Ten-Year Drugs Strategy

Debate between George Howarth and Kit Malthouse

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his words of encouragement. It has been an enormous effort across the whole of Government to put this plan together. I congratulate my team, and I thank my fellow Ministers who have worked on putting it in place. My hon. Friend is quite right that we need to focus very much on drugs in the home. The funding that is put in place, although it is routed through the Department of Health and Social Care, will go to local authorities, which will then be able to design their own services locally to fit their own requirements and demographic. Some of that might be in the home, some of it might be residential, and some of it might be on an out-patient basis. We do not want to be prescriptive at this stage, but this will be channelled through local authorities, which can design services appropriately.

[Sir George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I welcome the measures set out in the Government’s new strategy and the funding that goes with it. I particularly welcome the emphasis on disrupting supplies and dealing with those who already have addiction problems. One piece of the jigsaw that seems to be missing, although I may have missed it, is targeting of so-called drug barons and the extent to which money laundering is going on in this country, always through legitimate businesses and increasingly, I think, through some private landlords. Will the Minister say a word about how the Government intend to tackle that specific problem?

Birmingham Attacks and Extinction Rebellion Protests

Debate between George Howarth and Kit Malthouse

Monday 7th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I obviously recognise the challenges, in urban areas of this country in particular, and I know that the hon. Lady will be pleased to hear that we have provided many millions of pounds of surge funding to West Midlands police, alongside money for the violence reduction unit and, of course, the money to allow the uplift in the numbers of police officers. At some point this autumn, I will be visiting that force again to talk about its murder prevention strategy. I will then be able to take a better view about how prepared it is to help us in the fight against this kind of crime.

[Sir George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab) [V]]

On behalf of the people of Knowsley, may I express our solidarity with the people of Birmingham? In a free society, peaceful protest is important, as is a free press, but does the Minister agree that that does not extend the right to any group to prevent the people of Knowsley from going about their lawful business? Will he also confirm that the police have all the powers they need to prevent the unfortunate events that took place in Knowsley and elsewhere over the weekend from being repeated?

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s support, and he is right to say that, beyond the freedom of speech arguments, the workers in that plant would have been significantly affected and probably unable to leave work that evening. We are constantly reviewing the powers that the police have. Merseyside police managed to deal pretty effectively with that protest, having it cleared by 10.45 the next morning, but it is our duty constantly to ensure that we review police powers in the light of new and emerging tactics, and that is exactly what we will do.

Retail Workers: Protection

Debate between George Howarth and Kit Malthouse

Tuesday 11th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service (Kit Malthouse)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I make no complaint that this subject has been brought up twice in three months. It is obviously extremely important and affects all our constituents in many ways.

Frankly, I have experienced this issue myself. When I was a young man, as a relatively penniless student, I worked behind a bar in a pub for about six months. I well remember the tension when denying another drink to those who had perhaps drunk a little too much. I am a big fellow, and if I felt threatened, there is no question but that people who do not quite have my physical stature might have felt deeply anxious and threatened. Fortunately, I never faced violence, but I am aware that lots do. As an MP representing a constituency with a small town in it, I am aware of the violence prevalent on the high street, and particularly in retail premises.

In the debate back in November, on the last day of the last Parliament, I took Members through the initial findings of the call for evidence. To be honest, although my speech was going to rehearse that again, it sounds as if people are a little more interested in a sense of action and movement, so with the forbearance of Members I will skip to that part. Having sat as a Back Bencher through a lot of ministerial speeches, I have found that there is quite a lot of flannel in a lot of them, and this is an area in which we need to see action more swiftly.

First, we will publish the response to the call for evidence next month; it will come shortly, in the next few weeks. I hope that that will be the start of action, not the end. I refer everybody to the speech I gave back in November, which indicated some alarming developments in violence towards retail workers and, sadly, the sense that that community of workers is starting to feel that it is just an acceptable part of their existence, which, from our point of view, is completely unacceptable. There is much more that we can do.

Secondly, as I am sure Members know, we co-chair the national retail crime steering group with the British Retail Consortium, through which we can do a number of things. One key theme coming through from the call for evidence is about really understanding the data and what is going on and disseminating that to the organisations that need to be doing something about it, both private and public. I will set up an intelligence-sharing group, made up of some members of the steering group, to work through what the data tells us and some of the practical solutions that we need, and then to report back to the wider group, which can help to implement this on a national scale.

Another thing that came through was about messaging effectively—to customers and staff—about the unacceptability of violence in a retail environment. As mentioned by the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas), we should take a zero-tolerance approach towards this sort of violence, so a second group will try to develop some of that effective messaging, which we then hope to promote among retailers, learning from some of the good practice we have seen in sectors elsewhere and trying to bring the worst up to the standard of the best.

Thirdly, there is a big job for policing in terms of violence generally across our streets, but in retail in particular. As a couple of Members mentioned, we are recruiting 20,000 extra police officers by the end of the next 36 months. We will have to replace all the ones who retired as well, so the overall target will be to recruit between 40,000 and 50,000 over the next three years. It is a huge task, but it has nevertheless started well, and the first batch of recruits are already out and in training, on top of some of the recruits put in place last year off the budget settlement that policing got then.

Critically, we said that those first 6,000 police officers, whom we are relatively confident we will get in the first 12 months, have been designated to be territorial police officers, so they will be out in our communities and on the streets, able to respond to incidents that take place in a retail environment. That is an investment of something like £750 million, and it is the first instalment of a three-year programme that we hope and believe will significantly increase the police presence in our high streets and shops. We have also given the Crown Prosecution Service an extra £85 million to enhance its ability to prosecute.

I am conscious that my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) raised the issue of making sure that our police and crime commissioners and chief constables are aware of the issues around the £200 limit. I will write to them all to point out that the £200 limit is optional. It is no brake on their ability to prosecute or arrest somebody, which is effectively for their judgment. I will also include in that letter a requirement for chief constables and police and crime commissioners to examine their data too, to understand what is happening and to respond to concerns in their own communities about this kind of crime in the priorities that they set in their police and crime plans. Hon. Members will be aware that police and crime commissioner elections are coming up in May. This is such an important issue that I think all candidates should be apprised of it. We should put it on their agenda, so I will write to them as well.

That is the start of what I hope will be a huge collective effort to combat violence in retail and generally across the country.

[Sir George Howarth]

The Minister will have noticed that several colleagues raised sentencing and available sentences. Is he able to say anything about that?