Metropolitan Police: Stephen Port Murders Inquest

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I have to confess that I object to this characterisation that I do not care or that we do not care about these individuals. It is completely unfair and completely untrue, not least to those members of the Government who happen to be of that description themselves—[Interruption.] No, many of us have worked on these issues addressing all sorts of communities, whether it is domestic murders or murders in minority communities. The murders of all sorts of people are profoundly important to us. That is why we have set murder as a national priority. If it is of interest to the House, last week I got the police chiefs of the seven biggest contributors to the murder total in this country around a table to talk about how we can further drive murders of all types down. This is a particularly unpleasant murder—[Interruption.] I understand the alarm and distress it will have caused across the country. We need to learn the lessons from it and we are determined to do so.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

The Minister’s response to the urgent question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), which should have been a statement from the Home Secretary, is extremely disappointing. I have dealt with the Met for more than 30 years, as a lawyer and as a politician, and I can remember few cases as serious as this, both because of the callous incompetence of the investigation and because of the consequences in the loss of lives of those young men.

All I have heard from the Minister today, and from the senior members of the Met—London MPs are just about to go to talk to them—are platitudes. I have heard platitudes specifically because they will not address the homophobic nature of these murders. That is not being addressed because it will not be included in the inquiry, and the Minister will not establish a full inquiry. He needs to order that now. A BBC series on this issue is starting on 3 January; it is not going to go away. He is entitled to his view that the Met is not institutionally homophobic—I would take a different view—but he is not entitled not to investigate that and to sweep this issue under the carpet.

[Kit Malthouse]

First, it is not the case that this matter is not being investigated further. As I have outlined several times, a number of lines of inquiry are being pursued, both about the Met’s investigation generally and its culture more specifically, and the IOPC may or may not reopen the investigation into the officers. So it is not the case that this has reached some kind of dead end, as some Opposition Members seem to be implying. It is simply not true to say that we are not bending every sinew to try to identify those who are likely to murder, in all different circumstances, whether domestic or through drugs—whatever the circumstances are. As I say, just last week I sat the seven biggest forces down and we had a three-hour session to look at what more work we could do to identify those who are likely to go on to commit such crimes: what their precursor behaviour is; what indications there are in their background; what data pools we could put together, whether that is their background offending or intelligence about them, that would give us clues towards what they were likely to do and allow us to intervene before. That enormous project of work has been under way for two years, and I hope and believe it will drive down murder numbers in the next few years to come. It is very unfair to accuse us of not taking these murders extremely seriously—that is exactly what we are doing and we are determined to make sure that they do not happen again.