Police Officer Safety
Debate between Robert Flello and Diane Abbott(8 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)
Fire crews, which attend emergencies and save people’s lives, are also coming under attack. It is outrageous that our police, fire and emergency ambulance services, which are all on the frontline, are being discussed not because of the positive work that they do, but because people think that it is fair game to attack them.
Ms Abbott
My hon. Friend must be clairvoyant, because the next thing I was going to say was that fire crews in the UK have come under attack 1,000 times in the past two years, and attacks on ambulance workers are also on the rise. Although the main purpose of this debate is to discuss violence against the police, I could not let it pass without referring to other blue-light services with similar issues. All assaults on the police are unacceptable, and we will discuss how to address them. The sad thing is that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) said, there is no clear, reliable evidence of the number of assaults on the police, because the data are still recorded in a haphazard and irregular fashion.