Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: The work of the Home Office, HC 505
Tuesday 17 December 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 17 December 2024.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Dame Karen Bradley (Chair); Shaun Davies; Mr Paul Kohler; Robbie Moore; Margaret Mullane; Chris Murray; Mr Connor Rand; Joani Reid; Jake Richards.
Questions 1 - 70
Witnesses
I: Rt Hon Yvette Cooper, Home Secretary, Sir Matthew Rycroft KCMG CBE, Permanent Secretary, Home Office and Simon Ridley, Second Permanent Secretary, Home Office.
Witnesses: Rt Hon Yvette Cooper, Sir Matthew Rycroft KCMG CBE and Simon Ridley.
Q1 Chair: We are delighted to welcome the Home Secretary, the Permanent Secretary and the Second Permanent Secretary from the Home Office. We have a number of questions for you, as I am sure you can imagine, but I know you want to start with an opening statement so over to you, Home Secretary.
Yvette Cooper: Thank you very much, Chair. It is very kind of you to allow me to do so. Thank you for having me at what I think has always been the best Select Committee in Parliament. There is certainly a sense of karma for me to be sitting here, and for Dame Diana Johnson as well. I think there is probably also a bit of karma for the senior officials who have worked so brilliantly in the Home Office for us over the last six months, but who previously appeared before us at the Select Committee. I think they had a sense of karma, seeing us prepare for a Select Committee.
Thank you very much for having me. Obviously, the responsibilities of the Home Office are not just extensive but hugely important. We have responsibility for the Safer Streets Mission with the ambition to halve violence against women and girls and knife crime in a decade, alongside rebuilding confidence in policing and the criminal justice system where the most important milestone is around rebuilding neighbourhood policing.
We have responsibility for two of the underpinning foundations for the Government’s work around protecting national security and strengthening our border security, which means in practice the action to tackle the criminal gangs who have taken hold along the Channel and the work to bring both legal and illegal migration down.
We have made two new announcements today and I want to highlight them to make sure that the Committee has seen them. The first is on policing, where we have set out next year’s police settlement, which means extra funding of up to £1 billion. At a time when obviously the public finances are under pressure, it is a sign of how seriously we take the importance of getting neighbourhood police back on to the beat. That is included as part of the police settlement that we have set out.
Secondly, around national security, we set out for the House today an update on a series of reforms and progress to prevent radicalisation and terrorism where we know the primary threat is still Islamist extremism followed by far-right extremism, with growing levels of mixed ideology extremism, and where we are seeing increased numbers of young people being drawn into terrorist cases. That is why we have announced the introduction of a new youth diversion order that would allow the police to intervene at an earlier stage as well as measures to strengthen the Prevent programme, including introducing a new Prevent commissioner to be appointed in the new year to be able to monitor performance and effectiveness.
Q2 Chair: I want to start with some questions about the culture of the Home Office because it is something that you were critical of when you sat in this seat and when you were Shadow Home Secretary. What steps have you taken to address the criticisms that you previously made and what you have found on being in the Home Office?
Yvette Cooper: I have been very impressed by the dedication and determination of the civil servants right across the Home Office, the incredible hard work, and the commitment that so many people have to the core purpose of the Home Office, which is fundamentally about keeping people safe, whether that is about security of our borders or security of our streets. Also impressive is the huge amount of work that has been done to support us as new Ministers to support manifesto commitments and to work at great pace on the challenges that we face.
We have made a series of changes that are about addressing some historic cultural issues. After the Windrush scandal, which was obviously a huge stain on not just the Home Office but the British state, the Wendy Williams report was accepted by the Home Office, but the Windrush unit had been disbanded. We have restored the Windrush unit and the idea is that that is to be very much the champion for the values that were identified as part of the Williams review, whether that is about seeing the face behind the case, or about being able to swiftly respond when concerns are raised by the public, by people who are coming into contact with the Home Office, being able to have that swift response, identifying problems, and also being able to move quickly to tackle things rather than just getting stuck, as I think perhaps the Home Office had been in the past.
Chair: We will move on to some questions around migration and I want to bring in Paul Kohler.
Q3 Mr Kohler: Your Government, like the previous Government, are talking about the need to reduce immigration. You are also talking of course about the need to grow the economy. Immigration is important to growing the economy. How do you square the circle of lowering immigration but growing the economy? How will you balance the trade-offs between the different sectors that need immigration to function and to increase productivity?
Yvette Cooper: Immigration has always been important with people coming to the UK over generations to work in public services, to found businesses and so on. However, it needs to be properly controlled and managed so that the system is fair and effective. In the space of just four years, we have seen net migration quadruple. In particular, we have seen that increase be driven by, I think, the trebling of work visas, a huge increase in overseas recruitment, and at the same time training in the UK in some areas was often being reduced. Take, for example, an area like engineering where there have been persistently high levels of recruitment from abroad while we have also seen a reduction in the number of engineering apprenticeships in the UK. To my mind, that is a system that is broken, that is just not working.
That is why we believe that net migration needs to come down. We think that those record high numbers were not the right thing for the UK. We have to bring net migration numbers down. We have to do so in a way that recognises that overseas recruitment had driven a lot of the increase and that therefore what we need is a new system that means we are better linking the immigration system with requirements for training, for skills, and for looking at the UK labour market.
The Migration Advisory Committee published their report just today and I have not managed to see the whole report yet, but I have seen some elements of it. It is very much looking at the issues of how you link what the Migration Advisory Committee does with Skills England and the Scottish, Welsh and other local skills organisations. It also looks at the work that the DWP needs to do around bringing more people back into the labour market and the work of the Industrial Strategy Council around what the private sector workforce strategies should be so that we do much more to recruit from the UK, alongside having stronger visa controls in place.
Q4 Mr Kohler: Addressing the training deficit will take a long while to feed through into the system. You are talking about reducing immigration very swiftly. How do you square that?
Yvette Cooper: I think we also have to have stronger visa controls in place. The policies that were introduced by the previous Government after the implementation of Brexit ended up with things like a 20% discount for wages for overseas recruitment. I think that was completely the wrong approach. It encouraged undercutting. It was an incentive for overseas recruitment rather than an incentive to recruit or train in the UK. Also, the salary threshold was not increased for a very long time.
We have to have the proper visa controls in place but alongside the visa controls we want to see much stronger links to looking at where we need skills training or other workforce policies in the UK.
Other things that we have done are to ask the Migration Advisory Committee to look particularly at IT and engineering because those are sectors where we know there have been high levels of recruitment from abroad, to look in much more detail at why have there been such high levels of recruitment from overseas and at what more could be done swiftly to address some of those issues in the UK.
Q5 Mr Kohler: Talking about particular sectors, there will be different pressures on each of us. Are you talking to the universities? Are you talking to the health and social care sector and those Departments to address the specifics?
Yvette Cooper: Our plan is to publish a White Paper in the new year that will set out how we will bring that migration down and will set out much more detail about how we want the new system to work, how to have a much more coherent approach to the labour market, how to link the work of the Migration Advisory Committee with those other organisations as well. It will need links into other organisations—universities, training bodies and so on—and also to recognise particular sectors. In the social care sector, for example, we need a proper workforce strategy. For example, we have talked about having fair pay agreements in place for social care.
We must have a proper, medium-term strategy for sectors instead of what, to me, just felt like what we ended up with was almost a free market approach to the labour market and to migration, which is effectively a free-for-all for employers to be able to recruit from wherever they wanted to. When we had some of those discounts, when it was too easy for the exploitation to take place, then too often what you got was employers recruiting from overseas, when what we should have had was much more of a workforce strategy here in the UK.
Mr Kohler: I look forward to the White Paper. Do we know when it will be out?
Yvette Cooper: I will not set out the precise week or month—you know that it would be unwise for any Government Minister to do that—but we will be publishing the White Paper in the new year.
Q6 Chair: I have two questions to follow up. First, you have talked about talking to the various skills bodies. Does that mean you could be looking at differences in regional immigration if Skills Scotland says they want something different from Skills England?
Yvette Cooper: The Migration Advisory Committee already has to look at what the different labour market challenges might be in different parts of the country because of course that is going to vary. However, we have a national immigration system and the approach to visas and to visa controls needs to be a national one.
Q7 Chair: You talked about unethical employers. The GLAA has had a big role to play on unethical employers. With that organisation being folded into the Fair Work Agency, I am concerned that that body will sit underneath DBT while the policy body is still in the Home Office. How will you make sure that the Home Office can still ensure that your policy priorities are delivered by that agency?
Yvette Cooper: Our intention is for this to be about strengthening action against exploitation, some of which will be exploitation of UK resident workers and sometimes be exploitation of people who have been recruited from overseas, but overall we need to be tackling exploitation much more widely. The intention of the legislation and of the policy is substantially to tackle that exploitation.
We then want to link that work and the action against exploitation with stronger penalties in the immigration system. If you have employers breaching other aspects of employment law, for example, persistently not paying the minimum wage to any of their workers, to be honest, they just should not be allowed to use the immigration visa system and to be sponsors recruiting from abroad.
We look at all aspects, but we integrate the enforcement approach we want to take from the immigration point of view with the enforcement approach that we want to take from a broader employment point of view as well.
Another thing that we are doing is to focus on illegal working enforcement. We have had a 33% increase in enforcement raids over the summer and that has led to a big increase in arrests and also to an increase in prosecutions. Six employers have been prosecuted for illegally employing people since the election. That is a very substantial increase. Over the previous two and a half years, there had been four prosecutions, which was very low. It is still nowhere near where it needs to be—we must obviously keep up that action—but it is a sign of accelerating work in that area.
Q8 Jake Richards: In connection with the link that Paul was asking about between skills and immigration, I wanted to ask about the immigration skills charge. It was introduced in 2017, designed partially at least to confront that mischief, if I can put it like that. However, it seems as if that money just goes into Treasury coffers and is not spent on skills specifically. Do the Government have any plans to reform that or look at it?
Yvette Cooper: One of the things that we will do in the White Paper is to better set out the links in what I sometimes think of as the quad arrangement. You would think of the approach that employers need to take, which is as represented effectively by the Industrial Strategy Council; the approach that we need to take to get more people back into work, to be able to tackle some of the problems in activity, which is the DWP side of things; look at the skills side of it, which in England is Skills England, but there will be other bodies across the country and it also has the mayoral role; and the fourth side of it would be the Migration Advisory Committee.
The immigration skills surcharge has been an important part of saying that employers need to do their bit and that as sponsors, they need to do their bit as well. However, I think there has never been a clear enough link about the requirements on employers, particularly in key sectors, which have consistently recruited from abroad and where there have been lower levels of training in the UK for a very long time. People have been raising concerns, for example, about digital skills and digital training levels in the UK for a very long time, but we still have these very high levels of overseas recruitment in IT. The skill surcharge is not working as a system to sort that problem out. We need to look at new approaches, and I think particularly to look at key workforce areas where there are the high levels of overseas recruitment.
Q9 Chair: Still on skills, student numbers have always been a topic of discussion in the immigration figures. Do you intend to keep student numbers in the overall migration figures?
Yvette Cooper: I think that international students are always really important to the UK. They bring investment into the UK. They also bring long-term links to countries all over the world. International students will always be important.
From Opposition, we supported the changes that the previous Government had made around dependents for the short-term graduate courses and medium-term graduate courses, and I think that was the right thing to do. Sometimes people say, “Can you cut the figures in different ways?” Ultimately, we have said, our focus is on looking at the net migration for work in particular, but overall net migration needs to come down. Within that, we will continue to support international students coming to the UK to study, because I think that is a good thing to do.
Chair: But you will keep them in the figures?
Yvette Cooper: I am not sure it makes that much odds, if you know what I mean. The numbers are there, they are real, and you can add them up in different ways.
Q10 Mr Kohler: Will universities be free to admit as many qualified overseas students as they can or will there be limits placed on them?
Yvette Cooper: We continue to think that international students are very important. However, I also think that universities may need to make sure that their systems are not being misused. There have been cases in the past of misuse around student visas. Universities also need to ensure that there is adequate housing in the local area for graduate students, for example, who are being recruited and so on.
There are systems around the visa arrangements for students. I think it is important that it is not done with universities operating in isolation from the broader issues with local councils and communities, making sure that housing and so on is provided. But my sense has always been that universities are keen to do that.
Q11 Mr Kohler: Subject to that, are they free?
Yvette Cooper: I think we will continue to work with universities and with other organisations to make sure that we have both the benefits of international students coming to the UK, but also make sure that there are proper rules in place so we do not have misuse, and also proper arrangements for housing.
Q12 Chris Murray: I want to ask about the e-visa system that is due to come in, which is of course moving from physical documents for people with visas to a digital document, which obviously does make sense but is a fantastically complex administrative task for any Department. It was due to come in in a couple of weeks. You have decided to push it back but only slightly. What prompted your decision to push back e-visas coming in, and how confident can you be that you can solve any problems by April when you want to move over?
Yvette Cooper: Seema Malhotra, our Minister for Migration and Citizenship, has spent a lot of time working through the detail on this. I think the intention behind the e-visa system is absolutely the right one. Having a digital approach to borders and visas means that you can have a much more streamlined approach to people travelling to and fro across borders. It also means you can have much more effective checks, swift checks, around employment and housing and all those sorts of things. It also helps to tackle fraud and other problems and makes for a much more effective system.
We did review the plan. We inherited it from the last Government—it was right that they should intend to do it—but we did review the plans after the election. We were applying a Windrush test to it, applying a test to say what is the risk that some people might end up with this not working, even if it works for most people? People who are unable to verify their identity, do not have the right documents or who are vulnerable may get caught in the system. It was for that reason—and Seema Malhotra has been going through in a lot of detail—that we concluded effectively that there needed to be an extended implementation period to provide more time to make sure we do not have a drop-dead moment when everything has to be implemented, but actually not all of the systems are in place or not everybody has their e-visa and their UKVI account set up and running.
We do still urge everybody to get their UKVI account set up but we will allow the existing biometric permits to be used for travel documents in the meantime for the first few months as part of that phased implementation. It is not really a delay to the implementation; it is more saying we are doing a phased implementation to make sure that we can address any problems as we go. We will keep all of that under review. It is more a set of principles in our approach.
Q13 Chris Murray: It is reassuring to hear you draw the parallel with Windrush, because we know that having even 0.1% of people being caught up in these systems can have catastrophic effects for them. Do you know how many people still need to sign up for their e-visa and get their UKVI account? What are you doing to make sure that number rises to 100% of people?
Yvette Cooper: The number does change week by week because of the numbers of people whose permits run out, new ones are granted and so on. Also people leave the country so the numbers are fluid. Overall, however, it is estimated that around 4 million people have biometric permits and need to switch to e-visas. More than 3 million people have already registered for their UKVI account, and we have a lot of work in place, including support through different local organisations and so on, to encourage people to sign up as rapidly as possible.
Q14 Chris Murray: I will move on to another topic—the new Border Security Command. Obviously, this is one of the Government’s big priorities, it is an issue that a lot of our constituents care about, and it monopolises a lot of attention. Can you tell us how the Border Security Command differs from anything that we have seen before, and how therefore you see it having a different effect?
Yvette Cooper: We previously had the Small Boats Operational Command. That is a good set of operations led by Duncan Capps that is extremely effective in the work that it does and operates along the Channel. It also does the security check operations at Western Jet Foil.
A lot of the work that Duncan does is also directly with immediate French counterparts around operations in the Channel. That is important. The Border Security Command brings together not just the work of the Small Boats Operational Command but the prevention work that goes much further back along the criminal smuggler supply chains and networks. For example, it looks at the much broader issues around border security that include Border Force, the National Crime Agency, the work of the Home Office intelligence teams, the work of the Foreign Office, and UKIC, the UK intelligence and security communities.
Martin Hewitt, who is the lead Border Security Commander appointed earlier this year, has been with me on the trips to Iraq where we have been talking to the Iraqi Government and the Kurdistan authorities about the stronger work we can do together and the stronger action that can be taken against some of the criminal smuggler gangs that operate—Kurdish Iraqi gangs. The Kurdish and Iraqi authorities want to take much stronger action against those gangs. We want much stronger action taken against them. So too do the French authorities because they are operating in northern France, as do the German authorities because a lot of them are operating through Germany as well. However, there has been no co-ordination of the work to go after those gang networks.
As a result of the work by the Border Security Command and Martin’s work we are talking now particularly to Germany and to Europol about a much stronger Europol taskforce operation against those Kurdish and Iraqi gang networks, stretching all the way along that route and linking in with the Kurdish and Iraqi authorities. That is a part of the Border Security Command that would never have been part of the Small Boats Operational Command.
Q15 Chris Murray: I understand the point you are making and I think that the analysis that it is very international makes sense. However, the task being set for this command is enormous. Can it be done? I understand your diagnosis but how will this command be able to do that? You have listed a huge number of countries and a huge number of policy areas. Is it possible for one command to pull it off?
Yvette Cooper: We are investing £150 million over the next 18 months in establishing the command and strengthening resources. That includes some additional resources for the National Crime Agency and their investigators as well. The model that we based this on was the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism that was set up under the last Labour Government after 9/11 and 7/7, which was a way of approaching the counter-terrorism work that was needed and that did not exist in a co-ordinated way before those appalling terrorist attacks. It needed to be pulled together.
The OSCT pulled together the work of the intelligence agencies, the work of counter-terror policing and the prevention work—the Prevent work in local authorities—and so on as well. It was effectively overarching work. It is not going to replace the work of the National Crime Agency. We need the National Crime Agency to be doing the work with Europol and with law enforcement across Europe. It does not replace the work of the Border Force, which does the actual checks when people arrive in the UK. It becomes the overarching co-ordinating approach that can draw all the others together so that we have a coherent strategy that, over time, will be more broadly around border security. Right now, the priority is the smuggler and trafficking gangs that are operating in the Channel because those gangs are undermining border security and putting lives at risk, and going after those gangs has to be the priority.
Q16 Chris Murray: I have one further question, or maybe two. What you have mentioned sounds like a lot of engagement is with other countries, working with European countries and further field. Can you tell us a bit about how that is going to work in practice because a lot of this stuff has happened before—obviously that was before Brexit but also before the international immigration flows changed as much as they have. How are you sure that this is going to be up-to-date and ready for the challenges of 2025 rather than those of 10 years ago?
Yvette Cooper: We had a meeting of the Calais Group last week—the UK with the interior Ministers from France, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium. I met with the Italian Interior Minister at the weekend and have further conversations with the French and German Interior Ministers coming forward. We are very much trying to work to strengthen law enforcement across our borders because if criminal gangs are operating across borders, law enforcement needs to operate across borders as well.
We have lost quite a bit of that law enforcement co-operation in the reality of recent years and we want to rebuild it. Having looked at how law enforcement takes place, I think that cross-border law enforcement across all of our countries is much weaker than it should be. There is a growing interest now across a lot of European countries in going after those criminal smuggler gangs. It is becoming a shared priority and that it why it was a central part of the G7 agreement that we reached. Some of it does involve things like changing laws. As part of the agreement with Germany, they have agreed to strengthen their law so that it is possible to go after the supply chains.
It was becoming too difficult for German law enforcement to go after boats that are being held in warehouses in Germany. They were not being used in Germany or putting lives at risk in Germany, so they needed to be able to strengthen their laws so that they could go after the people who are organising those supply chains, which ultimately are putting lives at risk.
Q17 Chair: Clearly, we were part of Europol. We had the European Arrest Warrant and so on. We are not there now. Are you considering rejoining any of those justice and home affairs measures?
Yvette Cooper: We are clearly staying out of the EU and that means that we are out of several of their legal frameworks and have to co-operate on a different basis than the one we had before. We are trying to work to get as much co-operation in place as possible. Law enforcement ought to be an area of shared interest across borders. We are looking at areas around the Europol task force. We can still be part of Europol task forces. We obviously cannot lead them but we can be part of them and we can work closely with other European countries on them. Also, we want better information sharing. We do have good arrangements for intelligence sharing around terrorism, for example. However, we do not have them around crime or organised immigration crime. It is one of the things we are working to strengthen. It would make it much easier to be able to go after some of those criminal gang networks.
Q18 Shaun Davies: Clearly, it is a key mission and a foundational mission of the new Government. What appetite do you detect from our European colleagues? Where does this feature in their prioritisation? You mentioned Germany, for example. Why would Germany want to prioritise this piece of work using their own assets of state?
Yvette Cooper: The German Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, would say that the same criminal gang networks that are operating in Germany, are operating in northern France, organising boats across the Channel and stretching across Europe as well. That is causing challenges in Germany.
The smuggler networks, for example, are facilitating dangerous journeys into Germany and also facilitating dangerous journeys into the UK. Some of those networks are also involved in other kinds of organised crime, which also cause challenges in other countries as well. I speak particularly of some of those Iraqi Kurdish networks but there are other networks. It is just that the Iraqi Kurdish networks happen to be the ones we have been working with the Iraqi Government on. Those networks also particularly affect Germany.
In France, the French Interior Minister has, in the last month, announced additional French resources for northern France for policing along the coast and going after the gang networks, including effectively a new chief to be in charge of and co-ordinating those operations. That is also incredibly welcome, and we are very keen to work more closely with them as well.
Q19 Shaun Davies: Just thinking about our European colleagues though, could they do more or are you impressed by what they have done up to this point? Clearly, in order for this Government to achieve their ambitions to smash the criminal gangs, we do need European colleagues, and international colleagues for that matter, to co-operate and see this as a matter of urgency for their own states as well.
Yvette Cooper: In the conversations that I had in Italy at the weekend, the shared interest was around going after the illicit finance. The Italian Government have been doing a huge amount. They have parallel challenges with boats across the Mediterranean. Interestingly, the work they have done on a combination of law enforcement, but also prevention work upstream, particularly around North Africa, has led to a reduction—a very significant reduction—more than a 50% reduction, in Mediterranean boat crossings over the last year. Italy is very keen to work with us on the illicit finance, some of the Hawala banking networks, some of the networks that are being used to underpin the smugglers, where both Italy and the UK have significant expertise in finance. It is true that we need that co-operation. That is why we are spending a lot of time working on it because I think the best way to strengthen our border security is to work with neighbours on the other side of those borders who face the same challenges, rather than just standing on the shoreline shouting at the sea.
Q20 Mr Kohler: One of the drivers of irregular arrivals is, of course, the relative paucity of safe and legal means of entering the UK. Has the Home Office looked at any ways in which to increase the number of safe and legal passages and routes?
Yvette Cooper: The UK will always need to do its bit alongside other countries to help those who have fled persecution, what we have done with the Ukraine programme, with Hong Kong, with Afghanistan, and so on. We made some changes to the Afghanistan arrangements earlier this year to help reunite family members who had been separated in the evacuation of Kabul because that had not been done.
All I would say on this is that I strongly do not think that it is an alternative to going after the criminal gangs and the work that we need to do in law enforcement to prevent the small-boat crossings. What happened in 2022 was a clear example of what happens where you have that big increase in numbers when some of the gangs were effectively doing a massive advertising campaign in Albania. The criminal gangs will just advertise to fill the spaces that they have. If they have spaces on these incredibly dangerous boats, they will run advertising campaigns to fill them. For them, this is a criminal industry that is based on them making hundreds of millions of pounds of profits from putting lives at risk. If we let them get away with it—and they have been getting away with it for far too long—they will just keep advertising, whether it is on TikTok, whether it is on different forms of social media, and they will just keep putting people into these incredibly dangerous boats.
It is worth talking to some of the people at Western Jet Foil about how they have to respond. These boats are flimsy and they can fold inwards. The smugglers put the women and children in the middle of the boat. When the boat folds, they can end up being crushed. It is not just that people drown, they can also end up being crushed to death because of these incredibly dangerous death traps that the gangs are profiting from. That is why I think you have no alternative but to go after the criminal gangs.
Q21 Mr Kohler: As an alternative, is it part of the solution or are you saying that there is no prospect of expanding safe and legal routes into the UK?
Yvette Cooper: I think we already have different forms of safe routes, that will always need to be part of the UK system. That is one of the things that we did with the family reunion for Afghanistan and that will always need to be part of the system. All countries will always need to do their bit but I think it is just not an alternative to the enforcement we need against the criminal gangs who are making such huge profits.
Q22 Mr Rand: The Government have committed to significantly increasing returns. You have talked about some of the co-ordination and international co-operation required. Could you outline further what steps you are taking to increase the number of returns of people who do not have the right to be in the United Kingdom?
Yvette Cooper: Immediately after the election, we moved up to 1,000 staff into the returns and enforcement work more widely, looking at direct returns. We have had 13,500 returns since the election. That includes 33 charter flights and I think four of the biggest return charter flights that the Home Office has ever operated and a 25% increase in enforced returns as well. The principle behind this is that the rules need to be respected and enforced for people to be able to have confidence in the system, for us to be able to restore order to both the asylum and the immigration system. We have to be able to restore order in that way.
Of course, some of the work is about the organisation of the return, some of it is about the earlier stages of enforcement, and that is why we also set out the details about the increases, for example, in the number of raids on illegal working, and some of the checks on employers that we are doing. We have taken a broader approach to returns and enforcement.
We have been looking at some of the key arrangements for different countries. In some areas, we obviously want to get actual formal returns agreements. In other areas, it is simply about making the existing systems work more effectively and trying to troubleshoot some of the arrangements about how fast you can get papers in place, how you can get quick agreements with other countries. We have that work under way as well.
Q23 Mr Rand: Returns agreements are obviously part of the jigsaw in making sure that we can swiftly return people who have no right to be in the United Kingdom. We have seen the new returns agreement that has been signed with Iraq but of course we did already have a returns agreement with Iraq. Thinking about that agreement and the work that Government are doing, how can we have confidence that these efforts are going to be different and ultimately succeed where previous Governments’ efforts failed?
Yvette Cooper: We have had previous returns arrangements with Iraq. When I visited, we agreed to strengthen those returns arrangements. There is a lot more work that we still want to do. The numbers of returns to Iraq have still been relatively low. There is a series of things that we still want to do and we discussed doing them in partnership with the Iraqi Government. Some of that work is around the issuing of papers, including the issuing of documents by the Iraqi embassy here in the UK. Some of it is looking at the issues around what the travel arrangements are and the most effective travel arrangements.
There is a lot of work under way at the moment. I hope that in the new year, I will be able to update the Committee about the work that we are doing jointly with the Iraqi Government to try to speed up and troubleshoot some of those systems and problems.
Q24 Chris Murray: Can I just come in briefly on returns with one follow-up question? I want to talk about voluntary returns because obviously returns have increased, but voluntary returns have increased. I absolutely accept that. However, they are still at a lower level than they were 12 years ago when net migration was a third of what it is today. Do you have a plan to focus on voluntary returns, and do you not see them as the low-hanging fruit that we could be pursuing to increase returns?
Yvette Cooper: Yes, that is absolutely part of our work because making it easier for voluntary returns is obviously a much simpler, much more effective way to arrange things. Many of the charter flights that have been organised are charter flights for voluntary returns. That is a lot of what has been taking place.
Q25 Chair: There is clearly a global, multilateral angle here. Are you working with partners to encourage the UN to take further steps to look at global migration flows? This affects the whole world, so this is surely something that the General Assembly should be looking at. Maybe there should be more annual heads of government meetings about it, maybe a draft returns agreement, a model returns agreement that could be implemented. Are you working on those kinds of areas as well?
Yvette Cooper: We obviously already work with the IOM on some of the voluntary returns arrangements. That has been in place for some time. Interesting, while I was in Italy, one of the meetings I had was with the Italian UNHCR and IOM representatives, just talking about the work that they were doing, including around some of the safe returns arrangements that Italy is operating as well.
I do think there is more that we can do internationally on this. It is clear that EU countries are trying to work together on better returns arrangements for those countries. There is an interesting question for us about how we might work alongside the work that they are doing, especially if there are returns arrangements. For example, if we have good returns arrangements in place that other countries want to replicate, and vice versa, the more that we can do of that the better. If people who do not have a right to be in another country can travel safely back to their own homes, that is obviously much better for all countries.
Q26 Shaun Davies: In terms of the push and pull factors—climate change, war, jobs, skills—what is your measure of success? Is it migration numbers going down or return numbers going up? How do you measure success in that space?
Yvette Cooper: We need to increase returns because we need to increase the credibility of the system. If there is no proper sense that the rules are respected, that the rules are enforced, people do not have confidence, in the asylum system or the immigration system. Returns are still significantly lower than they were under the last Labour Government. You have seen those problems over an extended period, even if there had been work done in recent years. You always have to have a system of respect for the rules, and that is about restoring order to the system.
Of course, we also need to be preventing dangerous journeys in the first place. The Italian Government use an interesting phrase. They talk about the right not to migrate, in other words, the right to have a safe home, to be able to get a job in your own home country, to be able to feel that you have a future in your home country, rather than feeling that the only way to find a future is to make a dangerous journey. Therefore, you also need that international work around how to prevent people needing to travel or to make dangerous journeys in the first place. Preventing journeys across the Mediterranean is a big part of the work that Italy has done, particularly in North Africa.
Q27 Shaun Davies: Do you see the role of DfID and the International Development Fund as crucial to the Home Affairs effort you are talking about now?
Yvette Cooper: One of the first things that the Foreign Office did after the election, as part of the European political community event, was to announce additional investment. From memory, it was over £80 million. I cannot remember now whether it was £84 million or £92 million, but it was additional funds to work alongside other European countries on exactly that prevention work further upstream. The UK has now become part of what they call the Rome process, the Mattei Plan, an Italian-led programme to look at some of the prevention work further upstream.
Q28 Joani Reid: Quickly picking up on a previous point about voluntary returns, are you confident that the process is streamlined and that it has not been caught up in any backlog accidentally caused by the previous Government? The only reason why I ask that is because I have a detention centre in my constituency, and I understand that there are people in there who would be very keen to go home but it is seemingly not as easy as one would expect.
Yvette Cooper: If you have cases of voluntary returns that are not being progressed as swiftly as they could be, I and Angela Eagle, the Border Security and Asylum Minister, would be extremely keen to follow it up with you to make sure that we can make progress.
In general, the detention centres tend to be used for the enforced returns and we know that there can be cases where there end up being difficulties around the final arrangements and so on. However, if you have cases of voluntary returns that we could help to speed up, we would be very keen to follow up.
Q29 Jake Richards: I should have declared an interest in that a family member works for the Home Secretary. I forgot to do that previously.
I want to ask quickly about immigration detention and the Brook House inquiry. It was published in 2023 and made 33 recommendations. Last year, before the election, it seemed to emerge that the previous Government had only accepted one of those recommendations and then, in response to a written question last month from Minister Angela Eagle, it was implied that 30 recommendations had been accepted and that progress is being made. Is it right to assume the two of the recommendations rejected by the last Government remain rejected? They include the 28-day time limit, I think.
Secondly, what progress is being made and what plans, if any, does the Department have to set out its approach to those recommendations in a coherent and compelling manner?
Yvette Cooper: I will ask Matthew or Simon to follow up on this because a lot of the work around the Brook House immigration removal centre took place before the election. Ten areas of concern were raised in the report, and a lot of very serious issues were raised around standards. It was a very troubling report.
In any of these issues around removal centres and detention, the highest standards have to be maintained. That is why the work of the Independent Monitoring Boards and the Inspector of Prisons is immensely important here as well.
My understanding is that positive progress is being made against the 30 accepted recommendations and that 12 of them have been completed, with the rest of those that were accepted on track for the summer of 2025. Matthew or Simon?
Simon Ridley: That is exactly right, Home Secretary. We have accepted 30 recommendations and have completed the implementation of 12 of them. We continue to work on the rest.
We did not accept the remaining recommendations including those on time limits in detention. The reason for that was because at the end of the process of removal, new barriers are often brought up by legal representation and by individuals, and with a time limit there is an incentive to do it at the last minute. There is a risk that we frustrate the process of removal.
We obviously seek to complete the process as quickly as possible in all cases, but there can be very difficult to remove cases for various legal or operational reasons about getting the right papers from their home country or other things.
Q30 Mr Kohler: Can I press you on the time limit, Home Secretary? In the other place early this year Baroness Chakrabarti said, “We believe in custody time limits in this society. Even suspected terrorists can be held for no more than 14 days. Why should these desperate people be held without limit of time?” She is right, isn’t she?
Yvette Cooper: There are still safeguards in the existing system around anything that is disproportionate detention. If you have somebody held in detention and there is no prospect of being able to remove them, you will not be able to keep them in detention. However—and this is the point that Simon Ridley made—if you have a fixed time limit on something like the immigration, detention and removal, the risk is that concerns or challenges would be raised at 26 days. They might be relatively straightforward to resolve but they will take more than the additional two days, and then there is effectively an incentive to push past the hard deadline of the 28 days.
If, instead, the issue is around the principle of proportionality, it does mean it prevents long-term detention, unless you have cases where obviously you have dangerous foreign national offenders, who are obviously treated in a different way, but you do not have something that could end up being misused or end up being counter-productive.
Q31 Mr Kohler: Is there a presumption of 28 days then?
Yvette Cooper: No. The issue is what can you do with each individual case on a case-by-case basis to be able to make decisions as swiftly as possible and to be able to remove people as swiftly as possible.
Q32 Mr Kohler: Is it 28 days apart from exceptional circumstances.
Yvette Cooper: No. We try to remove people as swiftly as possible. Bear in mind that the whole point is to be able to deliver the returns while respecting and enforcing the rules. You want to use the detention facilities as effectively as possible in order to do that. The focus always has to be on the likelihood of being able to deliver returns.
Simon Ridley: If I may, Home Secretary, the other thing that we have done, in part in response to the Brook House inquiry but more broadly as well, is that we have been increasing our detention engagement teams very significantly in recent months. We have more of our immigration enforcement teams in the IRCs who can engage with individuals and move their cases forward because we are reducing the ratio of officers to detainees.
Q33 Chris Murray: I want to ask you about the enormous backlog of asylum cases that you have to clear and, in particular, how much it is costing the Department. In 2019-20 you were spending £17,000 per asylum seeker, In 2023-24 you are spending £41,000 per asylum seeker, and the number has been growing. The previous Government had attempted to secure larger sites. I saw the Permanent Secretary last week when we discussed Northeye, which had cost hundreds of millions and did not end up working. The Home Office is supposedly working at pace and learning lessons but how can you be confident that the new models that you are trying to approach, which I understand is smaller sites, moving people out of hotels into smaller sites, is going to work—because the previous Government’s attempts did not work—and that you will be able to reduce the amount of money that you are spending on accommodating people.
Yvette Cooper: We need to do two things. The first and most important issue is to get the backlog right down because the backlog that we inherited is extremely costly. The second thing is to be able to get out of the very costly hotel arrangements and the contracts. Bear in mind that many of contracts were signed in a rush in the summer of 2022 and, as a result, have not been the most effective and have ended up being a huge cost to the taxpayer as well.
I had not expected this, so this was one of the things that did surprise me after the election. In the run-up to the election, the asylum decision-making just crashed. The number of decisions being made every month dropped by about 70%, and the number of monthly interviews taking place— effectively the pipeline of decisions—had dropped by 80%.
In July, we inherited a situation where the backlog was shooting up because decisions were just not being made. We have got decision-making right back up again now. The caseworkers are back in place, we have the decisions churning through and interviews are taking place. That means that the backlog is coming down. That work has put additional pressure on throughout the summer but we had to get that action going so that we can now keep bringing the backlog down.
The second issue is what we do to make sure of value for our money and the accommodation that we actually have. You are right that there have been some examples—not just, I think, the Bexhill case, but also Scampton and other cases—of where huge sums of money were put into things that were not value for money at all. The work that Angela Eagle is taking forward is all about how to get much better value for money and also work with local authorities on the most effective locations for asylum accommodation while overall trying to bring any need for asylum accommodation right down.
Q34 Chris Murray: It is good to hear the point about getting the backlog down. I agree with that. However, having spent the last five years before being elected working with local authorities that were having to respond to the decisions the Home Office took, setting up hotels without telling local authorities, trying to secure contracts, I know that it can be very, very difficult for local communities. We do know that tensions in local communities about this issue are very febrile, and quite understandably so. What work are you doing to ensure that as you bring down the backlog, people will either be moving to removals or appeals, or that they will be granted refugee status and will then be able to apply in the mainstream for local authority housing, for example, and claim benefits? Pushing people through the system could have a huge impact on local authorities. What are you doing to make sure that local authorities can cope with what is happening and that local communities are not disadvantaged?
Yvette Cooper: First, the progress with the backlog—we have just served closure notices on another seven hotels and they should be closing in the new year as a result of bringing the backlog down. We are determined to make progress on that work.
Andrea Eagle is taking forward work on setting up new arrangements with local authorities to determine the most appropriate locations for asylum accommodation and working around what happens once asylum decisions are taken. In part, that feeds back through to the discussions we were having before about increasing returns and enforcement to make sure that the rules are properly respected and enforced. Also we want to see refugees who have fled persecution being able to work and support themselves or their families as swiftly as possible.
We are putting liaison officers—AMLOs—in place. I am going to turn to Simon to say what AMLO stands for now.
Simon Ridley: Asylum Move-on Liaison Officers.
Yvette Cooper: There you go. The move-on officers will work with local authorities on how, when asylum is granted, to work at pace to help people to get jobs, find private rented accommodation that they can fund, and so on.
Q35 Chris Murray: I think I heard you say that you will be working with local communities as well for those new set-ups, so that is positive to hear.
My final question is about the other part of this process. People will either be granted refugee status or not, or they could go to appeals. You are going through a very large backlog, there are a lot of very complex cases, and the number of appeals is creeping up. I think that close to 50% of appeals are upheld. What are you doing to ensure that the quality of decisions that Home Office officials are taking is robust and stands up in the appeal courts so that the system keeps functioning?
Yvette Cooper: We have a programme of work looking at the appeals, both trying to speed up appeals and also trying to make sure that we can increase the quality of decision making. Part of the problem, of course, is that some of the cases that are going through appeals are about decisions that were taken a long time ago. The faster that we can make decisions, the more effective the system needs to be. We have a lot of work under way in this area to try to make sure that we are getting good quality decisions and speed up the process. To be honest, this is a challenging area.
Q36 Mr Rand: It is good to hear of the Government’s work focusing on clearing that huge backlog.
We have reflected on the huge pressure that asylum hotels put on local communities, local authorities and local infrastructure. It is clear that they are bad for the taxpayer, bad for communities and bad for the people seeking asylum.
I think it is fair to say that you have previously been very critical of the asylum accommodation system as a whole. Can you reaffirm that the Government are committed to stop using hotels to house asylum seekers?
Yvette Cooper: Yes, we want to stop using asylum hotels. It is inappropriate and extremely costly. The cost of hotel accommodation hit a peak of, I think, £8.8 million a day last year. It is an appalling waste of taxpayers’ money, spending money on that kind accommodation which was expensive but necessary because the asylum backlog had gone up.
We are already saving hundreds of millions of pounds. We need to go much further. We have to clear the backlog, deal with some of the appeals issues and also make sure that we can work towards a better co-ordinated arrangement with local authorities. It does take time to do all those things and we have to work through each bit of it step by step in the interests of having a properly managed, fair, sensible and supported asylum system while making sure that we get good value for the taxpayer.
Q37 Joani Reid: Home Secretary, we know that around 50% of asylum applications are initially granted and that the number increases on appeal. There is a discussion generally about returns and enforcement. In light of the summer riots, is there any plan to develop an integration strategy at top level or to look at how communities can contribute more effectively?
Yvette Cooper: Part of the reason for having the liaison officers in local areas is for them to co-ordinate with local authorities so that when a decision has been made, where somebody has fled persecution, arrangements can be swiftly put in place for them to be able to work, be part of a community and be supported. You can look at resettlement arrangements around Hong Kong, for example, or Ukraine, to see how important supporting people to integrate has been. It must be a central part of our overall approach.
Q38 Shaun Davies: I have two quick questions. First—and this might be for the officials—what was the reason for that collapse in decision-making; the 80% drop before the election?
Yvette Cooper: Matthew or Simon will correct me if this is not fully accurate but I understand that it was to do with the implementation of the Illegal Migration Act and, in particular, the retrospective element of the Illegal Migration Act. The way that the Illegal Migration Act was drawn up—it is incomprehensible that it was drawn up in this way—meant that cases that had arrived after March of 2023 could not be decided.
When decisions had been taken on cases that had arrived in February 2023 and we were on to the March 2023 cohort, no decisions could legally be made. In theory, decisions on around half the cohort who were not covered by the framework of Illegal Migration Act were possible but there was no practical, operational way to distinguish between the people who were covered by the Illegal Migration Act, and for whom you could not take decisions, and the people who were not covered by the Illegal Migration Act, and for whom legally you could take decisions. Therefore the Home Office was left with a situation where legally they could not take decisions on thousands of cases. We did keep going on the cases they thought they could consider. That is why numbers dropped to 2,000, 3,000 a month, from the previous 11,000 a month. The Home Office is still taking a small number of decisions but, basically, the system gets stuck and clogged up. Had we carried on with that retrospective arrangement, we would have tens of thousands more people stuck in the backlog, with no decisions being made on their cases and effectively a big increase in the use of hotels over the rest of this year.
Q39 Shaun Davies: Thank you. Over the last few years, the Home Office has had a reputation of working in silos. I used to be a council leader and would find that the council was having to pay a hotel for the same room twice because Home Office was making decisions about claimants and responsibility was passing to different hands. When you put on top of that the numbers of Afghan refugees, people in temporary accommodation, 500,000 kids in emergency accommodation, how will the Home Office ensure that in dealing with the backlog, which is absolutely the right thing to do, local government is not landed with the headache of trying to find accommodation that simply does not exist and is very competitive in any event?
Yvette Cooper: That is partly what the move-on officers are designed to do and that is a new development. MCHLG is in the same building as we are and so it has been quite easy to have meetings with the Deputy Prime Minister on exactly these issues and we have been discussing them directly. I have found great willingness across the Home Office to do much more of that partnership work.
As long as the system is under pressure from the high backlog, partnership working becomes harder because decisions are being taken quickly. However, if we can get the backlog coming down over time it will become easier.
Sir Matthew Rycroft: I can give you one example of breaking down silos with our colleagues in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government. We are working jointly with them on a joint long-term accommodation strategy, which is putting much greater emphasis, as the Home Secretary said, on engagement with local authorities and on a wider variety of different types of sites, not the large sites the previous Government were working on. As part of that, one of our commitments to local authorities is that if we ever hear that they are interested in using or acquiring any particular accommodation, we will withdraw our own interests from that accommodation.
Q40 Jake Richards: First, the neighbourhood policing commitment and commitment to recruit 13,000 new PCSOs is very welcome, especially in constituencies like mine where community policing has been dismantled over the last decade. I want to get some further clarity on how this will be funded.
The letter that you and Diana Johnson kindly sent to the Committee talks about first steps to delivering the 13,000-strong neighbourhood policing commitment. Diana Johnson’s statement talks about kick-starting the recruitment. Where are we with that?
Yvette Cooper: Today’s statement sets out the funding for the police forces for the next year, the £1 billion additional funding that I set out at the start of today. That includes increases in the core grant and an additional £100 million for neighbourhood policing. The £100 million is about enough to recruit over 1,000 police officers but in practice we would expect police forces to be making decisions about the mix of officers—PCSOs, specials and so on—that they want to use their share of the funding for. We have set out that this is a plan for over the course of the Parliament for the 13,000 neighbourhood police and PCSOs that we want to see back on the streets as part of neighbourhood policing teams.
Q41 Jake Richards: It is right though, isn’t it, that the spending review process has started and that there are still efficiencies to be made? The Government have set out areas that they are looking at in the Home Office. I also note that the police productivity funding area will be announced for 2025 next year.
Could I ask about two perhaps more long-term changes to policing, which may lead to real efficiencies? One of them is digital ID. At the weekend, I think seven former Home Secretaries of different parties and Prime Ministers came out saying that that time for digital ID has come. What are your broad thoughts on that? I noted that you spoke about digital approach to borders and e-visas in answer to Chris’s question.
Secondly, the police have been very clear that facial recognition technology could lead to widespread efficiencies in policing. It is now four years since the Court of Appeal signalled the alarm. There was a letter to the previous Home Secretary in January of this year from the Lords about the lack of a legal framework.
I know that the Government are looking at these two issues. I just want to get a sense of timings and where we are going with them.
Yvette Cooper: Facial recognition technology has significant potential and it is already being used by some forces. There is no clear overarching governance framework for it and that means that some police forces are not really clear about the legal basis and when and where they can use it. We have been working at pace. Dame Diana Johnson has been having a series of meetings and workshops, with police forces. South Wales, for example, has put in place what is effectively a governance structure involving the Police and Crime Commissioner and the Chief Constable on the circumstances in which they would use facial recognition technology, including live facial recognition, for example, if they were trying to identify somebody.
I think one of the examples that they gave me—and I will clarify if this is inaccurate—was, for example, if they were trying to identify people who they were concerned had been previous offenders and who might be arriving at a football match or a major event and who might be expected to cause trouble or something like that. They would use live facial recognition in those circumstances and they had set out a governance structure to be able to do so, but there is no formal arrangement at the moment. That means that many police forces feel they are struggling with lots of different competing bits of regulation and legislation, making it much harder for them to use the technology effectively. Diana Johnson has work under way to try to be able to support police forces to use the facial recognition technology in the right and appropriate way.
Work is underway from DSIT and Peter Kyle on how to regularise the digital forms of ID that most people already have. A particular issue there, though, where this has often been raised, is around, for example, illegal working. We already have the biometric permits that should be used and should in theory be able to be used immediately on the spot to identify whether somebody is working lawfully or not. However, enforcement teams have often not had the equipment or technology to be able to do that. That is why we have just announced provisions for an increase in body-worn cameras for immigration enforcement teams and the rollout of biometric kits so that they can do those biometric checks on the spot rather than having to go to a police station.
Q42 Jake Richards: It is good to hear about the work that Dame Diana Johnson is doing on facial recognition technology. I do not expect to hold you to a date, but is there any time span for when the Government might come forward with a new legal framework? Is that a work in progress?
Yvette Cooper: I will ask Dame Diana Johnson to update the Committee on the timescale and the work that she has under way. She has had a series of meetings with policing and community organisations.
Sir Matthew Rycroft: As the Home Secretary said, pilots in the South Wales and Met forces are being rolled out. I think six forces are already involved and there is a plan to involve more. There is not a single bespoke governance framework but there is a lot of governance around the use of live facial recognition, as you would expect, including laws on human rights, equality and data protection. Any use of live facial recognition for policing has to be necessary, proportionate and fair, and all the algorithms tested for bias before they can be used operationally.
Jake Richards: From what I have read, the results from the three forces that are using facial recognition technology can be quite important.
Yvette Cooper: You also asked about productivity issues and over-funding. There is a series of other areas where we think that productivity and efficiency could be improved and savings made. That is why we have set up a commercial efficiencies programme. We think that there is evidence that we can save significant sums of money on procurement contracts, for instance, and we do expect all police forces to become part of the programme. Take changing practices such as redaction requirements for example, where you end up with officers redacting files with the equivalent of a bottle of Tipp-Ex before they can send them to the CPS rather than having a much more streamlined process. There is a series of areas like that.
Q43 Jake Richards: Earlier this month, the National Audit Office produced a report on the link between an increase in police numbers and pressures on the prison estates. I know that is not perhaps not under your remit. However, what is the relationship between the two like on modelling for prison capacity as we hope to increase the numbers of police on the beat?
Yvette Cooper: The Lord Chancellor is giving evidence in the next room as we speak. I am sure he will be being asked about some of the prison issues. The big focus of neighbourhood policing is around both preventing crime and tackling some crimes around anti-social behaviour, town centre crimes, issues around shoplifting, street theft and so on, where we think we can make a substantial improvement and an impact. Of course we have to work closely between Departments and across the criminal justice system to respond to the scale of the prison crisis that we have had to deal with. However, we are also clear that it is extremely important to get more police back on the beat and that that will make our community safer.
Q44 Mr Rand: Picking up on some of the points Jake made about facial recognition technology, one area where it could have a very significant impact is in tackling retail crime, assaults on shop workers and the anti-social behaviour that blights too many of our high streets, including Altrincham, my constituency. Has much thought been given to that area of work and the importance of making sure that we communicate the proportionate use of such technology with people working in such settings and with the public, particularly in light of some of the operational and logistical challenges we have seen in other parts of the world where such systems have been introduced and especially around bias and protections against bias in the system?
Yvette Cooper: As the Permanent Secretary has already said, we do already have significant checks in place to ensure that any facial recognition technology that is used is tested for any bias. Users must actively test for bias, not just take the existing evidence but actively demonstrate that they have tested for bias. The use of retrospective facial recognition technology has been in place for some time and can be used, for example, in circumstances of trying to identify somebody.
Town centre crime is a wider issue. We have had, I think, a 30% increase in shoplifting in recent years and a 40% increase in street theft. There is a real sense of town-centre crime having a huge impact on confidence in local communities. At the same time, neighbourhood policing patrols have pretty much disappeared in many places. We need to get neighbourhood police back into town centres and make sure that we have better arrangements in place for tackling those kinds of crimes, which can impact confidence in the community. Retailers will sometimes say that they struggle to upload any CCTV they may have as evidence because they do not have the systems in place. They tell us that the £200 rule means that thefts to the value of less than £200 are not investigated even if there is evidence of them being due to repeat offenders. I think there are issues that are much broader than the use of one particular kind of technology and more about strengthening partnership working at local level on those crimes that have a big impact on confidence.
Q45 Mr Rand: I agree and the work that the Government are doing on specific offence and respect orders, alongside the effective and proportionate use of facial recognition technology, can have a huge impact on our high streets. It is important that we take the people who are working on our high streets and in retail settings with us when we are undertaking those measures. I hope that is the approach that the Government will continue to take in talking to workers and their representative organisations.
Yvette Cooper: A lot of the work on tackling retail crime has been very much linked to the discussions with retailers and with USDAW as one of the main trade unions representing shop workers. USDAW has been heavily involved in the work to get a new offence around assaults on shop workers.
Q46 Robbie Moore: I have a follow-up question on police numbers, Home Secretary. You mentioned that you are looking to recruit around 13,000 officers in the years ahead. Does the Department have any expectation of the funding split between recruiting police officers and PCSOs?
Yvette Cooper: We will need to work with police forces on the mix and the way it that develops because it will vary from force to force. For example, I think Norfolk currently does not have any PCSOs at all. Some other forces have focused heavily on PCSOs. We want to see a mix of people in policing teams. Neighbourhood policing teams are best when they have officers and PCSOs. They can play different roles in the teams.
Our starting-point figures—and it was just an indicative starting point—looked at 3,000 newly recruited police officers, 4,000 newly recruited PCSOs, 3,000 police officers redeployed from other areas—for example, we know high numbers of police officers have been doing back-office jobs or having to spend a lot of time on things such as redaction—and another 3,000 as specials. I think specials are underused. However, it was a starting point and we said in Opposition that it was a starting point for what the recruitment might look like. In practice, the final mix will have to be worked through with police forces.
Q47 Robbie Moore: I want to move on to police standards and confidence within policing, so moving on to themes. In October you announced a package of reforms to rebuild confidence in police officers and communities. Will you be publishing a formal response, building on the accountability issue, to the concerns that the last Administration raised? When do you anticipate being in a position to release more details about the reforms that you announced in October?
Yvette Cooper: I think you are referring to the police accountability reforms after the announcement about the Martyn Blake case. The important issue that we were raising as part of that piece of work was the need to raise public confidence in policing. That is part of our Safer Streets mission and links back to some of the issues around town centre crime as well. However, we also have to make sure that police officers have the confidence to do their jobs. In important specialist roles such as those of firearms officers, that includes an extremely difficult and highly skilled set of responsibilities and it is important that officers can have the confidence in the system and in the accountability system. There has been a series of cases over many years that have raised concerns and that we were clear about addressing.
One of the things that we announced was the immediate intention to do things such as introducing anonymity for firearms officers. In other areas, we asked for a piece of work to be done by Sir Adrian Fulford and Tim Godwin. We expect that they will report early in the new year. They are looking at a series of areas where there are different thresholds around misconduct, inquests and criminal investigations. Different thresholds, which are sometimes the result of historic court cases, can add to delays, to perceptions of unfairness in the system and end up undermining confidence.
Tim Godwin has a senior police chief background and Sir Adrian Fulford has a senior legal and judicial background. We have asked them to look together at the multiple thresholds and make recommendations, we hope early in the year. We will publish the conclusions of the work that comes forward. We have said that we will legislate for some other areas in the Crime and Policing Bill and expect that to happen in this parliamentary session as well.
Q48 Robbie Moore: Home Secretary, to expand on the associated wider remit associated with that, can you say what those other areas are likely to be?
Yvette Cooper: Do you mean the areas that the police—
Robbie Moore: Police misconduct.
Yvette Cooper: Police misconduct and vetting, yes—the wider work around the response to the Angiolini and Casey reviews includes putting a statutory underpinning to the vetting system so that we have national vetting standards. It includes stronger requirements around action to be taken, for example, suspensions in cases where police officers are being investigated for domestic abuse or sexual assault cases. It also includes training requirements. It involves several areas.
I have another, broader concern—a longer-term concern than something for which there are immediate remedies—and that is to do with how the misconduct system works overall. Very often when something goes wrong in policing, the focus falls on an individual police officer and does not look sufficiently at, for example, whether the real problem was around the systems or the training that were in place within a police force. The focus becomes about the decisions of an individual officer, whereas the reason behind those decisions might be due to poor training or something wider within the force. That is a broader concern that is harder to address.
Chair: You will know that we are holding an inquiry into the policing response to the summer disorder and Joani Reid has some questions about that.
Q49 Joani Reid: You said at the time of the summer disorder that the intelligence co-ordination infrastructure was weak and that the central co-ordination could be strengthened. Could you go into more detail and say what steps you are taking to address those things?
Yvette Cooper: I know that the Committee is holding an inquiry on the disorder and will be looking into further into it. In any of these issues around the violent disorder, we must always start by thinking about the three little girls who lost their lives in Southport, and whose families will still be grieving, and all the families who were affected by that appalling attack and then about the truly disgraceful and violent disorder that kicked off. It was criminal. We saw the burning of Spellow library, attacks on the asylum hotel and looting of shops and so on.
I asked the Manchester Inspectorate of Policing to conduct a review of what happened during that summer disorder and the policing response to it. The interim report from Andy Cooke will be coming out very shortly. I do not want to pre-empt the work that Andy Cooke has done but I will give you some of my reflections on it. I felt that, rightly, the policing and criminal justice response to that violent disorder was very strong. There were, I think, 1,700 arrests and over 700 people were charged. Fast co-ordination between the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts enabled a swift response.
At one point we had over 6,000 public order officers on the streets and I think the police worked 40,000 public-order shifts over 10 days. I pay tribute to the officers who responded. The level of officer injuries was shameful. Three hundred officers were injured in that disorder and it was truly disgraceful that police officers came under attack in that way. I also pay tribute to the senior police chiefs, particularly in the MPCC, who did a lot of the co-ordination between forces. However, it felt at the time that the scale of the response depended on the partnerships between individuals rather than on there being a system in place. I am concerned about two areas where there was not a strong enough system in place.
The first was around shared national intelligence. Clearly, there were national interactions. It was not just about something happening in one local area. There was copycat disorder. We did not have a system in place for police forces to be able to quickly share their intelligence. We did stand a system up. We arranged to put a national intelligence system in place and involved the National Crime Agency in that, but it was not there at the start.
Secondly, we did not have a strong enough system for police forces to be able to co-ordinate with each other to have national public order policing in place so that police officers could be deployed swiftly where needed. In the first few days of the disorder there were mutual aid agreements between individual forces in place but that was much too slow a response.
I have asked for those things to be looked at. They are just some of the issues that the inspectorate is looking at and I am sure that they will be able to give more evidence to your inquiry.
Joani Reid: I am also sure that they will. Chair, if you want me to wrap up quickly—
Q50 Chair: I will ask about the funding and then bring Paul Kohler in. We heard from senior police officers last week about the cost of the disorder to each force. Can the Home Office reimburse the forces?
Yvette Cooper: This becomes part of the special grant procedure. I reassured police forces at the time that we would ensure that there was funding through the special grant process for the additional overtime they had to pay for, shifting resources around in order to respond. We are working through the allocations to each force at the moment. At the time, we had to be able to give the forces the confidence that we would do that. Now we need to make sure that we follow through and that the Home Office does provide the necessary funding.
Q51 Mr Kohler: What role, if any, did Police and Crime Commissioners play in that process?
Yvette Cooper: I had meetings with Police and Crime Commissioners during that process. I think that they were also involved in the work, first by supporting the police chiefs in making sure that they had sufficient public order police ready. In early stages of the disorder, there were not enough public order police in the right locations and they had to swiftly respond to that.
Secondly, people in communities were truly appalled at what was happening and local communications and reassurance that action was going to be taken were necessary, reassurance that if people commit a crime there will be an investigation, the police will prosecute and they will face the full force of the law. Publicising some of the cases was also very important.
Q52 Joani Reid: I think that the whole House is pleased with the target of halving incidences of violence against women and girls but there has been a lot of talk around how ambitious the target is. Some might say that it is overly ambitious. Could you go into some detail about how you are going to identify the policies that will effectively deliver on this target and, crucially, how it is going to be measured?
Yvette Cooper: You are right that it is very ambitious. I do not think any Governments, international or domestic, have tried to do this before. However everybody has talked about tackling violence against women and girls for a long time, but we have only had incremental change and what we need in many areas is almost a system overhaul. We need to fundamentally change how institutions respond to violence against women and girls, and the ways in which it needs to be just taken much more seriously.
It has been troubling to find how little there is of an effective evidence base around violence against women and girls. For example, there is much more evidence on action to tackle knife crime and youth crime than there is on measures to most effectively tackle violence against women and girls. Of the two parts to the Safer Streets Mission—halving knife crime and halving violence against women and girls— the key measures in tackling the knife crime side of things are clearer. Therefore, on the side of violence against women and girls, we have been doing what we call an evidence sprint, working internationally with experts, and academics to gather evidence on the things that make the greatest difference.
We have been working with the Office for National Statistics on how to measure progress because there is currently no clear measure. We want to be able to combine measures around domestic abuse, sexual assault, stalking—some of the biggest crimes that most heavily affect women and girls—and be able to draw them together in an effective way. The current system of measuring does not allow that. The ONS is working on how to combine those measures effectively and robustly. The ONS is also looking at how to look at prevalence, not simply at reporting, because we want reporting to go up. We have to recognise that because the measures are changing to include coercive control as one of the measures of domestic abuse, prevalence and reporting figures will go up before they come down but that will reflect society taking those crimes much more seriously.
We intend to draw up a cross-government strategy on violence against women and girls strategy that will be published next year and to look at the full range of strategies—prevention, what you do in schools, right through to what happens in the criminal justice system and also what happens in terms of support for victims of abuse.
Q53 Joani Reid: Thank you for that. I think you are absolutely right about there being a lack of effective evidence in this area. As a result of that, I think there is a fear that there is going to be a focus on higher-volume types of offences, rather than on the offences that cause the most harm. Are you committed to looking at programmes or continuing to commit to programmes that have strong evidence base and work with small, high-intervention programmes, such as Drive, for example? There are a lot of ineffective programmes in this space.
Lastly, when can we expect to hear from the ONS on that work that you mentioned? Will that just be announced as part of the wider strategy?
Yvette Cooper: The work is underway. As part of the strategy, we will set out which measures we are going to use. We have been doing some provisional work but we will confirm it as part of the strategy.
The issue with the ONS will be timetables, not just to identify the measures but also the timetable to be able to conduct those measurements and the point at which they can say that the figures are robust. We will, I hope, be able to update the Committee in the new year.
As for how we target the greatest volume crimes and the most dangerous, we have to do both. So, yes, things like the Drive programme and how we target the most dangerous offenders are central. We have been looking at how each police force can identify the most dangerous perpetrators and those who are the highest risk in each of their areas. The Met has already been doing a version of this with their V100 programme. Other police forces have also been doing their own versions. It is a matter of how you target the most dangerous perpetrators rather than almost ignoring the perpetrators and just focusing on additional protection for the victims. The victims do need additional protection and support, of course, and we think that domestic abuse protection orders are extremely promising and are just starting the pilots or first phases of their rollout.
Joani Reid: Thank you. It is reassuring to hear that there will be a focus on high-risk perpetrators of violence.
Q54 Chair: Can I check the halving? What is the starting point for halving? Is it the figures before coercive control or the figures after coercive control?
Yvette Cooper: That is what we are still working through at the moment. This will partly depend on the work that the ONS has underway. The reason behind halving is that we think that we need that scale of ambition to try to get everybody away from just thinking about the incremental change. If you want to really transform things in a decade, what are the big things that you need to change? Whether that is in in schools, whether that is in policing, whether it is in the criminal justice system, the way in which employers respond to abuse, what are the big things that you need to do?
Q55 Robbie Moore: One of the issues that concerns me is child sexual exploitation, particularly when we are looking at violence against women and girls. Greater Manchester published the Rochdale review, which identified 96 men with risk to children, and identified systemic failures at the local authority level. Do you agree that the work carried out and commissioned by Mayor Andy Burnham was of good value in identifying those failures?
Yvette Cooper: This was important. There have been a series of these investigations. There was the work that was commissioned by the Mayor in Greater Manchester, there has been some by IICSA, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse as well. Some of the issues go back to the point about how you identify the most dangerous offenders and how you make sure that they are being targeted and are being dealt with. Some of it is also about how you make sure that systems respond and take child sexual abuse seriously wherever it is found, mandatory reporting, for example, that was highlighted as part of the IICSA inquiry, and how you make sure that every institution is doing its bit to take seriously child sexual abuse.
The Safeguarding Minister, Jess Phillips met with Alexis Jay recently and has also been meeting with survivors of child abuse as well on what now needs to be done to roll out and implement the recommendations of the independent inquiry. She can also update the Committee on the progress that she has made because she has been taking forward those meetings relatively recently.
Q56 Robbie Moore: Alexis Jay did a very good report into Rotherham and we have had Mayor Andy Burnham do the Rochdale review, both of which identified systemic failures at that local level. In my constituency of Keighley and Ilkley I am deeply concerned about issues of child sexual exploitation in the wider Bradford district. Given that we have had those two reports that specifically looked at the failings at that local level—and I am getting a lot of constituents coming to me about historic cases that are still working their way through the system, and live cases that are unfortunately happening—would you support a review specifically into child sexual exploitation across the Bradford district, for example?
Yvette Cooper: Of all the overarching issues that were raised as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, the most shocking thing is that they have not been implemented. We have had one set of recommendations; we have had other recommendations coming out of individual local inquiries and it is important that those are followed up at local levels as well. However, from the Home Office point of view, we want to see the IICSA recommendations being taken forward. Progress has been too slow. It is about two years since IICSA reported and we have to make sure that those recommendations are now being implemented. That does mean that each local authority also needs to look at their responsibilities, to look at making sure that standards are properly being met and also making sure that they are looking at those recommendations as well.
Q57 Robbie Moore: A final question before moving on: one of the key concerns that keeps getting raised is this feeling of disenfranchisement felt by those victims and their families from the state, whether the state be local authorities or anyone who has safeguarding responsibilities. That has been raised with me, as well as things that were highlighted in the reports that have been carried out. There are different complexities in different areas. That is why I fear, based on correspondence I receive and conversations that I am having, that the scale of some of the complexities associated with child sexual exploitation across the Bradford district would be of a far greater number than, say, even in Rochdale or in Rotherham. Given those concerns that are being raised not only by me but others—a former colleague of yours, Ann Cryer, for example, a previous MP who represented Keighley—do you think that that would warrant having a review or an inquiry that specifically looks at child sexual exploitation across the Bradford district where those complexities are undoubtedly apparent?
Yvette Cooper: This is an issue for every single local authority and for every single area. Every area has to look at whether its safeguarding arrangements are strong enough, whether it has strong enough support for victims and support for people who are coming forward. If you have victims and families coming forward and identifying serious problems of child sexual abuse, including historical problems—where, for example, there have been historical issues involved—it is important that those survivors and those victims have a voice. Whether they have that voice at local level, at national level and in every area and in every community, it is very important.
There cannot be any holds barred on this. You have to make sure that victims and survivors get support at local level and at national level, but this is also something that is a responsibility for every head of children's services, it is a responsibility for every local council. It is also a responsibility for other kinds of institutions, whether that be NHS, faith institutions and other organisations as well. The independent national inquiry made clear that you have patterns of abuse not being taken seriously enough or institutions not responding at the highest level in all kinds of different organisations. Therefore, I would urge vigilance on every local organisation and national organisation in terms of being able to address this.
Q58 Shaun Davies: You are quite right that in the independent inquiry report in October 2022 and in June 2023, Alexis Jay, the chair, said that she was deeply disappointed that her recommendations had not been taken forward by the then Government. Do you have a timeline for when the recommendations will be fully reviewed and a response given by the new Home Office and you as the new Home Secretary?
Yvette Cooper: I will ask the Safeguarding Minister to write to you on this one. I am conscious that she has held meetings very recently with Alexis Jay and with groups of survivors of child sexual abuse as well. She can update you directly on the next steps on that.
Q59 Shaun Davies: Thank you, Home Secretary. Can you also ensure that that response confirms that where there are local reports, those recommendations are taken into the mind of the Home Office and that that informs policy development going forward?
Yvette Cooper: Yes, I will. When the Greater Manchester reports came out, I did speak directly to Andy Burnham about the content, about what his next steps were going to be and what the local next steps were going to be. We take very seriously the local reports, be it the Greater Manchester ones or the Rochdale and other ones as well. That is immensely important.
Q60 Chris Murray: Home Secretary, could I ask you about a group of women who have faced extreme exploitation and violence, women who have been trafficked in the UK? Can you tell us about your plans to reform and improve the national referral mechanism, in particular for the victims of sex trafficking and exploitation?
Yvette Cooper: You are right that the system has become a bit stuck and we have ended up with very long delays in the national referral mechanism. One of the things that we have done is to recruit 200 additional staff members to clear the backlog for the national referral mechanism. We are looking at future support services for victims of modern slavery, trafficking and so on as well.
Another thing that we need to address at some point is that within the numbers at the moment there are different arrangements for children and young people who are ending up victims of county lines. There are parallel arrangements that they become transferred into with local authorities, which is probably the more effective response for them, but one of the things that we are looking at is whether we are getting the system right in the way that currently we are bringing all the groups together under the same umbrella system, rather than making sure that they each get the more dedicated support of the kind that they need.
Q61 Shaun Davies: Thank you, Chair. Home Secretary, we have mentioned knife crime already and it has remained very, very high in this country despite a range of measures brought in over the last 10 years. What plans do you have to reduce this crime and do you see the violence reduction units, particularly in London, as key to that across the country?
Yvette Cooper: We just confirmed today the continuing funding for the violence reduction units next year. We want to work more closely with the violence reduction units on the focus particularly on the ambition to halve knife crime over the next 10 years alongside halving violence against women and girls.
To take a step back for a second, the way the Safer Streets Mission is framed, it is about reducing the most serious violence and rebuilding confidence in policing and the criminal justice system. On the serious harm side, the violence reduction units are doing some very important work but we want to work with them on how we better focus on some of the evidence about what is most effective. We have established the Coalition to Tackle Knife Crime, which particularly draws in families of those who have tragically lost loved ones through knife crime and who often have been the most powerful advocates in the most unimaginable and unthinkable circumstances or deeply distressing circumstances but have been hugely powerful advocates for reform. Therefore, we have the Coalition to Tackle Knife Crime.
We have the new measures on the zombie-style knife ban that came in the summer, and we are consulting on the ninja sword ban as well. Also we have the review into the online sale of knives, which the National Police chief lead Stephen Clayman is carrying out. That reflects the experience of Pooja Kanda, who has been campaigning after her son Ronan was killed by a teenager who was able to buy a knife online and pick it up from the post office. It was a ninja sword. He was able to pick it up from the post office with no proper checks in place at all. Therefore, you have to look at all of the things in place in the system. This is a combination of what you can do nationally and what you can do locally through things like the violence reduction units.
Q62 Shaun Davies: Some of these knives are terrifying just to look at. Is there a need to consult on them or can we just move to a ban on them as a matter of urgency? What is the point of consulting on them? For some of them it is very difficult to come up with any lawful explanation as to why you would want one of those in your premises or on your person.
Yvette Cooper: We should frame it as we are consulting on our intention to ban the ninja swords. There is a process that we go through but we will want to implement a ban as soon as possible. However, we do go through a consultation first.
Q63 Shaun Davies: What are your views on stop and search by police officers in this regard?
Yvette Cooper: Stop and search is an important policing tool. Of course, it has to be used appropriately, but it is an important tool for policing, including for things like preventing knife crime. A review was carried out by the inspectorate a few years ago about how to make sure that all police forces have the right standards and so on in place. They are the standards that I would recommend that all police forces follow when they are using stop and search. It was a very effective report, and it is an important tool.
Q64 Margaret Mullane: Home Secretary, you have mentioned confidence in the communities. Antisocial behaviour has a huge and terrible impact on communities. The Government are going to bring in respect orders to make it easier for local authorities and the police to deal with this problem. Why are these new powers necessary when there are existing powers already available to both? Did the police and local authorities ask the Government to do this?
Yvette Cooper: I had a conversation with a local authority enforcement officer who used to be a neighbourhood police officer. We were standing in the town centre and he talked about repeat perpetrators, because we were talking about problems with antisocial behaviour in the town centre and he described to me powerfully how they used to be able to ban repeat perpetrators from the town centre. Now, he said, they can take out an antisocial behaviour injunction, but normally it does not have a power of arrest. Therefore, if it is breached—and we have the same people, the same repeat offenders, walking around the town centre again causing all the same havoc—even if the neighbourhood police are there, they cannot arrest them or do anything about it. Yes, you can get a criminal behaviour order, but that relies on all of the paperwork being ready at the point of conviction for another offence. That can be sometimes difficult to co-ordinate between the local authorities and the police and so on.
Therefore, the point of having the respect orders is to be able to have a proper power of arrest. It is like a modernised ASBO to be able to bring it in and have a power of arrest where you have repeat offending on antisocial behaviour, for example in town centres, and people who are causing havoc and creating a misery for everybody else.
Q65 Margaret Mullane: In my seat it is vital and I welcome it wholeheartedly. The police and the local authorities want to step up and they want to deal with it. However, do you think that when the new police teams arrive the abstractions will be an issue? In their heart they want to be there dealing with it but the reality is that they are often abstracted out of the area.
Yvette Cooper: One of the reasons that we worked with the College of Policing on drawing up a neighbourhood policing guarantee and a new performance framework for neighbourhood policing—and we continue to work with the police forces on this—is how to have a system so that you can prevent the high levels of abstraction, how you can make sure that you have neighbourhood officers who are properly based in the community. Of course emergencies or particular incidents will happen, but too often we are seeing routine abstraction.
I spoke to some officers in the Midlands about this. They said that half of their neighbourhood team was on three- to six-month abstractions. It was not just that one day that something terrible had happened that they had to cover for, this was for several months. You have to have something that is about embedding neighbourhood teams in the community so that they know the communities and so that the communities know who the officers are so that they have a guaranteed person who they can contact, get in touch with, to pass on that local intelligence. We go back to that heart of the spirit of the British policing model, which was officers in the community, the Peel principle, that the public are the police, the police are the public. That close working that makes all the difference.
Q66 Margaret Mullane: On violence against women and girls, it is very good what the Government are proposing, but do you think that the police are operationally independent from the Government and how do you think that the Government's priorities will be taken seriously with all that the police have to contend with?
Yvette Cooper: It is a fundamental principle of British policing that they are operationally independent. That principle is rooted right through the heart of British policing and remains immensely important. There will always be operational independence in terms of particular investigations, in terms of local priorities and in terms of how they respond to crimes and deal with them in an operational way.
However, we can also say at a national level that there are these missions for the whole Government for policing and that includes the missions on halving violence against women and girls and halving knife crime. My experience of talking to the police since the election has been overwhelmingly that the police want to work in partnership with the Government. The idea that you have an approach where the Home Office stays way away from policing and just shouts from a distance, policing when things go wrong, in the end undermines confidence, because what you need is a partnership. There are some things that only policing can do, there are some things that you need government partnership, for example working with other Government Departments on prevention programmes and so on, that you need the Government working alongside policing if you are going to deliver results.
Q67 Shaun Davies: On the piecemeal work on how policing is operated, there are some really good police forces and some not so good and there are some that are innovating and some not so good. How do you ensure that the standards across all police forces are good or outstanding? Do you think that a reorganisation of police forces, in the same way that maybe the Deputy Prime Minister is thinking about local government, is something that you need to consider or not?
Chair: Can I add on the back of that where police forces have taken steps to innovate, that they are not then punished in funding settlements or anything like that because they have taken the steps and the measures that they needed to take and others have yet to do so?
Yvette Cooper: We are keen to do a major programme of policing reform but we want to do this with the Home Office working with policing to be able to do this. We are working at the moment on establishing joint teams to be able to work together to draw up proposals for a White Paper sometime next year on policing reform.
Some of the component parts or the issues that we want to cover—and do this working with policing—are on standards. That includes some of the vetting misconduct standards but also includes standards for police forces as a whole and having a new performance framework for policing that we draw up with the College of Policing, a new performance unit in the Home Office that can be clear about the shared data that all police forces need to be gathering. It is shocking that there are areas around response times, for example, where there is no consistent information across police forces about responses in the way that there is for ambulance and fire and so on. There are other areas around violence against women and girls, for example, where again we do not have consistent data. That means that even a local chief or a local PCC or a local mayor cannot tell whether their force is performing really well compared to other forces or really poorly. Therefore, having that shared information and raising standards is extremely important.
In terms of what we are looking at across forces, rather than looking at some of the historic debates that have been had about different forces merging or anything like that, instead we are starting from what are the issues that should be done at local level, what are the things that should be done at national level, particularly looking at things like procurement of certain shared services—things like forensics or helicopters. How much of that could be done as part of a national policing body, a new national policing body, that could then provide those? For example, West Yorkshire Police currently deliver NPAS, the helicopters, but that means that they have to spend a huge amount of time each year negotiating the funding across 43 different police forces for helicopters that we know that we all need and that we know needs to be done at a national level. There must be a much better way of doing some of those services around forensics, helicopters and so on.
Q68 Shaun Davies: We talked about innovation. Bedfordshire Police, for example, cracked their reduction issue a long time ago but you can still talk to other police forces that are still battling with that issue, which seems bizarre given that we should have a national police service delivered at a local level. Will you mandate and penalise those forces that are slow to embrace new technology and innovations that other police forces have demonstrated time and time again work?
Yvette Cooper: Yes, and this also links into your question, Chair, about how you make sure that you can encourage innovation and make sure that innovation is not penalised, but also make sure that you get take-up of successful innovation in other police forces right across the country. We do not currently have a strong enough framework to be able to do that. I do not want that framework to just be designed by the Home Office, because it has to be done in conjunction with policing to make sure that that is as effective as possible.
There are areas where you cannot carry on with 43 voluntary arrangements where you do need more co-ordination and where it does need to be more of a requirement for police forces to sign up to things. Again, we will determine those areas with police forces. It needs to be done in the most effective way. There are all these different police forces. I have talked to police chiefs who say that they are having to become experts on record-management systems and IT for independent police forces because all the police forces are doing things differently. Sometimes you will have companies that can easily play forces off against each other as to which contract you should be going for, whereas what you want is interoperable arrangements across all police forces to be able to use compatible technology because so many crimes will cross local borders and they need to be able to share information and cases and swiftly as possible. That is what we want to work with police forces to do. The Home Office has been very hands-off in the past. You can neither be hands-off nor attempt to run things from the Home Office. It has to be that partnership between policing and the Home Office, which is what we hope to do.
Q69 Mr Kohler: Sir Mark Rowley has recently spoken about a £45 million funding shortfall and his plans to cut 2,300 officers and 400 staff. I have looked at Dame Diana Johnson's statement and I think it says that he will get £65 million more than he was expecting. I have three quick questions. Am I right, is that enough and have you spoken to him about it?
Yvette Cooper: Yes, I have spoken to him and we have announced, as part of the police settlement that we announced today, a £65 million increase in the national capital city grant. That reflects two things, first the existing grant for the capital cities because they obviously do have lots of national events that will take place in the capital that are different in terms of the pressures on policing compared to other parts of the country. That funding has not been uprated with inflation for at least five years and arguably before that either. Secondly, in the last 12 months we have had the big increase in protest activity since the 7 October attacks last year. It is important that they are able to properly police protest activity to make sure that the capital can stay safe as well. That is why we have provided that additional funding.
Q70 Mr Kohler: Is it enough?
Yvette Cooper: The mayor has described it as the biggest increase for Met Police funding for many years. We know that police forces right across the country have faced very significant financial pressures in recent years, and we recognise that. Overall, this is a 6% increase in the cash funding for police forces, a 3.5% real increase. It does include funding to cover, for example, the national insurance contributions and it does include additional funding to get neighbourhood police on the beat. This is a demonstration of how seriously we take funding and the investment that police forces need in London and in every other community right across the country to get police back on the beat and keep us safe.
Chair: Thank you very much, Home Secretary, Sir Matthew and Mr Ridley. We appreciate you coming in. I apologise for going slightly over the time that we were hoping to do it in, but there has been some extensive questioning.
Yvette Cooper: And to you, Chair, thank you very much and happy Christmas to you all.
Chair: Thank you, Committee, as well, for all of your work and contributions. We look forward to seeing you in the new year. Happy Christmas.