Macpherson Report: 20th Anniversary

Debate between Ed Davey and Sandy Martin

Monday 25th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova). Her concluding remarks about the importance of giving our young people hope, and showing that we have made progress and learned the lessons of the past, is essential. I will talk about both the positives and the negatives as we assess the situation in our country, particularly with respect to the police and whether we have learned and implemented the lessons.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris). I was brought up in north Nottingham, so it is a privilege to hear his remarks. He and the members of the Home Affairs Committee do a good job in reminding us that we must continue to pay attention to these critical issues.

Inevitably, hon. Members on both sides of the House have paid tribute to Baroness Lawrence and Dr Lawrence, without whom this country would not have focused on these important lessons. Their bravery, courage, determination and persistence deserve huge tribute, and I know they have done it as a tribute to their son. We should thank them today.

As the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) said, Baroness Lawrence wants to know where the positives are, and it is important to mention some of the positives. Our country, particularly the capital, has seen so many murders by stabbing, and we are seeing some of the lessons learned from the Macpherson report applied to those appalling murder investigations.

In my constituency, two young men from black and minority ethnic communities have been murdered with knives in the past two years. I have witnessed how those murder investigations have been conducted, and lessons have been learned, and we have seen that in practice. Of course, I wish that there was no need for murder investigations at all, but they have improved by reaching out to the affected communities. Communities have been given confidence that that there is genuine independence, that investigations are reviewed, and that there is a team approach as opposed to things coming down to one individual, which was part of what went wrong in the original investigation into the Stephen Lawrence murder. There has been some improvement, but of course we just wish there were not so many murders to be investigated.

The role of the family liaison officer came from the report and is incredibly significant, and some of our amazing FLOs do important work in managing the grief of a victim’s whole family.

[Sandy Martin]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that much of the focus on the problems of gang violence and young people being targeted by criminals has fallen on the police force? However, an awful lot could and should have been done with youth and social services that might have helped to prevent some of the violence that we are seeing now.

[Sir Edward Davey]

I absolutely agree, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.

Some of the changes that we have seen are the mechanical and policy changes that were the least we could have expected. In reading the material 20 years on, my concern is that we still need some deeper changes, and they relate to culture and attitudes. We had a good exchange about training off the back of the speech from the hon. Member for Moray, and one problem with training is that it can be a tick-box exercise and does not go deep enough and get to what is in people’s hearts and minds. That applies not just to the police force, but to wider society.

I genuinely worry that the reason why we are not making progress in the police force is because we are not making progress in society, and I have to say that I feel that there is more racism today than there was a few years ago. I think we are going backwards, and that relates to how race is being portrayed in the media and—I am not going to bring Brexit into this—to some of the issues that may have contributed to Brexit. Some of those things have unleashed feelings and voices that I do not think we heard a few years ago, and that is regressive. As we mark this important anniversary and look to the police to do a lot better, we need to do better as a society. This is a deep issue.

While there has, of course, been progress and while we have seen some recommendations implemented, I am afraid that we have gone backwards in several areas. That is the truth. I look forward to the Home Affairs Committee’s full report so that we can compare and contrast it with the report published on the 10th anniversary, and I wonder whether it will be as positive. According to the crime survey for England and Wales, only 50% of Black Caribbean people agree with the statement “police would treat you fairly” compared with 68% of white people. That is quite a big difference, and that is based on people’s experiences.

Stop-and-search is being used more now than it was back when Stephen Lawrence was murdered, and parts of this House are putting pressure on Home Office Ministers to go back to using more stop-and-search as if it is the answer. We have huge amounts of evidence to suggest that stop-and-search is not going to find the criminals. If we are going to stop and search people, it is much better if it is intelligence-led, based on information that comes from the community and is gathered by community police officers and others working in the community, so that it is effective. I pay tribute to the Prime Minister—I do not always do that, as the Policing Minister will know—for being brave on this issue when she was Home Secretary. She made clear that stop-and-search was not the tool that the police force should use, because there was so much discrimination coming from it and so much ill feeling, given the much higher proportion of black people being stopped and searched. As we have this debate, we should remember Stephen Lawrence and be very careful before we reach for the stop-and-search tool as some sort of solution.

New technologies are being used that this House has not yet turned its attention to. At the moment, facial recognition techniques are not regulated, and this House has not debated the civil liberty issues around them. I am worried about that, because in the United States, where they have been used, there has been bias against black and ethnic minority communities in the way that those technologies appear to work. If we are going to update our understanding of racism in policing, we need to ensure that we apply the lessons of the past to the technologies of the future, so that they are properly regulated and not discriminatory.

In my intervention on the hon. Member for Nottingham North, I mentioned the real concern that at senior ranks—superintendent and above—there appears to be a disproportionate number of black and ethnic minority police officers being disciplined. That is a worry, because there seems to be no reasonable explanation other than attempts by other officers to get in the way of those officers’ careers. That is pernicious. I have not done a full study—that would require a lot of evidence, because it is such a serious allegation—but it needs to be looked at.

I hope the Minister can assure us that his Department and the police are taking those issues seriously, because if we do not ensure that black male and female officers are treated fairly and perceived to be treated fairly, we will not deal with this. We will not get the recruitment and retention. We will not get enough representation at a senior level, which is fundamentally the only way to solve this issue, and we will not give all our communities trust and confidence in their police force.

There has been progress, but I worry that it has stalled, and as it reflects wider society, it may even have gone backwards. We all know about and have debated at length in this Chamber in recent weeks and months the many challenges facing our country, our society and our police forces, but this issue has to come back on to the agenda, because it has slipped down, and it is our duty to ensure that it gets back up there. We must ensure that senior police officers, chief constables, the Met Commissioner and all those whose day-to-day responsibility this is understand and hear a message from this House loud and clear, cross-party, that we want them to take this even more seriously than they have in the past, that progress is too slow and that we want them to go further and faster.

When we talk to black and ethnic minority communities about the police, they often say that they are over-policed and under-protected—I am not the first to use that phrase. We cannot accept that combination. We cannot allow a group in our population to feel that they are targeted and yet not protected. Figures show that they are often more likely to be the victims of crime. I go back to the appalling knife crime we are seeing, particularly in the capital. It is black and ethnic minority young people—often, young men—who are most likely to be the victims, and they therefore deserve more protection and more attention in a very sensitive way.

I hope that, as a result of this debate, the House will come together and send a clear signal to Ministers and to police authorities across the country.