Neighbourhood Policing: West Midlands

Khalid Mahmood Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) for making such an eloquent speech and raising all those figures. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), who secured the debate. Owing to his position as a shadow Minister, he is unfortunately not able to take part.

This is a crucial debate to my constituents and the people of Birmingham. We have people who live in fear. In my constituency, gangs maraud around with knives, baseball bats, sticks, machetes and, in some instances, guns. The police are called, but they are not able to attend because they need sufficient numbers for such an event, which I understand.

There is a business in my constituency. A group of young people got together and opened a car wash. They do not employ labour from abroad; they wanted to do it themselves and make a living for themselves. For some reason, they were set upon by a gang—probably because they did not want them to open the business where they had. They made several complaints to the police themselves. Nobody turned up. A week later, when the father approached me and spoke to me, they still had not come. I made enquiries and the police were not able to visit those young people, who wanted to better their lives and their local environment.

It is not the fault of the police officers who work in my area. They work extremely hard—fantastically hard—but they do not have the numbers. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston says, the West Midlands PCC is working extremely hard to increase numbers. It is important to heed the words of the PCC. If they do not have the officers to do the work, it is difficult to do the work. That is what the problem is.

I have a fantastic sergeant working in my constituency, Nick Hill. He came in as a breath of fresh air in my patch. He is available literally all the time. He comes to community events. He wants to engage, to the extent that we were able to set up a police drop-in at a local church on a Tuesday afternoon, so that people who could not get through to the police on the phone or by other mechanisms could come and see the police and report things. That is a fantastic initiative.

We have some local police officers who are doing a fantastic job. On my own security, Nick has been fantastic. If I tell him where I am holding surgeries, he tries his best to support me. We all have to think about our position and our safety, particularly since the tragic incident of Sir David Amess. That is an additional requirement for the police. More issues are being added to the list for the police to address.

There are also issues within the policing structure. The Home Office has said that more officers need to have a degree to work on the streets.

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

No, they do not.

[Mr Mahmood]

Well, that is what I am being told—that police officers need to have a degree to be able to work. A lot of recruits have been taken in. I know about four recruits who have come into my constituency as police officers who have come in through the degree mechanism, and there are others who have been told they need to complete degree qualifications in order to move on, which removes them from the limited number of police we have. There are some people who want to be on the street, who want to do policing, who have the qualification, who want to build connections within the community and deliver those services. What we want are police officers who understand local communities and know what is going on.

In another policing debate, I mentioned a PCSO in my area who was a member of the Labour party, and joined the police, so he cannot deliver leaflets for me any more. Rob Capella has done fantastic work. He has been there almost 20 years now. He is recognised by the community. Less so now, because he has less of a team to operate, but he used to go on the streets to understand and speak to people. He was a huge resource as the eyes and ears of the police, working in the community, and that gleaned great intelligence. We can only do that if we have sufficient numbers of police.

Before 2010, we used to have neighbourhood meetings. We would get police there. We would get PCSOs there. We would get people speaking to them in Perry Barr. My hon. Friends here will understand that, in Perry Barr, where we have Handsworth, Lozells and Aston, there have been significant issues with policing and crime. Before 2010, we had some of the lowest crime rates across the country. We did only one thing: increase the police. We had more PCSOs in those areas, and we delivered for the community.

People in the Asian community have a huge issue in terms of robberies that are taking place. Most people understand that it is a traditional practice to have gold jewellery, particularly for weddings and those sorts of events. Those things have been targeted specifically, and damage has been done to buildings and to people. We need more police officers, and we will achieve that only if, on Thursday, we look at the police settlement for the west midlands and listen to the PCC, who is working hard to ensure that we get more police officers. It is the only way to deal with crime. That is what Margaret Thatcher said—to give an example of someone the Minister may look up to. The only way to police is to ensure that there is sufficient policing in the community. If we do not have sufficient police in the community, it is not safe for them or for my constituents. My plea is that West Midlands police get their fair share of the police officers required to give our communities peace of mind and to have law and order in our city and my constituency.

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[Preet Kaur Gill]

I am sorry that the Minister decided to go off track in his response. In any event, I am grateful to him. I thank all the hon. Members who took part in the debate, which made it clear that at the centre of the issue are families and others across the west midlands who have felt left behind, and who deserve a fair police funding settlement. I hope the funding settlement will reflect that.

[Mr Khalid Mahmood]

The Minister did not clarify the point about the management of West Midlands police. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services said:

“The force is good at strategic planning, organisational management and providing value for money.”

That includes the input of both the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable in the west midlands. I will not see West Midlands police run down in that manner.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered funding for neighbourhood policing in the West Midlands.

Stop and Search: West Midlands

Khalid Mahmood Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Ms Rees. I thank the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Nicola Richards) for securing this important debate. As we have all said, stop and search is a constructive and useful power. The police service, with their cameras on, should be trained properly to respect the level of search they will be conducting and how that will be reflected in their numbers. It is important, it is needed and we should be working together to do that.

I had a meeting with the PCC last Friday and that was one of the issues we discussed. Another was resourcing my local areas with more police officers and more police community support officers. The reason I say that is that, on its own, stop and search is a weak tool. In the past, we had local PCSOs walking up and down the streets, speaking to people in their local areas and understanding what the issues were, where there was instigation of crime and what people were engaged in. What prevented the stop-and-search process was the intelligence that we had on the ground.

In my constituency, we had Rob Capella, who used to be a party member—in my first election, he delivered a lot of leaflets and I was sad to see him become a PCSO, but he is fantastic in the job that he does. He has built a huge relationship and a huge amount of trust in his local community and people come and speak to him. Unfortunately, about 85% of his team is no longer there. It is essentially just Rob doing most of the job that he had wanted to do. He does not have the police officers to report back to and carry out some of those necessary actions.

My constituency contains Lozells, Handsworth and Aston, which have had particularly high levels of crime. When I took over the constituency, very early on, we had the killings of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare—a hugely tragic event, which was difficult for me as a new Member of Parliament to handle. I got the community together, I got the black churches together, we got the local enterprise people together and worked to deliver that process. We delivered that because we all got over it together. We did the same recently, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) said earlier, with the murder of Dea-John, where we got the churches, the community and the police together and we responded very quickly. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) also joined us in that process. It was the right thing to do.

We are prepared to bring together whatever is needed to ensure that anything that happens is dealt with in a proportionate manner and the communities understand what has gone on. We are quite prepared to do that. However, the PCC explained to me how difficult it is for the officers to do that policing work without the support of additional resources and additional police officers on the streets. While we confine ourselves to stop and search, that is a small tool in the police’s armoury.

My colleague from the Westside business improvement district works very hard. He has a huge amount of entertainment venues in his BID district, mainly around Broad Street in Birmingham, which most people will know is quite well frequented from Thursday until at least Saturday night and sometimes Sunday as well. There is a huge challenge in trying to resolve some of the issues with people. He employs wardens to work alongside the officers in the area, but there are not sufficient resources. When the officers come in and try to apply stop and search, it causes issues for a number of people in the area and makes the situation tense, so other people come in, with the risk of causing another incident. We have to look at where and when we can apply stop and search.

In my constituency, in January of this year, we lost Keon Lincoln, a young boy of 15 who was shot and stabbed. It was another hugely tragic event, not just for his family but for the community as a whole, so we need to look at giving support. To that effect, at my meeting on Friday, I also had the violence reduction unit present to look at forging a multi-agency approach to dealing with this issue. I want youth services, social services, educationalists and the police to work together to provide a resolution. I know it works, because when we had real issues in the early ’00s, we got those teams together and it worked. By 2008-09, we had some of the lowest crime rates in my constituency because we worked together.

No one mechanism is good enough to effect change. I think we would all say that stop and search has a place but has to be done by properly trained officers. Again, more resources are needed to do that. We also need to have enough officers to do that properly, so that we can provide positive outcomes. In much of the city, it is probably not safe enough for officers to do that. They are professional servants of the community, but at times they put themselves at risk because they do not have enough support. It is very difficult. I praise them for the great work that they do in protecting us all, but they need sufficient resources.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook) mentioned the issue of lower crime rates. The way that crimes of domestic abuse have been reclassified has had the effect of lowering some of the crime figures in Birmingham and around the west midlands. That is something that we need to look it, rather than saying we are reducing crime.

We have a huge amount of work to do. I commend the police service, which does a fantastic amount of work in our area. The PCC is engaging with us all, and I hope the Minister will engage with him constructively to ensure that we all work together to provide the best possible policing for all our communities.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

I would like to call the Opposition spokesperson at 3.38 pm at the latest, and we have two Back Benchers left to speak. Please bear that in mind. I call Mike Wood.

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[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

Thank you, Ms Rees, for presiding over a tight and passionate debate about crime in the west midlands. Given that I devote pretty much every waking hour to crime generally, it has been great to hear. I start by paying tribute to the police officers who are tackling the incidents in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Nicola Richards), as she outlined. She and I have conversed often about crime in her part of the world, and I will do my best to try to help her now, as in the past.

I am pleased to hear that Project Guardian is now in play in my hon. Friend’s constituency and I hope that it will have an effect. Notwithstanding its impact, she is right to bring her constituents’ concerns to this place, along with other hon. Members. Fighting crime is a priority for most of my constituents, as it is for all hon. Members present. As a result, it is one of the chief priorities that the Prime Minister has placed before the Government for us to make progress on and drive numbers down.

I am very pleased that hon. Members are feeling the effect of Operation Sceptre, our national programme of weeks of intensification in the fight against knife crime, which has been mentioned. However, it is obviously always tragic to hear about these terrible incidents, particularly the killing of young people.

I make no apology for being a stout defender of stop and search, and I am very pleased to hear that consensus across the Chamber today. It has not always been thus, and I hope that Opposition Members who have spoken passionately about the use of stop and search will speak to their colleagues who have, for example, opposed our recent proposed expansion of section 60 stop and search—the deregulation, as it were, of section 60 to a certain extent to make it more dynamic and usable. As a number of Members on both sides of the House have pointed out, stop and search is about saving lives, particularly against the background of knife crime.

I have seen that effect for myself: back in 2008, when I became Deputy Mayor for policing in London, we were facing a rising tide of knife crime and teenage killings in London. That was at a time of enormous expenditure by the then Labour Government, with the numbers in London at an all-time high, yet the number of young people being killed was rising on a weekly basis. Against the background of the previous Mayor’s rather relaxed attitude, we came in and sorted that out, driving numbers down. In 2008, 29 teenagers were killed, and by 2012 we had got that figure down to eight. That was eight too many, but that decrease was due to the assertive use of that particular tactic in a critical emergency situation. That is why stop and search, particularly section 60 stop and search, is so important. As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) mentioned, it is preventive. We know that the knives are out there tonight in people’s hands. We need to find them and remove them, because otherwise some of them may be used, often to deadly effect.

Stop and search is also preventive because taking knives away from people means they are less likely to be victims. A person is much more likely to be stabbed and injured, or even killed, if they are carrying a knife themselves. Stop and search is unequivocally about saving lives, but it is also preventive because of the psychological effect of raising the likelihood of being caught—the perception of detection. We know that the perception of the likelihood of being caught is the greatest deterrent to any type of crime, so by making sure that stop and search is high-profile—that it is seen, that there are knife arches at transport nodes and at schools, and that stop and search is being done in the community—we will stop people carrying knives in the first place, because they will think they are more likely to be caught. I urge all parts of the country where there is a violence problem to use stop and search judiciously and proportionately, but nevertheless recognise it for the vital tool that we all agree it is.

As my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East has said, we need to be careful about the use of data on stop and search, because although data can inform when properly interpreted, it can also deceive. There is a famous case of a pair of drug dealers who went from London to the Purbeck coast, down in the south-west. They were intercepted, stopped and searched, and drugs were obtained. However, because they were from a different background from the local population, being stopped and searched in that part of the world became 44% more likely for a person of black, Asian or minority ethnic background, just because of those two cases.

Understanding what the data is telling us is key to maintaining the legitimacy of stop and search, and while we often talk about the disproportionality in those who are stopped, searched and found with knives, or stopped and searched anyway, we never seem to talk about the other side of the argument, which my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) outlined. That is the disproportionality of victimisation: those people who, sadly, are killed also display a disproportionality that the police cannot ignore. Understanding what is actually happening in the data is a critical part of the mission.

Stop and search can be done well—there is no doubt about it. There are parts of the country where it is done extremely well. Liverpool, for example, prides itself on the way it conducts, handles and promotes in the community its stop and search. Of course, transparency with local people is absolutely critical. Buying in their consent is critical, particularly in those communities and neighbourhoods that are disproportionately affected by knife crime. As a number of Members have said, that takes political leadership. If the police are going to get out there and do this work, they need the political top cover. We politicians are the living consent, by the people of the areas we represent, to do this kind of work and we should be the interlocutors, as should police and crime commissioners.

All those years ago, when we were doing this work in London, the then Mayor, who is now Prime Minister, and I toured London, speaking to audiences large and small, in village halls and the Brixton Academy, to buy in this idea that what we were about was saving the lives of their young people. That is the mission that we all need to be joined on, shoulder to shoulder, including police and crime commissioners. I know that the actions of the police and crime commissioner in the west midlands is the subject of this debate, but I know that he will stand for that purpose and that he will do his best to try to sell this tactic, as Government Members have said, as a critical one for the police to use.

I say that because we are all concerned about crime in the west midlands. We need to reinforce constantly the often difficult and confrontational things that the police do, underline the legitimacy of what they do, and illustrate to our electors and the wider community that the police have a difficult and challenging job, which sometimes involves doing unpalatable things, but that fundamentally their purpose is to save life and build neighbourhood safety. If we could all join on that mission together, I think we can point towards success.

[Mr Mahmood]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

I do not have time, I am afraid; I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

I am hesitant to engage in what I have to say is this rather hackneyed debate about cuts, which I have heard the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak engage in many times, and I have certainly heard his party’s Front Benchers engage in it many times. It is now getting on for over a decade that that debate has been had, through numerous elections, most of which we have won, not least the last one. Indeed, we also won the last round of police and crime commissioner elections, when—I must point this out to the hon. Gentleman—we won 70% of the seats available. By the way, the votes for the Conservative candidate in the west midlands increased to 239,000, from 44,000 back in 2008, so we might catch his party at the next election—let us see where we get to.

Notwithstanding that, we have given commitments at the Dispatch Box about the funding formula. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East and other Government Members from the west midlands have certainly engaged with me about the need for that change in the funding balance, and we will be running that programme over the next couple of years. I have given a commitment that we will have the formula in place before the next election, assuming that the next election is at the end of this Parliament—who knows when that will come?

However, I urge Members to recognise that police and crime commissioners make a difference, and that someone cannot walk away from the decisions that were made in the intervening 10 years and say, “Nothing to do with us, Guv.” Decisions made over that decade by police and crime commissioners mean that as we get into a time of investment in policing—I am very happy about that, and we are now over halfway through our growth in the number of police officers—where we start from is a product of those decisions. There are some forces in the country that fought hard to preserve police officer numbers, not least in London, where I did the same, because we faced the same cuts during our time, or the same reduction in resources, because of the crash and the needs of the country’s finances. We fought to preserve numbers and, as a result, London is in a better position now to advance on police officer recruitment. I am afraid that the west midlands made a different set of decisions during those 10 years, driven by the thinking and the priorities, or whatever it might be, of the police and crime commissioner there.

I understand that the imperative on the Opposition side is to blame us for everything that goes wrong, and we want to blame the Opposition, but I am not walking away from some of the decisions we made during those 10 years—absolutely not. They were driven by bigger issues than us: geopolitics and economics; and a desire to get the country’s balance sheet back into good shape. At the same time, Opposition Members have to accept that the police and crime commissioners of those years—there have been three of them—made a set of decisions that put the west midlands in the position it is in now. If that is not the case, I am not sure what they were saying to people in elections about what difference they were going to make.

I hope that in future, as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak quite rightly said, all of us can focus on making sure that the west midlands is as safe as it can possibly be, and I will join with everyone here on that mission.

Terrorist Incident at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Khalid Mahmood Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I know that the hon. Lady has done a vast amount of work in this area, and we congratulate her and thank her for it. She is right: while we entrust a huge amount of our safety to our police forces—and, in particular, to our counter-terrorism police and those who promote the Prevent programme and other radicalisation prevention strategies—we all have a role to play in our collective safety, including the executives and others of social media companies, who need to think about the role that they play in shaping young minds for the future. That is not, as I have said, to speculate on the motivation in this case. I speak in general terms, as a father with children, and I know that there are young minds out there to be shaped. Those companies are part of the shaping, and they need to step up to that responsibility.

[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

I commend Mr Perry for his bravery, and I commend all the emergency services that came to the rescue. I wholly and unreservedly condemn the terrorist act that took place. It was a premature act in that the fuse probably went off earlier than it was intended to, and it could have been far more devastating to the city of Liverpool and indeed to all of us.

For too long—for the last 20 years—we have spoken of addressing radicalisation and extremism. We do not appear to be making headway. I agree with what was said earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), the shadow security Minister: we should be looking far more closely at this issue, and providing support and resources not only for the security services but for the local police to enable them to be more active.

[Kit Malthouse]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s frustration, and I apologise to the House for not being able to say more about this case at the moment, but I must reiterate that we are not yet clear—and the police have stated in terms that they are not yet clear—about the motivation for the attack. The time will come for us to draw lessons from it, and indeed from other attacks, and apply them to the further work we can do to protect ourselves, both in dealing with those who may be radicalised and, more practically, in dealing with the groups who may be organising the attacks. However, this is a difficult and complex area of work. I hope the House will give the police the space that they need to complete the investigation and learn those lessons, from this incident and, as I have said, from the previous incident.

Terrorist Offenders (Restriction of Early Release) Bill

Khalid Mahmood Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 12th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I am pleased to hear that, and I hope we will never again be in a situation where someone who led a review is not aware of what is going on years later. That simply cannot and should not happen, as I am sure the Justice Secretary would agree.

There are concerns about the Ministry of Justice listening, and the extent to which justice has been a priority for the Government over the past decade. The coalition Government chose not to make the Ministry of Justice a protected Department when they implemented spending cuts That led to 40% cuts over the past decade, including to the prisons that today we expect to play a vital role in offender management. We know that 21,000 police officers disappeared from our streets, and prison officer numbers have been slashed. There are currently 18,912 front-line prison officers, which is not yet back to 2010 levels. That loss of prison officers has not just reduced the capacity of prisons to deal with rehabilitation; it also means that years of experience of working in challenging environments in our prisons have been lost.

In 2019, 35% of prison officers had been in post for less than two years, compared with just 7% in 2010. I do not mean that those officers are not doing their best in difficult circumstances, but the Government needlessly threw away valuable experience in our prisons.

[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that lack of prison officers, the privatisation of some of our prisons, and having those young officers, has led to problems in Her Majesty’s Prison Birmingham, which has seen a number of riots over the past couple of years? It adds more to the Treasury’s costs if we have to take away people with experience and later bring them back.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My hon. Friend speaks with great authority about HMP Birmingham, and he is right to identify that if prisons are run in such a way there will be consequences because the time available for meaningful activity is reduced.

The Justice Secretary talked in the media at the weekend about improvements in our justice system since Mr Acheson’s report. He repeated that in his speech and he has repeated it in an intervention a moment or two ago. I therefore thought I would compare what the Justice Secretary is saying with the views of the independent chief inspector of prisons. The latest annual report from Peter Clarke states that

“far too many of our jails have been plagued by drugs, violence, appalling living conditions and a lack of access to meaningful rehabilitative activity.”

That should be a wake-up call to the Government. Mr Clarke went on to say that

“levels of self-harm were disturbingly high and self-inflicted deaths tragically increased by nearly one-fifth on the previous year.”

That is no way for the Prison Service to be run and things must change.

There is also, if I may say so, an issue at the Ministry of Justice with the Government failing to provide it with stable leadership. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is the seventh Justice Secretary since 2010. Of those seven, five have served for 18 months or less. The role of Lord Chancellor should have been respected and not been subject to a revolving door. No wonder there is such a lack of direction and no wonder there is no long-term planning. Justice Secretaries are simply not in post long enough. There are even indications from 10 Downing Street that half the Cabinet could be out by Friday.

I say in all sincerity to the right hon. and learned Gentleman that I very much hope he survives in this role—I hope I have not jinxed him by saying that; I could have just ruined his Friday—because there is an enormous job to do. There are 224 terrorist prisoners in England and Wales, of whom 173 have been assessed as having extreme Islamist views. We also know that there is a growing threat from far-right terrorism. If we want properly to manage the risk of terrorist offenders, we need the most effective targeted de-radicalisation programmes to be delivered by staff working in the best conditions we can provide for them.

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[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

It is always a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes). I was privileged to work with him when he was Minister for Security—a time he mentioned in his speech.

My thoughts are with the victims of all terrorist attacks and their families, and I recognise the hardship that they have all gone through. It is important, in this debate and in any debate on the subject, that we remember those who have suffered incredibly because of our failures as parliamentarians, failures of our legislation, and failures in the support with which we provide people.

There are two issues to consider: resources for our Prison Service, and the things behind that—the soft power, which we need to get right. It is not enough to extend sentences; we have to put right the things behind that. That is what I want to concentrate on. Of course we should look at the number of prison officers and the support they get—a point my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) rightly made. It is important to ensure the right corrective controls in the prison framework. At the moment, we are failing on that. We need to get that right, get proper resourcing, and move forward.

A lot of Members spoke about imams coming into prisons. The issue is twofold; there is the question of psychotherapy and counselling for the people they are visiting, and the need to tackle those people’s misguided version of Islam. They do not practise Islam; they practise what they believe is Islam. Islam in itself is a peaceful religion.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

As a religious education teacher, I concur with the hon. Member’s viewpoint. In no way do the radical views of this small minority reflect the views of Islam. I am glad he raised this point; it is important that we ensure that it comes across in our national media, and in national debates.

[Mr Mahmood]

I thank the hon. Member for his contribution.

How do we assess and work with these radicalised people? A lot has been made of deradicalisation, but we need the right people, theologically speaking, to do it. We do not have a principal education facility to train imams who go into prisons. I had a friend who was deputy governor at HMP Birmingham. The prison brought in an imam to try to speak to somebody who was radicalising the rest of the inmates. After a two-hour one-to-one, the imam came out saying, “I think I agree with the inmate.” That was due to the so-called imam’s lack of knowledge. Just because someone calls themselves an imam, it does not mean that they are able to deal with this important issue.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Is the situation not even a little worse than that? There have been reports of imams from the Deobandi sect of Salafists being allowed access to prisoners.

[Mr Mahmood]

The right hon. Member speaks from experience of these issues. He is quite right to say that. It is very difficult for those who do not understand religion to put people into places of religious control and support. That is my clear point. We should have proper registration of people who go into these institutions. Anybody who goes into them should be required to have the proper qualifications and certifications, yet we let most people walk in, and we say that they can do this job. We have heard stories of radicalisation being perpetuated in certain prisons by some of the people who have gone into them. It is important that we look at how we move forward.

[Sir John Hayes]

I intervene partly to pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for the good work that he has done in this field over a considerable time. He points out the difference between Islamism and Islam—a difference too rarely identified by our media, as he says. Perhaps a review of all the Prison Service’s work on the appointment of imams and their work in prisons should be part of the Government’s ongoing plans to address the issue.

[Mr Mahmood]

Again, I concur with the right hon. Member. As for the Government moving forward on this, for the past 10 years we have not paid enough attention to what has gone on. We need to look at this seriously. The two incidents we are considering, as well as others, and the potential release of other prisoners have brought the issue to our attention.

A big functional issue in prison is how we position inmates. The Acheson report looks at segregating these prisoners. How to deradicalise is a really big issue. If we put these prisoners all together, they become a group. If we put them with other prisoners, they radicalise them. We cannot keep prisoners on their own, because human rights law does not allow that. There is no magic wand of deradicalisation. We have to take the issue very seriously. We have to get the right people, with the right understanding. Good work has been done in Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on ways of deradicalising. We have to learn lessons from how those countries are proceeding, in order to address these issues. We have to go further in looking at those methods, whether they are relevant, and how they relate to what the community wants to do.

We have to look not just at prisons, but at external departments that deal with the issue. We have to consider education, under what licences we allow madrassahs to operate—if they have a licence at all. The only consideration for a local authority in granting permission for a madrassah is whether it would cause traffic congestion. If an applicant clears that hurdle, they can have one. No heed is given to the qualifications of the imam, there is no proper scrutiny of their past, and there are no security checks. Those are very important issues for us to look at in deciding how we move forward.

As for the people we know of, they are the tip of the iceberg. There is still significant radicalisation taking place, and we need to address that in the community. Radicalisation is progressing in prisons because there is a captive audience there. We need to move forward. We need to look at the availability of resources in prisons, because the resources that are required to deal with this problem are quite significant







While we are looking at Islamic extremism, we also need to look at far-right extremism. If this Bill is to apply to terrorists, it must also apply to far-right extremists —it is important that that is said. The contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) made a lot of sense. I pay tribute to her for the great work that she has done on these issues, including as Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. She deserves commendation for the great balance with which she has worked on these matters. It is important for that work to move forward.

It is also important to look at how we police these issues. As my right hon. Friend said, we need to look again at control orders for when people come out of prison. In the past 10 years, we have forgotten about control orders. We need to get back to that issue, look at what is valid and appropriate, and see how we can move forward. That is hugely important.

I support the Bill because it is necessary for us to move forward with the resources currently available to us, but we need to have a much deeper look at how to resolve this issue for all our communities in the long term.