Phone Hacking

Tessa Munt Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Let me deal specifically with the issue of John Yates, because this is important. He does an extremely important job for the country in terms of counter-terrorism policing. I have watched him and the job that he does at close hand. We have to have a situation where the police are operationally independent, and if we put our trust in Paul Stephenson to run his team, we must allow him to do that. I ask the right hon. Gentleman to think about this: it would be quite dangerous, would it not, if politicians were able to point at individual police officers, particularly those who were leading investigations into other politicians? So there are some dangers here. I think that John Yates is doing a good job on counter-terrorism. Clearly, as he said himself, he has some questions to answer about what went wrong with the initial investigation, and I hope that he will welcome this inquiry, which will get to the bottom of what went wrong.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

In the light of and under the pressure of this inquiry it seems possible that serving police officers will go off on sick leave because of stress. Will the Prime Minister guarantee that in no circumstances will the taxpayer be asked to fund any pension of any police officer, either serving or now retired, who is found to be corrupt, as that would be the final insult?

[The Prime Minister]

I will have to look at the point that the hon. Lady makes. It sounds perfectly sensible but we have to obey the rules of the pension schemes and all the rest of it. However, people should not be rewarded in the way that she says.