G20 and Paris Attacks

Richard Drax Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Our diplomatic posts play an absolutely vital role in Britain’s soft power. We were ranked the other day as No. 1 in the world for soft power. We have been opening embassies around the world rather than closing them. This is a good opportunity to thank all our hard-working staff from this Dispatch Box.

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

To counter the appalling slaughter that was faced by all those in Paris, we will need armed police on the spot within minutes. Will my right hon. Friend reassure the House that we have sufficient armed police in all our cities to do just that?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this. Following the Mumbai attacks and the intelligence we had after that about potential attacks in this country, a lot of work was done to make sure that our armed response vehicles have a sufficient number of people to meet the challenge in any of our major urban areas. We keep this under review. We are studying what happened in Paris. We are looking at the numbers that we need. I do not think the idea of routinely arming all the police in our country is the right approach, but certainly increasing the number of armed police that are available is something that we are looking at very carefully and something that, if necessary, we will do. While we do not talk about the role of our special forces, they are also available to help in these circumstances. We will do everything we can to make sure that they can be brought to bear at the right moment and can help with our overall effort in dealing with what are extremely challenging problems thrown up by what happened in Paris.