Immigration and Home Affairs

Dawn Butler Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Cleverly]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right; although it did not make its way through all its parliamentary stages, the proposals that we put in the Criminal Justice Bill strengthened the accountability framework for officers and strengthened police leadership to take action. Again, I hope that the Government will continue that incredibly important work, and once again I put on record my willingness to support them in ensuring that the disciplinary practices within policing give women the confidence to come forward.

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

Is it not true that the net number of police is lower after 14 years of Tory Government? There has been a net loss to policing. Does the shadow Home Secretary agree that the reason we have not hit our numbers in London for the Met Police is that we are in special measures, and there needs to be caution over the police who are recruited? We need to ensure there are good police officers, so it is about quality, not just quantity.

[Mr Cleverly]

I disagree with the hon. Lady’s assessment of police numbers. That does not accord with the figures that I have seen. Police numbers are up, and we had plans to recruit even more. I get the party loyalty towards the Mayor of London, but the simple fact of the matter is that all police forces have to ensure that there are vetting procedures in place. The vetting procedures for the Metropolitan Police are no more onerous than for other forces around the country, yet many other police forces, including my own, have record numbers of police officers. The Metropolitan Police is the best-funded police force per capita in the country, and yet, with all the freedoms that the Mayor of London has and with all the money that was put on the table, he has failed to recruit the police officers that the capital city needs. That has an impact not just on people who live and work in London, but on visitors and people who travel through it.

In a constantly evolving criminal landscape, we delivered the online fraud charter. It was a world-first agreement, with 12 of the biggest tech companies as signatories, proactively to block and remove fraudulent content from their platforms. Facebook, Instagram and Amazon were among those key signatories. We introduced the National Security Act 2023 and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, and we proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir, Terrorgram and the Wagner Group, to make promotion and membership of those organisations illegal.

To conclude, the right hon. Lady has a tough job. Home Secretary will always be a tough job. However, during our time in government we ensured that she has more police officers at her disposal, an effective small boats operational command, an effective immigration enforcement command and a suite of legislation to allow her to match the rhetoric of the campaign to her action in government.

The Home Secretary has inherited falling met migration figures, a growing economy and a large parliamentary majority to ensure she gets her business through the House. While we will be critical when the Government make mistakes and will seek to ensure that they do the right thing, we all have a desire for her Department to succeed and indeed an interest in its doing so. On that point, I wish her the very best of luck.

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[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member makes a really important point: this is about all of us, and Northern Ireland has some of the highest levels of domestic abuse murder. This issue is immensely serious, and the safeguarding Minister is already planning to have those discussions, because we should all be learning from each other about what it takes to save lives and keep people safe.

We will bring in new powers on antisocial behaviour, including new respect orders and new action on off-road bikes, which are dangerous and deafening and are being used to terrorise some communities. We will also take action against the soaring shoplifting that has seen supermarkets chain butter, cheese and fabric conditioner to the shelves, reversing the previous Conservative policy on low-value theft, and we will stand up against the appalling violence against shop workers. For years, the Co-op, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, major retailers, small shop owners and shop workers across the country have urged us to strengthen the law against assaults on shop workers, and through this King’s Speech, we will do so.

We will also increase standards in policing, including through mandatory vetting standards across forces and improvements around misconduct.

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

On the topic of mandatory vetting, does my right hon. Friend agree that we should also have psychological testing for the police? Some of the incidents that have been brought to light, such as the kidnapping and killing of Sarah Everard and the pictures taken of Bibaa and Nicole in Brent, are appalling and can only be done by people who have lost compassion in their job.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Some of this is about the vetting standards before people are appointed as police officers, but some of it is about the culture that can operate within forces—or small groups within forces—that always needs to be challenged, including by leadership. We want to see national vetting standards.

Let us be clear: there are police officers who do an incredible job every day of the week to keep us all safe, while also showing immense bravery. For 14 years running, I have been to the police bravery awards to hear incredible stories of heroism, but those brave officers are badly let down—just as communities are badly let down—when other officers fail to meet those standards or when they abuse the power they have. That is why the standards and safeguarding issues are so important.

Turning to knife crime, no parent should have to lie in bed worrying that a son or daughter might not come home. One of the hardest things is to talk to parents who are grieving—who stand with a photo in a frame, because that is all they have. It is important that all our communities take action to prevent our young people from being dragged into crime and violence. The King’s Speech means new laws to get dangerous knives off the streets, such as ninja swords of the type that was used to kill 16-year-old Ronan Kanda near his home in Wolverhampton two years ago. I pay tribute to the tireless campaigning of Pooja, Ronan’s mother. We will also set up a radical new Young Futures prevention programme to stop our teenagers being drawn into a life of violent crime, bringing services together around young people in the way that the last Labour Government’s Sure Start programme did for our youngest children. It will be a programme for teenagers, to help them get back on track.

We will also bring forward new legislation on borders, security and immigration. Legal migration has trebled in the past five years; the biggest driver has been overseas recruitment, with work visas soaring because the last Government ran what was effectively a free-market, laissez-faire approach to both the economy and the immigration system. They completely failed to tackle skills shortages: areas such as engineering have been on the shortage list for decades if not generations, never having a proper programme. We have seen the number of engineering visas go up while the number of engineering apprenticeships has gone down. We have to turn that around, which is why, as well as continuing with visa controls, we will draw up new arrangements to link the points-based system with new skills plans. That is why the Education Secretary has drawn up plans for Skills England.