Yvette Cooper
Main Page: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford)Department Debates - View all Yvette Cooper's debates with the Home Office
Tuesday 28th November 2023
(5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Criminal Justice Bill 2023-24 View all Criminal Justice Bill 2023-24 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Cleverly)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Victims of crime must have justice, and lawbreakers must face the consequences of their actions. This Criminal Justice Bill will give the police the powers they need to crack down on criminals and ensure that those who pose the biggest threat to the public are imprisoned for longer. It will give the public greater trust in the police and more confidence that the system works for them. We have always faced criminal threats, but those threats mutate and evolve, so we have to stay ahead of them by updating our technological capability and also updating our laws.
We are building on strong foundations. Compared with the year ending spring 2010, as measured by the crime survey of England and Wales, domestic burglary is down 57%, vehicle-related theft is down 39% and violent crime is down by 52%. Police-recorded homicide is down by 15% and the number of under-25 NHS admissions for assault by a sharp object is down by 26% in the year ending June 2023, compared with the year ending December 2019.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I thank the Home Secretary for giving way. It is so good to see him in the Chamber now. Could he tell us what the percentage increase has been in knife crime since 2015?
James Cleverly
The right hon. Lady has made an intervention. Let me make some progress now—[Interruption.] If she had the answer, she could have just stood up and said it rather than making this rather performative intervention. I will make some progress.
We have also taken the fight to the county lines drug gangs and to antisocial behaviour. Of course, these successes are not the Government’s alone, but we have enabled and supported that success with record funding for police; record numbers of police officers in England and Wales; expanding the powers to stop and search; and expanding the powers to tackle disruptive protests. Of course, we have also cut red tape, which means that more of those police officers are out on the beat fighting crime. We are building over 20,000 more prison places and ensuring that offenders face the toughest possible punishment for their crimes.
We will never rest, and we will go further still. This Bill will support the Government’s zero-tolerance approach to crime by giving the police, the courts and the other criminal justice agencies the powers they need to make our neighbourhoods even safer still.
Illegal drugs and knife crime bring chaos and misery to individuals. They destroy families and ruin neighbourhoods. Knife crime is a scourge in many of our cities and, during my time on the London Assembly and as a Member of this House, I have seen for myself the devastation it can bring to families.
Any family can be affected by drug misuse. I send a message to so-called casual users of recreational drugs that their actions underpin a vicious trade that has a profound and negative human cost. That is why we are giving the police more powers to seize and destroy bladed articles and to drug test more suspects upon arrest.
The Bill increases the maximum penalty for selling dangerous weapons to under-18s and creates a new criminal offence of possessing a bladed article with intent to cause harm. It will enable the police to seize, retain and destroy knives held in private when officers are lawfully on private property and have reasonable grounds to suspect the item or items will likely be used in violent crime.
The police will also be able to test individuals in police detention for specified class B and class C drugs, just as they can already test for specified class A drugs. This will mean that the police can direct more suspects using illegal drugs into treatment, which will help to reduce drug use, support recovery and, of course, cut crime. Those who refuse a drug test, or who fail to attend or stay for the duration of a directed drug assessment, may be committing a further offence.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
It is good to see the Home Secretary in his place. He was not here for the urgent question earlier, but he has been having a bit of a week of it. He had to pseudo-apologise yesterday to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) for his language. He has been rude about northern towns and rude about northern MPs. Although he may be all over the place on home affairs, we should perhaps be relieved that he is no longer in charge of diplomacy for the nation—although, to be fair, given the treatment of the Greek Prime Minister in the past 24 hours, things may have got even worse since he left.
As I said, the Home Secretary did not come to the Chamber earlier to answer the urgent question, but I gather from reports that he was meeting Back-Bench Conservative MPs. Certainly, yesterday, he had half his party standing up to complain about his policies. The problem seems to be that he thinks his Rwanda policy is batshit, that has driven his Back Benchers apeshit, and now his whole party is in deep sh-ambles.
The Home Secretary told us yesterday that he does not really know yet what is going on in the immigration system, so I assume from today’s speech that he is still getting the hang of what is going on in the criminal justice system. His claims about how well things are going are incredibly out of touch. Let me sum it up for him. After 13 years of Conservative Government, things are pretty dire: 90% of crimes now go unsolved; the charge rate has dropped by two thirds; more criminals are getting off; and more victims are being let down. The Prime Minister has an excuse when he says that things are great: he only sees things from a helicopter, but the rest of them have no such excuse and they are out of touch.
If a person commits a crime today, they are less than half as likely to be caught as they were under the previous Labour Government. That is the collapse of law and order under this Conservative Government, who have been in power for 13 years. In the past eight years, we have had eight Home Secretaries and 10 Justice Secretaries. We have huge court backlogs and delays, record numbers of crimes being dropped with no suspect identified, and record numbers of victims dropping out of the criminal justice process due to lack of support and unacceptable delays.
New technology has helped to prevent some volume crimes, but serious violence is up by 60% on 2015. The Home Secretary did not have the figures to hand on knife crime, but knife crime is up by 70%, and the number of young victims of violence is at its highest in a decade. I have spoken to mums who have lost their children through knife crime; they feel as if they have lost their future, but they want us to act to save other children’s lives.
Crime at the heart of our communities and town centres is also on the rise. We have seen shoplifting surge to record levels—up 25% in the past year alone—but town centre policing has dropped. Many towns have seen a huge drop in neighbourhood police on the beat and half the country say that they do not see police on the streets. There are now 10,000 fewer police and police community support officers in neighbourhood teams. When the Home Secretary talks about police numbers, we remember the 20,000 police officers that his party cut, for which we are still paying the price across the country. The lack of police on the street means that half the country never see them. That is the result of 10,000 fewer police and PCSOs on our streets, and that is the backdrop to this Bill. Quite simply, it is not enough to tackle the serious problems that the country and the criminal justice system face.
Mr Sheerman
My right hon. Friend is speaking with great authority on this. Every Member of this House knows how underfunded the police are. We have not only an underfunded police force, but a justice system that has been cut and cut and cut again. We must do something to build it up again, and perhaps the way we will do that is to have a new Labour Government.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right that huge damage has been done to policing and the criminal justice system. In addition, because police are often the public face of the criminal justice system, the fact that confidence in policing has been heavily knocked has an impact on confidence in and respect for the rule of law in our country. That is why it is so serious and why there ought to be cross-party support for restoring confidence in policing and the criminal justice system.
Mr Sheerman
One more very small point: I think my right hon. Friend knows of my interest in miscarriages of justice, but is it not a fact that in this underfunded criminal justice system we see more miscarriages of justice?
Yvette Cooper
It is certainly the case that far too many victims are not getting justice, because they are either dropping out of the system or being let down.
The Opposition support the Bill before us and we will support its Second Reading. Of course there will be individual measures that we need to pursue, but there are many measures in it that were Labour policies or that Labour has called for. However, the Bill simply does not go far enough to address the challenges that we face.
We welcome the fact that the Government have now agreed to Labour’s calls to crack down on antisocial behaviour by going after drug dealers with stronger closure orders and the introduction of the power of arrest for breaches of antisocial behaviour injunctions. In 2013, the then Conservative Home Secretary removed the power of arrest when antisocial behaviour injunctions were introduced, and we warned that they would not be strong enough. It has taken the Government 10 years to restore the power of arrest, but we welcome it.
On fraud, we called for the introduction of corporate criminal liability during the passage of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, so we are pleased to see it in this Bill now. We have also supported stronger sentences on sexual offences. We support the increase in sentencing for the most serious offences and the power to compel perpetrators to attend sentencing in person. Justice must be seen to be done and the victims of the most heinous crimes need to see justice done and sentence given with the perpetrator standing before the court.
We also welcome plans to tackle revenge porn and image-based abuse. The right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) makes a very important point on that, which we are keen to discuss further and support in Committee. We also welcome tougher sentences for those who commit murder at the end of a relationship.
It is welcome that the Government have ditched the plan to make cancelling tents their entire policy on homelessness, but we will need to pursue the detail of the measures in the Bill, because they do not address the root causes of homelessness. The last Labour Government cut rough sleeping by two thirds, but under the Conservatives that progress has been reversed and it is now up by 75%.
Paula Barker
In February last year, both Houses of Parliament supported the repeal of the Vagrancy Act 1824 via an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. However, no commencement date was included in the amendment, so the Vagrancy Act technically remains in force. The Government are now introducing replacement legislation via this Bill. Is my right hon. Friend as confused as I am about why that would be?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point about the detail and I hope that, in the evidence-gathering sessions in Committee, evidence is properly taken on that. It is an area where the legislation needs to be got right and concerns have been raised. There is also the wider problem of a toxic mix of rents and the failure to end no-fault evictions, which is hitting vulnerable people hard, and the Conservatives still have not kept their promises to act on that.
There is still a series of substantial omissions from the Bill that we would like to see added to it. There is nothing to ensure that neighbourhood policing is properly restored. We have set out proposals for 13,000 more neighbourhood police and police community support officers, and we want to see that underpinned in legislation.
There is nothing in the Bill to turn around the shocking collapse in charge rates. For example, there is no plan to tackle the problem of redaction—a problem I know the Policing Minister recognises—where officers effectively spend hours and the equivalent of a bottle of Tipp-Ex having to redact a whole series of things before files are even passed to the Crown Prosecution Service. Many have argued that legislation needs to be changed to tackle that. Doing so could save police officers hours and hours of time, and I think it is included in the police productivity review. Surely we ought to be able to tackle that, but it is currently not in the Bill.
The Bill is also not strong enough in its measures to tackle town centre crime. A law brought in by the Conservative Government, again around 10 years ago, means that shop thefts under £200 often are not investigated, even if the same gang comes back time and again. We should end that £200 rule to tackle the shoplifting gangs. We also have shop staff who are petrified to go to work when there are 850 incidents a day of violence and abuse against shop workers.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
The week before last, during Respect for Shopworkers Week, I had the pleasure of visiting one of my local Co-ops. They have had £155,000-worth of goods stolen in the first six months of this year. For many stores, that is enough to close them down. I commend USDAW—the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers—and the Co-op for the work they are doing on that, but the police are just not turning up or taking it seriously. I commend what my right hon. Friend says; let us see whether she can push the Government to move further here.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the impact of shoplifting. If town centres do not feel safe, it is local businesses that are hit and can end up going under as a result, undermining local economies and putting off local residents who want to go shopping. Sometimes elderly residents, in particular, will simply not go into town anymore if they do not feel safe, and if they feel that laws are just not being enforced when they watch people leaving the shops with a big bag of goods stolen from the shelves and see nothing being done. It is just not good enough.
That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) rightly called for stronger measures to tackle assaults on shop workers. The Government did finally agree, as a result of his campaigning, to an aggravated sentence for assaulting shop workers, but that is not enough. The whole point is to make it simpler for the police to take action and to send a clear message from Parliament to police that this is an offence we take immensely seriously. That is why Labour will be tabling amendments that reflect the campaigns by USDAW, the Co-op, Tesco, the British Retail Consortium and small convenience stores for a new law and tougher sentences for attacks on our shop workers. Everyone should have the right to work in safety and to live free from fear.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)
We do take retail theft and shoplifting very seriously and agree that more needs to be done, but may I draw the shadow Home Secretary’s attention, and that of the House, to the retail crime action plan, which the Government agreed with the National Police Chiefs’ Council just a few weeks ago? In that plan, the police commit to investigating reasonable lines of inquiry for all shoplifting cases, including running CCTV evidence through facial recognition software, attending the scene of a crime where that is necessary to gather evidence, where there has been an assault or where the offender has been detained, and using data analytics specifically to go after prolific offenders. All that is in addition to Project Pegasus, a joint project with retailers to go after serious and organised crime. I hope she will join me in welcoming the plan, which I believe will be very effective.
Yvette Cooper
I would gently say to the Minister that the fact that it is an announcement—
Yvette Cooper
It is a plan; it is not even an announcement of something that is going to happen. It is an announcement that there is a plan for the police to check CCTV when a theft has taken place. That just shows how bad things have got over the past 13 years. We welcome any work that is being done, including by the British Retail Consortium with the National Police Chiefs’ Council. However, the Government are not taking the action that they should be taking to underpin this. In particular, they are not changing the law either on assaults against shop workers or on the £200 limit, and neither are they supporting the neighbourhood police we need to do the work to deliver the plan. There are 10,000 fewer neighbourhood police and PCSOs on our streets and in our communities, and communities know that. It does not matter what the Policing Minister says or what figures he plucks from thin air: people know. They can see it. We all see it in our own towns in our own constituencies, and half the country now say they never see the police on the beat.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way, because the Policing Minister is a glutton for punishment on this one.
Chris Philp
The shadow Home Secretary is very kind to give way. I am sorry that facts and figures get in the way of her argument but, as I said at oral questions yesterday, the neighbourhood policing figures that she keeps quoting are unintentionally misleading. Local policing numbers cover neighbourhood policing, emergency response and others. Since 2015, which is the year that she cites, those numbers have gone up from 61,000 to 67,000, and overall policing numbers are at record levels, at 149,566—3,500 higher than under the last Labour Government.
Yvette Cooper
This is the problem with the Policing Minister: he just thinks that the country has never had it so good on crime and policing. As far as the country is concerned, he is incredibly out of touch. That is not what is happening in towns and cities across the country. The idea that we can just merge neighbourhood policing and response teams, which are different things, shows that he simply does not understand the importance of neighbourhood policing or what it actually does.
Neighbourhood police are the teams who are located locally. They will not just be called off for a crisis at the other end of the borough, district or force area; they are the police officers who can deal with local crimes. They are not the officers who have to deal with rising levels of mental health crisis, which we know so many of the response units have to deal with. There has been a big shift away from neighbourhood policing and into response policing because the police are being reactive, dealing with crises that this Conservative Government have totally failed to prevent for 13 years.
The Government have demolished a lot of the prevention work and teamworking between neighbourhood officers and other agencies in local areas, and as a result the other response officers are having to pick up the pieces instead. The Policing Minister’s approach just shows why the Tories are failing after 13 years. It is not the answer.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Ind)
On the restoration of police numbers, may I inform the Policing Minister that in Cleveland the numbers have been slashed by 500 since 2010? They have still not been restored, so we are still down in those numbers. On retail crime, we cannot take any lessons from the Conservative party—the Conservative police and crime commissioner in Cleveland received a caution for handling goods stolen from his then supermarket employer. This stuff about retail crime is, quite frankly, hogwash.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point—[Interruption.] I do not think the claims made from a sedentary position by the Policing Minister help him in the slightest, given the challenges involving the current police and crime commissioner.
We ought to have a consensus on tackling knife crime. There are some measures in the Bill, but they do not go anywhere near far enough. I urge the Home Secretary to consider a proper offence of child criminal exploitation to prevent people drawing children into criminal activity in the first place, as well as stronger action on the loopholes that still allow online marketplaces to sell knives. We have had multiple announcements over the years about taking action against zombie knives, but it is groundhog day, because far too many are still being sold easily and not enough is being done about it.
The Bill also does not go far enough on violence against women and girls. We still need rape investigation units in every police force, we need all 999 control rooms to have domestic abuse experts, and we need stronger requirements on police forces to use the tactics and tools normally reserved for organised crime and terrorist organisations to identify and go after the most dangerous repeat abusers and rapists and get them off our streets.
Too many things are not in the Bill. Overall, there is still no proper plan to raise confidence in policing and the criminal justice system. That confidence has plummeted, putting respect for law and order in our country at risk. We support the Bill and will work across parties to strengthen the measures in it, but it will not tackle the serious problems that we face. Security is the bedrock of opportunity. If people do not feel safe—if they do not believe that anyone will come or anything will be done when things go wrong—that undermines confidence in their community, in their way of life and in the rule of law in our country.
That is what is at stake here, that is why incremental measures are not enough, and that is why we need to tackle the crisis of confidence and halve serious violence. Labour has committed to halving serious violence, including violence against women and girls, and to increasing policing confidence, the number of criminals who are charged, and the number of victims who get justice. Those ought to be shared objectives, but for too long the Conservatives have undermined them. That is why we need change.
Priti Patel
The hon. Member is absolutely right. We have discussed that issue more broadly in relation to an end-to-end criminal justice system being fit for purpose: working to a sensible timeframe; the police being able to process the cases with the Crown Prosecution Service; and then, obviously, the cases going to court. I am afraid that there is a lot of merit in the whole debate, particularly around sexual violence and rape cases. We have discussed the matter many times and much more can be done.
Good support has been brought in to address violence against women and girls—the rape review has taken place and there has been investment in independent domestic violence advisers—but there are fundamental criminal justice system issues around cases of this nature, including: the time such cases take; the level of attrition; and the retraumatisation of victims, because these cases are absolutely appalling. I have raised this subject in the House many times, including from the Dispatch Box, and have spoken about personal cases that have come to me through constituents. We all have tragic constituency cases, and we have to make sure that we are strong advocates to bring about justice for those victims.
Let me turn to a number of strong measures that are already in place. A great deal of work has taken place to tackle drugs gangs, organised crime and county lines. The Government deserve great credit for that and for their work on the ring of steel. I used to harp on about the fact that we do not grow these drugs in our country—and some are obviously manufactured—but it is vital that we have in place a ring of steel around our ports and airports to make sure that we do absolutely everything we can to stop at source the scourge of terrible chemicals and drugs coming into our country. We should never, ever stop doing that work; and that goes back to the point about the investment required in our ports and in law enforcement.
The violence against women and girls strategy and the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 have helped victims of the most horrific crimes, but I will touch on what more can be done. I welcome the new Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris), to her place. I look forward to working with her on these sensitive and difficult issues.
On policing, the Government have enshrined the police covenant in statute, given the police more powers to fight crime and increased prison sentences. That is all part of offender management and making our communities safer.
Yvette Cooper
I know that the former Home Secretary takes the police covenant very seriously. Does she agree that, as well as the police covenant, we should have a police bravery award for those who lose their lives in the line of duty?
Priti Patel
The right hon. Lady is absolutely right; we have had discussions about that point previously. I think this might be an opportune moment to pay tribute to those police officers who have lost their lives defending communities, being braver than ever and going after the criminals out there. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] We see so many acts of bravery, but I am sorry to say that they are sometimes not recognised enough. A lot of our police officers sadly get a bad rap because of other reporting issues and all sorts of things, but the reality is that we should pay tribute to and give the right recognition to those who are out there on the frontline, defending us. The right hon. Lady will be familiar with the police bravery awards—what a sobering moment, when we honour our police officers—but we must do more to represent the fallen and to protect family members. That is why the police covenant is so important. I would like this House and Ministers in particular to do much more collectively to recognise that bravery, because the families of officers are affected in a very challenging way.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Laura Farris)
It is a pleasure to close this important debate on the Second Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill, a Bill that puts public protection and community confidence at its core. It has a strong empirical basis, building on the detailed work undertaken by the Law Commission, by Baroness Casey into misconduct in the Metropolitan police, by Clare Wade KC into domestic homicide and coercive control, and by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse.
It consolidates the significant progress this Government have made since 2010 and it was disappointing to hear the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the shadow Home Secretary, only rely on the statistics from police recorded crime when she knows as well as I do that the Office for National Statistics says that the correct measure is the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which provides—
Laura Farris
I will not because I have little time. That survey provides a more reliable measure of long-term trends than police recorded data.
Laura Farris
If we use the correct measure, the regrettable conclusion for the Opposition is that like-for-like crime is down by 56%.
Laura Farris
Violent crime is down from where it was in 2010 by 52%, and domestic burglaries are down by 57%. If we compare—[Interruption.] If we compare where we were in 2019 to today—
Laura Farris
Domestic abuse, a sensitive category of crime, has fallen between 2019, before the pandemic, to today by 16%. [Interruption.]
Yvette Cooper
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Minister will know that the time is not limited. We do have time and she has named me. I do understand that she has the right not to take an intervention but she will also know that, having named me, as a courtesy to the House, she would normally do so.
Mr Deputy Speaker
That is not strictly a point of order for the Chair. The right hon. Lady understands the procedures extremely well.