County Lines Drug Trafficking

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

It is right that we should put children at the focus of county line activity. By that, I mean preventing children from being involved in county lines, not criminalising those children who are involved in county lines but seeing them, as I think my noble friend indicated, as victims who need our support. I will take away her contribution and discuss it with my right honourable friend the Police Minister, see what steps are being taken to do that, and contact my noble friend accordingly.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, more than 27,000 suspected drug suppliers are either on bail or released under investigation due to forensic and digital backlogs. One in five of those cases has been going on for more than a year, and currently there are more than 25,000 digital devices waiting to be examined. While a government funding boost is always welcome, what is being done specifically to address the lack of regional and national co-ordination and the insufficient numbers of trained forensic personnel?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a valid point, and I will start from that premise. The Government have put an extra £1.1 billion into police forces with the police settlement that was approved by the House of Commons just a few weeks ago, and that is providing a range of functions. It is for police forces, chief constables and police and crime commissioners to determine the use of that resource locally, but she makes a valuable point about co-ordination and central management, which I will continue to reflect on because we need to ensure that there is not a backlog. The amount of digital material we have on our phones now—Twitter contents, phone calls, texts, Facebook messages and everything else—means that when someone is arrested there is a giant amount of digital information, and that is growing daily and monthly. It is important that we focus in on getting the right digital information to ensure convictions and drive up the conviction rate from the figure that I mentioned for between July and September last year, and that means tackling the backlog that the noble Baroness has rightly mentioned.