Metropolitan Police: Stephen Lawrence Murder Investigation

Debate between Abena Oppong-Asare and Sarah Dines

Wednesday 12th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Miss Dines]

I am grateful for that intervention. I will pass that message on to the Home Secretary and the Policing Minister.

On police culture, I disagree with one thing that the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) said, which was that the Home Secretary was not leading enough in her role—I think “standing back” was the phrase that the hon. Member used. That has not been my experience of the efforts put in by the Home Secretary, who has made it consistently clear, both in public and in private to me, that the culture and standards in policing need to improve as a matter of urgency. I hope we can agree on that.

Examining the root causes of poor and toxic cultures is a key focus of part 2 of the Angiolini inquiry, which is now under way. The College of Policing is also currently updating the code of ethics, which plays a key role in instilling the right principles and standards from the start of a police officer’s career. The Policing Minister is certainly holding leaders to account in this area.

I will briefly mention that whenever, in my safeguarding role, I visit a police force that I have not visited before, one of the first questions I ask is: what is the ethnic diversity of new recruits and existing officers? That must be very much in everybody’s mind. We need a police force that reflects better the whole of society.

The Government and the public rightly expect the highest standards from our police officers. The ability of the police to perform their core functions—tackling crime and keeping the public safe—is dependent on their capacity to maintain the confidence of the public. As part of the Inclusive Britain strategy, the Government are committed to developing a new national framework for policing partners, including police and crime commissioners.

Police powers such as stop and search and the use of force must be scrutinised properly at a local level. That will help to create tangible improvements in trust and confidence between the police and the communities they serve by improving public understanding of how and why the police use their powers and will help account for any disparities. Alongside that, the Home Office is committed to seeking and removing unnecessary barriers that prevent the use of body-worn video, which will be implemented in the framework. Work is well under way on the community scrutiny framework, which we aim to publish in due course.

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

Will the Government look at the use of tasers? Members of the community are concerned about them and the way they are used.

[Miss Dines]

I will ask the Policing Minister to write to the hon. Member about that. We have only two minutes left, and I want to leave a minute for the Member in charge to wind up.

I offer my thanks to the hon. Member for Eltham for securing this debate. I am acutely conscious of the significance of the case not only for the Lawrence family, but for the Britain that I want to see and for Britain’s policing as a whole. My thoughts are with the family of Stephen for the loss of their loved one. They had such a shattering loss. We cannot bring him back, but we can do more to strain every sinew to learn every possible lesson from that awful crime.

Agriculture Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Abena Oppong-Asare and Sarah Dines

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 13th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)]

Q As you know, clause 1 provides financial assistance for protecting and improving the quality of soil and, as you mentioned earlier, soil is highly variable and it is difficult to set the standards equally across all the farmers. You mentioned something about tools for farmers—being given specifically, I guess, for the 25 years that you mentioned. Are there any specific measures that you would like to see mentioned in relation to soil health?

Gareth Morgan: At the end of the day, there will have to be some sort of whole-farm planning process. I am sure the Minister has thoughts about this: there is an aspiration to reduce our transaction costs, around the amount of advice and so on that schemes involve. I think there is a limit to how far that can go, so at the end of the day I suspect that any farmer who is receiving substantial public good payments will need to have some kind of system of working with an adviser around a whole-farm plan, which will enable them to put the measures into place, particularly for something like soil.

There are general measures that are great for wildlife and the environment, like having flower margins around fields, having rough grass margins and the rest of it; they will be useful anywhere. With something like soil, I cannot really see how that can be done without the support of an agronomist, or a specialist, or someone helping the farmer and working on the nature of the soil on that particular farm. That need not be done by Government advisers; it could be done by certifiers, or private suppliers and so on. But without that level of support being built into the system, it is quite hard to see how farmers will be able to make the transition that they might want to make on their farm to things like sustainable soil management practices.

[Miss Sarah Dines (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)]

Q Mr Morgan, in your written submissions you criticised the Bill as it is currently drafted for not having clear targets for soil health. I represent the Derbyshire Dales area, which has a massive variation of soil qualities from the flats to the higher land. How can you possibly fairly have targets, and how would you measure them, to make sure that those of my farmers who put a lot of effort in to improve the soil, but who will get a lesser result because of the nature of the soil they have, can be fairly rewarded for providing a public good improvement?

Gareth Morgan: I am quite pragmatic about where those targets should lie and if it is not in the Agriculture Bill, there are other places; I have already alluded to the potential for both the Environment Bill and the 25-year plan to be the place where those targets and metrics could reside. It is disappointing that at the moment the Environment Bill does not have a soil chapter, because it would seem to me logical for that to be the place where, say, a target for increasing organic matter in soils at a national level would reside.

Regarding the targets for an individual farm, clearly it would not be sensible for those to be iterated in this Bill, because they might have to be done farm by farm. However, some provision for making sure that farmers are clear what they are working to on the soils on their farm over a particular period will be vital. I do not know whether some provision can be made in the Bill for there to be that level of assessment before public good payments are made on a particular farm, for example, because you are right: unless the farmer is clear about their current resource or what the expectation is about where they will be going, it is going to be quite—and this may be one of the reasons why soils were not previously itemised in the Bill, because of this precise problem about that geographical specificity.

Agriculture Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Abena Oppong-Asare and Sarah Dines

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 13th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Miss Dines]

Q With respect, what do I say to my farmers in the Derbyshire dales, where, by necessity, the land is good only for sheep in some areas? Do I tell them they should not be able to earn a living and feed the country? It is a bit fanciful to think we can give up huge tracts of land. Is it not the case that we will get the best outcome if farmers work in conjunction with places such as the Peak park authority?

George Monbiot: I would characterise the Peak park as an ecological disaster area. It is remarkable how little wildlife there is. You can walk all day and see just a handful of birds; I will see more in a suburban garden. We need a completely different approach to managing land like that.

What you can tell the farmers is, “Let’s pay you to do something completely different, such as restoration, rewilding, bringing back the missing species or bringing back the trees.” Where are the trees above around 200 metres in the Peak district and, indeed, most of the uplands of Britain? They simply are not there. This is a disaster. Anyone who visits from another country—someone from Brazil or Indonesia, my friends, tropical forest ecologists—says, “What’s happened here?” They see these places we call our national parks and say, “How can you call that a national park? It’s a sheep ranch.”

By all means let us keep people on the land, but let us use public money to pay them to do something completely different. Let us face it: there would not be any hill farming in this country without public money. It is a loss-making exercise. If we, the public, are going to pay for it, I think we, the public, have a right to determine what we are paying for. We should be paying for public goods, not public harms.

[Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)]

Q Hi George. There has been a lot of publicity about the carbon footprints of different types of food. For example, 1 kg of vegetables produces approximately 2 kg of carbon dioxide, whereas 1 kg of beef produces about 27 kg of carbon dioxide. Do you think the Bill should go a step further and focus on those who produce foodstuffs with low carbon footprints rather than those who produce foodstuffs with higher carbon footprints?

George Monbiot: I think this should be the perspective through which we start to see everything. This is the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced: the breakdown of our life-support systems. The Governments that will be judged favourably by future generations are those that put that issue front and centre. Other things are subsidiary to our survival. It is imperative that we should start favouring a low-carbon diet and use public policy to disfavour a high-carbon diet. Whether through farm subsidies—I think that does play a role—or meat taxes, which I think could also play a role, we should find all the instruments possible to steer and encourage people to reduce the environmental impacts of their diets.

The most important metric here is what scientists call carbon opportunity costs, which is basically, “What could you be doing on that land if you weren’t doing this?” If, for instance, you are producing beef or lamb on this piece of land, what is the carbon opportunity cost of that? What would be the carbon storage if, instead, trees and wild habitats were allowed to return? There has been some new research just published, or a new compilation of research, on Our World in Data showing that when you look at the carbon opportunity costs, those of beef and lamb are massively greater than those of anything else we eat. It is really, really huge. Even when you take food miles into account, they are tiny by comparison to those carbon costs, and that is what we should focus on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

Q The Food Standards Agency looks into the standards in food production. Are there elements of that that you think should be incorporated into the Bill to embellish it?

Sue Davies: Including provisions that enable financial assistance for food safety and public health measures, such as the reduced use of antibiotics, feeds through into the things the Food Standards Agency is trying to achieve. That then allows sufficient flexibility.

I mentioned the example of campylobacter because that has been a big priority. It is the main type of food poisoning in the UK. Most of it comes from chickens. We have been struggling to reduce its level for years. We have made progress in recent years by taking the farm-to-fork approach. We need to recognise that a lot of things that manifest at the end of the food chain originate in production. Giving the flexibility to be able to provide financial assistance and incentivise those kinds of measures is really important. The Food Standards Agency will then need to work with DEFRA and others in defining what those might be and what sort of indicators you might want to include, in terms of the monitoring that is set out in the Bill.

[Miss Dines]

Q Ms Davies, your organisation, Which?, has historically been a champion for consumer choice. I want to ask you what your position is. From your written statement, it seems like you are proposing a form of protectionism against certain imports based on standards, but with a lack of clarity, I would suggest. Does that not deny the consumer a choice and potentially make food a lot more expensive for the consumer?

Sue Davies: We are certainly not protectionist and we are certainly in favour of consumer choice. However, it is about enabling people to make meaningful choices and the types of choices that we want. We also base what we say and what we call for on consumer research—talking to people and understanding their perspectives. Over the last couple of decades, we have been talking to people about food a lot, but in the last three years we have had a regular tracker and have been asking a lot about food standards.

We are just in the process of doing some more research, for which we are going to do a series of public dialogues around the country, particularly focused on trade deals and what some of the opportunities of those could be, as well as some of the issues over which people might have concerns. It will look at food standards, but also at things like digital services and opportunities for a wide range of cheaper products. We know from the research we have done to date that people feel very strongly about food production methods and would have concerns if food was allowed to come in with reduced, cheaper standards that undermined the standards and choices we have at the moment.

I do not think it is about reducing people’s choice. It is about enabling people to have an informed choice, and about enabling everybody to have a choice. At the moment, we have regulation and standards that underpin everything that everybody buys, whatever their income level. If it suddenly becomes the case that only those who can afford it can have the type of standards we have at the moment, and other people have to have lower standards, that would certainly be a completely retrograde step.

We are starting from a point where we have good standards, and we are about to start negotiating trade deals, so we need to be really clear in those objectives about where food fits. We need to look at the opportunities for food and other things that we might gain in those trade deals, but also to be really clear about where we will not compromise. Things such as food safety and quality and animal welfare come out from our research as things that people do not think we should compromise on.