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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 24 February 2025

Debate

County Lines Drug Trafficking

Contribution

The noble Baroness makes a valid point, and I will start from that premise. The Government have put an extra £1.1 billion into police forces with the police settlement that was approved by the House of Commons just a few weeks ago, and that is providing a range of functions. It is for police forces, chief constables and police and crime commissioners to determine the use of that resource locally, but she makes a valuable point about co-ordination and central management, which I will continue to reflect on because we need to ensure that there is not a backlog. The amount of digital material we have on our phones now—Twitter contents, phone calls, texts, Facebook messages and everything else—means that when someone is arrested there is a giant amount of digital information, and that is growing daily and monthly. It is important that we focus in on getting the right digital information to ensure convictions and drive up the conviction rate from the figure that I mentioned for between July and September last year, and that means tackling the backlog that the noble Baroness has rightly mentioned.

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