Police Uplift Programme

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

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

The Home Secretary has been out on the airwaves this morning but she is scared to defend her record in this House, and little wonder because that statement was a joke. Where are the Tories pretending to have been for the last 13 years? They cut 20,000 police officers. Belatedly, they set a target to patch up their own cuts and now they want us all to be grateful. They want the country to applaud them for their attempts to patch up some of the criminal damage this party of Tory vandals has done to policing and the criminal justice system over the last 13 years.

They were warned about the damage their cuts would do: arrests have halved; prosecutions near-halved; community penalties halved; crimes solved halved; more crimes reported and recorded, but hundreds of thousands fewer crimes are being solved—hundreds of thousands fewer victims getting justice every year. The Home Secretary claimed on the television this morning, “Oh, it’s irrelevant what happened over the last 10 years”: not to the millions fewer victims who have had justice in the last decade as a result of what this Tory Government have done.

As for the policing Minister’s claim that “Criminals must be cursing their luck” because we are “coming after them”, who is he kidding? The charge rate hit a record low last year: 95% of criminals not charged—for rape it is over 98%. The charge rate has dropped by two thirds since 2015 alone. That is record levels of criminals getting off under the Tories; they are not cursing their luck, they are thanking their lucky stars. Under the Tories the criminals have never had it so good; they are pathetically weak on crime and weak on the causes of crime.

As for meeting records, well, yes, they are meeting some records: a record number of crimes not being solved; a record number of people saying they never see police on the street; record numbers of police officers leaving policing last year; record low charge rates last year for rape and sexual offences. And then we have got serious violence rising: knife crime up; gun crime up. And of course the fraud and online crime that they never want to talk about is also at a record high. What has the Home Secretary got to say about that this morning—just some more waffle about woke. She has got nothing new to say to tackle the problems.

Then there is the chaotic recruitment process, with forces ending up cutting standards to meet deadlines. Most of last year, the average monthly increase from recruitment was 475 officers each month; in March, just before the deadline, it was suddenly 2,400 in a month. No one believes that this is a properly managed and sustainable recruitment plan. We have had reports of people who were initially turned down being asked to reapply at the last minute to meet targets; reports of people with addiction, and with criminal histories, being encouraged to apply and let in. A massive variation of standards applied across forces so that Matt Parr in His Majesty’s inspectorate said that hundreds of people have joined the police in the last three years who should not have, and then he said,

“certainly in the hundreds if not low thousands.”

Have the Tories learned nothing from Wayne Couzens and David Carrick? We have still not got proper national mandatory standards in place; have they learned nothing of the need to raise standards? So is the Minister confident that all these new recruits meet the standards we should expect from policing?

Look at the numbers that the Government have announced: this is not an uplift programme, it is a damage mitigation programme, and they have not even achieved that. In Hampshire the Home Secretary’s own force, in Cleveland, in Durham, Northumbria, and Merseyside, they all still have fewer police than they had in 2010. Compared to our growing population, there are 9,000 fewer officers compared to the rates in 2010. They have cut 8,000 police community support officers and 6,000 police staff, including intelligence and analysts, forensics, digital, vetting and standards checks. And worst of all, they are refusing to do Labour’s plan for 13,000 more neighbourhood police. Instead we have got 10,000 fewer police and PCSOs in neighbourhood teams since 2015. So when will the Government reverse those cuts to the police on the beat the public want to see? That is what people see and what people feel.

The reality is that half the country say they do not see the police on the beat at all any more—half the country, up from a quarter of the country in 2010. That is why people know all this boasting from the Minister is out of touch. That is the reality that no amount of boasting, crowing or fake headlines can cover up. Let me just say to all the Tory Back Benchers: the only thing that all this boasting and crowing does is tell the country you are even more out of touch than we thought.

[Chris Philp]

The shadow Home Secretary asked about police numbers in the years following 2010, during the coalition Government. She will recall that the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, her colleague, left a message saying the money had all gone and that led to difficult decisions that had to be made. But I am not sure if she was listening to what I said before because the number of officers that we now have—149,572—is higher, by 3,542, than the number of officers left behind by the Labour party. These are record ever numbers. Never in our country’s history have we had as many officers as we have today. It is important that the shadow Home Secretary keeps that in mind.

She asked about neighbourhood policing. The way the figures are reported, neighbourhood policing, emergency response policing and local policing are reported together. Since 2015, local policing, neighbourhood policing and emergency policing taken together is in fact higher.

She asked about crime. She asked about crime numbers. The only source of crime data endorsed by the Office for National Statistics is the crime survey for England and Wales. I have got the figures here. If she is unfamiliar with them, I can hand them to her afterwards, but they show domestic burglary down 56%, robbery down 57%, vehicle theft down 39%, violence down 38% and criminal damage down 65%. She may not like the figures from the Office for National Statistics, but those are the figures.

She asked about standards in police recruitment. For every police officer recruited in the last three years, there were about 10 applicants, so there was a good degree of selectivity. In relation to vetting, the College of Policing has just finished consulting on a new statutory code of practice for vetting, which will be adopted shortly, and police forces up and down the country are implementing the 43 recommendations made by the inspectorate on vetting standards. We are also conducting a review in the Home Office, which will conclude in the next few weeks, on police dismissals, so that where misconduct is uncovered officers can be removed quickly, which is absolutely right.

The message to the country is clear. We have record levels of police officers—higher than we have ever had before—and according to the crime survey, crime has gone down compared with the last Labour Government that she served in.