Starmer accuses Sunak of failing to act after Sarah Everard murder

Prime Minister’s Questions today was a weighty affair, with Keir Starmer focusing on the murder of Sarah Everard following the Angiolini Report into the failings of the police that allowed Wayne Couzens to continue in his role and to abduct his victim. The Labour leader asked how it could be the case that there was ‘nothing to stop another Couzens operating in plain sight’ three years on from Everard’s death. Sunak replied that the government had taken action ‘quickly’ to ‘strengthen police vetting, strengthen the rules for rooting out officers who are not there to serve and conducted the largest-ever screening of all serving officers and staff’. He added that ‘we will thoroughly consider all of the report’s recommendations’. 

Starmer continued to push on this, saying his party had been arguing for a mandatory national vetting standard, so why wasn’t that already in place. Sunak didn’t answer that initially, so the Labour leader came back again, snapping ‘I’m obviously very familiar with codes in criminal justice systems’ – which prompted a number of ‘ooohs’ from the Tory benches. He added that there was a ‘world of difference between a code and binding mandatory standards which don’t have legal effect’. He asked for an assurance from the Prime Minister that there would be an immediate review of all indecent exposure allegations against serving officers in order to identify, investigate and remove those officers from service. Sunak’s response was: ‘Indecent exposure, just like any other kind of sexually motivated crime, is abhorrent. We expect police chiefs to take it extremely seriously. And we fully expect police chiefs to suspend an officers charged with any kind of sexually motivated crime’. Starmer replied that he thought the recommendation should be implemented urgently ‘because every day that goes past when it isn’t implemented carries risk for victims in these cases’. He then asked how Sunak could expect women to have confidence in the criminal justice system when ‘almost all rapists don’t see the inside of a courtroom’. 

The Prime Minister said the government had acknowledged that more needed to be done to improve the justice system, but that there was already ‘considerable progress’. At this point, he became a little more partisan, saying: ‘We’ve already increased the average sentences for rape by a third since Labour were last in office, Mr Speaker, by the way using a power that the Labour Party voted against.’ He then added that Starmer hadn’t ’acknowledged that under his tenure rape convictions actually dropped’. The Labour leader’s response was that this would be ‘fact-checked’ and that victims deserve better than this ‘nonsense’. In his final question, he said: ‘The problem is the rosy picture the Prime Minister tries to paint of the current criminal justice system is completely at odds with the confidence many women currently have in it.’ He then moved the focus to the delay, announced last week, to a vote on banning from Parliament MPs who face allegations of sex offences. This was moved because Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt felt it was inappropriate for members to be voting on a matter like this when there was a crisis of confidence in the way the House operated following the Gaza vote. Sunak ignored the question. 

The pre-Budget PMQs is always a session that struggles to get much notice. It often ends up being a bit of pointless knockabout. But this Labour attack today will probably be mirrored by much of the response to the Budget from the opposition: it was all about things the government should have sorted out already.