Oral Answers to Questions

Jake Berry Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

Of course I will work closely with the police and crime commissioner and chief constables in the 43 authorities for which I have responsibility. As for the conference itself, the vast majority of police officers did a fantastic job. It was often decisions made above them that told them what they had to do. I am naturally concerned if there has been an increase, which is against the national trend: crime has continued to fall under this Government.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

If the Conservative party conference is to return to Blackpool one day, it is absolutely key to get the Lancashire police funding formula right. Increasing concern has been expressed this weekend among Lancashire MPs of all parties, so I would be grateful if the Minister would meet me and other Lancashire Members to discuss the police funding settlement.

[Mike Penning]

I thought it was you, Mr Speaker, in your days on the Back Benches, who could manage to get such a question in. It was very cleverly done by my hon. Friend, and I will naturally meet any delegation from any party to talk about police funding.

Devolution and Growth across Britain

Jake Berry Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

I believe—this is my view—that fiscal devolution is important, and I will say a little more about that shortly.

I have been clear that we support devolution across the UK in principle. It cannot, however, be devolution for the sake of it; it must be a devolution of powers for the purpose of creating a fairer and more prosperous society for everyone. As our amendment sets out, we want an ambitious UK-wide plan to devolve powers, not a series of piecemeal measures or one-off deals, and those powers must cover transport, housing and skills for all areas.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making some very good points. In the spirit of cross-party working, I am sure that he, like me, would welcome the concordat between the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and central Government to devolve more powers to the north-west of England. Would he join me in encouraging other large councils, such as Lancashire County Council, to come forward to the Government with plans to ensure that more powers can be devolved to the constituents I represent in Lancashire?

[Mr Umunna]

I certainly want more councils to follow Manchester’s example. I think that it is a good thing, so I agree with the hon. Gentleman.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sajid Javid]

I welcome my hon. Friend to this Chamber and congratulate him on his election victory. We will keep on doing more of the same: more economic measures; more devolution; and more investment in local communities, for example through LEPs. We will help to reduce unemployment throughout Britain, including in his own constituency where, as he will know only too well, it has fallen by 60% in the past five years.

[Jake Berry]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way on this important point. The northern powerhouse ideal, which is hugely popular across the north of England, must not be just about our cities, but our regions. I repeat my call for Lancashire County Council to come forward with a proposal that will see powers devolved to Lancashire, so that our economy can continue to grow in the way that this Government have delivered on in the past five years.

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is not just a programme for cities; it is for regions. He uses the example of Lancashire. If Lancashire comes forward with proposals, we will absolutely consider them. Our new Bill will allow us to give it more powers.

Criminal Law

Jake Berry Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

The seriousness of the case to which my hon. Friend refers in his excellent speech will be listened to by his constituent and his constituent’s family. Does that not show that the voters who send us here do not want us to get involved in procedural shenanigans in the House of Commons? They would rather we have a proper debate and allow Members to raise constituency cases as my hon. Friend is trying to do.

[Bill Wiggin]

My hon. Friend is quite right, but this case gets a lot worse. This man was then held in a Madrid prison while an appeal against his extradition was submitted. The Foreign Office sent a letter to the Spanish authorities saying that, unless the Romanians were willing to ensure that a retrial took place, they should decline Romania’s request to have him extradited. No such assurance was given, but on 14 May 2007 he was taken back to Bucharest where he spent a further 21 months in prison, enduring horrendous conditions which fell considerably short of the minimum required by members of the EU. Most importantly, the Spanish constitutional court, following the Foreign Office request, upheld the appeal against extradition—

Oral Answers to Questions

Jake Berry Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I feel that the hon. Gentleman would benefit from hearing some of the facts about what is happening. Across the Metropolitan police, there are 2,600 more police officers in neighbourhood teams to boost local policing. Specifically in Hammersmith and Fulham, the number of officers in the borough will have increased between October 2011 and 2015. Very specifically, there will be an increase of 92 officers in the safer neighbourhood teams he values so much. That is why crime in London generally and Hammersmith specifically has been falling.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

I know that my right hon. Friend will be aware, not least because it was mentioned at Prime Minister’s questions last week, of the death of Cherylee Shennan in my constituency. I want to put on the record my thoughts about Detective Sergeant Damien McAlister and Detective Constable Karen Kenworthy, both of whom were severely injured in an attempt to save Cherylee’s life, and give him the opportunity to echo them. They serve as a constant reminder to everyone in this House of the danger that police officers put themselves in every day to keep us and our streets safe.

[Damian Green]

I am sure that the whole House will echo my hon. Friend’s sentiment about those officers. Damien McAlister and Karen Kenworthy showed the bravery that we get from officers all over the country in the most difficult of situations. Such bravery is essential, particularly in tragic situations such as the one he mentions, and it should never go without being noticed.

Syrian Refugees

Jake Berry Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for the comment that he has made. In putting the priorities together, I decided that although we will have a focus on women and children at risk, the survivors of torture and violence will include not only women and children, but people of both genders. It is therefore quite possible that individuals who have been subject to the sort of violence that he raises will qualify within that category.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement. Emphasis has correctly been placed on helping people who have been subjected to the worst abuses of the Syrian conflict, including sexual violence and being detained in regime detention centres. Will she confirm that when people are brought to this country, the evidence collection will not end? It is vital that when people are taken away from the refugee camps, the UK Government continue to co-operate with the evidence collection so that the perpetrators of crimes can be prosecuted.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. As I said earlier, this country is helping with the process of evidence collection by training Syrians to collect evidence. It is important that in bringing people to the UK, we do not lose the possibility that evidence can be collected and break that chain. I entirely accept the point that he has made.

Immigration Bill

Jake Berry Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Syms]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point.

We need to send signals to people around the world that we are serious about ensuring that people who are here illegally should not stay. That is why I welcome the measures on bank accounts and driving licences. There are concerns about private sector landlords, but if someone is about to rent out a £250,000 or £500,000 home, there is a good, solid logical reason for having the full documentation. After all, they want to collect the rent. Many residential landlords already take passport and other such details. The Bill is a perfectly common-sense approach to ensuring that there is a barrier for those who should not be here but no difficulty for those who have a right to be here.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

I am sure my hon. Friend is aware that estate agents are obliged to take contact information—both photograph identification and proof of address—from tenants and landlords under money-laundering regulations. Does he agree that the measure in the Bill is a simple and reasonable extension of the existing regulations, which have worked so well?

[Mr Syms]

I agree with my hon. Friend. With the tightening up of measures on employers taking on workers, the measure to which he refers is one of a series to provide barriers so that we find people who are not here legally.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jake Berry]

The right hon. Gentleman may not be aware of the case of Amy Houston, a girl from my constituency who was killed by an asylum seeker. He made appeal after appeal after appeal. Owing to the length of time that those appeals took, he was able to establish the right to a family life by fathering two children in this country. He killed that young girl with a motor vehicle, and he is not the sort of person we want to welcome into Britain. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we need these reforms to stop such cases in the future?

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. After 26 years as an MP, I get frustrated when people come to my surgeries on Friday evenings and say, “We want to stay longer.” I feel they have no right to stay, but I am not an immigration officer and do not know the history of their case. Multiple appeals do not help, but the solution is a quick and robust decision. We must tell people, in a timely way, whether they have a right to remain in this country, and if they do not, they ought to leave. That is when the enforcement process should begin and end, not 10 years after someone makes an asylum application, when they have established a family. It is very difficult to tell people to go back, when faced with a loving family and children looking into your eyes who do not want to go to a country they know nothing about. It is the failure of the system that creates such misery, and that is what we need to end.

Finally, I wish to make two quick points. First, the Minister is due to appear before the Select Committee shortly—I will not give him the date now, because he is deep in conversation with the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker)—and when he comes, we will want real, practical dates for the introduction of the e-Borders programme. As I have said, the Minister listens to the House’s concerns and is prepared to act accordingly, but in my view it is not acceptable that three and a half years after the e-Borders contract was cancelled we still do not have tendering.

In case my right hon. and hon. Friends think that that is all the Government’s fault, I must say, I am afraid, that the previous Government’s handling of the e-Borders project was lamentable. It is an absolute disgrace that anyone should sign a contract for an e-Borders programme worth £750 million and not tell the company what they expect and when they expect it. That is why we have an arbitration process that has been going on for two and a half years and which will cost the British taxpayer millions of pounds. This is a lesson not just for a future Labour Government, but for the present Government. When they sign procurement contracts, they must have benchmarks.

I say to the Minister, however, that we do not have to wait until 2015; we can have exit checks now. He has not written back to me since his last appearance before the Select Committee, when I asked him to confirm that there were no exit checks on departure. [Interruption.] No, the Minister has not. Mr Speaker, when you or I leave the country, the airline has a lot of information on us: it knows how we booked our ticket, sometimes which hotels we are staying in, whom we are travelling with, which seat we are on—we can book our own seats—and so on. When we leave at Heathrow airport, they look at our boarding cards, but they do not check our passports. It would be easy to introduce these checks now, and it would be a big win for the Government —much better than ad vans. They could place immigration officers at departure gates—it would not create any queues—to check people’s passports as well as boarding cards. They would then know who was going in and out. It is not as brilliant as an e-Borders programme, but it would be the first stage of knowing who has left the country. I hope the Minister will give special attention to that point.

Finally, on the administration of the Home Office, I give full credit to the Home Secretary for abolishing the UK Border Agency, but it will only have been worth abolishing if we get something better. Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to get answers from senior Home Office officials to simple Select Committee questions about the number of people with the right to remain in the country and the number of people who have applied for further leave to remain. In the end, I got the answers half an hour ago, after I said that I would come to the Chamber and name the officials who had not replied to my letter. I do not want, as the Chairman of a Select Committee, to have to do that, but when people write to Ministers and officials, they need a reply. That goes not only for Select Committee members, but for members of the public; members of the public want timely replies.

New legislation will work only if the Minister and the Home Secretary improve the administration of the Home Office on immigration and visas issues. The Home Secretary abolished the UKBA because she said it was closed, secretive and defensive. If at the end of the year we are having exactly the same problems with the same officials in the same jobs, answerable to the same line managers, which is what they were told would be the case, we will be disappointed. At the moment, their administrative changes have a fair wind, but we will want to see a real difference in how immigration policy is not just agreed by the House, but implemented after it becomes legislation.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jake Berry Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point. That is why, as part of the action plan that the Minister for Equalities announced recently, the Home Office is funding organisations that support the victims of disability hate crime to find a way to make it easier for those who are particularly reluctant to report it to come forward.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

12. What steps she is taking to tackle metal theft.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

16. What steps she is taking to tackle metal theft.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Brokenshire)]

As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced in a statement to the House in January, we are taking legislative action to tackle metal theft, including raising the financial penalties for rogue dealers, banning cash payments for scrap metal and giving the police powers to enter unregistered scrap yards. That is part of a coherent package of measures, which includes enhanced enforcement through the funding of a £5 million national metal theft taskforce.

[Jake Berry]

Rossendale and Darwen has been subjected to a spate of metal thefts, including from the mills and, on Thursday night, from a school in Lower Darwen. Will the Minister inform the House how quickly the cashless payment system will be introduced to stop this metallic crime wave?

Border Checks Summer 2011

Jake Berry Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Margot James]

No one fired the individual concerned. There was a resignation following a suspension, and my understanding is that the suspension was not ordered by the Home Secretary. It was immediately instituted because the individual admitted to varying the terms of the pilot.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has long experience in business, which she could perhaps use to compare the suspension of Mr Clark by the UKBA with the sacking, live on television, of Sharon Shoesmith by the current shadow Chancellor.

[Margot James]

My hon. Friend makes an insightful observation, and one that I trust Opposition Members will learn from.

Gangs and Youth Violence

Jake Berry Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

Many issues affect the level of knife crime in a particular area. I am announcing today a cross-government strategy that is going to make a real difference to gang membership and youth violence, which, sadly, blights too many communities.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

I have seen personally the wraparound support provided by voluntary mentoring in my constituency, especially by the Lighthouse Foundation supported by the Methodist Church. Will my right hon. Friend update the House on what role voluntary mentoring can and will play in tackling gang violence and family breakdown?

[Mrs May]

Voluntary mentoring of individuals can have an incredibly important role to play in tackling both gang membership and youth violence. There are many projects out there in which voluntary and charitable groups provide necessary support to families that helps them to bring up their children in a way that prevents them from going down the route of gang violence. I commend the project that my hon. Friend mentions. I am sure that it is doing excellent work in his constituency, as it does elsewhere in the country.

Public Disorder

Jake Berry Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

The events in south London follow what the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) has so clearly described. In Walworth and Peckham, on the Old Kent road, in Rotherhithe and in many of our other communities, we saw on Tuesday night scenes that none of us can ever have expected to see. There was some absolutely despicable behaviour—people being pulled off their motorbikes and scooters, and women driving alone whose car windows were smashed and whose car, with them inside, was raided for its contents. In the evening, we saw parents with their children—women with their youngsters—going in with the younger people to take things out of shops on the Walworth road. People were crying on the street because they had just been promised a job in a shop that was being broken up and might not be able to carry on in business.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

Unlike so many other subjects that the House debates, the aberration of these events links north and south. In my constituency, in Bacup, there was a riot by disaffected young people. Does my right hon. Friend agree with me that it is time for the police to take off the kid gloves, to use the full force of the law and, where possible, to prosecute and imprison those who have engaged in such disgraceful behaviour in both the north and south of this country?

[Simon Hughes]

That is a clear view shared across the House. We have a common message that the law must be applied fully and without reservation, but I qualify that in one respect: it is even more important that those who are the role models—the adults, the parents and the serial criminals—are caught and dealt with without compromise. The 10-year-old, the nine-year-old, the eight-year-old, the follower, the person who got on their BlackBerry the message saying, “Come down here, it’s kicking off down here”—yes, of course, if they give in, they are to blame, as are their parents for not knowing where their children are going at 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 o’clock at night. But the older youngsters, and the ones who are over 16, 17, 18 or 21, particularly need to be seen in our courts and dealt with.

Public opinion is clear that these disturbances were not caused by this Government or the previous Government, or by the capitalist system. Public opinion is clear that they were simply criminal activity. The borough commander in Southwark made it clear that when people who have been nicked and are now being questioned in Southwark were asked why they had committed the offences, they did not put up some political argument for their action. They were clear that it was for the trainers, the televisions, the kit in the windows. They were clear that this was criminality.

It is also clear that over the past few days there were very few house burglaries in Southwark. The people who were normally doing the burglaries were out on the street kicking in the windows. I am grateful that the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister have accepted that the serious serial criminals, often the gang members, had a truce—between the gangs—over the past few days. That was recorded and it can be seen. They decided not to fight each other, but to go in and take on the community. Some people joined them who should know better—some professionals, some people from outside; the teaching assistant, the graduate—but the serious contributors to trouble in our communities, who are no good at all, are the people on whom we need to focus. Every one of the 32 borough commanders in London will say that there are about 30, 40 or 50 people who lead the local gangs and whose pictures are in the back of the police stations, and we need to concentrate on them.

When MPs break the law and fiddle their expenses, or when police officers receive money from journalists, we have to understand that there are other questions out there and that greed applies across the board, but those were not the presenting issues last week. I want to set out where we need to go now. Above all, we need to support the businesses. Our high streets need to be back to work. We need to shop in our high streets, support the small traders and make sure they have the necessary national support.

People want to give, and there ought to be systems whereby they can contribute to the statutory funds. If we have Disasters Emergency Committee appeals for east Africa, we can have an appeal, if people want to give, for north London, south London, Liverpool, Birmingham or Manchester too. Additional help may be needed for local councils and the local police holding the additional people in custody. There must be a willingness to report the culprits and, as we heard earlier, the media must hand over the information that they have. It is no good standing there and recording it, and not offering the information that would allow people to be dealt with.

We need to make sure that we tackle the causes of continuing violence. As was rightly pointed out in an intervention, two thirds of those who offend come from families where there has been a history of offending. It is generational and we need to recognise those dysfunctional families where the activity is repeated. The right hon. Member for Tottenham has often made the case that we need to recognise families where youngsters are taken out of school and out of the family early, because they become the ones most at risk. We need to support the parents, because some of them find it very difficult indeed. We need to make sure that our housing strategies and our youth services are supported, and that the mobile phone industry helps. We can recover soon, but we have to stand together and support our communities in doing so.