Metropolitan Police: Casey Review

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:43 pm on 21 March 2023.

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Photo of Yvette Cooper Yvette Cooper Shadow Secretary of State for the Home Department 12:43, 21 March 2023

The report published today by Louise Casey, commissioned by the Mayor of London, into standards and culture in the Metropolitan police service is thorough, forensic and truly damning. It finds that consent is broken, management of the force has failed and frontline policing,—especially neighbourhood policing—has been deprioritised and degraded after a decade of austerity in which the Met has ended up with £0.7 billion less than at the beginning of the decade. It finds that the Met is failing women and children, and that predatory and unacceptable behaviour has been allowed to flourish. It finds institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia.

Baroness Casey pays tribute to the work that police officers do and the bravery that they show every day, as we all should, because across the country we depend on the work that police officers do to keep us all safe—catching criminals, protecting the vulnerable and saving lives. We support them in that vital work. But that is what makes it all the more important that the highest standards are maintained and the confidence of those the police serve is sustained, otherwise communities and the vital work that police officers do are let down. We support the work the new Met commissioner is doing now to start turning the Met around. He and his team must now go much further in response to the Casey review, but I am concerned that the Home Secretary’s statement is dangerously complacent. Astonishingly, there is no new action set out in her response, simply words saying that the Met must change. This is a continuation of the hands-off Home Office response that Baroness Casey criticises in her report. Some of the issues raised are particular to the Met because of its size, history and particular culture, where the Home Secretary and Mayor are jointly responsible for oversight and where the commissioner is responsible for delivering, but the report also raises serious wider issues for the Home Office.

The failure to root out officers who have been involved in domestic abuse or sexual assault also applies in other forces. The failure to tackle culture has gone wrong in other forces too, with problems in Gwent, Hampshire, Police Scotland, Sussex, Leicestershire and more. It is a disgrace that there are still not mandatory requirements on vetting and training, underpinned by law, and that misconduct systems are still too weak. I urge the Home Secretary to commit now that anyone under investigation for domestic abuse or sexual assault will be automatically suspended from their role as a police officer, and that anyone with any kind of history of domestic abuse or sexual assault will not be given any chance to become a police officer. We need an urgent overhaul, underpinned by law. Will she give us that commitment today?

The Home Office approach more widely to standards is also failing. Six police forces are in so-called special measures, but it is still too easy for forces to ignore the recommendations from the inspectorate and the intervention processes are too weak. Where is the Home Secretary’s plan to turn that around?

The report is damning about the decimation of frontline policing, but neighbourhood policing has been decimated everywhere, not just in the Met. There are 6,000 fewer police officers in neighbourhood teams and 8,000 fewer police community support officers than just in 2016, and it is worse than that because officers are routinely abstracted for other duties. So where is the plan to restore neighbourhood policing? Labour has set out a plan. We would work with the Government on this, but where is the Government’s plan?

The report is devastating on the lack of proper public protection arrangements for women and children who have been let down, but again we know that across the country prosecutions for rape and domestic abuse have plummeted and serious cases have too often been dismissed. Again, where is the national action plan to improve public protection? Where is the commitment to specialist rape investigation units in every force and specialist domestic abuse experts in 999 control rooms? It is not happening.

The findings on institutional misogyny, racism and homophobia are based on evidence and clear criteria that Baroness Casey has set out for measuring change with recommendations. The Home Secretary rightly says she wants discrimination tackled in all its forms, but she has been telling police forces the opposite in telling them not to focus on those issues. Where is her plan now to turn that around? Where is the Home Office plan in response to this, on standards, on neighbourhood policing, on violence against women and girls, and on systemic or institutional discrimination? Where are those plans?

The British policing model is precious. The Peel principles, which started in London— policing by consent—said

“that the police are the public and that the public are the police”.

They are our guardians, not our guards, but that precious policing model is in peril. The Home Office and the Home Secretary are the custodians of that tradition, but the lack of any plan to restore trust, to stand up for policing or to turn things around is letting everyone down. It is not standing up for the police; it is letting both the police and communities down. It is because we believe in policing and because we believe in those Peel principles that we know standing up for the police also means working with the police to deliver change and to restore the trust, confidence and effective policing that all police officers and communities properly deserve.