Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2018-01-08
Topic: Law and Crime
Questions: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I apologise for not wishing you a very happy new year from the sunny shores of Clacton-on-Sea.Does my hon. Friend agree that sheer numbers of police is not the whole answer in tackling crime? In Clacton, Tendring District Council and Essex police have established a successful community safety hub with some 47 partners. Will the Minister please come to sunny Clacton to see how the scheme has been working and to look at some of the successes that we have achieved for ourselves?; Given cuts to police numbers and resources, how many police forces have notified the Home Office that they will not be pursuing certain types of crime?; Ministers have already spoken about online crime. My constituent Anne Gleed was defrauded out of a considerable sum when she was given false bank account details for the seller of a car after her emails were hacked. She reported the matter on the same day, but has been unable to recover her funds. This is an authorised push payment scam. What are the Government able to do to reduce crimes of that nature?; Since 2010, according to the Fire Brigades Union, Cheshire fire service has lost more than 170 firefighters, incident response times are up, the number of available appliances is down, and casualties are rising year on year. Will the Minister now accept that his Government’s cuts are having a detrimental effect on local services?; Will the Home Secretary confirm her commitment to the right to peaceful protest in this country? Given that there have been no successful prosecutions for harassment outside abortion agencies in recent history, will she resist the campaign to set up buffer zones? Does she accept that if peaceful protest outside abortion agencies is banned, the Government will also have to ban it, for instance, at hunts and outside animal life laboratories?; One of the missing links in tackling violence against women and girls has most certainly been caused by a failure to deal with perpetrators. Although the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), responded to my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) with sympathy, how precisely can we use research on what makes a difference to ensure that we empower our police forces and other agencies to deal with perpetrators?; Does the Minister share my concern that there were 59 known cases of drug-driving on Kent roads in 2016? Sixteen of those cases resulted in serious injury, and three resulted in death. What action are the Government taking to address this increasing problem?
Victoria Atkins (Conservative, Centre-right): I share my hon. Friend’s concerns and thank him for raising this important issue. We have developed mobile drug-driving enforcement devices to help the police to identify suspected drug-drivers at the roadside, and they help to enforce the drug-driving offence that was introduced in 2015 to make it illegal to drive with a specified drug in the body above certain limits. The Government commissioned an evaluation of that new drug-driving legislation, and we are considering its findings and recommendations as part of future work to strengthen the law.