Preventing Crime and Delivering Justice

Anna McMorrin Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)]

We know that the backdrop to this year’s Queen’s Speech is one of real concern and worry. People up and down the country are terrified as they work out how to manage their ever-thinning finances. Working people are having to make sacrifices themselves to feed their children and choose between eating and heating. After 12 years of Tory rule, we are seeing the fabric of our society and our communities being ripped out: services decimated, with no plan in place to put them right, inflation and interest rates going up and a recession now looming.

What are we supposed to say to our children and young people? How are we supposed to reassure them, after 12 years of Tory Government, that they can achieve whatever they want in their future? What is their future? Some children have only ever known a country in which a community centre houses both a food bank and a polling station, or where services are so decimated that there is nothing to do and nowhere to go—consequences of this Tory Government. Those children deserve better. Cardiff North, my constituency, deserves better. Britain deserves better, and after the local elections we know the British people want better. The election results told us that. I am proud that in Cardiff North we have gone from three Labour councillors to 11, and now there are no Tory councils anywhere in Wales.

The Tory-shattering results across Britain saw them lose nearly 500 seats and strongholds such as Monmouth in Wales, Wandsworth and Westminster. I give a special shout-out to Cardiff North’s own Paul Fisher, who won a seat here in Westminster against the odds. Labour is a renewed, confident party, but the Conservatives are tired and mired in scandal, with their own candidates even refusing to put the party logo on their election materials.

Right now, people up and down this country are working hard and paying more, but getting less. They need solutions, not tired, empty rhetoric and political soundbites. I am inundated with emails, stopped on the street in Cardiff North and asked again and again what I can do to get this Tory Government to help hard-working families who are seeing bills escalate and having to make huge sacrifices.

One of my constituents, Linda, an elderly pensioner who is struggling to make ends meet, told me that what the Government are doing,

“is torturous and will kill people slowly”—

grave and sinister words to be hearing in 2022. The Government’s announcements yesterday do nothing to help to curb the crisis that is crippling her and others in our communities. Here, the Prime Minister is more concerned with saving his own skin than with tackling the real issues that families face: rising prices and taxes and stagnating wages. At every opportunity, the Government have failed to step up and support struggling families.

Where is the windfall tax on oil and gas producers, to save households up to £600, or the much-needed emergency Budget? Perhaps the cost of living crisis is simply a joke to this Government. We saw the Housing Secretary take to the airwaves this morning mimicking and laughing at calls for an emergency Budget. This is not a laughing matter. People need real help right now. Meanwhile, oil and gas producers announce seismic growth—billions—in their profits, propped up by this Government, while they themselves have welcomed our suggestion of a windfall tax to help hard-working families. But the Tories are not on the side of working families—15 Tory tax rises in just two years is evidence of that.

What of the way that Ministers run their Departments, creating chaos and confusion? With many of them too busy focusing on the chaos of their own internal affairs, they are letting criminals off the hook and letting victims down. I am afraid that the hostile environment at the Home Office is just stark. I know that many hard-working civil servants are doing the best they can under these difficult circumstances, but there is only so much they can do under the disconcerting leadership of this Home Secretary. It is clear that the Home Office is not fit for purpose.

Innocent women and children in Ukraine are being targeted, gunned down, beaten, raped and murdered; indiscriminate attacks have continued to destroy homes, hospitals and schools; and Russian rockets strike railway stations. People are rightly fleeing the horrors of war and seeking sanctuary. I feel very fortunate that under a Welsh Labour Government, Wales is a nation of sanctuary for refugees and super-sponsor of those fleeing Ukraine. It is absolutely heartwarming to see how many people in Cardiff North have signed up to the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

The incompetence of the Home Office is having a human cost as it continues to “lose” applications of the families my constituents are sponsoring. My constituent Sarah stopped me in the street a few weeks ago. She has written about this and we have tried to help. She is sponsoring a Ukrainian family with a severely disabled son. They have been unable to flee because their son needs extra assistance, and they were kept waiting and waiting, terrified, because the Home Office lost their visa application. Another of my constituents, Maria, who sponsored a mother and baby, was in utter distress as a Home Office error meant that only the mother was granted a visa, meaning that she would have had to leave her baby behind. This is unimaginable. What a mess to put these families through who are facing such horrors in their own country.

This chaos is affecting not only refugees trying to enter the country, but our own citizens because the Tories are levelling down our communities. Crime is blighting our neighbourhoods because of the 12 years of chronic underfunding to our police forces, our local communities and our services. Victims of crime are being let down and criminals let off the hook. With crime up by 18% under this Home Secretary, prosecutions down and criminals getting off, the Conservatives are clearly not taking crime seriously. The Bills announced in this Queen’s Speech do nothing to change that.

We have had six years of waiting for a victims Bill—a victims law. Time and again, under six Justice Secretaries, we have seen no Bill. Under the Tories, hundreds of thousands more criminals are being let off the hook. Victims are being let down and losing faith in the criminal justice system. This Tory Government are playing with people’s lives. Of the 300 women across England and Wales who, sadly, are raped, only about 170 of those rapes are reported, while just three make it to a court of law. That is before we even consider the failure of prosecution rates, which have gone down from 8.5% in 2015 to just 1.3%. That demonstrates that victims are nothing more than an afterthought for this Tory Government.

Lastly, what of the climate crisis, the biggest challenge we are facing? Based on the Queen’s Speech yesterday, it is one that this Government are hellbent on ignoring. Just a few hours ago, The Guardian published an investigation that has found that oil giants are secretly planning 195 carbon bombs—short-term oil and coal projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO₂ emissions from China, the world’s biggest polluter. Each carbon bomb would result in at least a billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions over their lifetime and have catastrophic global impacts, yet nothing announced yesterday by this Government will help avert climate catastrophe. We have a Government who are so caught up in their own mess that they are sending us along a path to our own destruction. We need leadership on this, and the gap between the Government’s empty promises and real climate action is disturbing.

Failure to put sustainability and net zero at the heart of the Government’s new legislative agenda is a betrayal of future generations. Delivering net zero and nature recovery is the only way to protect people and planet and to create valuable, well-paid, highly skilled jobs and resilient communities. The energy Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech yesterday is welcome, but will it include those important elements that we need to see? Will it invest in those crucial green jobs? Prioritising energy efficiency, for example, is critical in tackling the cost of living crisis.

By 2025, energy efficiency, clean heat and renewables alone could replace four times the gas we currently import from Russia. The energy Bill is a chance to make right the absences from the energy security strategy by prioritising renewables and energy-efficiency measures that offer a win-win for consumers, business and the environment. We need a mass retrofit programme, slashing household bills, cutting emissions and investing in skills. We know that new onshore renewables are six times cheaper than the cost of running gas plants, but we are yet to see a single piece of evidence that further licensing in either the North sea or fracking would increase UK energy security or lower bills. No more warm words—we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get this right. It is imperative that this Government match deeds with words.

This Queen’s Speech is little more than a vanity project delivered with the intention of winning back favour with the public. Instead of neglecting and decimating our communities, letting victims down and letting criminals off the hook, let us invest in a nation that we can be proud of. Only Labour can do that.