The Commons was wearily furious as it responded to the David Carrick case this morning. Carrick yesterday admitted 49 sexual offences across more than two decades as a Metropolitan Police officer.
The fury of MPs didn’t stop at the police. There was a great deal of frustration with ministers for being too slow to do what they could to stop offenders continuing to work as police officers after complains had been made.
This frustration didn’t just come from shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, but from Tory backbenchers too. The most notable critic on Suella Braverman’s own side was Priti Patel. The former home secretary was customarily polite, but complained that there were already options for the Home Office to act on. She said:
The recommendations are already there. In fact, if I may say so to the Home Secretary, previous policing ministers and I put forward proper recommendations for the strategic policing requirement. There are issues that could be resolved so that people could be held to account sooner rather than later through that requirement. I urge her to consider, particularly after the tragic cases that we have heard about in relation to the Carrick incident and his victims, putting much of that on to a statutory footing.
Patel added that if Braverman didn’t, MPs would be coming back again to pay tribute to more victims ‘while, frankly, parts of the law enforcement system continue to fail the British public and fail victims’. Patel’s point about changing regulations was echoed by a number of other MPs, including Harriet Harman, who asked Braverman to bring forward draft regulations making it easier to sack officers who are unfit to be in the Met.
Patel wasn’t the only unhappy Tory. Jackie Doyle-Price complained that ‘it feels like Groundhog Day, questioning one of the ministers in a government I support about the culture within the Metropolitan Police’. She too asked ‘when are we really going to fully use statutory power to protect women from male violence?’ Braverman’s response was that she wanted to wait for the conclusion of inquiries into how Carrick and other offenders were able to operate within the police. She also later tried to shift the focus onto Sadiq Khan, arguing that ‘the politician responsible for the performance of the Metropolitan Police is the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and ultimately he should be held politically responsible for failings within the Met. Greater support, greater priority and greater focus from him would do no harm.’ Given the Mayor can’t change the regulations that Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has said are making it hard to sack unfit police officers, this felt a bit like armchair politics – but from someone who has the ability to be on the pitch. Many of Braverman’s colleagues seemed to agree.
Comments