Those were the heartbreaking words of Pooja Kanda, whose teenage son Ronan was fatally stabbed in 2022. His teenage killers were able to buy multiple dangerous weapons online, without any proper checks. Following Pooja’s campaigning, we are introducing Ronan’s law, which includes tightening the rules for online retailers, increasing the maximum penalty for selling weapons to under-18s, and introducing much more stringent ID checks at the point of purchase and delivery. I thank Commander Stephen Clayman for his crucial review in this area, which underpins the reforms, and pay tribute to the Kanda family. We need to do everything in our power to prevent other families from suffering from terrible knife crime.
Thames Valley police are £1.9 million down this year because of the flawed formula for distributing funds to police forces after a pay award is given. When will this historical anomaly be fixed?
I will just point out to the hon. Gentleman that his party had 14 years to address all the things he is so concerned about now. This Government have increased funding for policing by up to £1.1 billion next year, including £200 million to start redressing the huge cuts in neighbourhood policing that we have seen on our streets in Thames Valley and right across the country, because we need to get police back on the streets.
T2. I thank the Minister for her previous answers, and for her commitment to reducing the number of asylum claimants in the UK. As she will know, the UK is spending 27% of its official development assistance on housing asylum claimants—almost double the OECD average. Our overseas spend was cut by the previous Government. Does she agree that in order to reduce the number of claimants coming to the UK, the Government should increase the spend on building peace and security abroad?
My hon. Friend is right to say that asylum costs make up the bulk of Home Office spend classified as ODA spending and that we are committed to reducing them, including by ending the use of hotels, which will mean that we can return that ODA resource so that it can be used upstream to prevent migratory flows from happening in the first place.
Border security is fundamental, but between the July election and yesterday, 25,135 people illegally and dangerously crossed the English channel—a 28% increase on the same period 12 months earlier. Does the Home Secretary now regret ignoring the National Crime Agency’s advice that law enforcement alone is not enough and that a removals deterrent is needed?
I will just point out to the shadow Home Secretary that when the Conservatives were in government, we saw that many people arrive in the space of just over 100 days, because they completely lost control of our borders and let criminal gangs take hold along the channel. Some 84,000 people arrived in small boats while the Rwanda policy that he somehow wants to reintroduce managed to send just four volunteers. We have increased returns by over 20% to 19,000, which is important. I hope he will explain why he voted against counter-terrorism powers to go after smuggler gangs.
The Home Secretary talks about the Rwanda scheme. Of course, it never even started, as she well knows. The first flight was due to take off after the election, but she cancelled it.
She mentions that returns have gone up. What she fails to mention is that the vast majority of those people did not enter the country by small boat. The number of small boat returns went down after this Government came into office, and it represents only 4% of people crossing the English channel. Does she really think that letting 96% of illegal immigrants stay here is going to deter anybody?
The scheme ran for two years, and the Conservatives spent £700 million of taxpayers’ money to return just four people. In the period during which the shadow Home Secretary was in the Government, 128,000 people arrived on small boats, and only a tiny percentage of them were ever returned, even though that number included 12,000 Albanians. This Government are having to sort out this chaos, but his party is again failing to support counter-terrorism powers against smuggler and trafficking gangs—siding with the criminal smuggler gangs instead of the people of Britain.
T5. It is illegal to post a prostitution advert in a phone box, yet the very same advert can be freely posted online by a pimping website. Such websites are making it as easy to order a woman to exploit as it is to order a takeaway. Does the Minister agree that we must urgently update our anti-pimping laws to make it a criminal offence to enable or to profit from the prostitution of another person online or offline?
I thank my hon. Friend for raising this important point. The Government are clear that online platforms are a significant enabler of sexual exploitation, and must be responsible and held accountable for the content of their sites, including taking proactive steps to prevent their sites being used by criminals. We are implementing the Online Safety Act 2023, which sets out priority offences, including sexual exploitation and human trafficking.