Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point. As he knows, all proscribed organisations are reviewed on an annual basis by a cross-Government group that assists the Home Secretary to come to decisions on these matters. Each case is carefully considered, taking into account all the detail as time passes. The right hon. Gentleman makes a good point that organisations can change over time. There is an appeal mechanism not just to the Home Secretary, but beyond the Home Secretary to an independent committee, so I am confident that organisations can present a case that they have changed. The system and the Act allow for that.

Proscription is a tough power, as is clear from the various interventions, but it is necessary. Its effect is that the proscribed organisation is outlawed and is unable to operate in the UK. Proscription means that it is a criminal offence for a person to belong to or invite support for a proscribed organisation. It is also a criminal offence to arrange a meeting in support of a proscribed organisation or to wear clothing or carry articles in public which arouse reasonable suspicion that an individual is a member or supporter of the proscribed organisation.

Given the wide-ranging impact of proscription, the Home Secretary exercises her power to proscribe an organisation only after thoroughly reviewing all the available relevant information and evidence on the organisation. This includes open source material, as well as intelligence material, legal advice, and advice that reflects consultation across Government, including with the intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Decisions on proscription are taken with great care by the Home Secretary, and it is also right that the case for proscribing new organisations must be approved by both Houses.

Having carefully considered all the evidence, the Home Secretary firmly believes that the TTP is currently concerned in terrorism. Although hon. Members will, I hope, appreciate that I am unable to go into much detail, I am able to summarise. The TTP is a prolific terrorist organisation that has committed a large number of mass-casualty attacks in Pakistan. It has announced various objectives and demands, such as the enforcement of sharia, resistance against the Pakistani army and the removal of NATO forces from Afghanistan. Examples of recent attacks include a suicide car bomb attack outside a courthouse in Mingora in March 2009 that killed 14 people and injured 130. Another attack on a police station in Lakki Marwat in September 2010 killed 17 people. Although the majority of attacks have been against military and Government targets, the TTP is also known to target religious events. In September 2010, a suicide attack on a Shi’a rally killed 50 people.

The group has also claimed responsibility for attacks on western targets. For example, in June 2010 an attack on a NATO convoy just outside Islamabad killed seven people and destroyed 50 vehicles. In April 2010, an attack on the US consulate in Peshawar killed at least six. The TTP has also threatened to attack the west and was implicated in the failed Times square car bomb attack last May.

Proscription will align the UK with the emerging international consensus against this murderous organisation. The TTP is already designated by the United States and proscribed in Pakistan. The proscription of the TTP will contribute to making the UK a hostile environment for terrorists and their supporters, and show our condemnation of the terrorist attacks the group continues to carry out in Pakistan. Proscribing the TTP will enable the police to carry out disruptive action more effectively against any supporters in the UK.

I should make it clear to hon. Members that proscription is not targeted at any particular faith or social grouping, but is based on clear evidence that an organisation is concerned in terrorism. The TTP is not representative of Pakistani or wider Muslim communities in the UK. The organisation has carried out a large number of attacks in Pakistan resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties. It is clear that these actions appal the vast majority of British Muslims.

As a final point, I have already said that the Government recognise that proscription is a tough power that can have a wide-ranging impact.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s statement. Will he confirm that the Government are looking, as they have said in the past, at proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the political wing of Hezbollah, which still operates in the United Kingdom?

[Damian Green]

I can only repeat to my hon. Friend what I said to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). For obvious reasons, it is not this Government’s, nor was it the previous Government’s, policy to discuss whether an organisation is or is not under consideration for proscription. He will be aware that Hizb ut-Tahrir is an organisation about which we have real concerns, and I can confirm that its activities are kept under review. But as I say, it would be unwise to promote a running commentary on any individual organisation.

Any organisation that is proscribed, or anyone affected by the proscription of an organisation, has an appeal mechanism, as I was saying to the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee. They can apply to the Home Secretary for the organisation to be de-proscribed, and if the application is refused, the applicant can appeal to the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission, a special tribunal that is able to consider the sensitive material that often underpins proscription decisions. A special advocate can be appointed to represent the interests of the applicant in closed sessions of the commission. I hope that gives some reassurance to those who were concerned about that.

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[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the Government’s reasons for the order. Let me clarify that no one on the Opposition Front Bench finds these matters amusing in any way whatsoever. I note, however, that the Minister was somewhat under pressure when the Prime Minister’s conduct in matters of national security and the banning of organisations was cited. We were merely pointing out that the Prime Minister does not have a glorious record in that regard.

Let me reiterate at the outset for the benefit of the House the approach adopted to counter-terrorism matters by the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls):

“We, the Opposition, will take an evidence-based approach which gives the greatest importance to national security in coming to a view on counter-terrorism issues, and therefore wherever possible we will seek to work with the government and will seek consensus.”

To that end, I can tell the House that, despite frequent earlier requests, my right hon. Friend received only in the past hour a Privy Council briefing on the organisation that is the subject of the order. As I have said, we are happy to seek a consensus-based approach on matters of national security, but I point out to Government Front Benchers that that would be helped along somewhat if they provided Privy Council briefings in a more timely manner.

[Robert Halfon]

To be fair, given what the hon. Lady has just said about Hizb ut-Tahrir, it was Tony Blair who first said that the organisation should be proscribed, and nothing ever happened subsequently.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I will return to the issue of Hizb ut-Tahrir shortly and hopefully deal with the substance of the hon. Gentleman’s intervention.

I have a number of questions about the order for the Minister. Paragraph 7.2 of the explanatory memorandum states:

“The Secretary of State has regard to additional criteria (announced by the Secretary of State in 2001) in deciding as a matter of discretion whether or not to proscribe an organisation. These are:…The nature and scale of the organisation’s activities…The specific threat that it poses to the UK…The specific threat that it poses to British nationals overseas…The extent of the organisation’s presence in the UK…The need to support international partners in the fight against terrorism”.

Those criteria seem to be perfectly sensible in providing the basic test against which a Secretary of State may decide to exercise his or her discretion, but will the Minister shed some light on how, in this particular case, they have been applied? The 2001 criteria are not contained in primary or secondary legislation, so in light of that are they under regular review by the Home Office? Will he give us some details about how the Government intend to keep them under review? How frequently will that be done?

Given that the criteria were stated first in 2001, does the Minister consider them to be fully comprehensive still? Could they usefully be added to, and are there any plans to do so? He will be aware that there is a large and settled British Pakistani community in this country, and many British citizens from that community travel regularly to Pakistan to visit family and friends. What is his assessment of the threat that Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan poses to them? That will be a matter of some interest to the British Pakistani community, so I hope that he will take this opportunity to address it. Related to that, is Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan operative in this country? How has the threat that the organisation poses in this country changed since it was set up in 2007, and what is the extent of its operations in this country?

The Minister will also be aware that, as a result of the devastating floods in Pakistan last year, the effects of which are still being felt by the Pakistani population, a large number of British aid workers operate in Pakistan and are involved in vital efforts to provide humanitarian relief and assistance to the flood affectees. Soon after the floods, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan made a number of statements, widely reported in the British media, threatening British aid workers. Will the Minister update the House on the threat posed to British aid workers engaged in flood relief work in Pakistan, and will he give some detail about the efforts being made to provide the maximum possible security and support to them?

The organisation was set up in 2007, proscribed by the Pakistani authorities in 2008 and designated by the United States in September 2010. What prompted the Government to follow suit now? How was the timing of the decision arrived at? There is, of course, necessary and close co-operation between the Pakistani authorities and the Government in combating terrorism. Is the Minister confident that the Government are doing enough to support the Pakistani authorities and society as a whole to prevent the rise of Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

Of course the hon. Gentleman is right: Prime Ministers should take an interest in these matters, and I am sure that the Prime Minister of the time did that while fully respecting the operational independence of the police. The present Prime Minister is an advocate of individually elected police commissioners; in fact, it was in his 2005 manifesto. It is always good for the Home Secretary to support the Prime Minister if she can, but sometimes, as I know, it is important to say no. I am afraid that, on this matter, she has been remiss in her duties. It would have been much better if she had said to the Prime Minister, “I am very sorry, Prime Minister, but a policy that sounded good in opposition is deeply flawed and unimplementable in government.”

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned three organisations that support the proposals for elected police commissioners. I should like to read him a quote from a fourth:

“And with local meetings, new elected police representatives, and online crime mapping, people will have more information and more influence over what their local team is focused on.”

That quote is from the Labour party website, www.labour.org.uk.

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[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

Without the change in the law she would not dare come here.

The Israeli Administration are one of the most discredited regimes in the world, and have persisted in committing war crimes, right through to the lethal attack on the Gaza flotilla on 31 May.

[Robert Halfon]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I shall give way in a moment. Israel breaches international law and the Geneva convention—[Interruption.]

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

The fact is that Israel breaches international law and the Geneva convention every single day. It has just snubbed the President of the United States by refusing to halt the illegal building of settlements—that in itself is a contravention of international law.

[Robert Halfon]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, but I must say that his hatred for Israel knows no bounds. He explains exactly why universal jurisdiction needs to be changed—it is being used as a political football by people such as him who have hidden agendas.

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

There would have been no proposal to change the universal jurisdiction law if Tzipi Livni had not been scared away from this country after committing appalling war crimes against the people of Gaza. It is as simple and as plain as that.

As I said, the Israelis have just snubbed the President of the United States by refusing to halt the illegal building of settlements. The Israeli regime uses its powers of arrest without charge arbitrarily. Two Members of the Knesset, including the Deputy Prime Minister, were scared away by the law, but 30 members of the Palestine National Council are currently held by the Israelis without charge. That is not a threat of arrest, but an actual arrest.

Last month, when I was in Jerusalem, I visited three PNC members who are taking refuge from arbitrary arrest by the Israeli police with the international Red Cross. I met and heard the testimony of young Palestinian children who were assaulted by Israeli police—they showed us their scars and bruises—as a result of the arbitrary and illegal way in which the Israeli police treat Palestinians, including Palestinian children. When we met the Foreign Minister of Jordan in Amman, he told us that he had to offer diplomatic shelter to the President of Palestine because when they were driving along one after the other, the President was continually halted at Israeli checkpoints. For all those crimes and many more, the Israelis are answerable to no one. Now, one of the few sanctions on those crimes will be removed. As a result of the Bill, Israeli politicians will be literally allowed to get away with murder.

That comes at a time when the ground is shifting. As I said, the pledge on the measure was made in a full-page advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle in order to get Jewish votes in the recent general election, but there is an upheaval in the Jewish community, as a result of which the across-the-board support for anything an Israeli Government do is no longer available.

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[Neil Carmichael]

That is why I am sympathetic to dealing with the problems in supermarkets. My hon. Friend is right: we do have cheap booze; it is bought in bulk; it is consumed in a bingey way, which does cause huge problems; and we have to address the issue.

We had a debate about pubs last week, but let us repeat the point that we must recognise the pub as a useful, controlled environment in which people can drink.

[Robert Halfon]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, but following the previous intervention does he not agree that alcohol sold in supermarkets is often bought by people who cannot otherwise afford it? Surely, the only restrictions should therefore be on so-called alcopops and drinks like that.

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank my hon. Friend and appreciate all the interventions—the two of them, at least—that I have had. He makes a good point about alcopops, and we need to think about that, because we can be too draconian, but I shall make three general points about drinks. First, we have to think about binge drinking and its causes; secondly, we need to look at the role of supermarkets in supplying the drink; and, thirdly, we need to bear in mind the strength of the drink.

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[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I welcome the Bill and the debate. I have four substantial points to make: where there is direct democracy and policing elsewhere in the world, it works; we must do more to support special constables; we must tell the truth about crime in our statistics; and universal jurisdiction must be reformed so that the Director of Public Prosecutions has control over issuing warrants.

We have rehearsed the arguments about police commissioners this evening. I am a passionate supporter of the policy because I believe that local people should have some say in the policing they want for their neighbourhood. The public want that—they are unhappy with police authorities. Extremist groups have not taken control of the police in north America, where there has been no great backlash against democracy.

I want mainly to speak about special constables. I have long believed that we must do more to support them and make them into a reserve force, like the Territorial Army or reserve firemen. Since 1997, the number of specials has fallen dramatically from 20,000 to fewer than 14,000. I have tabled three early-day motions on the issue—1160, 598 and 520. I also raised it at business questions last Thursday, and welcomed the Leader of the House’s response.

I am grateful to the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, who previously agreed with me in the House that there is huge untapped potential for recruiting more specials, who are in many ways like neighbourhood watch: a genuinely local force and a vital source of community intelligence.

One suggestion is to allow councils to discount council tax for those who become specials. That would act as an incentive and fit in with the Government’s big society proposals. The Association of Chief Police Officers supports the idea and Southampton city council has already trialled a scheme, which offered special constables a rebate rather than an up-front discount on their council tax. However, because of the legal uncertainties, the process took months and was only a one-off. At the end of the debate, I intend to table an amendment to clause 10(3) to make such action much easier for our colleagues in local government.

Under the new duty to co-operate, I would like the Bill to clarify that local authorities are free to co-operate with police forces, if they choose, by exempting special constables from council tax, or, at the very least, offering them a substantial discount. That does not have to be expensive. Essex is lucky to have nearly 700 specials. If each was offered £100 off their council tax bill, it would cost the grand sum of £70,000. Given that the public sector spent £10 billion in Essex last year, £70,000 is not an astronomical sum. I hope that the Minister and colleagues will be able to consider my amendment.

We must tell the truth about crime in our statistics. There is huge bureaucratic and political pressure to say that crime is decreasing. Everyone wants to believe that things are getting better. However, the tragedy is that that translates into immense personal pressure on individual police officers not to record crime because if they go out on the streets and find criminals their statistics look worse and worse. I recently met the Home Secretary and the chief constable of Essex to discuss crime in Harlow, and the chief constable made that point powerfully. One solution is to record two sorts of statistic. An innovative proposal is to use the Australian system and distinguish between crimes that the public have reported and those that the police have discovered.

Imagine if instead of one single box for recording crime, where everything gets jumbled and mixed together, we had two boxes. In the first box we could measure crime reported by the public, police officers and PCSOs, and in the second we would measure crime proactively discovered by the police. If the number of the latter crimes increased, we would not worry unduly, because it would mean that the police were doing their job, patrolling the streets and uncovering the hidden criminals who are disrupting our neighbourhoods.

I sincerely hope that when we consider that reform, we consider how to free our police officers from the immense political pressure to say that crime numbers are coming down. I welcome the reforms to public information, such as crime maps, which the Government are pushing for, and measures such as clause 89, “Crime and disorder strategies”, and clause 34, which contains the duty to liaise with local people. However, I hope that the Minister considers the Australian system of recording crime.

Finally, I believe that universal jurisdiction must be reformed so that the Director of Public Prosecutions has control over issuing warrants. Currently, the process for private prosecutions is being abused—it is used as a political tool for campaigning and point scoring—but the purpose of our justice system must be justice, not media campaigns. Therefore, I welcome clause 151, which will ensure that universal jurisdiction cases proceed only on the basis of solid evidence.

[Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that there is evidence that the current process was abused in the past, and that it got in the way of peaceful discussions and an understanding of different points of view?

[Robert Halfon]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. The problem is that the current arrangements have been used as a political tool. A disproportionate number of arrest warrants sought for war crimes are directed at Israeli officials and politicians. It is worth remembering that Israel is a democratic country with the rule of law, and that it has a thriving judiciary and a Supreme Court that often rules against the state in cases with sound legal bases. If we want to promote peace in the middle east, Israel’s leaders must be able to come to Britain for talks with the British Government. The current misuse of universal jurisdiction actually hinders reconciliation efforts. That applies not just to Israel—for example, I understand that an arrest warrant was issued against Henry Kissinger.

In conclusion, I am hugely supportive of the Bill. The more democracy, the better. I hope that the Minister and colleagues will consider my amendment on special constables and reforming the flaws in our crime statistics, but I welcome the Government’s reforms, especially on universal jurisdiction and elected police commissioners. The Bill is in the same vein as all the Government’s policies and can be summed up in four words: power to the people.

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[Vernon Coaker]

I cannot give way as I have to finish in four or five minutes. Those Members wishing to intervene can argue this point in more detail in Committee, as they do not have to be Committee members to do so.

The Bill makes a number of proposals on issues such as drugs, alcohol and protests around Parliament, but at its core is police reform and the proposal for elected police commissioners and police and crime panels. At the same time as we have massive cuts to policing that will mean thousands fewer police in every single area of the country, the Government are subjecting police to an unwanted organisational upheaval. Of course, not only are police officers under threat but police staff in the back office and police community support officers will go.

[Robert Halfon]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Public Order Policing

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The whole issue of kettling has been looked at previously. It has been supported as an appropriate technique that is available to the police to use. The operational decision on when it is right to use kettling—or not—must be left to the police. It is not for us as politicians to say, on any one occasion, whether it is appropriate to use kettling, but overall as a tactic it is appropriate.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

My constituents will be incredibly concerned about reports that suggest that some agitators came from overseas countries, such as Latvia and Germany. If that is the case, what steps will my right hon. Friend take to ensure that such agitators do not come from overseas in future?

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend is trying to tempt me down a road that it is not necessarily appropriate for me to go down on this occasion. All I will say is that it is important that we look at the make-up of the crowd. As I said in my statement, sadly what we saw was a significant number of people who came not to protest peacefully but to perpetrate and encourage violence and criminal damage.

Controlling Migration

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for echoing the importance of this issue, which was also raised by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion and by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd). As I said, I am happy to meet a group of MPs to discuss English language schools. We know how important that issue is and we are looking to address it through consultation.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

May I congratulate my right hon. Friend on her statement and tell her that my constituents will welcome the move away from expressing rhetoric about British jobs for British workers towards taking substantive action? Nevertheless, many people in Harlow will be concerned that their jobs are being given away, particularly by big companies like the major supermarkets, to temporary migrant workers. Will my right hon. Friend set out how her measures will help this situation?

[Mrs May]

I believe that our measures will help because they will tighten up the provisions to ensure that the people who come into this country under either tier 1 or tier 2 are the skilled workers that companies need, not those coming here to do low-skill jobs. We will also tighten up on the intra-company transfers route through the salary threshold so that that route is available, as it was always intended to be, for senior managers and people with specialist skills rather than for people doing low-skill jobs.

Immigration

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Field]

I would rephrase that slightly. My hon. Friend makes the absolutely valid point that large numbers of people who want to get on in their lives come here and believe the prospectuses of such colleges, but my worry is that increasingly the news has gone round the traps, so to speak, that such courses are one way in—a bogus route. That is deeply cruel to those who have paid to enrol because they wish to build a more constructive life for themselves by getting an education; I could not agree more about that.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. Following on from the previous intervention, I personally know someone who went to one of these English language schools with the intention of getting a proper grounding in the English language, but when she wanted her certificate, she was threatened—unless she gave extra money she would not get her certificate. That institution had all the qualification documents hanging on the wall saying that it was regulated and licensed by the Home Office, so is the real issue not how these organisations are licensed and regulated?

[Mr Field]

May I cap that helpful intervention? In order to satisfy the Home Office, constituents of mine wished to pay more, because all they wanted were the certificates for the courses they had undertaken. I hope the Minister will comment on this issue, if not today then on another occasion. I share the concern expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). The last two constituents who came to me about this point had paid the full sum and were willing to shovel out even more money, but the wretched college would not produce certificates of the relevant qualifications.

Secondly, I hope that the Government will look at tier 1. Under the existing points system, people can come here and look for work—I assume the details of the MAC report will not suggest otherwise. That they can do so is totally unsatisfactory given our current unemployment level, and I would like the Government to close that route immediately.

I also want the Government to look at intra-company transfers. The Prime Minister has recently been making statements on this issue. May I delicately suggest that he could dig himself out of the hole he has dug himself into by raising the sum of money required for a person on an intra-company transfer from the low £20,000s to about £50,000? That would sort out the problem of those who are using such transfers as a way of importing IT workers. It would also offer some hope to those of our constituents who are unemployed IT workers and who would love the chance to bid for some of those jobs.

I also hope the Government will close the post-study route. Those who come to this country to study for degrees are given two years after graduation to search for work. That is wonderful if the economy is booming and there are difficulties in recruiting people to posts, but we now have an unemployment rate among recent graduates of 9% or 10%. It seems totally appropriate that at this time—not for ever—that route should be closed. In reading for the debate, I was shocked to discover that 600 institutions in this country award degrees. That is a highly significant route into the British labour market.

The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) made the point that the Government need to look at the marriage route. I do not in any way want to clamp down on genuine marriages, but if we implement the English test and other measures effectively we will find that the numbers presenting themselves to immigrate will fall substantially.

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[Mr Brazier]

I heard the hon. Gentleman’s intervention on the right hon. Member for Birkenhead and I do not want to go too far down that route, but I do not believe that it is practical. I know that the Australians have done it, and the hon. Gentleman made that point vigorously. I am familiar with the Australian system, but there are two big differences between the six states that make up Australia and the four nations that make up Britain. The first difference is that the entities in Australia are very large and the population centres—most of the population of each of the six states lives in one part of that state, except in Queensland—are a very long way apart, so it is easier to see that people are fulfilling their obligations. The second key difference between Australia and Britain is that Australia has a legal system that works, so if people break the rules, they get deported, but we do not. Trying to provide people with permission to come as long as they settle in Scotland is not practical. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not go further down that route.

Although the cost of housing has come back a little from its recent gross peak, it is still very expensive compared with housing in the majority of other countries, especially for first-time buyers. The primary effect of unaffordable housing is that vast numbers of young families either cannot get housing or work very long hours to pay their mortgages. Even nine years ago—the situation has worsened since then—a huge one-off survey by the OECD discovered some very sad facts about Britain. Some 63% of UK families thought that they only just managed on their household incomes and a higher proportion of Britons than inhabitants of any other major EU nation felt that they had to work more hours than was good for their family life.

Apart from a couple of small countries, we have almost the highest proportion of working mothers in the world. Of course mothers should be able to work—my wife worked when she was a mother—but mothers, including some who work as staff in the House of Commons, are being driven into working much longer hours than they necessarily want to when their children are small because they are paying mortgages for overpriced houses in an overcrowded country.

Along with housing, other relevant issues include health care, social housing and the cost of providing infrastructure. I have mentioned water shortages in Kent; huge costs are associated with the next dam that we are going to need. Those things all cost money and all have to be brought into the balance when we decide whether we want a population of 70 million in a generation’s time.

The third area that I want to discuss is employment. Let me reassure hon. Members that I do not suggest that anyone who is here legitimately, whether as a successful asylum seeker or through a legitimate marriage, should ever be disadvantaged in the job market. I do not suggest there should be discrimination, but we must do what the right hon. Gentleman did in his speech and examine the impact of allowing heavy net immigration, as has happened in the past few years, on the employment of our population. That immigration has not been overwhelmingly from Europe: in the past decade, about two thirds has been from outside Europe.

Interestingly, the employment of UK-born people averaged about 64% in the latest figures available, having fallen by half a per cent. The corresponding employment rate is slightly higher for non-UK-born people at 66.5%, so the right hon. Gentleman’s point about many of the incoming groups teaching us a lesson about the work ethic is true. However, that is not the whole story: we have one of the highest rates of workless households in the developed world. Nearly 4.8 million people of working age are not working and 1.9 million children are living in households in which no one works, many of them households in which no one has ever worked.

Government figures show that 1.4 million people in the UK have been on out-of-work benefits for nine or more of the past 10 years. As John Hutton said in 2006, when he was the Work and Pensions Secretary,

“if people have been on incapacity benefit for more than two years, they are more likely to retire or to die than ever to get another job.”—[Official Report, 24 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 1305.]

It has already been observed but is worth repeating that, although the previous Government can take credit for creating more than 2 million jobs, almost three quarters of those were accounted for by people coming from outside the country. The previous Government effectively had a policy of replacement migration. I am a huge admirer and supporter of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pension’s shake-up of the welfare system, but, as he has hinted in his speeches, it can work only with diligent application of the Government’s plans on immigration, because if large numbers of people are encouraged to get back into the work force—there are some expensive carrots as well as sticks in that regard—they will not have a great deal of luck, as we pull very slowly out of a very difficult recession, if there is a steady stream of young economic migrants to take their place. We cannot do anything about people coming from eastern Europe, but we can do something about those coming from other parts of the world.

The fourth issue I want to address is the student system. I am very proud to represent the largest number of students in any constituency. I have two excellent universities in my patch and a number of highly valued English language schools that act as feeders to those universities and others. However, we must recognise that the problems in the student system that the right hon. Gentleman hinted at are very real. Unlike him, I do not believe that they are confined to a number of bogus colleges, but it is good that the Government are clamping down on them.

I know two people who regularly go to other parts of the world to market their organisations, both of which are legitimate—a Russell group university and an English language school with a very good record in the field—and they both say that the first thing they are asked in many countries is, “Once you get a foot in the door, can you stay?” All too often, people from even the most respectable institutions are tempted to say, “Well, yes, in practice, that almost always follows if that is what you want.” As the universities come under pressure, with the new funding regime starting in 2012, the temptation for those organisations, particularly those that are struggling economically and cannot fill their books, to take people who can pay the money but do not necessarily have the right academic qualifications will be huge. As the right hon. Gentleman pointed out, the largest single route for entry into this country is the student system.

We have to strike a balance, but that will be difficult. It is essential that the best lecturers have the opportunity to come if they want to spend part of their career here and we must have a system in which the brightest and best students see Britain as a place to come. That will be good not only for the countries they come from and the universities that receive them: a key third benefit is that, a generation on, Britain will have friends, potentially in high places. In striking the balance, we have to make sure that perfectly legitimate organisations at the lower end of the economic scale do not pad their numbers out with people who are willing to pay a year’s fees up front and then disappear into the system.

I conclude by drawing attention to an absolutely extraordinary hole in the immigration system that came to my attention at my constituency surgery on Saturday. My constituent, Mr Spence, is happy for me to share his experience with the House. He had a suitcase containing all his personal documents stolen. He has never had a passport, but it included his birth certificate. He was born in Rutland and he was told that to get another birth certificate from Rutland county council, he needed to fill in a form online and send a cheque for £9. He asked what verification was needed and was assured that there was none. Let me inform the House that Government guidelines to anyone applying for a job—I have seen a string of these from various organisations—say that someone who has either a passport or a birth certificate and a letter from a Department, which could be anything and does not require any identity checks, can come into this country.

[Robert Halfon]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the great author, Mr Frederick Forsyth, identified this problem a long time ago in his book “The Day of the Jackal”?

[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I was wholly unaware of that and must reread the book.

Mr Spence’s story gets better—or worse if one is being serious about it. When he was five, his mother remarried and changed his name by deed poll. He contacted Rutland council and said, “There is just one problem: I need to change my details because my name was changed a long time ago.” “Ah,” said the council, “That is no problem.” He had only to fill in another online form and send a cheque for £40 for it all to be fixed.

Unlike the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, I am not going to end with a shopping list of firm recommendations, although I have hinted at a number already. I simply end by observing that we cannot continue to have an open-door policy. I welcome the steps that the incoming coalition Government have already taken, but I firmly believe that they must go further, as we have inherited a system that certainly is not fit for purpose. I congratulate the co-sponsors of the motion and the Backbench Business Committee for giving us the opportunity to discuss this subject.

--- Later in debate ---

[Heidi Alexander]

I do appreciate that recent waves of immigrants are sometimes the most deprived people in urban areas, and I understand their concerns, but I believe that a lot of them respect the contribution that former waves of immigrants have made, and they want to feel that society’s resources are shared fairly and that we take an appropriate, fair but firm approach to immigration.

I have talked a little about the stereotypes of the Daily Mail about why people are concerned about immigration. Those stereotypes have now taken root in many communities across the UK. I understand the concerns of my constituents. I understand that when a family from a different country who speak a different language move into a council house down the road, constituents might question why their daughter is still living at home with them and is number 4,323 on the housing waiting list. However, who is to say that their new neighbours are not renting that house privately? Who is to say that the house was not sold many years ago under the right to buy, or that the main breadwinner in the family is not a highly skilled hospital doctor who has come to the UK to fill a position in our NHS that desperately needed to be filled?

[Robert Halfon]

I thank the hon. Lady for her thoughtful opening remarks. Does she agree that the problem is not that bad people are hostile to immigrants, because there will always be bad people? The real problem is that so many good people have become hostile to immigrants, because, as was mentioned earlier, every time they raise the subject they are accused of being racist. The problems that she talks about occur because people are not allowed to discuss the matter openly without being accused of some ulterior motive.

[Heidi Alexander]

I agree that it is very important that we discuss the matter openly and rationally. I agree entirely with the comment made earlier by the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) that if politicians from the mainstream parties do not discuss it, we leave a space for other parties. That is why I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead on securing the debate.

I also believe that people’s concerns about immigration are symptomatic of the other big challenges with which we are grappling, which some Members have mentioned. They include the availability of housing at a price that people can afford and of jobs that pay a salary that makes taking the work worth while. We need to address those fundamental problems at the same time as ensuring that our immigration system is, to coin a phrase, “fit for purpose”. It is to that issue that I now turn.

What frustrates me more than anything else about our immigration system is our failure—yes, I accept that it was a failure of the previous Government as much as it is of the current one—to enforce decisions in a fair and humane way. We need appropriate enforcement at the point at which decisions are taken. Given that 37% of immigration appeals are successful, there is also a problem with the right decision being made in the first place, but perhaps that is a discussion for another day. I simply say that we should learn from our mistakes and make better decisions at the outset.

I suspect that I have many constituents who were told years ago that they were liable to deportation or removal, but nothing has happened. Such people carry on their lives, which is understandable. Some might be working in the informal economy, and some will have hung on to jobs that they legally should not have done. They have started relationships and had children, and their children have started school. It is then, years down the line, that they get a visit from the enforcement officers. I do not know what it would feel like to be a six-year-old child and be taken out of school—often the only school they have ever known—and have to move to a country to which they have never been, but something tells me that it would not feel great. I accept that every case is different, and that people who have been convicted of crimes in the past should not be allowed to stay, but I question why we are so intent on causing such upheaval to families.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field). It frightens me, given that he sits on the Labour Benches, how often I agree with his sentiments, not just about immigration but about welfare, education and many other issues.

I am not here just to talk about the immigration chaos of the past 15 years or so, because colleagues on both sides of the House have discussed the human and economic issues. Clearly, this debate is not just about process and numbers. We seem to face a much deeper problem than just the number of people coming to the United Kingdom. This debate is also about how we support, resource and recognise those in charge of protecting our borders. In many ways, the immigration service has become the forgotten service, and that will be the focus of my remarks.

During his Labour party leadership campaign, the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), accepted that Labour’s arguments on immigration had not been good enough. Immigration officers have been telling us that for some time. In May 2009, Mr Mike Whiting wrote a letter to The Times saying that the Labour party’s reforms had

“devastated the visa officer network that successfully operated for many years.”

Then in April 2010, just days after the last Government publicly hardened their stance on immigration, it was revealed that they were also seeking to cut the number of immigration officers. That is despite a quadrupling of immigration on their watch. An e-mail that was leaked at the time stated:

“A Voluntary Early Release Scheme will be launched in selected parts of the UK Border Agency… There is an opportunity to make targeted reductions across the Border Force.”

The e-mail claimed that the policy would not “impact on front-line services”. However, clearly immigration officers are, quite literally, the front line, because they physically guard the borders of the British Isles.

From such evidence a picture slowly emerges. Under the last Government, the immigration service was at best neglected by Ministers, but at worst it was treated with contempt. It was only two years ago that a Labour Home Office Minister, the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who was in the Chamber earlier, described immigration officers in somewhat unparliamentary language. This was reported online by the BBC on 29 November 2008:

“UK immigration officials have been on the receiving end of a four-letter outburst by former Home Office minister”,

the hon. Member for Slough, who

“told a conference of a Labour think tank that the job could corrupt ‘even quite good and moral’ people.”

She apparently then said:

“One of the reasons immigration officers are”

s***s

“is actually because some people cheat and they decide everyone is like that”.

That is wrong, wrong, wrong. It seems astonishing that senior Labour figures could trash immigration officers when it was their Government who caused the immigration chaos in the first place.

If those were stand-alone comments, that would be bad enough, but the hon. Lady was backed up by the Labour MEP Claude Moraes, who rounded on immigration officers, complaining about their professional standards. However, they are paid a modest income compared with other parts of the public sector. Their entry-level salary in London is less than £15,000 a year, and during the past 13 years they have suffered a loss not just in working conditions, but in prestige. The symbol of that is that they were not awarded the golden jubilee medal, unlike those in almost every other comparable area of the public sector. That is why I call the immigration service the forgotten service.

As the House will know, eligibility for the Queen’s golden jubilee medal was initially restricted to the armed forces and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Service. It was then extended to include the police, fire and ambulance services, the coastguard, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the mountain rescue service. The right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell), the then Culture Secretary, explained that she had taken that decision because 11 September had highlighted the vital role of the emergency services and the risks that they face. The golden jubilee medal now recognises those who face a potential threat of injury or worse each time they are called out in response to 999 calls. In 2003, the golden jubilee medal was extended to living holders of the Victoria cross and the George cross. In 2005—an election year—Labour took the additional decision to award the golden jubilee medal to public sector prison officers. Speaking to prison officers, Baroness Scotland stated:

“The Prison Service is a key public service, whose greatest achievements often go unseen by the general public. In times of emergencies you rise to the challenge with great skill and professionalism, and these medals recognise that.”

The House will know that such medals have been given out at every coronation ceremony since Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887, and they have a rich civilian history. For example, the recipients of King George V’s silver jubilee medal in 1935 included members of the judiciary, members of the clergy and religious sisterhoods, teachers, physicians and, according to an ancient copy of Hansard, “mail couriers” and “lighthouse tenders”. In 1977, the Queen’s silver jubilee medal was awarded to many other civilian groups, including the police, firemen and women, social workers, health visitors and the civil service.

The key criterion for getting the golden jubilee medal seemed to be that one had risked one’s life for Britain, especially in the face of potential terrorist attacks. Immigration officers do not just protect our borders; they are also on the front line against terrorism. Whenever there has been a crisis, such as when there were hijackers at Stansted airport, it has been immigration officers who have been called on to deal with the resulting emergency. In the attack on Glasgow international airport in 2007, they were first on the scene. In 2001, for instance, two officers serving abroad in Nigeria were attacked with gunfire on their return from work one day. Sadly, that has become an all-too-frequent occurrence. Those are just a few examples of the daily risks and sacrifices that we ask of immigration officers.

To quote Baroness Scotland again, when she announced why the Prison Service was being awarded the golden jubilee medal, she said that it was

“a key public service, whose greatest achievements often go unseen by the general public. In times of emergencies you rise to the challenge with great skill and professionalism”.

Surely that is true of our immigration service too. That is why I have written to the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport asking him to consider awarding immigration officers the diamond jubilee medal in 2012. I have also asked him to consider retrospectively awarding them the golden jubilee medal. The first ever early-day motion that I tabled—early-day motion 114—was on that issue, which was also the subject of the first question that I asked in Parliament.

In conclusion—

[Stephen Pound]

I apologise for interrupting the hon. Gentleman, and I appreciate that he had come to his conclusion. With reference to his earlier comments about my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), may I confirm for the benefit of the House and the way in which things are done here, that he had the courtesy to inform her that he intended to name her in the Chamber this afternoon?

[Robert Halfon]

I did not inform the hon. Lady, because I did not know that I was supposed to do so. I apologise to the House, and I will write a letter of apology to her.

In conclusion, it is bad enough that Labour cut the number of immigration officers, and that at the same time they opened the floodgates and allowed the number of migrants to quadruple, it is bad enough that the previous Government did not always speak of the service with decency and respect, and it is bad enough that every day the immigration service must face the rising threat of terror from extremist bombers and separatists, but it is unacceptable that immigration officers have not been given the recognition they so richly deserve, and have not been awarded the golden jubilee medal. Their work of keeping our borders secure against great odds and on low pay deserves a public honour. Since I started this campaign in Parliament, more than 50 immigration officers have written to me independently, expressing their support. I am proud to say that many of them live in and around my constituency, as they work at Stansted airport.

I shall finish by quoting one of those letters from an official. He said:

“I have served as an Immigration Officer for over 25 years. We play an important role in the fight against terrorism, smuggling, people trafficking, crime and illegal entry.

During my own service I recall officers being called upon to assist with emergencies such as…The Herald of Free Enterprise disaster…The return of hostages from Kuwait…Hostage emergencies at Stansted...Deployments to Kosovo, the Czech Republic and Iraq.

Whilst Prison Officers won their battle to receive the Golden Jubilee medal, nobody considered immigration officers. Not surprisingly we feel we are the Forgotten Service, called upon when needed, cast aside when convenient.”

The immigration service has been forgotten for too long. For the sake of common decency, public sector morale and recognition of that service, I hope that the Government will right this wrong as soon as possible.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Will you clarify the forms of the House when hon. Members refer to other hon. Members who are not present? My understanding from perusing “Erskine May” is that hon. Members should notify another hon. Member if they make a personal attack, but not if it is the cut and thrust of political debate. I understood that what my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) said was the cut and thrust of political debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for giving me this opportunity to speak in the debate. I had not originally planned to do so because I knew that I would be unable to be here for most of it, although I was here at the beginning. I have been moved to speak, however, by a report of the remarks that the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) made about my views, which I have now read in Hansard. I would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight before the House.

I want to start by informing the House about the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion that I made remarks as a Minister that immigration officers deserved to be called by a four-letter word. They were not made by me when I was a Minister. I made the remarks that he is referring to when I was a Back Bencher, and I never suggested that that label should be given to the class of immigration officers. I pointed out, in response to a question, that it is a fact that large numbers of people—not some, but large numbers—seek to cheat the immigration system, which hardens immigration officers. Inevitably, that leads to a kind of cynicism, which means that they cannot necessarily give each case a completely fresh and individual look. I argued at the time for proper training to ensure that immigration officers did not make that kind of mistake in future. Obviously, it is unfair on the genuine that they should be disadvantaged because of those who are not genuine. I am glad to set the matter straight. If one wants to look at evidence about the degree of cynicism in some immigration officers—as I say, I do not believe that this is universally true by any means—the book “Refusal Shoes” is full of the most shocking anecdotes.

I want to speak briefly about the general issue of immigration. I am pleased to debate it. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) will know that I am not one of those who has ever been backward on this subject; I have never been worried about debating immigration.

I am hugely proud to represent one of the most productive towns in this country. One reason why it is such a productive and successful town is that thousands of people have come from countries all over the world to build their future in Slough, which has offered them work. I was so proud just a week ago to sit in a school prom and watch 850 Slough children singing about how people from different countries had contributed so much to the town that they live in and love. This was a celebration of the multiculturalism that is without doubt one of the reasons for the wealth of Slough. It is one reason why, according to the chief executive of Slough borough council, there are more headquarters of European companies in our town than in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. That is why we should celebrate the economic prosperity that migrants bring to Britain. I am glad to do that.

We know that migration offers and brings much. The hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) put it rather well when he said that we need to work to make the best of it and make the consequences of multiculturalism worth celebrating. I will find it depressing if that is not done. The last Labour Government introduced the migration impacts fund as a mechanism to help to achieve that. I profoundly regret the huge cut to Slough borough council’s budget that has resulted from the abolition of that fund.

I did not originally expect to participate in the debate because I was hoping to attend the Westminster Hall debate about houses in multiple occupation. One point of investing resources from the migration impacts fund in Slough was to ensure that migrants in the town did not have to live in sheds—and I mean sheds in people’s back gardens. Government funding enabled the council to inspect HMOs and occupied sheds. It was used successfully to prosecute a landlord who had put a shower on the stairs of a house in multiple occupation in the expectation that people could somehow walk past it. Now we have lost the resources to carry on doing such things, which is much to be regretted.

[Robert Halfon]

As I have said, I apologise for not giving the hon. Lady advance notice of my comments. I was not aware that I should have done, and I will make sure that I do in any future instances. However, all I did was publicly to quote from what the BBC said. I accept that you were a former Minister, but in being a former Minister, you actually give more prescience to your remarks—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Let me say to the hon. Gentleman that I am not a former Minister, I have never been a Minister and I have no aspiration to be a Minister.

[Robert Halfon]

I apologise again, Mr Speaker. However, what the hon. Lady said, as reported by the BBC, is one reason why immigration officers are viewed as “s***s”—because some people decide that if one is like that, all of them are like that. She made no attempt to distinguish between them, and by her remarks she has tarred every immigration officer with the same brush.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

Actually, I did not say “some”, I said “large numbers”. That is one of the corrections that I have just inserted in Hansard. Unlike some of the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues who have only read the blog that he wrote about the subject rather than the original BBC article, he knows that the original BBC article makes it entirely clear that I was asked about the negative attitude of some border officials by a questioner who implied that it was universal. I corrected her, suggesting that that was not a universal belief.

I cannot take responsibility for the words that the BBC put in its report. If the hon. Gentleman reads the BBC article that he claims to have in his hand, he will see that when I gave the reason for the fact that some officials acted in this way, I used the phrase “large numbers”. Every time he has quoted from it, he has referred to “some”, rather than to “large numbers”, which was the phrase that I used.

I do not want to bore the House with quibbles about the details, but the words that I have used are accurate, and I regret to say that the words that the hon. Gentleman used—inadvertently, I am sure—are not. I think it important for the House to know my views.

We need to invest in helping communities to deal with the consequences of migration. If we fail to do that, we may create the tensions and vulnerabilities in our communities that we in Slough have experienced in the past. The competition between people of different races and origins poses a risk to our peaceful, multicultural co-existence, which was genuinely reflected by those 850 children from Slough singing in the Albert Hall. The risk is that it will not continue to be a positive attitude, but will create such a source of stress in communities that it could turn into tension and violence between individual communities. No one in the House would like to see that outcome.

[Robert Halfon]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) implied that I have misled the House. I am quoting directly from the BBC article. The part that is in quotation marks reads as follows:

“One of the reasons immigration officers are”

s***s—

“is actually because some people cheat and they decide everyone is like that”.

It is a direct quotation, and that is all that I wish to say about the matter.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that attempted point of order. What I would say is simply this. A comment was made earlier, and subsequently there was a series of points of order. The hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) offered an apology; the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has now made a speech. As a matter of courtesy to the hon. Gentleman whom I am about to call and the right hon. Gentleman whom I shall ask to wind up to the debate, I suggest that we leave it there. There are now considerations of courtesy to other Members.

Aviation Security Incident

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman is right to remind us of the fact that terrorism comes from a number of sources, and not just from al-Qaeda. I commend the security forces and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, not only this weekend but over recent months, for the increasing amount of work that they have done to prevent any incidents of terrorism in Northern Ireland from taking place. Indeed, the right hon. Gentleman will have seen in the national security strategy that we published two weeks ago that we have clearly identified the threat from dissident republicanism as one that we need to address. We are conscious of the fact that the number of attempted attacks in Northern Ireland has been increasing in recent months.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I commend the security services for doing a remarkable job, but does not the incident involving the Detroit bomber show that other parts of civil society, such as our universities, are failing to get a grip on Islamist extremists? Does the Home Secretary agree that, for our fight against terrorism to succeed, we need to deal effectively with the conveyor belt to terrorism, just as we must deal with the terrorists themselves?

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend has raised an important point. I hope that I can reassure him that, alongside our work on the incident at the weekend and on reviewing our counter-terrorism legislation, we are also looking at the development of extremism and the process of radicalisation. It is important that we ensure that people do not get drawn into a radicalised agenda that leads to extremism, violence and terror. That work is ongoing.

Identity Documents Bill

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention. We told people who were thinking about taking out an ID card, “Don’t do it—we’re going to abolish this scheme.” In fact, if someone took out an ID card in Scotland, they would not require compensation but having their head looked at. The Scottish Government made it clear that people would not be able to use an ID card to access public services in Scotland. We did everything we could as a Government and as a party to discourage people in Scotland from taking out ID cards—and thank goodness they listened to us. I think that perhaps one in 10 of the people involved took out an ID card in Scotland. Anyone who did so would have to be the biggest new Labour cheerleader waving in and celebrating the arrival of the anti-civil libertarian state in Scotland. They would need to have had “Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath’s Finest” tattooed on their chest to have taken out an ID card in Scotland: that is how ridiculous a proposition it would have been.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way in the course of such an impassioned speech. Does he agree that not all Labour Members take the same view? In fact, the Labour party leadership candidate, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), has said that ID cards were a great mistake and that the party should show some humility and admit that it got it wrong.

Crime and Policing

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson]

The answer is quite simple. The Home Secretary ought to do some research. From 1998 onwards we did not need a strategy, because we had introduced an action plan involving the changes that led to the reduction to which I referred. [Interruption.] The statistics that I quoted came from the Attorney-General and from the Home Office. If we had waited 12 years to introduce any measures to deal with this issue, we would not have reduced domestic violence by 64%.

As I said earlier, during the biggest global recession that we have experienced since the 1930s, crime fell by 9%. During the recession of the 1990s over which the Conservatives presided, it rose by 18%, and domestic violence doubled. That was the legacy of the broken Britain that we remember from those days. It is ridiculous of the Home Secretary to suggest that because we published a strategy to deal with domestic violence against women and young girls and then moved to the next stage, we did nothing for 12 years. We did nothing for 12 years except reduce domestic violence by 64%, and produce all the other statistics quoted so generously by the Attorney-General.

I have dealt with the reduced resources being inflicted on police forces with restricted powers. Let me now deal with the third part of the triple whammy: the imposition of elected commissioners to replace the hundreds of experienced councillors, magistrates and other citizens who sit on our police authorities. Here we see the “we know best” arrogance of the Government in all its depressing detail. The public did not vote for the abolition of police authorities at the general election, or for their replacement by an elected commissioner. This model is opposed by the police, by local councillors of all political persuasions, by ACPO, by the Association of Police Authorities, and by practically everyone who knows anything about policing.

The Local Government Association, under a Tory stewardship, says it does not believe that introducing directly elected individuals is the best way in which to strengthen police accountability. The association believes that such action

“will weaken the ability of the police, councils and other public services to cut crime.”

It could also “fragment local partnerships” and make a “place-based budgeting approach”—I am not sure what that is—“more difficult” to operate. Yet the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice has said:

“we are not going to consider other models, this is the model we are going to introduce, that is the coalition agreement.”

And so we have a rushed White Paper, “Policing in the 21st Century”. Incidentally, the Conservatives also produced one of these in 1993; it was called “A police service for the 21st century”, so the titles do not change much but the content certainly does. They published the more recent document on 26 July for an eight-week consultation period over the summer break. Helpfully, at the back of the document there is a code of practice on consultations, which includes the criterion:

“Consultations should normally last for at least 12 weeks with consideration given to longer timescales where feasible and sensible.”

Irrespective of where we stand on the political spectrum, the topic under discussion is a major issue about which there are deep reservations. To quote from the code of practice, it is “feasible and sensible” to have a longer consultation than 12 weeks; there is no argument whatever to curtail it.

The first objection to the proposal is its puzzling inconsistency in relation to the approach to elected mayors. While a referendum is necessary if a city or town might have an elected mayor, no such public consultation is proposed for the equally profound step of introducing a single commissioner to replace the collective and diverse wisdom of police authorities—and this, again, from a Government who preach localism.

There is, of course, an attraction in direct accountability; indeed, when we were in government we looked at the issue not once, but twice. However, the difference between us and the dogmatic zealots who now occupy the Treasury Bench—I excuse the Attorney-General from that—is that we consulted properly. Our 2004 consultation found overwhelming opposition to direct elections. Respondents pointed out the dangers of extremist groups succeeding on low turnouts, single-issue groups dominating, a move to a more short-term approach with re-election dependent on quick wins rather than long-term objectives, the politicisation of accountable bodies and the lack of public appetite for elections and the cost of running them. However, the case for directly electing the 17 members of the police authority—which is what we consulted on and which was Liberal Democrat policy at the last general election—is much stronger than that for the replacement of police authorities by a single elected commissioner. This is the most ill-considered and pernicious aspect of the proposal.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan looked at this issue in his 2008 review. He expressed the great fear about a single person with a political mandate exerting pressure that too readily conflicts with operational judgment. He pointed out that it may also be an impediment to collaboration—which, rightly, is a major part of the Government’s White Paper—since the vote for the post will be on localised issues rather than the largely unseen issues of cross-border collaboration.

Flanagan made a number of points from a policing perspective, but an even stronger argument concerns the loss of a body of people who are geographically diverse as well as diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender and background. The Government propose a new body—a police and crime panel—to oversee the commissioner. That is meant to provide the checks and balances. The body will, however, have no say on policing and no veto over the commissioner’s decisions. Therefore, we face the prospect of having an elected commissioner who, as the White Paper makes clear, will have a team of personal appointees, and a police and crime panel to overview the commissioner but not the police, whose overview will be conducted by a single commissioner whose decisions are final. Somewhere in all of this will be elected councillors—and in some places elected mayors. Chief constables will have to find their way around this maze, with all the additional costs involved, while trying to cope with the biggest financial upheaval the police service has ever faced.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

If it is okay to elect a Prime Minister and local councillors, why is it so wrong to give a local community the chance to choose the kind of policing it wants for its neighbourhoods? Why are the right hon. Gentleman and his party so hostile to local democracy?

[Alan Johnson]

This is a very different issue from that of elected mayors, because they have a broad remit. We introduced elected mayors, and we agree that the Mayor of London should chair the police authority. The trouble is that he finds doing that too hard, so he has stepped down and his unelected deputy is now chairing it. We agree with the Mayor chairing it, however; that is very important.

To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, I believe, as do many other Members on both sides of the House, that the narrower a post’s remit, the more difficult is the argument that we should elect someone to the post by individual ballot, which I presume is why the Government are not suggesting electing the local leader of the health service or the local chair of an education authority. This is a fundamental argument. If there is a broad remit, part of which is policing, election is fine, but if someone is being elected to a post that addresses only one narrow remit, then I think it is wrong. I have serious concerns about this, and the Flanagan consultation showed that they were widely shared.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

If local people in Islwyn and others throughout the country were to draw up a wish list, I am sure that a request for more police officers would be at the top of it. If police officers are seen on the beat, the public not only are seen to be protected, but feel protected.

It is an absolute duty of the Government to protect the public through investment in our police service and by building strong and secure communities in which the law-abiding majority are supported and the vulnerable protected. That is why I worry about the message that the Government send to the general public when they talk about cuts in police numbers. Cuts affect not only police numbers on the ground, but the organisations that have been set up to combat crime and antisocial behaviour.

In Islwyn, the Safer Caerphilly community safety partnership scheme works with local partners to reduce crime and disorder, antisocial behaviour, substance misuse and the fear of crime. I was worried when the Home Secretary said that we lived in a high-crime country because what message does that send to people who are fearful of crime? The big issue is not so much crime itself, but the fact that people are afraid of walking down the street and becoming a victim, however real or imagined the risk is.

Our partnership has improved local policing and community safety since it was set up five years ago. The scheme has been hugely successful, especially at reducing crime and antisocial behaviour. I have no doubt that such schemes were instrumental in the 43% reduction in crime between 1997 and 2010. I know that not everything was perfect under the Labour Government, but even the most sceptical or cynical person would say that that is an impressive record of which we should be proud.

The Safer Caerphilly community safety partnership faces an uncertain future because of fears about funding. Gwent police authority has made it clear to me that the planned cuts in police funding would significantly impede the police’s ability to maintain the high standards for which they are renowned. Senior police officers in my constituency are adamant that if funding for the Safer Caerphilly community safety partnership scheme is pulled, the ability of local officers to keep a grip on criminal and antisocial activity and maintain community relations, which is so important, would be severely hampered.

Gwent police have already reduced their budget by 8% in the past 12 months through efficiency savings. Of their current budget, totalling some £120 million, staff costs account for 83%. Tinkering with cost outlays such as uniforms, patrol cars and everything else that goes with policing would not be enough to meet the Government’s spending reduction targets. Inevitably, cuts would have to be made to police numbers. It is clear that a reduction in funding would make it operationally almost impossible for police authorities to maintain their current effectiveness in areas such as prevention of crime, civil disorder, terrorism and antisocial behaviour and the promotion of community cohesion. The question we must ask ourselves is: how will the budget deficit be tackled—surely not by risking the safety and, indeed, the lives of the law-abiding majority who play by the rules? Officers have also expressed to me their dismay at the Government’s plans to scrap the policing pledge—a policy introduced in 2008 that is widely seen as having driven up standards, as well as accountability and public confidence in the police nationwide.

At the same time as the cuts, the Government are setting up a hugely expensive plan for the introduction of popularly elected police commissioners. Essentially, that will make a politician head of the police force, with the same mandate as we have. I am sure that they will follow policies that they think are popular, however short term they are and however damaging they may be. It seems nonsensical to me that, on Monday, the Government introduced a Bill that aims to reduce the number of politicians in this House, but they want to create more jobs for politicians. Police authorities around the country have condemned the proposal. Fortunately for all of us here, we live in a climate where there is little public appetite for more elections, but unless the policy is seriously thought out and Ministers put some meat on the bones of the policy this evening, we run the risk of seeing the election to key positions in public life of wholly unqualified maverick extremists whom we all know in our local areas.

Furthermore, elected police commissioners would require significant and costly staffing assistance. Such staffing is not provided for in the Government’s plans. That is why I am asking for more detail. Perhaps I am being cynical, or perhaps that is an example of a lack of serious thought being given to the proposal. I am worried—the policy is truly radical, yet no information is coming down to us. It is important, not just for us as politicians, but for police authorities and superintendents, to know what elected police commissioners will do. In August, members of Gwent police authority told me that they had received no information—they do not know how the police commissioners will be established.

The Government have provided no evidence for why the reform is necessary, or why the current system is in need of change. None the less, they seem intent on carrying out a costly and untested reorganisation of policing in England and Wales. Bringing politics into day-to-day policing and law enforcement is nothing short of a dangerous move. It is my serious fear that the sensitive and emotive nature of criminal justice will, in many cases, lead to reactionary, short-term populism from a police commissioner who has his eye on his next election.

[Robert Halfon]

What the hon. Gentleman says is somewhat surprising to me. Surely, by his logic, any election could produce an extremist. I do not believe that the British people would vote in that way. The idea of having an elected commissioner is to ensure that there is a local person accountable to the local population that the police serve.

[Chris Evans]

On the question of accountability, the point that I am driving at is that we will be electing a politician, and I envisage—indeed, I am sure—that only political parties will be able to fund a campaign for the post of police commissioner. I cannot see an ordinary person from the community having the money or the resources to become a police commissioner, so the measure will only introduce politics into policing.

That point brings me on to another, because we could see a situation in which certain groups spread fear about others for the simple purpose of electoral advantage. Young people might be demonised, as they are all the time in the press, and that has no place in modern society, so I urge the Government to look again at the proposal and give it some serious consideration.

I have tried to be brief, and in closing I must say that people want to feel safe. They want to know that, should they become a victim of crime, they can look to the police to protect them, so I say to the Government, do not risk the safety of the public by introducing such swingeing cuts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) on what was, as always, a sometimes political but nevertheless thoughtful contribution.

The debate has focused on a number of issues, notably accountability and cuts, but I want to talk about the situation in my constituency. I want to talk about what has gone wrong, the cost of crime and some of the solutions. I accept that great strides have been made in fighting antisocial behaviour, and that major reforms and successes have been achieved in Harlow. Recent operations have succeeded in targeting the few prolific offenders who cause the majority of the problems. Nevertheless, the town still suffers from the highest violent crime rate in Essex and from a high rate of burglaries and car thefts, and in terms of crime and disorder, some of its estates suffer from the worst 10% of deprivation in the British Isles. We also have serious problems in specific areas such as the town centre.

Although crime in those areas is not always reported to the police, I find—like other Members—that local residents often contact me about it, and mention it to me frequently in surgeries. That is why I consider this debate to be so important. We have some very effective police officers in Harlow and some good leadership in Essex, but I believe that in the wider United Kingdom there has been a breach of trust between the police and the public. The umbilical cord has been cut. Raymond Chandler, the American novelist, said:

“Crime isn't a disease, it’s a symptom.”

It has already been said that Tony Blair promised to be tough on the causes of crime, but the last Government approached prevention in a chaotic way. For example, sadly, they rewarded family breakdown by penalising couples in the welfare system, and they also failed to ban the sale of alcohol below cost price.

We see this elsewhere, too. There has been much comment in the debate about closed circuit television. I am in favour of it when it cuts crime, but the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), came with me a few years ago to visit a company in Harlow called Rotatest which trains people in how to use CCTV. It has shown, through using Home Office studies, that about 80 or 90% of CCTV in this country is not fit for purpose either because it does not comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 or it is not operated properly or the machinery is not working properly. In 2006 alone we spent about £250 million on CCTV that was not working in the way that it should.

Only a couple of years ago, the deputy chief inspector of the Met, Mick Neville, said the system was an “utter fiasco”, with only 3% of London’s street robberies being solved using security cameras. Although Britain now has more cameras than any other European country, he said that “no thought” had gone into how to use them. We must have CCTV, of course, but I would like us to prevent more crime so that we need fewer CCTVs. It is not that we do not want CCTV; rather, we want to prevent crime so it is not needed in the first place.

Another problem is the micro-managed target culture of the previous Government and the bureaucracy, in part driven by the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband) when he was head of Tony Blair’s policy unit. The Opposition talk about cuts, but three years ago when they were in government they established a National Crime Reduction Board and then gave it no budget. They talk about cuts, but for all their spending they left England and Wales with double the crime rate of the European average. The Home Secretary said earlier that there were about 900,000 violent offences in 2009. The House of Commons Library has shown that that rose from 618,417 such offences in 1998, so there has been a huge rise in violent crime.

The Government’s reforms are urgently needed for Harlow, because there is not just the social cost of families blighted by crime, but there is also the huge cash cost, which is hurting the recovery. Labour Members have talked about cuts and expenditure, but they must accept that their policies led to crime now costing more than £3,000 for every family in the UK each year. Given that there are about 40,000 family households in my constituency, the cost to Harlow could be in the order of £120 million a year.

During the election campaign, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice visited with me a newsagent in Nazeing village that had been robbed three times in three weeks. This shop was just one of many whose profits were suffering because of crime. When we legally oblige police constables to spend 50% of their time on paperwork, we deny people the power to shape local policing and this is the sad result.

What are the answers? First, I would like to congratulate chief superintendent Mr Simon Williams and chief constable Mr Jim Barker-McCardle, as despite the challenging economic situation they have no plans to cut the number of front-line police officers in Harlow and intend to keep the police station in Harlow open for 24 hours a day. They are demonstrating that a smarter public sector can deliver more for less, even when it spends 80% of its budget on people. Earlier this year, before we entered government, Essex police had to cut £2.5 million from its budget, and it did so without any effect on front-line services.

We must also restore the trust between the wider public and the police, and the umbilical cord between them. That is why I am a passionate advocate of the Government’s policies to reconnect the police with the communities that they serve, which include having the direct election of a police commissioner. I cannot understand the opposition of Labour Members to making the police more accountable to the communities that they serve. We also propose reducing police paperwork and bureaucracy, so that constables can spend more time on the streets; introducing regular beat meetings, so that residents can hold the local police to account; and publishing more detailed local crime statistics.

We also propose to have more specials, and it is tragic that their number has declined by 6,000 since 1997. I completely disagree with the comments made by the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) about specials. There is scope for greater community involvement in policing. For example, Essex has one of the largest forces of specials in England. In early-day motion 520, I welcomed the statement made by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice that there is a “huge untapped potential” for recruiting more specials, and I suggested transforming them into a Territorial Army-type force. That would enable specials to cover more policing duties and would offer excellent value for money. Specials are also a genuinely local force and a valuable source of community intelligence.

I am not asking for extra money, but rather for the Government to refocus their resources to incentivise special constables, so that they can work more hours and develop professionally. Following many tragic fatalities on the railways near Harlow, I have called, including in my early-day motion 598, for a similar volunteer force of special rail guards to be established to improve safety on train platforms. In a time of scarce resources, special constables offer a big society answer to the crime problems we face, not only in Harlow, but across the country. I am talking about having fully trained constables with real powers who give a few hours a week to their local neighbourhood. We already have 600 in Essex, and let us hope we have more soon.

[Guy Opperman]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is scope to widen the training and opportunities available to the existing special constables, so that they can carry out alternative tasks on a more big society basis?

[Robert Halfon]

Yes, entirely, and I would like community support officers to have the chance to become specials.

To sum up, our crime policy must move away from that of the previous Government, which was about bureaucracy and the big state.

[Karl Turner]

I might be wrong, but the hon. Gentleman seems to be suggesting that police offers go from being paid to being unpaid. Is that the case?

[Robert Halfon]

I am saying completely the opposite. I am saying that for the special constables we should create a model similar to that of the Territorial Army. We should have a special constable force and its officers would be paid for the hours that they do, in the same way as TA people are paid.

In summary, I think that we want to move away from the big state and bureaucratic policies on crime to an approach based on accountability and community. That is why I oppose the Opposition’s motion.

Policing in the 21st Century

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

If the hon. Lady is implying that people who wish to stand for election should somehow be required to have security clearance, that is a new and interesting thought, but it is not one that I intend to pursue.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

Is the Home Secretary aware that the chief constable of Essex has said in a written statement that the opportunities presented by elected police commissioners include the potential for less cost, less bureaucracy and greater public clarity? Will she agree to meet the chief constable with me, and to support local people who believe in local democracy for local policing?

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reporting to the House the comments of the chief constable of Essex, whom I would be delighted to meet. We have been meeting chief constables across England and Wales to discuss the proposals, but I would be happy to hear what he has been able to do to fight crime and reduce bureaucracy in Essex.

Terrorism Act 2000 (Section 44)

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. His observation of the difficulty arising from the exercise and use of those powers in Kent shows precisely why there has been fairly widespread concern about them. He is entirely right, which is why I have come to Parliament today to make this statement. The decision on the guidance that is issued to police forces is one that I have taken as Home Secretary.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

Last December, I was subject to section 44—[Interruption.] Fortunately, I was sent away and everything was fine, but nevertheless I felt that my liberties as a citizen had been infringed on, and a sense of grievance, albeit a small one, against the authorities. [Interruption.] My great problem with what the previous Government did is this: if we believe in liberal democracy, we must also hold out strongly for its values. We weaken those values at great cost. Does the Secretary of State agree?

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments. The shadow Police Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), mutters from a sedentary position, “It was random,” but that is the whole point of the European Court judgment. There needs to be a degree of suspicion if the police are to stop and search somebody. On the rest of my hon. Friend’s question, it is important for us to defend our civil liberties. I believe that that is the task of everybody in the House, and I am only sorry that the previous Government chose to infringe those civil liberties in some of their legislative decisions.