Speeches by Jones.

“He met with my predecessor as Policing Minister. We were not there, but the action from that was that the UKFPU was to work with Lord Mann, as we understand it. Lord Mann will know whether that happened or not.”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Stringer, and to take part in this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher) on securing this debate and on leading the charge in Parliament for more action for his constituents on bike theft. He was right when he …”

“The right hon. Member is right to say that confidence in policing is incredibly important. We need that confidence across all our communities, and we know that there is a lot of work to do in some areas in particular. I am not going to comment on what appears to be the case, but I can reassure him that, as I have said,…”

“To the right hon. Gentleman’s first point, the Prime Minister’s view was very clear: the wrong decision was made. That is our position. We believe that the decision made was the wrong one. On the safety advisory groups, we have asked the inspector to look at them, their role and their function. Of course, the right hon…”

“The SAG looked at lots of considerations in terms of what the options were. Should it have been a closed match, for example, with no fans? That sometimes happens. Should the match not have gone ahead at all? As my hon. Friend says, should it have been a match with a limited number of tickets? Many options were being we…”

“I think not, but there we are. He is my constituency neighbour in Croydon, so best wishes to him always. The 2 October was the point at which the Home Office asked officials in the United Kingdom football policing unit for the update, and we were told that a range of different options were being considered. That is cer…”

“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his questions. At this point, I cannot give him the answers he wants about intelligence—the root of it and the truth of it. We are responding simply to the information that we got yesterday, and we have asked the appropriate questions to get to the bottom of that. He is right to say that …”

“I agree entirely with the shadow Home Secretary that we should not allow the threat of mob violence to stop matches going ahead. With respect, I think that he is jumping the gun a bit with some of the phrases he has used, saying that it was “just made up”. We are not clear on that at this point, and I do not want this …”

“I can definitely give my hon. Friend that assurance—she is absolutely right, and I thank her for the work she is doing as chair of the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism. I have been involved with that group and with Danny Stone for many years; they do a fantastic job, and I recommend that all Members o…”

“Of course we want to ensure that as much information as possible is in the public domain. We do not yet know the truth about some of the statements in yesterday’s article and we need to get to the bottom of that. I know that Members of the House will be very interested in hearing about where the inspector gets to in hi…”

“We were not fully briefed in advance of the decision; we were told when the decision was made. As we have already said, we knew that options were being considered. This is the way in which these processes work: a safety advisory group makes recommendations, and the local authority responds accordingly. In response to w…”

“The right hon. Member is right. I am very familiar with Sutton Coldfield—and my husband is a Villa season ticket holder, as are my twin boys. It is in some ways the bane of my life, because I never see them as they are always at Villa. It is worth saying that Villa fans are lovely and it is a lovely club. They are deva…”

“The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there are Jews in this country who do not feel safe. In Croydon we have a small community who visit a synagogue very close to my house, and I have spoken to them many times about how they feel. It is true that people do not want to go into central London at weekends, which should…”

“I thank my hon. Friend for the work that he did supporting colleagues and his constituents after the Manchester attack. He is right to point to the 1980s, when we had a completely different era of huge violence in football. We are very glad that that has, in the main, subsided. He says that there should be no no-go are…”

“I am not going to draw that conclusion today, but the hon. Gentleman can be assured that I am going to ensure that we get to the bottom of yesterday’s reporting and what happened. We often ask the police to make decisions that are almost impossible, and—here I am setting aside this particular case—we ask them to police…”

“I am not going to make a slightly political point about the right hon. Lady’s decision to attack the police and crime commissioner; I think that he does a good job and has served well for many years. As for the wider point that she made, as a west midlands MP, about what has happened and what it means, I absolutely sha…”

“There were a series of different interactions and communications between the different groups in that period, as Members would expect. There is a balance to be struck with the operational independence question, and we need to get that right; it is not for the Home Secretary to march in and demand that the police say a …”

“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his questions. I know that he understands the principle of police operational independence, and that we need to ensure that we reflect that correctly when such decisions are taken. Stepping back, there are wider lessons that we need to learn, which is why the Home Secretary has written to…”

“I agree with the premise of the hon. Gentleman’s question. Where we can, we want to ensure that intelligence is correct, that decisions are made on the basis of a wide range of factors, and that football, a sport that this country loves so much, carries on in the way that we all want it to.”

“Of course, we want to ensure that all fans from all parts of the world are welcome in this country. The hon. Member is absolutely right to say that the problem of football hooliganism is nothing like what it was in the 1980s. There was a football match at Villa from which fans were banned in 2023, but I think that deci…”