Speeches by Cooper.

“I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to her constituent, and to the more than 7,000 victims and survivors who gave evidence to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and exploitation. The inquiry took seven years—many years of people bravely speaking out about some of the most difficult and traumatic things…”

“This is an issue on which I worked with Government Ministers when I was shadow Home Secretary and when I was Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, and there has been cross-party consensus on the need to tackle these serious and vile crimes. These are the most appalling crimes against children: repeated multiple brutal r…”

“My hon. Friend has worked immensely hard to champion the victims and survivors of terrible crimes. She raises important points about the prevalence of these appalling crimes, the need to be vigilant, wherever this abuse is to be found—in any kind of institution, across communities and across the country—and the importa…”

“We just confirmed today the continuing funding for the violence reduction units next year. We want to work more closely with the violence reduction units on the focus particularly on the ambition to halve knife crime over the next 10 years alongside halving violence against women and girls. To take a step back for a se…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“We should frame it as we are consulting on our intention to ban the ninja swords. There is a process that we go through but we will want to implement a ban as soon as possible. However, we do go through a consultation first.”

“Stop and search is an important policing tool. Of course, it has to be used appropriately, but it is an important tool for policing, including for things like preventing knife crime. A review was carried out by the inspectorate a few years ago about how to make sure that all police forces have the right standards and s…”

“I had a conversation with a local authority enforcement officer who used to be a neighbourhood police officer. We were standing in the town centre and he talked about repeat perpetrators, because we were talking about problems with antisocial behaviour in the town centre and he described to me powerfully how they used …”