Charlotte Cane

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton) on securing this important debate. Before I turn to the substance of the debate, I acknowledge the deeply troubling incident in north Belfast last night, in which a man was seriously injured in a knife attack on Kinnaird Avenue. My thoughts are with the victim and his family, the members of the public who attempted to stop the attack and the PSNI officers who responded. Those officers are precisely who this debate is about, and we should all be asking whether they have the support, resources and facilities that they deserve. As we have heard, 25 years ago the Belfast agreement promised a new beginning for policing in Northern Ireland. Out of that promise came the Patten commission, which led to the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It is worth noting, as many Members have, that policing in Northern Ireland is a devolved matter, with day-to-day funding allocated by Stormont’s Department of Justice. This Parliament does not set the PSNI’s budget, but the UK Government are not disinterested observers. Responsibility for national security rests with Westminster: additional security funding and paramilitary crime taskforce funding are channelled from here, and Treasury decisions—including the refusal to meet Stormont’s reserve claim for the £119 million cost of the 2023 data breach—carry direct consequences. The police college at Garnerville sits at the centre of all this, training every officer who joins the PSNI, and it exports that expertise to forces in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland, as well as internationally. Every PSNI officer carries a personal protection firearm, including when they are off-duty—something that applies nowhere else in UK policing, fortunately. The standing authority under Patten recommendation 65 has not been withdrawn because the threat has not gone away. The terrorism threat level was reduced from severe to substantial in March 2024, having been raised to severe following the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell in Omagh in February 2023. The PSNI recently told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that there is no operational difference between the two threat levels: the posture, vigilance and resource commitment remain the same. No other policing workforce in the United Kingdom has to weigh the personal security implications for them and their families when simply deciding whether to join the police force. The latest student officer recruitment figures, released in February this year, underline the scale of the challenge. The 2026 recruitment campaign received more than 4,100 applications, but that was down from more than 4,800 last year. Of those, nearly 27% identified as Catholic, against almost 29% the year before. The current intake runs at 51 student officers per month through Garnerville, barely keeping pace with the number of police leaving at the other end. Each of those officers completes the 22-week programme at a site that Patten identified as inadequate back in 1999. The PSNI told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that the continuing terrorist threat, legacy perceptions and resource pressures are active barriers to recruitment from all communities. No training college can resolve those barriers alone, but a modern, accessible facility would at least stop them compounding. It matters that Patten recommendation 131 remains undelivered. The Desertcreat project—a proposed shared police, fire and prison training facility in County Tyrone—was abandoned after costing more than £12 million without a building completed. As we have heard, the PSNI has since purchased the Kinnegar army base in Holywood, which it acquired from the Ministry of Defence for £4.9 million.