Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

Again, I am grateful to my noble friend for his contribution. He knows as much as anybody in this House, given his previous role as Home Secretary, about the difficult challenges that we face here. To assure him on the Prime Minister’s commitment, we want to review how the policing capability was undertaken. That is not to interfere with operational policing but, following the Prime Minister’s announcement of the national violent disorder programme, to try to bring together good practice, look at where there needs to be resilience and make sure that forces support each other, which is a natural part of the policing landscape. It is extremely important to review what happened. As has been mentioned, we need to look at what happened at Harehills; there may not have been sufficient policing to deal with it. There is a whole range of issues and we can learn lessons. It is not for a Minister to direct chief constables, of the Met or anywhere else, but it is for a Minister to hold them to account and ensure that people, as mentioned by both Front Benches, are protected as a whole. My noble friend also mentioned the whole question of migration. I spent a long period over the past 10 years as shadow Immigration Minister and know that it is a toxic debate at times. In my view, immigration falls into three or four categories: immigration for everyone from the centre forward of a football team through to a professor or somebody else coming to this country because they are an expert in their field and bringing a contribution to the growth of our economy, versus people coming on a boat seeking asylum or people coming here completely illegally. The debate needs to be put into the context of how we manage that. We need to detoxify the debate to ensure that we deal with asylum and speed up asylum claims; deal with people who have come here illegally, because we must have integrity in the migration system; and make sure that, in doing that, we do not turn away people who will help us grow our economy or bring skills and challenges to our society. That is all on the agenda. I am still surprised that we are only seven weeks into this Government. We will look at those issues and I will report on progress to this House on a regular basis, as well as being held to account over the next few years.