Speeches by Cooper.

“I think you are referring to the police accountability reforms after the announcement about the Martyn Blake case. The important issue that we were raising as part of that piece of work was the need to raise public confidence in policing. That is part of our Safer Streets mission and links back to some of the issues ar…”

“Do you mean the areas that the police—”

“Police misconduct and vetting, yes—the wider work around the response to the Angiolini and Casey reviews includes putting a statutory underpinning to the vetting system so that we have national vetting standards. It includes stronger requirements around action to be taken, for example, suspensions in cases where police…”

“I know that the Committee is holding an inquiry on the disorder and will be looking into further into it. In any of these issues around the violent disorder, we must always start by thinking about the three little girls who lost their lives in Southport, and whose families will still be grieving, and all the families w…”

“I had meetings with Police and Crime Commissioners during that process. I think that they were also involved in the work, first by supporting the police chiefs in making sure that they had sufficient public order police ready. In early stages of the disorder, there were not enough public order police in the right locat…”

“You are right that it is very ambitious. I do not think any Governments, international or domestic, have tried to do this before. However everybody has talked about tackling violence against women and girls for a long time, but we have only had incremental change and what we need in many areas is almost a system overha…”

“The work is underway. As part of the strategy, we will set out which measures we are going to use. We have been doing some provisional work but we will confirm it as part of the strategy. The issue with the ONS will be timetables, not just to identify the measures but also the timetable to be able to conduct those meas…”

“You also asked about productivity issues and over-funding. There is a series of other areas where we think that productivity and efficiency could be improved and savings made. That is why we have set up a commercial efficiencies programme. We think that there is evidence that we can save significant sums of money on pr…”

“That is what we are still working through at the moment. This will partly depend on the work that the ONS has underway. The reason behind halving is that we think that we need that scale of ambition to try to get everybody away from just thinking about the incremental change. If you want to really transform things in a…”

“You are right that the system has become a bit stuck and we have ended up with very long delays in the national referral mechanism. One of the things that we have done is to recruit 200 additional staff members to clear the backlog for the national referral mechanism. We are looking at future support services for victi…”

“This was important. There have been a series of these investigations. There was the work that was commissioned by the Mayor in Greater Manchester, there has been some by IICSA, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse as well. Some of the issues go back to the point about how you identify the most dangerous offe…”

“I will ask Dame Diana Johnson to update the Committee on the timescale and the work that she has under way. She has had a series of meetings with policing and community organisations.”

“Of all the overarching issues that were raised as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, the most shocking thing is that they have not been implemented. We have had one set of recommendations; we have had other recommendations coming out of individual local inquiries and it is important that those are…”

“We will need to work with police forces on the mix and the way it that develops because it will vary from force to force. For example, I think Norfolk currently does not have any PCSOs at all. Some other forces have focused heavily on PCSOs. We want to see a mix of people in policing teams. Neighbourhood policing teams…”

“This is an issue for every single local authority and for every single area. Every area has to look at whether its safeguarding arrangements are strong enough, whether it has strong enough support for victims and support for people who are coming forward. If you have victims and families coming forward and identifying …”

“I will ask the Safeguarding Minister to write to you on this one. I am conscious that she has held meetings very recently with Alexis Jay and with groups of survivors of child sexual abuse as well. She can update you directly on the next steps on that.”

“This becomes part of the special grant procedure. I reassured police forces at the time that we would ensure that there was funding through the special grant process for the additional overtime they had to pay for, shifting resources around in order to respond. We are working through the allocations to each force at th…”

“Yes, I will. When the Greater Manchester reports came out, I did speak directly to Andy Burnham about the content, about what his next steps were going to be and what the local next steps were going to be. We take very seriously the local reports, be it the Greater Manchester ones or the Rochdale and other ones as well…”

“As the Permanent Secretary has already said, we do already have significant checks in place to ensure that any facial recognition technology that is used is tested for any bias. Users must actively test for bias, not just take the existing evidence but actively demonstrate that they have tested for bias. The use of ret…”

“Facial recognition technology has significant potential and it is already being used by some forces. There is no clear overarching governance framework for it and that means that some police forces are not really clear about the legal basis and when and where they can use it. We have been working at pace. Dame Diana Jo…”