Public Disorder

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As I said, what we saw in London over the past few days, where we have 32,000 officers in the Met, was a greater deployment of more of those officers on to the street. Frankly, it was not good enough that there were only 3,000 deployed when this started. It shows how much can be done, getting up to 16,000 deployed, with help from outside. Those numbers will be available at all times in the future, even with the reductions that we are making in budgets.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

Today marks the start of a long, sober and difficult post mortem to find out why parts of our society chose to rob the very communities of which they are part. The Prime Minister implied that we must start by looking at the powers given to the police. May I ask him to assure the House that if the police choose to use water cannon they can do so without influence by Ministers? If necessary, they should also be allowed to close down mobile phone rebro masts, as was done after the 7/7 bombings, to make sure that we isolate the use of Twitter and Facebook, which allowed the mobs to be one step ahead of the police.

[The Prime Minister]

Of course conversations have to take place between the Home Office and the police about the use of different technologies or tactics. The point that the Home Secretary and I have been making over recent days is that they should feel free to examine whether they need these capabilities in the knowledge that they will have political support for doing what is necessary to keep our streets safe.