Federation meets Labour politicians during conference

28 September 2022

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper at the Police Bravery Awards 2022.

Welsh affairs lead Nicky Ryan was part of a Police Federation delegation which met Labour politicians in Liverpool earlier this week for their party’s annual conference.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, shadow policing minister Sarah Jones, West Midlands Assistant Police and Crime Commissioner Tom NcNeil, Commons Home Affairs Select Committee chair Diana Johnson and shadow minister for employment rights Justin Madden were all present at the meeting.

Nicky said the meeting gave both sides the opportunity to raise issues facing policing and how they could work together to address them.

She explained: “We don’t go into the conference but we have lunch at a local restaurant and that allows us to talk, almost on a one-to-one basis, with politicians and they were real key players for us within the Labour Party.

“The conversation was quite fluid and in part was to initiate further engagement and to work out at what point the Police Federation can help the politicians as much as they can help us.

“As an organisation we are cross-party so we will be going to meet the Conservatives at their conference next week and obviously within Wales I am in regular contact with politicians from all sides.”

Nicky said the Labour Party was interested in the Police Uplift Programme and the recruitment and retention of officers and added that the Home Affairs Committee was looking at policing priorities.

Ms Johnson, Nicky explained, showed an awareness and understanding of the differences between policing in England and Wales and the need for feed-in.

Nicky said: “Politicians are clued-up on policing. Policing can sometimes be a bit dismissive of politicians but they really do know what’s going on.”

The meeting came after Ms Cooper promised Labour would take on an extra 13,000 police officers if it won the next election.

She outlined how a Labour government would recruit more police officers, PCSOs and Special Constables in an effort to cut crime and restore confidence in the police while also bringing back the last Labour administration’s focus on neighbourhood policing.

Ms Cooper said: “We are announcing this week that we have got to return to neighbourhood policing. We have seen the clock hugely turned back on the policing in our communities that Labour brought in.”

She added that focusing on neighbourhood policing was “about both expanding policing in our communities, but it is also a reform because it’s about the way in which we police, if you’ve got police embedded in those communities, providing intelligence and working together”.

Bringing police officers into communities, she argued, was “incredibly important in terms of prevention, in terms of preventing people being drawn into crime, in terms of keeping people safe and in terms of following-up”.

Ms Jones told the same event that a Labour government would overhaul police standards, including officers’ social media use.

She said: “It’s for us to make sure that those brilliant police officers, which is the majority of our police officers, are not being dragged down by those few who are not expressing the cultures and the behaviours that we would expect of them.”

Ms Jones explained Labour would speed up police misconduct proceedings and introduce compulsory training on subjects such as violence against women and girls and racism.

She also rejected recent claims by Home Secretary Suella Braverman that the police were spending too much time on “symbolic gestures”, pointing instead to the amount of time officers spent dealing with mental health crises and other non-policing matters.