Arrests and Prison Capacity

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

Cases of the kind that the hon. Lady describes would not have been in the scope of the contingency outlined in the letter of a week ago. The antisocial behaviour that she described is completely unacceptable. I am sure that many Members are parents and would want their own children to go to and from school safely. The Government have launched an antisocial action plan, one of the elements of which is a funded scheme for antisocial behaviour hotspot patrols. That started just a few weeks ago, so I would urge the hon. Lady to speak to her local police and crime commissioner—I think a newly elected one in Northumbria, if memory serves me correctly—and to ask that one of the funded hotspot patrols be set up in the vicinity of that school to try to tackle the issue that she described, because no parent should have to face that.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Figures published last month showed that Bedfordshire police has the slowest response time to 999 calls, because of understaffing. Does the Minister realise how ridiculous it sounds to ask the police not to police and to arrest fewer people, because his Government have broken the justice system and are allowing criminals to get away scot-free?

[Chris Philp]

That is a completely inaccurate characterisation of the situation. The eight-day period provided for a contingency that was not required. I have read to the House an assurance from the relevant National Police Chiefs’ Council lead that arrests were not forgone or cancelled as a result of the contingency. More widely, as I have said, we have record police numbers and lower crime than 14 years ago, and I would have thought that we would all welcome that.

Crime and Neighbourhood Policing

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point because more criminals are getting off under the Tories. As a result of 13 years of Conservative Governments, criminals are not paying the price. About 7,000 people will be the victim of theft today. Of those thefts, just over 4,000 will be reported to the police, but only 180 will face court. For thousands more victims, there will be no justice.

The worst figures of all are on rape. The Conservatives’ amendment to the motion shows how low they have fallen and how out of touch they are. The proportion of rape cases reaching charge is still two thirds lower than six or seven years ago, and it was too low then, but their amendment effectively boasts about an increase of a third in the number of adult rape convictions in the last year. The number of convictions in a year that they are talking about is 532, which is the equivalent of about one and a half convictions a day. That figure may be up from just over one conviction a day during the covid crisis the year before, but let us think about the estimated 300 women who are raped every day. Are we supposed to be grateful and applaud the fact that there might be a conviction in perhaps one and a half rather than one of those cases? What kind of justice does it provide for the other 298 women if just one or two of those rapists are locked up? What kind of shameless, failing Government think that they should boast about that appalling failure in justice for women and girls? I say to Government Members, “That is the motion that you will be voting for this afternoon.” They will vote against an increase in neighbourhood policing and vote to boast about a truly dismal record in tackling violence against women and girls.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Despite unprecedented levels of recorded rape and sexual offences, local authorities and charities are having to fight to keep open victim support services, such as women’s centres. Meanwhile, the long-promised victims Bill is nowhere to be seen. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, alongside ending violence against women and girls, we must prioritise supporting the victims of crime?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: where is the victims Bill? Where is the opportunity to provide proper support for victims of crime, not just of domestic abuse and sexual violence, but more widely? They need support but, too often, the Government have turned their back on them and they have been badly let down.

Where, too, is the action to get specialist rape investigation units in all our police forces? Again, too often, the Government have turned their back. For all their talk about powers and sentencing, the reality is that they voted against Labour’s policy for new powers to clamp down on the criminal gangs that are exploiting and grooming children; they voted against Labour’s policy to increase sentences for rape and set minimum sentences; and they voted against Labour’s policy for increased monitoring and powers on repeat domestic abuse perpetrators.

HM Passport Office Backlog

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Passport delays are causing immense stress to my constituents. This problem was predictable, but the Government completely failed to plan properly for the surge in applications when borders reopened. The Prime Minister will not admit that there is a problem and cannot even say how long it is taking for passports to be processed. It seems to be an unlucky dip of four, six or 10 weeks, but far too many of my constituents are waiting even longer than that.

A mother wrote to me a month ago to ask for my help on her son’s passport after receiving no response from the Passport Office. After weeks of chasing the new passport, she was advised that HMPO had lost her documents and that they would need to apply and pay for a lost passport and start the process again. After more weeks of waiting, my constituent chased the Passport Office again only to discover that it had entered the wrong details on the system. My constituent was exasperated when the call handler thought it was funny—the date of birth that they had entered would have made my constituent 600 years old. The HMPO advised that it would fast-track the application, but that did not happen.

My team had to travel to Parliament to raise a number of cases with action teams in Portcullis House, but the flaw in that system—other than the inconvenience and expense of my caseworkers having to travel to Parliament to escalate cases—is that the MP engagement team do not appear to have a full overview of all actions that have been taken on a case, including any notes added by the Portcullis House team. That means that caseworkers are unable to follow up on any action that the Portcullis House team has committed to without travelling to London again. I hope the Minister will look at fixing that. Despite the best efforts of my team, my constituent had to cancel the flights that she had booked to pick up a family member’s ashes and was absolutely devastated to miss the memorial service. She finally received her son’s passport on 7 June—nearly 13 weeks after the application. My constituents should not have to deal with the stress and incompetence of a service for which they pay the Government a lot of money.

Missing significant family occasions during the pandemic was tragic but understandable. It really is disgraceful that it is still happening because of a failed passport system. The Government are desperate to point the finger at civil servants. The Passport Office has not covered itself in glory, but there is much more going on here. The Government want us to believe that a hitherto hard-working group of individuals have suddenly and for no apparent reason decided to stop doing their jobs properly. Nothing seems to be working under this Government, whether it is getting a GP appointment, a visa, access to courts, a dental appointment, or a driving licence. Nothing is working properly. If the public are sick of the appalling delays and errors with HMPO, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is now just waiting for the Prime Minister to cut its staff by a reported 90,000.

The common denominator in all these failings is this Government’s mismanagement, underachievement and incompetence. I have no confidence that any of this will be sorted out before the summer holiday rush starts. This is where the impact of this Government’s policies will be revealed for all to see, as there will be chaotic delays, queues and frustrations at passport control and customs. The Government should sort it out now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I am certainly happy to meet my hon. Friend. We will see future rounds of the safer streets fund, and I hope his police and crime commissioner and his local authority will make a bid. I will be more than happy to meet him, not least because the commitment and conviction he shows should be at the forefront of their bid to convince us all to fund this.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

10. What plans she has to increase the number of police community support officers.

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

The decisions on how to use funding and resources are operational matters for chief constables, working with their democratically elected police and crime commissioners. They are best placed to make these decisions within their communities, based on their knowledge and experience, including decisions about the right balance of their workforce.

[Mohammad Yasin]

Our Conservative police and crime commissioner was elected on a platform to fix the unfair funding formula for Bedfordshire police, but his solution to raise much-needed funding to put more police on our streets is to raise local council tax. With two large towns and an international airport, Bedfordshire police should not be funded as a rural force. Will the Minister give our force the resources it needs before expecting my constituents to pay more?

[Kit Malthouse]

Obviously the Bedfordshire police and crime commissioner is doing a fantastic job. He won a resounding victory in the recent election, and I know he continues to enjoy significant support in that county. As I hope the hon. Gentleman has heard me say in the past, we are committed to coming up with a new funding formula for policing. The formula we use at the moment is a little bit elderly and creaky. He will be pleased to hear that I had a meeting just this morning with the chair of the new technical body that is putting that work together. We hope to be able to run the formula before the next election.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Daly]

It is better to move on from such an appalling speech.

Amendment 12, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), which would remove clause 9, is a quite straightforward legal matter. However, as I have listened to the debate, I have thought on occasion that hon. Members have been debating a clause that does not exist or is not in the Bill. As I said in my intervention on the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous), the Labour Government, through the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002—as well as through further legislation in 2016—codified and ensured that a Home Secretary of whatever political party had the power to exclude or take away somebody’s citizenship in certain circumstances. If there was an objection to that principle, an amendment should have been tabled. Anyone in the House had the opportunity to do that. However, the only amendment tabled on this measure concerns the notice period—that is it. Let us therefore have a debate on the notice period. If the Labour party opposes in principle what the previous Labour Government did in 2002 and 2016, I am certain that its Front-Bench team would have tabled an amendment.

Let us get to the notice period and what we are arguing about, on which important issues were raised. The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) made a point that I hope the Minister will address. If an order is made without notice, does the appeal process start when the order is made or when the order is received, as is currently the norm and the law?

I could read out some of the scaremongering and appalling things said about the Bill, but I do not want to go down into that. My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) gave a magnificent speech on that. I find it surprising, because if this or any other Government wanted to do things of which they are being accused, they could do them now. What does it matter whether people have notice or not? There was the genuinely unbelievable suggestion that the Bill could be used to address climate change activists. The Opposition are genuinely scraping the barrel when it comes down to that level. I am here to tell my constituents that that is scaremongering. There is a requirement for exceptional circumstances in clause 9, which are there to protect them, and no one has anything to fear from the clause at all.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

I am deeply concerned by and opposed to the great majority of the proposals in this inherently authoritarian Bill. Much of it appears to be written to satisfy front-page tabloid headlines rather than to fix the broken asylum system. It amounts to a fundamental rejection of our international obligations under the 1951 UN convention relating to the status of refugees and does nothing to resolve these complex issues at all. Even the Government’s own impact assessment suggests that measures in the Bill could lead to an increase in unsafe journeys across the channel rather than a reduction in them. The Bill originally tried to criminalise not only asylum seekers but those who try to help and rescue them. I cannot recall a more immoral and wicked piece of UK legislation.

I am disturbed by clauses 9 and 10, which enable a Home Secretary to deprive UK nationals of citizenship without notice and restrict stateless children’s access to British citizenship. As a British citizen with dual nationality, I personally feel the ice-cold chill of those proposals. It looks and feels like a ramping up of the hostile environment. I will not support a set of clauses that create a hierarchy of British citizenship. The Government are trying to reframe citizenship as a privilege, not the right that it is. The message this sends is that certain citizens, despite being born and brought up in the UK and having no other home, remain migrants, so that their citizenship and therefore all their rights are permanently insecure.

This Bill clearly disproportionately targets those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or other racial groups, regardless of their country of birth. The racialised nature of this tiered system is obvious: the citizenship of those like myself, many of my constituents and millions of others of minority and migrant heritage is less secure and less important than those who belong to majority ethnic groups in the United Kingdom. It is a shameful piece of legislation that we should all be concerned about. Much of the Bill appears to be written to satisfy the front pages of tabloids, as I have said. It is not in favour of all the communities such as those of our parents, who came here years and years ago and worked hard to rebuild this country, and they are facing this because of this Tory Government.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

There have been some powerful speeches, and I want in particular to pay tribute to the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), whom Conservative Members would have done better to listen to rather than shout at.

I want to address the Government’s clause 9, which proposes removing people’s citizenship without notice and, in effect, removing their rights of appeal. When people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds raise concerns—deep concerns—about this proposal, the response from the Government is, “Trust us”. “Trust us”—the people who deported black citizens in the Windrush generation? “Trust us”—the people who sent “Go home” vans around working-class estates? “Trust us”—the people who authored the hostile environment? “Trust us”—the people who are talking in this legislation about offshore detention centres? “Trust us”—the people who have created an atmosphere in which others are trying to demonise those going into the waters off our country to try to save lives and prevent death? “Trust us”? It is no wonder that the people at the sharp end of this Government’s hostile environment and at the sharp end of this racist legislation do not trust this Government.

It is absolutely appalling that people are being made to feel as if they do not belong in their own country and as if they are somehow second-class citizens. Let me contrast that—[Interruption.] No, they are not being made to feel that because of Members of Parliament raising these concerns. It is because of the legislation—the racist, divisive, scapegoating legislation—that this Government are bringing in.

Safe Streets for All

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab) [V]]

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is a Bill of two halves. Many of my Labour colleagues had a hand in the development of much-needed new laws on the police covenant, assaults on emergency workers, the Lammy review and the extension of whole-life orders, but whole sections of the Bill have been hastily drafted and it will introduce some of the most draconian measures this country has ever seen to impose disproportionate control on free expression and the right to protest. In particular, the Bill targets some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in this country.

Successive Tory Governments have decimated our public services over the past 11 years. They have totally lost sight of the need to address the causes of crime, with the predictable consequence of the rise in violent crime in every single police-force area of England and Wales. The Government are making a habit of creating legislation for a problem that they have invented or exaggerated while overlooking the real and difficult issues. The problems in my constituency, like many others, are not protest but serious violent crime, knife crime, county lines drug running, gang culture, violence against women and girls and persistent antisocial behaviour. To tackle all that, we need visible community policing.

After a decade of police cuts, Bedfordshire will finally get some more police officers, paid for by council tax increases, but nowhere near as many as we need or were lost because of austerity. For many years I have been telling the Government that the funding formula for Bedfordshire police does not work. The force covers not only rural areas but large and growing urban conurbations and a main airport. Successive chief constables of Bedfordshire police and the former police and crime commissioner have said that the funding formula is not fit for purpose and needs to be urgently reviewed.

The force has made great strides in tackling violent crime and serious organised crimes. Such improvement was possible only because of an urgent funding grant. There is an overflow of intelligence about crimes that is not currently being developed because of the lack of resources. The force has had to find many millions in savings while the demands on it because of violent crime, sexual offences, domestic abuse, burglaries, fraud and cyber-crime are ever rising. Instead of tackling those things, the Government want to crack down on critical dissent—they are not being tough on crime or on the causes of crime.

The Queen’s Speech shows that rather than soundbites, policies are needed to come up with an effective preventive strategy. Bedfordshire police know how to bring crime levels down. They need a sustained level of increased funding. The bottom line is that until the funding formula is fixed, the streets of Bedford and Kempston will not be as safe as they could and should be.

Immigration Rules: Supported Accommodation

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

My hon. Friend is quite right that hotels are being used in central London and, indeed, in other cities. That is a consequence of the very short-term pressures created by coronavirus. It is our intention, as we go into next year and as the coronavirus pandemic abates, to get hotel numbers back down again. For financial and other reasons, it is not ideal to have to use hotels and we would like to phase out their use as quickly as we possibly can in the coming year.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab) [V]]

On Christmas eve, the first asylum seekers are due to arrive at the remote site of Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre, where they will be housed in prefab-style accommodation. We have seen a similar approach in Kent and Wales, where Army barracks are being used, and other sites are planned. That is a lot of activity for what we are told is a temporary arrangement. Will the Minister explain the new policy approach to housing asylum seekers in hostile environments and tell me exactly when it will end?

Windrush Compensation Scheme

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I thank my hon. Friend. As ever, he succinctly and clearly highlights the contribution that his family and his parents’ generation made to our incredible country. As Members have heard me say previously, we live in an open and tolerant society. It says a great deal that the children of immigrants are now represented in the House of Commons, given the hardships that our parents and previous generations dealt with when they came to this country. They made a great success of their time here. We should celebrate the successes of all communities, and yesterday Windrush Day was a celebration. We should not lose sight of that.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab) [V]]

My constituent Dorian Green came to the UK 52 years ago at the age of nine. In 2008, the Home Office wrongly told his employer that he did not have the right to work. He has been in a battle with the Home Office ever since, and crucial documents were lost or deleted. I am pleased to say that he finally has his British passport, but only after suffering the shame of being unable to work and the indignity of being treated as a second-class citizen. Does the Home Secretary think that £1,000 is enough to compensate Mr Green for his ordeal in proving what was always true: that he was and is a British citizen?

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Gentleman has just highlighted a case going back to 2008. If he would like me to look at it in further detail, I would be very happy to do so.

Public Services

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East (Colleen Fletcher).

Never has a Government agenda looked so hollow. Everything on this Prime Minister’s wish list, masquerading as a Conservative party broadcast, being read out by Her Majesty in Westminster, was utterly dependent on what was happening in Brussels with Brexit. Brexit, not this Government, will dictate fiscal strategy. It is clear to me that the Prime Minister is refusing to listen to the voices of those on the frontline of public services who are telling him and all of us how damaging his Government’s reckless strategy will be.

The Prime Minister is pretending and telling us that his Government are the guardians of law and order when it was his party that slashed police officer numbers. Under the austerity agenda, for the last decade, his party has systematically under-resourced the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and legal aid. It has also closed courtrooms, including in my constituency, Bedford, leading to delays of years in cases coming to trial.

The Home Secretary claims that a law billed as a crackdown on foreign criminals would make the UK safer, but this dog-whistle policy, which is estimated to cost the taxpayer about £100 million a year once it kicks in, would apply to only about 10 people a year. Terrorism, cyber-crime and other serious and organised forms of crime have no borders. We rely on working with our European counterparts and joint working with EU police forces to keep our country safe. That is where the Government’s focus needs to be in order to keep the public safe, not on vanity projects that appeal to populist sentiment.

For years, Bedfordshire police begged the Government for more funding. I will not forget that only a year ago the former chief constable of Bedfordshire police told me and this Government that in his 35 years as a police officer he had never seen such high demand on his force, yet he had to deal with a surge in serious violent crime with fewer officers than he had in 2010 and with a £47 million budget cut. He simply could not find enough officers to attend all 999 calls. Since then the Bedfordshire police force has received more funding, the brunt of the cost of which will be shouldered by taxpayers through the council tax precept. They will see only 54 new officers in the next two years, but that will not even replace those lost or those who will soon be retiring. It falls very short of the 440 police officers and 80 detectives that the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Bedfordshire says our county force needs.

It is a similar story with the hollow promises for our NHS. NHS England has made it clear that core treatment targets cannot be met within the funding settlement offered by the Government. How many more times will this Tory Government promise to bring forward proposals to improve social care and then produce absolutely nothing? We need urgent action, not empty words, reviews or vague proposals. The Tory cuts have hit funding by an average of 9% per person since 2010, leaving the social care system close to collapse. Social care services cannot continue to be the victim of political turbulence. Hundreds of thousands of older people, many living in poverty and loneliness, have already suffered years of inaction and broken promises.

The Prime Minister cannot be trusted on the NHS. His grand announcements collapse under scrutiny. The Prime Minister promised 40 new hospitals but will deliver only six new buildings or refurbs—and that is only if they win not just this election but the one to follow. It is totally unclear what criteria were used for which hospitals would receive extra funding, but in the Bedford, Luton and Dunstable merger Bedford Hospital got nothing from the £99.5 million proposed investment. Next to nothing is being done to address the severe staffing crisis at all levels of the NHS. Bedford Hospital had to recruit 237 nurses from the other side of the world to fill vacancies that were largely left by EU nurses leaving because they feared for their future in the UK.

The Prime Minister’s hints at rail reforms also have a hollow ring for my constituents, who have experienced a severe reduction in services. Thousands of my constituents who moved to Bedford because of the fast train services to London and the north have been let down. Commuters from Bedford face almost daily misery because of unreliable services. Rail privatisation has failed completely. No one is fooled by a commercial model. What is needed is an integrated system run by the people for the people.

The Queen’s Speech is a sham. Much of it is not even new policy. There is no plan, no vision and no honesty about the state of crisis in our public services. The Prime Minister may want to distract us from Brexit by trying to focus on fixing the public services that his Government decimated, but it is his Government who are making a mess of everything.

Rwandan Genocide: Alleged Perpetrators

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

My hon. Friend knows better than anybody else about the judiciary and its relationship with the Executive. I absolutely understand the importance of urgency when it comes to evidence. It is important that we produce trials that are successful. All I can say is what I have said to many hon. Members: I will impress the need for urgency on the counter-terrorism police when I next see them. I promise to update the House on the progress of war crimes prosecutions. My hon. Friend and I know that we must respect the rulings of the judiciary. There has been too much bashing of the judiciary in the past 20 years, and that does not help our society. They made that decision, and we abide by it. We must now prosecute in this country, and we will do so urgently.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Not long after my election, I met a constituent who had seen their family members brutally killed during the Rwandan genocide. Her story was heartbreaking. It is unbearable for her that one of the alleged perpetrators of those horrific acts of violence now lives in her town and is free to continue with his family life without fear of extradition. She is asking when she will see justice for her brothers.

[Mr Wallace]

The hon. Gentleman will have heard my earlier answers. As the police progress whatever cases they have, we stand ready to support them. Subject to the complexities and the courts, I hope we will see prosecutions sooner rather than later.