Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: The work of the Home Office, HC 662
Tuesday 15 September 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 15 September 2026.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Dame Karen Bradley (Chair); Lewis Atkinson; Mr Paul Kohler; Ben Maguire; Robbie Moore; Margaret Mullane; Dr Peter Prinsley; Joani Reid; Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
Questions 1 - 110
Witness
I: Rt Hon. Shabana Mahmood MP, Home Secretary.
Witness: Shabana Mahmood.
Chair: We are delighted to welcome the Home Secretary for her second appearance in front of us. Home Secretary. I am going to tell you that you are going to have to be more frequent than this. We want to see you more frequently, but we are very pleased you are here today.
We have questions for you. We know how incredibly broad the scope of what the Home Office covers is. We know we have a limited amount of time. We are going to focus our questions on policing, violence against women and girls, and—I suspect quite a lot of our questions will be on this topic—migration, regular and irregular. Just to warn you, those are the areas we are going to be asking you about.
We appreciate and know your deadlines, so I do not think we need you to introduce yourself, if that is okay.
Shabana Mahmood: That is quite all right.
Chair: We will move straight into questions. I will start with Lewis Atkinson.
Lewis Atkinson: Hello, Home Secretary. Good afternoon and congratulations on your reappointment.
Shabana Mahmood: Thank you.
Q1 Lewis Atkinson: Clearly we have a new Prime Minister. What is your assessment of what that means for your previously stated intention to reform and reduce the number of police forces in England and Wales?
Shabana Mahmood: That is a good point. I will start with what has not changed and what remains exactly the same, and then talk a bit about the changes since Andy Burnham became Prime Minister.
First, the case for police reform remains unchanged. The case has been made for some time now. We have a system that requires 43 different-sized police forces to be very good at providing a highly localised response to neighbourhood crime, antisocial behaviour and so on, and to perform national-level functions, responding to regional organised crime, specialist investigations and so on. It is very difficult to do both those things to a sufficiently high standard such that you do not have a discrepancy in the standards of service either across those two functions or, indeed, across the country.
The case for police reform remains as strong as it has ever been. That is why I very much believe we need to pivot to a new model of policing with local policing areas as the bedrock and foundation of the new policing model, coming down to local authority level; a smaller number of regional strategic forces sitting above that, doing the specialist investigation work to a high standard; and then the national police service on top providing system leadership and system-level efficiencies as well as taking over, ultimately, crime that is at national level or indeed has an international dimension.
What is different since the new Prime Minister came into post and the new Administration were formed? Of course, he has personal experience of having oversight of policing in his role as Mayor of Greater Manchester. He has direct experience of the ability of mayors in such authorities who have the convening power of wider public organisations within their mayoralty and can convene them particularly on issues relating to crime prevention and violence reduction.
Given the new steer of the Government to be very focused on devolution by default and the paper from the Cabinet, overseen by the Prime Minister, called “Rewiring the State”, which had lots to say about what levels of devolution will look like across the country, we have asked Lord Hogan-Howe, who is doing the independent review into what the new force structure should look like, to take into account the new Government’s position on devolution and to retest the evidence that he has collected as part of that review against the new stated intention and focus of the Government.
I am confident that that can be done. The Government’s paper recognises that we should go for alignment where possible. Sometimes there will be a case for not having direct one-to-one alignment, but the boundaries should remain aligned. It should be possible to incorporate the new focus of the Government into the work that Lord Hogan-Howe is doing for us. It has meant that that work will take a few more weeks than I anticipated, but I expect to have that report in the next few weeks and then I will be able to update Parliament.
Q2 Lewis Atkinson: You touched on it rightly; I was going to ask you about Lord Hogan-Howe’s review. To that point around the alignment with “Rewiring the State”, you responded to me recently in the Chamber on the Cleveland police statement. Using the north-east as an example, we have three relatively small forces. As you pointed out, that made the case for police reform. Is it likely that there will be a presumption against forces being any bigger than mayoral strategic authorities?
Shabana Mahmood: No. As “Rewiring the State” makes clear, where possible and where alignment works, not just for economic devolution or for the devolution of transport infrastructure decisions, which are and will be the primary focus of lots of the work of combined authorities, where it makes sense for operational reasons, there will be total alignment on mayoral boundaries. I am sure that probably is not a million miles away from the work that Bernard Hogan-Howe and his panel have already been doing.
Not all these authorities will be the same size. Tees Valley is a good example where the mayoral authority is relatively small, which makes sense from an economic devolution perspective but does not necessarily take into account the wider policing structures. If you were doing one-to-one alignment as the requirement going forward, that would mean that some current forces would become even smaller. Avon and Somerset would end up being shared between the Mayor of the West of England and an as-yet-unnamed new strategic authority. It would mean changes in Cheshire, where a part of that would go out into Merseyside. Humberside would lose around half of its force to Lincolnshire, and Thames Valley would shrink as well.
In the new structure, it is not the case that, even if you did one-to-one alignment, police forces would remain the same. In fact, some would go down in number, which again would have other operational implications. The new way of thinking about it is not hugely different from how we conceived of the reform programme beforehand, which is to align one to one where it makes sense. That should be the way forward. Where mayors have oversight, we know that that works reasonably well. The new Prime Minister is a living example of that himself, but it will not work everywhere. Lots of parts of the country do not currently have a mayor and will not necessarily have a mayor either before the end of this Parliament and who knows when. It has to be a mixed approach.
Q3 Lewis Atkinson: Just quickly on Wales, would you consider devolving responsibility for policing to Wales as part of these reforms?
Shabana Mahmood: Again, Bernard is looking at the arrangements in Wales. I know that the full devolution question is contested within the Welsh political establishment between those who want full devolution of most elements of the criminal justice system and those who do not think that works for Wales. We do not need to get into those broader constitutional devolution questions, but we can recognise that Wales has a pretty unique public services landscape and we absolutely want to respect that. I am sure Bernard Hogan-Howe’s work is looking at that sensitively.
Certainly, once that review is in, I will want to continue engagement with the Welsh Government and Welsh colleagues here in Parliament to make sure that whatever structures we have make sense for Wales, given the broader public services landscape there.
Q4 Lewis Atkinson: I hear clearly that a bit more work is being done on the regionalisation of forces. The Government’s intention remains to create a national police service. Could you just update us about the developing plans for that and its potential launch date?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes. Plans are well under way on the national police service. Much of the new underpinning for that police service, such as what powers the new commissioner will have, and the balance of power between the new commissioner of the national police service and the Home Secretary, will require a statutory underpinning. Work is under way on the planned police reform Bill.
A delivery authority that is jointly led between the Home Office and policing is looking at the whole area of police reform. Its biggest area of work is the setting up of the new national police service. There is a ministerial board as well as a programme board that looks at progress on the development of the policy and the legislation. That includes the National Crime Agency, counter-terrorism policing and other colleagues. They are working through what needs to be true on day one to get the national police service up and running and then, working backwards from that, thinking through issues on the workforce transferring over and all those operational questions.
Drafting of the Bill is also well under way, taking steers from the boards and me. Once the Bill is presented to Parliament, we will be able to give a firmer deadline of when we expect that to get Royal Assent and where we hope to be by the end of the Parliament. It is the intention that most of the operational readiness of the NPS will be done by the end of this Parliament. I want to appoint a commissioner-designate as quickly as possible once we have the Bill introduced to Parliament so that we have a system leader, who will be charged with being the first ever commissioner of the national police service, up and running and able to shape the way in which the organisation develops.
If all goes to plan, most of the operational changes will be made by the end of the Parliament, with a view that, as soon as they mature early in the next Parliament, you transfer in the capabilities of the National Crime Agency and counter-terrorism policing. I gave a commitment that we would not do any of the transfer of capabilities until it is ready for it. I am absolutely firm on that commitment. I do not want to go so quickly that we undermine the operational effectiveness of what are, in my view, exceptional agencies doing very good work.
Q5 Lewis Atkinson: How do you intend to fund police reform? Would it be funded from existing Home Office budgets? If so, where would you find savings or move money from to fund it?
Shabana Mahmood: Overall, the setting up of the national police service is £340 million or so, two thirds of which I have already committed through the current spending review allocation. We were funded to progress police reform in this spending review, so a large bulk of that money has gone towards the setting up of the national police service. About a third of that, I anticipate, will come from the next spending review. I am confident that those numbers are there and that this is a fully funded programme of work.
Q6 Chair: Lewis, before you move on—I know Peter wants to come in—I just want to clarify a point on police reform. Let us take the west midlands. We are both west midlands MPs. Are you thinking that, because there is a mayor for the west midlands, you would expect the police force to be co-terminous with that? What happens to Staffordshire and West Mercia? Are you expecting them still to go in or not?
Shabana Mahmood: Having commissioned an independent review, it would not be right for me to set out expectations. I have asked Lord Hogan-Howe to consider what the new shape of strategic forces in the country should be. He is also looking at the local policing areas and what the relationship between the two should be. He is looking at whether they should be just on local authority boundaries or smaller than local authority boundaries in some cases. All that is the work of the review. It would be wrong for me to start giving my expectations.
In general terms, is there a likelihood that some of the new model will reflect forces that are currently co-terminous with mayoral boundaries? Probably, yes. We will have to wait to see his full report, but it is probably not outside the realm of probability. Let me put it like that. I am not directing him and he has certainly not been given an indication that he has to make certain forces co-terminous because they are already up and running and have a mayoralty. He has been engaging with stakeholders. Of course, there is a lot of discussion about co‑terminosity, as you would expect.
Q7 Chair: On the national police service, would you be open to this Committee undertaking pre-appointment scrutiny of the appointment?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes. I am very happy to follow the established norms of how these things are done. As I say, I do want to move forward as quickly as is reasonable with a commissioner-designate because that will provide the system leadership that we need. I will update the Committee on the plans for when that will happen and the role of the Committee in due course.
Q8 Dr Prinsley: Home Secretary, I just wanted to quickly ask you about police and crime commissioners. What is your intention in this respect? For instance, in Norfolk, the police and crime commissioner resigned, and we had to have a by-election for a new police and crime commissioner, who is going to serve for an uncertain period. There has been a political change, and that police and crime commissioner is perhaps behaving in a way that is unexpected. I am wondering what your plan is in respect of police and crime commissioners going forward.
Shabana Mahmood: I would just observe that politicians often behave in ways that are unexpected. That is something that applies to all political parties, really.
We have already announced that we are going to be abolishing police and crime commissioners. They are up for re-election—the vast majority—in 2028. Those elections will not go ahead and we will transition to a new model.
Once the independent review comes back, we will be able to set out what we expect to be the governance arrangements. Where there is co-terminosity in the future model, the responsibilities for oversight and governance will sit with mayors. Where there is not co-terminosity, you move to a new crime and policing board. That might include multiple mayors and local authority leaders with a nominated deputy who leads on policing. There will be a strong governance and oversight framework that follows the abolition of police and crime commissioners.
As I have said before, it is not an indictment of any individual. It is just a model that was supposed to yield a new era of policing. It is not something that we believe has worked, and the levels of public engagement with this structure are just not there to justify it continuing. Given that we are looking at the new force structure and model overall, it is the right opportunity to move to a new governance framework as well.
Q9 Lewis Atkinson: Finally on police reform, when would you expect our constituents to notice a difference? You have made the point previously, Home Secretary, that you cannot reform the funding formula for forces until the new force footprints have been confirmed. Are we expecting to see that sooner rather than later?
Shabana Mahmood: Once we have the review back, and the Government have responded to the findings of Lord Hogan-Howe’s review and said what our preferred model for all structures of policing is going forward, I will, as I said in the statement after the incident in Cleveland and the deaths of PC Blades and PC Clough, come back to the House with our plans on the funding formula because that will have to change to reflect the new model of policing. There is a long process for the review of a funding formula, but it starts with the new principles that should underpin the funding formula. We will come back to the House very quickly once we have settled policy on the new force structures.
On broader change that people can see, this is a long programme of reform—deliberately so. It is learning the lessons from previous attempts to reform policing structures by not going too quickly and making sure that operational effectiveness is not compromised. As we move to the new national police service, I hope we will be able to realise more savings, because having one system leader, one way of doing things and one way of procurement is the right way forward, and those are all savings in the wider policing system, which again is to the benefit of our constituents.
As we then roll out the new local police areas, that is where you will get the biggest reset of relationships between local people and local policing. The way that I envisage local police areas working is effectively the equivalent of a borough command, but this is your dedicated local policing, whose main focus is the everyday crime, antisocial behaviour and high streets issues that we see in communities all over the country. They will be absolutely laser-focused on that work in communities, which we know is the sort of thing that has decreasing demand as you go up the chain.
Q10 Lewis Atkinson: Moving on to police leadership, there has been a report by Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert about policing leadership. What is your assessment of the findings of that report? What is your response to the recommendations made in it?
Shabana Mahmood: First, let me pay tribute to Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert. They were commissioned by my predecessor. It is a very important piece of work. I really value and respect the effort that has gone into the production of the report as well as the findings of the report.
We did an initial statement in the House once it was published, which the Policing Minister took. We will respond later in the autumn with the Government’s full response to the 27 recommendations. We will come back on each of those specifically with a proper Government response and how we intend to take the work forward.
We welcome the broad thrust of the report, its central findings and the case for reform. There are some areas where we had already, through the White Paper and other policy decisions, made choices about going further, which aligns very well with some of the recommendations of the report, particularly on appointments, panels and being able to create a better pipeline for policing leaders and chief constable appointments. We had already said that we would move forward on the reform of the promotion system and making sure that there is much more consistency in that.
There are aspects of the report where work is already being taken forward, which we will press ahead with. There are other things that I will need to come back to the House on in the autumn.
Q11 Lewis Atkinson: I look forward to seeing that. Linking the culture of leadership to police forces, and to the wider question of morale and the recruitment and retention of police officers, what action are you taking to enable the police to increase morale among rank-and-file police officers? What is your assessment of that? You might also want to say something about how you hear the voice of normal police officers. It has been pointed out to some of us that the Police Federation has got quite a lot going on. We wonder how Government hear the voices of police officers and how the action that you take is informed by that.
Shabana Mahmood: On broader morale, let me just say that the Government fund the College of Policing on its work for the National Police Wellbeing Service, which is incredibly important and has been operationalised after the deaths of PC Clough and PC Blades. That is good work. There is a new focus on what it takes to look after the wellbeing of police officers and to make sure that they go into the job with a good sense of how to look after their mental health and are supported to do so as they deal with very difficult incidents.
We have reformed the way in which we think about assaults on police officers, and there is legislative change as well to show the importance that we place on looking after our police staff.
More broadly, certainly in my old job as the Lord Chancellor, when we had the issues around the Chris Kaba shooting with firearms officers and big questions around anonymity, I was very struck then about how, after a particularly difficult incident like that, a police officer, as well as the family of the victim of a shooting, will go through many years of legal processes that can feel never-ending. I have heard directly from police officers about how that accountability system can take a decade off your life. Even if you are found wholly innocent, and you acted wholly appropriately and in line with your training, you have lost a decade of your life and things for you will never be the same.
Our end-to-end accountability review, which is a six-month programme I started in July, will report to me and the Lord Chancellor. It is specifically looking at the whole accountability system to make sure that it is fair, fast and delivers for people on both sides of that equation—police officers as well as victims and their families. We made some decisions about the presumption of anonymity in firearms cases. That was responding legitimately to the particular pressures on policing. Across the piece, we are doing lots of work that is designed to make sure that we offer a service that the public can have confidence in and that police officers can feel confident going about their daily roles.
In terms of hearing from police officers, like all of you, I am a constituency Member of Parliament so I engage with local neighbourhood teams in my own constituency. I know the local officers pretty well and I hear from them directly. When I am out and about and meeting people, I make a particular effort to do that, although I have to say people are not shy about telling me what they think is really going on either in their police force locally or nationally. Of course, like a small number of other Ministers, I am protected by police officers too. Believe me, between them and my local cops in Birmingham, I feel like I get a pretty authentic view of what is really going on.
Q12 Lewis Atkinson: Finally on morale, I recognise that you have set out a lot of action there on a number of things. How will you know whether that is making a difference across the bulk of policing in the country? An observation would be that there is no unified national policing staff survey and that it is optional for forces to opt in to some of the surveys that exist. Is that good enough? If not, how will you measure the improvement that you have to make?
Shabana Mahmood: You are right. There is a slight hampering of the data. It is not possible to give a totally complete picture or to set a metric that you know is accurate and reflects the full national picture.
In the future model, having a proper workforce strategy falls full square within the work of the new national police service. I would expect the new commissioner, once in place, to work with us in the Home Office to have a clear sense of what the workforce strategy should look like and to pay particular issue to the recruitment and retention of officers as well as promotion opportunities. We want to progress the licence to practise as well. That professionalisation work is all part of making sure that you have a workforce that works to high standards, feels respected and appreciated, and has opportunities to progress.
Until we transition to that model, I have to work with the best of what I have available to me. On that basis, we are not targeting any one headline metric in particular. I just continue to take views from system leaders and rank-and-file officers wherever I can to make sure that the current system at least can provide things such as the wellbeing service and answers on accountability before we transition to a new model where we can do this more systematically.
Q13 Mr Kohler: It is good to see you, Home Secretary. There have been various failures of leadership—in Northamptonshire, in Staffordshire and, as this Committee and you know too well, in the west midlands recently. There is a damning comparison in the Blunkett report from Sir Mark Rowley. He makes the point that a colonel, 15 years after leaving Sandhurst, has had 72 weeks of training and leadership. A chief superintendent of comparable experience will have had two or three weeks. How can we expect leadership from our police if we do not invest in their leadership?
Shabana Mahmood: I agree. It was a Labour Home Secretary just before me who commissioned this work in the first place because we recognise that there is an issue around having the police leadership that we want more consistently all over the country. At the moment we do fund some bits of work, but the point of the review was to look more coherently across the whole system and think about everything from pipeline to performance, to promotion and on to discipline as well.
I recognise the case that they have made. The Government recognised that they needed to do more on police leadership. When I set out the Government’s full response later this year, we will be able to say which of those recommendations we will be taking forward.
Q14 Mr Kohler: Are you able to give any commitment to invest more in leadership training for our police?
Shabana Mahmood: I am not going to give any new commitments today.
Mr Kohler: You will not give any commitments at all.
Shabana Mahmood: I am going to save that for a statement to the House later this year, but I am sure you and I, Mr Kohler, will have plenty to say to each other when I do.
Mr Kohler: We often do.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, we often do.
Q15 Mr Kohler: Sir Mark Rowley’s deputy, Matt Jukes, wrote to every London MP last month. He talked about the fact that the workforce was under sustained pressure and referenced the fact—this is all from his letter—that real-terms funding has reduced by a third since 2015 in the Met, that it has lost 3,300 staff in the last two years, and that it is about to lose another 1,000 staff because of more funding cuts. What do you think that does to morale in the Met, when the police are under such pressure and, according to the letter, the Met is now the smallest it has ever been per head of population?
Shabana Mahmood: There is plenty that I agree with Matt Jukes on. I am not sure I necessarily agree with all his characterisation of the funding. Since we have been in government, there has been a £2 billion uplift in police funding and a real-terms increase for every force in the country.
I recognise, as does every Government Minister overseeing any public service, that there are particular pressures, particularly given the inflation picture. It is why the work of the Government has been very clearly focused on bringing some of those pressures down, but I would just recognise that there has been a significant uplift in police funding since we have been in Government.
Q16 Mr Kohler: Not for the Met: the Met is the smallest that it has ever been.
Shabana Mahmood: Every force has had an increase. Whether that money is able to cover all the inflation increase is a different question. In a difficult funding environment, it would be unfair to suggest that the Government have not presided over a very significant increase in overall funding as well as delivering a real-terms increase for every force. That is true of the Met as well.
Q17 Mr Kohler: There are particular issues in London with NICC funding—Sir Mark Rowley constantly says it is badly underfunded. You end up using neighbourhood police to police marches, etc. Is anything going to happen about the NICC funding?
Shabana Mahmood: I engage with all policing system leaders regularly, and I hear the cases that are made to me. We will have the next year’s settlement towards the end of this year.
Q18 Mr Kohler: You hear, but are you listening?
Shabana Mahmood: I hear and I listen. Can I always act? Do I always agree that that is the one thing that should be prioritised over all others? I am a politician, as are you. Those are choices that have to be made. We are focused on making sure that forces can meet the pressures they have and on delivering an increase for every force, which is what we have done.
I recognise that it is a constrained environment, given the overall economic picture. In that, we are making choices about protecting neighbourhood policing and the overall operational effectiveness of policing, but of course I hear about the pressures and I am sure I will do as we go into next year’s settlement as well. Those will be choices to make, given whatever financial headroom we have.
Q19 Mr Kohler: Sir Mark Rowley and Matt Jukes have made the point that neighbourhood policing suffers in London because of the failure to properly fund the NICC commitment.
Shabana Mahmood: The first year of neighbourhood policing growth was delivered by the specific grant for neighbourhood policing. That should not be skewing anything in any one direction. That was specifically for—
Q20 Mr Kohler: There is abstraction, though.
Shabana Mahmood: Again, we are working with policing on dealing with abstraction issues, which I recognise is a problem, but money for neighbourhood policing was set aside to deliver neighbourhood policing. In year one of the Government, it went beyond the number that was required. They were able to recruit more. That was specific money.
In year two, there is an ask of the policing system to redeploy from current resources in the manner that it sees fit. On that, we have also responded to a request from policing leaders all over the country to remove the very distortive uplift programme, which was forcing choices that ultimately led to warranted officers behind desks. You do not want to have a distortion in the way that the workforce is planned. We removed that to give them much more flexibility over what their force looks like.
Q21 Ben Maguire: Thanks, Home Secretary, for coming in today. The police leadership commission report by Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert identified 78 misconduct investigations involving senior police officers since 2018, including eight current or former chief constables, two of whom are from my local force, Devon and Cornwall. Both those have been reinstated or retired at a cost of £500,000 to the taxpayer. Just last week I got a freedom of information request, which said that by the end of August this year 17 officers in Devon and Cornwall were on full pay at a cost of £1.3 million a year, and one officer appears to have been suspended on full pay for more than four years. It is estimated in that report that the national cost of suspended police officers on full pay is around £60 million a year.
We hear you loud and clear, Home Secretary, when you talk about this Government placing community policing at the heart of your strategy. I fully support that and I know my constituents do, but do you share my constituents’ frustration when they see £60 million spent on this and meanwhile a local police desk in my constituency, in a town called Launceston—it would probably cost £100,000 to get that reopened—is put completely on the back burner?
Shabana Mahmood: I understand. The broader discipline programme has pressures of its own. Of course, not everyone who is suspended is ultimately removed from duty. People have the right to a fair system, proper due process rights and all the rest of it, but there are issues in this system. When I set out our full response to the leadership review later this year, let me assure you that we will be thinking very carefully about what this means for the wider system and police disciplinary procedures.
The two things go hand in hand: a good disciplinary procedure and a good promotions picture. These things are all about investing in those in your workforce who are diligent and who do the right thing, and being able to remove officers who are not behaving as we would expect.
The details in the report about current cases and the things that we know of—I cannot comment on those specifics and I do not wish to prejudice any hearings—are always very worrying. The public need to have absolute confidence that the person with whom they are dealing at the end of a phone or in their community, or the person to whom they are disclosing a serious incident, is a person they can trust who will deal with that diligently and professionally, as is the case for the vast majority of officers. Where it does not happen, the system needs to be faster. It has to prove to the public that it can move quickly, not waste money, remove the so-called bad apples and really invest in everybody else who is doing the right thing.
Q22 Ben Maguire: At the recruitment stage, do you see that being an issue? Currently, we have police and crime commissioners doing that recruitment. As we move forward, how do you see that changing and hopefully improving at that early recruitment stage?
Shabana Mahmood: Moving to the senior appointments panel will help with the pipeline into policing, particularly for chief constable roles. If you think about—again, it was all done with good intentions—the idea of the PCC being in charge for their local area, in terms of recruitment that has meant you often get only one candidate for these jobs because locally it is known and understood who the deputy is or who the likely frontrunner is. That means you do not have the wider moving around the country that you tend to have with leadership positions in other types of service. In that respect, it has not worked.
The person who is doing the oversight in the end has to be in charge of the appointment, but it is a wider system job to make sure that the pipeline for these chief constable roles is strong and you do not just get the locally preferred candidate, but you get a bit of competition. You are able to say to people who might be somewhere where there are lots of potential candidates around that they have a future somewhere else. The senior appointments panel and that new process will help us to think carefully about the people who are in that pipeline for senior roles. We can then take a system view of whether that pipeline is providing adequate opportunities for high-performing people across the system. We will be able to tell whether it is skewed in any particular direction as well.
These are things that we cannot do well at the moment because it is such a localised system. When it goes back to shades of the old model, if not quite the old model, that bit of the workforce strategy should come together better.
Chair: Just to warn you, Home Secretary, we have quite a lot more to get through.
Shabana Mahmood: Am I being too long?
Chair: No, you may want to consider the length of your answers. That is all I will say.
Q23 Margaret Mullane: It is great to see you, Home Secretary. You said to Lewis that since the election neighbourhood policing has been the bedrock, as far as you are concerned, and I do not think there is a Member of Parliament who would disagree with that. Although you have pushed and promoted, quite rightly, neighbourhood policing roles, the overall workforce has shrunk. What you wanted to achieve has not been realised yet. Add to that the abstractions that my colleague Paul related to, and the fact that we are trying, quite rightly, to focus on serious crime, vape shops and high streets. That is very resource intensive, and we need our police, really, to deal with that. Is it the case that what you set out to do was the right thing, but that, at the moment, with how the workforce is and police morale, it is not working?
Shabana Mahmood: No, I do not think so. The Government had a manifesto commitment on neighbourhood policing, which we are cracking on with delivering. By the end of this financial year, in March 2027, we hope to be at 4,750. There is a lot more still to do to hit the 13,000 target. The trajectory of that is a decision for the future, but it is right that we have sought to invest in neighbourhood policing. We see it as the bedrock. We know that visible policing—all the evidence shows this—is not just about public confidence in policing, but it has an impact on reducing crime and reducing demand in the wider system. It is the right thing to invest in.
On the wider picture, I know that one of the critiques that people are making is that the focus on neighbourhood policing leads to a loss of officers elsewhere. It is not quite such a simplistic picture. Certainly, forces have not told me that the neighbourhood policing requirement is having a distortive effect as, say, the uplift programme did. It is something that I monitor very carefully. I am in regular contact with policing leaders to discuss what is happening in terms of workforce.
Q24 Margaret Mullane: I have a quick follow-on from that. It is what Paul alluded to. In my area, in the east BCU, neighbourhood police officers are often abstracted. They might not necessarily share that with you because that is operational. I just wonder whether you think it is working.
Shabana Mahmood: On the wider problem of abstraction, I would just recognise that there will be exceptional situations where you do need to move your officers out of their normal duties because you have a major incident and you need to surge resources somewhere. We should just accept that that is an operational need that occasionally presents itself. It should not be the norm. The operating model should not be that you will just abstract officers every day from one set of duties to another.
We are working with policing to develop what you might call new national standards for how we think about abstraction, what is acceptable and what is not. That is also due for delivery by the end of this Parliament. I recognise the problem, and we are working with policing leaders to address it. What I would not recognise is the direct link between that and the discussion that we have just been having about neighbourhood policing.
Q25 Margaret Mullane: Finally, how are the police going to have the flexibility to pay for technical staff, including civilians, and equipment to tackle modern forms of crime?
Shabana Mahmood: On modern forms of crime, I would recognise that by far and away the largest crime type is fraud, much of which is tech-enabled. The last set of figures I saw suggested that something like 70% of fraud has an international dimension. That is why the Government have a specific fraud strategy, which is £250 million, including a new online centre, as well as all the work that we do with international partners to crack down on scam centres and the like, ultimately to see a decrease in fraud incidence here at home.
On the largest crime type, there is already a good strategy with a significant sum of money attached to it, which can make progress in terms of the investment needed and going after the tech companies—effectively the platforms on which this occurs—and scam centres more broadly.
On wider technological developments, we have the new PoliceAI programme, which is about making the best use of AI and developing technology to either synthesise data or analyse evidence more quickly, so that the bit that only the police officer can do, which is to assess that evidence according to law, can be sped up. There are different investments that are designed to make sure that we can keep up with the changing tech environment.
Again, in the future model of policing, this is exactly the sort of area where the new commissioner for the national police service can take a strong lead and provide the system leadership needed to make sure that every part of the country benefits from positive developments in tech that improve productivity and investigation capacity, as well as looking at the broader trends on what new forms of crime are being tech-enabled.
Q26 Robbie Moore: Home Secretary, I am sure we will all agree that neighbourhood policing is the core of everything that goes on in our communities in challenging law and order issues. I just want to focus on the “clear, hold, build” strategy with neighbourhood policing, which would be widely recognised as being a success. This is about dealing with hotspot areas within communities where there is drug distribution and individuals in balaclavas riding around on e-bikes and e-scooters.
Of course, this is something that happens in my own constituency of Keighley, where we previously did have a “clear, hold, build” strategy, but the challenge—this has been put to me locally—is that the funding has to be deemed to be cost-efficient by the Home Office, utilising existing resources, budgets and personnel already allocated to police forces and local authorities. Given that there is wide recognition that the “clear, hold, build” strategy works, why is there not dedicated funding specifically for it?
Shabana Mahmood: First, let me say that “clear, hold, build” is a good operational response to particular patterns of local organised crime and has been shown to be effective. In fact, the Government have just provided additional funding to Cleveland so that its “clear, hold, build” programme can be expanded to meet the current challenges that it is facing. I recognise the effectiveness of that type of work.
We are dealing with a broader system where there is a lot of demand. As I say, we provided uplifts in funding and we will make new funding decisions for the coming year in December and January in the normal way. It is not possible to fund literally every type of programme that is effective. There has to be a better balance between things that are business as usual and things that normal policing does without always requiring an additional stream of funding from the Home Office.
The very fragmented system that we have has meant that you often get new operational capabilities only when the Home Office specifically funds a programme, but in the future you want policing to be able to make the best of its resources and to take a system-wide operational approach.
Q27 Robbie Moore: It has been put to me at local level that there can be only one “clear, hold, build” strategy per local authority area. In my area, Bradford has a “clear, hold, build” strategy live right now, but in Keighley we are being deprived of one simply because of that direction, which I think is inappropriate. I would encourage you to re-look at that strategy.
Shabana Mahmood: I would be happy for you to write to me. I can come back to you with a view on not just what is currently happening but what might happen in the future.
Q28 Robbie Moore: Of course, this is a partnership-led approach. Again, I give a live example in my own constituency of dodgy shops and mini-marts. Again, this is not just in my constituency; it is a common issue across the country where the system seems to fail. Again, I will give you live example. On Cavendish Street in my constituency seven of these dodgy shops were raided, quite rightly, by the police and counterfeit goods were taken away, but these shops are still live and active and, I dare say, have restocked their counterfeit illegal goods and are carrying out illegal operations. What seems to fail is that there is then not a combative approach by trading standards in its relationship with HMRC.
Home Secretary, what are you doing in relation to having that relationship with colleagues in MHCLG and HMRC to make sure that, when the police rightly do their actions, as I have experienced in Keighley, the system then does not fail by other services not coming in and dealing with the problem?
Shabana Mahmood: On this, there is a specific Home Office programme. Just referring to my previous answer, the new high streets organised crime work is building on a National Crime Agency programme that was shown to have a good effect. We have put some new money behind that.
Specifically, there are more officers going after high street organised crime. That is exactly your dodgy mini-marts or vape shops—the businesses that appear overnight and have blacked out windows and all sorts of nefarious activity happening behind the scenes. Usually, the local community has spotted and is well aware of that.
The good thing about that new high streets organised crime programme is that it is not just a policing response. Through that work, we are funding trading standards and HMRC, and taking along Immigration Enforcement as well. I have been on one of those raids, which involved all those different agencies. We know that you need to have a full-spectrum response. Sometimes the evidence will be there on tax evasion or illicit tobacco, if it is not necessarily there in other areas. You can have a quick and effective response when you have all those different agencies engaged. It is a deliberate decision in that new work that we are funding to involve the other agencies.
It is fair to observe that trading standards overall across the country has had large numbers of cuts over previous Administrations. The price of that is being felt, but we are through this work at least funding some new work for trading standards and involving it in the high streets work that we are doing. It will prove to be very effective. It is relatively newly up and running, but it has got good engagement from other Government Departments. When we set it up, we were discussing with the Treasury on the HMRC side, MHCLG on the trading standards side, and of course I hold Immigration Enforcement. We were all involved in designing it. As it has been effective over the coming year, we will be able to see what difference it is making and where future funding might then flow.
Separately, the new Prime Minister has had a lot to say about vape shops in particular and the new requirement for planning permission. Constraining the environment in which these dodgy businesses operate is a key feature of the work that the Government are doing.
Q29 Chair: The Committee is looking at this as part of an inquiry that we are working on. Can I just ask two quick questions before we move on? You have talked about fraud being the largest crime type. The noble Lord Hanson is a great Minister, but I just wonder whether it is appropriate to have the biggest crime type being led from the House of Lords.
Shabana Mahmood: Lord Hanson is a very effective and exceptional Minister. I would not read anything into the fact that he sits for us in the Lords. All aspects of fraud policy and the strategy as it was being developed have been discussed directly between him and me. He is a very good Minister.
Q30 Chair: We can be confident that the answers that are given in the Commons reflect the up-to-date position.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes.
Q31 Chair: My second question, before we move on, is around the independent review on public order and hate crime. We were expecting that before the summer. We have some very sensitive events coming up in the next few weeks. Are we going to see it before then?
Shabana Mahmood: I do not yet have a date that I can give to the Committee today. I can write to you with an indication of when we expect that to happen. That was delayed due to the change in Government and the access talks beginning. It was not something that already had agreement and therefore could not proceed. I would hope to make progress on that very soon after conference recess.
Q32 Ben Maguire: Home Secretary, how are you measuring success in reducing the impact of serious and organised crime on local communities, including whether action against visible crime is leading to the disruption of the organised criminal networks that sit behind them?
Shabana Mahmood: I have just been answering this question in relation to high street organised crime at the local level. That is where you see the bulk of dodgy shops and the criminals who sit behind them moving into communities. The Government have a specific strategy and a funded workstream on that. Of course, wider organised crime sits within the usual structure of regional organised crime units as well as work at the National Crime Agency.
In terms of effectiveness, that is business as usual, as it were, for those policing organisations. The biggest change that our public have rightly noticed is the movement into the high street of organised criminals, which is not a thing that used to happen before but is definitely a new feature of high streets today.
The Government are responding to that with our new strategy and our new work. It is a three-year programme. At the end of year one, we will have a good sense of the increase in the number of premises that have been raided and the outcomes for HMRC, Immigration Enforcement and so on.
We also need to do some legislative change. As you might know, I have already announced that the period that you can get a closure order for will change. It will go to a year, which will give policing a much increased operational ability not just to close shops but to keep them closed. There might be more legislative change needed, which we will be looking at ahead of the third Session of this Parliament.
Q33 Ben Maguire: How in particular will you be supporting smaller police forces? I am thinking particularly in rural areas such as mine in North Cornwall, which face lots of challenges from county lines gangs to rural theft. You have mentioned already the high street issues that we are facing. Lots of these rural forces are already pushed to breaking point in trying to deliver the community policing that you have mentioned.
I am pleased that the Government have taken up the rural and wildlife crime strategy, but there is only something like £365,000 for the rural crime unit. Spread across our police forces, that is about £8,500 per police force, which is a bit of a drop in the ocean. I would be keen to hear what you think needs to be done to support smaller rural police forces.
Shabana Mahmood: Each of the things that you have just mentioned—there is a county lines programme that is specifically funded by the Home Office as well; there is the high streets work that is also now specifically funded; and you are rightly raising the wider pressures—speaks to the need for police reform. At the moment, each time something new happens the system does not have the flexibility at local, regional or national level to respond to that and to have a good policing response. There is a lag between a new type of problem emerging and the Home Office being lobbied and working out what a new funding programme for that looks like, which is not a sensible way to do things. Each small pot of money for each new type of activity becomes vulnerable when there is not enough money around and you cannot plan your resources effectively. That rather makes the case for police reform, if I might say so, first and foremost.
There is one other thing that I would just observe. I take your point on the national rural crime unit, but, for a smallish operation, it has very good and effective co‑ordination capacity across different rural forces and a good understanding of what is needed in order to try to clamp down on the sorts of crime that you see only in rural areas, such as agricultural vehicle theft. It came into being in 2023 and has been able to recover something like £30 million worth of goods. That is not a bad rate in terms of performance for the unit. It is highly specialised and it does good work.
Ben Maguire: Can I just quickly ask a follow-up? You mentioned that you thought police reforms would really help in this area. I would quite like to know in particular what you think will improve as a result of those reforms. I am still hearing constituents who have had quad bikes or farm machinery nicked, and they are not even getting follow-ups from the police. The police tell me that they are just too stretched to do that. I am quite keen to hear what those reforms will improve.
Q34 Chair: If I can come in on the back of that, I have exactly the same problem in my constituency. I met residents in Dovedale, right on the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border, this year. They have visitors galore—that is great; we love to have people come and visit us—but there is a lot of antisocial behaviour. There are a lot of barbecues being set, which is a worry for wildfires. There are a lot of people who are not observing the use of the lavatory facilities properly or parking properly. These residents expect police officers to come and patrol the streets and make sure this is not going to happen.
They are realistic. It is a very small place. They recognise that there are not going to be police there every moment of every day. If the police are being delivered out of Birmingham rather than out of Stafford, how is that going to make it better for them?
Shabana Mahmood: The mistake is to think that the new regional force does exactly the work of the current regional force. That is not what is happening here. In the new model, you are looking at local policing areas, at least at local authority level if not a bit smaller, being the effective equivalent of a borough command, as you see in London and elsewhere.
That is your new system-wide neighbourhood policing. These are exactly the officers who will be picking up all the local intelligence about changes in the environment. They will be picking up all the intel from local communities about what is happening on the high street. They will be doing the patrols. That is what good system-wide, consistent neighbourhood policing looks like. It will be embedded, including in statute, as the new local policing model. It will get right to the heart of the different needs in every local area, whether that is a rural area or a city centre in a city area such as mine.
That is the bedrock of the new policing model. On top of that, you then have strategic forces. You will have a smaller number of broader regional forces. In the new model, this is where all your specialist capabilities sit. These are your specialists at rape or murder investigations; these are the people who can surge public order resourcing into areas where it is needed.
At the moment, you have seen in Cleveland, for example, a relatively small force struggling to both do the day-to-day local policing and have the right numbers to do public order policing when things got very tricky over the last couple of weeks. In the new model, that is a problem that you are trying to fix. At strategic force level, you are able to have the flex that you need with all those specialist capabilities and your public order policing, so that the whole system is not just completely reliant on mutual aid between one small force and another. It wipes out many of those problems that policing is currently experiencing.
I would say this to you, Chair. Do not think that the new strategic forces in the new model will be doing exactly the same work as your current regional force is doing today. It will be split between a local policing area, the equivalent of a borough command, and a strategic force above that that does the specialist work.
Q35 Chair: You are telling me that those residents will see a difference following police reform.
Shabana Mahmood: Absolutely, your residents in the future will know what their local policing area is. They will have a direct relationship with the people who run their local policing area. That will be underpinned by statute.
Q36 Ben Maguire: Does that mean there will be more police officers, then? Forgive me, but there is no absence of specialism as far as rural crime goes. Among my local police officers, they are excellent on rural crime. It is literally an issue of capacity. They cannot get out to Bodmin Moor or to more rural areas to investigate thefts, for example. Under the new national police service, will there be more officers dedicated to investigating these crimes?
Shabana Mahmood: In the new model, your local officers in your local policing area will be responsible for policing localities and focusing on everyday crime and antisocial behaviour. In a patch such as yours, that will look and feel a lot more like rural crime. In a patch such as mine, it will look slightly different. These will be highly responsive to their local needs.
The strategic force on top is the standard of service and the consistency that you will expect wherever you are in the country. If you are a rape victim in your part of the world or in mine, you should get the same standard of service and it should not be dictated by the fact that one of us is in a very small force and one of us is in a much larger force that has that specialist capability. It will eliminate the postcode lottery that you are getting in specialised crime types.
In terms of the future funding and future size of workforce, those are questions to be determined as we decide what the new structure looks like and as the reforms are carried out. They are being deliberately done over a longer period to make sure that they are embedded properly. I am sure that we will have discussions about what numbers are needed at each part of the model once those decisions are a little more mature in the process.
Q37 Ben Maguire: We will have the existing local officers and then a new national force that sits above them. Is that right?
Shabana Mahmood: It is a three-tiered structure: local police areas, strategic forces and then the national police service.
Q38 Chair: Who will the local police report to?
Shabana Mahmood: These are questions to determine as the reforms are being developed. We are still waiting on the review. Once that has published, I will be able to answer more of the detail about the interrelationship between all three tiers of the new structure. To be clear, the local police areas are just as important a part of these reforms as what the new strategic forces look like. Lord Hogan-Howe’s review will have things to say about what the local policing areas should look like as well.
Q39 Joani Reid: I want to turn now to violence against women and girls, particularly around implementation. Do you have any specific update that you want to give the Committee? Also, could you explain to us the significance, particularly around implementation, of splitting the role of the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence against Women and Girls across two Departments?
Shabana Mahmood: In terms of who does the work, the creation of the violence against women and girls strategy, as well as its implementation, is jointly led between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, which is where the two Ministers sit. There is a ministerial board that meets every month. In fact, it might be having its meeting either today or tomorrow. That is jointly chaired by Minister Kaur in our Department and then Minister Davies-Jones from the MoJ.
It is attended by up to about 18 different Government Departments, all of which have different elements of the strategy that they are responsible for delivering. They have taken on board the criticisms from the National Audit Office about how implementation and delivery are monitored, and whether that is effective. The new structure is being designed to make sure that it can reflect the learnings from the National Audit Office.
The creation of the strategy was a cross-government effort. The previous Prime Minister personally chaired the final meetings at which all aspects of the strategy were agreed. The Home Office and the Ministry of Justice effectively held the pen as that was being developed. Implementation is shared and joint. There is a board, and other Government Departments attend.
Q40 Joani Reid: There is no specific, tangible implementation impact around this splitting of the Minister.
Shabana Mahmood: I do not think that the shared responsibility has an impact on the ability to deliver the commitments in the strategy. In fact, it helps, because the problem is that, if you look at something only through a Home Office lens, you are essentially looking at the point at which crime has been committed, or perpetrators and reducing re-offending, but the strategy is deliberately also trying to get further upstream of the problem and look at prevention and education programmes, some of which are really quite innovative and need to be tested in terms of what they can deliver in the future.
If it is something that is held only by essentially a criminal justice Department, you miss the broader requirement for the whole of Government, and indeed the whole of society, to have a response to what is a society-wide problem. It can help the implementation rather than hinder it. In the end, it comes from political impetus as well. All I can tell you is that that was very strong under the previous Prime Minister and is very strong under the new one as well.
Q41 Joani Reid: There has been a commitment to speeding up the roll-out of the police rape and sexual offence teams by about 18 months. Do you believe that is a realistic objective? Do you think you will achieve it? What are you deprioritising to ensure that that is a success?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, that can be achieved. We have been advised throughout by, and have been in communication with, the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, which has been assisting in this work. Our current assessment is that something like half of forces already have a specialist team. In fact, the NCVPP is going to do a progress report on 1 October, so I will make sure the Committee is updated when we have additional numbers, which will show what the progress is. We are pretty confident, having discussed this with policing partners, that it is achievable and doable.
Does it require deprioritisation? I do not believe it does. That is the wrong way to think about it, because in the end you are responding to caseload. You are trying to have a consistent way of approaching the caseload, and to have the same standard for how that caseload is managed and how those cases are dealt with. The NCVPP developed four different models for how this work might be done. It is up to forces to decide which of those they take forward and how they actually deliver. These forces have workload in the rape and sexual offences space. This is about making sure that the work of those cases, the development of those cases, the assessment of the evidence, the dealing with the victims and so on is done to a consistent standard.
Q42 Joani Reid: So you would anticipate that the impact would be around case prioritisation within each force, as opposed to more widely.
Shabana Mahmood: It is about quality of investigation. You are trying to make sure that each force has a good way of handling what are really quite sensitive cases, and that you do not get the big discrepancies that you currently see across the system, where some forces are particularly good and have model ways of dealing with these particular types of cases, and others, which maybe do not see enough of this work, might have less well-developed structures for managing the caseload. As I say, the NCVPP has developed the four different approaches that could be taken, and they can choose which one is best for them. I am not here to tell police forces what is the right operational answer for them, but it is right to expect that they can handle these cases to a high quality and with consistency across the country.
Q43 Joani Reid: On violence against women and girls online, you mentioned in the House that you believe that a new suite of policy responses was required. I know that a couple of the Baroness Bertin recommendations have been adopted. Have you given any more thought to what that will look like and what those policy responses will be? I understand that there is a pilot project around undercover policing online to tackle violence against women and girls. Can you give us more detail on that?
Shabana Mahmood: On the undercover operatives, that is already a funded part of the violence against women and girls strategy from within the Home Office. That is one of our commitments under the strategy, and it is something that we are already delivering. We will assess progress a year in to see what the operational impact of that was, and then make decisions about what is then funded.
On the wider issue, you are referring to what I said in the Commons about the broader online space and the need to have a fresh look at what policy changes are needed, given the implementation of the Online Safety Act. There is a wide recognition across the political spectrum that we are going to have to take another look at what online safety looks like, especially in the age of AI, deepfakes and so on.
I know that it is work that the Secretary of State at DCMS is looking at. There has been a machinery of government change, but she now holds the pen on this. She gave the statement recently on device‑level controls and the Government’s broader approach to tech companies. We work very closely on this and we know it is a priority, so I would expect her to set out more in terms of the broader online safety environment, whether the tools we currently have are good enough and the extent to which they need to change.
As for our specific part of that, we have been working already on the policy, so on device‑level controls and the online officers. There is a bit of work that still needs to complete across Government, which is on Baroness Bertin’s review, especially on the question of parity between offences committed online and then in the real world. That work continues; that is a cross-government bit with Home Office, DCMS and other partners across Government involved. I cannot give a sense today of when that will complete. It has been on the “being done but not finished” list for a while, so let me undertake to write to the Committee with when I expect us to be able to set out a new response on Baroness Bertin’s porn review.
Q44 Joani Reid: Thank you very much. We look forward to receiving that. Yesterday, the Attorney General set out the pressure that she is putting on the CPS to get to grips with the patterns around domestic abuse and stalking cases. I was wondering whether you were confident that police officers are capable of identifying these patterns before they get to the CPS.
Shabana Mahmood: There is a much broader societal understanding of different offences. There is a much stronger understanding across policing of not just different offences, but how to approach investigation and build the strongest possible case where the evidence is there. What the AG is specifically looking at is whether the CPS has a sufficiently robust attitude towards prosecuting such cases.
We know what the evidential challenges can be. We know how difficult some of those cases are to prosecute in trials. It is right that every bit of the criminal justice system considers whether it is forward-leaning, whether it is going where the evidence should be taking us in terms of prosecuting these cases and getting the best outcomes for victims, and making it clear that these are crimes that will face the full force of the law.
Of course, if there are issues in policing, we want to make sure that policing is as forward-leaning as possible. It is why the specialist teams are a policy innovation that it is important to roll out. There are questions across the CJS, which is what the AG was seeking to respond to.
Q45 Joani Reid: You do not think at the moment that there are any specific problems that need to be addressed within police forces. You are confident that they are capable of identifying domestic abuse.
Shabana Mahmood: To separate that out, one reason why we have pushed specialist teams for rape and sexual offences is recognising the challenge of those cases, how difficult it is for victims to come forward, and what the evidential issues can be in getting a case successfully to prosecution and then to conviction. We know that every part of that journey can be fraught, which is why we have rolled out that policy on other offences that are in the violence against women and girls space, but are not covered by rape and sexual offence, so, exactly as you say, domestic abuse and stalking. Policing has a much more positive posture and is capable of identifying issues. Again, if there is evidence to the contrary, I would be happy to consider it. This is the sort of work that the NCVPP looks at very closely.
Q46 Joani Reid: I just want to briefly turn to Scotland, if I may. We had fairly recent victim testimony of women and girls who have been trafficked across the border. In February, the Scottish Government announced that they were going to do their own statutory inquiry into organised child sex abuse. Given the victim testimony that we have all read and seen, have you had or are you aware of any conversations with the Scottish Government that have looked to work together on this and to support each other in addressing the learning from the inquiries?
Shabana Mahmood: I know that the inquiry that we set up for England and Wales is engaging with the inquiry in Scotland. To the extent that there are independent inquiries, it would be wrong for Ministers to start trying to set the pace, as it were, on what the inquiries are looking at or what the lessons might be. The inquiries themselves, I believe, are in discussion. We would want to see learnings shared, with shared challenge. The fact that there is a border does not eliminate the horror of the crimes that have been committed. To the extent that there are independent inquiries, those are in touch and are discussing their emerging findings.
On the specific policing response, even though you have devolution, there is always co-operation between law enforcement agencies. I do know that the team that is running Operation Beaconport, which is looking at historic cases here in England and Wales, is in touch with its operational policing partners in Scotland as well. At both operational level and inquiry level, that is work that is being led by the officials who are responsible.
Q47 Chair: There are some very high-profile organised cases. Are you going to bring all of that together into one place? Are we going to actually get to have some form of inquiry that looks at everything in the round so that we can get to the bottom of what happened to these poor victims?
Shabana Mahmood: Sorry, do you mean specifically on the grooming gangs inquiry?
Q48 Chair: No, I mean on the high-profile cases.
Shabana Mahmood: The wider UK picture.
Q49 Chair: Yes, the wider UK picture of the high-profile elite individuals.
Shabana Mahmood: I am happy to engage with you in writing, Chair. It is important that the inquiries that are currently under way can do their work, but I am sure once they are completing there will be broader lessons, both at the very high-profile end of the spectrum and then also, unfortunately, for those victims whose cases are not high profile, but the damage done to them is no less serious. Across the picture, I can undertake that we will make sure we have a proper response.
Q50 Chair: Victims all deserve to be treated equally, no matter who the perpetrator was.
Shabana Mahmood: They all deserve to be treated exactly the same.
Q51 Robbie Moore: Just sticking with the same theme, we now finally have the national grooming gangs inquiry, with a focus on Bradford and Keighley as part of one of those local areas. Can I just put a concern to you that has been reiterated to me many a time? The underlying issue of this is trust between those victims and survivors and the state, at all levels, which has failed them for far too long.
While it does not sit under your jurisdiction, the early prisoner release scheme has caused a massive issue with trust between those victims and survivors and the state. While the Prime Minister has said that those will not be released at 33%, we still have those perpetrators being released at 50% of serving their sentence.
I have a live scenario where many victims and survivors have contacted me. Fiona Goddard is one of them, where her perpetrator is being released early. My worry is that, with the independent inquiry now taking place, victims and survivors will potentially be reluctant to come forward, because they feel that there is not that trust that has been reestablished. My question to you, Home Secretary, is whether you are aware of this potential reluctance of victims and survivors to come forward to the independent inquiry.
Secondly, what are the Home Secretary and police forces doing to provide the protection that needs to be put in place for these victims and survivors to come forward to the inquiry? As it sits at the moment, I do not think that that is there. Fiona Goddard, who I have referenced, has had to move home. We are still in the process of trying to get her into a safe accommodation for fear. Are you aware of these challenges and what are you doing about it?
Shabana Mahmood: In respect of what happened to Ms Goddard, my understanding is that she was wrongly sent a letter about the circumstances of release of one of the criminals who offended against her, and that was not a case of an early release, but let me make sure. You have written about this, so let me make sure that you get a proper response. I do not want to misspeak on the record for what is obviously a very difficult and very sensitive case, but my understanding is that it is not a case of early release.
There has been a problem over at the Ministry of Justice where a series of letters have been sent out incorrectly, causing a huge amount of fear among victims. I know that the new Lord Chancellor is very focused on making sure that the MoJ is able to apologise where the wrong letters have been sent and then give very clear information to victim survivors about what is going to happen in their cases.
More broadly, of course, you will know that the Prime Minister has announced a series of exclusions. What you are talking about is not the progression model, which is about releases at a third of sentence with a third spent on tag, but the more serious offences where people normally serve two thirds of their sentence in prison. The Prime Minister has announced some exclusions to the policy that was going to drop that from two thirds to 50%.
Q52 Robbie Moore: Can I just ask, though, on protecting those victims and survivors? There is a real concern at the moment of not wishing to come forward to give evidence to the independent inquiry for their own fear. Can I just ask again: what is the Home Office doing to provide that reassurance to victims and survivors so that they can come forward and give evidence?
Shabana Mahmood: I understand that trust is a key issue here. It is one of the reasons why, once appointed, I moved very quickly on having the national inquiry and getting that set up—to try to win the trust of victim survivors back. I know that is a process and it will take time. Let me just say here and now that I do want victims to feel like they can come forward. Now that you have raised this with me, I will engage with the Chair to see what more we can do to give confidence to victim survivors in coming forward. I will also undertake to work with colleagues in probation and elsewhere, such that the policing response is fully joined up with the other criminal justice agencies.
Q53 Chair: We need to move on. We have done two of our three topics, and we are now moving on to migration, both regular and irregular. Before we go into specific questions, I wonder, Home Secretary, whether you could perhaps give us your reflections, one year on, as to how you feel about migration, regular and irregular, knowing what you know now, perhaps what you did not know 12 months ago, what you have seen from the statistics, and what you have seen from the experiences you have had.
Shabana Mahmood: That is a very good question. My experiences are that it remains an issue of widespread public concern, and that the public are often ahead of where the political debate is. It has reaffirmed things that I had a sense of. As a constituency MP, I have always had a very large immigration caseload. I have a very diverse constituency representing every part of the immigration picture, whether that is on the legal, illegal or irregular—or anything in between—side of things. It has reaffirmed for me that public sentiment or public knowledge about things is usually ahead of where the political debate is.
My challenge is to make sure that the politics can respond to where the public is. It is a mistake to think that the spread of concern is only certain types of people in certain constituencies. Border security is a matter of concern, whether you are youngish in a seat such as mine—a city centre constituency—whether you are middle class, whether you are working class, and anything and everything in between. One thing that the political debate sometimes gets wrong is a sense that this is only of concern to people who are at one end of the political spectrum. That is wrong. In fact, all the public polling shows that that is wrong, but maybe that is not the prejudice that politicians sometimes bring to their discussion.
Q54 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Home Secretary, I am thinking about some of the issues you just raised. Perhaps moving back slightly, these issues have sparked a lot of protests over the past few years. Lord Macdonald submitted a review to you on this in late May. I believe your office said in a formal response that it would be published shortly. I was just wondering when it will be published.
Shabana Mahmood: As I said in response earlier, the Macdonald review has been delayed only because of the change of Government. The access talks began in the week that we were due to publish. It will be published; we are just waiting for a new timeline. I will write to the Committee when I know what that is going to be.
Q55 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: More generally, can we expect any major changes to immigration policy under the new Prime Minister?
Shabana Mahmood: There are elements of migration policy that are to be settled; for example, we have had a consultation running on settlement. We will be making policy decisions on that very soon. Of course, that will be shaped by the new Prime Minister, as it would have been under the previous Prime Minister. We have an immigration Bill in train, which will proceed. It has already had Second Reading. You are about to take oral evidence on the Bill soon, if you have not already. In any case, the Bill will continue to progress, as will other parts of the asylum policy statement and delivery. I have already had good conversations with the new Prime Minister about aspects of migration policy.
Q56 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Next year, migrants who arrived in 2022 will start to qualify for settlement under the current system. You had previously told us that the earned settlement changes are targeted at migrants in these groups. Will these reforms be implemented by next year?
Shabana Mahmood: The earned settlement is not just for one group; it is a new model of settlement, which is about settlement being something that is earned through contribution and a new set of tests that lead to settlement. It is basically permanent residency in this country; there is no meaningful difference in day-to-day life between somebody who has indefinite leave to remain and somebody who is a British citizen, so it is right to reassess the basis on which settlement is granted. At the moment, it is effectively an automatic process based on how long you have been here. It is for a broader range than simply new arrivals.
I am very aware that a large group of people who arrived in 2022, absent any change, would qualify in February 2027. We have to give certainty to the system. It remains the case that the rules that apply to you are the rules in force at the point of your application, not when you arrived in the country. That will continue to apply in the normal way. Later this year we will set out the new policy on settlement, taking into account all the consultation responses we have had, as well as any transitional arrangements we might decide to implement.
Q57 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Is there an expectation about what time of year it will happen? That should be a guide for some people as to what their situation will be.
Shabana Mahmood: Again, I do not want to overspeak for the Government grid and decide my own timeline. We have always said that we would have a consultation. We had many more responses to that than we thought. The analysis of not just the responses but the modelling that underpins it has taken a little longer. Since then, we have had a change of Government. These are policy questions to be settled on transitional arrangements and so on, but that will happen later this year and in good time before you get the first round of people qualifying who arrived in 2022.
In terms of people being aware of what is going on, I would just say this is a highly informed cohort of people. There is a high degree of awareness. I know that people are anticipating changes, which, as I say, we will do later this year.
Q58 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Just on that, how much notice do you expect them to receive? What steps will your Department be taking to make sure that people are aware of the changes as they come into place?
Shabana Mahmood: We make immigration rule changes twice a year every year, almost automatically. It has been settled case law, both at the Court of Appeal and in a House of Lords judgment, that the rules that apply to you when you make your application are the rules in place at the point of application. That is a long-settled principle.
As I say, this is a highly knowledgeable cohort. I know people have been following the debate very closely. That is also my experience as a constituency Member of Parliament. Before I came into office, leading up to summer recess in 2025, the Government set out their immigration White Paper, which signalled the change for indefinite leave to remain to move from five years to 10. It was in November that we set off the earned settlement consultation. That was once I had come into post. We have been doing that consultation, which closed in February.
I have said that we will announce changes in the not‑too‑distant future. People are aware of what is going on. We will publicise those changes and the rules that apply to people in the normal way. As I say, this is a highly knowledgeable cohort and they tend to know their rules very well.
Q59 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: It is just really for those who will see their pathway change, especially when there is not a cutoff date. There is a lot of anxiety that people may fall through the gaps and then there will be some problems. I just want to understand what the transitional protections would be.
Shabana Mahmood: The transitional protections are something that we specifically consulted on. There are a range of different options available for what transitional protections might look like. It is everything from passporting certain cohorts through—so no change, and they still qualify at five years—to different options for what you might do with other cohorts over a longer period. That is policy to be settled. I will obviously come to the House to inform the House of what that policy is once it is settled, and it will pass in the normal way. I am sure there will be lots of public debate, and the Home Office will make sure that those rules are clear.
Again, speaking more as a constituency MP now, if I think of the people I represent, there is a high degree of knowledge. People find out very quickly what rules will apply to them—let me put it that way. We will obviously do everything we are supposed to do to make that process as smooth as possible.
Q60 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I want to ask some questions about the new family reunification policy. That was expected to cover all UK residents by the end of 2025. Can I ask why there has been a delay?
Shabana Mahmood: Again, this was before I came into post, but the previous Home Secretary made a decision on suspending family reunion for refugees, on the basis that we were seeing much larger numbers than we had seen before, with a recognition that the rules that apply for family reunification for refugees are very privileged compared to others in the system, including British citizens who might want to bring a relative over from abroad, who have to meet an English language requirement and a minimum income threshold. I know that the income threshold is often very contested, including in my experience as a constituency MP, so there was a desire to try to bring the system to more coherence.
At the moment, there are something like 30 different routes for family migration and reunification. It is very complex. We want to take the opportunity to have a much more streamlined system where more of the same rules apply to everyone, regardless of whether you started off as a refugee and have been here with settled status, whether you are a British citizen who is applying, whether you are on a work visa, or whether you came on an asylum route. We want to rationalise that.
It is a very big piece of work. We have been very focused on trying to get the other changes to the asylum system and the Bill under way. I would expect to say more about policy in this area in the early part of next year.
Q61 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: There are about 30 routes overall, but nothing at the moment specifically for refugee family reunion.
Shabana Mahmood: Refugees can apply for members of their family to come over if they can meet the other tests in other parts of the family migration system. The specific family reunification route where there were no fees and a much more straightforward process with no language requirement or minimum income requirement is the one that has been suspended while we take a view of the broader policy and what rules should apply to everyone, regardless of whether you are a citizen or not.
Q62 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Are you comfortable with the potential legal risks if there was no reunion route for a prolonged period?
Shabana Mahmood: The courts have previously upheld the principle on family migration and the need to look at people’s ability to support themselves. We are in line with jurisprudence in this area. We have not closed it permanently; we have suspended it while we think about how we rationalise policy so that you have a coherent system.
As I say, the worst-placed people in the system for family migration are British citizens, because of the specific hoops they have to jump through before they can sponsor a family member from overseas to join them in this country. There is a strong public fairness case for rationalising that system but, as I say, it is very complicated. There are over 30 different routes, and we just wanted to take the time to get that work right.
Q63 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: The concern is how long that is going to be, and what the issues will be. How long do you reckon the suspension will last?
Shabana Mahmood: I am not in a position to give you a timeline today. As I say, it is a big piece of work. Separately in the immigration Bill, we are also reforming the way in which article 8 will apply in future to cases, going further on the definition of family and what the family unit is, and creating some new presumptions that will underpin the way in which article 8 is applied to cases in the future.
There is a lot of work happening in this space. Because it is such a complicated area with all the different routes we have at the moment, it will just take us a little bit of time to make sure that, when we come forward with the proposals, they are right, they are fair to everyone, and they will stand the test of time.
Q64 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I understand, but I suppose I will ask it in a slightly different way. How long would be legally problematic? What is the bar that you would set by which time you would definitely have something?
Shabana Mahmood: The Home Office is regularly in court having to explain reasonableness and so on. I think it is perfectly reasonable for a Government to want to look at the system of family migration in the round, to not have a system of 30 different routes, and to not have such wide disparities between the rules that apply to refugees or to British citizens. That is perfectly fair. It is right to take the time that we need to in order to get that policy right. I would be very comfortable defending that position in court.
Q65 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Your Department commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee to review the minimum income requirement. It suggested that thresholds between £21,000 and £28,000 would be reasonable, depending on how you calculate it. How did the Home Office come to the figure of £29,000 for the minimum income requirement? Do you plan to make any changes to it?
Shabana Mahmood: The £29,000 was something we inherited. Let me check that; I do not want to misspeak to the Committee. The MAC has since done its work, and its findings are part of the wider review on family migration policy, so it feeds into the work that we are doing. There is a question there about whether you have an income threshold, what it should be, how high it should be, and how it should be calculated in the future. We will fully take into account the MAC findings.
Q66 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: When do you plan to respond to them formally on that?
Shabana Mahmood: When we settle overall family migration policy.
Q67 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Okay, so there is no date.
Shabana Mahmood: No. It would be irrational to go ahead and just speak to the income threshold bit, which at the moment applies only to British citizens, when in fact we are looking at the wider picture for family migration of all people who can apply, so British citizens or not, people with indefinite status, and people who have arrived as refugees. Because we are looking at the whole system of migration, the work of the MAC will feed into that as we assess where we want to land on the principle of income thresholds and then how they are applied. Sorry, they have just confirmed we inherited the £29,000 from the previous Government.
Q68 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I want to ask you a question on child citizenship fees. In March, we recommended that child citizenship registration be charged at cost recovery, and that your Department run a campaign so that children know that the entitlement exists. We were expecting your response, which I do not believe we have had as yet. Children are still being charged over £1,000 to claim, while the administrative cost is just a fraction of that. The registration is actually a right in the British Nationality Act, so I was wondering whether you had any plans to change that.
Shabana Mahmood: Let me come back to you on the letter. Forgive me; I was not aware that we had something outstanding, so I will make sure that we do that.
Q69 Chair: It was a response to one of our reports.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, sorry. I will make sure that that is in train when I get back to the Home Office today. It is important to remember that there are no fees attached to those who are unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, for example. For those who are looked-after children, effectively, there are no fees for them in any case.
On the other fees, the thing we take into account when we do fee waivers is wider affordability for families. Applications are made by parents, usually as part of a whole family regularising and seeking citizenship together. I would be happy to look at the recommendations of the Committee, but I am pretty comfortable with the principle of fees, and also the principle that fees are not just cost recovery for that specific element of the migration system, but are for the broader functioning of the migration and border system as well.
Q70 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: I suppose I ask because the cost is so high, and we have a situation where most people are being rejected when they apply for a fee waiver. You still have a lot of children—many have lived here since they were young, or were actually born here in some cases—who do not yet have British citizenship.
Shabana Mahmood: As I say, the right distinction is of those who are looked-after children, for whom the state is effectively the corporate parent. I do not think they should pay fees. That is the right thing to do. For all other children, that is part of a family grouping and it is right to level fees. It is right that those fees reflect the broader costs of the migration system. If we were to take that away, those costs would then fall on the wider taxpayer. It is a question of who bears the burden, but citizenship is a right. As I say, we take into account family circumstances when requests are made for fee waivers. Again, I will write to the Committee—I do not want to misspeak—but there were something like 15,000 fee waivers for the last year that we have data.
Q71 Lewis Atkinson: Just returning to earned settlement, you rightly said that there is a very informed cohort of migrants to this country. They are very informed, but they are also very anxious. One of the key principles in your consultation was about integration. I met a family last week—it could be one of a number of families in my constituency and many others—who do not feel that they can properly put down roots in the way that they want to, because ultimately in a few months’ time they do not know whether they are going to need to seek another job that has a visa, despite being at five years. It is then impairing their ability to integrate and to contribute to our city in the way that they wish to. Do you accept that that uncertainty is to some extent hampering the integration that I genuinely believe that you and the Government want to see?
Shabana Mahmood: I do not think so. Let me just separate out those points. Regardless of how they have come to be in this country, whether citizens, new arrivals or anything in between, reasonable people can understand that the Government have to be able to look at migration policy and to look at numbers. If numbers were more than anticipated, they have to be able to be fair, not just to those who have arrived, but also to those who are already here. It is a balance to be struck. Reasonable people can agree that it is perfectly right and proper that we have the freedom to do that.
Of course, people will have views on where policy should ultimately fall and how it should be implemented. I accept that there are a lot of people wondering what rules are going to apply to them. Of course there are; I hear that myself as well. People have views about what they want those rules to be. Some people will say—including from the cohort affected—we should delay access to benefits for longer or do things a different way. People have ideas. They have fed those ideas in. It is right that the Government have taken time to look at the consultation responses properly. We have engaged very widely on what the transitional arrangements look like and what the knock-on consequences of those arrangements will be.
I can assure people we are trying to do a proper piece of work, where we have the right arrangements that strike the right balance between our responsibilities to people who have come here to work, our recognition of the failures that we inherited as a Government, and also our need to do right by the people who are already here and who pay for the systems that we all rely on.
Q72 Lewis Atkinson: Finally and quickly, on the economic contribution of international students to the UK, do you think that international student numbers are still too high? If so, is your concern solely about asylum claims following student visas? We know the visa break has taken effect for some countries that have had particular suggestions of asylum abuse. Where are you in conversations with the Department for Education and universities about supporting the UK’s international education strategy?
Shabana Mahmood: My interest as Home Secretary is to make sure there is no abuse of the system for international students. What I am worried about is not the overall number. Legitimate students coming to this country are very welcome and make a big contribution. Our university sector is world leading and is something that the Government want to focus on, celebrate and prioritise. My issue is not with the numbers specifically; it is the number of people who then switch straight into the asylum system at the end of their student visa.
It is important that we uphold this principle that, when universities recruit students from abroad, they are effectively selling students access to a world-leading university and excellent education system, and the chance to improve their circumstances and gain excellent skills and qualifications. What they are not selling is immigration status. It is important that, where we can see abuse, we really do clamp down on it. I have taken action on visa brakes. We will have more to say about abuse of the student route.
Going forward, I want to make sure that you can be confident that the system of international students is not also a backdoor for making an asylum claim in this country. That is the thing that we want to clamp down on, which has meant that we have higher expectations of universities as sponsors. We are taking other measures to clamp down on that abuse, but it is the abuse, because that goes to broader confidence for the public in the immigration system overall. If they can see that the numbers of people who go straight into the asylum system are high, the public would rightly be worried about that. They would think, “Hang on a minute; what is going on here?”
Q73 Lewis Atkinson: So if there is no asylum abuse and as long as the numbers are fine—
Shabana Mahmood: It is a broader question for the Government and overall government policy, but I am not trying to artificially reduce the number of international students. I am trying to stop the abuse of the student route that goes straight into the asylum system. That is the thing I care about.
Q74 Chair: I have one final point on regular migration, because I am keen to move to irregular migration. We conducted a series of deliberative democracy workshops around the public’s attitude to regular migration, and work-related migration in particular. We published the outcomes last week and it was very clear from all three workshops that the public want prioritisation of training and opportunities for residents before migrants are brought in, so I just make the point.
We are about to launch an inquiry. The terms of reference will be published straight after this evidence session. We are very keen to support the Government and give you some recommendations that will help in terms of a whole-of-government approach that ensures that those that are resident here get priority for skills and training needed for work, rather than migrants being used just to fill holes without considering a native worker.
Shabana Mahmood: That is absolutely the approach that I can endorse and support. What you have seen in the care sector is a degradation in terms and conditions and a reliance on overseas labour, which is just designed to undercut what would be good terms and conditions for a broader workforce strategy. I definitely agree with that principle in the report and look forward to the Committee’s work in this area.
Q75 Dr Prinsley: I have a question about how you are expecting the proposed work and study protection route to function in practice. Where people come here as refugees, some of them will eventually move from court protection into work and study. What proportion of refugees do you expect that to apply to? For instance, if we have a shortage of care workers, would you expect the refugees to get into care work, or will they all go off to colleges? What will happen to them?
Shabana Mahmood: The first cohort to whom the new 13-month rule applies and whom we would expect to move into the work and study route falls in autumn 2028. Policy on the work and study route for people with protection status is being developed as we speak. It will look at exactly these practical questions of how people might move from one route into another, how to make sure that you do not penalise somebody who has moved into the work route and had a job, but then lost their job—or their employer went bust or whatever—so that you do not penalise people who are trying to do the right thing. All the technical elements of how the routes will work are being developed. Again, I would expect to be unveiling settled policy in this area over next year, in good time before the first cohort would be looking to move into a different route if available to them.
Q76 Dr Prinsley: We just visited Denmark as a group. We were impressed by quite a lot of things that went on in Denmark, and I know you are too. One of the things is that the Department there is called the Ministry of Immigration and Integration. The second part of my question is what we are going to do to support integration of people who have become refugees or who have been granted refugee status, so that they can in fact contribute.
Shabana Mahmood: There are two things on that. First, all the work that is underpinning all the reforms in the migration space, whether asylum or earned settlement, is about setting the principles of fairness and contribution to be at the heart of both of these systems. I conceive of it all as one system, certainly because of the numbers of people from a work or student visa who then transfer into the asylum system. Any Home Secretary has to look at the whole system overall.
The reason those principles of fairness and contribution are so important is that they unlock, in my view, the generosity of the British public. If you have played by the right rules, you have done the thing we asked you to do and you have made a contribution—whether that is measured on income or other ways you can support yourself—that does unlock the inherent generous spirit of the British people in terms of welcoming people, wanting them to be part of our communities and seeing them as equal.
The bit that the Home Office can do here is about the rules of the game, to make sure that the public who are already here, who in the end have to welcome new people, are sufficiently confident in the system that we are running that they feel able to do that, because integration is a two-way street. It is for the community that is already here to be welcoming, and it is incumbent on the person who has come newly to this country to want to take steps to integrate themselves as well. It is a two-way street. Our job is to set the right rules and build public confidence so that individuals who are coming through our system are welcomed and people understand that this is a good, well-managed system.
The rest of the work on integration is an active process. It is not something you can passively just expect to happen. It speaks to local communities, resilience and so on. That is work that specifically MHCLG is taking forward. When the Government released their strategy on social cohesion, “Protecting what Matters”, we specifically committed to a broader integration strategy for migrants, which MHCLG is working on. I cannot tell you today when MHCLG will publish it, but I do know that the Home Office is fully engaged in that work, as are other Government Departments. There is a recognition that the Government need to do more in the integration space to smooth that journey, particularly given the hostility that we are seeing.
Q77 Dr Prinsley: That was certainly what we saw in Denmark. They are very active about arranging for people to be integrated who have arrived. That was the take-home message I felt from our visit.
Shabana Mahmood: There are good lessons to learn from Denmark. As I say, I visited myself and have learned from some aspects of their system. Of course, other aspects of their system are not things we either could do or would want to do as a Government. They have thresholds for minorities who live in particular areas and then what they do to those areas. That is a matter for them; those are not policies we believe in or would ever seek to introduce here. We want policies on integration that speak to the sort of country we are, with very large diaspora communities that are well settled, have been here for many decades, and can then play a full part. As I say, it is an active process and it is something that MHCLG is drawing up.
Q78 Margaret Mullane: Everyone would accept that channel crossings are decreasing. Do you think that is through what the Government have done, or do you think that it is more that the boats are generally in decline across Europe?
Shabana Mahmood: It is definitely a result of the policy environment changing, and particularly the law enforcement work. I have two things to say to that. First, while numbers of people into Europe are down this year by, I want to say, about 27%—I can write to the Committee with the exact number—there are a lot of people in Europe already. There is still high demand and no shortage of people wanting to get to the north of France to get on a boat. I do not think that it follows that just the European border situation hardening and fewer people arriving into Europe is causing the drop in numbers, because there is still plenty of demand.
We have seen welcome decreases. The numbers are 40% down this year compared to last year, which is very welcome progress. I am not complacent; I want to build on that and go much further. It is impossible to say which one intervention is making the difference. It is a whole suite of interventions.
We are doing a lot of upstream work, not just in France, but with colleagues in Belgium and in Turkey, as well as further up the chain, in terms of disrupting the organised criminals who are behind the trade in people trafficking. We are seizing boats and equipment. There is a lot of disruption activity that happens long before you get to France with, again, much more intense work in France itself, so the whole of that picture is making a difference.
Q79 Margaret Mullane: I agree with what you said earlier. Our public are very invested and very aware. Do you think that the decline in the numbers of arrivals will continue?
Shabana Mahmood: I hope so. It is a highly adaptive environment, and things change very quickly. As you can see already, you have had a displacement of activity by the gangs from beaches in the north of France. They are moving westerly. We have seen people try to have launches from Belgium as well. That change that we are seeing from the gangs is in response to the new environment from law enforcement, so we can expect them to keep trying to adapt. Unfortunately, these are highly adaptable, entrepreneurial people, so they will change, and we have to keep pace with any changes that they are making in their operating model in how we go after them with law enforcement.
As I say, it is a very welcome decrease that we have seen, and a very significant decrease particularly over the summer, but we are not complacent and we know that we need to go further. I am watching with an eagle eye what displacement activity is occurring and how the gangs are adapting in order to make sure, particularly with our partners in France, that we adapt just as quickly to their change in posture as we have to the previous operating model.
Q80 Margaret Mullane: We have had quite a few presentations over the years to this Committee. Do you think that we have reached a point where there is a limit to what you can do with enforcement because it is so dangerous?
Shabana Mahmood: No, I do not think that we have reached a limit. We can and will continue to go further. Just last week, I was signing an agreement with my Belgian counterpart on law enforcement co-operation. He knows that our key priority there is organised immigration crime. We have already had good work with the Belgians, with a number of arrests made, people brought to justice, and a disruption of the trade there.
As the model of the gangs changes, we need to change alongside it, so I do not think that we are at a limit of what can be achieved with law enforcement alone. We have made excellent progress this year and can go further.
Q81 Margaret Mullane: On the channel crossings from France, are you concerned about the change in tactics now to larger boats, which is a topic of conversation?
Shabana Mahmood: First, the move to larger boats is placing people in even more danger than they are in by getting on one of the regular-sized boats. I have seen these things. They are very flimsy and very dangerous. There have been incidents where one or two of them have nearly caught fire close to the French beaches, with a real, potential risk of significant loss of life. We know that people continue to die in the channel. It does not make news as it used to, but it happens and is a reality that we want to eliminate. We want people not to be putting themselves in danger in this way.
The change of tactics, so displacing further west in France, trying to get into Belgium and using different-sized boats, is all because there is real disruption happening. Boats and engines are being seized. The organised immigration criminals are being brought to justice in different parts of Europe. Other countries are taking a new posture. Germany has changed its law, having worked closely with us, so that it can go after these people more effectively, particularly where things are held in warehouses. As that is having an impact, of course, they are looking to change the way in which they do things as well but, just as we have gone after them in their current operating model, we will do that for any changes that they make as well.
Q82 Margaret Mullane: We are paying France a lot of money to help us with the channel crossings. Would you say that we are getting good value for that? If you think that that is not happening, will you withdraw the funds, speak to the French, or change, disrupt and go a different way?
Shabana Mahmood: I signed a new agreement with the French for three years, for a total of £662 million. It is a three-year deal. It is a lot of money; it is more than we were paying before. What the new deal does that the previous deal did not give us the flexibility to do is to pay for the things that we know are making a difference. We know the law enforcement tactics that make a difference on the ground and are now able to direct our funding towards that law enforcement response. That is the riot police being available; it is the uplift in French law enforcement officers and boots on the ground. That is the thing that we paid more money for, and we know that that is effective and is part of the reason why the numbers are coming down.
Given history and all of that, there is lots of commentary about the relationship with the French, but these things are always a partnership. It is important that they see this as a shared challenge, not just a problem for the Brits—when the boats arrive, we have the problem; they do not. They have put a lot of effort into delivering on the deal that we have agreed. They have recruited the additional law enforcement; those boots are on the ground. They also changed their posture on maritime tactics and are now using them. That is a big thing for the French to have changed in their system, and it has helped. It has constrained the operating environment for the gangs.
I am very pleased with the co-operation that we have. I am pleased that the new agreement gives us flexibility, so we will pay for the things that work, and not fund things that are not making a difference to crossings. The combination of those two things puts us in the strongest possible position going forward.
Q83 Margaret Mullane: You cannot tell us how the conversations went when you were speaking to the French, but you feel that you have enough levers and got what you needed to move this forward.
Shabana Mahmood: I am not going to get into discussions. I talk regularly to Minister Nuñez, my French counterpart. We would both say that we have robust discussions. He has views; I have views, but they are exchanged respectfully. We are both happy with the deal that we have, and we are both very much in favour of the principle of flexible funding and funding the things that make a difference. The French system has recognised the fact that we want to show value for money, and we want to be able to say, “If we are paying more, we are paying for the things that work.” We want to be able to show a difference in the number of crossings, and that is well understood in the French political system.
Q84 Chair: We did visit northern France just before Christmas last year, so we saw some of the stuff in action and welcomed the fact that the deal has been extended, but what we hear from law enforcement across the board is that the gangs that are behind this are largely Iraqi Kurdish gangs. Are the Government using their position and influence with that area to try to impact what is happening and to disrupt those gangs at source?
Shabana Mahmood: Without going into the sort of detail that might compromise operations, let me just say that, across the whole picture of the organised immigration crime network, from source countries all the way through to people who provide the equipment, where they are warehoused, and right down to what happens in the north of France, there is UK Government activity everywhere.
Q85 Robbie Moore: Home Secretary, I wanted to focus on this relationship with France on the so-called one-in, one-out deal. Just looking at the numbers, in the period between August 2025 and June 2026, 28,000 migrants arrived on small boats, yet only 1,087 went out of this country to France. We let more in—1,117—through the one-in, one-out deal. My question is simple. How much is this costing per person? Do you think that, as it is at the moment, this pilot is a success?
Shabana Mahmood: The number today is something over 1,400. I appreciate that you are looking at a different time period. As a first challenge, it is easy to take the numbers at a particular day and time, and to say, “We took more than they did,” but, when you look at the trend, the numbers have tracked fairly evenly, so the numbers in and out are about the same. There is always a little discrepancy, depending on whether a flight has gone off on our side or on theirs, but the numbers have tracked.
The intention was one in, one out, and that is the way that the pilot has functioned. In any given week, they will look skewed in one direction or another, but that is not the trend and not what the treaty is about. The numbers are tracking as the same.
Secondly, this was always a pilot programme. It was designed to try to prove the concept that it is possible to have this kind of arrangement between us and the French, not just as an agreement politically, but to operationally deliver it and to overcome legal hurdles. There have been legal challenges all the way through, as I am sure you and other Committee members know. The aim was to prove the concept that such an agreement can work and that it is possible to provide a safe and legal route into the country from the north of France and, therefore, degrade the boats trade, as it were.
On the specific difference made by the pilot compared to everything else that we are doing in terms of law enforcement and the broader policy environment, it is not possible to separate out, “This one led to this decrease, and this led to the other.”
Q86 Robbie Moore: Home Secretary, I asked how much it is per person, and whether you think it has been a success.
Shabana Mahmood: I will need to write to the Committee with the most recent figures. Per person, for the numbers that have been returned so far, it is about £56,000.
Q87 Robbie Moore: Has it been a success?
Shabana Mahmood: On its own terms, can you prove the concept that such a deal is viable and that you can get returns up and running? Yes. It has not been without its challenges. The numbers are still relatively small, and what has been more operationally difficult is to scale up very large numbers of removals every week into the French system. It is operationally difficult for them, as well as for us, and there are constraints on both sides on things such as detention capacity.
Q88 Robbie Moore: From my point of view, for constituents watching, 28,000 people is probably about the size of Ilkley, Addingham and Silsden in terms of population coming into this country on small boats over an 11-month period. With the in-outs varying on numbers, it is about the same based on what is coming in and out, so it does not look to me as if this is working as a deterrent. What is your assessment of this pilot scheme working as a deterrent?
Shabana Mahmood: Again, it is difficult to separate out any one of the actions that we are taking. Is it the case that people in the north of France are aware that there is another route that they might want to try to avail themselves of? Yes. Third-sector agencies such as UNHCR tell us that there are people who they know are not getting on boats because they think that there is a chance of being accepted through the one-in, one-out deal, so it is having some effect. As I say, it is not possible to separate out which one of the things is making the biggest difference. I have always said that you need a full-spectrum response to this problem, and that you have to go at everything as hard as possible in order to break the gangs’ business model.
Q89 Robbie Moore: Another measure that you announced in March this year, I believe, was a policy offering handouts of up to £40,000 to failed asylum seeker families who agreed to return home voluntarily. How many families have accepted that offer so far?
Shabana Mahmood: I do not have the exact number to hand today, but I can write to the Committee with it. They are relatively small numbers. It is a pilot that we have been running. It has not concluded yet, but it will soon.
Q90 Robbie Moore: When did that pilot start?
Shabana Mahmood: It started soon after I announced it in the asylum policy statement. I will have to get back to you with the exact date.
Q91 Robbie Moore: Could you write to the Committee with the exact numbers that have accepted that offer? Many people have been trying to get a firm answer from you, and the Home Office has stonewalled the response, but there is a narrative that asylum seekers are not accepting the family payout of £40,000 because it is more lucrative to stay in this country. I would like to understand: is that your assessment of this scheme so far.
Shabana Mahmood: I will make a full assessment when we have completed it and learned all the lessons. In the end, you are trying to affect human behaviour. We already have packages for voluntary removals. That is true in Denmark, which you guys visited not long ago, because it is a good way of persuading people who have no right to be here to move. It usually represents value for money because it is much cheaper for people to go through on a package such as that than a forced removal, which can be very expensive.
We were trialling that specifically on failed asylum-seeking families, but you are right. If you are a failed asylum-seeking family, what you are trading off is an offer of £40,000, which will help you resettle in your country of origin, versus access to free healthcare and education for your children. We are trying to assess what people respond to and behavioural changes.
It is right to have trialled something different to see whether we can break the logjam on the removals of failed asylum-seeking families. We are already consulting on new policy around the removals of families as well, because we know that there are large numbers. Policies of previous Governments, before the Labour Government came into power, changed the environment in terms of removals, which has led to more people choosing to stay.
Q92 Robbie Moore: What would be a measure of success for that policy that was announced in terms of numbers of families accepting it?
Shabana Mahmood: We are trying to assess whether people, if they are a family, respond to a more generous package. That is different from single individuals, but, with a family, do people respond? That is the thing that we will need to learn from in order to make decisions and policy choices in the future about what we do when we have families in supported accommodation who are from safe countries that they can return to. We will need to change policy to make sure that we are able to return people who have no right to be here.
Q93 Ben Maguire: Home Secretary, we have heard a bit of a mixed picture on the one-in, one-out deal with France. My understanding from that exchange is that you are still looking at and analysing it before any extension or expansion of that scheme is brought forward. Is that correct?
Shabana Mahmood: It has already been extended, because the pilot would have run out before the summer, into October. You will appreciate that I am not going to comment on discussions with the French or be drawn on where those discussions are heading or what the future there might be.
Q94 Ben Maguire: One thing that we found from talking to counterparts in Denmark was that they are part of the EU migration pact that has recently come into force. Is a broader returns deal with the European Union something that you or this Government might consider?
Shabana Mahmood: I get this quite a bit from other spokespeople in your party. It is a mistake to see the EU’s new pact as some sort of new silver bullet that, if we were in it, would somehow eliminate all the problems that we have. I would observe that, just on the one-in, one-out with France, more returns have happened than ever was the case under the Dublin arrangements, when we were still members of the EU.
I talk to my counterparts in Europe very regularly. They are very focused on trying to make that pact work for EU members, which is, itself, going to be a real challenge and places pressures on countries that people come to in order to access the rest of Europe, such as Italy and Greece. Getting the pact up and working is a work in progress for the European Union. We will always have discussions with colleagues everywhere on what we can do on a shared challenge, but it is a real mistake to think that that pact is the future and that, if we were in it, this problem would go away, because I promise you that it would not.
Q95 Ben Maguire: With respect, the one-in, one-out deal is considerably more expensive than the EU migration pact, so I would expect it to be more successful.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, but £56,000 is still cheaper than, or just about the same as, supporting someone in a hotel for a year.
Q96 Ben Maguire: Which we are spending £2.2 billion a year on.
Shabana Mahmood: That is correct, and we should not be.
Q97 Ben Maguire: In terms of data sharing, this feels like a no-brainer to me, and I am not sure whether you agree, but, when a violent criminal comes into the European Union seeking asylum, we, as a country, are no longer able, following Brexit, to get that data under the Eurodac system. Is that something that you might support the UK co-operating with Europe on?
Shabana Mahmood: We definitely talk to European colleagues about data sharing, for law enforcement and immigration purposes. Again, it would be wrong for me to try to get ahead of discussions that may or may not be happening at the UK-EU summit, but, from a Home Office perspective, rest assured that data sharing is the first item on the agenda whenever I discuss these things with the European Commission and others.
Q98 Ben Maguire: That is good to hear. We have a large proportion of failed asylum seekers in the UK, who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their home country. The figure is something like 5,000. Would you consider, as European counterparts such as Denmark and Germany are currently considering, having return hubs in a safe third country?
Shabana Mahmood: It is already Government policy to look carefully at arrangements with other countries for the purposes of returns. There is a lot of activity, both here and across Europe, on the whole concept of return hubs and trying to get agreements over the line. I will not say more than that today, but it is something that we are pursuing with interest.
Q99 Ben Maguire: Aside from return hubs, is there any other work under way to address this backlog of failed asylum seekers?
Shabana Mahmood: Where failed asylum seekers are capable of being removed, Immigration Enforcement will proceed with removal. Usually, the reason that you cannot remove is article 3 of the ECHR on the grounds of the safety of the country that you are seeking to remove people to. That is something that we just continue to work on, either to try to find somewhere else or to keep monitoring the situation in their home countries such that removal becomes a viable option.
Q100 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: SAMU Social Paris, which provides healthcare to the one-in, one-out returnees, has reported to the French Parliament on the harm that has been done to detainees in UK detention during transfer—things such as bruising, lacerations, handcuff injuries and skin lesions. There was even one man who arrived in such a state that he was sent straight to A&E. His injuries were consistent with restraint and abdominal pain from repeated blows. Home Secretary, are you aware of these instances, and what will your Department about the violent treatment of detainees in our care?
Shabana Mahmood: I do not recognise that picture. What you are describing would be a criminal offence in our country. It is not a picture that I recognise. It is not unusual for people who are being returned to seek to physically harm themselves. People will do quite a lot of damage in trying not to be put on a plane or be returned. Thank you for raising with me what you were describing. I was not aware of it and I will certainly challenge whatever has been put to the French Parliament, but those are crimes.
Q101 Robbie Moore: I just want to focus on asylum decision making. What are you doing to address the poor quality of asylum decision making, which has been widely recognised, that is taking place at the moment?
Shabana Mahmood: There have been specific issues that we inherited from a 2023 decision-making model, which are being worked through. There have been a range of recommendations made by the ICIBI, all of which we are implementing in full to strengthen decision-making processes.
More broadly, though, decision making is in a stronger position than it has been. In particular, the grant rate has come down. Decisions are assured; samples are taken and then measured against whether we think the decision was right. On the last round of figures, something like 93% of decisions were deemed correct at the initial decision point, which is not necessarily the same as the courts upholding those decisions.
As you will know, the circumstances between initial decision and a court appeal hearing are often significantly different, but the current assurance model for decision making suggests that around 93% are accurate and were the correct initial decision, based on the circumstances known to the official.
Q102 Mr Kohler: I was going to ask you about the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority, but I am told that we do not have time. All I would say to you is that Denmark was very surprised that we were moving from a judicial to an administrative system. I would ask you to look at what happened in Australia when they tried it and it failed.
Shabana Mahmood: It is a system of independent adjudication, to be clear, and perhaps Denmark does not have a 12 to 18-month lead time for hiring judges, as we do in this country.
Mr Kohler: As I say, there are doubts about whether it will work.
Shabana Mahmood: I am happy to answer questions, though.
Mr Kohler: I am not allowed to go any further.
Chair: You can ask questions. We have until 5 o’clock, so use your time wisely.
Q103 Mr Kohler: Turning to asylum accommodation, you inherited some terrible contracts. Private companies have made a vast amount of money out of the Home Office and taxpayers. The break clause is now exercisable. The contracts go until September 2029. In reality, is there any chance that the break clause will be exercised?
Shabana Mahmood: I do not think that the position on the break clause is much further on than when I was last at the Committee, when we had an exchange on the break clause. We have dealt with these two things before, but the break clause and getting out of hotels are not related. We can keep exiting hotels. Hotel accommodation was an addition to that contract, not the core contract.
I have been pushing the commercial arm of my Department to make sure that we are pushing as hard as we can on getting value for money from these current contracts that, as you rightly say, we inherited. The thing about exercising the break clause and getting out of the contracts is that I still need to have an asylum accommodation estate to move people to. The absence of that and other good, viable alternatives for doing this at scale and at speed is the real limiting factor on simply being able to rip up these contracts today. We do need to transition to a new model of asylum accommodation, but that is not something that the Government can do overnight. We also cannot have something like 90,000 people potentially homeless either.
Q104 Mr Kohler: You are tendering for the new contract post 2029. You also have a desire to bring in local authorities. How is that all dovetailing together?
Shabana Mahmood: Especially given the new Prime Minister’s focus on devolution, we are looking at how we work with local authorities. At the moment, for the dispersal of asylum seekers, there is what they call a full dispersal model, which tries to have an even spread around the country, but there is a recognition that, as closely as you might work with local authorities, no one place can have a veto. The Home Office still has obligations that it has to fulfil, and so, while we try to work as closely as we can with the local authorities, we cannot just agree that some places will have nobody and others will take all the strain. We are trying to go for as fair a spread as we can.
You are right that that is partly limited by how much we pay on the current contract. As we transition to a new model, there is a question around how you might have flexibility in what you pay. We want to work with local authorities. The problem with a fully devolved model, where local authorities either have, essentially, a statutory duty or take responsibility for fulfilling asylum accommodation need, is that you have to insure that system against some authorities not playing ball, not taking part and saying no—and we do have authorities that say no.
In fact, there are stresses and strains in Glasgow, for example, which have rightly had a lot of interest, and I am engaging with local Members of Parliament. That is because nowhere else in Scotland would take that complement, so Glasgow ended up taking all the pressure that should have been spread out more fairly across all of Scotland. There are authorities that do not play ball, and so, if you had a devolved model, you would still have to have an answer for what happens there.
You also need to be able to deal with surges in demand. Again, the reason why it works now is that the Home Office—believe me, I do not really want to be running such big accommodation estates—can surge capacity based on flows of people into and out of the asylum system.
In security terms, we cannot lose track of who we have and where they are, so you would need a model that, with everyone doing things in their own way, still speaks to some sort of national structure such that you are not losing people into communities, and then you have lost track of them and they have disappeared.
There are quite a few structural challenges with having a fully devolved model, but we are leaning in to see what more we can do to work more effectively with local authorities as we move to a new contract in the future.
Q105 Mr Kohler: Do you envisage private companies still playing a role post September 2029?
Shabana Mahmood: It is a little too early to say. If I had to answer today one way or the other, I would say that they probably will. It is hard to see how we would have the amount of accommodation required without some element of private provision, but there are live discussions between us and MHCLG about how local authorities might be able to play a more innovative role in this space.
Q106 Mr Kohler: In Denmark, we saw that NGOs provided this function. They had a contract with a no-profit clause. If they did not spend the money on the asylum accommodation, they had to pay it back to the Government. The Red Cross running it made a huge difference to the whole tone of the debate. People in the local community were volunteering to help. Have we ever explored that approach?
Shabana Mahmood: We have not for what has been inherited or done so far. One thing that will definitely change under the Government is the model of asylum accommodation, with more use of medium-sized and large sites, as well as dispersed accommodation, so that all the pressure is not between hotels, which we intend to close, and dispersed accommodation. We want medium-sized and large sites to play a bigger role in asylum accommodation.
We are definitely looking at what different providers could be in this space. Again, without going into live conversations between us and other Government Departments, we are not looking to simply give the same contract to the same people.
Q107 Mr Kohler: Are you having active discussion with NGOs? The Red Cross has huge international experience on this. Are we talking to NGOs such as the Red Cross and bringing their experience into the British system?
Shabana Mahmood: Let me take that away from this discussion to see what specifically I could tell you about discussions with others that are not private providers.
Mr Kohler: I would say that it impressed the Committee how it changed the whole tone of what was happening. Am I allowed a bit more time?
Chair: We have three minutes.
Q108 Mr Kohler: Can I press you on Manston? Private Eye has made the point that MTC has just been awarded a long-term contract on the Manston return centre. MTC has a pretty chequered record, including with the London probation service, the New South Wales prison system and the Australian asylum system. Time and time again MTC has been found wanting. Are you confident that it will provide the service that we require?
Shabana Mahmood: I am happy to write to the Committee about the process that we have undergone and the standards that we hold ourselves to, but Manston is an important facility, and it is important that it is well run. I can assure you that my officials and I are very engaged on the overall effectiveness and performance of the immigration estate.
Q109 Mr Kohler: Is the history of MTC’s role in this type of contract relevant to the awarding process?
Shabana Mahmood: Let me write to you about the process that we had. Rather than engaging in Private Eye-related speculation, let me just write to you about the process that was followed and what was taken into account.
Chair: I have Joani Reid and Lewis Atkinson with quick follow-ups. Perhaps if you both give your follow-ups, and then you can respond, Home Secretary.
Joani Reid: Home Secretary, you mentioned Glasgow. I accept that good progress has been made there, but the pressure is still acute. I do not need to go over the figures, but over 50% of asylum seekers in Scotland are in Glasgow, which has quite deprived communities. I know that a colleague has written to you. Can we pause? It really demands some sort of dispersal policy in Scotland. You mentioned it as an extreme example. Almost all of the pressure is on Glasgow, whereas the more affluent local authorities are taking zero. It really needs to be addressed.
Q110 Lewis Atkinson: As a continuation of that point, areas in the north-east such as Sunderland have had a significantly higher proportion of asylum seekers accommodated per head of population than elsewhere as a result of the contracts inherited from the previous Government. As numbers accommodated fall across the country, will you prioritise reducing numbers in local authorities such as mine that have had higher amounts?
Shabana Mahmood: I am very aware of the acute pressures in the areas that are above what their allocation should be. There are some areas that are very significantly above what their allocation should be on the full dispersal model.
On Glasgow specifically, as I said before, I very much recognise those challenges, partly borne out because other local authorities in Scotland have not stepped up to play their full part to enable a fairer distribution across the whole of Scotland. There has not been any procurement of new asylum accommodation in Glasgow since 2024.
Let me say to both of you that, as we go for a fairer spread, we have renegotiated the rates that we pay in some areas to bring in the ability to move out to slightly more affluent areas. As we do that, I am looking to reduce the pressure on places that are way above their allocation and to bring that down in a sustained way so that every area plays its full part.
As we move to more military sites, and then also more medium-sized sites, I want to, again, alleviate that pressure, and I will be targeting the areas that are above allocation to be first in line to see those reductions.
Chair: I am going to bring things to a close. Thank you, Home Secretary. We look forward to seeing you again before Christmas.