Oral Answers to Questions

John Bercow Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Mr Speaker]

I call Mr Thomas Docherty to ask the first question. He is not here.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

2. What her policy is on the use of CCTV cameras.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Brokenshire)]

With permission, Mr Speaker, I should also like to answer questions 8, 13 and 21.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The Minister is not to know this, but I should point out that question 13 has been withdrawn.

[James Brokenshire]

Thank you for that clarification, Mr Speaker.

The Government recognise the importance of CCTV in preventing and detecting crime, and support its use by communities. The Government also acknowledge that continued use of CCTV requires the support of the public and public confidence that systems are being used appropriately. Accordingly, we intend to introduce a code of practice for surveillance cameras and appoint a surveillance camera commissioner.

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[Nadhim Zahawi]

Warwickshire police in my constituency are pushing forward with innovative changes to its policing model to allow more police to be out on the streets doing what they are supposed to be doing. It is also implementing new technology to allow officers to file paperwork without having to return to their desks. Could the Home Secretary or the Minister tell us what progress has been made in implementing similar changes in other—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We are grateful. We have got it.

[Nick Herbert]

I welcome the steps being taken by Warwickshire police in this area and I would happily visit the force to look at what it is doing. We want to make sure that new technology is used in that way by police forces. We have inherited the problem that there is still multiple keying of data into different systems by police officers, as I heard this morning for myself, which is wasting their time. We still have 2,000 different IT systems across the 43 forces, which we have to converge and we have a programme to achieve that.

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[Nick Herbert]

The Labour party simply cannot stand the fact that the Mayor of London has said that he will enter the next mayoral election with more police officers than he inherited. He has made that pledge and is protecting safer neighbourhood teams. Of course there are sensible arrangements whereby some sergeants are being shared, but the number of officers in safer neighbourhood teams is being protected. It is possible, as the Mayor has shown, alongside the leadership of the Met, to protect front-line policing while having to deliver significant savings. The hon. Gentleman—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I think we have got the general gist.

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

9. What recent estimate she has made of the number of people who are addicted to a class A drug.

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[Yvette Cooper]

The Minister has not answered the question. He may want to look back at the words that the Home Secretary used on Second Reading, which were rather different. Does he really think it is practical for the police separately to assess, fill in forms and apply to hold DNA on 5,000 new rape cases each year, as well as countless other serious crimes? Ministers have just spent 20 minutes telling the House that they want to cut police bureaucracy; now they are increasing it. The West Midlands police chief said to the Bill Committee:

“We have always argued that it is impossible to create a regime of individual intervention for a database of 6 million. We have to make decisions based on automation.”––[Official Report, Protection of Freedoms Public Bill Committee, 22 March 2011; c. 9, Q4.]

The Home Secretary is making it impossible for the police—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. That is the last sentence.

[James Brokenshire]

The right hon. Lady needs to look at the statistics, as I have already highlighted. If she looks at the data from 2001-02, when there were 39,000 detections against a database of fewer than 1.4 million, all from convicted people, and compares that with the data from the last year, when over 5 million individuals, including hundreds of thousands of innocent people, were on the database, she will see that the number of detections had fallen to 32,500. Labour Members appear to be very casual with people’s liberties, although they claim they are not. They seem to assume that simply because someone is arrested for a crime, they are guilty. We take a different view. Labour Members are not prepared to look at the facts and the evidence.

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

Despite what the Minister has said about impact assessments, it is surprising and deeply worrying that the Government are pursuing a policy which, on their own view, will cost the country £2.4 billion and which, on their own view, will have only half the impact on net migration that they originally said. This policy was part of a package of changes that the Government said would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands by 2015. In support of the policy, the Prime Minister said in April to Tory party members:

“No ifs. No buts. That’s a promise we made to the British people. And it is a promise we are keeping.”

Well, not according to his Government’s own impact assessment, and not according to the Migration Observatory—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Lady must now bring herself to a one-sentence question. That is the end of it.

[Shabana Mahmood]

Thank you, Mr Speaker; I was just about to. Will the Minister be upfront and admit today that this is a promise that he and the Prime Minister will not be keeping?

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[Nick Herbert]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. I visited Cheshire police a few weeks ago and was impressed by what they are doing to drive savings and, in particular, by a pilot scheme that they are running in Runcorn, which returns discretion to police officers and improves the service to the public. In the pilot, when police officers are dealing with an offence, they are asked to look at the causes of that offence—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am extremely grateful to the Minister. I think we will take that as a yes and perhaps make some progress.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

This Friday, the Metropolitan Police Authority will consider a report that, if agreed, would halve the number of safer neighbourhood team sergeants in my constituency. If the Minister is so adamant that police numbers in London will not be reduced, what will he do stop the planned reductions in Lewisham?

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[Mrs May]

We retain an interest in the whole question of the internet. The consultation that we launched was about a number of proposals that we will put in place in reaction to the Supreme Court judgment on the interpretation of the Human Rights Act 1998, and to the fact that sex offenders should now have the right of appeal as to whether they stay on the register. Alongside putting in the process for dealing with those appeals or a situation in which offenders ask for a review of their reference on the register, we will tighten the loophole by requiring them, for example, to notify the authorities when they are travelling abroad for more than 24 hours, and not the several days—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. With a degree of self-restraint, we can get through a couple more questions.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

Given that the Home Secretary is reviewing extradition law, does she welcome last week’s report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights highlighting again the case of my constituent, Gary McKinnon, who has fewer rights than foreign criminals facing deportation? When can we have British justice for British citizens such as my constituent, Gary McKinnon?

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[Nick Herbert]

We are strongly in favour of police forces providing face-to-face contact in all sorts of innovative ways. However, the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends simply will not accept responsibility for bequeathing to the country the deficit that we now have to deal with, and which means that we have to make savings—police forces have to make those savings, too, and protect the front line at the same time.

[Mr Speaker]

Last but not least, I call Mr Mike Freer.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

The Home Secretary will be aware that Mr Raed Salah has been invited to speak in the palace precincts. Given this man’s history of virulent anti-Semitism, will the Home Secretary ban him from entering the UK?