Public Disorder

Hazel Blears Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. and learned Friend makes a good point, and obviously we will look again at the guidance. Let me be clear: there was no instruction to police officers to stand back, but as I have said, and I think police chiefs have been very frank about this, the balance between what is right for public order and what is right for stopping criminality—looting and thieving—was not got right to start with. They admit that, they accept that, but they were—to be fair to the police, who do a very difficult job on behalf of us all—facing a new set of circumstances. Yes, they have had riots before; yes, they have had looting before; and, yes, there has been violence and vandalism; but we have not in our country before had the same thing happening in different places with different people all doing it at the same time. That was a challenge for the police—a challenge that I believe they are now meeting excellently—but they did not get everything right to start with and they are the first to admit that.

[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Prime Minister for his telephone call yesterday. What happened in Salford on Tuesday night was not about protest; it was about deliberate, organised, violent criminality. Will he give his full backing to the police to intervene in such circumstances? Some officers, who did not have riot gear and were not trained, had instructions to stand by and watch what happened. The effect on public confidence is devastating, so will he ensure that the police have the backing and confidence to review the guidance so that we never again see the police fall back in the face of a violent mob, as we saw on our streets?

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Lady speaks with all the authority of a former policing Minister who knows this issue well and, I know, discussed it with the chief constable of Greater Manchester. Clearly, what happened in Salford was unacceptable, and tragically it reversed very many good years of excellent work, breaking up gangs and taking on organised criminals, and I suspect that what happened is that those gangs and criminals saw it as an opportunity to reassert themselves. All those lessons must be learned, and I know that the Greater Manchester police chief, to whom I too have spoken, wants to learn those lessons. It is not right ever to cede control of our streets to hooligans, which is what happened briefly in Salford, but we have to rest with the operational judgment of police chiefs when they are on the streets, and the time to learn the lessons is now.