Speeches by Cooper.

“I can write to you with the Policing Minister’s assessment of what the next steps and the timetable will be.”

“Individual police forces all over the country always have concerns that they face particular pressures. Those pressures may vary: they can be particular patterns of protest, other kinds of crime and other incidents. The capital faces the issue of big national events, such as the King’s coronation, and international eve…”

“I understand that, and I know that many forces will continue to make representations about different issues. We will always look at representations that are made to us. All I would say is that there is never a perfect way to ensure funding for police forces, and there will always be individual police forces—probably in…”

“That is one of the issues that I am really worried about. We are seeing increasing extremism among young people. The CT caseload involving teenagers has trebled in the space of three years. I see it in the kinds of cases that I am briefed on as well. There are increasing numbers of teenagers, even as young as 13, where…”

“Some of this is terrorism-related material—it is unlawful and should not be online—but some of this is about radicalising processes that are taking place online, where the material may not be unlawful but the approach to young people is exploitative and dangerous. The first step is that, as part of the Online Safety Ac…”

“We do need to bring forward new legislation. Jonathan Hall identified challenges with the existing legislation, which was drawn up around terrorism. State threats often look like terrorism in their impact in communities and on public safety, but Jonathan Hall has made it clear that the nature of the organisation behind…”

“The independent Prevent commissioner is probably more similar to the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism in its form. It is effectively an oversight process and mechanism to look at the effectiveness of the Prevent programme. As we know, Prevent has huge numbers of referrals each year and takes action on them, bu…”

“Yes. The counter-extremism role is probably a more wide-ranging role, focused outwards across the country. The independent Prevent reviewer is about this particular programme that is crucial to our public safety and about making sure that there is proper oversight of it, in order to ensure that it meets the highest sta…”

“I know that the Safeguarding Minister has met you, and I thank you for the information and evidence that you provided. This is a truly vile crime, and there are really disturbing, lifelong consequences for the children and teenagers—very often teenage girls—who have been raped, abused and subjected to the most horrendo…”

“We have identified funding to ensure that there is additional funding for local inquiries, which is clearly important. Once the Casey audit has reported back to us, we will set out the next steps about how we will expect local inquiries to be taken forward and the funding support that we will give. Obviously, we want a…”

“What we found from the experience of the Telford inquiry, as well as the two initial Rotherham reviews that took place about 10 years ago—one by Alexis Jay and the other by Baroness Louise Casey—is that they can come in different forms. Three different kinds of review have taken place: the Alexis Jay inquiry, the Louis…”

“The first thing I would say is that they have to be independent inquiries. They cannot be done by local authorities, and it is only independent inquiries that we will provide funding for—that is what happened with the Telford inquiry. Although it was initiated by the local authority and local organisations, it was then…”

“We have to take action on this. The law has changed, but there are people who have been convicted of crimes who were the victims of the most horrendous exploitation as children. Although the prostitution laws have now changed, the idea of treating somebody as a prostitute when they were the victim of the most horrendou…”

“As you rightly say, DSIT is already developing digital ID. What we are particularly looking at is how we have digital ID for everyone coming to the UK, whatever visa or system they arrive in the UK through. We set out in the White Paper our next steps on this. We want, for example, to have a digital service linked to e…”

“Our clear focus is around being able to ensure that we have proper rules being respected and enforced in the immigration system and the asylum system and to ensure that if people are not here lawfully or are not working lawfully, we can get that information and take much stronger action to prevent that kind of abuse of…”

“We do work with DSIT on all the issues around online crime, online abuse and online exploitation. There is a lot of cross-Government working. Part of the issue here is making sure you develop systems that can evolve over time to be used in the most effective way. You talked about silos. We have over a very long period …”

“Digital technology has moved on a very long way since then. Again, this is from an immigration perspective, but for example, we are looking at ways in which the technology we have around whether people are in the country or not—depending on not just their visas but the check-ins and outs through the border, using the m…”

“The starting point is that we have a history in this area of confidence understandably plummeting. A lot of promises were made to people across the country about what would happen to net migration under the previous Conservative Government. A lot of promises were made about what the impact of the new Brexit agreements …”

“I think there is a particular issue about confidence in the immigration system—and, frankly, quite understandably, given the way in which those numbers shot up in such a short period of time. I have said that I think that really was a free market experiment in which, effectively, employers were encouraged to recruit fr…”

“One of the things we highlighted as part of the immigration White Paper is the importance of increasing domestic skills, which improves our productivity. In the period in which we saw net migration quadruple—the biggest driver was an increase in overseas recruitment and an increase in work visas during that period—we a…”