Injury in Service Award

Jess Asato Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jess Asato (Lowestoft) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee and the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) for bringing forward the debate. It is certainly long overdue. I also thank former police officer Tom Curry, who was injured in the line of duty and whose campaign with other injured emergency service workers has brought us here today.

I want to pay tribute to a constituent of mine, Sue Mitchell, who I met today alongside her husband. In November 1984, Sue was 22 and on her sixth day working for Essex police when, while pursuing teenage burglars, she was severely rammed by their car as she and her colleague tried to block their escape. Despite having a shattered kneecap and hand injuries, Sue was able to chase and arrest one of the burglars. She was beginning to recover, but crippling back pain and losing feeling in her legs prevented her from returning to the frontline. She had to leave her flat because she could no longer climb the stairs. Nine months after the incident, she returned to light duties at Southend police station, but despite surgery on a damaged spinal disc, which was diagnosed three years later, the police retired her on medical grounds at the age of 26, less than a week after the operation.

The teenage burglars were handed 12 months’ youth custody, but Sue has had to live with what happened that day for the past 41 years—a lifetime of chronic pain and medical issues. She sustained those injuries in the service of us all, out of duty to maintain law and order, and an eagerness to right wrongs. Five days after the incident, the then chief superintendent praised her “meritorious” conduct and wrote that

“consideration will be given to more formal recognition of”

her and her colleague’s

“action at a later stage.”

That later stage never came and Sue was never recognised. We have the chance now to right that particular wrong—something so long promised should now be delivered.

As we have heard, it is estimated that 15,000 former police officers have, like Sue, been forced to retire due to an injury they suffered in our service. Today’s call to action is supported by nearly a third of Members of this House, across all parties, and by the Police Federation, the Fire Brigades Union, the Fire and Rescue Services Association, the National Fire Chiefs Council and Unison, of which I must declare I am a member.

Medal recognition for Sue and other blue-light emergency workers who have been injured in the line of duty will not change what has happened to them, but it could go some way to repaying the debt we owe them for their service and their sacrifice.