those provisions when that should have happened, straight after the general election. She waited for a year to get round to it, and she still has not enacted the provisions in Labour’s Act to take DNA from people who commit crimes abroad.
As for the provisions in this Bill, the Home Secretary is ignoring the evidence. She is ignoring not only the evidence from the police, who estimate that 1,000 fewer crimes will be solved every year as a result of these measures, and the wise words from my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), who tabled amendments, but the evidence that Ministers tried to hide, which was produced by their own Department. It shows that every year crimes will be committed by 23,000 people who would have been on the DNA database under Labour’s plans but will not be on it under her plans. We are talking about 23,000 criminals each year, and these are cases in which she wants to make it harder for the police to bring them to justice. Some 17,000 rape suspects will be taken off the database straight away as a result of these measures.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the hon. and learned Gentleman, but I ask him whether he can give a good reason for removing those 17,000 rape suspects so swiftly from the database, against the advice and the pleas from Rape Crisis.
Stephen Phillips
I am grateful for the right hon. Lady’s anticipation of what my intervention might be. What would she say, and what would her party say, to the millions of innocent people who regard it as offensive that their DNA is retained when they have never been convicted of any crime whatsoever? Is that really the policy that the Labour party thinks ought to be pursued in this country?
Yvette Cooper
I point out to the hon. and learned Gentleman that that is his policy and that of his party. That is what he has voted for. People will be on the DNA database who have not been convicted of any crime, but his party wants to hold their DNA for three years, based on no evidence whatsoever, whereas we believe that it should be held for six years, based on the evidence, because that is the best way to ensure that we get the balance right between protecting people’s civil liberties and ensuring that we can take the action needed to solve crime. The hon. and learned Gentleman has not given an answer to Rape Crisis and others who are deeply concerned about the impact of these measures on our ability to prevent rapes and to solve rapes in future.
We know that every year there are nearly 5,000 cases in which someone has been arrested on suspicion of rape and the police believe that there is a case to answer and have passed the file to the Crown Prosecution Service, but the CPS has decided—we know that rape cases can be complex—not to charge. In all such cases, the DNA will be wiped straight away under this Government’s proposals, despite the fact that there is considerable evidence, as well as the concerns raised by organisations such as Rape Crisis, that more, not less, needs to be done to tackle the crime of rape and to bring more rapists to justice.
Government Members have their priorities wrong if they think that it is more important to keep people’s DNA for three years rather than six than it is to solve 1,000 more crimes, that it is more important to do that than to have DNA matches for 23,000 more criminals each year, and that it is more important to protect the rights of a rape suspect to keep their DNA code off the database altogether than to take the action that Rape Crisis has called for to make it easier to catch rapists in future.
Finally, on CCTV, which was critical in identifying the culprits in the riots, the Bill adds layers of bureaucracy that make it harder for the police to do their job.
We believe that it is important to protect people’s freedom, but protecting people’s freedom means not just protecting them against unwarranted interference by the police or by the state but protecting them against unwarranted interference, abuse or violence by other people. Freedom means protecting people from crime, too. The measures to which the Home Secretary objected in her speech helped cut crime by 40% and mean that there are now millions fewer victims of crime each year because we brought crime down. Yes, balancing acts and difficult decisions are required, and the freedom of victims of crime as well as the freedom of crime suspects should be considered. Decisions should be based on evidence, and time and again the Government have either ditched or denied the evidence in front of them.
The Home Secretary has made great play of attacking the Human Rights Act 1998, which at its heart includes protection for people’s freedom against oppression or abuse, but we should be clear that it is not the Human Rights Act that is putting privacy for child sex offenders ahead of sensible child protection measures, or putting the privacy of rape suspects above action to prevent rape in future, but this Government. It is not the Human Rights Act that is putting three years of holding DNA above action to solve 1,000 crimes a year, but a Conservative-led Government. Although the Home Secretary is very keen to be tough on the Human Rights Act, it would be rather more effective if she were tougher on crime and made it easier for the police to do their job.
We believe that this is a risky Bill that puts at risk freedom for crime victims, makes it harder for the police to do their job and ignores important evidence about the way in which crimes need to be solved. That is why we cannot support it on Third Reading, and will vote against it tonight.
Oral Answers to Questions
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mrs May
If I may say to the right hon. Gentleman, I expect to be having a further conversation with the Mayor after Home Office questions, but I hope to be sending a recommendation to the palace, and I firmly expect to do so, later today.
In relation to the funding figures for the Metropolitan police, the right hon. Gentleman will know full well that we are providing support to it, and indeed to other forces, as a result of the riots that took place recently. However, I am pleased to say that the previous Metropolitan Police Commissioner was able to increase visibility with police on the streets within the resources he had, by the simple and effective method of moving from police patrolling in pairs to single-patrol policing.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
It is intriguing to discover that the Home Secretary and the Mayor have not yet agreed on the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
The previous question was about the comprehensive spending review. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary estimated that 16,000 officers would be cut as a result of the CSR. Since then, the police have faced substantial additional costs of £125 million from policing the August riots. The Home Secretary has said that she is supporting the Met police and other forces, but the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice said in his letter that this will be only
“where forces are not in a position to cover the costs of recent events themselves”.
That leaves the police with no clarity at a time when their budgets are already being cut. Will she therefore now guarantee that no police force will have to cut any officers or services to pay for policing the riots, and will she stand by the Prime Minister’s commitment to pay this extra money to the police?
Mrs May
It is absolutely clear—and has been made clear to police forces affected by the riots—that police forces should put in claims to the Home Office and that we will look at them. We will be looking at claims for operational costs and riot damage costs. On the right hon. Lady’s first statement, however, I do not think that she should try to transpose on to this Government the sort of disputes that took place within the previous Government. As I understand, from reading the recent book by the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), she even disputed the extent of the deficit—as she and other Labour Members appear still to do.
Yvette Cooper
I am afraid that the Home Secretary did not answer the question. She said that the Home Office is “looking” at the claims. That provides no certainty for the police or clarity for police budgets. Police officers are having to make decisions right now about making people redundant. The truth is that she is happy to find extra resources for elected police chiefs, but she will not find the extra money for the police. She is spending more than £100 million on elected police chiefs that no one wants when she could spend the same money on the costs of policing the riots or on 3,000 extra constables in Olympics year. Does she think that the public would prefer the money to be spent on elected police chiefs or on constables who will cut crime?
Mrs May
I think that the public want a Government who actually look after taxpayers’ money, which is exactly what we will do. The police forces know that there is a process by which they can put in claims to the Home Office. Those claims will be properly considered, and as we have made clear, the Home Office will be making funds available in relation to the matters that the right hon. Lady has raised.
Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I join the Minister in commending those who have participated in the debates both in Committee and in the House today. This debate has been serious and important, and we have heard considerable expertise from all parts of the House in the discussions that have taken place.
Counter-terror policies are extremely important. They are vital to public safety, so our approach is, wherever possible, to seek to support the Government in their counter-terror policy. However, tonight we cannot. We cannot vote for the Bill because we do not believe it is the right thing to do for our national security. We do not take that decision lightly, but we are afraid that the Government are taking unnecessary risks with national security and public safety by introducing the Bill, and we do not believe that Parliament should support that approach tonight.
Control orders are not desirable but, sadly, they are needed. That is why they were introduced. However, the Bill, in its response to control orders, raises some serious problems: it weakens counter-terror protection in important ways; it weakens the safeguards—the checks and balances—that are needed to prevent abuse; it does not live up to the promises that were made about it; and it creates a shambolic legislative process and legal framework that will make it harder, not easier, for the police and the security services to do their job and keep us safe.
From the start, concerns were raised that the Bill was simply a fudge. Control orders are being replaced with something very similar. Curfews are being replaced with overnight residence requirements, and restrictions on movement and communications are being replaced with prescriptions on movement and communications. However, in key areas, the Bill weakens the powers of the Home Secretary to deal with very difficult cases.
My hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) and for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe) set out in Committee a series of our concerns and tabled amendments. Today we heard my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) set out his concerns and very powerfully speak to amendments on additional measures. My right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) spoke to amendments on relocation, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) spoke of specific Opposition security concerns. That is particularly important in Olympic year.
I shall focus particularly on our concerns about relocation—they were discussed on Report, but they are fundamental on Third Reading. In some cases, the courts, the security services and this Home Secretary have agreed that the power to relocate someone to prevent terrorist activity is needed and justified. In May this year, just four months ago, the Home Secretary argued in the case of CD that he needed to be removed from Greater London to protect the public from a terrorist attack. The judge said:
“I have concluded that the relocation obligation is a necessary and proportionate measure to protect the public from the risk of what is an immediate and real risk of a terrorist attack.”
That was just four months ago, but now the Home Secretary believes that those powers are not needed. What has really changed since May?
In July of this year, just two months ago, the Home Secretary said in the case of BM that relocation outside London was “fundamental” to preventing terrorist activity. In that case, BM admitted that he was committed to terrorism. The Home Secretary now believes that those powers are not needed. Again, what has really changed since July?
Ministers claim that they will put more surveillance in place, but the Met expert on this, when giving evidence to the Public Bill Committee, said:
“To get the resources that we anticipate we need will take more than a year, in terms of being able to get people trained and to get the right equipment.”––[ Official Report, Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Public Bill Committee, 21 June 2011; c. 9, Q27.]
It is simply not credible that the security environment has changed so substantially in the past two or four months that the powers were needed then but are not needed now. Are the Government really telling us—in Olympic year, of all years—that the powers are less needed in the coming year than they were last year, when this Home Secretary has felt that she needed to use them five times?
Ministers have conceded that the powers could be needed, but they are promising only emergency legislation to solve the problem. However, that is a deeply disorderly and shambolic response. It is not fair on the police or security services—or, ultimately, on the public—to say, as the Minister has today, that the Government cannot tell us in what circumstances the emergency legislation will be passed. When pressed, he suggested that it might be passed in the case of multiple threats or in the wake of a terrorist attack, but neither circumstance applied in the cases of CD or BM, when the Home Secretary decided that the powers to relocate were needed.
Ministers know that it is hard to predict how long primary legislation will take, even when there is an imminent threat. The Joint Committee on the emergency legislation, which the Home Secretary set up, concluded that it was a flawed response to difficult counter-terror situations. That is not the way to set a stable framework for our security services to operate, and removing powers in one Bill and promising to reinstate them in unspecified circumstances is a chaotic way to treat Parliament.
While the Government are weakening the counter-terror powers, however, they are at the same time weakening the safeguards, the checks and balances and the parliamentary oversight. Our view is that we need strong powers but also strong checks and balances, so the Government are wrong to remove the annual vote and recourse to Parliament. These powers should be treated as exceptional, not routine. If Parliament is prepared for such powers to be used, as I believe it should be, it should also be prepared and required to reflect on those exceptional powers each year, rather than waiting until 2017. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats should reflect carefully on what they have really achieved in this process, because if this emergency legislation is passed, not only will we be back where we started—round the Houses, through two new laws and back again—but we will have restored all the same security powers, but with fewer checks and balances in place than we had when we started with control orders.
Instead of amending or withdrawing the Bill in the face of these problems, the Government have tied themselves in knots because they are still in thrall to their irresponsible pre-election promises. Legislation that began as a political fudge now looks more like treacle. This is not a responsible approach to national security, and nor is it a responsible approach to Parliament. I hope that the decisions that the Home Secretary and the House are taking tonight do not prove dangerous, but on the basis of the evidence and expert advice that we have, the Opposition do not believe that it is right to take the risk. We will not be supporting the Bill on Third Reading tonight.
Public Disorder
Yvette Cooper Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
We gather today in sober circumstances, when the scenes on the streets of Britain’s cities have disturbed and appalled us all: burning buildings, looting, beatings, smashing windows, setting cars on fire, with shop owners fearful for their livelihoods and residents fearful for their very lives. City dwellers, who have been proud of regeneration and the reclamation of the streets as urban crime fell, suddenly feel afraid to walk outside their doors.
Yesterday, I talked to a woman in West Bromwich outside her shop. It is a small shop, which she staffs alone. Two of her neighbours were also small business women running their own high street shops. On Tuesday afternoon, those women were terrified by gangs who tore down that high street, throwing bricks and setting a van alight outside the sweet shop on the corner. Yesterday, they were back in their shops—they work hard—but they were afraid. The jeweller’s opposite had decided not to open at all. The security and confidence in going about their daily lives that they normally took for granted had been destroyed.
We have all been horrified by the extent of criminality—the opportunistic looting, the aggression, the greed, the lack of respect for people, property, community or the law—that we saw in those involved over a series of nights. However, we must not let that blind us to the heroism, bravery and determination of communities to support law and order and to stand against the violence and the chaos.
In particular, I want to join the Home Secretary in paying tribute to those police officers who have worked so hard to face up to the criminals and restore order. Many have been out on the streets working 17 or 18-hour days, standing up to baying mobs. Officers have come from throughout the country into cities to help, and specials and police community support officers have been doing everything they can. We should pay tribute to their bravery and to that of the fire and other emergency services.
We should also pay tribute to those in our communities who have worked hard to prevent violence from escalating: the thousands who have joined clean-up campaigns; the people who are helping the police now, reporting the neighbour who has suddenly got three new tellies; and those who are reaching out to young people to prevent them from getting drawn into criminal activity. We should recognise that millions of young people across Britain were also deeply appalled by the violence of a minority. They reject the criminal action that we have seen.
All our thoughts will also be with the family and friends of those who have died. I particularly want to send condolences, as the Home Secretary has done, to the families of the three young men in Birmingham who were killed in the early hours of yesterday morning in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood). She has told me how much those young men were loved and how devastating their loss is to their friends, families and communities. Special tribute must go to Tariq Jahan, who stood before the public, just hours after losing his son Haroon, to appeal for calm. He said:
“'Today we stand here to plead with all the youth to remain calm, for our communities to stand united.”
That was the sentiment of a man and a family in their darkest hour, which has resonated—and should—throughout the country.
It was a disgrace to see literally thousands of British citizens, many of them not yet even old enough to vote, ripping through our urban fabric, but standing against them now are not just thousands of British police officers, but millions of British people, who love their cities and towns, and who support their communities and the rule of law. That is what has been so shocking and disturbing for city dwellers over the past few nights: the fear that the rule of law, which we so often take for granted, could suddenly seem to be ripped up. Those women in West Bromwich whom I talked to yesterday need the confidence to keep their businesses open and to be able to lock up at night and walk the streets home to their families in safety. People have a right to feel safe in their homes and safe on their streets. Maintaining respect for the rule of law is a fundamental part of our democracy and why we as democrats in this House all stand to support it now. Ultimately, it is about respect for other people—for their safety and their livelihoods.
That is why we now support the Government and the Home Secretary in their work to restore order to our streets and normality to our communities. I know that the Home Secretary has been deeply worried and concerned about these events from the start. I know that she called my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) on Sunday to express her concern and that she returned to the Home Office on Monday. I commend her for doing so, and for her early grasp of the seriousness of the violence. We support her and the Prime Minister in their determination to restore order to Britain’s streets. As other Members have said, it is important that we come together in this House to condemn the criminality that we have seen. There is no excuse for the violence, destruction and theft, putting lives as well as livelihoods at risk. The perpetrators must take responsibility and face the consequences of what they have done.
The Government were right to convene Cobra, were right to recall Parliament and are right to support the police in the action that they need to take. Thankfully, last night was relatively calm, and we have seen progress being made. However, Ministers will also know that it is not sufficient to restore calm for a night or a week. Our cities cannot afford for these problems to simmer and bubble, and then to spill over again in a week or month, or when the next big public event takes place. We need a clear strategy for tackling this violence throughout the summer and beyond. That is the task for Parliament now: not just to condemn, but to debate the action that must be taken.
That means, first, support for strong action through the police and the courts, and considering the powers that the police and the courts have. More than 1,500 people have been arrested so far, and that is rising all the time. Those who committed criminal acts must face the full force of the law. The Home Secretary was right to show her support for robust police action as well. I welcome the all-night sittings of the London courts to ensure that charges can be swiftly brought. I welcome too the use of CCTV, which has played a powerful role in identifying the culprits, and the use of dispersal orders and other powers to intervene fast, rather than waiting for disorder to take hold. We also support looking further at the issues of face coverings and curfews.
However, those now in government have in the past criticised the use and the existence of many of the powers concerned, previously voting against many measures on face coverings and now, in the Protection of Freedoms Bill, making things harder for the police, including on CCTV. I particularly ask the Home Secretary to look again at her proposals to introduce considerable additional layers of new bureaucracy for the police and councils who want to introduce CCTV. I hope that she will think again. As she does so, she may also want to consider looking again at plans to ban antisocial behaviour orders.
Mr Burrowes
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. I wanted to intervene when she was being particularly measured in her response, which I welcome. Will she dissociate herself from the ill-judged comments by the former London Mayor, who sought to put the blame for what happened on the streets of London on Government actions?
Yvette Cooper
No, that is not what Ken Livingstone was saying. He has been very clear that those who have committed criminal acts need to take responsibility and to feel the full force of the law.
Let me add a word of caution to the Government briefing on water cannon and baton rounds. The perception in the newspapers has been that it was only the Prime Minister’s intervention that has made possible the use of water cannon and baton rounds, and the Home Secretary seemed to suggest something similar in her statement today. However, it is important to be clear that the police already had the power to use baton rounds or to ask police in Northern Ireland for the use of their water cannon. That is an operational matter for the police, not a political judgment for Ministers. The Home Secretary will know that the ACPO head, one of the few chief constables to have used water cannon, has made it clear today that those options are open to senior officers but would not have been useful in the particular circumstances that the police faced.
The Home Secretary has rightly backed the police when they need to be able take robust action, but I hope that she will also—as part of that backing—affirm that the police are able to make independent operational decisions based on the individual circumstances that they face and that politicians are not trying to direct the police on issues as important as the use of water cannons and baton rounds. Fundamental to the rule of law that we are now working so hard to sustain is the principle of an impartial, professional police service, involving policing by consent, and that must be preserved.
I would also caution against any consideration of the use of the Army to play a policing role. If we have enough police, we do not need the troops. They have their own important job to do.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
Does the right hon. Lady not agree that while of course the police have discretion to use water cannon and baton rounds, it is very important for our political leaders to articulate their support? We must not fall into the trap that her Government did when Ministers in the Ministry of Defence failed to give backing to troops doing very difficult jobs in very difficult circumstances. It is important that Ministers back the actions of our police.
Yvette Cooper
I simply disagree that when we were in government we failed to back our troops in difficult situations. We were very clear always to back the troops in the very difficult job that they did.
It is right to back the police and be very clear that we will support them when they have to take very difficult and robust decisions, but some of the briefings to the newspapers suggested that the police did not have the powers to use water cannon or baton rounds, and that they had them only because the Prime Minister had stepped in to authorise them and to encourage their use. This issue needs to be carefully handled. The police have always had those powers and it is right that they should use them in operational situations where that is appropriate and they judge that they are needed. We should back them in such circumstances, but I caution that we should be clear that it is an operational judgment for those police officers, not a matter of direction by politicians.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I agree with my right hon. Friend. If these horrendous events were to occur in the era of police and crime commissioners, is she confident that chief constables would have the power to make such decisions should a baying public demand different action from the commissioners? Would chief constables be able to withstand that pressure?
Yvette Cooper
Senior police officers whom I have spoken to are concerned about the possibility that their activities will be constrained or inhibited by inappropriate intervention by American-style police and crime commissioners in operational decisions. It is important to note that the operational independence guidance has not yet been agreed between the police and the Government.
Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)
The Prime Minister rightly made great play of the ability of the Metropolitan police and, for example, the Greater Manchester police to draw on officers from other forces, but it is not clear to me whether it would still be possible to move police around the country following the introduction of political commissioners. The pressures against it would be enormous.
Yvette Cooper
The Met’s ability to put 16,000 police officers on the streets of London depended partly on mutual aid. It depended on the ability to draw on officers from other parts of the country, which is a hugely important principle. It is part of our policing model, and it has been effective. However, as my hon. Friend says, we should consider whether a chief constable and a police and crime commissioner campaigning to be re-elected by the local community will put local policing before their obligations to neighbouring areas that may face greater pressures. That is another major concern that has been raised with me.
This issue raises serious questions about resources that need to be addressed. Like the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, I have asked police representatives whether they need more powers to do their job in the present circumstances. One senior officer put it very bluntly: he said that the problem in the early stages had been not a lack of powers, but a lack of cops. As the Home Secretary has confirmed, there were not enough police officers on the streets when the violence started. No one anticipated the scale of the violence that our cities would face. In some instances, the police did not step in to make arrests because they did not have enough officers out there to do so while also containing the public order problems that confronted them.
Last night, again, the Met put 16,000 officers on the streets. That is more than five times the normal likely strength in the capital, and it worked, but it came at a cost. Thousands of officers from other areas must be paid for, as must the cancelling of leave. The last couple of nights have probably cost the Met alone millions of pounds, and we need some clarity about the Government’s position. The Prime Minister said that, under Victorian legislation, the costs of riot compensation would be borne not by police budgets but by the Treasury reserve, and I welcome that announcement. However, the Prime Minister also appeared to say, in answer to a question asked by Members, that the Treasury would stand behind all the extra operational policing costs as well. I hope that that is correct, because the Home Secretary seemed to say something very different. She appeared to suggest that the pressure would sit on the reserves of the police authorities and forces involved.
I shall be happy to give way if the Home Secretary wishes to clarify the disparity between her comments and those of the Prime Minister. I hope she will agree that the costs of policing unprecedented riots and criminality must not necessitate cuts in the very neighbourhood and community police whom we need in order to prevent further criminal action.
Yvette Cooper
First I want to give the Home Secretary an opportunity to clarify the position in relation to the immediate additional operational costs that the Met and other forces will incur. [Interruption.] The Home Secretary says, from a sedentary position, that she has already clarified that. The Prime Minister may need to correct the record, because he certainly gave me the impression, and I think he gave many other Members the impression, that the Treasury would stand behind any of the additional operational costs faced by the Met and other police forces as a result of this unprecedented criminal activity. Those costs could well be considerable, because we do not know how long the police activity will need to continue. Will it continue through the weekend or into next week, and how will it be paid for? Will it have to be paid for by police budgets which are already extremely stretched and already under pressure? Will normal, routine policing be overstretched as a result of the Government’s decision not to fund these extra, additional and exceptional costs?
Keith Vaz
The Prime Minister was answering a question that I had put to him, and I was very clear that what was meant was if a police authority dipped into the contingency, the additional costs would be reimbursed to it. I think that what the Home Secretary just said in answer to me was that an authority would have to make an application for that, but she tended to support what the Prime Minister said. That was my understanding; is it also my right hon. Friend’s understanding?
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary will be immensely grateful to my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs for desperately trying to create some consistency between what the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have said. I will certainly give the Home Secretary the opportunity to confirm whether my right hon. Friend is correct and in what circumstances the police forces will be able to get additional help, because I am afraid she has not clarified that. I am sure my right hon. Friend would make an excellent Home Secretary, but I think the current Home Secretary may need to answer his questions, and mine as well. I still await the Home Secretary’s answer, but she remains silent.
Yvette Cooper
I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman on the Government Back Benches, to see whether he can provide clarity where the Home Secretary still refuses to do so.
Christopher Pincher
The right hon. Lady asks the Home Secretary to clarify a point, but may I ask her to clarify a point about her earlier comments on Ken Livingstone? On the BBC, Mr Livingstone said that the Government’s policies were creating social division, bringing conflict between the communities and the police. Does she support that point of view, or will she condemn it?
Yvette Cooper
Ken Livingstone was very clear about the need for people to take responsibility for their actions and for those involved in recent events to be punished. He was very clear about there being no excuse.
I have to say to the Home Secretary that we still do not have an answer. In the discussions I have had with the Met police, they have expressed concern that the additional cost of the extra policing required as a result of this criminality will come not from the Treasury reserve, but from their own reserve. Like the reserves of many police authorities across the country, the Met reserve is extremely stretched as a result of the police cuts. If this situation continues over many days, I am deeply concerned that the Met may end up having either to reduce the level of policing on the streets before it is ready to do so or to make cuts elsewhere in its budgets on routine policing. The Home Secretary has still not given any answer as to what she would do to support the Met police and other police forces. She really does need to think again on this and provide more information to the House, and to police forces and communities across the country about what support they will get.
Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
I must, I am afraid, take the right hon. Lady back to what other members of her party have said, and seek clarity on that. The hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) tweeted that
“the Tories are back alright. Why is it the Tories never take responsibility for the consequences of their party’s disastrous policies”,
with the hash tag “tottenham”, but the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) has said:
“Cuts don’t turn you into a thief.”
Which of them does the right hon. Lady agree with?
Yvette Cooper
I noticed the hon. Gentleman’s nerves when holding his piece of paper to read out what was clearly another Whips’ question, but I say to hon. Members that serious issues need to be addressed in this House about what the Government are doing, and what this House should be doing, to address the serious criminality that is taking place.
Let us deal with the wider problems this raises about resources for our police and the views that are being expressed to us—and, I am sure, to Members on the Government Benches in their constituencies—about the scale and pace of the policing cuts across the country. The Prime Minister claimed that he was making only 6% cuts, but he used cash figures, not real figures, when he knows that inflation is high and that the cuts set out in the spending review—according to the Treasury’s figures, not mine—were for a 20% cut in the Government’s police budget. The independent Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary report makes it clear that 16,000 police officers are going as a result—the equivalent of every one of the police officers on London’s streets last night will go.
Any of us who were on London’s streets last night will know quite how many police officers were on the streets of our capital. We have heard the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary tell us that front-line, visible policing will not be hit, but, with respect, it is being hit already. The HMIC has confirmed that front-line officers will be lost this year. The Prime Minister himself used a figure of 7,000 officers in back-office jobs, but 16,000 will be cut.
We agree that the police need to make savings and efficiencies, that they need to do more to get police officers out on to the streets and that they can sustain sensible reductions in their budgets, but the cuts set out by the Government go too far, too fast, and we do not agree that now is the time to cut 16,000 police officers across the country.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the hon. Lady, if she can tell me whether she supports cutting 16,000 police officers at a time such as this.
Miss McIntosh
I think the right hon. Lady would agree that recent events have united those of us living in the north and the south and in rural and urban areas. May I take her back to the time of the previous Government, who introduced a raft of community support officers with no power of arrest and had a load of police officers with the power of arrest filling in forms? Does she think that that was the best use of police resources at that time?
Yvette Cooper
I think it was right to increase the number of police officers and to introduce police community support officers. PCSOs have done an excellent job across the country, working with police officers and communities, and have been an important part of addressing some of the tensions, concerns and difficulties that we have faced in the past few days.
Today, the Prime Minister again ruled out reopening the police budget. I implore him to think again. The newspapers report that Ministers now have doubts, and I urge him to listen to them.
Mrs May
The right hon. Lady is making much of a point about police cuts that was made by a number of her right hon. and hon. Friends during questions to the Prime Minister. Will she clarify for us the Opposition’s policy on police cuts? Do the Opposition still support police cuts of 12%, or do they want a review of or a moratorium on that? Will she guarantee police numbers, or will she not?
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary will know, because we have had this debate in the House many times, that we believe it is important to give the police enough resources to sustain the number of police officers. We maintain that position now.
The HMIC gave its view that the police could sustain a reduction of about 12% in their budget over the course of the Parliament. The former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), also said that his assessment when he was in office was that 12% could be sustained over the course of the Parliament and that that would allow the police to sustain the police numbers that we believe are so important. Instead, the Government are cutting by 20% and the steepest cuts are in the first two years. They are cutting more in the first few years than we would have done over the course of a Parliament. That is why the police, despite making immense efficiencies and taking immense actions to deliver savings, are finding that the number of police officers is being cut. That includes some of the most experienced police officers in the country, who are being forced to take early retirement against their wishes—officers whom we need and whose experience and contributions we need now.
Yvette Cooper
I ask the hon. Members who are standing in a frenzy to listen. If they will not listen to the members of their Government who are clearly starting to have doubts, or to Opposition Members who have been saying for many months how dangerous it is to make such large cuts in the policing budget, will they at least listen to their constituents, who are deeply concerned about the decisions that they are taking and the scale of the policing cuts that the Government have announced? The public know that more officers on the streets of the capital have made them safer, and they do not want those cuts now. The Liberal Democrats have raised an interesting point: if the Government called a halt to American-style police and crime commissioners, that alone would save £100 million that could go back into policing and restoring confidence.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
Given the right hon. Lady’s great concern about the number of police officers, will she join me in congratulating Cambridgeshire constabulary? The chief constable has committed to ensuring that he has more police constables at the end of this Parliament than at the beginning, and he is already recruiting. Will she congratulate the constabulary on that, as well as on its performance over the last few days?
Yvette Cooper
The HMIC’s independent assessment of Cambridgeshire’s position is that it will lose around 80 officers over the course of the Parliament and the spending review. It will need to have a discussion with the HMIC, which has carried out a detailed assessment, not simply of what will happen in the first two years, but of the consequences over the course of the Parliament.
Yvette Cooper
I need to make progress, because hon. Members all want to make serious points. This is a time for us to have a debate about the events of the past few days, and I want to give Members across the House the opportunity to speak.
We need to look at the wider action that is essential for maintaining order, and to see why so many people became involved in rioting and criminal action. Boots on the streets are not enough to sustain safe communities for the long term; that requires all of us to do our bit to stand up for law and order. It requires parents to ask where their children are, and where that new pair of trainers has come from. It requires teachers, neighbours, classmates, friends and family, social workers, youth workers and the neighbourhood police—each one of us—to ask what we can do to stop people getting caught up in gangs or frenzies of criminal activity.
We should ask why some people had so little respect for the rule of law and for others in society, and why some people felt that they had nothing to lose by breaking the law. We should look at respect, responsibility and aspirations, but asking those questions is not about excusing individuals—quite the reverse. Nothing excuses the way people behaved. It is not about avoiding justice or appropriate punishment; those engaged in criminal acts must take personal responsibility for them, and they must feel the full force of the law. It is about preventing further crime and disorder. We will have that debate in more detail in future. I would caution against over-simplistic approaches. I agree that more should be done on parenting, but that will be harder if family intervention projects and Sure Start are cut. I agree that more needs to be done about gang culture, which has been getting worse.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
South Wales, and Wales as a whole, has been fortunate in experiencing no rioting. In fact, the devolved Administrations collectively did not have the experience that England had. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is most important to look at why forces in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland successfully held their communities together and have, in partnership with their communities, avoided the riots that England has had, despite south Wales facing £47 million of cuts over this Parliament?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point about why some areas fell victim to looting and criminality on such a scale, and others did not. A series of important questions needs to be properly addressed. The Home Secretary raised some of them—for example, the speed and nature of the police response, and the role of social media. That is why we Labour Members believe that there is a case for a special commission of inquiry that can ask the questions that a Select Committee might not be able to ask because of its departmental remit. That needs to be properly done to give those communities that have been most affected a stronger voice in this debate about what has happened and what needs to happen now.
I welcome what the Home Secretary has announced about action on gang culture. London Members have been warning for some time about the problems that it is creating and the fact that it has been increasing. Most recently, my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) did so in her Adjournment debate, and the Home Secretary will know that other Members have done so, too. The Home Secretary needs to move fast on this. In June 2010—14 months ago—an independent report by the independent inspectors commissioned by the Youth Justice Board on the rise of gang culture was published. It said that a national strategy to deal with gang culture among under-18s was urgently needed. It set out specific measures for the police, the prisons and others. That was 14 months ago.
In March, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) asked for the Government’s response, but the record in Hansard shows that the Government were still considering how to respond. Clearly, it is a concern that there have been delays in responding to the report, but we have the recommendations available now. I urge the Home Secretary to implement them urgently and to use them as the basis for further work that I hope we can support. I hope that action on gang culture is something that we can agree on across the House. Indeed, I believe that there is much that we can agree on, including action in the criminal justice system and support for the police.
There are still four areas in which we ask the Government to think again. The first is setting up a proper commission of inquiry to look at the wider problems and why the riots happened. Secondly, they must look at the immediate resource pressures faced by the Met and other forces as a result of policing the rioting and criminal activity. Thirdly, there is the wider issue of resources and the serious need to reopen the policing spending review. Fourthly, they should make it easier, not harder, for the police and councils to use CCTV, which has been so important.
I began by saying that these are sober circumstances. We have seen awful events. But we cannot just despair that nothing is to be done, and we must not. When street crime became a serious problem 10 years ago, we seemed to face an epidemic. Action was taken by the Government and police. Prevention work was done and work was undertaken through the courts. It made a difference, and street crime came down. It is possible to tackle criminality, to work together to bring crime down. That is what must happen. We have seen crime fall; we must do so again.
People I spoke to after the rioting and the violence told me not that they are ashamed of their country but that they are still proud of our communities, our towns and our cities. The shop owners to whom I spoke had posters in their windows saying “I love Sandwell”. People want to stand together to support their communities and to stand against this awful violence and crime. We now in this House must stand together with them to do so.
The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. In view of the level of interest in our debate, and after discussion through the usual channels, it is my intention at 6 o’clock not to move the Business of the House motion in the name of the Prime Minister, which would have terminated our proceedings at 7. It is my intention to move an alternative motion to enable us to continue until 8 o’clock to enable another 12 Members to take part in this debate.