Safe Streets for All

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am hugely grateful to you for not bringing in the four-minute limit straight away, otherwise I would have been gabbling particularly fast to get to my final points.

The purpose of the Queen’s Speech should be to help the country to recover from covid, to rebuild, to heal the scars, and to help people to get back on with their lives, building a fairer, stronger and safer country. I do not believe that this Queen’s Speech does that. For the Home Office, the particular priority is to make sure that we can come through the covid crisis in the first place, to reflect on the way in which the public health border measures simply have not worked in this crisis, and to look at what new framework we ought to have in future, so that lessons can be learned and that the same mistakes are not made again.

Looking back over the past 12 months, we had a period at the beginning of the crisis where for months on end there were no public health border measures in place at all and an estimated 10,000 people with covid came into the country, accelerating the pace and scale of the pandemic in a very damaging way. In summer, the mix of different controls in place still meant that there was a surge in autumn, because they simply did not work effectively. Now, despite all the huge amount of work that everyone has done supporting the vaccine programme and following restrictions, we have the deeply frustrating situation in which progress has slowed and been put at risk by the failure of the Government’s border measures to prevent the spread of the Indian variant across the country. Throughout all of this, we have seen a pattern. We have seen confusion over which Department is in charge of public health border measures. Is it the Department of Health and Social Care, the Home Office or the Department for Transport? It has been somebody different each time. We have also seen a lack of transparency. In particular, the Joint Biosecurity Centre has still not published any detailed assessments of India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh—the countries where red list decisions have been taken. We still do not know what data or evidence was drawn on to make those decisions, so all of us think that they were based on the timing of the Prime Minister’s trip to India. We need a new system that has proper transparency, proper accountability and proper clarity in place in order to make improvements for the future.

The Government have an opportunity in the Immigration Bill, which will be scrutinised by the Select Committee and in this place, to address public health border controls, and I urge them to do so. We cannot make the same mistakes again.

Let me briefly touch on some of the other Bills in the Queen’s Speech. We have had a full Second Reading debate on the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill. I simply highlight that I hope to discuss further with the Home Secretary’s colleagues this week potential issues around the failure to have proper domestic abuse prosecutions under the common assault system. There is also a wider problem with the drop in the number of prosecutions. There has been a 30% drop in the number of prosecutions over the past five years at a time when recorded crime has gone up by 40%, which means that victims are not getting justice and that more criminals are getting away with it. I am really worried that, unless action is taken, there could be a crisis in the criminal justice system, because I do not see the measures being taken as part of this Bill to address the matter.

I welcome the possibility of the victims Bill. I hope that we will see that and be able to support it on a cross-party basis. The same is true of the online harms Bill. We have waited a long time for this Bill, so I urge the Home Secretary and her colleagues to get on with the legislation and accept that we will need to amend it. We will not get the perfect framework for regulating on online harms at the outset, but if we wait until we get that, we will be overtaken by events, with the scale of online extremism and online harms.

I am very worried about the voter ID Bill. Nearly half of women over 70 do not have a driving licence—I think those figures are higher in my constituency—and the additional hurdles that many of those women will face to be able to vote will not only make the whole system hugely discriminatory, but disadvantage people who have a right to vote and feel very strongly about it. Not since the suffrage have we seen the clock potentially being turned back on inequality in this way.

[Anthony Mangnall]

Does the right hon. Lady therefore disagree with the 2014 Electoral Commission report that suggests that we should have voter ID?

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

I am really concerned about voter ID—I am. I do not think that it is the right way forward, because it will disenfranchise people. The differential impact on older women has not been properly taken into account or considered. Women could end up having to produce ID in order to get a free ID card. Where will they get that ID from? From my constituency, they will have to travel all the way over to Wakefield—we are talking about older women over 70—to meet the electoral returning officer to try to get an ID card. All sorts of additional hurdles will be put in the way of their right to vote.

Finally, I am surprised to find myself in partial agreement with the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) over the planning Bill. There are concerns about taking power away from local communities.

I hope that the Government will come forward with proposals on social care, particularly on valuing social care workers who have been on the frontline of this crisis and who are, too often, undervalued and underpaid. To do something positive about those workers would be an important way to take forward the legacy of the covid crisis.