Yvette Cooper
Main Page: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley)Department Debates - View all Yvette Cooper's debates with the Home Office
(10 years ago)
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Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House endorses the Government’s formal application to rejoin 35 European Union Justice and Home Affairs measures, including the European Arrest Warrant.
This is a very clear motion. In fact, it is a bit of a Ronseal motion—it does what it says on the tin. It means that today we can support 35 measures, not just 11, and it includes the three words that we were promised: “European Arrest Warrant”. It includes other measures, too: football banning orders, confiscation orders, joint investigation teams, criminal records sharing, and border information sharing so that we can secure our borders. Those are important measures, because crime does not stop at our borders—criminals do not stop when they get to the channel. I had hoped that the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary would be able to sign the motion, but the Home Secretary has written to me to say that she will vote for it. I am glad that she has decided to support our motion, although it would of course have been so much easier if she had just been straightforward in the first place.
This motion is almost exactly the same as the one tabled in the House of Lords. While we got to vote on only 11 measures, the other place was offered a vote on all 35. Here is the revealing statement by the Minister in the Lords:
“the Government have amended the Motion to put beyond doubt that we see tonight’s debate and decision…as on the whole package of 35 measures that the Government will seek to rejoin in the national interest.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 November 2014; Vol. 757, c. 328.]
While we were denied our chance to vote in the elected Commons on the European arrest warrant, the Government decided to assuage the doubts of the House of Lords. They decided to do that last Tuesday. Just 24 hours after the mess in the House of Commons, they decided to change the motion in the Lords—so why not do it for us?
I will give way to the Home Secretary if she can give us any good reason why she did not come back to this House last week and table a new motion, as she had in the other place. She was prepared to do it there, so why not come and do it here? No reason is being given. We were happy to do it for her, however, because she promised us a vote on the European arrest warrant. She said that the vote will be
“on the whole package of 35 measures—including the Arrest Warrant”.
The Prime Minister promised us a vote on the European arrest warrant. He said that
“we are going to have a vote…before the Rochester by-election”.—[Official Report, 29 October 2014; Vol. 587, c. 301.]
We understand that the Home Secretary has a rather contemptuous view of the Prime Minister’s promises. He promised democracy in policing; she delivered 13% turnouts. He promised, “no ifs, no buts”, that he would meet his net migration target. The net migration target is going right back up, and the Home Secretary said that it was not a promise, but a “comment”. Labour Members are glad to be able to help the Prime Minister to meet his promises to the British Parliament. It looks as though we are doing a rather better job than the Home Secretary of helping him to meet his promises.
Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
Look, some of us kind of lost the will to live on all this last week, and I think if we go through all this procedural stuff again today we will seriously lose the will to live. I think we have all had our fun. Will the shadow Home Secretary now move on to the substance of the European arrest warrant so that we can sort it once and for all, have a vote, and go home? I think we would all be grateful if we could just do that.
Yvette Cooper
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The Home Secretary has deprived him of his will to live, so I feel sorry for him, but he is right that we need to get on to the huge amount of substance in this debate.
I must say that the most startling thing of all in the chaos of last week’s debate was not the betrayal of promises or even the contempt for Parliament, but seeing the Chief Whip and the Home Secretary having to sit next to each other on the Government Front Bench and having to talk to each other for a change.
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend share my surprise that the intervention by the right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) was not to thank her for giving the House the opportunity to demonstrate the good faith of the Prime Minister? The Prime Minister said—quite clearly, I think—that there would be a vote on a specific measure, so I look forward to interventions by Conservative Members thanking her for giving them such an opportunity, not passing that over as if it had never been said.
Yvette Cooper
I am sure that Conservative Members are all deeply grateful to us, which is why they have come to the Chamber to join the debate today.
We still do not know whether it was the Chief Whip or the Home Secretary who made so much of a mess of last week. In June, the Chief Whip said of the Home Secretary that she
“lacked intellectual firepower and quick wit”.
He said that “she has no friends”, and with amazing prescience, he said that
“she can’t even gain the support of her colleagues”.
That makes two of them, because the Chief Whip is on a roll. He nearly lost a vote—he came within 10 votes of doing so—last week. The man who is supposed to be working the bars of Westminster lost a vote on pubs this week. The man who is supposed to be holding the parliamentary Conservative party together has managed to mislay two MPs. When he was appointed, he said that his new job was
“to ensure the right people are in the right place”.
It is just a shame that they were in the wrong Lobby.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. I appreciate that the right hon. Lady is making some very important and interesting points, but I should remind her, lest she stray too far, that the motion is about the Government’s formal application to rejoin 35 European justice and home affairs measures. I am sure that she will address her remarks to the motion.
Yvette Cooper
You are exactly right, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is in fact the debate that we should have had last week. It is a debate about 35 different measures, including the European arrest warrant. It covers the 11 measures that we voted for last time, but also the 24 measures on which we did not have the chance to vote last time.
Those measures include a series of different things. We need the supervision order, under which a UK national could spend time in the UK pending trial, rather than in a foreign jail, to rectify the rare cases in which that happens. Joint investigation teams are needed to tackle cross-border crime, as was shown by Operation Golf, in which co-operation between the Met and Europol and data sharing stopped child-trafficking rings that were bringing teenagers to London to be raped and forced into prostitution. We need co-ordination on the freezing and seizing of the assets of organised criminals and terrorists. We support continued co-operation on confiscation orders and freezing orders. We need to exchange criminal records. Pilots in London have shown that a significant proportion of foreign nationals arrested already have convictions abroad.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
Operation Golf was conducted in my constituency, and I hope to talk about it if I get the chance to speak. It would not have been possible without co-operation between the British and Romanian authorities, including on the Romanians’ subsequent use of an extradition warrant. Is it not wrong—in fact, disgraceful—that we did not have an opportunity to discuss the joint investigation teams during the previous debate?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. It would have been so simple to cover those measures in the initial debate on a straightforward motion tabled by the Government. I think that it is unprecedented that the Opposition table what should be a Government motion and ask the Government to vote with us on the very measures that they supported in the first place.
The 24 measures include football banning orders, which we welcome, to stop hooligans travelling to matches in Europe. We need to participate in Eurojust to gather evidence on cross-border crime. We need Europol to support and co-ordinate cross-border investigations. We need co-operation to prevent drug trafficking, and we need the European Police College to share best practice.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way and hope that she will excuse me for interrupting her. She is clearly on a roll, because I cannot remember a time on which the Home Secretary has written to my right hon. Friend to say that she will support one of her measures. When the Select Committee on Home Affairs considered the matter, we suggested that the vote should have happened much earlier and that the House should have voted to give the Government a mandate to negotiate, rather than it being left to the last moment. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should really have discussed these matters a long time before?
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend is right. The truth is that the Home Secretary’s handling of the whole thing has been chaotic from start to finish. We have had no proper opportunity to debate the subject and have a vote at the right time and we have had confusion about when we were going to have the votes at the wrong time. We had parliamentary confusion, votes in chaos, Tory MPs scuttling back from their dinners, champagne banquets abandoned and a humiliated Prime Minister returning to the House of Commons with his tails between his legs.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
I think I heard the right hon. Lady say just a few moments ago that one of the measures she wanted to debate was the European Police College. Perhaps she has not noticed that CEPOL is not in the list of 35 measures that the Government are rejoining, because it has been “Lisbon-ised” and does not need to be in the list. It falls out of the opt-out altogether.
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary knows that an awful lot of the measures she has removed from the 35 are in fact measures that she plans to continue to co-operate with. There is a whole series of different aspects of guidance and pledges for co-operation across the policing and Eurojust world that she plans to continue to co-operate with. However, she has told her Back Benchers that she will not co-operate with them at all so that she can promise them a grand repatriation, when in fact it is the equivalent of repatriating the “Yellow Pages”.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
My right hon. Friend knows that this is really about co-operation across Europe to bring thousands of villains to account. How can we have faith in the Government if they cannot even co-operate with their colleagues in the House of Lords so that we can have the same debate, or give us enough time to consider the right thing to do, instead of this complete farce built on a hoax?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point. I heard somebody on the Government Front Bench muttering that there are different procedures in the House of Lords—different procedures that mean that they are allowed to vote on 35 measures, but we are allowed to vote on only 11? I have never heard anything so ludicrous.
The Home Secretary has been ducking and diving on this issue from the start. There are important measures in the 35 that we should be supporting and debating, and too many times the Home Secretary has tried to duck having a vote on them. The Schengen Information System II is vital and necessary. The recent Public Accounts Committee report that set out that there had been a 70% increase in delays in asylum claims also pointed out that the British Government have less information about criminals crossing our borders than other countries, and that is because we are not part of SIS II. The Home Secretary has not been able to join SIS II because she has been so busy renegotiating her opt-in, opt-out hokey-cokey for the sake of pandering to her Eurosceptic Back Benchers. We should be part of SIS II and we should be voting for it today.
The Association of Chief Police Officers has described the European arrest warrant as “an essential weapon”. Distinguished legal figures, including the former president of the Supreme Court, have argued that Britain also risks becoming a safe haven for fugitives from justice, a handful of them British citizens but the vast majority foreign nationals wanted for crimes elsewhere in Europe. They are right. For example, Zakaria Chadili from France was alleged to have travelled to Syria in late 2013 and undergone a month of training with a proscribed organisation. Instead of returning to France, he came to the UK and the French police wanted to arrest him. Between his first court appearance on 9 May and the orders for extradition on 13 June were just a few days, and he was surrendered on 25 June. In a similar case from 1995, before the European arrest warrant, Rachid Ramda, an Algerian national, was arrested in the UK in connection with a terrorist attack on the Paris transport system and it took 10 years to extradite him back to France.
The statistics are clear: the European arrest warrant helps us to deport foreign criminals and terrorists. More than 1,000 people were removed because of an arrest warrant last year. Of those people, 43 were UK nationals, eight of whom were connected to child sex offences. Since 2009, 500 people have been brought back to the UK to face British justice, including suspected child sex offenders and those suspected of murder, rape and drug trafficking, and more than 4,000 people have been removed, including more than 100 for murder, more than 300 for serious violence, more than 400 for drug trafficking and more than 500 for robbery. The arrest warrant helps us to bring to justice people who have committed heinous crimes in the UK and who should be facing British justice, and people who have committed crimes abroad, whom we want to deport from this country to face justice at home.
Geraint Davies
My right hon. Friend is being generous in giving way. Swansea has the most overcrowded prison in Britain. Does she agree that this measure is very important because, over the past five years, it has meant that 5,000 people have been removed from Britain to face justice abroad, with only 5% of the total moving in the other direction? Unless we continue using it, we will have an even greater crisis in our prisons because they will be full of foreign criminals.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. We do not want people to be stuck in British prisons when they should be facing trial and justice abroad. It would not be fair on victims of crime if we denied them justice because we did not have the procedures in place to ensure that people faced the courts. We do not want British families to be left without justice. We do not want the UK to be a safe haven for dangerous criminals.
It was right that the arrest warrant should have been reformed. We have supported the reforms that have been passed by this Government and have backed further reforms in Europe. The European Commission has concluded that
“it is essential that all Member States apply a proportionality test, including those jurisdictions where prosecution is mandatory.”
The Polish Parliament has taken through legislation that follows those principles.
Crime does not stop at the channel. That is why it is right that we should have the chance to show our support, right across the House, for the measures today.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
Will the right hon. Lady concede that the European Union is not a sufficient basis on which to make such judgments? What about countries such as Turkey, Canada, Australia and the United States? What is so special about the European Union that the arrest warrant should apply specifically to it, rather than to the rest of the world?
Yvette Cooper
The point is that the European Union provides us with opportunities to be able better to fight crime and get justice for British citizens and citizens right across Europe. It is good that we can ensure that our police forces can co-operate more effectively with other police forces across Europe, whether they are dealing with trafficking, drug smuggling or child protection. There are so many crimes that cross borders and so many criminals who cross borders that we think it is a good thing to be part of Europe and to have the opportunity to work more closely with other European countries to deliver that.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to set out the benefits of cross-border co-operation with other crime-fighting agencies across Europe, but is not the real issue one of democracy, in that elected Members of the House of Commons, whichever side of the debate they are on, have not been given the opportunity to have a say on these issues? Is not the reason behind that that it will show the deep schism on the Conservative Benches on the issue of Europe?
Yvette Cooper
That, in the end, is what it comes down to. Sadly, too many Conservative Members do not want to vote for something just because it has the word “Europe” in the title. That is what Conservative Front Benchers have been running scared of. It is why they have ducked and dived around to avoid having the debates that the Select Committees have called for, to avoid having the votes that they promised, and to avoid having an honest discussion about what the measures are. The ridiculous thing about it is that the vast majority of Members of this House supported the 11 measures the Government allowed us to vote on last week. There is strong support and consent for the measures. There should be an opportunity for us to send a strong signal to the courts and everybody across Europe that this House is strongly in favour of the measures, including the European arrest warrant.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
I just want to place on record the fact that the Select Committee on Justice, although it was severely critical of the Government’s handling of the matter from the beginning, has supported the five measures that the Government wish to opt into. I am pleased that my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Government have been firm in their determination to opt in.
Yvette Cooper
That is the bizarre thing about this whole situation. We had the opportunity to demonstrate the House’s support for these measures to everyone, particularly the courts—we know that Eurosceptics have made challenges in the courts to any aspect of legislation that they can challenge. Why do we allow them to do that without having a vote that shows the House’s strong support for the measures? The right hon. Gentleman is right that Select Committees have supported them, and the debate in the other place also showed support. Many Lords who strongly objected to the process that had been followed, even in that House, said that they supported the measures and wanted the opportunity to signal that support. We need to send that important signal, whether on football banning orders, the European arrest warrant or the other co-operation measures, and we now have the opportunity to do that.
We need co-operation to stop international crimes such as human trafficking and online child pornography, and to protect people and get justice for victims. So last week, I told the Home Secretary that I would support her motion. Today, I am glad she has said that she will support mine. These are unusual circumstances, and there were many other issues that we would have been keen to debate this afternoon, from the bedroom tax to the national health service. However, we thought it was right to ensure that the House had the opportunity to meet the Prime Minister’s promises and demonstrate its support for these crucial international crime-fighting measures. We need to demonstrate the strong support throughout the House for co-operation with Europe. We have the opportunity today to have a straightforward vote on the European arrest warrant and European co-operation measures, and to do what it says on the tin, even though the word “Europe” is in the title. I hope that the whole House will support the motion.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I am well aware that for a number of right hon. and hon. Friends the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice is key. I have been clear—as I was in previous debates—that the issue of our relationship with the European Court of Justice should be in the work that we will do as a Conservative Government after next May’s election to renegotiate our relationship with the European Union. That, of course, is not in the motion tabled by the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) today, and there is no reference to it or to the overall opt-out issue.
I think I am right in quoting the right hon. Lady as saying that the opt-out was an opt-in, opt-out “hokey cokey”. I remind her that that opt-in, opt-out hokey cokey was negotiated by the previous Labour Government. I am not sure from her comments whether she now supports our decision to exercise the opt-out, which, as I have said, the Labour Government negotiated, voted against last year, and have never said whether or not they would use. Is she congratulating the Government on successful negotiations in Europe and bringing back a deal that is good for the UK? Does support for our package mean that she supports the return of around 100 powers from Brussels and the largest repatriation of powers since this country joined the EU?
I am pleased that today’s motion supports all 35 measures, because last time the Opposition called a debate on this matter in June last year they highlighted only seven measures that they wanted us to rejoin. The list did not include Eurojust, which the right hon. Lady has now said that she supports, or the prisoner transfer framework decision, which allows us to send foreign criminals home to serve their sentences. It also left off the asset recovery office, which allows law enforcement to pursue the criminal proceeds of crime.
Yvette Cooper
Can the Home Secretary give a single example of a moment when she has put to Parliament the opportunity to vote on any of those measures?
Mrs May
I will give way to my hon. Friend in a moment. We were very clear that the only measures that needed legislative motions in this House were those in the regulations. We would be bound by the vote on those regulations as a vote on all the other measures in the package of 35. As I have said, this is the sixth debate we have had on this matter.
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary now says that her position is that she does not actually have to offer the House of Commons a vote on anything and therefore we should be grateful for the 11 measures we got to vote on last week. When did she say that to Parliament? Is it not the truth that she said repeatedly, over many months, that she would give the House a vote on the measures? She did not say that she would not give the House a vote because she did not have to; she said she would give the House a vote. If she has changed her position, why did she not say that before?
Mrs May
The right hon. Lady really needs to understand the difference between a requirement on the Government to bring a vote to this House and a decision by the Government to bring a vote to this House, which we did last Monday. I also say to her that for most people looking at these measures, the issues are whether they are important measures for the Government to opt back into and whether they are important measures for law enforcement. It sounds as though we have absolutely the same opinion on that and I would be happy to be able to get on to questions about the measures themselves.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Opting back into the European criminal records information system, which is one of the 35 measures we wish to opt back into, and to the exchange of criminal records is very important. We need to enhance our ability to exchange criminal records with other member states. Going back into Schengen information system II will also enable us to have more information of this sort at the border. We are doing a project with the Latvians and one or two other member states to improve our ability to deal with these issues, but there are challenges. For example, some countries have a different attitude from us to criminal records—in some countries, as soon as somebody is out of prison, effectively there is no criminal record—and as part of our discussions, we have to deal with those differences if we are to do what we all want to do, which is keep people safe.
I welcome the fact that the Opposition agree with the Government’s position on opting back into the 35 measures. It is a pleasure to agree with the right hon. Lady so often in one week: I understand the Labour party thinks that immigration was too high and out of control under the last Government; that it was a mistake not to have the full transitional controls to stop significant migration from the new member states; and that we must take action to reform European free movement rules. As a final step, perhaps she could ensure that her party agrees with the Conservative party’s commitment to an in/out referendum so that we can get on with the good work of negotiating a better deal for the British people.
Yvette Cooper
Will the right hon. Lady tell us the level of net migration now and how it compares with her target—her “no ifs, no buts” promise?
Yvette Cooper
Will the right hon. Lady confirm that it came down by a quarter under the last Labour Government and that net migration is at exactly the same level now as it was when she became Home Secretary?