Police Officer Safety

Debate between David T C Davies and Andy Burnham

Wednesday 2nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

I am delighted to be able to speak in this important debate, and I am glad that the Opposition have secured it. I spent nine years as a special constable, during which time I was assaulted—once in a police station, of all places, although not by another police officer. I echo many of the comments that have been made by Members from all parts of the House.

I am particularly keen on sentencing. It is fantastic that Members from all parts of the House are saying firmly that they want stronger sentences for people who commit assaults on police officers. I have stood here many times over a decade or more, as a Government Member and an Opposition Member, and argued that prison works, prison is effective, prison keeps people safe and prison acts as a deterrent. Many times, I have been intervened on by Opposition Members—and, sometimes, by Government Members—who have told me otherwise. There seems to be a strong consensus here, however, and I thoroughly support that.

I thoroughly support the use of Tasers. At the moment, all police officers are equipped with pepper spray or CS gas, as was the case when I started, and a long, retractable stick of metal called an ASP, which is basically a long baton. The problem is that the baton has to be used quite close up, and there is a risk of causing a severe injury by striking somebody in any way with a baton. Police officers are trained to use a baton against the legs and arms, but that is difficult to do in the sorts of situations where those batons are pulled out. The advantage of Tasers is that people can stand 10 or 15 feet away and point it. The vast majority of times when a Taser is used, all the police officer has to do is to draw it and draw to the potential offender’s notice the fact that there is a red dot on their chest. The potential offender will very often desist from whatever they are doing and comply with the instructions they are given, without receiving any injury at all.

When I was a special, there was at one point a debate about the possibility of police officers being armed. I felt that I would never be able to do the job if I was armed with a firearm. I simply could not do that. I have the utmost respect for the highly trained officers who do, but the decision to use it is not something that I would ever want on my conscience. Using a Taser is something else. It is a far less offensive weapon than the retractable iron bar with which all police officers are equipped.

[Andy Burnham]

I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman’s argument, but he will be aware of a case earlier this year in Telford where the footballer Dalian Atkinson was killed in an incident. We do not know all the circumstances, and generally I support the use of Tasers, but does the hon. Gentleman not think that that case should give us pause for thought before we go for a major roll-out?

[David T. C. Davies]

It should. We could go into the details of why people sometimes die as a result of Taser use, and it is very rare for that to happen, but that should certainly give us pause for thought. If the alternative is a police officer waving around an iron bar, which could easily strike somebody on the head and similarly injure them very badly or kill them, we have to look at what is the lesser of two evils. For me, the use of Tasers is the lesser of two evils.

I want to go quickly through a couple of other points. I, too, support the use of body cameras. They will enable people to see the problems that police officers face and help to bring more people to justice. I worry, however, that some people may see them as another way of being able to criticise the police. It is very important that people understand two things. First, police officers are under stress when they are threatened by a large group telling them, “We’re going to kill you. We’re going to attack you now.” That has happened to me and, frankly, it creates a certain amount of fear. I could not have admitted that at the time, but it does. Police officers cannot get away from the threat in front of them, and one of the ways they deal with it is to become quite aggressive in their language, and certainly in their gestures and sometimes in their behaviour. People must understand that when they look at camera footage. Secondly, it is a fact that when police officers have finished dealing with such a situation, they sometimes go back into the station and make comments or use language that some people, taking that out of context, may feel is inappropriate. We will have to be grown up and understand that when we look at camera footage.

I worry that the use of cameras by protesters at demonstrations is quite often a means to criticise the police very unfairly. For example, I have seen pictures in national newspapers of police officers looking very fierce and holding up an ASP as though ready to strike somebody. They are doing that because that is what they are trained to do. By the time a police officer has to draw a retractable baton, they are expected to behave in an aggressive fashion. There is no point waving it gently around saying, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind going home now?” By the time that thing is out, people must realise that the police officer means business, and they very often do so. I am worried about the way in which such cameras are used.

I will not be able to sum it up in one minute and 20 seconds, but there is a wider issue, which is the need to consider the whole way in which the police force is structured. It seems to me that we take everyone and train them to be out on the streets, but we can give them only two days training a year in how to use handcuffs, restraints, batons and all the rest of it, which is not enough for those who are going to end up in conflict situations.

I can absolutely say from bitter and true experience—most officers would reflect this—that all the stuff taught during those two days in the gym soon goes out of the window. It all looks very good in training, but once it happens for real, there is just a mass of arms and legs and batons and heavens knows what flying around all over the place, and it does not look good. Yet many police officers frankly do not need to be put in such situations. Those who deal with cybercrime need to be IT experts; they do not need to be able to run after people and catch them. Those who deal with financial crimes need to be accountants. Even those dealing with and investigating serious crimes need to have a lawyer’s mind, rather than be able to run 100 metres in 10 seconds. I sometimes think that we could look at the different jobs being done in the police force and consider whether we need police officers to have all the skills that we currently require them to have. I will not have enough time to go into further details, but I want to say one more thing. It behoves us all as Members of Parliament to support the police, not to pander to groups or organisations that are there to criticise them.

Immigration Bill

Debate between David T C Davies and Andy Burnham

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House, whilst affirming its belief that there should be firm and fair controls on illegal immigration including new immigration enforcement powers and immigration status checks on current account holders, and particularly welcoming proposals for a Director of Labour Market Enforcement and to strengthen sanctions to be applied to employers of illegal workers, declines to give a Second Reading to the Immigration Bill because the measures overall in the Bill will not decrease illegal immigration, will reduce social cohesion and will punish the children of illegal immigrants for their parents’ illegal immigration, because the Government has failed to publish the report on the pilot Right to Rent scheme in the West Midlands which could cause widespread indirect discrimination and because the Bill enables the Home Secretary to remove from the UK migrants who are appealing against a refused asylum claim before the appeal has been determined, notwithstanding the slow appeal process and the high error rate in Home Office decisions.

Let me start by setting this debate in an essential and important piece of context and with a point that the Home Secretary skated over at the start of her speech: the most recent evidence is clear—immigration provides a net benefit to our economy. It is not, as was claimed last week, “close to zero” but, according to authoritative and independent research, can be quantified at around £25 billion. That migrants contribute more to the public purse than they take out is a simple fact that cannot be repeated often enough in debates such as this. Similarly, in the NHS, we are far more likely to be treated by a migrant than to stand behind one in a queue. The culture and identity of our country—for centuries an open, outward-looking, seafaring nation—has itself been shaped by centuries of inward immigration, and it is all the richer for it.

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

When I was on the Home Affairs Committee a few years, I put that very point to experts and I was told that nobody had ever worked out the costs of migration—the costs of providing health care, education and all the other public services that people take for granted—and done a proper cost-benefit analysis. Therefore I should like to know where the report that the right hon. Gentleman refers to comes from.

[Andy Burnham]

I can refer the hon. Gentleman to it. It is research carried out over a number of years by Imperial College, and I will be happy to send it to him. I suggest that he should perhaps spend more time looking at the evidence about immigration, rather than resorting to rhetoric, as I know he is wont to do.

All of that having been said at the beginning, the nature and scale of immigration to the UK has changed in the past decade, particularly since the expansion of the European Union into eastern Europe. Anyone who spent any length of time on doorsteps in the first half of this year cannot dispute the fact that immigration remains one of the highest concerns of the public, and the truth is that public and political debate has failed to keep pace with public concern, resulting in a feeling that the political class is out of touch.

National Health Service

Debate between David T C Davies and Andy Burnham

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies]

I agree with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald). The reality is that Labour Secretaries of State said over and over again that they were quite happy to use the private sector, and they did. They were probably right to do so in many instances, and we have continued to do so. There has been no departure from that policy.

[Andy Burnham]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have always to correct the record when these statements are made. I apologise for delaying the House, but I am going to carry on doing it. I did not put it out to tender; it was a process I inherited, and in the middle of that process I changed the policy from “any willing provider” to “NHS preferred provider”. Contrary to what the Secretary of State said at the Dispatch Box, NHS Peterborough and Stamford was still in the race.

NHS Services (Access)

Debate between David T C Davies and Andy Burnham

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I am glad that my hon. Friend raised that point, as again it highlights the major difference between us and the Government. They were saying that we brought in private providers. Yes, that is true, but that was to bring down waiting lists for planned operations, such as hip and knee operations. As she has just rightly said, the Government are putting out to tender cancer services. That is a very different thing. The Government are presiding over a major increase in private ambulances providing blue light 999 services. That is a massively different policy from the one they inherited, which is why the points they have made simply do not hold water.

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making some emotional points here. Does he support the policies of his colleagues in Wales, and does he endorse the way in which they have dealt with the NHS in Wales?

[Andy Burnham]

I do get emotional about the NHS, because I believe in it, unlike the hon. Gentleman. That is fine, I do not mind—it does animate me. Let us have a look at Wales and, as I am about to come on to cancer care. In England, only 84% of patients receive treatment within 62 days. That is not good enough, and Wales has better figures on cancer care. The analysis of the four home nations’ health care systems found that there is good and bad in all of them and this Tory attack on the national health service in Wales has to stop.

I will move on to cancer and I will go back to the letter that I was quoting. It said:

“Thousands of patients are facing longer and even unacceptable waits to find out whether or not they have cancer, because services are under extreme pressure and referral targets are being missed.”

In 2014, 10,000 people in England had to wait longer than the recommended 62 days to start their cancer treatment. The number of patients waiting longer than six weeks for diagnostic tests has doubled in the past year—doubled, for cancer tests. That is simply not acceptable. We need to hear today what the Secretary of State is going to do about it and may I suggest that the very first thing he should do is stop the cuts to cancer care? A parliamentary question shows that expenditure on cancer services has fallen by £800 million in real terms since 2009-10; the information comes from his Department and I will send it to him. That is why the NHS has missed the cancer treatment target for two quarters running, the first time that it has ever done that.

The evidence is indisputable. The NHS has gone downhill on this Government’s watch and the question follows of what they are doing to bring GP, A and E and cancer services back up to national standards. That is what our motion and, more importantly, patients demand to know from the Secretary of State today, but they will also want to know why the NHS has gone from being a successful service four years ago to being at breaking point today. The front page of The Times on Monday offered us an answer. It quoted a senior Cabinet Minister who said:

“We’ve made three mistakes that I regret, the first being restructuring the NHS. The rest are minor.”

The Secretary of State is conveniently looking down and avoiding my eye at this point, but I am sure he has found out who that was. I am sure he knows. I know that he is avoiding looking at me, but is he prepared to tell us who it was or is he going to carry on with his head buried and avoiding—[Interruption.] He is blushing. I see that he has the good grace to do that, at least. It is an embarrassing comment, it really is, from a senior Cabinet Minister, but what use is it to people now, when people such as the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and I were pleading with the Government to stop the process, to admit that it was all a mistake? It is an embarrassing situation for the Secretary of State to deal with, but at least we have from the very top of this arrogant Government the first admission that their reorganisation was a major mistake.

The article goes on to quote an ally of the Chancellor, who says:

“George kicks himself for not having spotted it and stopped it.”

Not having spotted it? This was famously the reorganisation so big we could see it from space. Not spotted it? What planet was the Chancellor living on? The truth is that the Government could have and should have stopped the reorganisation for the simple reason that they were elected on a promise of no top-down reorganisation and did not have the permission of a single person in this land to carry it out. That is why Thursday 7 May 2015 will be their day of reckoning on the national health service.

If this private apology now is designed to bring people back on board, it will not work. Doctors and nurses lined up to plead with the Government to call the reorganisation off, but they ploughed on. In the words of Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association:

“The damage done to the NHS has been profound and intense”.

Let me focus on just one example of that damage, staffing costs, as the Secretary of State was talking about them this week. The staff census shows very clearly that in the early years of this Parliament, when spending on back-office restructuring was at its peak, front-line nursing posts were cut by about 7,000. At the same time, the reorganisation threw nurse training into chaos. Training places were cut and have never recovered, down from 21,000 a year to 18,000 today.

The NHS has been recruiting more staff in the wake of the Francis report, but this is where the damage done by the reorganisation is hitting NHS trusts. They are being forced to recruit overseas or to turn to agency staff because there are simply not enough nurses coming through the training system.

I have been contacted by a whistleblower from a trust in Liverpool who says that it is now common for staff to receive text messages from agencies such as Pulse offering huge fees—up to £1,000—to work weekends in London or the north-east, with all travel and accommodation costs paid. That is now the norm, and it is happening on this Secretary of State’s watch. Some nurses are literally taking off one uniform on a Friday night and putting on another for the weekend. That is why the agency bill is out of control, and it is happening on his watch.

In 2013-14 the NHS spent £2.6 billion on agency staff. For foundation trusts that is a staggering 162% over what was planned. That helps to explain why trust deficits are mounting. Does not this mismanagement of the staffing budget explain why the Government are now reneging on their promise to pay nurses a meagre 1% pay rise? Is not that the real reason? I wonder how the Secretary of State thinks those nurses will feel when they read this week that senior mangers’ pay has increased by 13.8% on this Government’s watch, while their pay has gone up by only 5%. I am told that he has refused to meet the unions even to discuss it. It is not good enough. He should get to the negotiating table tomorrow and start treating the staff of our national health service with the respect they deserve.

--- Later in debate ---

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

The Secretary of State and his Ministers will know that I have had cause to write to them, to e-mail them and even to meet them on numerous occasions to discuss the absolutely appalling second-rate NHS treatment that patients in my constituency are receiving. They are receiving such treatment from an NHS that is run entirely by the Labour party, which is enacting precisely the policies that Opposition Members wish to enact here. Those patients include Mariana Robinson, whom the Secretary of State was good enough to meet recently. She has waited months for diagnostic treatment for an illness that could well be cancer; she does not know what it is. She wants to be treated in England by the coalition-run national health service.

Those patients also include Mr Christmas in Abergavenny, a war veteran who is in his 80s. He had constant chronic pain in his tooth that was keeping him awake at night, but he was told that, despite his age and his war service, he would have to wait nine months for any form of treatment. In the end, he was forced to use his meagre savings to go private. Ann Wilkinson also wants to be treated in England. She has stated very publicly that she has cancer, but there is no cancer drugs fund in Wales and she wants to have access to Avastin. I believe that she will shortly present a petition in Parliament and in the Welsh Assembly demanding the same high standards in Wales that this coalition Government are already delivering in England.

Some Opposition Members, including the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), wanted to quote statistics.

[Andy Burnham]

The hon. Gentleman mentions access to cancer services. He might have heard me say earlier that the NHS here is missing its national cancer target, with more people waiting longer than 62 days. In England, only 84% of patients start to receive treatment within 62 days. Does he acknowledge that 90% of patients in Wales start their treatment within 62 days?

[David T. C. Davies]

When they have been diagnosed. The right hon. Gentleman has failed to point out that while only 2% of patients wait more than six weeks for diagnostic treatment in England, 33% of patients do so in Wales. That is absolutely disgraceful. If a situation in which 2% of patients are waiting more than six weeks is bad, what on earth are we to make of a situation in which 33%—one in three, or so—are waiting that long? I hope the hon. Gentleman would agree that that is a disgraceful situation.

The hon. Member for North Durham talked about ambulance response times and gave the House some interesting examples. However, the recent Nuffield report demonstrated that the worst ambulance response times in the United Kingdom were in Wales. We have accident and emergency targets, for those in Wales who are lucky enough make it into a hospital, but those targets have not been met since 2009. We have waiting list targets of 26 weeks, as opposed to the 18-week targets that apply in England. One in seven of the population in Wales is on a waiting list. That is what lies in store for people if they vote Labour at the next general election.

It was interesting that the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) was unwilling to say what she thought voters should do about people who wanted to cut NHS budgets. Despite all the Opposition rhetoric, this coalition Government have kept their promise and continued to fund the NHS. In real terms, we have increased its budget, whereas Labour—where it is in office—has cut NHS funding in real terms by about 8%. It cannot escape any of the blame for this. We heard about reorganisations earlier, and we have had several in Wales. We went from having five health boards to having 22 and then back to having seven. Not only has Labour been in power constantly, either completely or as the dominant party, ever since the Welsh Assembly was set up in 1999, but it has rammed those health boards full of Labour party supporters, failed parliamentary candidates, ex-Assembly Members, local councillors and the like. In one case, Labour put in a former general secretary of the TUC, who, I am guessing, is probably not a supporter of the Conservative party. Labour has politicised the health boards and it must therefore take complete responsibility for the shambles that has led to so many people wanting to be treated not in Wales but in England, by the coalition-run NHS.

No more damning example of all this can be given than the recent antics with the OECD, which is trying to carry out a comparison on NHS systems across the whole of the United Kingdom. The coalition Government are keen for that study to go ahead and are delighted with the opportunity to have themselves compared with Wales, and they should be; they have every reason to look forward to that. But of course the reaction in the Welsh Assembly has been one of absolute horror. I am told by very reliable sources that the Welsh Assembly Government cancelled the visit by OECD officials because they were so desperate to try to ensure that no report comes out before the general election. Of course, people watching this debate do not have to take the word of anyone in this room; they simply have to Google “Wales NHS waiting lists” or something similar to see story after story about people who have been badly treated by the NHS in Wales and want to be treated by the NHS run by the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), who is sitting on the Front Bench.

I could suggest much that would improve things. Ideally, I would like to see the power taken away from the Welsh Assembly, because it has simply made such a mess, but that is never going to happen. If Opposition Members are confident that they could do a good job with the NHS, they should support the OECD report, and get their colleagues in Wales to get behind it and bring it out as quickly as possible. They should allow funding to follow patients, so that where a patient from Wales wants to be treated in England, that should be able to happen, with the money simply deducted from the Welsh Assembly block grant. Of course, the same should apply vice versa; any patients from England who want to be treated in Wales should be allowed to have that chance—I do not see many doing that.

One of the more irritating bits of propaganda coming out of the Labour party is that it says that lots of people from England are being treated in Wales. That is true, as historically there have been people with Welsh GPs who have to be treated in Wales even though they live in England. However, these people have set up an action group called Action4OurCare and are trying to take legal action on this. These are normal patients, not party activists, who want to be treated by the coalition-run NHS.

About the only good thing that comes from all this is that Labour apparently wants to make the NHS one of the main planks of its election campaign. I say bring it on, because I cannot wait to debate the NHS with Labour party members all over the United Kingdom. I will ask them about Wales and the cuts to the budget, the lack of a cancer drugs fund, the long hospital waiting lists and the fact that its ambulance response times are the worst in the United Kingdom. I shall remind them that people are already voting with their feet—they are voting to get out of the Labour-run NHS in Wales and get into the coalition-run NHS in England. They will shortly have the opportunity to vote not with their feet but in the ballot, and I very much look forward to seeing them have the opportunity to do so.

Health

Debate between David T C Davies and Andy Burnham

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The shadow Secretary of State is clearly not going to give way at the moment.

[Andy Burnham]

The Prime Minister set his own test for his reorganisation: its effect on waiting times. This month, waiting times hit a six-year high. Almost 3 million people are now on the waiting list for treatment, up by half a million since 2010, but that is not all.

[David T. C. Davies]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The shadow Health Secretary does not seem to want to give way to anybody from Wales. Is there any reason for that, and could it be a case of discrimination of some sort?