Oral Answers to Questions

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

We now come to shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

As this may be the Home Secretary’s last question time, may I recognise the unseen work that she and all her predecessors have done on national security and on warrants, which often goes unrecognised? I also join the Home Secretary in paying tribute to Oliva Pratt-Korbel, Thomas O’Halloran and the other victims of devastating knife and gun crime, which has escalated this summer.

Stabbings are now 60% higher than in 2015, yet the number of violent criminals caught is at a record low.

“There is a serious problem in this country with gun crime…with gangs…with knife crime”.

Those are not my words, but those of the incoming Prime Minister, so why have successive Conservative Home Secretaries allowed it to get this bad?

[Priti Patel]

The right hon. Lady knows perfectly well the Government’s record over many years in boosting police funding—which neither she nor the Labour party supported—including the work under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which has all the right deterrents in place to go after criminals and ensure that they are given the right kinds of sentences, supports serious violence reduction units, and extends the capabilities of stop and search. Those are the very tools and tactics that the police have, and it is this Government who have supported them every single step of the way—not just by backing, equipping and empowering them to go after criminals, but by working with the criminal justice system to ensure that the right sentences are given out.

[Yvette Cooper]

But the Conservatives have cut the funding for policing and they have brought in lots of legislation that has not worked. Stabbings are up by 60%, and over 90% of violent criminals now get away with it. That is way higher than it was just seven years ago. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has said:

“Detection and charge rates for a range of crimes have fallen over the past five years. This has been impacted by austerity and the loss of thousands of police officers and staff…and…backlogs in the court system.”

That is a damning reflection on 12 years of Conservative policies on policing and crime. On her last day in the job, will the Home Secretary tell us whether she thinks that 43 police chiefs are wrong?

[Priti Patel]

It is this Government who have delivered over 13,000 additional police officers. That is 69% of the 20,000 target that we have set to meet by March 2023. Not only that, but it is our Government who have been committed from day one to reducing serious violence by putting an end to tragedies. We have invested over £130 million in tackling serious violence, including £64 million for violence reduction units. It is important to remind the House, the public and the right hon. Lady that at every single step of the way, she and her party have voted against every single law enforcement measure that this Government have brought in, including our Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. Quite frankly, I suggest—

Business without Debate

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Commons Chamber

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

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Earlier today, during my statement on the Met police, there was an exchange about the prior notification of the contents of my statement to the Opposition. On reviewing the fast-moving events of the morning, it was clear that we could have sent an updated copy to the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), which would have contained some but not all of the amendments I and others had made. In that regard, my comments were not completely accurate. For that, and the associated discourtesy, I apologise to you, to the hon. Lady and to the House, and undertake that there will be no repeat.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I thank the Policing Minister for checking the records and the emails, as I requested him to do at the end of the statement earlier, and for correcting the record. Clearly, it was not a last-minute addition, as he had said, to put so many additional deliberate political attacks into the statement. Obviously, it should not have taken my asking such forensic questions to elicit this and to elicit this apology in the first place. Given that this is such an incredibly sensitive and serious subject—the future of the Metropolitan police—and that we have had repeated examples of this, could you use your offices to urge other Departments not to add in these political statements that are not included in the statements that are given to the House? In addition, will you urge Ministers to see this as a lesson to stop playing political games with something so important?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank both right hon. Members for their points of order and their forward notice of them. Clearly, both stand on the record and I am grateful as well that the correction has been made at the earliest possible moment. As for what the right hon. Lady has said, those on the Treasury Bench will have heard her comments and will make sure they get noted and followed by all Departments.

Metropolitan Police Service

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I will give the hon. Gentleman one thing, but I understand, and this seems to be a tactic by Opposition Members, that their deflection comes with, “Oh, this is a disgrace!” I really wish that somebody had acknowledged the role of City Hall, with 145 staff and a Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. What on earth do they think they are for if it is not for this? In all honesty, if they represent Londoners and they think the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime has done its job in this case, then we are in a whole world of pain that we do not need. I realise that they are attempting all sorts of deflection, but I have to tell them that if I had been doing the job, I would not have allowed that deflection to take place, and I have to tell them that if it had been a Conservative in that job, I would have said exactly the same things.

On the hon. Gentleman asking for something concrete, I, for example, specifically changed the remit of the inspection regime away from pure process and efficiency towards crime fighting. It was the case that, until a couple of years ago, the police could get an astounding report from the inspectors while their crime performance was still poor. That is now not the case, and we are seeing these results coming through as the inspections start to land.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Minister for Crime and Policing told the House that he had only added the several paragraphs launching a political attack “at the last minute”. Those paragraphs were not included in the statement that either you or shadow Home Office Ministers were given. However, the list of questions circulated to Conservative Back Benchers, which I have here—it will have taken some time to prepare and to circulate, with input from the Home Office—repeats the same script that the Minister used in his attack. In fact, those questions include nothing on the actual failings in the Metropolitan police and nothing on the reforms that are needed to the Metropolitan police or to policing across the country, but only political attacks instead. It is not credible that these political paragraphs were only added “at the last minute”. Did the Minister give inaccurate information to the House?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her point of order. As I said previously, it is the usual courtesy for a Minister to give the Opposition an advance copy of a statement. The Minister has already apologised for adding material to the version given to the Opposition, but he may like to reflect on the point that the right hon. Lady has made—and I sense that he wishes to respond further.

[Kit Malthouse]

Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is certainly the case that the statement was moving with some fluidity over the last hour or so. I am sorry if it did not make it through in its completed terms. I did add a number of items myself at the end. It should come as no surprise that the approach in the statement was being discussed between us and the special advisers. In future, if there are late changes, I undertake that I will issue a late version of the statement that includes all of my remarks.

[Yvette Cooper]

Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. To provide reassurance to the House, will the Minister provide the email details and the internal records from his computer and from the computer on which the statement was drafted to show at what point this information was added to the statement, just so that we can be sure that the House has been given accurate information?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I think the right hon. Lady is now having an exchange with the Minister as opposed to Chair, but she has put her request on record. That is up to the Minister; it is not really a matter for me.

Oral Answers to Questions

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

New analysis today shows that in half of communities no burglaries have been solved in three years. Meanwhile, the proportion of all crimes reaching court has plummeted to 5.8%. Why is this Home Secretary letting so many more criminals off?

[Priti Patel]

Let me respond directly to the right hon. Lady. First, the reports today on burglary statistics are deeply troubling. Working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, we are effectively getting more detailed information, force by force, but I would like to remind her that burglary is down by 24%, neighbourhood crime is down by 33% and vehicle offences are down by 28%. With that, it is worth highlighting—in fact, I would like to thank—some of the outstanding Conservative police and crime commissioners such as those for Bedfordshire and for Nottinghamshire, for example, who have effectively pledged and had specific operations to target burglary within their regions.

[Yvette Cooper]

I am glad that burglaries fell in lockdown but they are now going back up, and overall crime is 18% higher and prosecutions are 18% lower on this Home Secretary’s watch. This is the first time in 25 years that any Home Secretary has presided over both such a big rise in crime and a big drop in the charge rate. So how does it feel to be responsible for the weakest Government performance on crime in a quarter of a century?

[Priti Patel]

For the education and information of the right hon. Lady, may I restate to the House that burglary is down by 24%, neighbourhood crime is down by 33% and vehicle offences are down by 28%? [Interruption.] I appreciate that she does not want to hear the facts and that she struggles with listening to facts and grappling with factual information and data. This is why the Government’s beating crime plan will go even further, so that, force by force, the Government can absolutely ensure that every single police force is held to account, which the Labour party should welcome, along with many of the resources that this Government have put into beating crime.

Migration and Economic Development Partnership with Rwanda

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

This is a shambles; it is shameful, and the Home Secretary has no one but herself to blame. This is not, and never has been, a serious policy, and she knew that when she chartered the plane. She knew that among the people she was planning to send to Rwanda on that plane were torture and trafficking victims, that she did not have a proper screening process in place and that some of them might be children. Can she confirm that the Home Office itself withdrew a whole series of those cases on Friday and yesterday because it knew that there was a problem with them, and that even without the European Court of Human Rights judgment, she was planning to send a plane with just seven people on board, because she had had to withdraw most of the cases at the last minute?

The Home Secretary knows that there is a lack of proper asylum capacity in Rwanda to make fair decisions and that as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says, Rwanda normally deals with only a few hundred cases a year and has only one eligibility officer who prepares the cases. There is also a lack of interpreters and legal advisers to ensure fair decisions. The Home Secretary promised that there would be extra payments to Rwanda for each person transferred, presumably to pay for the extra caseworkers and support, but she has refused to tell us how much. What is she hiding? Will she tell us now how much she promised Rwanda for each of the people she was planning to send yesterday, and how many Rwandan refugees she promised to take in return?

The Home Secretary knows that serious concerns have been raised about Rwandan restrictions on political freedom, the treatment of LGBT people, the fact that 12 refugees were shot by the authorities in 2018 for protesting against food cuts, and the fact that Afghan and Syrian asylum seekers have been returned by Rwanda. She knows that none of those concerns has been addressed.

The Home Secretary also knows that the policy will not work. We need action to tackle dangerous criminal gangs who are putting lives at risk, and she knows that her policies will not achieve that. That is not their objective. If it was, she would not have asked the National Crime Agency, whose job it is to target the criminal gangs, to draw up 20% staff cuts—that is potentially 1,000 people being cut from the organisation that works to tackle the gangs. Can she confirm whether she has asked the NCA to draw up plans for staff cuts?

If the Home Secretary was serious, she would be taking seriously the fact that the Israel-Rwanda deal ended up increasing criminal people trafficking and smuggling and that her plan risks making things worse. If she was serious, she would be working night and day to get a better joint plan with France to crack down on the gangs and to stop the boats being put into the water in the first place, but she is not, because her relationship with French Ministers has totally broken down.

If the Home Secretary was serious about tackling illegal economic migration or cutting the bills from people in hotels, she would speed up Home Office decision making so that refugees can get support and those who are not can be returned home. Instead, the number of decisions has totally collapsed from 28,000 to just 14,000 a year—fewer than Belgium and the Netherlands, never mind Germany and France. She is so badly failing to take those basic decisions that she is trying to pay a country thousands of miles away to take them for us instead. How shameful does that make us look around the world if our Home Office cannot take those basic decisions?

The Home Secretary knew about problem after problem with her policy. She knew that it was unworkable and unethical and that it will not stop the criminal gangs, but she still went ahead and spent half a million pounds chartering a plane that she never expected to fly, and she still wrote a £120 million cheque to Rwanda with a promise of more to come, because all she really cares about is picking fights and finding someone else to blame.

This is not a long-term plan; it is a short-term stunt. Everyone can see that it is not serious policy; it is shameless posturing and the Home Secretary knows it. It is not building consensus; it is just pursuing division. It is government by gimmick. It is not in the public interest; it is just in the Government’s political interest, and along the way they are prepared to trash people’s lives, our basic British values of fairness, decency and common sense, and the reputation of our nation.

Our country is better than this. We have a long tradition of hard work and stepping up to tackle problems—not offloading them—to tackle the criminal gangs who put lives at risk, and to do right by refugees. That is what the Home Secretary should be doing now, not this shambles that is putting our country to shame.

[Priti Patel]

I always look forward to these exchanges in the House, primarily because—[Interruption.] Perhaps hon. Members would like to listen.

As a point of education for the right hon. Lady, we are not the only country in the world to be adopting this approach. She may be aware that it is an approach that the EU has adopted through its transfer mechanism to Rwanda. Denmark is also in the process of looking at it.

The right hon. Lady raises a number of points that are factually incorrect. [Interruption.] I will come to the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East shortly. The purpose of the work that we are doing is to absolutely break the business model of the people smugglers. It is a shame that Opposition Members run down the National Crime Agency.

Asylum Seekers: Removal to Rwanda

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Home Office chaos over the last few days has shown why this scheme is completely unworkable, deeply unethical and extortionately expensive, and why it risks increasing criminal people trafficking and smuggling rather than solving the problem.

Let us look at what has emerged in the past few days. The Home Office has admitted it has been trying to send victims of torture to Rwanda; is the Minister happy with that shameful policy? We have learned that Rwanda does not have the capacity, caseworkers, translators or lawyers to deal with cases; it often only has one official in charge of putting cases together. The Home Office has ignored UNHCR warnings on Rwanda’s record, including the shooting dead of 12 refugees. We have learned, too, that costs are shooting up as the UK taxpayer will have to fund ever more support in Rwanda; can the Minister tell us if that has been agreed and whether we have a final figure on top of the £120 million? The chief inspector says there has been no impact on deterrence on boats and gangs, and there is evidence instead that the Rwanda and Israel refugee relocation deal led to more trafficking and smuggling, not less.

The Home Office is failing to do the practical things we need: instead of strengthening the National Crime Agency work with France to crack down on criminal gangs, the Home Office has asked the agency to draw up plans for 20% cuts. Can the Minister confirm that that is the case? Instead of speeding up asylum decisions, it is only making half as many decisions as five years ago and, because it is failing to take decisions, offloading responsibility.

There is lots of noise from the Minister: never taking responsibility, blaming everyone else. This plan is not just unworkable, unethical and expensive; it is also profoundly un-British, ignoring our British values of decency and common sense. It is time to think again.

[Tom Pursglove]

I have to say that I think it would be helpful if the shadow Home Secretary were to think in the first place, because we have not had a credible Opposition policy to tackle this issue. I have said many times that I would be delighted to hear a credible policy from those on the Benches opposite, and I think the British people deserve to hear such a policy, but I think we will be waiting for a long time to get that, if at all.

The right hon. Lady raised a number of points. First, she claimed the policy is both unworkable and extortionate; it is difficult to comprehend it being possible for it to be both of those things at once. [Interruption.] Well, I am convinced that this policy is going to work and will make a difference, shutting down the evil criminal gangs that take people’s money, put their lives at risk and have no regard for whether they get here, while also providing resettlement opportunities that are properly supported—support around skills, around jobs, around opportunity—in Rwanda.

Our approach to this is a world first. This is not comparable to the sorts of proposals perhaps developed elsewhere; it is a different approach. The right hon. Lady will also recognise that other countries are looking at similar arrangements.

I repeat that we will live up to our international obligations under both the refugee convention and the ECHR at all times. The fact is that the UNHCR places refugees in Rwanda, so I again make the point that it clearly believes people will be properly supported and cared for and that they will be safe. I think that judgment is significant in all this.

On cost, as we have clearly set out to the House previously, we will be supporting ongoing running costs around this policy that are equivalent to the sums we spend on processing cases in the asylum system here in the UK.

On French co-operation, we of course already do that, but there is no one single solution that will resolve this issue of itself. We want to go further; we want to deepen that co-operation with our friends and neighbours to tackle this issue as it is a global problem that needs global solutions, and through the new partnership we are of course taking that co-operation further.

Finally, I will again just pose this question and ponder it for a moment: we have asked before whether the Opposition would cancel the Rwanda plan in the unfortunate event that they were in government. We have not yet heard an answer to that; perhaps at some point today we might have one.

National Security Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Labour Opposition support the Second Reading of the Bill, and we support measures to protect the United Kingdom’s national security against threats from foreign powers, from hostile states and from terrorists and extremists. Defending our national security is the most important task of any Government, as the Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) has made clear, in keeping our citizens safe, defending our historic freedoms and way of life, standing up for our values against those who seek to undermine us, and defending our security and prosperity as a nation from hostile countries who seek to attack our infrastructure, steal our assets or pit us each against one another to undermine our cohesion. There should be no party disagreement on that core principle. That is why we are clear that we will work with the Government on our national security and work constructively on scrutinising the Bill and getting the detail of the legislation right. Defending our national security would be at the very heart of a Labour Government, just as it was for Labour Governments past.

I pay tribute to those who work in our intelligence and security services, whose work is so often unseen. They work so hard to defend our liberty and democracy from threats from all sides and do so much to keep us safe. Our democracy will stay strong only if we can defend it from threats.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the right hon. Lady for referring to those who keep us safe. Coming from Northern Ireland as I do, it is important to put on the record our thanks to the security forces, to MI5 and to all those who kept us safe over all those years, including me and my family. It is important that we recognise that in the House, and I know that she would like to be associated with that.

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. The work done by those across our intelligence and security agencies often goes unseen and unremarked on, and, as a result, it is often unappreciated, but both sides of the House are clear about the debt of gratitude that we owe to many of those who work so hard to keep us safe.

In these debates, people often end up pitting liberty and security against each other or arguing, for example, that action to defend security constrains our liberty, that historic freedoms should be abandoned in the interests of security and that, somehow, they are in conflict. The truth is that, as we all know, both liberty and security are vital in a democracy, and they depend on each other. We need to feel secure to have the freedom to get on with our daily lives, and security measures also need to take account of the importance of the very freedoms that it is their purpose to defend. Our intelligence and security agencies also depend on public trust and, rightly, need always to be located within a strong legal framework with strong oversight. Where strong powers are needed to defend our national security, they need to be matched by strong oversight, with checks and balances to ensure that powers are proportionate and necessary, and never abused.

[Sir John Hayes]

As ever on these matters, the right hon. Lady is making a compelling speech. Given what she has said about the apparent paradox between freedom and order, will she join me in condemning those who in breaching secrets and leaking information, claim to do so in the name of liberty but actually act in a way that is injurious to order and therefore to freedom?

[Yvette Cooper]

I say clearly that our national security needs to be taken seriously by everybody. It should not be lightly dismissed that without it we do not have strong freedoms and liberties. The people of Salisbury had a right to the freedom to be able to walk safely on their streets and not to find their lives put at risk by a dangerous chemical attack by members of a foreign intelligence service that ultimately took a British life; patients throughout the country have a right to know that their medical records are not being hacked or interfered with by a foreign state; and our businesses, scientists and researchers, on whom our future prosperity depends, have a right to feel safe from foreign attacks that undermine the resilience of our infrastructure or from the theft of trade secrets.

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Lady condemn the WikiLeaks-type mass dumping of information in the public domain? It is hugely irresponsible and can put lives at risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

Yes, I strongly do, because some of the examples of such leaks that we have seen put agents’ lives at risk, put vital parts of our national security and intelligence infrastructure at risk and are highly irresponsible. We need safeguards to protect against that kind of damaging impact on our national security.

[Joanna Cherry]

Notwithstanding what the right hon. Lady just said, would she and her party support a narrowly and carefully drawn public interest defence, such as those that our Five Eyes allies New Zealand, Australia and Canada have, to protect civilians and journalists who make disclosures that are properly in the public interest?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. and learned Lady makes a really important point. In its consideration of these issues, the Law Commission made proposals on not only strengthening some of the measures in the Official Secrets Act 1989 but how to have proper safeguards to protect whistleblowers and the public interest. I recognise that there are complex issues in respect of how to draw up the legislation and shall make further points about that.

We have just spent the past four days celebrating our Queen’s historic platinum jubilee and celebrating our shared values and traditions, which are what we defend when we defend our national security. At a time when we have seen an illegal invasion of a fellow European democracy by Russia—an act that threatens and that has attacked and undermined the national security of a fellow European nation—there could be no greater reminder to us all of the need to be resilient and vigilant in the face of threats.

The threats to our national security, democratic values and way of life have inevitably evolved over the decades. The ending of the cold war in the 1990s and the major international terror attacks, particularly by Islamist extremists from al-Qaeda and then from ISIS, alongside growing domestic far-right terror threats, have meant that the national security focus—the top priority of our intelligence and security agencies—has for several decades been on terrorist threats to our way of life but, as the Government’s integrated review made clear, the threats from hostile states have not gone away and in recent years we have seen them grow and become more complex.

As the Government concluded in 2018, the attempt on the lives of Sergei Skripal and his daughter was, in the words of the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May),

“almost certainly…approved”

both by the GRU and

“at a senior level of the Russian state.”—[Official Report, 5 September 2018; Vol. 646, c. 168.]

We face different threats from other countries, too. MI5 recently warned publicly about the activities of an individual knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist party. The MI5 director general Ken McCallum has warned that

“the activity MI5 encounters day-by-day predominantly comes, in quite varying ways, from state or state-backed organisations in Russia, China and Iran.”

Alongside persistent hard power methods of attack, the advent of technology has also allowed soft power methods to flourish, with electoral interference, disinformation, propaganda, cyber operations and intellectual property theft used to foster instability and interfere in the strength and resilience of the state. The Home Secretary referred to the SolarWinds attack and the interference with major UK energy companies. As the Law Commission warned in its report, the Official Secrets Acts between 1911 and 1939 were enacted long before the digital age and include references to

“a sketch, plan, model, note”—

the pencil notings that are a far cry from the cyber and online data interventions that modern espionage might involve.

The words of the MI5 director general are perhaps startling, when he said:

“Today, it is not a criminal offence to be an undeclared foreign intelligence agent in the UK. Likewise, it is not currently illegal to be in a key position of influence in the UK and be secretly in the pay of a foreign state. That can’t be right. To tackle modern interference, we need modern powers.”

He is right, and we agree. That is why reforms and legislation are needed to address the new threats from hostile states. That is why many of the measures in the legislation are important, for example making it possible to take action against those who are operating in the pay of a foreign intelligence agency to do Britain harm; to make it possible to defend the trade secrets of British businesses, including taking action against those who may be paid by foreign intelligence agencies or a state to leak intellectual property or trade secrets that are then used to undermine our industry and our economy; to make it possible to have stronger action against incredibly damaging cyber attacks on our critical infrastructure; and to enable early intervention to prevent damaging attacks, not just to prosecute once the damage is done.

We have questions that we want to put, points that we want to probe and amendments that we will draft because we want to work constructively with the Government to get the legislation right. I shall make some of those points now and I look forward to further discussion with the Home Secretary and the security Minister during the passage of the Bill. The first gaping hole that we see is the promised foreign agents registration scheme that the Home Secretary has said she will bring forward. We had understood that this would be the central part and purpose of the Bill, but it is currently missing. I do recognise that drafting in those areas is complex, and we need to learn from what other countries have done, but that also makes it the more important to have proper scrutiny. I urge the Home Secretary to ensure that the scheme is not brought forward at the last minute so that we do not have time to give it proper consideration in Committee or to take evidence on it beforehand.

[Mr Steve Baker]

The right hon. Lady makes an important point about the foreign agents registration scheme. Will she join me in encouraging my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to consider possibly amending the programme motion so that we can have a day in Committee of the whole House to consider it? It will be a large part of the Bill and doing it through amendments in Committee may be inappropriate.

[Yvette Cooper]

I would certainly be happy to have further discussions through the usual channels about the way in which the Bill needs to be scrutinised. In the early evidence stage of the scrutiny, particularly for a Bill like this, it is important for the Committee to be able to hear evidence on this issue, in order to make sure that we get it right.

[Sir John Hayes]

With all due regard to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), a much better approach would be exactly as the right hon. Lady describes—to have the proposal early in the Committee’s consideration and for the proper interface to operate between the two Front Benches. I know that she is richly experienced in these subjects, as is the Home Secretary, and I am sure that a proper dialogue could take place to deal with the matter that has been raised.

[Yvette Cooper]

As I have said, these debates will rightly take place through the usual channels to ensure that we have that scrutiny. I am also keen to ensure that the evidence session can take place in plenty of time.



Another issue that Members on both sides of the House have raised is the absence of reforms to the Official Secrets Act 1989, and on that point I am slightly less clear what the Government’s intention is. My understanding from what the Home Secretary has said is that she does not plan to bring forward measures in this Bill but that she is looking at the issue further. The Law Commission has raised important issues about the need to improve prosecutions in certain areas and to have public interest safeguards, both of which are immensely important, as I think the Home Secretary has recognised. Will she and the Security Minister therefore engage at an early stage in discussions on this issue with Members on both sides of the House?

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Like my right hon. Friend, I am not clear what the Home Secretary’s timetable is for reviewing the 1989 Act. However, if the Bill goes through as outlined, some of the penalties in it will be life imprisonment, and some in the 1989 Act will be two years. Having the two Acts working together will create a very difficult process. Surely the obvious thing to do is to get the reforms into the Bill as it goes through Parliament.

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point, and he obviously speaks with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s insight on this issue. The only other consideration I would raise is that a last-minute proposal from the Government would be a problem, because we would end up not having full scrutiny, and this is an area where it is important to get the legislation right. On the points that the Committee has made about the importance of reforms to the 1989 Act, I encourage the Security Minister and the Home Secretary to have early discussions with members of the Committee, Opposition Front Benchers and Members on both sides of the House who have concerns. We will inevitably need to debate these issues during the passage of the Bill, even if the Government want to propose future legislation on a different timetable. Having those discussions at an early stage to try to get this right would be important.

We are also concerned about areas of the Bill relating to the ability of foreign powers to use misinformation and disinformation online, which the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) mentioned. My understanding of the interaction between this Bill and the Online Safety Bill is that some cases where misinformation or disinformation is repeatedly put online by a foreign state will not be covered and that there will not be a responsibility on social media platforms to remove some of that material, but it would be helpful to have some clarification from Ministers. Obviously that is an area where most of us in the House would want further action to be taken and would want there to be more responsibility on social media companies to take action. We would therefore like to explore whether there are further amendments that we could bring forward to this Bill or the Online Safety Bill. That would be very helpful.

We are also concerned about direct attempts to interfere with our democracy and elections. The Home Secretary has rightly included in the Bill measures to tackle foreign interference in elections but, as the Government will know, offences make little odds if they cannot be detected or measures are rarely enforced. As the Home Secretary will know, we have urged the Government to remove the loophole that allows shell companies to be used to make donations to political parties and to hide foreign donations and donations linked to hostile states. She will also know that the former director general of MI5, Lord Evans, who is now the head of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, has warned about the risks from shell companies, describing the risk from

“powerful forces out there that are trying to bring undue influence, part through parliament and part through money. We made some recommendations to close some of those loopholes but government hasn’t acted on them.”

Since the atrocity that is the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Government have had to recognise that it has been far too easy for Russian money, built up through illegal activity or state-sponsored corruption, to find its way into the London economy. Again, we have both the follow-up economic crime Bill and this Bill, but I urge the Home Secretary to ensure that the loophole on shell companies is closed and that those weaknesses in our democracy are addressed, because the loophole in itself is a threat to national security.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) raised concerns about MPs being targeted. There are also concerns about Ministers potentially being targeted. The Home Secretary will know that the shadow Security Minister has raised questions about reports that the Prime Minister, when he was Foreign Secretary, met with a former KGB agent soon after the Skripal attack. I have not heard concerns raised that that was a planned or intended meeting, but nevertheless the reports of the meeting show how easy it is for Ministers, as well as MPs, to be targeted by agents of foreign and hostile states. I urge Ministers to provide some clarity about that meeting—whether it took place, whether civil servants were present—and about what protocols should govern how meetings take place for Ministers, what kind of debrief should happen afterwards and what kind of safeguards should be in place, and whether those will be covered by this Bill or we need additional protocols for civil servants, MPs and Ministers.

There are some areas where we will want to question the drafting of the Bill, because it is very broad. For example, there is obviously a difference between someone who is meeting the foreign intelligence agencies of our closest allies—for example an academic who meets with an Australian foreign intelligence service, providing it with useful information that might help with our joint Five Eyes security arrangements and might be in all our interests—and an academic meeting with someone from the Chinese intelligence agencies and handing over intellectual property or research information that undermines British industry.

We are keen to explore in Committee how those differences will be addressed in the Bill and how, for example, it will address some of the issues around co-operation with Ireland over Northern Ireland security issues, which will clearly raise some particular and special cases. We also want to explore what might incidentally benefit a foreign Government and what deliberately benefiting a foreign Government is, and how that is addressed. We also want to address some of the questions around the public interest and national security that hon. Members have raised.

We have already raised directly with the Minister for Security and Borders a series of questions and concerns about the drafting of clause 23, to ensure that it is not too wide and cannot be used to cover individuals committing serious crimes abroad. I welcome the letter we have received from him, but we want to pursue those issues in further detail in Committee.

Perhaps one of the most important issues that the Bill could easily address but does not yet is oversight. Because agencies rightly need to operate behind a veil of secrecy, there needs to be proper oversight to safeguard both those who work within the agencies and the national interest. The Bill rightly introduces an independent reviewer to look at the state threats prevention and investigation measures, and we know that is a parallel arrangement to the independent reviewer arrangements we have for terrorism prevention and investigation measures.

The Home Secretary will know that I have argued previously that it was wrong to replace control orders and that TPIMs were too weak. They have since rightly been strengthened. They are used in only a small number of cases, but it is immensely important that there is oversight of them, and there must be proper oversight of the STPIMs as well. It would not surprise me if they were used even less frequently than TPIMs, but there must be proper safeguards.

There is a gap in the oversight framework. The terrorism independent reviewer looks both at individual TPIMs and at terrorism legislation, so he can look at all of the aspects of terrorism legislation to see where there are gaps and whether it is not working effectively. The scrutiny by David Anderson and by Jonathan Hall has been invaluable. It has been good for Government, good for the agencies, good for Parliament, good for our national security and good for our historic freedoms and having the right safeguards in place.

That scrutiny by the independent reviewer has in the past identified weaknesses in terrorism legislation. Sometimes that has been exactly the point I raised about TPIMs becoming too weak and needing to be strengthened, but the independent reviewer has also identified areas where stronger safeguards were needed, particularly on digital measures, digital infrastructure and digital safeguards. There is a really strong case for having the same kind of independent scrutiny of the operation of these new powers on espionage. The Home Secretary has rightly said that this is important legislation, but also that this is the first time we are drawing up legislation in some of these areas and that some of the legislation has not been updated for many decades, so we should have some humility on this: Parliament will not get all the details right.

[Bob Seely]

If I understand correctly—perhaps my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) will be able to help me on this—the Ministry of Defence is covered by the Defence Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the agencies and the Intelligence and Security Committee, but who covers Director Special Forces? That seems to be a bit of an oversight black hole. Where does it fit in? This does not seem to be arousing people’s attention thus far.

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member makes an important point about other potential gaps. I would be keen to discuss with him further how that could be addressed.

There is a principle here, which is that sometimes important powers are not subject to the normal public scrutiny—inevitably, because of how they need to be used in order to keep us safe and to deal with hostile threats, be it from other foreign states or from terrorists. However, that veil of secrecy makes the need for independent scrutiny all the more important. Rightly, we have the Intelligence and Security Committee and other Committees, but also things like the investigatory powers commissioners. Specifically on the terrorism legislation, the role of the independent reviewer has been immensely valuable. I urge the Home Secretary and the Security Minister to look at widening the oversight provisions in the Bill. While there might be areas of disagreement between us, we will come to a conclusion and measures will pass through Parliament, but there will still be weaknesses in them and there will still be problems with the legislation.

[Sir John Hayes]

The right hon. Lady is making a good point about oversight and checks and balances. She mentioned the Investigatory Powers Act and the judicial commissioners. I was involved in taking that legislation through the House, as she knows. The independent reviewer’s scope is already sufficiently wide, is it not, to look at terrorism legislation per se? So I assume that she is talking about making sure that that scope is sufficient rather than establishing a different and parallel structure.

[Yvette Cooper]

There is a very strong case for having the same independent commissioner to cover espionage and terrorism. That is obviously a matter that the Home Secretary would need to consider, but clearly, especially with the STPIMs and the TPIMs, there are overlapping issues that it would make sense for the same framework and the same independent reviewer to cover. My understanding is that at the moment the independent reviewer covers only terrorism legislation and that the provisions of this Bill will not be within their scope. It would be very easy to amend the Bill—I hope it would receive cross-party support—to allow either the same independent reviewer or a parallel independent reviewer to look at espionage legislation. That would also allow for ongoing review of whatever changes we end up concluding are needed to the Official Secrets Act 1989. Again, there will be an important need for further review to make sure that we have the right measures to protect our security and support the public interest. We can cover our many other issues with the Bill in Committee. We look forward to those exchanges and to having further discussions directly with Ministers.

I am conscious that other Members with great expertise in this area want to contribute to the debate, so I will conclude simply by saying that at a time when across Europe we are all coping with the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and supporting Ukraine’s immense bravery in standing up and responding to this appalling Russian threat; at a time when we have seen hostile state activity not just from Russia but, as the director general of MI5 has said, from countries such as China and Iran; and at a time when we all know we need to stand up for our democracy, historic freedoms, liberties and democratic values, I hope that we will be able to come together to support our national security, and continue to defend our democracy and democratic values.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Dr Julian Lewis.

Public Order Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Priti Patel)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

From day one, this Government have put the safety and the interests of the law-abiding majority first. We have put 13,500 more police on the streets, and we are on track to reach nearly 20,000 new police officers by March next year.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Will the Home Secretary give way—already?

[Priti Patel]

I think I will make some progress, if that is okay.

This Conservative Government understand that if we are to cut crime, level up the country and make sure that people feel safe in their homes, on public transport and on the street, we need to back our police officers by giving them the powers and the tools they need to fight crime and protect the public. That was one of the main purposes of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which Opposition Members voted against. It also requires proper investment, which is why we are funding the police to the tune of almost £17 billion this year. We are helping the police to tackle violence against women and girls through major investment in safer streets measures—closed circuit television and more street lighting—and initiatives across the country. Earlier this month, I announced that I am strengthening stop-and-search powers, because stop and search is vital to get knives and weapons off our streets and save lives. Each weapon removed from our streets is a potential life saved. More than 50,000 weapons have been seized since 2019 already. I have also authorised special constables to carry and use Tasers.

The police service is not just an institution, but a collection of professional and dedicated people. They are extremely brave, as are their families. The introduction of the police covenant ensures that we will do right by officers and their loved ones, who do so much to support them.

Recently, we have seen a rise in criminal, disruptive and self-defeating tactics from a supremely selfish minority. Their actions divert police resources away from the communities where they are needed most to prevent serious violence and neighbourhood crime. We are seeing parts of the country grind to a halt. Transport networks have been stopped, printing presses blocked and fuel supplies disrupted. People have been unable to get to work and go about their lives free from harassment. Shamefully, they have even been prevented from getting to hospital. This is reprehensible behaviour and I will not tolerate it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Public Order Bill because, notwithstanding the importance of safeguarding vital national infrastructure alongside the right to protest peacefully, the Bill does not include provisions for cooperation between police, public and private authorities to prevent serious disruption to essential services, includes instead measures that replicate existing powers, includes powers that are too widely drawn and which erode historic freedoms of peaceful protest, ignores the need for effective use of existing powers and does not recognise emergency NHS services as vital national infrastructure.

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

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

Do you know what, Madam Deputy Speaker? I actually will. I was deeply disappointed that once again the Home Secretary, sadly, would not take an intervention from me. It was deeply disappointing to note how frit she seemed to be of any of the questions that I tried to raise, which, once again, would have been extremely factual. I will give therefore way to the hon. Gentleman, if he can explain why crime has gone up and prosecutions have gone down since he became Policing Minister.

[Kit Malthouse]

When Labour Front Benchers called for “an immediate nationwide ban” on Just Stop Oil, did they have the support of their own Back Benchers? If not, is that why the right hon. Lady has performed the most enormous reverse ferret in the amendment that she has put before the House?

[Yvette Cooper]

I think that there is a strong case for using injunctions to deal with the kind of disruption that we saw from Just Stop Oil, but that is not dealt with at all in the Bill, which is part of the problem with it. It does not address a great many of the problems about which the Home Secretary is supposedly concerned; instead, it will cause alternative huge and serious problems. Most significantly, it fails to deal with some of the very serious issues about which the Home Secretary should be most concerned at this moment.

This is the first of the Government’s Queen’s Speech Bills of the Session. This is the Bill to which they have chosen to give pride of place, and what does it contain? There is no action to deal with the cost of living, although inflation is hitting its highest level for decades and millions of people are going without food to get by; nor is there any action to deal with the crisis facing victims of crime. There is no victims Bill, even though 1.3 million victims of crime who have lost confidence in the criminal justice system dropped out last year, and even though crime is rising and prosecutions are falling.

Instead, what we have are rehashed measures from last year’s Bill. We have a second round of measures on public order, even though the Government had plenty of time to work out what they wanted to do in last year’s Bill; even though the Home Secretary claimed that that Bill would solve all these problems—she said then that it would

“tackle dangerous and disruptive protests”;

even though the Government have not even implemented the measures from last year’s Bill, or assessed them to see what impact they are having before coming back for more, as any sensible Government would do; even though, for seven years running, the Home Secretary and her party have been promising a victims Bill; and even though, over those seven years, support for victims has become staggeringly worse. The number of victims dropping out because they have lost confidence has doubled since that victims Bill was first promised. That is more victims being let down and more criminals being let off.

[Dr Caroline Johnson]

The right hon. Lady has made an assertion that the Bill does nothing to help victims or to reduce crime, but does she accept that the prevention of disruptive protests will save a lot of money in the policing budget that can be redirected into preventing crime and helping victims?

[Yvette Cooper]

No, I do not. I will come on to that point later, because both HMRC and, astonishingly, the Home Office itself have said that those kinds of disruption orders are in fact unworkable.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

In addition to what the right hon. Lady has just said, does she agree that the terrible statistics on rape convictions are exactly the reason that rape victims do not come forward, and that the Government should have done a lot more on this?

[Yvette Cooper]

The rape prosecution rate is one of the most shocking figures of all. For only 1.3% of reported rapes to be going to prosecution is totally shameful. The Government had the opportunity to do something about this. Right now in this House, we could have been debating proposals to provide more support for rape victims and to bring in stronger measures to ensure that police forces took action and had specialist rape investigation units in every force, not just in some, yet the Government have chosen not to do that.

[Janet Daby]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that protests are noisy, and that in this Chamber we are also noisy when we are protesting or disagreeing during a debate? When the Prime Minister enters the Chamber, Government Members cheer as though they were at a football match—

[Janet Daby]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government need to recognise that noise has a way of releasing tension so that people can get their point across and be heard and recognised?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is certainly right to suggest that it is an unwise Government who try to silence those who disagree with them; it is also an undemocratic Government who seek to do so.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

I will in due course.

The Home Secretary said to us this afternoon:

“From day one, this Government have put the safety and the interests of the law-abiding majority first.”

She claimed that she was prosecuting more criminals, but the opposite is the case. Since she came to office in 2019, crime has gone up by 18% and prosecutions have gone down by 18%, so I have to ask her what planet she is living on. Just because she says things stridently, that does not make them true. When she wonders about being on the side of criminals, maybe she should remember that it is a Conservative Government, and a Conservative Home Secretary, who are literally letting more criminals off—literally. There are hundreds of thousands’ fewer prosecutions every single year than there were under the Labour Government. Prosecutions, cautions and community penalties are going down, even now when crime is going up, and that genuinely means that rapists, abusers, serious offenders, thieves and thugs are all less likely to be prosecuted than they were seven years ago. There is just a one in 20 chance of someone being prosecuted on this Home Secretary’s watch.

The Home Secretary said too that she would not “stand by” while antisocial behaviour caused misery for others, but she is. There are 7,000 fewer neighbourhood police than there were six years ago, and the police are failing to send officers to more than half of all reported antisocial behaviour offences. People and communities across the country are expressing serious concerns about antisocial behaviour being ignored time and again by this Home Secretary.

[Jonathan Gullis]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way first to the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), and then to the hon. Gentleman in due course.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I cannot see what these general points about the record of individual Ministers have to do with the substance of the Bill. What does have to do with the substance of the Bill is the difference between the right to protest peacefully within the rules and the right to insist on repeatedly bellowing a message—on and on and on—irrespective of the fact that other people have heard it and now want to exercise their right to go about their normal life. If I had insisted on intervening on the right hon. Lady when she was not allowing me to do so, that would be the parallel with the sort of abuse these measures are designed to stamp out. I obey the rules, and so should protesters.

[Yvette Cooper]

I do not think this is about bellowing; I think this is about serious offences and the committing of crimes.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I have been listening to the right hon. Lady, but I would appreciate some clarity. Does she condemn the behaviour and actions of Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil?

[Yvette Cooper]

I was going to come on to exactly that, because Insulate Britain’s motorway protests were hugely irresponsible and, frankly, dangerous. They put lives at risk, which is why the Department for Transport was absolutely right to put an injunction in place and why the police were right to take prosecution action. Nobody has a right to put other people’s lives at risk with dangerous protests.

What is the Home Secretary offering today? She offers a Bill that targets peaceful protesters and passers-by but fails to safeguard key infrastructure and does nothing to tackle violence against women, nothing to support victims of crime and nothing to increase prosecution rates or to cut crime. This Bill fails on all counts. It will not make our national infrastructure more resilient, and it will not make it easier to prevent serious disruption by a minority of protesters. Instead, it will target peaceful protesters and passers-by who are not disrupting anything or anyone at all.

There should be shared principles throughout the House on this issue. All of us, whatever our party and whatever our political views, should believe that, in a democracy, people need the freedom to speak out against authority and to make their views heard. Yes, that includes bellowing if they feel so strongly about an issue.

We have historic freedoms and rights to speak out, to gather and to protest against the things that Governments or organisations, public or private, do that we disagree with. That goes for protesters with whom we strongly disagree as well as for protesters whose views and values we support, because that is what democracy is all about. But we should also share the view that no one has the right, no matter what they may think they are protesting about, to threaten, to harass or to intimidate others. No one has the right to protest in ways that are dangerous or risk the safety or the lives of others. Nor should they be able to cause serious disruption to essential services and vital infrastructure on which all of us in society depend.

That is why Labour has long defended the rights to speak out, to protest, to be heard and to argue for change, and it is why we called for greater protection for women and staff from intimidatory protests outside abortion clinics. It is why we called for greater protection from harassment and threats outside schools and vaccine clinics after the threatening antivax protests. It is why we made common-sense proposals to give local authorities the powers to act which the Government initially voted against. It is why we condemned the highly irresponsible protests on motorways because, whatever we think about the cause pursued by Insulate Britain or any other organisation, no one should put lives at risk like that, which is why we supported stronger sentences for those wilfully obstructing major roads. It is also why we criticised those involved in Just Stop Oil for causing serious damage and trying to disrupt supplies to petrol stations, which could have stopped people getting to work or pushed up prices in the middle of a cost of living crisis. Those protests were not just against the law, but counterproductive; at a time when they should have been trying to persuade people, they alienated people instead. That is why we called for national action to ensure that speedy injunctions were in place to prevent serious disruption.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Yvette Cooper]

I will first give way to the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller), next to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and then come back to the right hon. Member for New Forest East.

[Richard Fuller]

I was following the right hon. Lady’s argument until this last piece, where she outlined a series of cases—political issues—that the Labour party is against. I am just wondering why and how she differentiates that from the proposals in the Bill, which seem to provide the basis for her to make those moves directly.

[Yvette Cooper]

That is exactly the point that I am about to make, because the Bill does not address any of those points. All those cases are areas where there are existing offences, but there are and have been problems with enforcement. The Bill does not tackle that issue or solve the problem. Instead, in a whole series of areas, it makes the problem worse.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend will correct me if I am wrong, but if I have got it right, this Bill will criminalise those who are protesting against major transport infrastructure projects, so I want to stand up for the right of one of my colleagues —in fact, my neighbouring MP: the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson)—who has committed himself to lying down in front of the bulldozer if there is an expansion of Heathrow airport and a third runway. I would not want to see him locked up—well, not for this anyway.

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point: people across the country want to be able to protest against big new projects that are planned for their area, such as major transport projects, or plans to turn a woodland into a car park or to close a library. That is why it is important to ensure that we have our historic freedoms to protest and people’s voices can be heard, and that we have the right to be protected from intimidation and harassment and we fulfil our responsibilities to keep essential services running. There should be a shared understanding across the House that there are rights to be balanced and important principles that should be respected on both sides of the House—for example, the principle that respects the historic freedom to protest, but also ensures that our essential services keep running.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving me a second bite of the cherry. I fear I have to confess that I am possibly the only Member here today who was actually arrested once—for taking part in a counter-demonstration 40 years ago, when we played the national anthem in public against a group of protesters against the Falklands taskforce, which was embarking to the south Atlantic.

The point that I am trying to get over to the right hon. Lady with the use of the words “bellowing” or indeed “incessant bellowing” is this: when the huge pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear demonstrations took place, everybody stopped and allowed each other to have their protest; and then the protest was over, and that was that. The idea that the same people could go on protesting day after day after day without being interfered with by the police, either for obstruction or causing a public nuisance, is ridiculous. What will she do to defend the right of other people to go about their normal lives once the protest has been made but the protesters will not stop?

[Yvette Cooper]

There are two different issues: there are issues in respect of the kinds of protests that might cause serious disruption to the vital public infrastructure that we all depend on, but there may also be protests that, to be honest, might be a bit annoying but do not actually disrupt anybody at all. In a democracy, we should recognise that even though the right hon. Gentleman and I may think that the world should move on, if people have strong views, they should be able to express them.

There should be a shared understanding across the House—

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. Lady give way before she moves on?

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way once, but I really want to get to the detail of the issues in the Bill.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Is there perhaps a case for introducing a retrospective clause, given the confession we just heard from the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis)?

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

A retrospective clause might affect not only the right hon. Gentleman but the Prime Minister —not that the Prime Minister has much of a record of taking seriously offences that he has committed or their consequences.

The problem with the Bill is that not only does it not respect the principles in respect of defending historic freedoms to protest, but nor does it contain sensible measures to safeguard national infrastructure. The Bill does not recognise the powers that the police and courts already have and the need to ensure that they can be used effectively; nor does it address some of the key changes currently faced by the police and authorities. The Bill does not include an effective strategy to avoid disruption to essential services, and there is clear evidence that some of its measures just will not work. At the same time, the Bill does not safeguard historic freedoms to protest—quite the opposite: it undermines those freedoms and targets peaceful protesters and passers-by instead.

Let me look at the proposals in more detail. The police and courts already have a range of powers that they can use in the minority of cases that involve serious disruption or criminal activity. They include powers in respect of wilful obstruction of a highway; criminal damage; aggrieved trespass; public nuisance; breach of the peace; breach of conditions on processions and static protests; harassment; threatening, abusive and disorderly behaviour; trespassory assemblies; preventing others going about their lawful business; and injunctions.

If someone blocks the road outside an oil refinery, they are already covered by the offence of wilful obstruction of a highway. If someone vandalises tankers, they are already committing criminal damage, which is an offence. Indeed, that is why more than 100 people have so far been charged by Kent police and Essex police as a result of Insulate Britain offences, and why the independent report on protests by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services recognised that there were different views, even among police officers, about whether more powers were needed.

I have heard from police officers—including the chief constables and former chief constables of forces that have dealt with protests over many years—both about problems that the Bill does not deal with at all and about their concerns about the Bill’s extension of the powers that they already have, which they say are sufficient. One officer told the inspectorate that

“the powers are sufficient; it is the ability to implement them that is the challenge due to lack of resources”.

There are challenges for the police if they deal with people who are determined to break the law repeatedly and are not deterred by the fact there are offences, but police also referred to concerns that sometimes even when offences had been committed there was no enforcement by the Crown Prosecution Service or the courts because of

“substantial backlogs in court”

and

“so much time passing since the alleged offence that the CPS deemed prosecution to be no longer in the public interest”.

The Bill addresses none of those issues. The inspectorate also raised concerns about lack of training, guidance and co-ordination among forces and authorities—issues that we raised in Parliament when we discussed this issue last year but that the Government dismissed.

We have heard from officers who have said that the most effective measures that they use in the face of potentially serious disruption and problems are injunctions, but the problem is the delays involved in public and private authorities getting injunctions in place. The advantage of injunctions is that they can be targeted at the problem. They often come with much swifter enforcement processes than individual offences, with the courts taking them seriously and escalating penalties. Not only can they act as a deterrent but, crucially, they include judicial oversight, which ensures that powers are not misused. Yet we have heard from police officers frustrated by the slow response from private and public authorities that have the ability to seek such injunctions, but instead leave the responsibility to tackle disruption to the police rather than taking greater responsibility themselves. Police chiefs, too, have been frustrated by the fragmented institutional response; there are so many different private contractors and organisations involved that no one takes responsibility.

If the Government were serious about the resilience of our vital infrastructure, they would have much more effective partnerships in place to make sure that companies act and co-operate, and that everyone understood their shared responsibilities. They would make sure that they understood the right to peaceful protest and the responsibility to safeguard essential infrastructure, and could get injunctions in place fast. They would be working to get the capacity, training and guidance in place that the police and the authorities need.

Instead of all of that—instead of those common-sense approaches—the Government have chosen to widen hugely powers on stop and search and on banning orders, which will affect both peaceful protesters and passers-by. Stop and search powers are hugely important as a way of preventing crime, but they can also be very intrusive and humiliating powers, which, if used in the wrong way, can be counterproductive and undermine legitimacy and trust in policing. Rightly, they are designed to be used to prevent the most serious crime—knife crime and drug dealing—and the police themselves have recognised serious concerns about disproportionality and about those who are black being much more likely to be stopped and searched than those who are white. Those powers should be used sensibly and not as a political football.

The police already have the power to stop and search someone who they believe has equipment that could be used for criminal damage, but the Government want to widen that to cover anything linked to a public order offence, including public nuisance and serious annoyance. We should ask the Government what that includes. They believe that noisy protests are a public nuisance, but does that include stopping and searching for a boombox or even for a tambourine? We concede that tambourines can be annoying, but could that be covered by the stop and search powers? That would allow the police to stop and search people not because they suspect them of being involved in a protest but simply because they are passing by an area where a protest is likely to be held.

What would that mean? Let us imagine that police expect an angry protest in a town centre by local residents who are furious that their local library is about to close. Those local residents’ singing and shouting would undoubtedly be a serious annoyance to those who are studying or using the library and reading quietly. Under the Government’s new rules, they could easily be covered by public order offences. In response, a local police inspector could designate the town centre a section 60 area and stop and search not only peaceful protesters but passers-by.

Let us think, too, about what that means for Parliament Square, where there are protests all the time and sometimes, people go too far and commit public order offences and the police rightly have to step in. But the offences that can be used to justify a section 60 stop and search order in this Bill are really broad and now include noisy protests that cause public nuisance and serious annoyance. I have an office that overlooks Parliament Square and I can say that there is definitely noise, loud music and serious annoyance every Wednesday before and after Prime Minister’s questions. With gritted teeth, I defend their right to be seriously annoying but the Government do not, so, again, under this Bill, a police inspector could designate Parliament Square every Wednesday and stop and search MPs, our staff and civil servants on their way to work, and also tourists and passers-by. Does the Home Secretary really think that we should all be stopped and searched every time the Prime Minister comes to Parliament? It sounds totally ludicrous, but that is what this Bill does.

The Government also want to be able to apply serious disruption prevention orders to people who have never been convicted of a crime. They want to be able to restrict where someone goes, who they meet and how they use the internet, even if they contributed only in some broad way to people causing disruption to two or more people. Again, the Government are extending powers that we would normally make available just for serious violence and terrorism to peaceful protest. Police officers themselves have said that this is,

“a severe restriction on a person’s rights to protest and in reality, is unworkable”.

[Interruption.] The Minister for Crime and Policing says that they have not, but that is what it says in the inspectorate’s report.

The inspectorate also said, that it agreed with the view shared by many senior police officers. It said that

“however many safeguards might be put in place, a banning order would completely remove an individual’s right to attend a protest. It is difficult to envisage a case where less intrusive measures could not be taken to address the risk”.

The inspectorate’s report also said:

“This proposal essentially takes away a person’s right to protest and…we believe it unlikely the measure would work as hoped.”

The Policing Minister is right: that is the view not of a police officer, but of the Home Office, which was submitted to the inspectorate.

There is an alternative approach for the Government: to work sensibly with the police, local authorities and those who run public and private infrastructure; to support the right to peaceful protest; to work together to safeguard essential infrastructure; to review the measures that they have just introduced before coming back for more; to work on training, guidance and resources that public order teams need; to work on streamlined plans for injunctions that could protect the smooth running of essential infrastructure if needed; to work in partnership with essential services such as the NHS and not just with oil and gas supplies; to accept that protests that this Government find seriously annoying are a vital part of our democracy; and, ultimately, to drop this Bill.

The Government should use this time to bring in a victims’ Bill that could increase the rape prosecution rate; that could provide more support for victims of crime; and that could take more action to get dangerous criminals behind bars or more community penalties to prevent repeat offending by first-time offenders. Instead of wasting time stopping and searching people outside a library protest, they should do something to tackle the serious antisocial behaviour and rising crime across the country; do the job of a Home Secretary instead of grandstanding and making headlines; and do the proper, practical work of keeping our communities safe.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I hope that we will manage this afternoon’s debate without a formal time limit, but that will depend on everyone taking less than eight minutes. I am sure that that can be achieved. It will be a much better flowing debate if we do not have a time limit, so I trust Members not to abuse the privilege of having the Floor.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I have listened to others with pleasure, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have had a debate with a vigorous exchange of views, although I am afraid it was largely bifurcated. There was a group of speeches on the end of democracy: “Here we go, fascism is on its way,” or “We are about to become North Korea”—although I am sure the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) would not think that an entirely backward step. The speeches made by the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) and the hon. Members for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), for Norwich South (Clive Lewis), for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), for Edmonton (Kate Osamor), for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey), for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) were all of a kind, predicting the end of democracy as we know it. Among the froth of outrage and alarm, there were some nuggets of questions that need to be answered, particularly on why we chose to bring back the Bill after it was roundly rejected by the House of Lords. Well, their key criticism was that the Bill had not had enough scrutiny in this House, so we brought it back as soon as we could for the scrutiny of hon. Members.

A number of hon. Members claimed that there is no public support for the Bill whereas, in fact, recent polling shows that a majority of the British public support it. There was a lot of focus on and concern about stop and search powers in the Bill. We should all take stop and search powers seriously, and look at them with care, but there seems to be a misapprehension among a number of Members about how the provision will operate, particularly regarding disproportionality and demographics. The notion is that the police will authorise an area for the equivalent of section 60 stop and search that will be where they believe the protest is likely to take place or where people will approach the protest. Therefore, the demographics of those searched are likely to reflect those attending the protest, rather than generally across the board as with other stop and search powers.

Getting ahead of those who are likely to lock on or take other equipment with them to protest will give the police an important head start in stopping some of the prolonged and difficult protests with which they have to deal and which often put them in danger. A number of Members asked why key infrastructure, such as hospitals and NHS sites, are not covered in the Bill. There are already offences that cover those areas in other legislation, so we do not need to cover them here.

I thought that two speeches in particular illustrated some of the issues. The hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) was alarmist in her portrayal of the direction in which the Government are going on protest, but nevertheless was not seen throwing herself between Police Scotland and the oil protesters at Clydebank, when they were carted off and arrested. Then there was the conundrum faced by the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq): she has happily accepted restrictions on protest outside abortion clinics and, in previous legislation, outside schools and vaccination centres—privileging them, quite rightly, as areas where protesters may come into conflict with those who are going to school or undergoing sensitive medical procedures, or indeed those denying vaccination—but I still cannot see the logic of then not applying some controls on protest outside other facilities or other people’s houses. [Interruption.]

There were some thoughtful speeches that added to the debate, including that of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller), who posed some interesting questions that we will address in Committee. I am more than happy to engage with him as he ponders the Bill. The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), also asked some probing questions to which we will give some thought as the Bill passes through the House.

We heard two interesting speeches about the two sides of protest. The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington spoke about a community who have been using protest to further what they regard as their interest against, as he put it, the changing winds of political decision about Heathrow. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) put the other side of the argument—about living with protest. Having lived in very central London for many years, I know the burden that protest can bring to residents and businesses in that part of town. The relentlessness of it—week in, week out, seemingly every weekend—can really prey upon people’s standard of living.

Then we come to the frankly hilarious contortions of the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), and the shadow Policing Minister, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), where we see in full the contradictions writ large in the body politic of the Labour party. First, the Front Benchers want a nationwide ban via injunctions, but not criminal sanctions. The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford condemns Just Stop Oil and XR but is unwilling to do anything about them, and she believes that injunctions, which sometimes take six weeks to bring people to justice, will be faster than a criminal offence.

The truth is that the right hon. Lady’s objective this evening is not to fashion legislation that will deal with new tactics in public order. It is to get her party through the same Lobby in once piece, and at the same time to keep her head down, because we know that she has form; back in 2005, she was the Minister in a Government who voted to ban protest entirely within half a mile of this place. Famously, the first arrest was of a woman reading the names of the Iraq war dead at the Cenotaph. The right hon. Lady has form and Labour Members all know it—she is just trying to get them through the Lobby in one piece.

My hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger), who is my constituency neighbour, made a thoughtful speech in which he nailed fundamentally the issue with which we are wrestling. As I said in the debate that we had on protest in respect of the PCSC Bill, the job of a democratic Government is to balance competing rights in any scenario, but most importantly in respect of protest. How do we balance that most fundamental right to make our voices known, to protest about those things that are important to us and to try to bring about change? As my hon. Friend quite rightly said, this is about balancing moral force against physical force. The use of moral force is legitimate in a democratic society, but the use of physical force to bring about what one wants to see is less so.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Minister talks about the extension of the powers of stop and search in the Bill; will he confirm that the Bill will make it possible for the police to stop and search people to try to find something that makes noise—such as a boombox, because that could contribute to a protest offence—and will also allow the stopping and searching of peaceful passers-by who walk through Parliament Square?

[Kit Malthouse]

It would depend on which part of the Bill they used for their powers. In essence, they would be stopping and searching people to look for equipment that could be used in the commission of an offence. I know the right hon. Lady will not want to confuse colleagues, but she possibly confuses the conditions that can be placed on a protest with the criminal offences that may ensue from a protest. The police will use their stop-and-search powers to deal with those criminal offences.

Let me return to my thread. As my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes said, we cannot allow our tradition of liberty to be used against us. Sadly, over the past few years we have seen, time and again, so-called protesters abuse our fundamental rights to make our views known to bring about their opinionated aggression, thereby impacting on people’s lives in a way that we feel is unwarranted. When I was a young politics student at university, I was taught by a member of the Labour party and great liberal thinker called Professor Hugh Berrington, who once said to me in a lecture I have never forgotten: “Being a liberal democracy doesn’t mean lying back and allowing yourself to be kicked in the stomach.” Sadly, too many of these so-called protesters—they masquerade as protesters but they are really criminals—bring about opinionated aggression that we believe is unacceptable.

We know that we have the support of the majority of the British public. Opposition Members have lightly lain aside the rights of the British public, but they have been championed in this debate by my hon. Friends the Members for Ipswich (Tom Hunt), for Dudley North (Marco Longhi), for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), for Stockton South (Matt Vickers), for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) and for Ashfield (Lee Anderson). In particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) yet again gave a bravura performance in defence of not only the ancient right of protest but the ancient British quality of proportion and moderation in everything.

Preventing Crime and Delivering Justice

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Priti Patel)]

It is an honour to open today’s Queen’s Speech debate on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government.

Keeping citizens safe is the first duty of any Government and, although it is not the only duty, meeting every other duty depends on it. Whenever fear and crime flourish, people cannot, and nor can our economy or our democracy. The Conservative party is the party of law and order. Unlike some, we understand that freedom includes the freedom of the law-abiding majority to go about their business free from harm. Those on the Opposition Benches are eager to defend the murderers, paedophiles, rapists, thugs and people with no right to be here. They cheer on selfish protestors who cause chaos and endanger lives. They back people who thwart the removal of foreign national offenders from our country.

In the last Session, opposition parties voted against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and the measures to stop the likes of Insulate Britain ruining the lives of ordinary working people going about their daily business.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

rose—

[Priti Patel]

I will not give way. The right hon. Lady will have the chance to speak shortly.

Opposition parties voted against tougher sentences for killer drivers, greater powers to monitor terrorists, and an end to the automatic release of dangerous criminals. They are much less curious about the rights of everyone else to go about their everyday business free from molestation. It amazes me that the Labour party dares to hold a debate on crime just after having voted against the PCSC Bill. If Labour Members really cared, they would have backed the Bill.

This Government and this party back the police, our intelligence and security services and the law-abiding majority. We have reformed the criminal justice system so that it better supports victims and ensures that criminals are not only caught, but punished.

[Yvette Cooper]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Priti Patel]

I will give way shortly.

While the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) voted repeatedly against boosting police funding, we have given the police the investment they need. An increase of £1.1 billion has taken the spending to nearly £17 billion a year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

I will come on to that as well, but first I want to speak about the rape action plan. We will increase the number of cases reaching court back to 2016 levels, which means reducing the number of victims who withdraw from the process and putting more rapists behind bars.

Crucial in how the Government will do this is not just money but investment in capabilities and the court system. The Government are investing over £80 million in the Crown Prosecution Service to tackle backlogs and recruit more prosecutors across the entire the country, because we need to start tackling this inequality. There is a significant inequality; that is in part a result of factors such as the way charges have been made and prosecutions brought, but there are other challenges as well.

[Yvette Cooper]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not give way; the right hon. Lady will have a chance to speak. [Interruption.] The right hon. Lady will have an opportunity to speak shortly. [Interruption.] If I may finish my point, I may come to her.

The other factor in terms of policing is the increase in the volume of digital evidence, and a vast amount of work is taking place across policing and the CPS now looking at how we can have an end-to-end approach across the criminal justice system to assess digital evidence. Also, for the first time the criminal justice system is now going to be held to account through performance scorecards through the crime and justice taskforce and also through the MOJ as well as the Home Office.

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. [Interruption.] I hear calls for more legislation from Labour Members, but, frankly, they also vote against all Government legislation. The hon. Lady raises a serious point. Through the crime and justice taskforce particularly, which is a cross-Government endeavour, the Education Secretary and other parts of Government are working with the MOJ to address and tackle these issues. The CPS has an important role to play here as well. I would be delighted to meet the hon. Lady and to speak to the universities Minister about this, because it is simply not right. Frankly, some of the practices being used are immoral, because they are effectively denying victims their right to have a voice.

[Yvette Cooper]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not give way. The right hon. Lady will have the chance to speak shortly and there are, I think, 32 Members wishing to speak in this debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I have to say, that was an astonishing refusal by the Home Secretary to take interventions and questions from the shadow Home Secretary and a shadow Cabinet Minister. I have been taking part in Queen’s Speech debates for 25 years and I have never seen a Government Minister at the Dispatch Box afraid to take questions from her opposite number—I have never seen that anywhere. She took questions from a few other Members; her predecessors always took questions from me. I wonder what she is so frightened of. All my questions would have been really factual—maybe that is what she was frightened of.

When the Prime Minister opened the Queen’s Speech debate yesterday, he did not mention crime—not once. Those of us out on the streets talking to residents in different communities across the country—an experience that was probably rather better on our side of the House than theirs this time—know that crime and antisocial behaviour were raised a lot, but the Prime Minister did not mention them once.

The cost of living, soaring bills and rising prices were top of people’s list, but they were followed by crime and antisocial behaviour and a real persistent concern that when crimes are being committed, too often, nothing is done. There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech to tackle rising bills and rising prices and also no serious plan to tackle rising crime and falling prosecutions. There was nothing from the Prime Minister yesterday about the basic issues bothering people across the country.

[Vicky Foxcroft]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way. It was a shame that the Home Secretary did not want to give way to me, because I wanted to ask her why, more than 30 minutes into her speech, there had been no mention of a public health approach to tackling serious violence, which has a long-term plan, addresses the root causes and is joined up. Perhaps the Government want to be tough on crime and not tough on the causes of crime.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right to talk about the public health approach and the need to prevent crime and work across communities to do that.

Across the country, in the last few weeks alone, I have heard from residents and victims talking often about there being no action when things go wrong; about repeated vandalism not being tackled even though there is CCTV evidence of who is responsible; and about the victim of an appalling violent domestic attack who was told that it would not come to court for two years.

I have heard about repeated shoplifting where the police are so overstretched that they have stopped coming; about burglaries where all the victim got was a crime number; about scamming, where Action Fraud is such a nightmare to engage with that pensioners have given up trying to report serious crimes; about persistent drug dealing outside a school where nothing had been done months later; and about a horrendous rape case where the brave victim was strung out for so long and the court case was delayed so many times that she gave up because she could not bear it anymore.

I have heard about police officers tearing their hair out over Crown Prosecution Service delays because they know that the victim will drop out if they cannot charge quickly; about other officers who are working long hours to pick up the pieces when local mental health services fail but who know that that means that they cannot be there to deal with the antisocial behaviour on the street corner; and about women who no longer expect the police to help if they face threats of violence on the streets or in their homes. There is case after case after case where crimes are being committed but no one is being charged, cautioned or given a community penalty and no action is being taken—and it is getting worse.

Since the 2019 general election—in fact, since the Home Secretary was appointed—crime is up by 18% and prosecutions are down by 18%. The charge rate is now at a record low of 5.8% compared with 15.5% in 2015. Cautions and community penalties are down too, notwithstanding the Prime Minister and his Downing Street staff’s attempt to make valiant personal efforts to get those numbers back up again.

The Home Secretary made an astonishing claim. She said:

“We have reformed the criminal justice system so that it better supports victims and ensures that criminals are not only caught but punished.”

Where are the criminal justice reforms that are pushing the prosecution rates up? The prosecution rates have plummeted on the Conservatives’ watch, which means that under the Home Secretary and the Conservatives, hundreds of thousands more criminals are getting off and hundreds of thousands more victims are being let down.

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

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the Policing Minister. I will also give way to the Home Secretary as many times as she wants, so that she can explain why prosecution rates have plummeted and cautions and community penalties have collapsed.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. I understand the picture that she is trying to paint, but I know that she will want to give the House a balanced picture overall. I am sure, therefore, that she will want to acknowledge that in the latest publication on crime statistics by the Office for National Statistics, violence was down 8%, knife crime was down 4%, theft was down 15%, burglary, which she mentioned, was down 14%, car crime was down 6% and robbery was down 9%. Although we acknowledge that the fight against crime is never linear, we should celebrate our successes, should we not?

[Yvette Cooper]

I am hugely relieved and glad that during lockdown, while everybody was at home, there were fewer burglaries of homes. I am also hugely relieved that during lockdown, while there were fewer people on the streets, there were fewer thefts on the streets. In April, however, the Office for National Statistics said:

“Since restrictions were lifted following the third national lockdown in early 2021, police recorded crime data show indications that certain offence types are returning to or exceeding the levels seen before the pandemic… violence and sexual offences recorded by the police have exceeded pre-pandemic levels”.

On overall crime, I am sure that the Policing Minister would not want to make the mistake that the Business Secretary made of somehow dismissing fraud, which is responsible for some of the huge increases in crime, and of saying that it is not a crime that affects people’s daily life. We know that it causes huge problems and huge harms, particularly for vulnerable people across the country.

[Mr Sheerman]

My right hon. Friend is coming up with some telling statistics. I have talked to constituents and the police, who say that morale has never been lower and their numbers have never been so small. Since 2010, Conservative Governments have diminished resources for the justice system more than for anything dealt with by other Departments. The balance is totally out, so the morale of the police and the confidence of my constituents have plummeted.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I pay tribute to police officers across the country who are working incredibly hard in our communities to try to crack down on and prevent crime. They walk towards danger when the rest of us walk away. They are valiantly trying to hold things together, but too often, they are let down by the Government, particularly when dealing with violence against women and rape. The rape charge rate has gone down from 8.5% in 2015 to a truly shocking 1.3%. Today, in England and Wales, an estimated 300 women will be raped. About 170 of those cases will be reported to the police, but only three are likely to make it to a court of law, never mind the jail cell. Just think what that means.

That applies not just to rape, but to many other crimes. No charge are made within a year of the offence being committed in 93% of reported robberies, 95% of violent offences, 96% of thefts, 97% of sexual offences, over 98% of reported rapes and over 99% of frauds. It is a total disgrace. As one police officer said to me, “This is awful—it feels like once serious offences are effectively being decriminalised”, because there are no consequences.

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

My right hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. I want to move on beyond the police to the issues she has raised about fraud. Fraud is now the biggest crime facing us, and the cost to the economy is coming on for something like £190 billion a year. Does she agree with me that, as well as funding the police, it is absolutely imperative that we fund all the enforcement agencies fighting this sort of economic crime? While the Americans are raising the amount of money spent on this, we are lowering our investment into the enforcement agencies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend makes a really important point, and we will pay the price if the law against economic crime is not enforced. The system just is not working. Everybody will know what a nightmare it is to try to report fraud; they may be passed from pillar to post, and sent between Action Fraud and the local police force. She is right, too, on some of the more serious issues, where this is also about the relationship between the police, the Serious Fraud Office and other enforcement agencies that need to take action. I hope this will be debated in our discussions on economic crime.

It is a really damning picture: crime rising while there is a shocking drop in prosecutions and action. But what is the Home Secretary’s response? Soon after she took up the job, she said:

“let the message go out…To the British people—we hear you… And to the criminals, I simply say this: We are coming after you.”

Well, to the Home Secretary I simply say this: “You’d better start running faster, because they’re all getting away.”

To be fair to the Prime Minister, yesterday his main Home Office focus was anger at the Passport Office, and that is probably something all of us can agree on, including the newly-weds who are having to cancel their honeymoon, and the hard-pressed families who face losing thousands of pounds that they had long saved up for a well-deserved holiday. Ministers told us the issue was being sorted out, but most of us can say from our constituency casework that it is getting worse. People are being badly let down, so the Prime Minister was right to be angry yesterday, although who does he think has been in charge of the Passport Office for the last 12 years?

The Prime Minister now says he wants to privatise the Passport Office if this is not sorted out. However, the immigration Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster)—told us:

“The private sector is already being used in the vast majority of the processes in the Passport Office.”

He also said:

“The bit that is not…is the decision itself.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 767.]

That leaves us back with the Home Office failing to get a grip on private sector contracts and failing to take basic decisions. It is part of the pattern of Home Office failure and the Prime Minister casting around to get someone else to step in. Ukrainians fleeing war have been waiting weeks on end for visas because the Home Office added long bureaucratic delays. So many desperate families have given up because they could not afford to wait; they have found somewhere else to live, and others to give them sanctuary instead. There have been 80,000 applications to Homes for Ukraine, but only 19,000 people have arrived.

[Lee Anderson]

The right hon. Member is being very generous with her time. She made a point about Ukrainian refugees; a family moved in next door to me two weeks ago. I would like to thank the Home Secretary personally: the family got in touch with me, and within minutes of my contacting the Home Secretary about them, her team had got back to me. The family is now in our village of Kirkby-in-Ashfield. They thank the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and the people of Great Britain.

[Yvette Cooper]

The people of Great Britain have shown that they want to help desperate families who are fleeing Ukraine. However, the facts are clear: there have been 80,000 applications, but there are only 19,000 people here. The Home Secretary says that is because they are staying where they are. Yes, a lot of them are; they gave up because it became so difficult.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree with me about the really troubling reports—some of these are cases I have dealt with, but some of these I heard of through the media—of the Home Office issuing visas for only some members of Ukrainian families? The families quite rightly do not want to leave someone behind, so do not come here. That is classed as Ukrainians not taking up a visa, rather than Home Office failure. At the same time, the Home Office lines are bunged up. We cannot get through, and when we do, we are told, “I don’t even have a computer in front of me. I’m just on a phone line, and I don’t know what to say.” This is failure at the Home Office, and the Home Secretary has presided over it.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. I have also heard of cases where one family member does not get their visa, and of course the whole family has to wait. They are not going to be separated at a time of crisis. That Home Office Ministers think it is somehow a triumph to take four weeks to issue basic visas to people fleeing war in Europe is totally shameful.

It now takes more than a year to get a basic initial asylum decision, because the Home Office is taking just 14,000 initial decisions a year—half the number it was taking in 2015. This basic incompetence means that the backlog has soared, and so too has the bill for the taxpayer. It takes nearly two years to get a modern slavery referral, which means that victims do not get support and prosecutions just do not happen. No wonder that even the Prime Minister, who is not known for his laser-like focus on delivering policies, has lost confidence in the Home Secretary and is getting other people to do the jobs instead.

The Prime Minister is looking to privatise the Passport Office; channel crossings are to be handed over to the Ministry of Defence; Homes for Ukraine is to be handed over to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities; and visas are to be handed over to the new Refugees Minister. Decision making on asylum processing is so slow that Ministers are in the ludicrous and unworkable situation of paying Rwanda over £100 million to take decisions for us. At this rate, crime will be given to the Ministry of Justice and the fire service will be given to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Under this Home Secretary, the Home Office has in effect been put into special measures because it cannot get the basics right. If the Home Secretary cannot get the basics done on any of those core decisions, she should get out the way and let someone else sort it out.

There is an alternative to this shambles. On crime and prosecutions, it was obvious a decade ago that this was where we were heading as a result of Government policies. I warned in 2013 of the risk of falling charge rates. I warned then about the Home Office’s failure to help the police tackle increasingly complex and fast-changing crimes, and about the risks if there was no proper, urgent plan to modernise policing, none of which has happened. I also gave a warning about what it would be like if the police were ripped out of the heart of our communities. Now, our towns, cities and rural communities are all paying the price; they all feel that the criminal justice system is not there for them when they need it.

Where is the action in the Queen’s Speech to turn this around? Where is the action to help the police modernise, so that they can keep up with fast-changing crimes? Where is the action on reform, and on raising police standards so that we improve confidence? Where is the action on getting justice and improving safety for women and girls? There is nothing on establishing specialist rape investigation units in every police force, nothing on establishing specialist rape courts to speed up cases and make sure that they have the expertise necessary, nothing on setting up the domestic abuse and stalking perpetrators register for which we have been calling for years, and nothing to establish a mandatory minimum sentence for rape—all things Labour has been calling for. There is nothing to tackle antisocial behaviour—the powers are just not being used. There is nothing to sort out community penalties, which are too often dropped, and nothing to prevent crime and antisocial behaviour There is nothing to ensure that neighbourhood police are restored to our streets or to set up neighbourhood prevention teams, which Labour has repeatedly called for.

The Home Secretary wants to boast that she is delivering the biggest increase in police funding for 10 years—well, who has been in power for the last 10 years? She has not even restored the police her party cut and she is not getting them out on to the streets. There are still 7,000 fewer police in our neighbourhoods compared with 2015. Instead, the police are weighed down by more bureaucracy, stuck back at their desks doing paperwork—the only way to improve their visibility is to move their desks nearer to the window.

To be fair, the Government have proposed a victims’ Bill, and we would support that, but it is only in draft and it was first promised in 2015. It was promised again in 2016, again in 2017, again in 2019 and, yes, again in 2021. This year, it did not even get a proper mention in the Humble Address and there was certainly nothing from the Prime Minister yesterday.

The Home Secretary rightly made a personal commitment to strengthen victims’ rights back in 2014 when she first said that she backed a new victims’ law. She was right to do so because at that time 9% of cases were being dropped because victims were dropping out of the criminal justice system as they had lost confidence. Since then, those figures have almost trebled. Last year, 1.3 million cases were dropped because victims gave up and dropped out. Yet is she seriously telling us she does not have time in this Parliament for victims again? Instead, the Government’s top priority is a rehashed Public Order Bill, even though they have just done one, because they are again failing to work with the police to sort out swift injunctions against serious disruptive protests or to help the police sensibly to use the powers that they have.

There are Bills that should command cross-party support. Labour supports a “protect” duty that could keep people safer from potential terror attacks. We remember with sadness all the victims of the Manchester attack. I ask the Government to listen to the calls from bereaved families from other major incidents, and I ask the Home Secretary again to look at calls for a Hillsborough law, which she knows have been made by Members across the House and by the families who have lost so much.

Labour also welcomes the long-overdue economic crime Bill. We have called for years for action to strengthen Companies House and we will be pressing for stronger action on money laundering, including illicit finance used for terrorist activity. On terrorism and national security, we always stand ready to work with the Government in the national interest. We agree on the need for a register of foreign agents, which, again, has been promised for years. We need much greater vigilance and action against hostile state activity. My hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) raised a significant issue that the Home Secretary did not answer, so I ask her to consider it and to be ready to answer it in future. There should be some transparency on the issues around contact with foreign agents. It would be helpful if she could confirm whether the Prime Minister, when he was Foreign Secretary, met the ex-KGB agent Alexander Lebedev in Italy in April 2018 and whether any civil servants were present. It would be very helpful to know that information.

Labour supports stronger action on modern slavery and hopes that the Bill will be an opportunity to go further, but the Home Secretary needs to reverse some of the damaging provisions from the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 that will make it harder to prosecute trafficking and slavery gangs, as the retiring Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner has warned. We must also ask: where is the employment Bill with the long-promised single enforcement body to crack down on forced labour and abuse? Without those measures, this is still not a serious plan to tackle modern slavery.

In the absence of any serious action in the Queen’s Speech on the cost of living or to push prosecutions up, the Government talked instead about levelling up and community pride. The trouble is, they just do not get it. There is no levelling up if people cannot afford to eat, cannot afford to pay their bills or cannot afford to go to the local shops. There is no community pride if town centres do not have police officers or see no action when there is vandalism, street drinking, shoplifting or litter—or if, too often, the windows are broken and nothing is done. How can people have that local pride if there are no neighbourhood police to help prevent crimes, solve problems or nip them in the bud, or if people feel that there are no consequences for criminals? The very communities to whom the Government keep making false promises about levelling up are towns that are being hardest hit by antisocial behaviour and persistent unsolved crimes.

Trust within our communities depends on us having trust in the law and trust in there being consequences. That is why Labour has called for the police to be getting back on the street and to have neighbourhood prevention teams and partnerships in place that work both to prevent crime but also to tackle the criminals and bring them to justice. If people stop believing that a fair and valiant criminal justice system will come to their aid if they are hurt or wronged, that is corrosive for our democracy, too. That is why it is so damaging to feel like we have a Government who shrug their shoulders as victims of crime are let down. The Conservative party in government is not a party of law and order any more. Too often, it is a party of crime and disorder, a party that is weak on crime and weak on the causes of crime, letting more criminals off and letting our communities down. Britain deserves better than that.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

HM Passport Office Backlogs

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Home Secretary to make a statement about delays at HM Passport Office.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Kevin Foster)]

Prior to the pandemic, HM Passport Office routinely processed approximately 7 million passports each year. Over the last two years the necessary restrictions on international travel meant only 4 million people applied for a British passport in 2020 and 5 million in 2021. This left about 5 million unrenewed passports.

In 2022 many of the customers who delayed their application are returning. We expect this year to deal with 9.5 million British passport applications and have been planning for this. Throughout the pandemic, HM Passport Office prepared to serve an unprecedented number of customers. Alongside technical solutions, staffing numbers have been increased by 500 since last April and we are in the process of recruiting a further 700. These preparations ensured passport applications could be processed in record numbers, last month seeing the highest total for any month on record, with HM Passport Office completing the processing of over 1 million applications, 13% higher than the previous record output.

Inevitably, however, faced with this level of demand applications will take longer. Consequently, in April 2021 guidance was changed to clearly advise customers to allow up to 10 weeks to get their passport, in recognition that a surge would arrive as international travel returned. The vast majority of applications continue to be processed within 10 weeks; in fact, over 90% of applications were issued within 6 weeks between January and March 2022, despite the much-increased demand. HM Passport Office also provides an expedited service where an application from the UK has been with it for longer than 10 weeks; 42 applications have been expedited under these criteria since 31 March.

With greater volumes of applications which are in the system for longer, levels of customer contact have inevitably risen. We recognise that difficulties in contacting HM Passport Office will cause concern for those wanting assurances about their applications. In response, the provider of the passport advice line, Teleperformance, has been urgently tasked to add additional staff as its current performance is unacceptable.

To finish, the team at HMPO are dealing with record numbers of applications and delivering a record level of output to match this. Their hard work will enable millions of British citizens to enjoy a holiday abroad this summer, and I thank them for that.

[Yvette Cooper]

From listening to the Minister we would think that actually everything is all right, but my constituents fear their honeymoon may now be wrecked because their passports have not arrived even though they applied in plenty of time, and we have had cases of people cancelling jobs, parents trying to get a holiday for a sick child waiting since January, and huge and long delays by the Passport Office and the contractor, TNT. The message today on the one-week fast-track service is “System busy, please try again later”, and the online premium service has no appointments anywhere in the country. So people cannot get urgent travel such as to go to funerals or to urgent events.

The Minister has said more passports are being processed, which is clearly welcome, but it is not enough. The increase in demand this year was totally predictable. In 2020 and 2021, the Home Office was asked what it was doing to plan, but people are already losing holidays, trips to see loved ones and thousands of pounds that they have spent in good faith because of the lack of planning at the Passport Office and at the Home Office, which is in danger of becoming a “Stay-at-Home Office” instead for people this summer. So what grip does the Minister have on this? Is it going to get better or worse over the next two months? How many passports have already been delayed by longer than the 10-week wait, and how many does the Minister think will be delayed by more than 10 weeks over the next month or two?

On staffing, what is the percentage increase compared with before the pandemic? Is it true that the Minister tried to recruit 1,700 staff and got only 500? When will the fast-track services be reopened? What is his advice to a family who are planning to go on holiday in 10 weeks’ time, in July? Do they have any chance of getting their passport, or should they be trying to cancel right now? The problem is that there is a pattern here: delays in the Passport Office, in Ukraine visas, and in basic asylum cases. The Prime Minister said that the answer may be to privatise the Passport Office, but why do Home Office Ministers not just get a grip instead?

[Kevin Foster]

It is quite interesting to hear all the claims of how predictable all this was. I am struggling to remember the number of times anyone on the shadow Front Bench predicted any of this over the last year or two. I welcome their recently found interest in the Passport Office.

To give some numbers, as of 1 April, there are over 4,000 staff in passport-production roles and, as I say, we are in the process of recruiting another 700. I would also make the point again that 90% of applications were completed within six weeks, and the service standard is 10 weeks. My advice to anyone who is looking to go on holiday this summer is exactly what I said the other day: get an application in now.

We are making a range of efforts. Staff are working weekends; overtime is being incentivised. We are certainly confident that we will not need to change the 10-week target, but as I have said, this is a record level of demand and a record output, far in excess of what we have seen before. We will expedite the applications of those who have compelling and compassionate reasons to travel, such as funerals or family ill health.

We know there are challenges. The teams are working hard to deal with them. [Interruption.] I hear comments about staying at home, but I have not heard a great deal of support from the Labour party for the work of the Minister for Government Efficiency in getting people back into the office, but I am sure that he will welcome the comments we have just heard.

As we see on so many occasions, we are hearing lots of complaints from the Opposition but we are not hearing any solutions or plans. Having just heard from Captain Hindsight, it is no surprise that we are now hearing from Lieutenant Rearview.