Rosie Cooper
Main Page: Rosie Cooper (Labour - West Lancashire)Department Debates - View all Rosie Cooper's debates with the Home Office
(11 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue. The process for scrutinising applications is such that any payment issues are supposed to be looked at right at the beginning of the process, so that they can be dealt with swiftly. If my hon. Friend knows of specific cases in which that has not happened, I would, of course, be pleased to either hear from him or meet him to discuss them in more detail.
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
T5. At 32 square miles, Scarisbrick in my constituency is the largest parish in Lancashire. The village now shares its one police constable and two police community support officers with neighbouring Burscough, following the £42 million-worth of cuts to Lancashire’s police budget. At night, three police officers cover 50 square miles from Ormskirk to Skelmersdale, which are vast areas for the police to cover. How can the Home Secretary justify to my constituents that the £100 million spent on the police and crime commissioner elections, with a turnout of just 15% in Lancashire, is an effective use of scarce resources when we are losing front-line officers?
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
Obviously, it is not for me to comment on the individual operational judgments of the chief constable of Lancashire, but I am happy to be able to tell the hon. Lady and the House that, despite the constraints that she has mentioned, recorded crime in Lancashire between June 2011 and June 2012 went down by 2%. I hope that not just her constituents, but others in Lancashire are reassured that the police there are doing an extremely good job of cutting crime and keeping the streets safer.