Metropolitan Police: Strip-search of Schoolgirl

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

Obviously I have not spoken to every other police chief in the country, since the report came out just a few days ago. As I say, we will eagerly await the IOPC report to establish whether we have a specific problem or a systemic problem. The initial reports of the local child safeguarding practice review are telling us that we may have a systemic problem. If we do, then we will act on it accordingly. Please believe me when I say that the impact of this on any family would be profound. Some of us have children too. Those children may, in time, be subject to something like this, and I hope we are able to prevent that from happening.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I think we all recognise that the Minister is waiting for the IOPC report. However, he says that this could have happened to any child and that he thinks of his own relatives. The brutal, difficult truth that many of my constituents have raised with me over the weekend is that it is not likely to have happened to any of his relatives or our relatives—it is young black girls who have read this story and are horrified by it, and who need us to recognise explicitly the disproportionality in how the police work with them.

I hope the Minister can help to answer the question that my constituents have been asking, because they have looked at the data, especially on families of colour in my community, and they can see that strip-searching of children is not a one-off. So will he, ahead of the IOPC report, publish the data about the numbers of strip-searches that have taken place, by borough command unit and by ethnicity, and confirm that if it ever comes to this exceptional circumstance—I think we would all agree that it should be exceptional that a child should be strip-searched, not a matter of course—a parent or carer will always be present? He could do that today. He could start recovering the trust that has been so lost. He could start by being honest that communities of colour in London are looking at and questioning the police. The data is the first point in getting this right. Will he publish—yes or no?

[Kit Malthouse]

If a strip-search is deemed necessary to be undertaken on a child, then an appropriate adult, whether a parent or otherwise, has to be present. [Interruption.] Indeed, they were not in this case, and the question we have to ask ourselves is why—what went wrong? Why did the officers do what they did? Why did they decide to have two present? What were they doing? We will know that from the IOPC report. Once we have that, as I say, we will have the full picture and we will be able to look at it accordingly.