Crime and Neighbourhood Policing

Debate between Anna Firth and Jonathan Gullis

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Wakefield (Simon Lightwood), but I must say that neither I nor any of my constituents in Southend West would recognise the picture put forward by the Opposition today. Not only do those of us on this side of the House believe in cutting crime and building safe communities, but we have actively voted for it. That is why we introduced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which has the central objective of cutting crime and building safe communities. Opposition Members opposed that legislation. They opposed new laws to give the police the powers and tools they need to protect themselves and the public.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act includes the ability to increase sentences for those who attack our brave emergency workers. Will my hon. Friend join me in condemning Stoke-on-Trent Labour Councillor Jo Woolner, who was recently arrested for assaulting an emergency worker? When Labour said that they were fighting hard all year round in Stoke-on-Trent, none of us realised that they meant it quite literally.

[Anna Firth]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing that example to our attention, as he illustrates my point and gives me the opportunity to change my glasses.

Labour Members also opposed the law that will keep serious sexual and violent offenders behind bars for longer, so they are in no position to lecture us on tougher policing. Frankly, every Labour Member who voted against the 2022 Act should be ashamed of themselves.

Making streets safer was one of my key priorities when I was elected a year ago, which is why I particularly welcome the fact we now have 16,743 new police officers, as we head towards 20,000—395 of them are in Essex and 20 of them are on our streets keeping Southend safer.

It is not just the numbers. We are also investing in police funding, which is up £1.1 billion on last year, to £16.9 billion in 2022-23. Essex has benefited from £432,000 of investment through the brilliant safer streets fund, which is already making our streets safer. The money has had a real impact on the ground, with overall crime down 10% and neighbourhood crime down 22% since 2020.

In the city of Southend, we are lucky to have a brilliant local police force. I pay special tribute to Inspector Paul Hogben and his team, who work tirelessly to keep our streets safer not only through sheer hard work but by innovating at a rate of knots. The excellent Operation Union takes an events mindset to policing our summer seafront. It was trialled last year in partnership with the council, transport networks and tourism and hospitality traders to tackle emerging issues and to prevent and detect crime. I cannot think of a better example of community and neighbourhood policing. As a result of Operation Union, we have now seen 7,437 hours of police patrols, which has led to 294 stop and searches and 106 arrests, taking criminals off our streets and making our community safer. That is not the only thing Southend police have been doing. I could mention numerous community initiatives. Operation Grip has recorded a 73.5% drop in violent crime and a 32% fall in street crime.

Unfortunately, however, one partner in Southend is not so helpful: our local Labour-Lib Dem coalition council, which is failing to keep our streets safe. Not only is it turning off our street lights at night, making vulnerable women feel unsafe, but it has taken more than a year to replace six lightbulbs on one of our footbridges, plunging women and tourists into complete darkness on a very dangerous bridge. I say to our Labour-Liberal council, “No more prevaricating. No more passing the buck. Fix our lights.”

I also made it a mission to support our police on knife crime, and I was proud to help the police obtain two new state-of-the-art knife poles, which are easy to move around and can detect all manner of offensive weapons. They have been a huge success, allowing our local police to confiscate a vast number of nitrous oxide canisters and to remove knives from our streets.

Knives take lives, and we must do all we can to remove them. Labour’s record on knife crime is abysmal. Sadiq Khan has let it rise by more than 11% in London over the past year. He is not keeping Londoners safe.

As a coastal community, Southend has its fair share of knife crime. One crime that came to my notice over Christmas involved a 17-year-old who purchased a two-foot zombie knife and had it sent straight to his door. Had our brilliant community police officers not taken the initiative to look for the packaging, they would have been unable to confiscate the knife because there were no violent images on the blade or handle, as proscribed by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019. Knives are not toys, but a quick Google search brings up any number of sites selling zombie knives with names such as Fantasy Master for as little as £40, and they can be sent direct to people’s homes. We must do more to get these knives out of homes, out of the hands of young people and off our streets. I want to see the loophole in the Act closed and I want to see us make more effort to ensure these offensive weapons, which are already proscribed under the Offensive Weapons Act, are not allowed to be sold online, manufactured or imported—it is already illegal and we must enforce that measure.

Thanks to successive Conservative Governments, overall crime is down by 50% and neighbourhood crime is down by 48%. Southend has a brilliant police force. This motion is an insult to every one of my brilliant community police officers, and for that reason I will certainly be voting against it.

Fair Taxation of Schools and Education Standards Committee

Debate between Anna Firth and Jonathan Gullis

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. According to the PISA—programme for international student assessment—tables, literacy and maths skills plummeted under Labour. We went from seventh to 25th in reading and from eighth to 28th in maths, and it has taken successive Education Secretaries and hard work from Ministers to recover from that position. Does he agree that before applying their big-state, freedom-stripping, economically illiterate ideologies to education, the Opposition should first get the basics right?

[Jonathan Gullis]

I fully concur with my hon. Friend. The simple truth is this. Even the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), told students at one of his local private schools, Redmaids’ High School, that he did not agree with this policy. Behind closed doors, the Labour Chair of a Select Committee says one thing while Labour Front Benchers say another.

This is not just about money; it is also about jobs. It is about the caterers, cleaners and groundskeepers who will lose their jobs if these schools close, and it will not necessarily be easy for them to find jobs to replace them. It is this Conservative Government who have introduced the successful multi-academy trusts and phonics; literacy and numeracy are up; and the disadvantage gap had narrowed before the pandemic. There is £7.7 billion from the spending review, and an extra £4.4 billion from the autumn statement. The Conservatives are on the side of teachers, on the side of parents and on the side of pupils. It is a shame that the Labour party is not.

Energy (oil and gas) profits levy

Debate between Anna Firth and Jonathan Gullis

Tuesday 22nd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anna Firth]

I very much hope we are not going to see tax rises. On the Government Benches, we are absolutely committed to protecting hard-working people, but at the moment we have heard no clarity—my hon. Friend is absolutely right—from the Opposition. There has to be a doubt that under their policy, taxes will go up on hard-working people.

The second point is that we have heard a lot about benefits not going up in line with inflation—another extraordinary comment. I remind Opposition Members that the OBR forecast that UK inflation will be 9.1% this year, going down to 7.4% next year. So, on the contrary, rather than our uprating of benefits not being enough, our uprating of benefits to inflation at over 10% is generous. Again, that is helping the most vulnerable.

Thirdly, we are keeping energy bills down for every single household across the country. Fourthly, on top of that, we are offering direct support for 8 million low-income households to the tune of £900 per household. Then, of course, we come to the triple lock. When the Conservatives came into coalition Government in 2010, pensioner poverty was a real issue. It was one of the legacies we were left to sort out. Since then, over the last 12 years, which we are harangued about regularly, we have protected pensioners. We brought in the triple lock and we have now restored it—the biggest ever cash rise for every single recipient of state pension ever next April. But more than that, for the poorest pensioners, pension credit will go up and be linked to inflation. Again, there will be £1,470 for a pensioner couple and another £960 for a single pensioner. That is before we get to more funding for the NHS and schools. People would think that we were not funding our NHS at all when, in fact, we are increasing the spending on the NHS to £166 billion, the highest amount ever.

[Jonathan Gullis]

My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech about the extra £4.4 billion going into schools over the next two years, but she should add that the Department for Education secured a successful spending review 2021, which included an additional £7 billion over the spending review period. We have more than £10 billion extra going into education, and we have been congratulated on that by many in the sector and by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, for example.

[Anna Firth]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I am extremely grateful to the Chancellor for listening to all those in the sector, and my hon. Friend is a fantastic advocate for schools in his constituency.

My question is this: if we have failed to make the right choices, which of all those compassionate choices do Opposition Members not like? What would their response have been if we had not made them? I think we all know: there would have been absolute outrage and we would have been roundly accused of being uncompassionate. I will take no lectures from Opposition Members about this not being a compassionate statement.

At the heart of the autumn statement is a commitment to economic stability, tackling inflation and growth. There are many paths to prosperity, but they all begin with economic stability. Without economic stability, Southend’s brilliant life sciences sector, with our globally leading companies such as Olympus KeyMed and ESSLAB, cannot innovate and expand. Without economic stability, Southend’s fantastic exporters such as Ipeco and Borough plating cannot conquer new markets. Without economic stability, Southend’s wonderful entrepreneurs, such as Tapp’d Cocktails and Adventure Island, cannot flourish. And without economic stability, Southend’s world-famous, 1,000-year-old cockle industry, based in Old Leigh, cannot invest in new plant and equipment. Economic stability is a down-payment on creating lasting economic growth, which we need if we are going to get the tax take to tackle inequality, improve our public services and provide opportunities for everyone in our society.

If we are going to drive up future economic growth and productivity, we must ensure that the UK economy is the most innovative in the world. The Chancellor was right to point out that in Britain we have a national genius for innovation, but we must invest in and encourage it. That is why I particularly welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to investing in research and development. The increase of more than a third is the largest in R&D spending ever. We know that every pound invested in R&D returns 25% every year forever, and that for every pound spent by Government on research and development, private sector R&D output rises by 20p a year in perpetuity. In other words, the more we invest in R&D, the more we create the high-paid, high-skilled jobs of the future.

If anyone is in any doubt about the importance of research and development in this country, they can consider covid. It is because 25% of the world’s top 100 prescription medicines were discovered and developed in the UK that those companies were able to use their expertise to create our world-beating coronavirus vaccine, assisted—I am proud to say—by using products developed in Southend West by Olympus KeyMed. The increase in research and development spending will allow our companies to develop new, transformative ideas, to innovate and to flourish. I would welcome a meeting with the Chancellor to explore how Southend West’s businesses can benefit from the new spending.

As well as being a fantastic example of a British city that has world-class innovation and is home to 3,700 businesses, Southend has an inspirational University of Essex campus. As the Chancellor has said, we must leverage the opportunities that Brexit has offered and build on our strengths; Southend is the perfect location for one of the new cluster-style investment zones based around universities. We are situated at the gateway to the Thames, an area with huge potential for economic development. It has the potential to double its economy and create 1,300 new jobs over the next 25 years. The new city of Southend is ideally placed to be a world-leading life sciences hub, with businesses and the University of Essex working together.

I welcome the Chancellor’s ongoing commitment to levelling up the country. I particularly welcome his commitment that funds will be forthcoming for the levelling-up projects that have been bid for, because in Southend we are set to benefit from £20 million of levelling-up money, a large portion of which is going towards upgrading the port of Old Leigh in my constituency. That will help our cockle industry, which is one of the oldest and already one of the greenest in the world, but we want to go further.

We are coming to the end of a 30-year licensing cycle, so it is now time to plan for the next 1,000 years of Leigh’s cockle industry. We need a new state-of-the-art processing centre so that our cockles do not need to be taken all over the place. Cockles landed in Old Leigh need to be processed in Old Leigh. I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment on LUF2 money. May I put in an early bid for levelling-up funds to come to Old Leigh and finish the job by creating a clean, green industry fit for the next 1,000 years of shellfish fishing?

Levelling up is not just about businesses, but about our public services. I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to increase the core schools budget by £2.3 billion in each of the next two years, which will benefit all 29 of Southend West’s wonderful schools. I also welcome the £3.3 billion of extra funding for our NHS in both of the next two years, which raises our NHS spending to the highest amount ever. It cannot be said that the NHS is not being looked after or that it is not safe on our watch; it plainly is, although of course there are stresses. Our doctors and nurses in Southend are doing an absolutely wonderful job and are innovating because of the pressure on A&E.

We now have the new ambulance handover unit that I and other south Essex MPs have campaigned so hard for, but I would like to press the Chancellor on one area. He has mentioned his commitment to the capital spending programme for hospitals. Ever since I was elected, as many hon. Members know, I have been pushing for the capital promised to us in 2017 to be forthcoming. Some £51 million was promised for essential renovations at Southend University Hospital. We need £7 million of enabling funding to move on to the next stage. I have been calling for that funding in every place I have managed to get into, and I do so again. I would like to meet the Chancellor at the earliest possible moment and make a plan for the delivery of that long-awaited essential funding.

I would like to finish by congratulating the Chancellor on his outstanding autumn statement, which will deliver economic stability. As the Prime Minister said in his Mais lecture earlier this year, we need an economy

“where businesses are investing more; where people of all ages are supported to learn; and, most importantly, where ideas and innovation constantly transform our lives.”

I believe that this autumn statement sets the UK on a course to delivering just that.