Licensing Hours Extension Bill
Nusrat Ghani ExcerptsFriday 17th January 2025
(4 days, 8 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Licensing Hours Extensions Bill 2024-26 View all Licensing Hours Extensions Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
I am delighted to hear that my hon. Friend will now have, I think, at least 12 free drinks in his constituency! Does he agree with me about the importance of community-owned and operated pubs, and the additional social value they can provide to local communities and groups?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Before Mr Ranger returns to his feet, I should obviously reference all the fantastic pubs in Sussex Weald!
Andrew Ranger
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and thank him for that intervention. I get the feeling we are going to hear a lot of pub names today. I named just a few of the 78 pubs that span my constituency. I will not comment on how many of them I have personally visited, possibly more than once.
Hospitality is also vital to tourism in Wrexham. It contributes nearly £120 million to our local economy, and I know that that will be similarly true in other Members’ constituencies. Since the arrival of two well-known Hollywood actors in Wrexham, we have welcomed visitors from far afield, eager to see the home of Wrexham AFC at the world-famous Racecourse Ground and, of course, to be pulled a pint by landlord Wayne at the Turf—there is another one. Accommodating the recent influx of visitors would never have been possible without pubs, cafes, restaurants and hotels stepping up to the plate. I know that that is the case across Britain, where dedicated staff work hard to deliver great service, food and drink to customers. I thank them for all they do, all year round.
Section 172 of the Licensing Act 2003 provides the ability for the Home Secretary to make an order extending licensing hours on a blanket basis, thereby allowing all licensed premises to open for longer at moments of important celebration.
Linsey Farnsworth (Amber Valley) (Lab)
We heard that licensing hours could not be extended for the Lionesses game because Parliament was not sitting. Does my hon. Friend agree that the changes in the Bill will give us the flexibility to ensure that, on such occasions, fans will be able watch games while supporting our pubs? We also have an opportunity today to progress legislation on the safety of fans in another way; my Bill is no. 15 on the list, and it would legislate to prevent—
Mike Reader
I am looking forward to my hon. Friend’s Bill—a much-needed piece of legislation.
The British Beer and Pub Association backs this change to the law because it knows that the industry needs it. And as a proud member, along with others in the House, of the all-party parliamentary beer group and the all-party parliamentary group for hospitality and tourism, I know that we need it, too. The Bill is about helping our pubs and communities to continue the proud tradition of celebrating British success together, and I fully support it.
Nesil Caliskan (Barking) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Andrew Ranger) for introducing the Bill—a small change, but one that will make a big difference to our communities. There are a few principal reasons why I support it. First, as others have said, it allows us to bring communities together at moments of national importance, making it a common-sense change that our communities would welcome. In many instances, they cannot believe the process that exists at the moment. Constituents across the country—certainly mine—would welcome this relatively minor change so that they can come together, support their local hospitality spots and mark those occasions.
Secondly, it will have a material positive impact on our local hospitality sector—pubs, but also restaurants and cafes. Our local businesses, particularly small businesses, seek flexibility above everything else, so that they can adapt and take up any opportunity for further income. They also want to play a part in our high streets and town centres. The change will bring that flexibility. I have 65 different hospitality spots in my constituency, which employ almost 1,000 people and make a contribution of more than £50 million. These small steps can make a big difference to them, and I am pleased to support them.
Finally, the Bill will relieve pressure on overstretched local authorities up and down the country. Councils talk about the burden of red tape, not just for local businesses but for themselves. The Bill will ensure not only that parliamentary time is spent well, but that existing pressures on council are relieved. For that reason, I very much support the Bill.
Dame Diana Johnson
The measures before us are simple and straightforward, and the debate shows there is widespread agreement in the House about them. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will, in this case, not cause any problems to the Bill going forward.
The Bill will rectify the issues we have been discussing and streamline the parliamentary process, but it does not seek to alter the fundamental content of the Licensing Act 2003. However, the Government fully intend to plan ahead, so that wherever possible licensing hour extension orders in England and Wales can be brought in with time for full public consultation. The power in section 172 of the Licensing Act has, rightly, been used sparingly, and there is no intention to change the frequency with which the relevant powers are invoked.
As the Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention, it is important that I make clear that the police have generally been supportive of extensions for royal events, and that there have been no major increases in crime and disorder attributable to temporary extended drinking hours. However, the police have previously expressed some concerns about licensing extensions relating to sporting events, namely football. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the police have the opportunity to put forward their views, and we will always give due weight to any concerns raised before pressing ahead with an extension of licensing hours.
The Government recognise the importance of providing the police with ample time to put in place additional policing measures that may be necessary to minimise any potential increase in crime and disorder as a result of any temporary licensing hours extension. To that end, the Government remain firmly committed to continuing to plan in advance, wherever possible.
In conclusion, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham for bringing forward the legislation and those who have spoken in support of it. It is a simple measure that will free up parliamentary time, help the Government to continue to support businesses and local authorities, and allow for celebrations of important events in the life of the nation. The Government fully support the Bill, and it is very important to get it passed before last orders.
Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(5 days, 8 hours ago)
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Yvette Cooper
On the funding to support the various measures we are taking forward, we have identified up to £10 million for additional investment to support further action. However, I cannot stress enough that this has to be part of the mainstream work that agencies, police forces and local councils do, because tackling child sexual exploitation and abuse cannot just be an add-on. It cannot be something that is done only if there is a particular announcement from the Government—it has to be done as part of the core responsibilities of police forces and local councils and included in their funding. That is why we want our mission to halve violence against women and girls to be the central mission right across agencies and right across the Government, as well.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I appreciate that this is a very sensitive subject, but if the questions are long and the answers are just as long, we will get very few people in. Chris Murray, show us how it is done.
Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. In her report, Alexis Jay notes that one in 20 boys and one in six girls in the United Kingdom is estimated to be a victim of sexual abuse. We have had scandal after scandal of grooming in care homes, councils, schools and churches for decades. I welcome the appointment of Baroness Casey on the rapid review into grooming, and welcome that it will be rapid, because these victims deserve justice.
It is unbelievable to my mind that grooming is not an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offenders. Will the Home Secretary restate her commitment to making it an aggravating factor, and commit to that being done quickly and by force, so that child sexual offenders are properly punished by the law?
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. I need Members to work with me so that we can get in the final 10 questions; otherwise, there will be a lot of disappointment. If Members have not been here and bobbing throughout, there is no point in them trying to catch my eye now.
David Burton-Sampson (Southend West and Leigh) (Lab)
I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement, which was full of action. I am pleased that last week I supported the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill so that we can start implementing much-needed safeguarding measures—unlike some Conservative Members, who attempted to wreck the Bill and spread misinformation, which led to online abuse towards many Members. Does the Home Secretary share my concern about the most rapidly evolving forms of child sexual abuse taking place online, including through artificial intelligence-facilitated child sexual abuse material? Can she outline what plans the Government have to strengthen the law in this area?
Yvette Cooper
Work is under way on drawing up the Hillsborough law, which was part of the King’s Speech to be taken forward as a priority in this Session. That work is being done across the Cabinet Office, with Ministry of Justice support, and it is part of the wider work on making sure there can be proper accountability where things fail and where people are let down, alongside both the duty of candour and the duty to report.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Well done to everyone who kept their question short. We got everybody in. I thank the Home Secretary.
Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(2 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Before I call the Home Secretary to make the statement on child sexual exploitation and abuse, I have a statement to make on behalf of Mr Speaker. I remind Members of the House’s sub judice resolution, which prohibits reference being made to any active criminal cases. Members should therefore not make any reference to any active case in which an individual has already been charged.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Yvette Cooper)
Child sexual abuse and exploitation are the most vile and horrific of crimes, involving rape, violence, coercive control, intimidation, manipulation and deep long-term harm. The information from the crime survey should be chilling to all of us. It estimates that half a million children every year experience some form of child sexual abuse: violence and sexual violation in the home; repeated rapes or exploitation by grooming or paedophile gangs; threats and intimidation involving intimate images online; or abuse within institutions that should have protected and cared for young people—cruel and sadistic crimes against those who are most vulnerable.
All of us have a responsibility to protect our children. Perpetrators must be punished and pursued, and victims and survivors must be protected and supported. But these crimes have not been taken seriously for too long, and far too many children have been failed. That is why this Government are determined to act, strengthening the law, taking forward recommendations from independent inquiries, and supporting stronger police action and protection for victims.
There is no excuse for anyone not to take these crimes seriously. Brave survivors speaking out have shone a light on terrible crimes and the failure of institutions to act, be it in care homes in Rochdale, Asian grooming gangs in Rotherham or Telford, the abuse covered up within faith institutions, including the Church of England and the Catholic Church, or within family homes.
That report, alongside the coming to light of other appalling crimes, is why our party when in opposition called for a national independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and supported that work when it was launched by the previous Government. Over seven years, that inquiry, expertly led by Professor Alexis Jay, engaged with more than 7,000 victims and survivors, processed 2 million pages of evidence, and published 61 reports and publications. The findings should be truly disturbing for everyone—they described the pain and suffering caused to victims and survivors, and the deviousness and cruelty and perpetrators. Nor is there any excuse for anyone not to recognise and act on the deep harm and damage of organised gang exploitation, abuse sexual assaults and rape.
Ten years ago, two reports by Alexis Jay and Louise Casey in Rotherham found that 1,400 children had been sexually exploited, raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked across other towns, abducted, beaten and threatened with guns. Children had even been doused in petrol. Girls as young as 11 had been raped. Those reports a decade ago identified a failure to confront Pakistani heritage gangs and a “widespread perception” that they should “‘downplay’ the ethnic dimensions” for fear of being seen to be racist.
When those reports came out, those failings in Rotherham were condemned across the board by both Government and Opposition in this House. As I said at the time:
“It is never an excuse to use race and ethnicity or community relations as an excuse not to investigate and punish sex offenders.”—[Official Report, 2 September 2014; Vol. 585, c. 169.]
The then Home Secretary made it clear that
“cultural concerns…the fear of being seen as racist…must never stand in the way of child protection.”—[Official Report, 2 September 2014; Vol. 585, c. 168.]
The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse also ran a specific investigation strand into child sexual exploitation by organised networks, which ran for two years and produced a separate report in February 2022. It concluded that police forces and local councils were still failing to tackle this serious crime and set out further recommendations for change. But despite those different inquiries drawing up multiple recommendations, far too little has actually been done. None of the 20 recommendations from the independent inquiry into child abuse has been implemented. As the Act on IICSA campaign group from the Survivors Trust said this week, victims of child sexual abuse
“cannot afford further delays in meaningful action… It is imperative to keep the focus on radical reform”.
Two different Conservative Home Secretaries said after the report was published that it was a watershed and should be the beginning of a new chapter for change, but that has not happened. We now need new impetus and action.
Since coming into office, the Safeguarding Minister has met with Professor Alexis Jay and survivors, and has convened the first dedicated cross-Government group to drive forward change. To ensure that victims’ voices remain at the very heart of this process, we will set up a new victims and survivors panel to work on an ongoing basis with the inter-ministerial group, to guide them on the design, delivery and implementation of new proposals and plans not just on IICSA but on wider work around child sexual exploitation and abuse. We will set out more details and timescales based on that work.
Before that, I can announce action on three key recommendations. First, I can confirm that we will make it mandatory to report abuse, and we will put measures in the crime and policing Bill—to be put before Parliament this spring—to make it an offence, with professional and criminal sanctions, to fail to report or to cover up child sexual abuse. The protection of institutions must never be put before the protection of children. I first called for this measure in response to the reports and failings in Rotherham 10 years ago. The Prime Minister first called for it 12 years ago, based on his experience as Director of Public Prosecutions. The case was clear then, but we have lost a decade and we need to get on with it now.
Secondly, we will legislate to make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences, because the punishment must fit the terrible crime.
Thirdly, we will overhaul the information and evidence that are gathered on child sexual abuse and exploitation and embed them in a clear new performance framework for policing, so that these crimes are taken far more seriously. One of the first recommendations of the independent inquiry was a single core data set on child abuse and protection, but that has never been done. We will introduce a single child identifier in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and a much stronger police performance framework, including new standards on public protection, child abuse and exploitation.
We are accelerating the work of the child sexual exploitation police taskforce, set up—rightly—under the previous Government. There was a 25% increase in arrests between July and September last year. That sits alongside the tackling organised exploitation programme, which uses advanced data and analytics to uncover complex networks. Data on ethnicity is now being published, but we will work further with them to improve the accuracy and robustness of the data and analysis.
We will continue to support further investigations that are needed, including police investigations and local independent inquiries and reviews, which can expose failings and wrongdoing in local areas and institutions, as we have seen in Telford, Rotherham and Greater Manchester. We support the ongoing work commissioned by Mayor Andy Burnham into historic abuse in Oldham, which has led to new police investigations, arrests and convictions. To build on those findings, the leader of Oldham council has confirmed this week that work to set up a further local independent inquiry is already underway, including liaison with Oldham survivors. We welcome and support this work, which will put victims’ voices at its heart.
The Telford inquiry was particularly effective because victims were involved in shaping it at every stage. Tom Crowther, who led that inquiry, has now agreed to work with the Government and other local councils where stronger engagement with victims and survivors is needed, or where more formal inquiries are required to tackle persistent problems. We should also be clear that wherever there have been failings or perpetrators of terrible crimes have not been brought to justice, the most important inquiries and investigations should be police investigations to track those perpetrators down, to bring them before the courts and to get victims the protection that they deserve.
Finally, we have to face the serious challenge that the fastest growing area of grooming and child abuse is online. We will also take much stronger action to crack down on rapidly evolving forms of child sexual exploitation and abuse and grooming online, including tackling the exponential rise in artificial intelligence-facilitated child sexual abuse material. We will set out a significant package of measures to strengthen the law in this area in the coming weeks.
For many years there has been broad cross-party consensus not only on the importance of this work, but that the interests of victims and survivors must come first. There will be different views about the details of the policies that are needed, but every one of us across this House has supported action to protect our children. It is the responsibility of us all to keep them safe for the future. I hope that Members across the House will work with Ministers and the victims and survivors panel that we are setting up to change protection for the better and to make sure that it is perpetrators who pay the price. I commend this statement to the House.
Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)
I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of her statement.
The whole country is shocked by the rape gang scandal. Over years or decades, thousands or maybe tens of thousands of vulnerable young girls were systematically raped by organised gangs of men, predominantly of Pakistani heritage. Instead of those victims being protected and the perpetrators prosecuted, those girls were systematically failed. Many cases were covered up because of absurd concerns about so-called community relations. Often, the police did not investigate. Local councils covered things up. The Crown Prosecution Service frequently failed victims. Those raising concerns were frequently accused of racism. Never again can people be silenced in that way.
I pay tribute to people who have raised these cases over the years, starting with former Labour MP Ann Cryer, who first raised these problems nearly two decades ago and bravely persevered despite accusations of racism and worse, including from her own colleagues. In that vein, let me say a word on the Prime Minister’s comments this morning: it is not far-right to stand up for victims of mass rape. [Interruption.]
Chris Philp
Smearing people who raise those issues is exactly how this got covered up in the first place. I repeat what I said yesterday: intimidation and threats towards elected Members of Parliament and Ministers, including the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), are completely wrong.
As the Home Secretary said, action is important. The last Government took extensive action, starting with the original Jay report commissioned in 2014 by the then Home Secretary, now Baroness May. A year later, she commissioned the independent investigation into child sexual abuse, and Sajid Javid commissioned data collection in 2018.
On the response to the IICSA report published in 2022, it is not true that the last Government took no action. The last Government established the grooming gangs taskforce, whose work led to 550 arrests of perpetrators in the first year and safeguarded 4,500 victims. My first question to the Home Secretary is therefore this: will she confirm for the House—I am sure she can—that the grooming gangs taskforce’s work will continue and, I hope, be stepped up? Secondly, as part of the work of the grooming gangs taskforce—and, again, implementing one of the recommendations of the IICSA report—in April 2023 the last Government mandated data collection on ethnicity, as the Home Secretary referred to. It has been going for over a year and a half, so will she confirm that the data on the ethnicity of perpetrators will be published?
As the Home Secretary has acknowledged, one of IICSA’s main recommendations was mandatory reporting to the police by people in positions of responsibility. The last Government were in the process of implementing that recommendation, via a measure in the Criminal Justice Bill, which fell because of the early election. I am glad that she has announced that she will continue with the last Government’s proposals in her forthcoming Bill. She can be assured that the Opposition will support the Government in the continuation of that measure.
Finally, the Home Secretary did not address the need for a full national public inquiry into this scandal. While the previous Government did initiate IICSA, under Professor Jay, that was mainly directed at other child sexual abuse and exploitation issues, and it covered only six of the towns involved in the gang rape scandal—it did not cover everything. We need to get to the truth. We have new evidence that is of interest to the public, including what Simon Danczuk, the former Labour MP for Rochdale, said about the way that he was pressured into staying silent. We also have evidence of local authorities covering this up, and the third report, from last year, on Operation Span, commissioned by the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, which exposes extremely serious failings by the Crown Prosecution Service. All that needs to be looked into.
Will the Home Secretary therefore commission a national statutory public inquiry, which can compel witnesses to attend, requisition evidence and take evidence under oath? If the Government will not order that inquiry, the Opposition will table an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill later this week to put the matter to a vote. I hope that Members across the House will vote for that full statutory public inquiry, so that we can get to the truth.
Yvette Cooper
This is an issue on which I worked with Government Ministers when I was shadow Home Secretary and when I was Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, and there has been cross-party consensus on the need to tackle these serious and vile crimes. These are the most appalling crimes against children: repeated multiple brutal rapes of children—particularly young girls, but also young boys—in the most appalling circumstances, and the abuse of children’s trust, often by people who should have protected and looked after them; institutions failed to keep them safe. That is why the independent inquiry was so important, why I and many others across this House called for it, and why we supported it, when the previous Government set it up. However, there has just not been enough action to tackle these vile crimes. There has not been enough change to policies, and to the way that services operate at a local level. It is a deep failing that those changes have not taken place.
The shadow Home Secretary used the example of the duty to report, which is incredibly important. It is about preventing any chance of people, including professionals, turning a blind eye to abuse, and covering up child abuse and exploitation in the most appalling way. It is about making that a criminal offence. We called for that 10 years ago. His party had a decade to introduce that —a decade that we have lost; a decade without those powers and measures in place.
The hon. Gentleman talks, rightly, about the taskforce, which I mentioned. We have supported not just continuing with that taskforce, but accelerating its work. The number of arrests in the most recent quarter increased significantly on the previous quarter. What I want to see most of all is perpetrators behind bars. I want to see perpetrators pay the price for these vile crimes against children. In order to achieve that, we have to improve policing performance and the co-ordinated work between police and local councils across the country, so we will accelerate the work of the taskforce.
The hon. Gentleman refers to the ethnicity data, which was published in November. The latest report was published in November as a result of the taskforce’s work. However, I do not think the data that has been gathered is adequate. It does not go far enough. There is a real problem with the way that police forces collect data, which is very haphazard. There is not a proper system for collecting data, or a proper performance framework for policing. To be honest, I think that his Government withdrew too far from policing, and from having the kind of standards that we need to have in place. I hope that we can work together on a stronger performance framework, and a clearer framework for data, including for dealing with issues around ethnicity. Back in 2015, we had consensus on the need to ensure that race and ethnicity were never used as an excuse not to tackle crime, and that where vulnerable girls supposedly consented, when they in fact did not, that would not be used as an excuse not to tackle crime. We can never accept those excuses. I hope that we will agree on how we do that.
On inquiries, the shadow Home Secretary’s party launched the child abuse inquiry; it set the terms of reference and provided the substantial funding for it. He could have raised concerns about the inquiry’s terms of reference and scope, and the extent of its reports, at any point, including after it reported, but he did not do so until last week.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will support the work that Oldham is determined to take forward, hopefully replicating the important Telford inquiry. I hope, too, that he is prepared to work with the victims and survivors panel, which will help us to take forward the further investigations, reviews and inquiries that should take place, both locally and across the country, in order to protect child victims.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. Child sexual exploitation and abuse is a heinous crime. It happens everywhere—in all communities and in all settings—and we must all be vigilant and do what we can to address it. My right hon. Friend mentioned the importance of ensuring that victims of CSE are at the heart of all that we do, and I support her wholeheartedly on that. If it is the will of the victims of the abuse in Oldham to have an additional review of the circumstances that led to their abuse, I will also wholeheartedly support that. Will my right hon. Friend expand on how we can transparently track progress in implementing the recommendations? It cannot be allowed that three years after we receive detailed recommendations from a national independent inquiry, we are still waiting for their implementation.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend has worked immensely hard to champion the victims and survivors of terrible crimes. She raises important points about the prevalence of these appalling crimes, the need to be vigilant, wherever this abuse is to be found—in any kind of institution, across communities and across the country—and the importance of tracking progress. The Telford inquiry was set up in such a way that Tom Crowther, who led the inquiry, goes back each year to do a follow-up report and to track progress, which has been really important. We have encouraged those looking at this matter in Oldham to be in touch with those involved in Telford, and I am glad that Tom Crowther has agreed to work with the Government on how we can make this work more widely.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of her statement. No child should ever have to face sexual exploitation or abuse. There should simply be no place for this horrific, abhorrent behaviour in our society. We must keep every child and young person impacted by these terrible, sickening crimes in our thoughts today. We owe it to the survivors to ensure that justice is delivered, which means requiring perpetrators to face the full force of the law, but also ensuring that the right steps are taken to stop children facing this vile abuse in the future. The expansive independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, which published its report in 2022, set out how to do just that.
However, under the previous Conservative Government, progress on implementing IICSA’s recommendations stalled. Professor Alexis Jay, the chair of the inquiry, said that she was “frustrated” by the then Government’s lack of action. Will the Home Secretary say when we can expect a clear timeline for the full implementation of IICSA’s recommendations, which Professor Jay has urged? Of course, that work cannot be siloed in the Home Office, so I would welcome more details about how cross-Government work to implement the recommendations will be co-ordinated.
Victims and survivors deserve more than warm words—they deserve action. It is my sincere hope that we can work together across this House to make that a reality, and can resist turning far too many children’s suffering into a political football.
Yvette Cooper
I welcome the points that the hon. Member makes. Historically, there has been a lot of consensus across the House about the importance of this work, but often there has been very slow progress; we have to change that. She rightly says that this is not just a matter for the Home Office, or even police forces, local councils and social services; this must be about work across government and across communities. That is why the Safeguarding Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), is leading a cross-departmental programme of work responding not just to the IICSA recommendations, but to broader work. Some of the work around online abuse is moving extremely fast, and we need action there as well. It is important that we set up the victims and survivors panel to work with this group. The victims and survivors need to be at the heart of implementation, so that they do not feel that after they gave evidence to the inquiry, that was it—nobody ever listened again.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Education Committee Chair, Helen Hayes.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
Several years ago, I supported, over a number of months, a constituent of mine who suffered horrific sexual abuse as a child in the care of Lambeth council, as she prepared to give evidence to the independent inquiry on child sexual abuse, chaired by Professor Jay. It was unimaginably hard for victims and survivors to give evidence to that inquiry, reliving the abuse that they suffered and being retraumatised. The fact that they did so was exceptionally important, and I pay tribute to their courage. My constituent and thousands of other victims and survivors gave their evidence so that their experiences could be at the heart of Professor Jay’s recommendations. Does the Home Secretary agree that if we are really to put victims and survivors first, the priority must be to act on what they have already told us, and to implement the IICSA recommendations at pace, and in full?
Yvette Cooper
I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to her constituent, and to the more than 7,000 victims and survivors who gave evidence to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and exploitation. The inquiry took seven years—many years of people bravely speaking out about some of the most difficult and traumatic things imaginable, which none of us would ever want anybody to have to go through. She is also right that they must not feel that their evidence was just empty words that got lost in the air, even though an inquiry took place. We have to make sure that there is action. Some of that action may be difficult, and some may require very hard work, but we have to make sure that we take it forward and make progress to protect children for the future.
Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)
Rape gangs and the grooming of children has haunted Keighley and the wider Bradford district for decades, yet local leaders have consistently refused to launch an inquiry. The national IICSA report, which the Home Secretary is treating as a silver bullet, was not an inquiry into rape gangs. Nor does it reference Keighley or Bradford once, despite many, including me, fearing that the scale of this issue across the Bradford district will dwarf the scale of the issue in Rotherham. If the Home Secretary believes that the IICSA report gives us all the information that we need to tackle this vile and disgusting crime, can she tell me how many children across the Bradford district have been abused through child sexual exploitation? Who are the perpetrators, and when can my constituents expect to see them behind bars or deported?
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. The level of interest shows how important this issue is, but I will struggle to get everybody in unless Members keep their questions short and the answers are just as short. I call Chris Murray, who is a member of the Select Committee.
Migration and Border Security
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
For the record, I draw the attention of those on the Treasury Bench, and all Members, to paragraph 9.5 of the latest addition of the “Ministerial Code”, which states that a copy of the text of an oral statement should be made available to the Opposition and to the Speaker’s Office at least 45 minutes before the statement is to be made. It is clearly highly regrettable that that did not happen today. I note the Home Secretary’s previous apology made shortly before the sitting was suspended. I call the Home Secretary to make her statement.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Yvette Cooper)
With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement on net migration, asylum and border security, and on the collapse in controls that took place over the last five years, the damage done as a result, and the action we are now taking to turn that around.
Last Thursday’s official statistics show how over the last five years controls in the immigration and asylum systems crumbled, legal and illegal migration both substantially increased, the backlog in the asylum system soared, and enforcement of basic rules fell apart. Net migration more than quadrupled in just four years to a record high of nearly 1 million people, and it is still more than three times higher than in 2019. Dangerous small boat crossings rose from 300 people in 2018 to an average of over 36,000 a year in the last three years—a hundred-and-twentyfold increase. In just a few short years, an entire criminal smuggler industry built around boat crossings has been allowed to take hold along the UK border.
The cost of the asylum system also quadrupled to £4 billion last year. In 2019, there were no asylum hotels; five years on, there are more than 200. Returns of those with no right to be here are 30% lower than in 2010, and asylum-related returns are down by 20% compared with 14 years ago. That is the legacy we inherited from the previous Government, one that former Ministers have themselves admitted was shameful.
We should be clear that this country has always supported people coming here from abroad to work, to study or to be protected from persecution. That has made us the country we are—from the Windrush generation to the Kindertransport; from international medics working in our NHS to the families we have supported from Ukraine. But that is exactly why the immigration and asylum systems have to be properly controlled and managed, so that they support our economy and promote community cohesion, with rules properly respected and enforced, and so that our borders are kept strong and secure. None of those things have been happening for the last five years. The scale of the failure and the loss of control have badly undermined trust in the entire system, and it will take time to turn things around.
Let me turn to the changes that are needed in three areas. First, on legal migration, recent years have seen what the Office for National Statistics calls
“large increases in both work-related and study-related immigration following the end of travel restrictions and the introduction of the new immigration system after the UK left the EU.”
Conservative Government reforms in 2021 made it much easier to recruit from abroad, including a 20% wage discount for overseas workers. At the same time, training here in the UK was cut, with 55,000 fewer apprenticeship starts than five years ago, and the number of UK residents not working or studying hit a record high of over 8 million. This was an experiment gone badly wrong, built on a careless free market approach that literally incentivised employers to recruit from abroad rather than to train or to tackle workforce problems here at home.
This Government are clear that net migration must come down. We are continuing with the visa controls belatedly introduced by the previous Government, including the higher salary threshold, the 20% discount and the restrictions on dependant visas for students and care workers, but we must go further to restore order and credibility to the system.
Since the election, we have set out new plans to ban rogue employers who breach employment laws from sponsoring overseas workers; we have reversed the previous Conservative Government’s decision to remove visa requirements for a number of countries from which large numbers of people arriving as visitors were entering the UK asylum system instead; and we are reviewing visas further to prevent misuse.
However, we also need to overhaul the dysfunctional UK labour market that we inherited, including by bringing together the work of the Migration Advisory Committee, Skills England, the Department for Work and Pensions and the new Industrial Strategy Council to identify areas where the economy has become over-reliant on overseas recruitment, and where new action will be needed to boost training and support. That work will be at the heart of our new White Paper, showing how net migration must and will come down, as we set out new ways to link the points-based system with new requirements for training here in Britain.
Let me turn to the asylum system. Last week’s figures showed how the previous Government crashed the asylum system in the run-up to the election. In their last six months in office, asylum decisions dropped by 75% and asylum interviews dropped by over 80%, so only a few hundred decisions were being taken every week instead of thousands. Caseworkers were deployed elsewhere and the backlog shot up. We have had to spend the summer repairing that damage, getting caseworkers back in place, restoring interviews and decisions, and substantially boosting returns. It will take time to deal with the added backlog and pressure on asylum accommodation that that collapse in decision making caused, but the swift action we took over the summer has prevented thousands more people from being placed in asylum hotels, saving hundreds of millions of pounds.
Today I am also publishing the full spending breakdown of the previous Government’s failed Rwanda partnership. In the two years that the partnership was in place, just four volunteers were sent to Rwanda, at a cost of £700 million. That included £290 million paid to the Government in Kigali, and almost £300 million for staff, IT and legal costs. The result of that massive commitment of time and money was that 84,000 people crossed the channel from the day the deal was signed to the day it was scrapped. That so-called deterrent did not result in a single deportation or stop a single boat from crossing the channel. For the British taxpayer, it was a grotesque waste of money.
Since the election, we have swiftly redeployed many of the people who were working on fantasy planning for the Rwanda scheme to working instead on actual flights to return those who have no right to stay in the UK. That has helped to deliver nearly 10,000 returns since the election. Enforced returns are up by 19%, voluntary returns are up by 14%, illegal working visits are up by approximately 34%, and arrests from those visits are up by approximately 25%. I can tell the House that this new programme to tackle exploitation and ensure that the rules are enforced will continue and accelerate next year.
Let me turn to border security. Six years ago, fewer than 300 people arrived on dangerous small boats. Since then, an entire criminal industry has taken hold and grown, with routes stretching through France, Germany and beyond, from the Kurdistan region of Iraq to the money markets of Kabul. The criminals profit from undermining border security and putting lives at risk, and it is a disgrace that they have got away with it for so long.
Since the election, we have established the new Border Security Command, announced £150 million over the next 18 months for new technology, intelligence, and hundreds of specialist investigators working; struck new anti-smuggling action plan agreements with the G7, and bilateral agreements with Italy, Germany, Serbia and Balkan states; and increased UK operations with Europol and the Calais group. In recent weeks, international collaboration has led to high-profile arrests and shown the smuggling gangs that we will not sanction any hiding place from law enforcement.
I can tell the House today that we have gone further, with a major new international collaboration. The Iraqi Government and the Kurdistan Regional Government share our concerns about the people traffickers operating through their country who have helped to transport thousands of people across Europe and across the channel, but joint action to tackle those problems has previously been far too weak. That is why last week I visited Baghdad and Erbil to sign new co-operation agreements on border security, migration and organised crime. As part of those agreements, we will invest half a million pounds in helping the Kurdistan region to enhance its capabilities on biometrics and security, and in training Iraqi border staff to tackle organised immigration crime. We have also made new commitments on joint operations, information sharing, pursuing prosecutions and disruptions, and with further work on returns. Those landmark agreements are the first in the world for an Iraqi Government focused on playing their part in the world.
Most people in Britain want to see strong border security and a properly controlled and managed migration and asylum system where the rules are respected and enforced; one where we do our bit alongside other countries to help those who have fled persecution, but where those with no right to be here are swiftly returned; and where it is Governments, not gangs, who decide who can enter our country. For five years, none of those things has happened, and people have understandably lost faith in the entire system. We now have the chance to turn that around: to fix the chaos, bring net migration down, tackle the criminal gangs and prevent dangerous boat crossings; to restore order, control, and fair rules that are properly enforced—not through gimmicks, but through hard graft and serious international partnerships. I commend this statement to the House.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. If we go back just six years, there were barely any boat crossings. This criminal infrastructure was not in place along our borders, but we have seen it take hold, and be allowed to take hold, for several years and to build and grow. Those gangs are getting away with undermining our border security and putting lives at risk, and we should not be allowing them to get away with it. That is why the co-operation in place, led by the Border Security Command, going after the gangs and pursuing prosecutions and disruption, is so vital to saving lives and strengthening our borders.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
The Conservatives trashed our immigration system, and now it is time to pick up the pieces—[Interruption.] A period of quiet reflection on some Benches might be appropriate for the next couple of minutes. Their chaotic approach of making and breaking targets shattered public trust and left the system in a right shambles. The words “Rwanda,” “small boats,” and “asylum hotels” took on new shameful meanings under the previous Conservative Government. Net migration figures hit record highs on their watch, skyrocketing, particularly after they took the UK out of the EU. Yet still the Conservatives’ arbitrary rules make it nearly impossible for some sectors, such as hospitality, to recruit the workers they need.
Change is desperately needed. We need to rebuild an immigration system that works for our country and our economy—a fair, effective system that welcomes the workers we need. I am thinking about the senior surgeon who undertook the kidney transplant that my dad had and that kept him alive. That surgeon came here as an immigrant. We also need a system that clearly and properly enforces the rules, and that sees our university sector as a jewel in the crown, welcoming students from overseas, and as a way of using the UK’s soft power for good. It is right that the Government are taking steps to make it easier to recruit British workers to fill vacancies, and a thorough workforce strategy is sorely needed. Will the Government consider implementing Liberal Democrat calls for a carer’s minimum wage to help address the well documented needs of the social care sector?
I am pleased that the Home Secretary talked about how we will have to work closely with our international partners to stop the dangerous channel crossings—something the previous Conservative Government made it harder for us to do time and again. International co-operation is crucial, but our response to the criminal gangs, who are profiting from some of the most vulnerable people, must go further. We must crack down on modern slavery here in the UK, as that is how those gangs make a big chunk of their money. I hope the Government will cut off the power of the gangs at its source, by providing safe and legal routes for genuine refugees. The Government have a mammoth task ahead, rebuilding not only an immigration system that works, but importantly rebuilding the public’s trust in the process.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right to say that in 14 years the previous Government did deep damage not just to our public services but to our economy, and they have to take responsibility for that. We have a history going back through generations of people who have come to the UK to work, study, and get protection from persecution, but it is because those systems are an important part of who we are that they also need to be controlled and managed. That is why alongside the damage that the previous Government did to our economy and public services, we have also seen damage to the relationship between the migration system and the labour market, which has ended up with a loss of control.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.
Yvette Cooper
I completely agree. Spending £700 million just to send back four volunteers was the most astonishing, shocking waste of money. My hon. Friend is right. The criminal gangs operate across borders, but law enforcement across borders is far too weak. It has been far too much a case of each country looking inwards rather than getting co-operation in place, so the gangs are able to run rings around law enforcement in far too many places across the world. We have to strengthen the co-operation across borders in order to tackle the gangs.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
I agree with the Home Secretary that the failure of the last Government to control immigration was unconscionable, and our new leader has rightly apologised for our failure. Some of us on the Back Benches warned the Government at the time, but there we are—that is the past. Looking to the future, I agree that we all want to return illegal migrants to where they came from, but will the Home Secretary list the countries that human rights lawyers say are so unsafe that people cannot be returned to them? What is the deterrent for people from those countries if we do not have an offshoring policy?
Yvette Cooper
Clearly the Rwanda scheme failed, and the Leader of the Opposition knows that it failed. That is why she does not want to reinstate it, contrary to the views of the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), who seems to want to spend another £700 million over another two years to send another four volunteers to Rwanda. The criminals who organise the boats are incredibly dangerous. We have seen children crushed to death and people drown as a result of these flimsy and dangerous boats, and the gangs are making profits of hundreds of millions of pounds. We should not be letting them get away with it. That is why we need to work across borders to go after them.
Yvette Cooper
The agreement that we reached and signed with the Iraqi Government explicitly commits to support for international law, international humanitarian law and human rights, and this was one of the issues that we discussed as part of the meetings. The hon. Gentleman will also know that every decision in the asylum system is made on its individual merits to ensure that, where somebody is being rejected from the asylum system and is being returned, it is safe and appropriate to do so. But we do believe that there are many people currently in the immigration enforcement system who should be safely returned to their homes, and that is why we have increased the process around enforcement and returns this summer.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker—I am sure that this is a thrill for everybody. I thank the Secretary of State for her statement. The failures of the previous Government may undoubtedly be a reason for this uncontrollable migration number, but my constituents in Northern Ireland—who have had their winter fuel allowance removed and who are seeing an increase in the cost of living that is pushing many working families towards the poverty line at warp speed—are interested not in a blame game but in getting immigration sorted and the boats stopped.
What will the Government do to achieve a reasonable immigration policy? How they will deal with those who have not come here legally and who do not deserve to be here ahead of the families from Afghanistan, who were instrumental in the war effort there and who are still waiting in the correct procedural queue rather than jumping off boats?
Yvette Cooper
Enforced returns for those with no right to be here were up 19% this summer, and voluntary returns are up 14%. We think that those should increase. On the overall immigration system, we will be setting out in a White Paper new proposals to better link the Migration Advisory Committee, the skills bodies across the UK and other organisations to identify stronger controls that are also linked to stronger training requirements, so that as well as having the visa controls in place, we also have clear requirements to train here in the UK to ensure that we can tackle the big increase in net migration for work that we saw over the last five years.
I think the hon. Member would probably agree that most people across the country want to see strong border security and a properly controlled and managed immigration and asylum system. We have not had that for too long, but those are the proper controls and fair systems that we need to get back in place so that we can fix the foundations and everybody can have confidence in the system for the future.
Madam Deputy Speaker
That is the end of that statement. I will give the Front Benchers a few moments to shuffle over quickly and quietly.
Respect Orders and Antisocial Behaviour
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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The Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention (Dame Diana Johnson)
With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement on the Government’s action to tackle antisocial behaviour.
From residential neighbourhoods to busy high streets, from rolling countryside to city centres and from idyllic villages to bustling towns, the places of Britain should be a source of local pride. As well as being safe, they should feel safe for those who live and work in them, yet the dismal reality is that in too many areas the opposite is true. In the last year of the previous Government, shop theft soared by 29% to a 20-year high, street theft surged by 40% and antisocial behaviour reached new heights in our towns and cities. That is the Conservative party’s legacy on law and order.
Up and down the country, people feel uneasy or even unsafe. Unruly gangs roam the streets, creating intimidation and fear, noisy off-road vehicles speed around, disturbing the peace, illegal drugs are abused with brazenness, public spaces are awash with litter and graffiti, and an epidemic of shop theft is plaguing retailers big and small while their staff are subjected to intolerable levels of abuse and violence.
At its core, this is about respect: respect between citizens, respect for our society and the expectations underpinning it, and respect for the rule of law. All those are woven into the fabric of our democracy, but, after years of neglect, that fabric has become worn. We saw a disgraceful illustration of that in the summer when serious disorder erupted in some towns and cities. We see it on a smaller scale every day as decent, law-abiding people suffer due to the selfishness of others.
More than a third of people—36%—in England and Wales report experiencing or witnessing some type of antisocial behaviour in their local area, while about a million incidents of antisocial behaviour were recorded by police in the year to June 2024. We must never make the mistake of dismissing this menace as low-level or trivial; to do so would be an insult to the victims. It may manifest itself in different ways in different areas, but wherever and however it occurs there is an adverse impact on neighbourhoods and communities.
Antisocial behaviour chips away at people’s sense of pride and confidence in their local area. It ruins their enjoyment of public spaces. For those affected by the most serious and persistent cases, their quality of life is damaged. One victim quoted in a report on antisocial behaviour published recently by the Victims Commissioner said this:
“Every day I’m crying…It makes me anxious…and it actually makes me physically sick.”
Another said:
“It’s totally isolating and nobody can understand the pressure it puts on you.”
I am sure that all hon. Members across the House will be familiar with accounts like those from the all-too-frequent interactions we have with our constituents on these issues.
Earlier this month, I visited Leyton in east London, where I heard from local councillors about the importance of partners working together to tackle antisocial behaviour. More recently, the Home Secretary and I met victims of antisocial behaviour and shop theft, Annie Valentine and Brian Roberts from Blackpool and Tim Nye from Sheffield, to hear about their concerns at first hand.
This cannot go on, and the Government will not stand for it. That is why the Prime Minister has made safer streets a central pillar of our agenda for change. A key part of that mission is the work that the Home Secretary is leading alongside police to put visible neighbourhood policing back at the heart of our communities. By restoring that crucial link between police forces and the people they serve, we will ensure that residents and businesses have the reassurance they want and need as well as deterring would-be offenders. As we implement our neighbourhood policing guarantee, we are determined to tackle antisocial behaviour head on. Today, I can update the House on that work.
To turn things around and effectively combat the problem, it is clear that fresh impetus is needed, which is why we committed in our manifesto to introducing respect orders, which will enable tough restrictions to be placed on the worst adult perpetrators of antisocial behaviour. Those subject to a respect order could be banned from a town centre as well as being compelled to address the root cause of their behaviour—for example, through mandated alcohol and drug treatment. The orders will be applied for by the police, by councils or by social housing providers and issued by the courts.
Importantly, there will be a power of arrest available for all suspected breaches, protecting communities and town centres from further harm. We are going even further: anyone who breaches a respect order will have committed a criminal offence and may face up to two years’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine or a community order. These new powers will be piloted first to ensure that they are as effective as possible.
We will also crack down on the scourge of off-road bikes in public parks, dangerous e-scooters on pavements and street racing, all of which inflict misery on local communities. Under strengthened police powers, officers will no longer be required to issue a warning before seizing vehicles involved in antisocial behaviour.
Retail crime harms lives and livelihoods and be must dealt with as the serious threat that it is. We will introduce a new, specific offence of assaulting a retail worker and we will end the effective immunity for shop theft of goods under £200.
The task of making our country safer will not be completed overnight, but this is a Government of action. The work of change is under way and, as we step up this vital effort, we are guided by the simple and unshakeable belief that our streets belong to the decent, law-abiding majority. For far too long, gangs, yobs and thieves have been running amok, and that is not going to happen any more. Under this Government, the safety and security of the public will always come first. We will be unrelenting in our mission to restore respect and take back our streets.
Dame Diana Johnson
I am going to answer the questions, if the hon. Lady will give me an opportunity to do so. [Interruption.] I think a little courtesy in the House is helpful. We are talking about antisocial behaviour, and a number of my comments were about respect, which is very important in this House.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. Can we have less noise and heckling from the Back Benches?
Dame Diana Johnson
I have always tried to be respectful to all Members of this House, and I will now try to deal with some of the points made by the shadow Minister.
The most important point for the shadow Minister to understand is that respect orders are different from criminal behaviour orders—I do not think he quite understood that. Criminal behaviour orders are attached where there is a conviction, and the Crown Prosecution Service applies in court for that criminal behaviour order. Respect orders will not require a conviction. They will be made on application to court by councils, social housing providers and the police. A power of arrest will be attached if they are breached, and that individual will be brought before the magistrates court if that breach happens. They are different from a criminal behaviour order. They are also different in the sense that they are not community protection notices, which I think the shadow Minister referred to, which are for lower-level environmental antisocial behaviour issues.
In the conversations I have had with individuals in the sector and organisations that work in this field, respect orders got a lot of support. We want to pilot them. We want to make sure that they will work fully when we bring them in across the country. I am confident that they will provide the flexibility of a civil injunction, which is what deals with antisocial behaviour at the moment. But if a civil injunction is breached, the police officer has to take the individual to court to prove the breach. There is no automatic power of arrest. That is the difference from the respect order. It combines the flexibility of the civil injunction with the teeth of the criminal behaviour order. I hope that explains to the shadow Minister why respect orders are a very positive development to deal with antisocial behaviour.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I welcome the measures that the Minister has set out today and the Government’s commitment to tackling antisocial behaviour, which is an urgent issue in my constituency, particularly in town centres. But the most urgent issue that we face in tackling these issues is the number of police officers. My hon. Friend will be aware that the previous Government allocated funding to recruit police officers, and then withdrew it when the Met was unable to meet its target due to a set of unique challenges in London. Can my right hon. Friend give her firm assurance that the unique challenges facing the Met are fully understood, and that the Government will provide it with the resources that it needs to tackle this very serious issue in our communities?
Dame Diana Johnson
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this issue. The Met makes up almost a quarter of overall policing. It plays a very important part in policing London, but it also has other responsibilities at national level—counter-terrorism and so on. Decisions on funding are being taken at the moment. The House will be informed in the normal way next month about the provisional settlements for policing, but I hear my hon. Friend concerns very clearly.
Madam Deputy Speaker
I call the Liberal Democrats spokesperson, who knows that she has a maximum of two minutes.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
Across my constituency, whether in Heaviley, Woodley, Marple or High Lane, illegal off-road bikers are a persistent blight on the community. They intimidate people, endanger public safety and are generally noisy, antisocial and really annoying. I was interested to read the Home Secretary’s comments on respect orders over the weekend and the Minister’s statement today; I thank the Minister for advanced sight of it.
My local Greater Manchester police officers tell me the challenge in tackling these off-road bikes, often ridden by young people, is not a lack of powers, but the difficulty of gathering evidence and a lack of tools to identify and actually catch offenders, who often evade them on these bikes. How will the Government ensure that local police have the time, resources and practical support needed to enforce these new measures effectively?
We already know what is most effective at stopping crime. It is proper community policing, where officers are visible, trusted and out and about in their local neighbourhoods—bobbies on the beat who know their community and prevent crime every day. The previous Conservative Government decimated frontline police numbers, leaving local forces overstretched and making our communities less safe. I would welcome details from the Minister on how the Government plan to address this situation, and in particular the cuts to numbers of police community support officers, who play a crucial role in tackling antisocial behaviour.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. I say to the Minister that detailed answers are very well enjoyed here, but we have a lot of people to get in with this statement. I call a member of the Home Affairs Committee.
Shaun Davies (Telford) (Lab)
In a recent survey of residents of Telford, it was overwhelmingly clear that they had had enough of the inaction of the past 14 years. I welcome the respect orders coming into the police officer toolkit. Can the Minister confirm that they will give the authorities the power to seize and crush off-road bikes, to seize booze off drunken yobs and to deal with those who consume drugs in our town centres? We also need a return to neighbourhood policing, so that we have coppers back on the streets, patrolling their communities.
Dame Diana Johnson
I am mindful of your instruction, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I can absolutely say that this is about rebuilding that neighbourhood presence to put those police officers, PCSOs and specials back in our communities and deal with exactly the issues that my hon. Friend has raised, with people drinking, taking drugs, riding vehicles and causing harassment, alarm, and distress.
Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)
I thank the Minister for her statement and warmly welcome it. She is right to mention neighbourhood policing. Does she agree with the Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, that local police stations are critical to neighbourhood policing, and whether she will pledge to stop the closure of local police stations that occurred under the Conservatives and under previous Labour Administrations? That includes Wimbledon police station, which remains under threat six years after I won my judicial review, stopping its closure.
Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
My constituent Linda, along with other members of my community, is extremely concerned about antisocial behaviour in Burgess Hill. Car racing, e-scooters and bike thefts are causing fear and distress to residents across the town. As the Minister noted in her statement, the impact of that behaviour should not be minimised. I have raised these issues with both Sussex police and the police and crime commissioner. What can the Minister do to ensure that Sussex police have sufficient resources to stop a small number of perpetrators having a disproportionate effect on law-abiding constituents across Mid Sussex?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Sussex Members of Parliament are listening very closely to the Minister.
Dame Diana Johnson
Announcements on the provisional police settlement will be made in the usual way next month. The Home Secretary has already indicated that an additional half a billion pounds will be made available for policing. That has already been announced. With regard to the direct figures for Sussex, I am afraid that the hon. Lady and you, Madam Deputy Speaker, will have to wait a few more days.
Dame Diana Johnson
We all know the importance of a good night’s sleep, so I hope very much that respect orders will go some way towards delivering that. There may be additional things that we need to do, but it is at least a start to remove the requirement for a warning before action can be taken to get these vehicles off our roads, parks and pavements, because they are causing such problems.
Andrew Pakes (Peterborough) (Lab)
I think there is an unwritten rule in this House that whoever asks the last question gets to be top of the pilot list. Given its beautiful cathedral and wonderful diversity, Peterborough city centre is the jewel in Cambridgeshire’s crown, as I am sure that county colleagues present will agree, but we are being let down by the rise in antisocial behaviour. Shoplifting, street drinking, theft and intimidation are the big issues raised with me by residents, businesses and Peterborough Positive, our fantastic business improvement district. Does the Minister recognise the sheer anger that the British public feel about the fact that antisocial behaviour has not been dealt with, and about the way that they have been ghosted by the Conservative party, which, when it comes to dealing with antisocial behaviour, told them that they never had it so good? Will she explain to the House how the measures announced today will help restore trust and faith in the ability of the Government to address antisocial behaviour?
Police Accountability
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(2 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Before I call the Home Secretary to make her statement, I inform the House that the inquest into the death of Chris Kaba has been opened and adjourned. The matter is therefore technically still before the courts. However, Mr Speaker has granted a waiver in relation to the House’s resolution on matters sub judice, so Members may refer to it in the House’s proceedings.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Yvette Cooper)
With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will update the House on Monday’s verdict in the trial of Sergeant Martyn Blake, on the accountability review into police use of force, and on confidence in policing. Chris Kaba was killed in Streatham two years ago. His parents and family of course continue to experience deep grief and distress. A year ago, Sergeant Martyn Blake was charged with murder, and on Monday, the jury returned its verdict and Sergeant Blake was acquitted. It is imperative that the jury’s verdict is respected, and that Sergeant Blake and his family are given the time and space that they will need to recover from what will have been an immensely difficult experience for them during both the investigation and the trial.
For an armed police officer to be prosecuted for actions taken in the course of their duties is very rare, so of course this case has raised considerable concerns for the public and for the police. The decisions made on any individual case, be it by the police, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the Crown Prosecution Service, the courts or a jury, are rightly independent of the Government, so it would not be right for me to comment further on the details of the case. However, the case has happened against a backdrop of wider and long-standing concerns about accountability, standards and confidence—a backdrop in which police officers and forces have raised long-standing concerns about the way in which the accountability system currently operates, particularly in cases of specialist policing such as firearms and driving, where we ask officers to do incredibly difficult and dangerous jobs to keep us safe, and a backdrop of fallen community confidence in policing and the criminal justice system across the country, with, as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner said this week, lower confidence among black communities.
The British policing model relies on mutual bonds of trust between the public and the police. For our policing model to work, it is essential that the police have the confidence of the communities they serve, and that officers have the confidence that they need to do their vital and often extremely difficult job of keeping us all safe. Too often in recent times, both elements of that confidence have become frayed. The Government have made it a mission to put confidence back into policing.
As part of that work, I want to update the House on new measures that we will take forward in response to the accountability review and following ongoing work to respond to issues raised by the Angiolini and Casey reviews. That will be a package of reforms to rebuild confidence for police officers and for communities, to tackle the unacceptable delays and confusion in the system, and to ensure that the complexity of specialist operations is considered at an early stage and that the highest standards are upheld and maintained.
Twelve months ago, the previous Government launched a review into the accountability systems for police use of force and police driving. The previous Home Secretary set out an interim response in March, which the Labour party supported, and I welcome his work. The review was not completed by the election, and although we have continued to draw on evidence from police and civil society organisations, we were unable to say more publicly in the run-up to the trial, so today I will update the House.
The accountability review found that the current system for holding police officers to account is not commanding the confidence of either the public or the police. Accountability and misconduct proceedings are too often plagued by delays stretching for years, which is damaging for complainants, police officers and police forces alike. The system has become more complex, with confusion over multiple thresholds for different investigations, and a lack of clarity, especially on specialist capabilities.
There are also wider concerns about the misconduct system. The focus when things go wrong can end up being entirely on the decisions of the individual officer, so system failings such as poor training, unmanageable caseloads or wider force practices are not sufficiently considered or followed up, meaning that too little changes. At the same time, as we saw following the Casey and Angiolini reviews, in cases where someone is not fit to be a police officer, it is too hard for forces to remove them, and communities feel that no one is held to account. The public must be able to expect that when officers exceed the lawful use of their powers or fail to meet proper standards, there will be rapid and robust processes in place to hold them to account. Police officers who act with integrity and bravery to keep us safe each day need to know they have strong public support. If officers lack the confidence to use their powers, following their training and the law, public safety is put at risk.
Let me turn to the policy measures. First, we will take forward the three measures proposed by the previous Government in March to strengthen and speed up the system. We will align the threshold for the referral of police officers from the Independent Office for Police Conduct to the Crown Prosecution Service to that used by the police when referring cases involving members of the public. Currently the threshold is lower for police officers—that is not justified. We will allow the IOPC to send cases to the CPS where there is sufficient evidence to do so, instead of having to wait for a final investigation report. And we will also put the IOPC victims’ right-to-review policy on a statutory footing to ensure that there is an appeal mechanism for bereaved families when a decision is made not to seek a charging decision.
Then we will go further. When officers act in the most dangerous situations on behalf of the state, it is vital that those officers and their families are not put in further danger during any subsequent legal proceedings. We will therefore introduce a presumption of anonymity for firearms officers subject to criminal trial following a police shooting in the course of their professional duties, up to the point of conviction. We will also ensure that the highly specialist nature of particular policing tactics and tools is reflected in relevant investigative guidance. That includes ensuring that in investigations of police-driving incidents, evidence from subject-matter experts and in-car video footage is considered at the earliest possible opportunity, and, more widely, that an officer’s compliance with their training and guidance is appropriately taken into account in investigative decision making.
I also have established a rapid review of two specific areas where recent legal judgments have meant that we now have different thresholds for criminal, misconduct and inquest investigations, adding complexity, confusion and delay to the system. In particular, that review will consider the legal test for use of force in misconduct proceedings, and the threshold for determining short-form findings of unlawful killing in inquests. The independent review will be conducted by Tim Godwin and Sir Adrian Fulford, and will report jointly to me and the Lord Chancellor by the end of January.
I have asked for further work to be done on timeliness, standards and misconduct procedures as part of our wider policing reforms. My right hon. Friend the Attorney General has invited the Director of Public Prosecutions to examine the CPS guidance and processes in relation to charging police officers for offences committed in the course of their duties. Following calls from civil society organisations, we will ask the College of Policing to establish a national “lessons learned” database for deaths or serious injuries arising from police contact or police pursuits, so that when tragic incidents occur, there is a responsibility to ensure that lessons are incorporated into the development of police training and guidance, and to prevent the repetition of such events.
To rebuild public confidence in the wider standards regime for policing, we also need to ensure that there is faster progress in responding to the findings of the Angiolini and Casey reviews on vetting and standards. We will therefore take forward in this parliamentary Session previously agreed proposals to ensure that officers convicted of certain criminal offences are automatically found to have committed gross misconduct; to create a presumption of dismissal where gross misconduct is found; and to change regulations to enable chief constables to promptly dismiss officers who fail their vetting—there has been a glaring gap in the system there for far too long. We will go further to ensure that standards are upheld: we will ensure that there is a statutory underpinning for national vetting standards, and strengthen requirements relating to the suspension of officers under investigation for domestic abuse or sexual offences.
Finally, we need wider measures to restore confidence in policing and the criminal justice system across all communities. That must include further work to take forward the Met’s London race action plan, on which action has already been taken, though the Met commissioner and the Mayor for London have made it clear that there is much more work to do. We need progress from the National Police Chiefs’ Council on the national police race action plan. The Government are also determined to take forward further measures, ranging from the introduction of neighbourhood policing to new police force performance standards, to strengthen confidence in policing in every community across the country.
The measures that I have outlined are practical steps to rebuild confidence, tackle delays, provide clarity and ensure that high standards are maintained. For almost 200 years, policing by consent has been the bedrock of British policing. The Government are determined to take the necessary action to strengthen public confidence in the police, and to strengthen the confidence of the police when they are out on the street every day, doing the difficult job of keeping us all safe. Those are the twin goals that we must all work towards. I commend this statement to the House.
Yvette Cooper
I thank the shadow Home Secretary for his response. I hope that there will be widespread agreement on both sides of the House on the importance of these issues, which go to the heart of the British tradition of policing by consent. All of us want to know that there is proper accountability for decisions that police forces and officers make, but also that the police have the confidence to take what are sometimes the most difficult decisions of all to keep the rest of us safe.
The shadow Home Secretary is right that firearms officers have to deal with some of the most difficult parts of policing, sometimes having to make split-second decisions in fast-moving and difficult circumstances that none of us would want to be in. Frankly, if any of us were in those situations, we would want to know that there were firearms police officers there to protect and support us.
In the UK, police officers discharging firearms is very rare, particularly compared with other countries. That reflects the nature of our unarmed policing tradition, as well as the professionalism and training of the police, and the different ways in which they manage often very difficult situations, but of course they need to know that when they follow their training and operate within the law, they will have our support for the difficult decisions that they have to take, and will not find their lives upturned as a result. The anonymity provisions are important, and I hope that they will have support from the whole House. The Government want to bring in the presumption of anonymity in the forthcoming crime and policing Bill.
The shadow Home Secretary also raised the issue of training. I want that to be looked at when the investigative guidance is updated; that way, it can be addressed relatively quickly to ensure that issues around police driving and training more widely are taken into account in early investigative decisions before cases are pursued.
On the Fairfield review, we are taking forward further measures, and will look, in wider policing reforms, at how the IOPC needs to work. It is important that we continue to have an independent process. That has to be set against the backdrop of the wider policing reforms that are needed to ensure that we strengthen confidence for both officers and communities. That is how we will maintain for the new generation the proud British tradition of policing by consent.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
First, I express my sympathy for Chris Kaba’s family and his mother. Whatever he was or did, he was her son, and she deserves our sympathy and respect. I also acknowledge my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), who has worked hard to support the family in challenging circumstances. In the past few days there has been an avalanche of information about Chris Kaba, but I say to those who are asking why that information was not made available to the jury: that was the decision of the judge, and they should put their complaints to him.
The Home Secretary will know that over the years there have been a series of deaths at the hands of the Metropolitan police that have led to deep unhappiness and even riots. One death that comes to mind is that of Cynthia Jarrett in 1985, who died of a heart attack when four policemen burst into her house, and whose death triggered the Broadwater Farm riots. Does the Home Secretary accept that nothing could be more damaging for police-community relations than if the idea took hold that in some way the police were above the law?
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
I also thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of her statement.
Any case in which a young person’s life is cut short is a tragedy, and my thoughts are with all those who are impacted by this awful situation. It is crucial that we in this place respect the judiciary and their right to make decisions without political interference. However, a case like this one does not happen in a vacuum—we must remember the wider context. As Baroness Casey said in her review, black Londoners are “under-protected and over-policed”. A huge and radical step is required to regain police legitimacy and trust among London’s black communities. Those findings cannot and should not be ignored, which means working together to rebuild community relationships and trust in the police, something that is vital to the very fabric of policing by consent.
With that in mind, I welcome the Home Secretary’s commitment to pick up the accountability review. When it comes to firearms officers’ accountability when operating under enormous pressure, ambiguity benefits nobody—not police officers, and certainly not our communities. I would, however, welcome more details from the Home Secretary about how those communities with the least trust in the police, especially ethnic minority communities, will be consulted in this review. These questions extend past the Met, so will other police forces—including my own Greater Manchester police—be involved in the review, and will the Home Secretary commit to commission an independent review of the implementation of the Casey review’s recommendations? Rebuilding trust in the police has got to be our priority, for the sake of our whole community and for ethnic minority communities, and for the officers who are working hard to keep us safe in difficult circumstances.
Yvette Cooper
I thank my hon. Friend for her question—as I said, she has worked hard to represent her communities. It is clear that there must be a proper framework for legal accountability for police forces and individual officers. There must always be investigations where there is loss of life following police contact—that is always appropriate. Although we want investigations to take place much more swiftly, all the police chiefs whom I have talked to as part of this work feel strongly that there must be a clear accountability system, which provides confidence to communities and to police officers who make difficult decisions in the line of duty. Police, Parliament and the public will recognise that we need to have the confidence of communities, as well as police officers who are confident that they will be able to do their job.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee.
Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
I thank the Home Secretary for her statement and for advance sight of it. Although the measures that she has announced are welcome, many of them will take time to introduce. In the meantime, what is she doing to ensure confidence throughout the system, and will she ensure that the Home Affairs Committee is kept updated on progress in making these welcome changes?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Before the Home Secretary responds, I remind Members that when they use the word “you”, they are speaking to the Chair. Please be short and sharp, Home Secretary, so that we can get everybody in.
Yvette Cooper
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The accountability review found that the accountability system does not currently have confidence among communities or policing. That is why we are setting out very practical reforms. It is important that the work of the IOPC and the CPS is done independently of politicians, police officers and communities. They have to take decisions within the law and within the framework that Parliament sets. That is why this review and this announcement are about how we amend that framework so that they can do their jobs.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. The hon. Member was not here for the absolute beginning, but she made it just in time for the opening statements, so I will call her.
Nesil Caliskan
I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. Building trust and confidence in the police requires time and honest reflection about the challenges, alongside meaningful steps to improve things. Often, when there are high-profile incidents, there is a knee-jerk reaction and a national debate is sparked. Does the Home Secretary agree that we must avoid knee-jerk reactions, that there needs to be a long-term commitment to building trust and confidence, and that trust and confidence are built through effective policing not just for serious violent crime, but for so-called low-level crimes such as antisocial behaviour and theft?
Spice-spiked Vapes
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Dr Beccy Cooper (Worthing West) (Lab)
On what you said about what more we can do in relation to young children, you are right—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. “You” refers to the Chair, but the hon. Lady is referring to the hon. Member. Interventions should also be short.
Dr Cooper
I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. I just wanted to make the point that we need to be mindful that young people are in a time of cognitive development—a formative time, when it comes to what they understand. Banning the advertising of vapes to young children, and making sure that the packaging is not attractive to them, is incredibly important.
Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill
Nusrat Ghani ExcerptsMonday 14th October 2024
(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Mr Connor Rand (Altrincham and Sale West) (Lab)
It is a privilege to speak today in support of this vital Bill. I start by joining the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary in paying tribute to the bravery and phenomenal campaigning of Figen Murray. To so selflessly and bravely campaign for the safety of others after suffering such unimaginable trauma is truly inspirational. It is the reason this legislation is before the House today, and it is the reason lives will be saved when this Bill becomes law. That should lead to an enormous sense of pride for her and for all the campaigners involved.
As a Greater Manchester Member of Parliament, I find this legislation especially poignant, coming as it does after the Manchester Arena attack in 2017, which united Manchester, our region and our country in grief. Twenty-two people died that night, and many more were left with lifelong physical and psychological trauma. First and foremost, they suffered from an act of indescribable evil and cowardice from people who seek to destroy what binds us and our way of life. They also suffered as a result of security arrangements at Manchester Arena that were not proportional to the severe threat posed by terrorism.
The Manchester Arena inquiry carried out by Sir John Saunders found multiple missed opportunities for detecting and stopping the bomber, or, at the very least, minimising the number of casualties that he was able to inflict. Sir John spoke of serious shortcomings from the operators of the arena, the company tasked with the concert security and the British Transport Police, including a lack of preparedness and a lack of communication between security employees regarding suspicious behaviour. That contributed to the attacker being able to do covert reconnaissance on the arena undetected and find a CCTV blind spot.
Underpinning those missed opportunities was a failure to treat the terror threat with the severity it deserved. At that point, the terror threat facing the country was classed as severe, but now it is classed as substantial, with an attack sadly likely. Indeed, we know that since the Manchester Arena bombing, 43 terror plots on UK venues have been foiled at a late stage. Figen Murray has said:
“We’ve been lucky 43 times but they only have to be lucky once.”
That is why there is such an urgent need for this overdue Bill. I am proud that the Government are treating this issue as the priority that it deserves to be. After all, our most basic responsibility in this place is to do everything we can to ensure the safety and security of our residents. The Prime Minister promised he would act, and he has done so just months into his Administration. I thank him and the Home Office team for their swift action to deliver us to this stage.
The striking thing for me about this legislation is how common-sense it all is. We would be hard pressed to find a constituent who disagrees that all public premises should take reasonably practical measures to mitigate the impact of a terrorist plot. Similarly, it feels like a significant oversight that there was no previous mandate setting out who is responsible for implementing these measures, as there will be should this Bill become law. These are common-sense proposals to deal with serious issues—something every Bill in this place seeks to do, but does not always achieve. That is why it has such strong support in all parts of the House.
I note the supportive comments of the head of counter-terrorism policing, Matt Jukes, who talked of
“the opportunity that this Bill brings to drive greater consistency”
among businesses and communities, and
“to take simple low or no-cost steps that will save lives”.
I appreciate that concerns have been expressed about the burden that will be placed on businesses, particularly smaller music venues that are still recovering from the covid-19 pandemic, but with the support of a dedicated regulator to help them and a period of 24 months to prepare, I do not believe that any business is facing obstacles that cannot be overcome. I thank the Home Secretary for setting out the Government’s tiered approach, and I know that much more will be said about support for businesses as the Bill progresses through the House.
For the Bill to be as effective as possible, we need collaboration between Government, business and campaigners. We have a duty to make it as effective as possible, because while it cannot remove the hurt or pain of those who suffered a loss in the Manchester Arena attack or ease the pain of those who are living with their injuries, it can forever reduce the likelihood of such an event happening again, and it will save lives. That is why I am proud to support the Bill.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. You must bob if you wish to contribute. I call Rachel Gilmour to make her maiden speech.
Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)
Thank you for calling me to make my maiden speech, Madam Deputy Speaker. Before I do, may I commend Figen Murray and her family and friends for the excellent campaign they have continued, completely selflessly? I am sure it will save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people. They are a great example to us all.
I confess to being unusually nervous—as indeed I should be—as I address my honourable colleagues across the House for the first time as the first Member of Parliament for Tiverton and Minehead. I would like to begin by thanking the two previous MPs for Tiverton and Minehead. My fellow Liberal Democrat, my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord), has happily been returned by his constituents as their MP, where he will continue to be a hard-working local champion. I am also grateful for the 23 years of service that my predecessor in Bridgwater and West Somerset, Ian Liddell-Grainger, in his own inimitable style, gave to my constituents in that part of my constituency. He is a doting grandfather, who will now have more time to spend with his grandchildren. I also want to thank Rebecca Pow, the former Member for Taunton Deane, who is a prolific gardener—vegetables are a particular favourite, I understand—and whose constituency encompassed some of the villages and towns now in Tiverton and Minehead, as well as the constituency of Taunton and Wellington.
As a new Member of Parliament, this place, even though it bears a resemblance to my alma mater, is a difficult and different environment to master. I know that I speak for all new Members when I thank all members of staff of the parliamentary estate, from Doorkeepers to police officers to catering and cleaning staff. I thank them all for their warm welcome, and for their tolerance and patience with the numerous questions they answer with humour and understanding. Thank you all.
Since September last year, my team, known as “Team Terrific and The Stalwarts”, have knocked on nearly 31,000 doors, delivered hundreds of thousands of leaflets, letters and surveys and spoken to over 12,000 residents. I know what matters to the people of Tiverton and Minehead because I have asked them.
I was raised in Somerset and have spent most of my adult life in Devon, from Holcombe Rogus via Hemyock to Bampton in the Tiverton and Minehead constituency. My husband and I chose to raise our family in Devon. In fact, all four of our children are born Devonians. Our eldest sons, Henry and Tom, were born in the old hospital in Tiverton. It is my sincere intention to support the NHS and social care systems in Tiverton and Minehead by keeping our local hospitals open in Minehead, Tiverton and Williton, and by supporting all our GP surgeries.
Ours is a very rural area and the need to keep local hospitals open is especially pressing given limited transport links and a higher-than-average elderly population. As mine is a rural and often disconnected constituency, transport improvements are one of my key priorities. With that at the forefront of my mind, I have convened a meeting with Peninsula Transport, the body that oversees all public transport in Devon and Somerset. Along with my transport adviser, David Northey, who has a deep history in this area as a former head of strategic planning at Great Western Railway, I have been hard at work for my constituents, putting together a transport plan and highlighting the challenges and solutions for rail and bus services across Tiverton and Minehead.
Minehead train station desperately needs linking to the main line at Taunton; I know that my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Mr Amos) would agree. We need also to secure the number 25 and 28 bus services in the north of the constituency and look carefully at rural bus routes to service the villages of Exmoor, such as Exford, Withypool and Winsford, along with local towns, particularly Wiveliscombe. Those will be key parts of that new plan for the local area.
Poor public transport provision creates a particular barrier to schoolchildren and students in Tiverton and Minehead. Some have no bus to take them to school, no way to walk to school or no way to cycle to get there. Other than the small A-level provision at West Somerset college, there is no—I repeat, no—sixth-form provision in my constituency. Students have to travel to Exeter, Taunton or Bridgwater if they wish to pursue their studies. That limits their aspirations and ability to succeed. Shockingly, West Somerset ranks 324th out of 324 on the social mobility index, and such transport problems explain some of why that is.
However, teachers and heads of primary schools across the constituency and of secondary schools in Tiverton, Minehead, Williton and Uffculme do not lack aspiration for their pupils. They are working daily to improve access to better education. That includes campaigning to have facilities worthy of 21st-century educational standards.
The first letter I wrote, within days of getting elected on 5 July, was to our new Secretary of State for Education, asking for a meeting to discuss the dire state of Tiverton high school. Nearly 25 years ago—I repeat, 25 years ago —Tiverton high school was promised a new build. The previous Labour Government put it on their priority list. The last Conservative Government sat on their hands and did nothing. The school is deemed by the Environment Agency to be a “danger of death” from flooding. There is asbestos in the sports hall, and children are being taught in dining and communal areas. It has capacity for 1,300 pupils but needs capacity for 1,800. Given the pledges made by our new Prime Minister and his commitment to schools, I know that I will get a fair hearing from the Secretary of State for Education. I hope that she will agree to meet a delegation of staff, parents and children from Tiverton high school in the near future.
Community plays a crucial role in Tiverton and Minehead. There are wonderful organisations providing support and help, from community food banks to support groups for carers, to Rotary clubs, conservation groups and the environmental networks with which I work to monitor and prevent the pollution in our rivers and on our beaches. Those organisations all make Tiverton and Minehead the wonderful, beautiful, special part of the UK that it is. When they meet to discuss important community issues, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill will ensure that they are safe. However, my party has previously had concerns about the impact on smaller-scale venues; I am delighted to hear today that the approach is more light touch than expected.
As a former director of the National Farmers Union, I have a deep passion for and understanding of my local farming community, who are spread across the constituency and facing harder challenges than they have for generations. That is thanks to the disastrous Brexit deal foisted upon them by the previous Conservative Government. In the face of climate change, increased rainfall, dryer summers and the rising cost of energy, they battle on. To them I say, “I will always back my farming community. Let’s work together to secure a future for farming across Exmoor, West Somerset and mid Devon. Come to my monthly farmers’ surgeries so that I can represent my farming community to the very best of my abilities.”
Becoming an MP has been my ambition since I was 17, when I joined the Liberal party at school. It has taken me four attempts over 43 years of campaigning, but now that dream has become a reality. Without my family, it would have been impossible. As a professional woman, I have broken several glass ceilings thanks to my inspirational grandmothers, Mabel and Jesse, who offered wise counsel; to Miss Whaite, now Mrs Michael Limb, my Latin teacher, who kept me sane at boarding school; and especially to my mother, who has always believed in me. Mummy, thank you—I love you. I am so proud to have her here today with my husband and our eldest son in the Gallery, so that she can see this moment.
Yesterday I celebrated my three-score-years birthday; I say to my Conservative colleagues, whose maths skills in government were found somewhat wanting, that that is 60. I share my birthday with Margaret Hilda Thatcher, who must be one of the best recruiting agents for the Liberal and Labour parties. I am proud that I share nothing with her other than a birthday. My passion for politics flows from my compassion for my fellow human beings—whoever and wherever they are, irrespective of background, race, religion, colour, gender, sexuality or ability.
It is impossible to mention everyone and everything in one’s maiden speech, but if there is one thing that I wish my constituents to know it is this: they are my world. I feel humbled and honoured to have been elected to represent Tiverton and Minehead in Parliament. They can help me do my job by coming to my surgeries at Tiverton and Minehead, Wiveliscombe and on Exmoor, by ringing my office and my staff, and by writing us letters and emails. I am at their service.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Fabulous at 60! Mabel, Jesse and your mum will be very proud. Now we have another maiden speech. I call Matt Bishop.
Police Conduct and Complaints
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the Sixth Report of the Home Affairs Committee, Session 2021-22, Police Conduct and Complaints, HC 140, and the Government response, HC 1264.
It is a rare pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani, in this packed Chamber here today. I have the honour—as someone who is not Chair of the Home Affairs Committee—to present our report and findings, largely because I am the only one who has been on the Committee long enough to remember the report’s origins and who sat through all of the sessions. I am delighted to pick up that baton and take the challenge.
The Home Affairs Committee started its investigation in 2015. We had wanted to have a proper inquiry and report for some time, which we eventually did under the esteemed chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), who chairs the Committee now and will speak later.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct was created in January 2018 to handle complaints against police officers and forces in England and Wales. It replaced various predecessors that had failed to keep public trust in the idea that police officers who fall below the high standards required of them are properly punished for breaches of codes of behaviour and conduct. The IOPC has a really important role, as we would all agree and as I am sure the Minister would emphasise, in maintaining public confidence in the police service in this country, where we police by consent. I will touch on some of the recommendations of the inquiry, what we found and why we did the inquiry, and also on an update from the head of the IOPC. I am largely going to leave the Government’s response to the Minister.
One thing that the Minister can now take credit for is that the Government have at last responded to our Macpherson inquiry report, which we produced a very long time ago. One of our recommendations was to get on with producing the Government’s response to our Macpherson inquiry report, and that happened a few weeks ago, but it was not a good exercise in responding speedily to a Select Committee report. I will leave that there, but the Minister might care to comment later.
It should be clear that a police officer accused of, for example, mistreating a member of the public or bullying colleagues or subordinates should be subject, like any other person working in the public service, to investigation and sanctions if proven to have done so. Public confidence is undermined if misconduct is not appropriately recognised, dealt with and punished. The Committee inquiry looked at whether the new IOPC was fulfilling its remits: bringing officers more quickly and successfully to book for conduct unbecoming and restoring public confidence in the police complaints and discipline system.
During the inquiry numerous examples of questionable policing conduct occurred—and far worse. Sadly, we are all too familiar with the high profile and appalling cases that have hit the headlines in recent months and years. The murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer who used his office to trap her is probably by far the most egregious example. Other prominent cases include the photographing of the bodies of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman by two officers who were supposed to be guarding a crime scene. In both cases, officer behaviour was criminal and substantial jail sentences have rightly followed, including a whole-life sentence for the killer of Sarah Everard.
Criminal activity goes beyond the bounds of the police conduct and complaints process, but there is behaviour below the criminal threshold that goes well beyond the bounds of acceptable professional conduct. At Charing Cross police station in London, the IOPC revealed a series of revolting sexist, misogynist and racist messages between serving police officers as well as a culture of bullying and racism. Three officers lost their jobs and others received internal disciplinary action, from retraining to official reprimand. The IOPC has recently ordered a fully independent investigation into the behaviour of six officers who stopped and searched a car belonging to the athletes Bianca Williams and Ricardo dos Santos, who were stopped in Maida Vale in 2020. It was able to do that under new powers that have just come in to allow the IOPC to investigate without referral and for it to present its own case at police misconduct hearings.
I want to spend a little time now on Operation Midland. Indeed, the genesis of this report was some hearings that the Home Affairs Committee undertook back in 2015 regarding Operation Midland, which hon. Members will remember was a high-profile case of a completely incompetent, bungled and wasteful investigation over a long time of some high-profile figures in politics and the military. We investigated and interviewed some of the senior officers involved in that case. High-profile figures such as Lord Brittan, Field Marshall Bramall—sadly, both are now dead—and Harvey Proctor were the subject of long-running police investigations. At the inquiry, we heard from Lady Brittan, Lord Brittan’s widow.
We heard about the appalling miscarriage of justice; key figures had been hounded by an incompetent police operation and an appalling waste of resources on the basis of flimsy evidence produced by the now-revealed and now-jailed fantasist Carl Beech. That was despite repeated warnings from officers and others, who have also been badly treated by the Metropolitan police, that the long-running and costly investigation was never going to go anywhere and the evidence was not there. However, it resulted in no penalties and no punishment against the main senior officers involved. Indeed, several were promoted and some remain in lucrative and senior positions within the police service.
The Home Affairs Committee has a long-standing interest in the case and since we took testimony from some of those officers back in 2015, those testimonies have been completely and utterly discredited. Operation Midland was succeeded by Operation Vincente, and then Operation Kentia, commissioned by the IOPC, looked into the way the Met had handled the whole process. We had a further damning report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services in 2020. The judge, Sir Richard Henriques, was commissioned to investigate the Met, but he also made very severe criticism of the way the IOPC had investigated the case. He said:
“The operation was conducted in a completely disordered and chaotic manner and was littered with mistakes, all of which could and should have been avoided by officers who were subsequently promoted.”
The force did little to improve practices for nearly three years. As Sir Richard says,
“So far as I know not one of my recommendations has either been accepted or rejected by the Metropolitan Police.”
A district judge was knowingly misled into issuing search warrants against the Brittans and there are reasonable grounds to believe that criminal acts have been committed, not by those being investigated but by the investigators, as Sir Richard Henriques found. It took almost three years for the IOPC to publish its findings in the Operation Midland affair. The lead investigator contacted Sir Richard 20 months into the investigation and readily conceded her lack of knowledge, training or education in relevant criminal proceedings. In Sir Richard’s review of Operation Midland he said he had called for a rigorous investigation and indicated that there were many questions to be asked. The IOPC failed in both respects.
HMICFRS’s report found that senior officers were preoccupied with restricting access to the Henriques report and that the Met had no plan to enact the reforms, took
“an underwhelming approach to learning the lessons”
and did almost nothing for three years. I emphasise again that no officers have been penalised as a result of Operation Midland and the subsequent unravelling of the appalling circumstances that allowed it to take place and ruin the lives of certain individuals and their families over many years.
We use that as an example because the IOPC should have been on that. It should have taken a high-profile case of clear deficiencies in police processes and accountability, looked at it properly and found that certain individuals were sorely lacking in the carrying out of their duties—but it failed to do that. Sir Richard Henriques claimed that it was a complete whitewash of the actual circumstances. That is why it is so important that we have a police complaints body that can be relied on and inspire confidence in the public. If high-profile figures, who have a recourse to parliamentary and other platforms, can be dragged down by an incompetent police operation that was not apprehended by the IOPC, what hope have our constituents with legitimate complaints about the way that they have been dealt with by the police that the IOPC will investigate fairly and thoroughly?
Our inquiry found that trust in the police was particularly low among young people, as well as among black and other minority ethnic members of our society. There is a particular problem in London. We heard in the last few days that the Met is being put in special measures. There are issues that we flag in our report that need to be considered as part of the rehabilitation of the image of the Metropolitan police and how it regains the trust of the public.
There is an old argument that such cases arise from the actions of a few bad apples spoiling the entire barrel. The volume of high-profile and successful complaints against police officers tests that argument to destruction. The police themselves no longer hold to the bad apple theory. Earlier this year, the acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Stephen House, told the Home Affairs Committee,
“It is not a few bad apples. You cannot simply say that Wayne Couzens and a couple of other people have done something wrong. I would suggest that that has been the spearhead of the problem, but
there is a wider issue within the organisation, which we acknowledge and we are dealing with.”
I hope that is the case.
A robust independent regulator, able to quickly resolve complaints and impose sanctions that fit the misconduct of officers, is essential to public trust. Since its foundation, the IOPC has gone some way to restoring that trust—we acknowledge that in our report. The time taken to resolve complaints has reduced significantly, with the majority now dealt with in less than a year. However, the Committee’s inquiry, while recognising that success, identified a number of areas for further improvement. Just this week, we have had further information from the head of the IOPC, Michael Lockwood, about the continued progress it is making. The Home Office will be publishing its annual report with more detail in due course; the Minister may wish to comment on that.
Michael Lockwood pointed out in that letter that 90% of all independent investigations that it started were completed with 12 months. That compares favourably to the 68% of investigations completed within 12 months in the final year of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. However, while the target was 50 days for completion of the inquiry, the actual result—78 working days for completion—fell well short. In addition to that, Michael Lockwood said that the IOPC made 171 learning recommendations, which were shared with all the forces in England and Wales or directed to national organisations such as the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing. Where a learning recommendation is issued under that power, the recipient is required to provide a response. Out of the 96 recommendations issued where a response has been received, 94% were accepted. That is a high level and is to be welcomed.
The issue of police officers’ co-operation with investigations was raised by the Committee. The guidance sets out what the IOPC considers co-operation should look like in general terms, and what police witnesses can expect. In its response to the Committee’s report, the IOPC reported progress on the number of cases awaiting a decision for more than 12 months. I think we can take that as a win for the Committee and, indeed, for the way Select Committees do their work, because Michael Lockwood goes on to say:
“Your letter to the Director of Public Prosecutions regarding these issues has helpfully brought about a greater focus and collaborative effort between our respective organisations to better understand the root causes of possible delays. We are clear there is a shared responsibility to work towards improved timeliness in decision making post investigation. To this end we are collating additional information on our cases with the CPS and agreeing how we might put in place better systems for sharing information and escalating cases.”
The IOPC made further recommendations to the England and Wales police forces about working together to develop guidelines and commissioning research into the trauma caused—predominantly to people from black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds, including children and young people—by the use of stop and search, which is a topical issue that has come up in the House recently. As a result of the report, the IOPC has undertaken widespread consultation. It is clear from Michael Lockwood’s words that our report has served a positive purpose and hit home, and the IOPC has picked up many of our recommendations. So far, so good, but there is still a lot more of the job to be done.
It is an inevitable part of any complaints system that those whose complaints are not upheld will be discontent. There is none the less a perception that complaints against police officers are unlikely to succeed and that investigations are over-complex, take too long and frequently result in limited action, even against officers who have been found guilty of misconduct. It should be clear that a police officer accused of mistreating a member of the public, or of bullying colleagues or subordinates, should be subject to investigation and—if proven to have done so—sanctioned, just like any other person working in a public service. Public confidence is undermined if misconduct is not appropriately punished, and the Home Office and the Home Secretary need to ensure that that message is received and acted on at the highest level of our 43 police forces, particularly as a new commissioner is chosen for the Metropolitan police.
During our inquiry, the question arose as to whether the IOPC should be staffed by investigators who are not former police officers. Opinion was divided on whether those who had previously served in the police should be excluded because they would potentially be marking their own homework or that of their colleagues. On the other side of the argument, we acknowledge that ex-police officers bring skills learned on the job and an understanding of police culture that is beneficial in investigations. It seems that an appropriate balance of former serving officers and investigators with other backgrounds is the right one to strike, but it may be that the IOPC should seek to widen its pool of potential candidates to include those with investigative experience from other spheres, including former military personnel.
At a more technical level, the IOPC has been headed since its creation by a director general without the support and oversight of an independent chair of the board, with Michael Lockwood effectively acting in both roles. He has held that post and been responsible for driving some of the improvements in the speed of investigations, as I have already mentioned. Mr Lockwood was relaxed when he gave us evidence on whether the time had come for more normal arrangements to be made for the organisation’s governance, as we would typically find in any business. It is now very rare, and often frowned upon, to find the same person occupying the roles of chair and chief executive of a board of a company. The Committee therefore recommended that the Government consider appointing a chair to the IOPC. We are glad to see from its response that the question will be considered in an upcoming review, and we hope that a fully accountable governance structure can now be put in place.
Perhaps the most worrying evidence we heard was of obstruction and delay in dealing with complaints, with the IOPC blaming officers for delays, and policing organisations blaming the IOPC. We recommend the creation of a culture, led from the top, that requires rapid, open and non-defensive responses to complaints about conduct. Quick and fair decisions are essential both to satisfy members of the public who complain about conduct and to clear the names of police officers who may be falsely accused of breaching standards, whose reputations can only suffer from long, dragged-out cases, and whose careers may be in limbo while an investigation is ongoing.
The IOPC could do more to use its powers actively to call to account officers who appear not to co-operate with investigations, and chief constables should also do all in their power to ensure that officers do not treat complaints as an inconvenience or a triviality. IOPC reports on cases below the level of the egregious examples I gave earlier in my speech now result in learning recommendations for forces, and a strong focus is needed to ensure that the learning available is adopted and embedded within the police.
On the delay issue, I would cite an example from my own experience. Some years ago, I was the subject of a police investigation as a result of a wholly vexatious complaint from a constituent. That later became the subject of an inquiry by the Standards Committee that found that the chief constable of Sussex had been in breach of parliamentary protocols and of privilege. I subsequently lodged a complaint with the forerunner of the IOPC, which took well over three years to investigate. During that process, the possibility of criminal behaviour by one of the investigating officers was raised, because he had frustrated the investigation process to play for time.
When the complaint body reported, it upheld four of my five complaints, casting a good deal of blame on the officers involved, right up to the chief constable of Sussex. The problem was that when the report eventually came out, every single senior officer who was a subject of the report had retired and no action could be taken against them. It is that sort of frustration that people feel, and there is no excuse for such long, drawn-out investigations. Such investigations are not in anybody’s interest, be they the complainer or the target of the investigations. I am glad that measures, which the Minister may want to mention, have been put in place to allow retrospective action to be taken if it so happens that police officers are no longer employed directly in the police force.
I will touch briefly on the Committee’s other main conclusions. I mentioned that we recommended that the role of chair and chief executive should be split, and the Government have responded to that. We urge the Government to consider police complaints as part of the review of the police and crime commissioner model that is currently under way, and to make an early assessment of PCC involvement in the police complaints system.
PCCs are an under-utilised resource. They exist to be democratic bodies that are accountable to local residents and taxpayers, and have developed a good deal of knowledge. My own PCC, Katy Bourne, is one of the most experienced and respected of the PCCs, and has undertaken a lot of helpful initiatives and is very public facing. We should involve PCCs more in how we deal with complaints, because they do not want to have lots of complaints against their own police constabulary. It would inform their work better if they were more integrated with the complaints that come in, as he or she could see whether there is a problem that they need to do something about at a senior level. That is an important Committee recommendation for the Home Office on the work it is currently undertaking.
It may be too soon to understand whether PCC involvement in the police complaints system is realising the benefits that the Government hope for, but we are concerned that the Government are not doing enough to monitor the implementation of the new PCC complaints model or to encourage uptake. We note that there are enhanced opportunities for PCCs to play a greater role in the local complaints process following the reforms in 2020. The three models present a unique opportunity for PCCs as part of their complaint handling responsibilities proactively and systematically to support more effective complaint systems within their forces, although what they do should not delay complaint handling processes any further.
We urge the Government to fund PCCs adequately, so they are able to take on those models as a minimum requirement in their complaint handling roles. This will provide PCCs the opportunity to work more closely with their forces, for example, to record and systematically monitor the root causes of complaints and recurrent issues that affect their communities disproportionately and how their forces resolve those issues. The input of PCCs and their commitment to do something about the issue within their local constabularies should be a win-win situation for PCCs and for the complaints process.
The Government’s recent changes to the police complaints and discipline system were intended to simplify and speed up the process. None the less, the language used to explain systems to members of the public who wish to make complaints remains too complex and technical, which contributes to public disengagement and lack of confidence in the system.
The Committee recommended that the police discipline system needs to be simpler and more transparent. All key stakeholders in the policing sphere—the IOPC, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the forces, the College of Policing and the Crown Prosecution Service—should be required to publish plain language versions of the systems available in different languages and accessible formats, which should be made available online and in print.
I mentioned earlier that there is a clear absence of urgency and a culture of non-co-operation from some police forces involved in investigations. Appropriate sanctions must therefore follow for any officer with disciplinary proceedings, whether serving or retired. Specific reforms were made to the discipline system under the implementation of the 2020 reforms, including the possibility for former officers to face disciplinary proceedings if allegations came to light within 12 months of their leaving the force, but that still may not be thorough enough.
The example of the IOPC taking seven years to clear one police officer of misconduct is an exceptional case, but demonstrates why the IOPC must focus its efforts on concluding investigations as quickly as possible. Quite aside from the effect on an individual’s morale, the removal of officers under investigation from frontline duties for lengthy periods may add to the strain on police resources generally, as well as blighting that officer’s career. The IOPC must also take care that its power to reinvestigate cases already concluded locally is used sparingly and when there is a clear public interest in undertaking further inquiry.
We recommended that a culture needs to be created within police forces—established by and led from the top—that requires rapid, open and non-defensive response to complaints about conduct, both to deal with misconduct where it arises, and to clear the names and reputations of officers who have not transgressed. This should not just be a finger-pointing exercise. It must be a learning exercise as well.
From my experience—such as on the child safeguarding programme or with the work of the former Secretary of State for Health, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), on accidents at work and patients who have suffered severe consequences—this is not just a question of whether it was an incompetent police officer, or surgeon in the health case, or child protection officer; it is about asking how the system allowed it to happen. That is the so-called black box approach, and we need to see far more of it in policing to encourage people to come forward when there are problems, so that we can make the problems right without those people being scared doing so because somebody will point a finger at them and everybody will automatically be blamed. It can be down to the system that stands in the way of people doing their jobs as best they can.
The IOPC must use its powers effectively to minimise delays to investigations at an early stage of the process. It should proactively call to account those responsible for delays or who refuse to co-operate with investigations. Police forces, individual officers and their representative organisations must take more responsibility for rooting out bad behaviour and lifting the cloud of complaint against officers who have done their exceptionally difficult job properly.
We welcome the super-complaints process and are encouraged by the Home Office’s pledge to review the designated bodies that can submit super-complaints on systemic issues in policing in order to include a broader range of organisations, including disability organisations. We urge the Home Office to highlight on its super-complaints website that the 16 designated bodies should collaborate with non-designated bodies as appropriate to make a complaint on matters raised by non-designated bodies.
We recommend that the Government monitor and review biannually how effectively local policing bodies are holding their chief constables accountable for implementing IOPC recommendations in their forces, and report the outcomes to the Select Committee. We urge the Government to review how the IOPC, the HMICFRS and coroners’ learning recommendations are reported to the public in a more joined-up and meaningful way, and we recommend that data be published centrally in order to simplify and streamline access to this important information.
There are a lot of sensible and proportionate recommendations there. In many cases, the Government and the Home Office have responded favourably.
Our report and the evidence we published alongside it contains many examples of what police misconduct feels like to members of the public who experience it. Aside from the high-profile examples I have given, most cases are more routine, more local and more capable of quick resolution. Typical complaints may be about how the police have treated a person—rudeness, use of excessive force, abuse of rights or wrongful arrest, for example. There is no excuse for those complaints not to be turned around much more rapidly.
As I said at the outset, our society is policed by consent. We give police officers considerable powers to do a job that is often difficult, dangerous and always essential to our safety and security, and the vast majority of officers perform that duty in an exemplary manner. The granting of those powers comes, however, with a duty to the public, who the police serve—that the police will conduct themselves according to the highest possible standards of professional behaviour.
Officers who commit crimes are subject to the full force of the law. Steps have been taken to ensure that those who fall below those standards are identified, and that sanctions are taken, ranging from retraining to dismissal from the force. The IOPC deserves credit for those steps. It also requires our exhortation to go further and faster to re-establish full trust in our constabularies. Part of the job is done, but there is more to go.
Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)
Before I call other colleagues, I must put it on record that I was also once a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, so I look forward to the Minister’s response. I can confirm the long-standing membership of the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton)—maybe we should refer to him as the “Father of the Committee”.
Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under you this afternoon, Ms Ghani. I think it is an excellent idea to recognise the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and his long-standing membership of the Home Affairs Committee. His institutional memory of what has happened on that Committee has certainly been important not only in putting together this report, but in our work on policing.
The hon. Member has set out clearly and effectively the findings and recommendations of our report. It is quite clear that the Home Affairs Committee inquiry looked at the role and remit of the IOPC in relation to the police complaints and discipline system, and explored the continuing disquiet at the way in which police forces in England and Wales investigate and deal with complaints about the conduct of forces and individual officers. Importantly, we sought to consider what changes might be required to improve public confidence in the police complaints and discipline system.
We thought it was important to undertake parliamentary scrutiny of that important role, given, as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham said, the establishment of the newly created IOPC in January 2018, and because the Committee had not looked at the topic for nine years, since the publication of its last report on the matter—I do not think the hon. Gentleman was a member of the Committee at that point. Our report has covered several different areas, which were set out effectively. I will focus my contribution on a couple of areas that we looked at in the Committee that will hopefully complement what the hon. Gentleman said in his opening remarks. First, I will focus on the treatment of vulnerable adults, specifically people with autism, and how they interact in the police complaints process.
A well-functioning conduct and complaints system is essential to maintaining the trust in the balance created by the founding Peel principles between the police and public. Despite the welcome reforms and improvements, some submissions to our inquiry demonstrate that there is continuing dissatisfaction with the handling of police complaints, and that much more work is needed to address both complainants’ and officers’ concerns. In our report, we noted that the IOPC impact report 2020-21 stated that 43% of people surveyed were confident that the IOPC did a good job, compared with 44% in 2019-20. Obviously, there is still a lot of work to do.
In the evidence heard and received during the course of our inquiry, individuals with autism and parents of children with autism outlined systemic issues in their treatment in the police complaints and criminal justice process. Many felt they had been badly let down by the IOPC and the police, and that that had caused distress to families and friends.
Fiona Laskaris, whose autistic son Christopher was unlawfully killed by a drug addict in 2016, told us:
“the IOPC urgently needs to start engaging in a meaningful way in cases involving people with disabilities, and particularly… with autism”.
Fiona argued that cases involving people with autism
“warrant an enhanced level of independent scrutiny”
and suggested the existing statutory safeguarding duties to protect vulnerable adults who come into contact with the police were not working.
We received anonymous evidence that one autistic person, who had experienced frequent contact with the police, including being arrested for alleged attacks, was not treated as a vulnerable adult, even though they informed the police they were autistic and had requested an appropriate adult for assistance. The anonymous submission claimed that the police “never acknowledge or check” their autism awareness card, even when their wallet is being searched, which always happens when the police seize personal items.
The Home Secretary wrote to the Committee on 9 December 2021 and said,
“Many police forces have developed additional training programmes”
and
“various autism alert card schemes, apps, and the creation of easy-read ‘widget-based’ sheets (using icons or pictographs) to aid communication in custody suites.”
She highlighted the IOPC statutory guidance for forces on complaint handling, which outlines the
“importance of accessibility as well as the duty under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that a disabled person does not suffer any substantial disadvantage when accessing a service.”
The Home Secretary said it was
“important that those dealing with complaints recognise the particular vulnerabilities of individuals with autism”.
In spite of these welcome statements by the Home Secretary, some evidence to our Committee suggests that autistic people are still not always been treated fairly by the police.
I want to say a little more about super-complaints, which the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham commented on. In her evidence to the Committee, Fiona Laskaris, who I mentioned earlier, proposed that the super-complaints process could be used to investigate system failures in the treatment of vulnerable adults, specifically people with autism. Since November 2018, the super-complaints process has enabled designated public and charitable organisations to ask HMICFRS, the IOPC and the College of Policing to consider investigating what they think are systemic issues affecting policing in England and Wales.
Our report expressed concern that of the 16 organisations designated by the Home Office that can raise such issues or concerns on behalf of the public, no specialist organisation represents complainants with disabilities, including autism. The Home Secretary wrote to the Committee in December 2021 and pledged to review the designated bodies that can submit super-complaints on systemic issues in policing to include a broader range of organisations, including disability organisations. We welcome that commitment, but nearly two years on, I hope the Minister can confirm when the Government will review the super-complaints system. As we have heard, the Home Secretary confirmed to the Committee that a designated body should collaborate with non-designated organisations and, where appropriate, make a complaint on the basis of the matters raised.
Our recommendation was that the Home Office should highlight on its super-complaints website that the 16 designated bodies should collaborate with non-designated bodies as appropriate to make a complaint on matters raised by those non-designated bodies. We are pleased that the Government have made that change on their super-complaints website, but we urge them, the IOPC and other relevant policing bodies to make the public aware that the super-complaints process is accessible to all groups and interests.
I thank everybody who assisted the Home Affairs Committee in our inquiry. We will be watching what happens on our recommendations in this area, and following progress over the months and years to come on this important issue, as we know police misconduct and complaints have been in the news a lot in recent times, and it is very much an issue that the public care about.
Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)
Before I call the shadow Minister, I can see that Sir Peter Bottomley has joined us—do you wish to contribute, Sir Peter?
Naz Shah
Absolutely. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), who chairs the Committee, and the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham for securing this important debate, and I thank the wider Committee for its important and timely scrutiny of this issue. Like both Members have said, it is very much in the news at the moment—it is top of the agenda, and rightly so.
It is also right that we thank those who submitted evidence, written or oral, to the inquiry to help shine a light on this issue. In particular, my right hon. Friend referred to the anonymous submissions, which are very significant. I thank her for highlighting the issue of autism and disability. Will the Minister say where we are with the super-complaints and the 16 designated bodies? We do not have anybody representing those with disabilities; will the Government be making any recommendations to get an organisation that does? What will they do to strengthen that process?
I thank the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham for highlighting his personal experience, of which I was unaware, with respect to Operation Midland. As he said, we are in privileged positions, so the fact that it took him three years to get a resolution, with doors closed on him and the closing of ranks right up to the chief constable of Sussex, is deeply worrying. That was the situation despite our being in positions of power and privilege—even more reason for us to ensure that the Government respond appropriately to this debate and take on the Committee’s recommendations.
The official Opposition believe that the Committee’s report is a timely and thorough examination of the police complaints process, and that the Government must properly heed its recommendations. All Members—Government and Opposition—support the long-standing principle of policing by consent in this country. That principle is fundamental to maintaining public support in our criminal justice system, and law and order more widely.
The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham referred to the horrible murders of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry. The fact that the police officers took those horrific pictures of the bodies was used by the defence team during the trial. This is not just about the complaints; it is about the impact of those complaints and what that can lead to with respect to justice for victims of crime.
The principle of policing by consent separates our policing system from many of those around the world. It is a principle that must be protected and strengthened. But the process must be underpinned by robust and well-functioning systems of complaint and redress for members of the public who believe that proper procedures have not been followed, whether on purpose or inadvertently. That is vital in maintaining public trust in our police, and in ensuring that the hard work of the great majority of police officers is not undermined and that, when mistakes arise, they are learned from.
It has been said during the debate—no doubt the Minister will reiterate it—that police officers regularly go above and beyond, in some instances risking their lives, to keep the public safe and fight crime. We have experienced that here in Westminster, and we continue to experience it across the country. However, as the Committee’s report notes, appalling examples of misconduct, such as the one that occurred with the murder of Sarah Everard, and the disgraceful, misogynistic, racist and bullying behaviour of a substantial number of officers at London’s Charing Cross police station, add to a long list of serious breaches of public trust. That is why we, the official Opposition, agree with the Committee that there is a strong need for cultural change right from, to ensure that lessons are learned from past mistakes, that proper action is taken to address poor or unprofessional behaviour, and that police forces up and down the country demonstrate that they understand that public trust in policing needs to be earned and constantly maintained.
I am pleased that the Committee has highlighted the advances that the IOPC has made since it replaced the Independent Police Complaints Commission. However, serious concerns remain about the transparency of the IOPC’s operations. I note that the Committee has particularly highlighted the poor communication with regard to its inquiries, including with Lady Brittan over the false allegations made against her late husband, Lord Brittan. It is vital that the IOPC, as well as the Government, takes note of this cross-party Committee’s recommendations.
My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) is sorry that she cannot be here, but during yesterday’s ministerial statement in the main Chamber on the Metropolitan police, she was clear that the Home Office must not stand back from this issue. It needs real leadership to drive reforms through. The Home Secretary and her Department must engage seriously with police reform to stop appalling scandals of the kind we have seen in recent years.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the shadow Home Secretary, has also been pushing for reform, having been the Chair of the Committee when this inquiry was initiated. Sadly, we have heard yet more examples today that show why it is important to shine a light on these issues.
Labour has consistently called for an overhaul of police standards. We want to see: much stronger vetting processes, better training, including on issues such as misogyny and racism, quicker and more robust misconduct proceedings, and better guidance on the use of social media, including WhatsApp, by police officers and staff. In the wake of the Child Q case, we also called for updated national guidance—which we are yet to see—on the strip-searching of children. When the Minister gets to his feet, I would be grateful if he could confirm what steps his Department is taking in each of these areas.
We know that there are several ongoing inquiries and reviews into policing, including the Casey and Angiolini inquiries, and the HMICFRS review of vetting. These are important pieces of work, and the Opposition look forward to reading their conclusions and recommendations. However, we could be waiting months for these inquiries to conclude, with the implementation of any recommendations taking even longer. As has been said in this debate, that is not okay. As my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central emphasised yesterday, we must have action now to address these issues. We cannot afford to wait.
Can the Minister also outline what progress the Home Office has made in implementing the Committee’s recommendations? In particular, could he provide an update on the steps taken in response to recommendation 9, which relates to the speeding up of complaints, investigation and disciplinary processes? In far too many cases, police officers who are disciplined for misconduct remain in their posts for months, if not years, while misconduct proceedings are set up. That was certainly true in the recent Charing Cross case, and the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham mentioned that his case took three years and that the officers involved had actually retired by that point. That does not give us confidence. Wherever standards in policing fall short, they should be dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible. Can the Minister outline what steps are being taken in this specific area?
Police officers up and down this country do incredibly important work, including in my area of Bradford, which is covered by West Yorkshire police. Members from across the House will have countless stories of police officers and staff going above and beyond, running towards danger and serving their communities. I want to put on record my thanks to West Yorkshire police, because we had the loss of Jo Cox, but the police step up and protect us as MPs, so that we can do our job, including in this place. It is in the interests of us all—politicians, police and the public—to ensure the highest possible standards for our police service. Serious work is needed, which includes reforming the police complaints system.
Again, I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North, who is the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, and the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham for securing this debate and for keeping up the pressure on this very important issue.
The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)
It is a great pleasure, Ms Ghani, to appear before you for the first time and also to appear for the first time before someone who was elected to the Commons on the same day that I was. That happy day in 2015 seems an awful long time ago. [Laughter.] I am very grateful—
Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)
Order. I hope the Minister is not trying to sway the Chairperson. I note for the record that it will have no relevance to the rest of the debate.
Kit Malthouse
I am also grateful to the assembled members—current and former—of the Home Affairs Committee for contributing to this debate. I am particularly grateful to the current members, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) and my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), for securing it. It is an immensely important topic. We have had some interesting contributions, which I will take away and digest.
As a number of Members have said, the police perform a unique and critical role in our society. The public look to them for protection and reassurance and, in certain circumstances, through us, authorise them to sometimes use lethal force against our fellow citizens. The public rightly expect all who serve to uphold high standards of conduct and professionalism. As I have said on many occasions—pretty much since I was appointed deputy Mayor for policing more than a decade ago—public confidence and trust are integral to the long-standing model of policing by consent. It is fundamental to the very essence of policing in the United Kingdom. I have worked hard during my career in fighting crime to ensure that we cleave to that model and do not drift towards the warrior model of policing that we see in other jurisdictions.
A range of elements come together to form the full picture when it comes to securing and maintaining public confidence. One of those is an effective conduct and complaints system. As Members have said, the vast majority of police officers already act with the highest standards of professionalism. It is therefore all the more disappointing and, in some instances, completely shocking when the behaviour and actions of a few undermine the hard work of their dedicated colleagues. When things do go wrong it is vital that the systems in place are robust and fair, and stand up to scrutiny.
I note the positive comments in the Committee’s report on the February 2020 reforms made to the police conduct and complaints systems and the significant improvement in the IOPC since 2018. Of course, we accept that there is more to do. With policing—indeed, with any major public service—complacency is something we must fight against with all our might and energy. We must strive constantly for improvement; the public deserve nothing less.
As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham mentioned, the Independent Office for Police Conduct was launched in 2018 following reforms to the IPCC, which scrapped the old commission structure in favour of a single head of the organisation. The new structure resulted in the director general having a combined role that includes chairing the unitary board. The aim of having a single role was to both streamline and demonstrate the independence of decision making to enhance public and police confidence. Scrutiny of and support for the director general is provided by the unitary board, on which the non-executive directors must be in a majority. There is a senior independent non-executive director.
Since its launch in January 2018 and under Michael Lockwood’s leadership, the IOPC has completed more than 91% of the core independent investigations started since then within 12 months. The average length of all investigations has fallen from more than 11 months in 2018 to less than nine months now. I understand that the backlog that was inherited on the conversion to the IOPC has been eliminated. That is huge progress, which, I am happy to say, was also highlighted in the Committee’s report. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham asked about the number of former police officers on the staff: it is 28%. That is a number that we need to keep an eye on, as he said, in terms of their expertise.
Last year, the Home Secretary announced that she was bringing forward the first periodic review of the IOPC, in response to pressure from my hon. Friend and others. Such reviews of the Government’s arm’s length bodies typically consider the effectiveness of an organisation and its fitness for purpose. We agree that the existing governance structure, along with the Home Affairs Committee’s specific recommendation on the director general’s role, should be looked at as part of that review. The review has not started; however, we are currently working on the arrangements, including identifying an independent reviewer. We will update the Committee when we are able to confirm further details.
The Government are clear in our determination to listen and act on issues important to the general public and their confidence in policing—including accountability, which is crucial to public trust. As colleagues will recall from the Committee’s report, the IOPC is already making a concerted effort to uphold confidence in the police complaints system, which includes greater transparency in the publication of investigation outcomes, actively listening to policing bodies and communities about their concerns, improved investigation timeliness and thematic reviews.
The legislative reforms in 2020 to overhaul the police complaints and disciplinary system were wide ranging, and were designed to simplify processes while increasing transparency and independence. The reforms have significantly reduced the bureaucracy in handling low-level customer service matters, which account for the majority of complaints. The most serious cases continue to be dealt with under robust processes, including independent investigations by the IOPC.
We continue to engage with policing stakeholders across the piece, including the National Police Chiefs’ Council, and we welcome the ongoing engagement of the Police Federation and other staff associations. We have agreed to review the impact of the reforms, including considering the role of police and crime commissioners in policing complaints. As part of that wider review, we will look at the issues raised by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North about super-complaints.
Recent high-profile cases of misconduct have shone a light on the culture that exists in some areas of policing. Aside from examples of appalling behaviour that has no place anywhere, let alone within an institution entrusted to protect the public, there is a wider impact on how policing is perceived. When standards are not met, it not only undermines the excellent work done by thousands of officers, staff and volunteers day in, day out, but risks damaging the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public. It is therefore crucial that there are effective systems and safeguards in place to ensure that all officers adhere to the high standards expected of them and that breaches of those standards are identified quickly and dealt with appropriately.
Although the Government have overseen significant progress in the police complaints system in recent years, we do agree that forces, individuals and their representative organisations must take further responsibility for rooting out bad behaviour. The College of Policing is currently undertaking a review of the code of ethics. The review will provide clear expectations that everyone in policing has a duty to challenge and report behaviour that undermines the profession and damages public confidence, and to be open and accountable and learn from mistakes at an organisational and individual level.
As part of the 2020 integrity reforms, the Home Office introduced a duty of co-operation for police officers. The duty provides clarity on the level of co-operation required by an officer where they are a witness in an investigation, inquiry, or other formal proceedings. Failure to co-operate is a breach of the professional standards and can be dealt with by police forces accordingly.
The Government will respond in due course to Bishop James Jones’s report on the experiences of the Hillsborough families and the report of the Daniel Morgan independent panel. The Government will also consider calls for a broader duty of candour for public bodies and authorities—an issue raised by various Members.
Colleagues may also recall that the Home Secretary has announced the Angiolini inquiry, which a couple of Members referred to, part two of which is expected to consider wider policing matters, such as barriers to whistleblowing, vetting practices, and professional standards and discipline, including workplace cultures. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham pointed out, since 2017 it has been the case that retired police officers can be brought back to face gross misconduct proceedings.
I again thank members of the Committee for securing this debate. I am grateful for the opportunity that it has provided me to underscore just how seriously we take this issue. This is not an end point in our work on police integrity and the complaints system. As I said in my opening remarks, the maintenance of trust and the model of consent require constant attention and adjustment as we face different circumstances and incidents. The Committee has my undertaking that we will report to it on our progress on this issue. We will take seriously its report and weave it into the work that we do. We will continue with the work programme to reinforce the fundamental foundation of policing in this country, which is the trust and confidence that the British public have and the consent that they give to the policing model.
Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)
Thank you, Minister—not an end point. I call Mr Tim Loughton to respond and wind up.
Oral Answers to Questions
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Kevin Foster
I am delighted to hear that housing is available in the highlands to support these people. We would be keen for them to make their new home in the highlands, which is a fantastic part of our United Kingdom. I would be delighted to meet the hon. Member to discuss how we can get those families on the way to a permanent home in a welcoming community.
Ms Nusrat Ghani (Wealden) (Con)
Operation Pitting was a remarkable success in evacuating Afghans, but also remarkable is the number of Afghan women seeking refuge who have been left behind and are now on the Taliban hit list. I have been trying to chase updates on a number of Afghan women but have been unable to get any response from the Home Office. It has been made clear to those women that the Taliban will kill them unless they can escape Afghanistan. Will the Minister meet me to try to help me to progress their cases?
Kevin Foster
I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss those women’s cases. Of course, through the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme we are working with groups such as the UNHCR to identify those who would be particularly affected by Taliban rule.