Angiolini Inquiry Report

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.

I call the shadow Home Secretary.

I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of the statement.

Three years ago this Sunday, a young woman walking home was abducted and brutally killed by a serving police officer who she should have been able to trust to keep her safe. Today we think of Sarah Everard and her parents, family and friends, who have to live with the shattering consequences of what happened. This is also a day when many families who have lost sisters, daughters and mothers to violence are here in Parliament to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), read out the names of the women killed this year.

Today’s damning report is about women’s safety. It is for all the women across the country who worry about walking home alone, or who worry about their daughters’ safety. It is also about trust and confidence in policing, and whether we have the standards in place to maintain confidence in individual officers. The work of the vast majority of police officers who work immensely hard and with integrity to keep communities safe is undermined when standards fail. I thank Lady Elish Angiolini for her inquiry and this comprehensive first report. I also thank those who came forward to give evidence.

The report exposes a catalogue of appalling failures in police vetting and misconduct processes, and in the investigation of indecent exposure and sexual offences. Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer. He should have been stopped, and he could have been stopped, from being a police officer. It is truly appalling. His history of alleged sexual offending stretches back so many years, yet the opportunities to investigate were repeatedly missed. Most disturbing of all, Lady Angiolini says that there is

“nothing to stop another Couzens operating in plain sight.”

Although I agree with most of what the Home Secretary says, I have to be blunt about this: his response is too weak—too little, too late. The lack of urgency is unfathomable to me. The Government have been repeatedly warned about failures around vetting and misconduct. Independent inspectorate reports in 2012, 2019, 2022 and 2023 all highlighted serious failures in vetting procedures, which is why, two years ago, I called for mandatory national vetting standards. Forces are working hard, but there are no mandatory standards for all forces. All the Government have done is bring in a code of practice two and a half years after Sarah Everard’s murder, and it is not strong enough. Frankly, it is not even clear that Wayne Couzens, or officers such as David Carrick and Cliff Mitchell—both now convicted—would definitely have failed the vetting standards and the code of practice had they been in force at the time. The Home Secretary has to go further, and that has to be driven by the Home Office.

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 join everybody in the House in paying tribute to Sarah Everard’s family. Having spent time with them, I hope the report will at least give them some sense of the facts and circumstances around what happened to their beautiful daughter, as they requested.

I thank Dame Elish Angiolini for her incredible work. This report is only part one; parts two and three will follow. The report has no surprises when we think about what has been said thus far about policing since Sarah’s appalling abduction and murder. Zoë Billingham, His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services and others have highlighted many institutional, cultural and practical failures.

Will the Home Secretary give his own view on what can happen next? This is a clear call for action for all police forces around the country to raise the bar on consistent vetting and action. There is no place for criminal or corrupt conduct in policing. We police by consent in our country but that bond has been broken with the public, as the report shows. With reports two and three due to come out, will the Home Secretary give a commitment that, as those reviews are undertaken and as he engages with Dame Elish Angiolini, he will act swiftly where issues are identified and not wait for the publication of further reports? Will he also act swiftly on putting forward the recommendations in part one of the report?

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.

I call the SNP spokesperson.

I am grateful for advance sight of the statement, and to Dame Elish Angiolini for the careful and thorough way she has worked through this task, and the thoughtful way she talked through her findings online earlier. I, too, am thinking of Sarah Everard and her family today, as well as the family of Emma Caldwell, who have experienced such a protracted, awful ordeal.

Fundamentally, our police forces must both keep us safe and have our confidence that they will do so. Of course, most police officers do an excellent job, but trust has been hugely damaged by issues being raised—including, as we have heard, indecent exposure—but not acted on. We have heard that Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer. The Home Secretary spoke about vetting. I put it to him that we need to hear more about both process and culture. It cannot be one before the other; both must be dealt with immediately. I would also like to hear more about how those currently in the force who show tell-tale signs, as Couzens did, will be dealt with.

What does the Home Secretary mean by “automated systems”, and how will they work? Will additional funding be made available to tackle institutional misogyny within the Met, and will Barnett consequentials be available so that the Scottish Government can similarly look at the threat of violence against women and girls, across society and within the police force?

Good policing will not end the epidemic of male-inflicted violence against women, but it should mean that men who abuse women are held to account. I wonder whether the Home Secretary is aware of the relatively small proportion of police officers investigated for domestic abuse, sexual assault, rape and abuse of position who were suspended over the last two years, and what steps he is taking to deal with that. Will the Home Secretary talk further about those who have raised concerns about domestic abuse by police officers, and how the specific actions that are needed will be taken? This is quite devastating for women’s confidence in policing. I wonder whether he is considering a statutory inquiry into institutional misogyny within the Metropolitan police.

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.

This comprehensive report reveals a truly appalling catalogue of what ultimately turned out to be fatal errors, incompetence and complacency, which were epitomised by a culture in parts of the Met police—it is important to say “parts”—where vile behaviour and deeply abusive language, as we would recognise it to be, constituted banter. Mark Rowley, when he came in, offered in response to open up more than 1,000 cases of previous scandal and conduct investigations to see whether they had been conducted properly. When the Home Affairs Committee went to see the standards committee at the Met, we were told that this would take some time and that we would see more of these cases coming out. Can the Home Secretary give us a progress report on what more instances we are likely to see in the public domain?

Can we also hear more about an issue that we have raised previously, which is where those reviews of standards are undertaken by other members of the police force. Surely there is a case for bringing in greater independence by using other agencies and institutions, such as the military, to help with these investigations, as they would approach this from a different standpoint, ensuring that it is not just a case of the police marking their own homework.

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 call the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.

I welcome today’s statement. I hope that we will get a full response to the report from the Home Secretary very quickly. May I also associate myself with the comments of the Home Secretary and other right hon. and hon. Members today? Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Sarah Everard.

I wish to ask the Home Secretary again about this issue of indecent exposure, which is highlighted in the report and which he has talked about a little. In my constituency, we had the horrific case of Libby Squire, who was raped and murdered by a man who had been stalking women and roaming the streets of Hull for 18 months prior to murdering her. He had been exposing himself and committing acts of voyeurism. People did not report his actions, because they did not think that the police would take them seriously. Libby’s mum, Lisa Squire, has been campaigning on this for the past few years. She has recently given evidence at a hearing of the Home Affairs Committee. I wondered whether the Home Secretary would meet her, because it would be interesting to know his view. What more can be done now to encourage people—women in particular—to come forward when such things happen to them? I would also say that almost every woman I know has had this happen to them at some stage in their life. This problem is endemic.

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.

I call the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee.

I would like to associate myself with the remarks of others—my thoughts are also with the Everard family.

This report tells us that the environment did nothing—nothing—to discourage Couzens’ misogynistic view of women. We know that not every flasher becomes a rapist, but we also know that every rapist starts somewhere. I respectfully say to my right hon. Friend that, of course, there have been good changes with regard to criminal justice and longer sentences for the most violent and the most serious offences, but that is too late. We have to intervene in the offending journey.

Last week, my Committee heard from Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Cundy, a man who has taken on a really difficult job, overturning those stones in the Metropolitan police and turning up at 1,600 instances of officers with at least one allegation of a sexual offence or domestic violence—1,600. Can my right hon. Friend give us an assurance today that he will give more power to Stuart Cundy’s elbow, so that we get rid of these individuals from our police service?

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.