PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Angiolini Inquiry Report - 29 February 2024 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement on the Angiolini inquiry.

Three years ago, Sarah Everard was abducted, raped and murdered by an off-duty serving police officer. It was a gut-wrenching betrayal, an abuse of power of the most egregious kind, and the country was shaken to its core. My predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), established an inquiry to examine the many failings arising from the Sarah Everard case, chaired by Lady Elish Angiolini KC. Part 1 focused on examining Wayne Couzens’ career and previous behaviour, and a report dealing with its findings has been published today.

First and foremost, we should take time to think about Sarah Everard’s family and loved ones at what must be an incredibly difficult time. I pay tribute to them all for the immense dignity that they have shown in the face of such an unbearable loss in such terrible circumstances.

Tragically, the report makes it clear that Couzens was completely unsuitable to serve as a police officer, and, worse still, that there were numerous occasions when that should, and could, have been recognised. Lady Elish identified significant and repeated problems in recruitment and vetting throughout Couzens’ career, including the overlooking of his chaotic financial situation. This meant that he was able to serve in a range of privileged roles, for instance as a firearms officer. It is appalling that reports of indecent exposure by Couzens were not taken seriously enough by the police, and that officers were not adequately trained, equipped or motivated to investigate the allegations properly. Had fuller inquiries been made in 2015 and 2020, Couzens could and probably would have been removed from policing. Evidence of his preference for extreme and violent pornography, and of his alleged sexual offending, dates back nearly 20 years prior to Sarah Everard’s murder. The inquiry found that Couzens was adept at hiding his grossly offensive behaviour from most of his colleagues, but that he shared his vile and misogynistic views on a WhatsApp group. The other members of that group are no longer serving officers, after a range of disciplinary processes. The fact that many of his alleged victims felt unable to report their experiences at the time speaks to the issue of confidence in policing among women.

I wish to place on the record my thanks to Lady Elish and her team for this report. It is a deeply distressing but incredibly important piece of work, and they have approached it with thoroughness, professionalism and sensitivity. We all owe thanks to those who came forward and gave brave testimony to the inquiry. Everyone who Couzens hurt is in my thoughts today.

The report makes 16 recommendations, including improving the police response to indecent exposure, reforming police recruitment and vetting practices, and addressing cultures in policing. The Government will now carefully consider the report and respond formally in due course, and I assure the House that our response will be prompt. We are taking action to address public confidence in the police, and there has already been progress in a number of areas that have been highlighted by the inquiry. Anyone who is not fit to wear the uniform, for whatever reason, must be removed from policing, and every effort must be made to ensure that similar people never join. That is why we are providing funding to the National Police Chiefs’ Council to develop an automated system for flagging intelligence about officers much more quickly.

We are changing the rules to make it easier for forces to remove those who cannot hold the minimum level of clearance. Police chiefs are getting back the responsibility for chairing misconduct hearings, so that they can better uphold standards in the forces that they lead, and there will be a presumption of dismissal for any officer found to have committed gross misconduct. I can announce today that there will also be automatic suspensions of police officers charged with certain criminal offences, but the work must continue. Part 2 of the Angiolini inquiry is considering systemic issues in policing, such as vetting, recruitment and the culture, as well as the safety of women in public spaces. I will of course read the findings closely and with care.

Sarah Everard’s murder started a national conversation about violence against women and girls, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham reopened a call for evidence that went on to receive 180,000 responses from members of the public, with many sharing their harrowing personal experiences. That evidence demonstrated the terrible truth: women and girls routinely feel unsafe. This is unacceptable and should anger us all, and the whole of society needs to treat change in this area as an urgent priority.

Tackling violence against women and girls has been a priority for me for a long time. It is now a priority set out in the strategic policing requirement, meaning that VAWG is rightly considered to be as serious a focus as tackling terrorism. Our tackling violence against women and girls strategy and tackling domestic abuse plan are backed up by significant investment. We are changing the law so that rapists will serve their full sentence behind bars, with no option of release at the two-thirds point, and anyone who commits a murder with a sexual or sadistic element will spend the rest of their days in prison.

Our safer streets fund and safety of women at night fund support a range of projects across England and Wales. The online StreetSafe tool enables the public to anonymously report areas where they feel unsafe and why. There is a new national operating model for the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences, which means that the police and prosecutors will work together more closely, building stronger cases that focus on the behaviour of the suspect, and that place victims at the heart of everything. We have also launched a nationwide behaviour change campaign called “Enough” to bring about an enduring shift in the attitudes and behaviours that underpin the abuse of women and girls.

Most police officers use their powers to serve the public bravely and well, but the impact can be devastating when they fall short. Society cannot function properly when trust in the police is eroded. I am unambiguous that police forces must keep improving and must command the confidence of the people they serve. It is imperative that police leadership, of whatever rank, plays its part in this endeavour.

Once again, I express my heartfelt sympathy to Sarah Everard’s family and friends. I cannot begin to imagine the extent of their pain. Together, we must do everything possible to stop such agony being visited on others, to rebuild public trust, and to make sure that our streets and public places, as well as the private realm, are safe for women and girls. I commend this statement to the House.

The right hon. Lady makes a number of points about the findings in the report, and about the issues raised because of Sarah Everard’s brutal murder. I have continued the work of my predecessors, including that initiated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), to make sure that not just the Department, but police forces around the country and other organisations, statutory and non-statutory, that deal with the safety of women, are focused relentlessly on this issue. We have made it clear that there is still much work to do, and, as I committed to do, we will respond promptly to the findings of this report.

I understand the frustration that not enough has happened; things have not moved fast enough, and cultural change still needs to be driven through, including on leadership. I have made clear to police leaders, both in forces around the country and at the College of Policing, my expectation of leadership. This is not just about process and procedure, but about these matters being amplified and supported by leadership, and about a real commitment to driving through change in forces. I will continue to ensure that that happens.

I do not think it is right for the right hon. Lady to say that nothing has changed. That would not be an accurate reflection of the situation from the time to which she makes reference. There have been a number of improvements. My first visit as Home Secretary was to Holborn police station to look at the team working there. There have been improvements, although I concede that they have not been universally applied. The differential performance among forces is not good enough. I have discussed what can happen to ensure the least well performing forces match the performance of the best forces.

There remains a huge amount of work to be done. We are not waiting for the outcome of the second inquiry before we take action. We will look at changes to the recruitment and vetting processes, which have been highlighted, but in her inquiry Dame Elish shows that there were plenty of occasions when the current system flagged problems that were not properly responded to by the force. Those are not procedural problems but a culture problem. We will look at what processes and procedures need to change, but I will not wait for the second report before doing so. I will continue to push for cultural change through society and policing, to ensure that where issues are flagged, as they were, they are taken seriously and investigated properly to ensure that such a situation will hopefully never happen again.

I thank my right hon. Friend for initiating the report and appointing Dame Elish. Details in the report were new to many people and were painful to read, but much of what is highlighted was already known. We have not waited for the report to start driving change. I have had conversations with police leadership about my expectations for their focus on the policing of the safety of women and girls and their attitude towards women and girls. Processes and structures are important; we will review and improve them. However, the best processes and structures in the world cannot replace focus and leadership. It is incredibly important that leadership at every rank in policing takes that seriously. This is a conversation that I have had with police leaders and the College of Policing to ensure that the attitudes highlighted in the report change. Without that shift in attitudes, all the processes in the world will not repair what needs to be repaired. That is a conversation that I will repeat.

On the hon. Lady’s final point, I want to make it clear what I meant. I was not suggesting that the report had brought to my attention, or that of the Department, a problem that is severe and long-standing. When I was at City Hall in the London Assembly, I contributed to the London violence against women and girls strategy, back in 2008-09, so I have been involved in this area and been passionate about it for the entire time I have been in elected office.

What Sarah Everard’s murder highlighted more generally to the public was something that I know women have known for a very long time: that the public realm is not safe enough; that their concerns are often not taken seriously enough; that there has been a dismissive attitude to non-contact sexual crimes; and that it takes far too long to bring domestic abusers to justice, too few of them are brought to justice, and women do not feel safe during the process. That has been raised by many people in the House. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who has made it clear that far, far more needs to be done, which many women already instinctively know.

That is the point that I am making about these tragic circumstances; we need to bring a greater and wider attention to this—a whole society attention. This is an issue about women and girls, but it is not an issue for women and girls. It has to be a whole society issue. I remain absolutely committed to ensuring that the specific recommendations of the report are responded to promptly, but, as my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), said, we are not waiting for the report to come out to take action; we have already taken action and we have already increased funding.

With regard to the Barnett consequentials, I will have to leave it to others to talk through the implications of that within the wider funding envelope of our support to Scotland as an integral part of the Union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The review that was initiated by my predecessor and worked through by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner is important. The commissioner has demonstrated an admirable commitment to reform. Having had conversations directly with him about this, I know that he takes these issues incredibly seriously. He wants to ensure that the Metropolitan police not only serve the capital and everybody in it, but are seen to serve them and that there is confidence in that.

I will of course consider my hon. Friend’s final point. I sat on the Metropolitan Police Authority’s professional standards committee from 2008, when I was first elected, until 2012. I saw the professionalism and alacrity with which the professional standards department of the Metropolitan police set about its work. There is a real anger directed at unprofessional officers by good officers. In my experience, the professional standards team takes its work incredibly seriously. The team wants to root out bad officers. Through the Criminal Justice Bill, we are giving chief constables more power to root out bad officers quickly, and I have committed to supporting them when they do so.

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for raising this point. I will of course seek to find an opportunity to meet the Squire family about this matter.

There needs to be a cycle of increased confidence. I hate some of the phraseology that has been applied, and I choose never to apply it about this issue, because there is the implication that these matters are less serious. But the sad truth is that, when we see reports of serious sexual violence, we can look back through the case history and often see plenty of examples of criminality leading up to that. Therefore we do absolutely need to take this seriously. Women who have been the victims of these kind of crimes—this kind of behaviour—need to feel confident about reporting them and they need to feel confident that their reports will be taken seriously. The more they see the police taking action, the more confident they will be in coming forward. Therefore, we need to develop a virtuous circle. We are not there yet; indeed, we know that we are a long way from that. We have seen this happen in the Couzens case. He was known to have committed these crimes, and that should have triggered a much more robust response. But it did not, and we must address why that was the case. We have to ensure that leadership and policing understand that, collectively, this House and the Home Office expect them to take this matter more seriously and send the signal that these crimes are not trivial and should not be ignored.

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. When I talk about that cycle of confidence, women need to see that when these crimes are reported, they are investigated and the perpetrators are brought to justice. Only then will they feel confident in coming forward. These are serious offences; they are not trivial. She is right to say that not everyone who is a flasher, not everyone who has made unwanted and inappropriate sexual advances to women, goes on to become a rapist or a murderer. None the less, the more people who are dissuaded from that behaviour because of swift and professional criminal justice, the more people we can prevent from getting to those later stages. That is why this is so important. That is why that cultural change needs to be driven through the whole system. A number of the Angiolini recommendations are for Departments other than the Home Office and for public bodies outside Government—all of us have to take this incredibly seriously. This is a whole of society approach, and that will remain the fundamental philosophy that I use to underpin the work of the Home Office in this area.

The hon. Lady makes a number of points about the implementation of the changes that we are making. I cannot give precise timescales at the moment, because this piece of work is ongoing and recently initiated, but my desire is for these things to happen as quickly as possible. She is absolutely right that IT and systems changes are not instant, and I am impatient to get improvement, which is why I keep saying that we are not waiting for these things to go forward. They are amplifiers and accelerators of what should be a fundamental change that we are looking to drive through immediately. The earliest conversations that I had when appointed as Home Secretary were on this issue with the College of Policing and with Lady Elish herself. One of those first meetings I had on my appointment was with Lady Elish about this report and the work that we could do to get ahead of the findings that she has put forward.

My hon. Friend rightly draws attention to the fact that London’s police and crime commissioner is the Mayor of London. He therefore has a duty to ensure that the police force over which he has political control changes, and changes in the way that has been highlighted through the inquiry and in the part 1 findings of the inquiry.

My hon. Friend is also absolutely right that even though many of the forces across the country are at the largest they have ever been in terms of numbers, that is sadly not true of the Metropolitan police, but there absolutely must be no sacrifice of quality of vetting in order to hit the recruitment targets that we have made it clear we expect the Metropolitan police to hit. We want the Metropolitan police to be a well recruited force, and the funding has been put on the table—it has not been fully utilised by the Mayor, but the funding has been put on the table—to enable the Met to be that. The force needs to be populated with good, professional officers. That is the bar, the minimum standard we expect. We expect all leadership, uniformed and political, to abide by that philosophy.

As I said, from my first day in elected office, I have tried to drive cultural change and an increase in professionalism, first in the Metropolitan police and, in this job, in policing more widely. I will continue to do that for all the time that I have the power and authority to do so. There needs to be—there must be—fundamental change. We must create an environment where women and girls feel confident in, not fearful of policing. That will remain my focus. I assure the hon. Lady and the House that I remain committed to that.

As I said in my response to the shadow Home Secretary, the simple truth is that there is no consistency across the country. Some forces deal with these issues better than others. We want to ensure that we increase the focus on such issues right across the country. The strategic policing requirement that I put forward is part of driving that attitudinal change right across the country. I demand that all police forces treat this as a priority issue, taking it as seriously as their work on counter-terrorism policing, for example, and that they learn from best practice, which is why I have spoken extensively with the College of Policing about the issue. Every woman everywhere in the country should have confidence in their police force.

The hon. Lady raises an incredibly important point about ensuring that offences are taken into consideration in vetting. That is part of the set of reforms that we will look at driving through. She makes a point about numbers of officers and budgets; I am not convinced that that is necessarily the most useful metric of the seriousness with which we take things. As I say, the strategic policing requirement makes clear my expectations. Ultimately, we continue to increase the financial support for the policing of these issues. I will continue, as I have committed to the House, to ensure that police officers of all ranks take this seriously, because without attitudinal change and a fundamental shift in philosophy, increased funding and changed processes —both of which are incredibly important; I absolutely agree with her on that—will not have the effect that she and I both desire.

I have worked with professional standards officers. Something like that, which might superficially seem obvious, is often more complicated. We have put forward changes in the thresholds that trigger a suspension. Of course, we expect investigating officers to move swiftly, as I said at the Dispatch Box on Second Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill. We want officers who are innocent to be vindicated quickly, and we want officers who are not to be removed from the force. That remains the philosophy that underpins our work on this.

I respect the hon. Lady’s experience on this issue. She will have heard the response that I gave to the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith). There cannot be universality in this; responses have to be based on the facts of individual cases. Successful challenges would be highly likely if suspension decisions were not based on the individual circumstances of each case. However, we have made it clear that the threshold has historically been far too high. We have reviewed that threshold and made it quicker and easier for officers to be suspended. That goes hand in hand with the changes we are making, through the Criminal Justice Bill, to ensure that the disciplinary procedure operates more quickly so that officers who are found to have behaved appropriately are returned to duty quickly, and those who are found to have behaved inappropriately are sanctioned quickly. That is incredibly important.

The policing of the vigil for Sarah Everard was awful —it was awful. It took what was already an incredibly painful set of circumstances and made them worse. I have spoken to police officers who recognise that. I will continue to speak about leadership, because that is not a process point; it is a leadership point. It is about driving attitudinal change and a willingness to accept criticism from people who have felt victimised for far too long and are demanding a change in the attitude of police around the country. The response to those incredibly legitimate concerns, at a point of incredible sadness and tragedy, amplified what were already tragic circumstances. I will do everything I can to ensure that situations like that are never—never—repeated.

As I said in response to the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), my point about starting a national conversation is that there are people who should have been thinking about this matter but were not. The terrible circumstances of the murder of Sarah Everard triggered a conversation within the Home Office and in policing. My own experience long predated those terrible events.

We must recognise, as a number of Members from across the House have said, that something changed when Sarah was murdered. We must absolutely ensure that those terrible circumstances, which the inquiry demands that we see, are utilised to drive fundamental change. I commit to the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) that I will continue to drive that change and prioritise violence against women and girls. It is a key priority, as I have communicated over and over again since the day I was appointed Home Secretary.

The hon. Gentleman is right. As I say, this is an issue that affects the lives of women, but it should not be thought of as a woman’s issue—he is absolutely right that it is male perpetrators who need to change. I have always said that I do not want women to have to change their behaviour; I do not want women to have to be in segregated train carriages, or to not be able to go out at night. We should be talking about not curtailing the behaviour of women, but a fundamental change in male behaviour.

The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) raised a point that I failed to answer when replying to her, so I will take the opportunity to do so now, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind. Information sharing between forces is absolutely key. We have seen that Couzens went from Kent to the Civil Nuclear Constabulary before coming to the Metropolitan police. While there were failures at various points, his vetting failure in Kent should have been flagged in other areas, particularly as he went on to very serious pieces of work with the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and then as a firearms officer in the Met. That vetting failure should have triggered much firmer action, and information sharing is a part of that.

I finish by repeating my point: the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) is absolutely right that this is about changing male behaviour, not women’s behaviour.

What will drive raised confidence is women seeing that their issues are taken seriously during investigations, and improving the speed with which the police respond to those investigations. My right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) made the point that non-contact sexual offences need to be taken seriously so that interventions can happen much earlier, before greater harm is perpetrated.

I know that there have been calls for misogyny to be made a hate crime. While I understand those calls, I am yet to be convinced that that would necessarily drive the change that we seek to drive. There are other direct things that we should do, and indeed are doing, to drive that change. We have increased the penalties for sexually related criminality, as I said in my statement; we are ensuring that rapists are not released at the two-thirds point; and we are ensuring that where convictions involve sadism and suchlike, people serve whole-life tariffs. We are making clear through the penalties for those crimes that we take them incredibly seriously, but it has to be ongoing work.

I recognise the frustration that the hon. Lady expresses, and I can only restate my personal commitment. With regard to the Metropolitan police’s implementation of decisions made by this House, she should recognise that that is a decision for the political head of policing in London, the Labour Mayor of London. I am more than happy to take this matter up with him, if she has not already done so.

I will ensure that either I or one of the Ministers in the Department gets the details of the points that the hon. Lady has brought forward.

I am more than happy to be held accountable for the words I have said at the Dispatch Box and the words I have said throughout my political career on this issue, because I am not going to lose focus on it. I can assure the hon. Lady and the House of that. As I have said, for the whole time that I have authority and jurisdiction over these areas, I will maintain this issue as a priority and demand that others—whether in uniform or out of uniform, operational police officers or those in the political leadership of police forces—take it as seriously as it should be taken. It is totally unacceptable that women and girls are not able to live their lives fully in our society because of fear, not only of criminality but of a lack of response from policing when these issues are brought to light.