Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Ben Obese-Jecty

2nd reading
Monday 10th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

Local police stations are a matter for local forces, but they can be a central part of neighbourhood policing, which, sadly, has been heavily cut back in recent years. In fact, in many areas of the country, neighbourhood policing has been cut by a third or nearly half. At the heart of the Government’s plan is rebuilding neighbourhood policing.

We plan to put 13,000 more neighbourhood police and police community support officers back on the beat over the course of this Parliament, kick-started with £200 million of funding in the next financial year. We will reverse the damage done by the Conservative Government through years of cuts to community police. There are half as many PCSOs as there were 14 years ago, and many thousands fewer neighbourhood police officers. Some 54% of people say that they never see an officer on the beat—that figure has doubled since 2010, as too many neighbourhood police have just disappeared.

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

rose—

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

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[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right: neighbourhood policing is crucial, but neighbourhood policing teams have been decimated, and even those that remained were often abstracted or merged with other teams. That has been deeply damaging. It is crucial to get those neighbourhood police back on the streets, back into our town centres, and back into our communities. I give way to the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), who I hope will apologise for the scale of cuts that his party’s Government brought in.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

The right hon. Lady mentioned 13,000 neighbourhood police, but 3,000 of those will be new warranted officers; I believe that 3,000 will be operational police officers brought back from other places. When will police forces find out what their share of those police officers will be? How will the 3,000 officers currently in other roles be reassigned, given that operational matters are the responsibility of chief constables, not the Home Secretary?

[Yvette Cooper]

We have started with £200 million of funding for the next financial year to kick-start the drive to put 13,000 more neighbourhood police and police community support officers back on the beat. Already, police forces have been working with the Home Office on plans for recruiting new police officers and new PCSOs, and for redeploying existing police officers and backfilling by recruiting other officers to take their posts. We will set out in due course plans for the next financial year and that £200 million.

The cuts to neighbourhood policing over the past decade were even worse than we had thought. The previous Conservative Government were so indifferent to neighbourhood policing that they did not even keep a proper count of who was doing that work. Too often, they treated neighbourhood police officers just the same as 999 response officers or local detective teams, and Home Office guidance allowed forces to report some of their response officers as neighbourhood police. The last Government did not have proper checks in place, and as a result, hundreds, even thousands, of officers and PCSOs were miscounted. Later this month, the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs’ Council will have to publish revised force-by-force figures, so that communities can see properly what is happening in their area. This Government take seriously neighbourhood policing, which must be community-led policing in our towns and on our streets.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Rodda]

rose—

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Reading Central, and then I will give way to the hon. Member for Huntingdon, but let me just make a couple of other points first. The Bill increases the maximum penalties for offences relating to the sale and possession of offensive weapons from six months to two years’ imprisonment. Following the Clayman review, we will also bring forward amendments to the Bill in this House to introduce stricter age verification checks, with a stringent two-step age verification system for online knife sales, so that customers have to submit photo ID at the point of purchase and again on delivery. It will be a legal requirement to hand a package containing a knife to the buyer alone.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend raises an important point, and he has raised the terrible case of the killing of Olly Stephens with me before. I know how incredibly devastating that has been for the whole community. He is right that the online system has made it far too easy for young people to get hold of lethal weapons. There is also the content that too many of our young people are seeing online. That is why the measures as part of the Online Safety Act 2023 to strengthen the requirements on tech companies around material visible to children will be important, too. Those are expected in the summer.

My hon. Friend is also right that we will bring forward amendments during the Bill’s passage to give effect to our manifesto commitment to introduce personal liability measures for senior managers of online platforms that fail to take action on illegal content concerning knives and offensive weapons. We will introduce a requirement for sellers to notify bulk or suspicious sales of knives to the police. We have seen cases where young people were able effectively to become arms traders, buying huge numbers of illegal weapons that should not have been sold to them and then distributing them in the community.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

Knife crime is a grave issue, and I welcome any measures that can help to reduce it. I have a debate next Thursday on knife crime, and I hope to see good representation from all parts of the House in debating how we can reduce the number of children and young people involved in knife crime, whether as victim or perpetrator. The question I would like to ask is about knife sales online. Some 52% of fatal stabbings involve a kitchen knife, and only 3.6% involve a zombie knife. I appreciate that measures are in place to reduce the ability of people to obtain kitchen knives online, but everybody has a drawer full of knives at home. How can we take measures to reduce that?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member makes an important point. We know there is an issue with young people being able to get some of these lethal weapons. It becomes part of what they want to do, and part of the search for status is to carry particular kinds of weapons, but he is right that people can get access to dangerous knives in different ways. We need stronger prevention across the board. That is why the Young Futures programme we are working on is particularly important.

Southport Attack

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Ben Obese-Jecty

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I have introduced a new Prevent commissioner—Lord David Anderson is beginning work as the interim commissioner right now—because there is no independent review of Prevent decisions or processes. That is a problem, because the decisions that Prevent takes are incredibly important. They need to be effective, and we need to make sure that standards are maintained. That is why we need an independent review. We have independent inspectors of aspects of the work of other public services, such as policing. We need an independent commissioner brought in to review not just this case, but similar cases. On the scope of the inquiry, the Prime Minister made it clear this morning that this inquiry will follow the evidence wherever it takes the inquiry, and no stone can go unturned.

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

On what dates were the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary made aware that Axel Rudakubana was in possession of ricin and an al-Qaeda training manual, and will the inquiry cover public communications after the murders?

[Yvette Cooper]

Ministers were of course updated throughout. The Home Office was advised about ricin in August, and we were advised about the document much later on in October. We made sure that the official Opposition were also briefed. In the end, those decisions and investigations are matters for the police on an operational basis. The tradition in this country is that we have operational independence for policing, and operationally independent decisions made by the CPS.

It is really sad that so many Opposition Members have chosen to ask questions about the timing of the release of information—they know that such issues are governed by the Contempt of Court Act, and that this is about providing justice for the families who lost their loved ones—rather than asking the serious questions about why that terrible, horrific and barbaric act took place. I would just ask the hon. Member, and others deciding what issues they want to focus on, to think very seriously about what the most important issue is here, when so many lives were lost.