Yvette Cooper
Main Page: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford)Department Debates - View all Yvette Cooper's debates with the Home Office
(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mrs May
My hon. Friend raises an important point. Many would have wished to see a conclusion to the Abu Qatada case rather more swiftly than has been possible so far. I am confident, however, that we are closer to the deportation of Abu Qatada today than we were two days ago. We need to go through the proper processes in the UK courts. My hon. Friend rightly referred to the written ministerial statement and the two available processes.
Mrs May
If I can finish providing an explanation to my hon. Friend, the right hon. Lady might not need to ask a question.
Two processes are available. A very high bar is set for the Government to go down the route of adopting the certification process. Declaring a case against deportation as unfounded is effectively the same as saying that there is no legal argument against the deportation. As I said, a very high bar has been set in relation to that, but I am, of course, taking advice on both options. I shall make the Government’s position clear in due course.
Yvette Cooper
Like the Home Secretary, I strongly welcomed yesterday’s decision by the European Court to refuse Abu Qatada’s appeal. I think that we all want him to be deported to Jordan as rapidly as possible. Of course we recognise that she will have to make complex and difficult decisions in order to ensure that she gets the next steps right, but will she now accept that she got it wrong when she told the House of Commons 12 times that the date of the deadline for Abu Qatada’s appeal was the Monday rather than the Tuesday night?
Mrs May
Obviously I welcome the fact that the European Court came out and refused Abu Qatada’s application for referral yesterday. As I told the Home Affairs Committee, I had been strongly advised that that was expected to happen because of the case that we had made.
Of course I accept that the Court has made its decision on the matter of the deadline. The Government still do not agree with that decision—[Interruption.] As I have said, we accept the Court’s decision. I made clear at every stage to the House and to the Home Affairs Committee that it was only ever going to be that panel of judges that finally decided whether the referral could be accepted. However, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office wrote to the European Court today drawing attention to inconsistencies in the guidance that it had published on how to calculate the date, and asking it to clarify the position for future purposes and provide revised guidance.
I was talking about the Crime and Courts Bill, and the matters relating to the criminal justice system that it reflects. We will ensure that fines represent real justice by making defaulting offenders, not the taxpayer, pay the cost of collection. A single county court and a single family court will be established to increase the efficiency of the civil and family court systems, and the judicial appointments process will be reformed to introduce greater transparency, flexibility and diversity. Court broadcasting will be allowed, in limited circumstances, to help to demystify the justice system. We will improve the efficiency of our immigration system by removing full appeal rights for family visit visas and removing in-country appeal rights for excluded persons, and we will strengthen our borders by extending the powers of immigration officers to tackle serious and organised immigration-related crime.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
Yesterday, it was clear that this Queen’s Speech will do nothing to tackle jobs and growth, nothing to get Britain out of a double-dip recession, and nothing to help family finances. Now, sadly, it is clear that there is not much to help tackle crime or improve policing, border security and justice, either.
As we gather to debate the Queen’s Speech, 16,000 police officers from across the country—officers in black hats, and many more thousands beside them—are gathering and marching through London. Constables, sergeants, inspectors, superintendents, even chief constables, are protesting against the 20% criminal cuts the Home Secretary is making. There are many more whom they represent who could not make it today because they are at work or out on the beat. There are officers such as Tony MacDonald, whom I met last month, who used to be a beat officer in Retford. He loved his job. He has been forced to retire years early, and police support for the town has been cut back. There are the officers in the midlands who told me that their response units have been cut back, so when a 999 call came in about a hit-and-run involving a child, it took the nearest officer 45 minutes to get to the scene of the crime.
This morning, I spoke to officers from Yorkshire who told me that they are spending more time on bureaucracy, not less, because the back office has been so heavily cut—officers such as Chief Constable Tony Melville, who warned that his force was at a cliff edge because of the cuts, and who has tendered his resignation because of his opposition to Government reforms.
Yvette Cooper
The officers who risk life and limb to keep us safe are deeply angry at the cuts and the chaos they face. They are worried about whether, in the light of the Winsor review, they will be able to keep up with their mortgage payments. Morale is at rock bottom and they are overstretched, especially with the Olympics coming up. They are angry at a Home Secretary and a Prime Minister who do not recognise or sufficiently value the work they do.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the hon. Lady if she will say whether she supports the officers from her constituency who are marching in protest today.
Andrea Leadsom
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. Will she give the House an idea of what her party thinks the outcome of the police review should be?
Yvette Cooper
We have said many times that we think the police could sustain cuts to their budgets of some £1 billion over the course of a Parliament, but instead, the Government have gone for £2 billion—going far further and too fast. That is why 16,000 officers are being lost, including thousands from the hon. Lady’s region. These are deeply destructive decisions that, in the end, are putting communities at risk. Of course, 16,000 officers is the number we needed on the streets of London to take back control after rioters burned Tottenham and Croydon, and looters ransacked Clapham, Hackney and Ealing; and 16,000 is the number of police officers that this Home Secretary has decided to cut.
Mark Lancaster
I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. So that we are clear, will she explain to the House from where she will find the £1 billion difference between this Government’s proposals and her party’s proposals?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that we have said many times that, overall, this Government are cutting too far and too fast. Their deficit reduction plan is going so far and so fast that it is hitting jobs and hitting growth, and it is not working. His Government and his Chancellor are borrowing over £150 billion more in order to pay for the bills of failure. The economy is not growing, jobs are being cut, businesses are not paying tax because they are not growing, and unemployment benefit has to be paid to all those people stuck on the dole.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point: the economy was growing at the time of the general election, but we now have a double-dip recession instead. The Government have shoved the economy into reverse. As a result, businesses are not growing and paying their taxes, and more and more people are needing unemployment benefit. We are spending billions more on unemployment benefit and social security benefits. The Government are paying the bills of failure, rather than supporting growth and success.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
The right hon. Lady can certainly argue about the pace at which the cuts have to be made, but may I take her back to the question my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) asked about whether the Government were going too far? The Chancellor is seeking to remove the structural deficit and, as I understand it, the Labour party is committed to exactly the same objective, and so the argument is only about pace, rather than about the overall scale. If that is so, can she answer the question: where will she find the extra £1 billion?
Yvette Cooper
I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that this is also about the “how”, because we want the economy to grow and his party has given up on growth, as even The Daily Telegraph has admitted. The economy has gone into a double-dip recession and, as a result, businesses are not paying the taxes that we need and more people are needing unemployment benefit. The economy is therefore suffering and the Chancellor is having to borrow an extra £150 billion more. He is failing on every single count; the approach is hurting but it is not working.
Yvette Cooper
I will give the Policing Minister the opportunity to tell us what he would say to the 16,000 or more officers who are out on the streets today.
Nick Herbert
The right hon. Lady has conceded that the Labour party would be cutting £1 billion a year from the police budget—I doubt she told police officers that when she saw them earlier. Will she also concede that she has said that there should be a two-year pay freeze, which saves another half a billion, and that her right hon. Friend the shadow Policing Minister has said that there should be changes to overtime and shift patterns that would save another £600 million—those were his words—which means that they are committed to exactly the same savings as the Government? Does she therefore understand that police officers will not believe her when she makes the claims that she does?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Minister, you should know better. Interventions are to be brief; they are not an opportunity to make a speech. That applies to Ministers as well as to Back Benchers.
Yvette Cooper
The Policing Minister can try this as often as he likes; it does not matter how many times he says it, he knows that it is not true. We have made it very clear that we think that this figure of £1 billion would be sustainable and, yes, it would include pay measures, changes and other ways of making efficiency savings. His figures may not include that, but we have made it very clear that to deliver the number of police officers—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. Minister, you should not shout across the Chamber. You made an intervention. You are not required to like the answer, but you are required to listen to it and not heckle.
Yvette Cooper
Government Members need to recognise that their decisions are cutting 16,000 police officers. Our approach is to say that we do not believe that 16,000 police officers should be cut. We believe that the police should have enough money to support those 16,000 officers. We should not have had to cut 5,000 police officers already from 999 units, from neighbourhood response units and from the urgent response units that we need to keep us safe and to arrive in an emergency.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the Home Secretary if she will tell us why she thinks that it is a good idea to have already taken more than 5,000 police out of 999 units, neighbourhood units and the traffic cops.
Mrs May
The right hon. Lady just said that the 12% cut in police budgets that she has told us in this Chamber the Opposition would support includes the pay freeze, but it does not. She has said that she would support the 12% efficiency savings outlined by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, but those did not include either the pay freeze—£500 million—or the overtime cuts of a further £600 million announced by the shadow Policing Minister. What Opposition Members need to understand is that what she has said about cuts to police budgets would lead to cuts in police officer numbers and that they should not say anything other than that when they talk to the police.
Yvette Cooper
We heard nothing then to defend the 5,000 officers being cut from 999 response units, from neighbourhood policing units and from emergency response units across the country. The Home Secretary is dealing in fantasy figures. She needs to think about what she has just said. If the figures she has just used were correct, no police officers would be going—no front-line staff would be being cut—everything would be hunky-dory and she would be able to do it all through the pay freeze and through the back-office cuts that she has proposed. But that is not what is happening. Instead, 16,000 police officers are going, from every corner of the country. They are being taken from the very front-line services we need. Time and again the Government told us that the front line would be protected and would not be hit, but that is not happening. She is out of touch. The Prime Minister told us:
“We won’t do anything that will reduce the amount of visible policing on our streets.”
But 5,000 police officers have gone already, and many thousands more are to go.
Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
This is not just about the number; it is also about the considerable experience of many of those police officers. That is especially the case in respect of the grotesque picture in the west midlands, where, under rule A19, which the Home Secretary has blithely ignored and dismissed, very experienced police officers are being dismissed. They are going on to the pension scheme—this does not fall on the west midlands account, but it sure adds on to the public finances because of the pensions. When we talk about dodgy figures, that is exactly the sort of dodgy accounting we are discussing. This is a real loss to policing in the west midlands.
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that we are losing some of our most experienced officers. I have spoken to officers from other places around the country who wanted to carry on working, and who had great skills and experience to contribute to the police force, but are being forced into early retirement. The evidence and research from the House of Commons Library shows that that will actually cost the taxpayer more. This approach is absolutely crazy. It is bad for communities and bad for the taxpayer.
We know now what the Prime Minister’s response to this situation is. He does not think it is a problem; cutting 999 response teams is not about emergencies or about visibility—it is not even austerity. He said that it is just “efficiency”. He calls it “efficiency” but communities across the country call it, “Out of touch, irresponsible and unfair”, because they know it is communities that are paying the price.
Michael Ellis
How can the right hon. Lady reconcile her current rhetoric on numbers with the fact that under the Labour Government only 11% of the police were available to the general public at any one time? Was that not because mismanagement and bureaucracy ran riot under Labour?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman knows that that figure does not actually reflect what happens in police forces across the country. Barely an hour ago, I spoke to police officers who told me that they are now having to deal with more bureaucracy, not less. They have to do all their own recording of crime and all their own collecting of statements, which used to be done by civilian support staff. Those police officers told me categorically that they are now spending less time out on the beat and having to deal with more bureaucracy than they were before. The police are becoming less visible, not more visible, as a result of this Government’s decisions.
What then does the Queen’s Speech have to offer to cut crime or to improve public safety? The answer is: not much. The previous Queen’s Speech was bad enough: 17,000 suspected rapists were taken off the DNA database; 20% cuts were made in policing at the same time as £100 million could be found for elected police commissioners; counter-terrorism powers were watered down; and getting CCTV was made tougher. So what do the Government have to offer this time to make good the damage? The answer is: cameras in courts. I guess they had to put them somewhere, now that they are taking them away from the town centres and the housing estates.
The Home Secretary did promise stronger oversight of the intelligence and security agencies. We will support that, and I hope that she goes far enough. She also said that she wants more closed material procedures—the devil will be in the detail on that. There is a problem with foreign intelligence, and I agree with her that there is a problem with the Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction. The proposals that she set out in the Green Paper were not justified and went too far. I recognise from her remarks today that she has made some changes to those positions, but we will need to see the detail, reflect and give the matter consideration. She also talked about extending communication surveillance. Again, we will await the detail. Everyone wants the police to be able to keep up with new technology in the fight against terrorism, but no one wants the police or security agencies browsing personal e-mails or Facebook pages at will. I hope that we can have cross-party discussions on this. The Home Secretary will know that the practice of previous Home Secretaries has been to provide extensive briefing for the Opposition and for Select Committees, so we will wait to see what detail she is able to provide.
Mrs May
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way again. May I please press her in particular on the point about closed material proceedings? When the Green Paper proposals were announced in this House, the Opposition made it clear that they supported closed material proceedings and recognised the need to protect certain material. Is she now suggesting that the Opposition’s position has changed?
Yvette Cooper
As the Home Secretary will know, we have said that the scope of the Green Paper was too wide. We recognise that there is a problem for the security agencies with regard to how civil claims are made and how material needs to be considered. However, proper safeguards need to be in place, as we have said. She also knows, as I have said this to her, that I am very willing to have further cross-party discussions with her about the detail. We have not yet seen what amendments she may have made to the Green Paper proposals and we will wait to see them and scrutinise them in detail. It is important that she should do that. On communications surveillance—I do not know whether she heard my points earlier, as she was conferring with her Front-Bench colleagues—it has been normal practice in the past for Home Secretaries to provide extensive briefing for the Opposition and the Select Committees. We will wait for that briefing and consider and scrutinise the detail as it is proposed.
The Home Secretary has also proposed stronger community sentences. That sounds good, although we gather that the Bill will be published and debated in the House of Lords without any clauses on community sentences. We should also consider what is missing. There is nothing on equal marriage—not even a draft Bill—even though, as Minister for Women and Equalities, she made it clear that she was consulting not on whether but on how to introduce the changes. There is nothing on violence against women and nothing on antisocial behaviour, even though she promised more than two years ago that new action would be taken. There is nothing on gangs, even though after the riots the Government told us that that was their big priority and even though we know that gang injunctions need to be improved. There is nothing on problem families, even though the Government told us in the autumn that they were the priority, and there is nothing to protect core public policing or to stop neighbourhood patrols being contracted out to private companies such as G4S or KBR as the cuts bite.
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend is certainly right that the newspapers have been briefed on that subject, but as it is not in the Queen’s Speech we do not know the Government’s position. It is obviously a complex issue; nevertheless it would be useful to know the Government’s view.
There is nothing on knife crime, crime prevention or counter-terrorism. This was the Queen’s Speech that the Government briefed as being tough on crime and tough on antisocial behaviour, but it is hardly the stuff to have criminals quaking in their boots.
To be fair to the Home Secretary, she did tell us about the National Crime Agency. We support it; it is sensible enough, it is right and there are serious national crime issues that need to be addressed, but let us be honest that this is not radical reform but mainly a rearrangement. It is a cross between the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, with the police national computer and a new command structure thrown in. It is sensible enough, it will be an improvement, but it will not compensate for the lack of 16,000 police.
As for Britain’s borders, the Home Secretary says the new National Crime Agency will include a border policing command. Will that deliver extra staff to deal with queues, extra technology to improve security checks, better management to sort out the chaos, and help for families queuing for hours with tired kids? No. Instead we will have a border command in a separate organisation from the border force, which is itself in a separate organisation from the border agency, and there will still be no clear direction from the Government about what any of the three of them is supposed to do. The Home Secretary is adding to the chaos, not solving it.
Keith Vaz
I am grateful to the shadow Home Secretary for giving way a second time. Has she had the opportunity to read the report by John Vine that was published this morning, in which he specifically points out his concern about constant reorganisation not helping the protection of our borders?
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend, who is the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, makes an extremely important point. I wanted to come on to that report, because, overall, we can see the queues getting longer while Ministers do not seem to have a clue what is going on.
Last Monday, the Minister for Immigration claimed the maximum queues were an hour and a half and accused the media of making “wild suggestions”. By Tuesday he was admitting the wild suggestions were nearer the truth; by Wednesday we were told the Prime Minister was getting a grip; by Thursday and Friday the queues were getting worse and worse. There were two-hour waits at Stansted and three-hour waits at Heathrow, reports of trains delayed by queues at Paris, Customs checks stopped at Heathrow and reports that staff from Manchester were being put on a plane, told to work for a few hours at Heathrow and put on another plane back again.
Finally, this week, we got the truth from the borders and immigration inspectorate. Passport staff at terminal 3 have been cut by 15%, shortages mean that they cannot cope with the queues, and management changes brought in under this Government are making things much worse. The Minister for Immigration charmingly told us that the report was out of date because action had been taken since September to sort it out, but since September things have got worse, not better. The report says the staff are all on at the wrong times—more when the airport is quiet and fewer when all the planes are coming in.
It is just baffling to everyone that the UK Border Force and the Minister for Immigration do not seem to be able to work out what time of day it is, but at least they are doing better than the Home Secretary, who is still rather challenged by the day of the week. I know that the Home Secretary is not on Twitter and she might have missed the attempts to cheer her up through the difficult time that she is having. They have started to suggest songs, such as “ Sunday, Wednesday, happy days,” “I don’t know why I don’t like Tuesdays,” “Eight days a week” and—clearly—nothing by The Police. How about Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Not leaving on a jet plane and I don’t know when I’ll be back again”?
Getting the date wrong in a case such as Abu Qatada’s, however, could have been very serious. Everyone is very relieved that the European Court decided to reject Abu Qatada’s appeal not because of the date, but because of the merits of the case. We should all welcome that decision. We all want him deported as soon as possible and the case has been repeatedly and thoroughly considered at every level in the courts, but lessons also have to be learned at the Home Office too. Three weeks ago the Home Secretary came to the House and was adamant that she had got the date right. Twelve times she told the House the deadline was Monday. In scathing tones she said to me:
“We are talking about a simple mathematical question.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2012; Vol. 543, c. 509.]
Sadly, it was a mathematical question that neither the Home Secretary nor her Ministers seemed able to answer.
The Court was very clear in its judgment that the deadline was Tuesday and Court officials said so at the time. It is no good the Home Secretary’s saying that the Foreign Office is now complaining that the Court’s guidance was not clear enough. If it was not clear enough, why not ask questions at the time? Why did they not ring up the Court and ask the question? Why did they not listen to the media and to the others who were raising with her the point that the Court was saying very clearly that the date was Tuesday, instead? Why take the risk?
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)
It is all irrelevant now.
Yvette Cooper
The Justice Secretary likes to chunter from a sedentary position that that is all irrelevant now, but the trouble is that it is not. The Home Office makes these serious decisions every day of the week. If it cannot even get what day of the week it is right, how can we have confidence in its decisions about the future? How can we have confidence when the Home Secretary next comes to the House and tells us categorically that she is right and that the Home Office advice is right when we still do not know why they got it so catastrophically wrong this time around? Surely she should now come to the House and explain why the Home Office got this so wrong, why it could not ask the right questions and why it did not take advice, listen to it and avoid taking the risk—a risk that could have added further considerable delays to this process.
Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)
The right hon. Lady is making good knockabout political points, but is it not the case that, given that Abu Qatada’s deportation process started in 2001, the real question she should be answering is why her party made so little progress in all that time whereas this Home Secretary has made so much progress in such a short time?
Yvette Cooper
We still have a problem in that we all want Abu Qatada deported but he has not yet been deported. I agree that the process has taken far too long in the British courts and in the European Courts. I even agree with the Justice Secretary that reforms need to be made to the European courts to try to speed things up although there are considerable questions about the progress he has been able to make. I do not think, however, that we should have self-inflicted problems with the Home Office creating additional delays by getting something so basic wrong. This is about the serious decisions the Home Office takes and if it is unable to learn the lessons of the past or to recognise the errors it has made there will be serious problems in the future.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
Do I gather that the right hon. Lady welcomes the fact that we got 47 countries to agree to get rid of these arrears so that there are not years and years of delay before things can get on? Does she welcome the fact that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has just won her appeal, which has not been delayed, and that we are now able to resume the ordinary deportation process? Why is she getting bogged down in procedural niceties that are now quite irrelevant and why did not her Government do anything about this for eight years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) has just asked?
Yvette Cooper
It is indeed gallant of the Justice Secretary to leap to the Home Secretary’s defence. They are huge friends—this is obviously a change of relationship between them. We are delighted to see their rapprochement.
I agree with the Justice Secretary that it is important to get rid of the arrears and try to deal with the backlogs at the European Court. That is a problem and I hope that some progress can be made. We are all very pleased that the Court rejected Abu Qatada’s appeal, but I must say that the Home Secretary made that more difficult, not easier. Abu Qatada should not have been able to appeal and she could have delayed her decision by a single day. The procedures matter because we do not want the Home Office to screw up important procedures. Whether it be in situations such as that when Raed Salah walked into this country because the Home Secretary did not get the procedures right to enable his being stopped at the border when she wanted him to be stopped, or whether it is about getting the date right, it does matter because this is not just any other omnishambles for this Government. It is not like a pasty tax or queues at the petrol pumps—this affects our national security. Whether about counter-terrorism or police on our streets, these decisions affect public safety. Whether on our borders or in our courts, these decisions affect our national security.
When we have 16,000 fewer police, a 10% increase in personal crime, 1,000 fewer foreign criminals being deported and this latest report showing 100 more illegal immigrants absconding according to the most recent figures, people are anxious. They are already worried about their jobs and their financial security and they do not want to have to worry about crime and public safety as well. This Queen’s Speech is failing the people of Britain just as the Home Office is failing on policing, border security and public confidence. It is a Queen’s Speech that offers no change, no hope and no direction from a Government who are not listening or learning. They should change course before it is too late.