Angiolini Inquiry Report

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

The hon. Lady makes a number of points about the implementation of the changes that we are making. I cannot give precise timescales at the moment, because this piece of work is ongoing and recently initiated, but my desire is for these things to happen as quickly as possible. She is absolutely right that IT and systems changes are not instant, and I am impatient to get improvement, which is why I keep saying that we are not waiting for these things to go forward. They are amplifiers and accelerators of what should be a fundamental change that we are looking to drive through immediately. The earliest conversations that I had when appointed as Home Secretary were on this issue with the College of Policing and with Lady Elish herself. One of those first meetings I had on my appointment was with Lady Elish about this report and the work that we could do to get ahead of the findings that she has put forward.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement. He will be clear that the overwhelming number of Metropolitan police officers are brave individuals who frequently put their life on the line to protect us all. That is key: such individuals want to see the bad apples rooted out and, indeed, never come into the police service in the first place. However, there are two aspects to the problems of the Metropolitan police: they are the one force in the country that failed to meet their recruitment targets in the past year; and the Mayor has yet to provide the funding from his budget to enable the cultural change that we need to see in the Metropolitan police. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we have to ensure that standards do not slip in recruitment—they should be enforced—and that the funding needs to be provided to change the culture of the Metropolitan police, as we would all like to see?

[James Cleverly]

My hon. Friend rightly draws attention to the fact that London’s police and crime commissioner is the Mayor of London. He therefore has a duty to ensure that the police force over which he has political control changes, and changes in the way that has been highlighted through the inquiry and in the part 1 findings of the inquiry.

My hon. Friend is also absolutely right that even though many of the forces across the country are at the largest they have ever been in terms of numbers, that is sadly not true of the Metropolitan police, but there absolutely must be no sacrifice of quality of vetting in order to hit the recruitment targets that we have made it clear we expect the Metropolitan police to hit. We want the Metropolitan police to be a well recruited force, and the funding has been put on the table—it has not been fully utilised by the Mayor, but the funding has been put on the table—to enable the Met to be that. The force needs to be populated with good, professional officers. That is the bar, the minimum standard we expect. We expect all leadership, uniformed and political, to abide by that philosophy.