Metropolitan Police: Casey Review

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

I only have responsibility for the police. That is why earlier this year, I asked for all forces to go through their data, wash it and check for cases where police officers should not be serving on the frontline or, indeed, in the force at all. Forces are coming forward with that information and that will be a good thing to ensure that the police force nationally rids itself of those who are unfit to wear the badge.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

I thank Louise Casey for her report and service to the country. Like her, I am fundamentally pro-policing and appalled at the findings. To give an example, sexual offences units kept rape kits in broken fridges next to lunchboxes, which may have included swabs taken from victims—an absolutely appalling thing to have to go through—and armed police units wasted money on spurious kit such as night vision goggles and camouflage clothes. My constituents will want to understand whether there are wider implications. What assessment has the Home Secretary made of the degree to which these appalling failings are happening in other forces? What action will she take to ensure that my constituents and those across the country get the decent, safe policing that they deserve?

[Suella Braverman]

I expect every report of rape to be treated seriously from the point of disclosure. Every victim needs to be treated with dignity and every investigation needs to be conducted thoroughly and professionally. The rape review took a hard and honest look at how the entire criminal justice system deals with rape, and in too many instances, it has not been good enough. That is why there is a whole programme of work afoot—including Operation Soteria, of which I am a big supporter—to improve the investigation of rape, reduce the time that it takes to get a prosecution going, and, ultimately, to improve outcomes for victims of rape.

Windrush Compensation Scheme

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

One category we have also included in the compensation is a discretionary category, because we are well aware that, although we can identify some of the most likely detriments to compensate, there may be some exceptional cases, and I want to make sure that nothing is left out by the compensation scheme.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

Will the Home Secretary look into the case of my constituent Mr Espedy Alvester Thomas? He has once again applied for a passport, this time under the Windrush scheme, and he still has not had a decision. Will the Home Secretary assure me that he will take every action to make sure similar delays do not happen with this compensation scheme?

[Sajid Javid]

I would be happy to look into that case.

Knife Crime Prevention Orders

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my hon. Friend, who absolutely sums up the situation. This is but one part of the Offensive Weapons Bill, which is but one part of our overall strategy. We have never pretended that this deeply complex and worrying crime can be solved with one tool or one approach, which is why this is just one small part of the overall picture. He is particularly right to identify those children who carry knives not because they are members of gangs but because they feel they need them for their own protection. That is why the orders are important—because gang injunctions, which are available at the moment, apply only to children whom the police can prove to be members of gangs. The orders will also help those children who are not members of gangs but who, as he says, carry knives out of a misplaced sense of security. The fact remains, however, as a visit to the Ben Kinsella Trust or any of the charities we work with will show, that if someone carries a knife, the risks of being hurt with their own knife are considerably higher.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

Knife offences in Leicestershire have risen by 63% since 2010, yet Leicestershire received no funding from the early intervention youth fund, and neither did the two other largest forces in the east midlands—namely, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Some £5 million from that fund has still not been allocated, so if the Minister really believes that early intervention is the key to tackling knife crime, may I urge her to put her money where her mouth is and give the east midlands the resources we need to tackle this appalling problem?

[Victoria Atkins]

I note in passing that the reserves of Leicestershire police have risen by £3.8 million since 2011, so just a fraction of the £27.6 million currently in reserves may go a very long way. I hope the hon. Lady will vote with the Government tomorrow to give Leicestershire police and other police forces up to a further £970 million on top of last year’s increases, with the help of police and crime commissioners.

Draft Domestic Abuse Bill: Territorial Extent

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my hon. Friend. She is absolutely right to draw attention to elder abuse. The number of colleagues and other people who have contacted me since the launch of the draft Bill to tell me their stories of abuse by their children or grandchildren is heartbreaking. Several months ago, the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) called a very important Westminster Hall debate on abuse by children of their parents and grandparents.

It is something that we are keen to uncover and shine a light on, because if a parent is being abused by their child, the stigma and shame that victims unfortunately and wrongly feel is compounded even more, because parents feel that they should be able to control the behaviour of their children. We want to shine a light on that, and say to everyone, whether they are parents, children or grandchildren, “Abuse in your home is not right, and we are here to help.”

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The Minister failed to answer the central question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). Who decided to exclude Northern Ireland from the Bill, and was it discussed with the DUP?

[Victoria Atkins]

As the hon. Lady knows, the process is that any Bill that is introduced has to go through various Government committees to ensure, across Government, given that we have collective responsibility, that it meets with approval. I do not know of any such meetings with the DUP. I will happily take that away, but as far as I am concerned, I looked at the Bill, I have examined it very carefully, and I am afraid that the central point about devolved matters seems to me to apply.

I know that that does not meet with the hon. Lady’s approval, but the fact is that the law is the law, and we have to build a Bill around it. As I say, I have written to the devolved Assembly in Scotland and to the permanent secretary in Northern Ireland, and those communications are ongoing.

Leaving the EU: Rights of EU Citizens

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that question. As I have said, free movement will end, and over the next few weeks we will set out the parliamentary timetable for the immigration Bill.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

How will free movement end at the end of March if EU citizens, including people arriving here after March, do not have to do anything different, other than produce their EU passport as they do now?

[Caroline Nokes]

The immigration Bill will be coming forward—[Interruption.]

Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

I am honoured to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Fiona Onasanya) and I agree with every word she has said. Many people here have spoken about the dignity with which the victims and survivors of Grenfell have spoken, but why should they have to hold it together in trying to persuade this place to take action? Why do they not have the time to grieve for the people they have lost, their families, friends and loved ones? To hold it together, to come to Speaker’s House, to persuade and fight for this Government to act—that should not have to be the case, and I am very sorry it has been.

I will make two practical points and one broader point. First is an issue that many hon. Members have spoken about: the appalling lack of action on rehousing those who have lost their homes in Grenfell. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) pointed out that 72 households are still living in hotel rooms and 64 are still in temporary accommodation. Even worse than that is the fact that over half of those families have accepted permanent accommodation, but they cannot move into it because it is not ready.

That is 68 houses. Are you telling me that with all the money, influence and power not just of the council, but of the national Government, we could not get those homes ready for people to move into? Where there is a will, there is a way. The problem is that there does not appear to be the will to sort out those 68 homes for people who have already accepted that accommodation. What is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea doing? How hard can it be? I hope the Minister will answer that question at the end of the debate.

Secondly, I follow up on the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) and the hon. Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) made about the children who have been affected—who have lost not just their parents, but their sisters, their brothers, their cousins, their friends and their neighbours. This has affected the whole community in that area. I do not believe that either the council or the Government have understood just how widely and deeply it has affected people.

I have heard from the Grenfell families their real concern that, when children wanted to go to visit the tower because it would help them to grieve and to say goodbye, they were told they could not go because it was not safe. They were not asking for the children to go inside, just to go and look and say goodbye, and to feel close to the people they loved. The state knows best—but it did not in this case.

On the point about education, I am deeply concerned that families have had to fight to get the catch-up help they need for their children. We have to put that extra investment into those children, so that they can live as normal a life as possible, fulfil their hopes, dreams and potential, and become the people they want to be. I ask the Minister to look at that again, too.

Thirdly, on mental health, I know that many child and adolescent mental health services advisers have been put in place, but my concern is over the much longer term. If someone ends up needing a physical operation as a child, on their heart or their limbs, they get follow-up support throughout their life, because we know that those physical impacts early on have a big impact later in life. Where is that help and support for the mental health of those children in the longer term?

My final point, which many other hon. Members have made, is that there is nothing—nothing—to be feared from putting the families at the heart of this process. In fact, quite the reverse: there is everything to be gained, because we will not get to the bottom of what happened or have a proper plan to put things right in future unless the families are front and centre. Do not repeat the mistakes of the past. We have heard from many hon. Members about Hillsborough. We know what went wrong there. Do not repeat those mistakes. It is actions, not words, that matter. I hope the Government will act.

Money Laundering

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

Yes. As I said at the beginning, one of the challenges of taking on people with deep pockets or large corporations is that they have no qualms about setting off to the Supreme Court or the High Court to challenge us. We are keen to ensure that we support the NCA with unexplained wealth orders, because some of the people to whom they serve them have a brass neck and are happy to challenge us. That is why we put in blockbuster funding for the SFO, which means that when there is a case of significant scale, it can access funding directly from the Treasury to ensure that money is not a barrier to taking on some of those very bad people.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The Minister has just talked about blockbuster funding for the crime enforcement agencies, but how many criminal cases have been opened in the UK in response to the Magnitsky case?

[Mr Wallace]

That is a matter for the NCA—[Hon. Members: “Zero!”] No, no. The NCA has appeared before many parliamentary Committees and been asked those questions. They are a matter for operational partners. It is not for Ministers to come to the House to talk about potential ongoing operations, which could expose our police officers or our methods to the risk of people getting away with it.

Women’s Suffrage Centenary

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Steady.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

I was honoured in Leicester on Sunday to help unveil the statue to the suffragette Alice Hawkins. Alice was a shoe factory worker who fought all her life for equality and liberty, including infamously digging up Leicester golf club with the message,

“No votes for women, no golf for men.”

On a more serious note, Alice knew, as we all know, that the fight for equality never ends. Does the Home Secretary agree that one of the next big battles is to ensure that the increasing number of women who care for elderly relatives are treated fairly in work and get the support they need, because this will happen to all of us as we live for longer? For those women to have equality, we need better support, better social care and more flexibility in the workplace.

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Lady is right that the main carer for elderly people—often it is our parents—tends to be a woman, just as it does for children. One thing that we hope to achieve culturally, rather than through legislation, is to share that responsibility more equally. Certainly she is right that the Government need to give considerable support to the women who do so much of the caring.

Women (Government Policies)

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

It is absolutely clear that the majority of the lowest-paid workers are women, as are the majority of workers who were taken out of tax. The right hon. Lady refers again to the House of Commons Library figures—she keeps quoting them—but they were produced on a remit that she gave to the Library. Interestingly, she earlier spoke of the distribution and sharing of incomes within households. However, the assumptions on benefits made in the figures that she quotes go against what she was saying about what happens within families.

For the first time, people will have the information to judge for themselves whether they think the Government’s decisions are fair. We have been making some difficult decisions, but for the first time the Government published an overview of the impact of the spending review on groups that are protected by equalities legislation, including women. The analysis demonstrated that our decisions mean that services used by women are protected. With our Budgets in 2010 and this year, and with the spending review, we published unprecedented distributional analysis of our proposals, as the IFS has acknowledged. Such analyses were never published by the previous Government. Perhaps if they had thought to publish such information, they would have avoided policies that hit some of the poorest the hardest, such as scrapping the 10p tax rate, which my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) mentioned.

I reject the Opposition notion that we can judge the value of a policy simply by looking at the number of men or women who are affected by it. We should not reduce the amount that we invest in tackling youth unemployment just because more young men than young women are unemployed, but that is exactly what the Opposition’s analysis suggests we should do. They say that spending on tackling youth unemployment would be unfair on women.

We should not stop investment in policies that will return Britain to growth, such as cutting corporation tax, because more men run companies than women. However, again that is exactly what the Opposition’s analysis suggests we should do. I reject that argument. We need to ensure that more women can start businesses as we invest in getting Britain’s economy going. In fact, one symptom of the inequality between men and women is that more women than men rely on state spending.

We need to continue to support all women who need it, which is why we have ensured that we have protected child benefit and tax credits for women on low incomes, and why we will increase the value of the state pension, and protect benefits such as the winter fuel allowance and free bus passes for older women. However, if the previous Government taught us one thing, it is that more state spending might help to deal with the symptoms of inequality, but it does not address the causes. This Government are determined to get to grips with the causes of inequality between men and women, from job opportunities to the number of women in top, senior positions, to tackling the shameful levels of violence against women, and working to reverse the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary will know that some of the key causes of inequality come into play during the very earliest years of a child’s life. Can she explain why her Government are cutting £5 million from the early intervention grant in Leicester, which covers children’s centres and Sure Start, which are crucial to giving all children the very best start in life?

[Mrs May]

We agree that early intervention is very important and, as the hon. Lady will know, the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) produced a very significant report for the Government on the whole issue of early intervention. The Government are ensuring that, within the early intervention budget, there is sufficient funding to provide for a network of Sure Start centres. We are also ensuring—as we are in other areas, as I have mentioned in terms of focusing what the Government spend on the most vulnerable and those most in need—that Sure Start is returned to the early focus it was intended to have by the last Labour Government, which was helping those who are most in need, those on the lowest incomes and those who most need access to the sort of provision that Sure Start and children’s centres can provide.

I want the Government to take a new, more mature approach to engaging with women. I want to see women’s voices in government strengthened. That is why we launched a consultation on how the Government listen to and engage with women, which has already received nearly 900 responses. In today’s world, we need to make full use of communications technology, social media and other techniques to allow us to talk to women directly.

The Government are focused on giving opportunities to women. We need to move beyond just protection from discrimination and help women to get on in modern businesses and modern workplaces. Many women have benefited from the introduction of the right to request flexible working for parents and carers, but by restricting flexible working to certain groups, the idea was perpetuated that this is some sort of special treatment. We will therefore extend the right to request flexible working to all employees. This will not only shift attitudes, but will help to shift behaviour away from the traditional 9-to-5 model of work that can act as a barrier to many women and that also does not make sense for many modern businesses.

Another stereotype we need to shift is the idea that women should do the caring and men should earn the money when a couple decide to start a family. Our policy to introduce a new system of flexible parental leave will make a real difference to working women who want to have children. For the first time, it will allow both parents to choose what is right for them and what is right for their family. If fathers want to take more of a role, they can. If mothers want to return to work earlier, they can. If parents want some time at home together after the birth of their child, they can have it. What matters is that they will have a choice.