Serious Violence

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I share the concerns around serious organised crime. I welcome the National Crime Agency’s national strategic assessment, which says that the cost of such crime to society is at least £37 billion a year. Clearly the work the NCA is doing with police forces around the country is vital. It is important that we continue to work together with the NCA and the police. It was welcome that this year we increased resources to the NCA to fight serious organised crime. We will certainly look at longer term resource need in the spending review.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I have discussed this with the Policing Minister before: despite the increase in funds to recruit more policemen, funding is not sufficient. That is the message my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) referred to just a moment ago. Violent crime is increasing, particularly in places such as Coventry and other parts of the west midlands. The police have been reduced to firefighting in an area for two or three months, before the resource goes to another area. The vacuum is then filled by more crime. Can the Home Secretary not do a bit more about that?

[Sajid Javid]

If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will come to resourcing: both general police resourcing for all activities and resourcing dedicated to serious violence. He will also welcome that it is not just about resourcing; it is also about powers. I will talk about that in a moment, too.

Offensive Weapons Bill

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way, and I hope that she will show me where I am wrong, but I always understood that delivery companies, particularly those delivering post and packages, have an X-ray procedure to see what the contents are.

[Victoria Atkins]

I am not sure whether I am in a position to answer that. Of course, every company will have its own security arrangements. The hon. Gentleman will know that what we have inserted through this Bill are further conditions on sellers to ensure that their packages, if they contain bladed products, are labelled very clearly so that anyone handling that package understands what is inside it. We appreciate that perhaps not everyone has access to those facilities.

International Women’s Day

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend and fellow member of the Select Committee for raising that point. I am married to a lawyer who works for the firm Kingsley Napley, where more than 50% of the partners are women. However, I urge my hon. Friend to look at some of the other law firms in the City of London that do not have the same proportion of women at the top, and to encourage his daughter to look for those good employers so that she, too, can progress right the way through to the top.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Could the right hon. Lady tell us what progress has been made regarding the pay gap between women and men?

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Gentleman raises a really important point. I think that the biggest amount of progress has been in the Government making companies publish their gender pay gap; for the first time ever, the pay gap has become an issue that is on the agenda of businesses throughout the country. However, in answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question, there has not been nearly enough progress. Although the gender pay gap has all but evaporated for women under 30, for older women it is alive and well, and we need to resolve it. I will come to that issue later in my speech.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes), I believe in equality of opportunity. We need to continue to look for ways of ensuring equality of opportunity for women in our communities. As women we are resilient, but we are so resilient that we sometimes need to stop and appreciate the blatant discrimination that still pervades our lives every single day, and which still denies some women the level playing field of opportunity. Too many women’s confidence is sapped—their career even destroyed—by bullying and sexual harassment at work. Forty per cent. of women in this country, and millions more around the world, suffer sexual harassment.

That issue was well highlighted this week by the day of action that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) and I hosted, when women from across the country, supported by CARE International, came into Parliament to lobby Members of Parliament to support the new International Labour Organisation global convention, which will outlaw sexual harassment and abuse at work in every country in the world, if it gets the support of their Governments.

Discrimination is still blatant because so much of the enforcement of the laws that we have passed in the UK is not working as we would want it to. In the Government’s new good workplace report, they set out the importance of enforcement of workplace rights, and they are right to do so. However, I urge the Minister for Women also to look at the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and the laws that pertain to health and safety, as well as others that are being looked at as part of the good workplace report. Legislation puts enforcement powers for those anti-discrimination laws into the hands of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but if it is not exercising those powers, we should give them to somebody who does. No one should be prepared to stand by and watch more than 50,000 women a year leave their jobs simply because they are pregnant, even though we already have laws in place to prohibit that.

One in eight women in this country want to start their own business, often as a way to create their own business culture, yet they find that just 9% of funding for start-ups goes to women, despite women-led businesses delivering double the returns on investment for financial backers. When a woman looks to Parliament to fix the problem, she might see a very strong Prime Minister admired for her resilience, but on these green Benches—well, perhaps not today, but usually—she will see that just one in three MPs are women. As I have said, the most important way to build in a resilient equality between men and women is through women’s economic empowerment—women’s full participation in work, including here.

The truth is that many of the barriers in women’s workplaces, including those that remain here, are in need of reform. With regard to the laws that we are so proud of having passed in this place, the reality is that a lack of enforcement on the ground often makes them worse than useless for many women. Most women do not work in the City of London, in large accountancy or law firms or in City institutions that may have modernised their approaches. Our constituents face a very different workplace, often still stuck in the ’70s, with presenteeism, a long hours culture, a lack of flexible working, employers who routinely use non-disclosure agreements to cover up discrimination, and management who look down on dads who want to take parental leave to share in the care of the newest members of their family.

Families of Commonwealth Soldiers

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Drew Hendry]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend makes a great point. As I was going on to say, the sacrifice is also made by the families. They have the anxiety of their loved ones doing a difficult and dangerous job, yet their sacrifices often go untold.

As the Army Families Federation has said,

“Commonwealth members of our Armed Forces make up a significant and vital part of the UK’s Defence capability and, as a nation, we ask them to make significant sacrifices to do so.”

Is it right that the sacrifices they make in undertaking the duty of service should mean being kept apart from their families? No, it is simply not right; yet it is continually happening. The current immigration rules are keeping Commonwealth soldiers apart from their families. The report from the AFF reads:

“The UK recruits soldiers from across the Commonwealth to serve in our Armed Forces. There are currently over 6,000 personnel serving in the UK Armed Forces from foreign and Commonwealth countries, with more being recruited each year to fill technical and specialist roles.

Since December 2013, those who leave their country of origin to serve our nation are subjected to the Government’s minimum income requirements if they wish to bring their immediate family with them.

This requirement means that due to military pay scales, a Commonwealth soldier with a spouse and two children can end up waiting up to six years before they earn over the £24,800 needed for their family to join them.

It cannot be right that those who have signed up to defend our nation by serving in the Armed Forces are doing so at the expense of their family life. The current situation can result in personnel making the heart-breaking decision of choosing which child they bring with them to the UK and which they leave behind until their income has increased. The MIT should be removed as a barrier from those who serve in the Armed Forces.”

Louise Simpson, chair of the Cobseo Foreign and Commonwealth cluster, has said:

“We struggle to engage with recruiters to make sure that soldiers and service personnel understand the financial commitment that they have when coming to the UK particularly around the cost of visas and the minimum income requirements. There was a lot of press…about soldiers not understanding that they may not be able to bring their children in for almost 4 years because they are not earning the right amount of money. As an organisation, we feel that is immoral”.

She is right; that is immoral. This Government must accept that fact.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is doing the armed forces a great service. Does he agree that we must remember that these Commonwealth soldiers put their lives on the line just like British soldiers and therefore should be treated in the same way as British soldiers in terms of family, instead of having this limit of £24,000 and waiting for six years?

[Drew Hendry]

I absolutely and fundamentally agree. It is a disgrace that people are being asked to put themselves on the line and at risk without qualifying for the same conditions as others enjoy just because they were born in one of the nations of the UK.

In 2011 the Government announced plans to introduce a new policy on family migration. One of the major changes was to make the level of income threshold

“higher than that of the safety net of income support.”

Subsequently, the armed forces immigration rules introduced in the first quarter of 2013 closely aligned themselves to the rules for non-military and introduced the requirement for a soldier with one child to be earning at least £22,400 and a further £2,400 for each additional child. It could be many years before a recruit earns the salary needed to meet the threshold.

In 2011, the Government enshrined the armed forces covenant in statute. The Army Families Federation and the Cobseo Foreign and Commonwealth cluster group have urged the Government to consider the principles of the covenant with regard to the family needs of Commonwealth personnel. Commonwealth recruits find it very difficult to hold down a second job, due to their irregular hours. They also stand alone as a cohort within the armed forces, in that they are forcibly separated from their immediate dependants on recruitment, unlike their domestic peers.

In August 2014, the Prime Minister announced the introduction of a family test to be applied by Departments when devising policy. The guidance and documentation for the test state:

“Strong and stable families, in all their forms, play an important role in our society. Families have a major impact on the life chances of individuals and strong family relationships are recognised as an important component of individual, community and national wellbeing.”

While we think about those words, let us consider the case study of an Army private who enlisted in 2013, just prior to the new rules coming into effect. He had not even had the chance to bring his family to the UK, as he had not finished training. He has two children and a wife back home in Ghana, and he has been separated from them for six years. He is now earning enough to bring his wife and one of his children to the UK, but it will be another two to three years before he can bring his other child here. He is faced with the agonising decision of choosing which child should join him and his wife in the UK. How can that be right?

The family test sets out a number of questions that Departments should apply when devising policies that risk affecting families. Those questions include:

“What impacts will the policy have on all family members’ ability to play a full role in family life, including with respect to parenting and other caring responsibilities?”

The previous Chief of the Defence Staff commented in the Ministry of Defence’s 2016 strategy that our personnel could fully carry out their defence tasks only if they had the support of their families and the confidence that their loved ones would be able to access the right support when required.

In September 2017, a soldier who had been refused a visa for the UK as a result of the minimum income threshold appealed, with the assistance of the Army Families Federation, on the basis of exceptional circumstances. The judge said that the appeal was successful in the light of the compassionate circumstances of the case, particularly noting that the sponsor had a legitimate expectation that he would be able to bring his family to the UK when he signed up to the armed forces in 2017. He said:

“I find that it is not in the public interest to exclude the appellant”.

It is time to amend the existing immigration rules on the minimum income threshold to exempt the families of serving armed forces personnel.

However, the difficulties do not end there. My constituent, Denis Omondi, is a serving soldier in the British Army who, in 2011, found out that he was the father of a little girl in Kenya. He had previously been unaware of his daughter’s existence, but he then sprang into action, meeting and visiting his daughter as often as he could. There was an instant connection between them, and they are indeed a dad and daughter, so when his daughter’s birth mother said that she could no longer look after her, Denis became Ann’s sole custodian. He pays for her education and living costs in Kenya and is proudly responsible for her care and wellbeing. Understandably, he takes the role of being her dad very seriously. He also takes his job very seriously. He is a British citizen and a serving soldier in 3 Scots, Black Watch, stationed at Fort George, where he has loyally served, undertaking tours in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cyprus. Despite the demands of his work, he has used every opportunity to visit and spend time with Ann in Kenya.

With his wife battling cancer and as a dad missing his daughter, Denis set about applying for a visa to bring her to live with them in the highlands. To him, it was simply the most natural thing for them finally to be together as a family. Imagine his heartache when he opened the letter from the Home Office telling him that Ann’s visa application had been rejected. The reason given was that the Home Office considered that this soldier, committed to serving in the British Army, had not spent enough time with Ann to prove the relationship. That happened despite him providing evidence of visits, photos and calls with Ann, correspondence with teachers and care providers and much more. Denis and his wife were in disbelief at the news, and Ann was devastated to be kept apart from her family.

I could not believe it when I heard about their plight so, in this very Chamber, I pleaded with the Prime Minister to right the wrong. She promised that the Home Secretary would investigate personally, and he readily nodded his agreement. I thought that common sense and common decency would prevail, but that has not yet been the case. Since then, the anxiety, cost and pressure has built up on the Omondi family. A promise to look again eventually came, but only after relentless chasing. Confusion and chaos at the Home Office meant that I had to raise the case again, this time with the Secretary of State for Scotland.

Incidentally, I thank the Immigration Minister for the apology for saying that Dennis, Shelagh and myself had told lies about the situation with the mislaid paperwork and about the fact that no conversations with the Omondis had come from the Home Office. It has been said to me in writing that the Home Office apologises for that, and I am grateful, but I would rather that it got on with sorting the situation out for the Omondis. Here we are: a Prime Minister, two Secretaries of State, a heartbroken family and still no answer on whether this serving soldier will be reunited with his only daughter.

I found out today that so distrusting is the Home Office that it has arranged with a South African agency to call Ann and her birth mother to check out the detailed information supplied by the Omondis. I cannot believe that we would trust a member of the armed forces to go and put his life on the line for us, yet we cannot trust the information that he and his family are directly supplying here in the UK. What does that say?

“Your Army needs you” is a recruitment call-out, and the website details many benefits of joining, including promises of child and adult safeguarding and support for emotional wellbeing, all of which is sanctioned and promoted by the Ministry of Defence. Those promises will seem pretty hollow if the UK Government fail to do the right thing by someone whom they have called on to serve for them. Let us expedite this case so that this family can be reunited. The Tory Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army, said:

“Commonwealth troops should be able to bring their kids to Britain. If they fight for us, they should be able to live with us.”

I agree.

Veterans Aid responded to my note this morning by saying:

“Since 2007 we have interacted with nearly 700 Foreign & Commonwealth veterans seeking help with status issues. These range from regularisation of their own status to complicated appeals to reunite, or keep together, families. Indeed during 2012-14 —well before the scale of the Windrush debacle was revealed—we highlighted two landmark cases that effected a change in the law.”

More recently, in a case remarkably similar to the one that I have described, Veterans Aid

“successfully helped to reunite a father from Sierra Leone with his daughter. It took nine months to resolve.”

That is not Veterans Aid’s core business, but on the basis of considerable experience with a similar case, it was happy to advise if required. The charity continued:

“Behind each ‘case’ there is a tale of human misery and while the details differ, the causes rarely do. Residency and status regulations are complex and inflexible. Advice to those about to leave the Armed Forces is either not given, or not given a priority. Costs relating to residency and citizenship applications are prohibitively high—and well beyond the budget of a typical former infantry soldier with a family.”

When families are in this country, the difficulties do not end, and they continue when soldiers do manage to be reunited with their families. One such case is that of another constituent of mine, a serving Commonwealth soldier who has done tours in Afghanistan, Kenya, Jordan, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland and France. His wife and stepdaughter applied for naturalisation in September 2017, but there is no decision yet.

Knife Crime

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the importance of this issue and the need to work across Government. He asked about social media and the way in which some parts of it glamorised violence. I, too, have seen some of the material to which he referred, and far too much is available on social media. Some of it is generated in the UK and some abroad, but it all glamorises this type of violence.

What are we doing about it? Last year, I funded a £1.4 million project on social media capability, run from London, to look at what can be done to try to tackle some of this material online, but we need to do much more. We need new powers to do that, which is why I am working with the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on a new online harms White Paper. The intention is to give the state more powers to tackle exactly what the hon. Gentleman was discussing.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

I call Jim Cunningham.

[Mr Cunningham]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. You have been very tolerant. May I tell the Home Secretary that it was useful to meet the Minister for Policing and the Fire Service about a fortnight ago? I want to reinforce the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) made. We need more community police on the streets—there is no doubt about that—and they could do something about youth services, but 20,000-odd police officers have been cut over the past seven years, which is a very low base on which to build.

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman, like other hon. Members, is right to raise the issue of resources. I have mentioned the increase in resources in this year’s policing settlement. When it comes to his local force in the west midlands, as I have said to his colleague, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), I am more than happy to meet the West Midlands force again. I visited them only last week—it is a force that I regularly visit—and I am always looking to see what more we can do.

Macpherson Report: 20th Anniversary

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I was about to come to exactly that point.

The Macpherson report presented 70 recommendations to the Home Office, police forces and other public bodies. Baroness Lawrence told us that she had tried to find out how many had been implemented before coming to see our Committee, but had struggled to find the information that she needed. She said:

“It seems as if things have become really stagnant and nothing seems to have moved”.

So are we really learning the lessons?

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

That raises a question about the Metropolitan police: why has it taken them about 20 years to start an inquiry into, according to the press, between 10 and 12 officers? That suggests to me the Metropolitan police have still not got on top of this problem.

[Alex Norris]

That is one of the reasons for the Select Committee’s work on this. We are at the early stages and so have not yet drawn any conclusions, but a real and clear audit against the recommendations for both the Metropolitan police and other organisations would be timely. In starting this debate I intend to run through some of the evidence we have seen so far, on just four or so topics.

The phrase “institutional racism” is synonymous with the Macpherson report, which concluded that institutional racism existed in the Metropolitan Police Service, other police services and other institutions countrywide, citing factors such as the Lawrence family’s treatment by the police, the disparity in stop-and-search figures, the under-reporting of racial incidents nationwide and the failure of the police to provide officers with racism awareness or race relations training.

So how far have we come since then, 20 years on?

Oral Answers to Questions

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

Of course, the statistic the hon. Gentleman omits is that the other key thing about 2010 was that this country was then dealing with the largest deficit in our public finances in peacetime history. Over the years we have taken action to tackle that and get the public finances under control—opposed by Labour—and we are now creating the conditions for increased public investment in policing, again opposed by Labour.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

rose—

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

rose—

Police Grant Report

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I will give way one more time, and then I want to make some progress.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

May I make the Home Secretary aware that in parts of Coventry, both in affluent parts and in less well-off parts, there has been an increase in burglaries and knife crime? The police used a dispersal order in the centre of Coventry on Saturday after a young man was badly stabbed. Will the Home Secretary increase police numbers in the west midlands, particularly in Coventry, where I am told by the police that they operate at only 75%?

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman raises the very important issue of knife crime, and I am sorry to hear about that incident in Coventry. This is about powers, which is why the Offensive Weapons Bill is bringing new powers for the police, but it is also about resources. I therefore hope that he will support the Government’s settlement today because of the extra £34 million it will provide to his local force.

Knife Crime Prevention Orders

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend who, with his expertise from the Select Committee on Education, hits the nail on the head when it comes to the role that exclusions and alternative provision seem to play in the lives of so many young people who are either the victims or perpetrators of serious violence. I am already working very closely with the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), particularly through the serious violence taskforce. I look forward to Edward Timpson’s review of good examples of alternative provision, because we need to ensure that children who struggle in mainstream education do not become targets for these criminal gangs that seek to exploit them as they attend alternative provision. We are very much working on that, and I would be delighted to meet my right hon. Friend to discuss our work further.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the birthday present of calling me to speak this afternoon. I very much appreciate it.

A famous boxer once said, “You can run, but you can’t hide.” The fact of the matter is that there is a shortage of policemen, and the level in the west midlands is only 75% of what it should be. I have met different groups in Coventry, some from affluent areas and some from not very well-off areas, and the common denominator is the lack of police and the increases in burglaries, knife crime and drugs. Over the weekend, the police used a dispersal order in the centre of Coventry after a young man was badly stabbed. There have been a number of stabbings in Coventry. Let us have the police; let us do something about it; and let us stop shadow boxing.

[Victoria Atkins]

I understand and hear the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about police funding. I hope that he will encourage his police and crime commissioner to spend some of the £85 million he has accrued in reserves as of March 2018 and that he will support the Government’s funding settlement tomorrow. West Midlands police stand to receive an extra £34 million through the settlement with the help of the police and crime commissioner, and presumably the commissioner will be able to use that money to good effect.

Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Bill [Lords]

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I apologise for missing some of the debate on Report. Will my hon. Friend reassure us about the sources of intelligence information? There have been stories in the past about how our intelligence has been gained. Is he satisfied that there are enough safeguards to ensure those stories are not repeated?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

Clearly, I do think the safeguards in the Bill have been significantly improved, which is one reason why I am content to support it. Obviously that is not to say there might not be legal challenges to aspects of the Bill in due course—there may well be—but I am pleased and content with many of the improvements that have been made. Throughout my time in this role I have tried to work consensually with the Minister, as has been the case with this Bill and others, and that will continue in the years ahead.

I join the Minister in thanking the Bill team. I have spoken to different members of the team over the course of the Bill’s passage. People did not necessarily expect the Bill to end up in this place when it began as a non-consensual Bill in the House of Lords. I also thank their lordships, the Minister and all the members of the Committee who contributed to the Bill. The time has come to move forward and to try to put in place this mechanism to speed up the exchange of information, with appropriate safeguards for keeping our citizens safe.