Monthly Newsletter

As challenging as it is contending with the state of the country inherited last July, the Labour Government continued to make progress over the past month. Many Bills are regularly starting their progress through Parliament, some of which I have detailed below.

We also had the Spring Statement on 26 March, in which the Chancellor continued the work of turning round the £22bn in-year Black Hole in public finances and facing challenges, such as on defence spending and international trade, caused by events on both sides of the Atlantic.

This report is a brief account of my work during March in Hull and at Westminster. I have also included wider developments at Westminster that I think may be of interest. To stay in regular touch in ‘real time’ with my Home Office, Parliamentary and Constituency work, please follow me on social media and see https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/home-office and https://members.parliament.uk/member/1533/contributions.

You can find details of my work below.

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The Bill

Alongside the Neighbourhood Policing pledge to deliver 13,000 more police and PCSOs into our communities over the course of this Parliament, the Bill forms the centrepiece of our Safer Streets Mission to reduce serious harm and increase public confidence in policing and the criminal justice system. 

The Bill started it passage through Parliament on 10th March with its Second Reading. This the first opportunity MPs have to debate the main principles of the Bill.

The House of Commons is now going through line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill – its Committee Stage. This began on 27 March with an Evidence Session.  We heard from many expert witnesses and stakeholders with an interest in the Bill.

These included the National Police Chiefs Council; the Police Superintendents Association of England and Wales; the Police Federation of England and Wales; the USDAW union; the Co-op; British Retail Consortium; the Victims’ Commissioner; the Suzy Lamplugh Trust; Action for Children; the Internet Watch Foundation; the Spike Aware campaign against spiking; the Local Government Association; the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners; the National Farmers Union; and senior lawyers.

In the later part of the day, I even appeared as a witness as one of the Home Office Ministers piloting the Bill through Parliament.

The Bill Committee of MPs from both sides of the House will now be going through the Bill on Tuesday and Thursday morning and afternoon each week, apart from during the Commons Easter Recess, up to 13 May.

These sessions can be followed live at https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Commons.

What will the Crime and Policing Bill do?

The Crime and Policing Bill contains the biggest, boldest and most ambitious package of measures on crime and policing for decades, with 50 new laws to cut crime, protect our communities and make our streets safer.

This includes:

• Tackling the blight of anti-social behaviour that we have seen locally causing misery across different parts of Hull North and Cottingham by introducing tough new Respect Orders for over-18s. My recent crime and anti-social behaviour survey in Central, West Carr, Kingswood and Cottingham, has confirmed that anti-social behaviour is an everyday problem for many constituents.

• Giving Police more powers to seize vehicles such as off-road bikes. In recent years we have seen the misery that their anti-social use causes, from Orchard Park and the North Hull Estate through to Kingswood and Bransholme.

• Taking forward the new Government’s aim of halving knife crime in a decade.  Knife Crime is a major national concern, with many lives lost and ruined. The Bill contains new powers to seize, retain and destroy bladed articles found on private property, increases the maximum penalty for the sale of dangerous weapons to under-18s and creates a new criminal offence of possessing a bladed article with the intent to cause harm. We are also introducing Ronan’s Law in honour of Ronan Kanda who was 16 when he was tragically killed with a ninja sword in 2022 in a case of mistaken identity near his home in Wolverhampton. The weapon had been bought online and we are introducing a range of new laws on the online sale of knives, including stronger age verification checks.

• Protecting shopworkers by introducing a new standalone offence for assaulting a retail worker. In Hull we have seen horrific cases such as that of Navin Sharda in Beverley Road – see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj91y0nmlelo. The Bill also undoes changes made under the previous government that made shop theft of goods worth below £200 a summary-only offence, meaning that much shop theft was regarded as less serious and often not investigated by police. The new Government is sending a clear message that any level of shop theft will be taken seriously.

• Protecting adults and children with a range of measures on children’s safety and child’s sexual abuse and exploitation, implementing the recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).

• Taking forward the Government’s aim of halving violence against women and girls within a decade, there are new measures to tackle spiking, stalking and consent. This follows recent Government action to start putting rape and domestic abuse specialists into every 999 control room.

• Giving the Police new powers to tackle serious organised crime, including economic crime and fraud – a growing area of crime in recent years.

• Introducing new public order and safety powers. This includes clamping down on the possession of fireworks, flares and other pyrotechnics at protests, powers to ban use of face coverings to conceal identity at specific protests and action to protect war memorials from vandalism.

• Reforming the Independent Officer of Police Conduct’s (IOPC) investigative processes to improve the timeliness and fairness of police misconduct investigations. This is an important aspect of restoring public confidence in policing following the scandals of recent years.

The progress of the Crime and Policing Bill can be followed at https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3938 and Bill Committee sessions watched at https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Commons.

Other work as a Minister

Aside from work on the Bill, I also attended many meetings and events in my Policing Minister capacity during March.

This included meeting the Home Office Special Constabulary Network to discuss the important work of Special Constables. I also discussed with Police Chaplains at a meeting in March the valuable support they give to frontline officers.

On 17 March, I visited Wembley Stadium before the Carabao Cup Final to see the Met’s policing operation in action at one of our major sporting events, keeping fans and the wider public safe. 

It was a pleasure too to visit those involved in the national charity Neighbourhood Watch in Vauxhall.  I also attended the annual dinner of the Community Security Trust who help protect the UK’s Jewish community from racist attacks.

In the Commons during March, aside from the Bill Committee, I was on the Government Front Bench for Home Office Oral Questions on 31 March, answering a range of questions from MPs on issues such as violence against shopworkers, live facial recognition and rural crime.

I also represented the Government in a number of Parliamentary debates. The topics of these included the use of stop and search powers, anti-social behaviour and the misuse of off-road bikes that the Government is clamping down on in the Crime and Policing Bill. 

At the start of March, I was in Sheffield to participate, as Policing Minister, at the Yorkshire and Humber Labour regional conference’s panel on crime and anti-social behaviour.

The work of change

In March we had the Spring Statement from the Chancellor and the statement from the Work and Pensions Secretary about the Green Paper on welfare reform.

The Chancellor’s Spring Statement on 26 March sought to build on the changes announced in last October’s Budget to bring stability to the economy, put public finances on a sustainable footing and set the conditions for economic growth and the decade of national renewal that we certainly need around the Humber.

With public debt max-ed out and the highest overall tax burden in 70 years left by the previous government, only a growing economy can deliver the better public services we need and reverse the decline in living standards that happened from 2010.

Given the £22bn in-year Black Hole in public finances left by the previous government and the uncertainty on transatlantic trade as we awaited President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ announcement on tariffs, bringing change will clearly be challenging. Tough choices are having to be made, but progress is being made.

This includes:

·      Interest rates being cut three times,

·      NHS waiting lists going down for five months in a row

·      A pay rise for three million workers.

As promised, the Spring Statement did not contain any further tax increases for April 2025, following those announced last October.  However, when working people are still struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, it cannot be right that others are still evading and avoiding what they rightly owe in tax. That is why further action was announced to cut down on tax evasion – to raise a further £1bn.

The new Government has begun to fundamentally reform the British state, driving efficiency and productivity. We are reducing the costs of running government by 15% by the end of the decade. There will be £3.25bn of investment to deliver the reforms that our public services need, through a new Transformation Fund.

Overall, day-to-day spending will grow by an average of 1.2% a year, compared to the 1.3% forecast in the Autumn. In the Spending Review Period, apart from the reduction in overseas aid to redirect an extra £2.2bn of funding to necessary increases in defence spending, day-to-day spending across government has been fully protected. This additional defence investment is not just about increasing our national security, but strengthening our economic security and industrial base.

We are pursuing the most ambitious set of planning reforms in decades to get Britain building, alongside the Government action to promote private investment that started last October with the £63bn secured in the record-breaking International Investment Summit.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) have concluded that these reforms will boost growth to the tune of an additional £15.1bn in our economy within the next ten years. As a result of these changes, living standards will rise twice as fast in this Parliament compared to the last.

Welfare Reform

Ahead of the Spring Statement, on 18 March the Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) set out a welfare reform package in her Green Paper.

The Government believes that those who can work, should work; and that those who genuinely cannot should be supported. We inherited a broken social security system - with one in eight young people, nearly a million nationally, not in employment, education or training (the NEETs). This represents a massive loss of potential economic growth and a waste of talent – not least in places such as Hull.

Since the COVID pandemic total spending on incapacity and disability benefits for working-age adults has soared from around £30 billion to around £50 billion, an increase of almost two-thirds. This is unsustainable.

The OBR estimate that the package announced will save £4.8bn in the welfare budget, liberating resources to invest £1.4bn into programmes that help people back to work. Our investment in cutting NHS waiting lists and in childcare is also of vital importance in supporting people off welfare and into work that pays.

The welfare reform measures announced include:

• An additional £1 billion a year for work, health, and skills support through a new “Pathways to Work” offer. This is one of the largest ever investments in support to increase opportunities to work for sick and disabled people. Building on existing provision, this will create a pathway to work, unlike now when so many are left on the scrapheap with no support. 

• Rebalancing payments in Universal Credit to address perverse incentives and protect those with the most severe conditions. 

• Scrapping the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) entirely – it's failing people, unhelpfully labelling them as either ‘can’ or ‘can’t’ work, when the reality is that health conditions fluctuate, and many want support to work. 

• Shift the balance towards more of benefits reassessments being face-to-face, while stopping them for those who will never be able to work.  

I know that some of the detail of welfare changes will be controversial and subject to discussion in coming months.

Other Government Bills

Meanwhile at Westminster during March, a number of other Government Bills were still going through their Parliamentary stages.

These include the Children’s and Wellbeing Bill, with its various measures on breakfast clubs, school uniform costs and safeguarding measures; the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and its range of measures to get Britain building and support economic growth; the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, to move forward the public health gains from ending smoking addiction; and the National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulation 2025.

As a result of this, April began with three million workers getting an increase in the National Minimum Wage – helping to make work pay and benefiting 320,000 workers across the Yorkshire and Humber region.

However, I would draw attention to a few key highlights.  I am pleased to report that the Water (Special Measures) Bill became law – an Act of Parliament – during March. This strengthens the ability of the Environment Agency to bring criminal charges against executives of water companies, bans the payment of bonuses to executives of water companies and we hope this Act will mark a step forward in starting to clean up our waterways.

Among Bills that will become law soon is the Employment Rights Bill. This upgrades protections against unfair dismissal, boosts sick pay, ends the misuse of zero hours contracts and bans fire and rehire. We all remember the mass dismissal of British workers by P&O Ferries in Hull a few years ago.

The progress of all Government Bills can be followed at https://bills.parliament.uk.

Sisters Act

As the first woman ever to represent Hull in the House of Commons, I always make it a priority each year to engage fully in events in Hull and at Westminster around International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8 March. This year was no exception.

In Hull, I spoke on the IWD panel at the Wilberforce Institute on the theme of life for women in Hull. I took part in a Wyke College IWD event held on the theme of what it’s like to be a woman in politics, sharing my experiences and answering questions from students who were clearly keen to get involved in politics. 

It was also a pleasure to be out in the early Spring sunshine to join my second ‘Headscarf Hustle’ walk across the Humber Bridge. This is part of the ongoing fundraising campaign for a fitting memorial in Hull to the Headscarf Revolutionaries – the women whose campaign in 1968 led to safety improvements on the trawlers.  

In Westminster, I was honoured to be named again this year as one of the 100 most influential Women in Westminster for 2025 by the House Magazine. It's a privilege to be included alongside so many inspiring women working in many roles in Parliament, Whitehall, the media, thinktanks and the unions.  

One aspect of IWD is highlighting women’s health issues and I met the ‘Coppafeel’ charity in Parliament to learn more about their important work raising awareness of the signs and symptoms of breast cancer. Checking for breast cancer is vital – it saves lives. See more information at https://coppafeel.org.

Investing in Hull and the Humber

In  March I took part in a number of other events in or near the constituency on issues that hold the key to our region’s future.

On 21 March, it was a pleasure to speak at Future Humber’s business event at Hull Truck. I outlined the key role of the Humber Energy Estuary in kickstarting UK economic growth and achieving Net Zero. Much has been achieved in the decade since we attracted the Siemens wind turbine factory to Hull, but I set out the argument that we need to go much further to transform our regional economy so that the Humber can make the contribution that we need to in order to help boost UK economic growth.

I highlighted the potential of the ‘M62 Growth Corridor’ across Northern England – but pointed out that developing this potential depends on getting investment, blocked under the previous government, in improving our infrastructure, especially our transport connectivity. 

Along with Emma Hardy MP and Energy Secretary, the Rt Hon Ed Miliband, I took part in an event organised by Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce to host potential investors in the green energy sector, carbon capture and other green initiatives around the Humber Estuary.

There is the potential of unlocking some £15bn of private investment for the Net Zero projects in our region - subject to a number of decisions happening in Whitehall. The problem of our creaking transport infrastructure across the North holding back growth and productivity was also raised at this event.

The Prime Minister came personally to Yorkshire on 28 March to announce £1.7bn of new transport investment this year, with more than double as much money per head on local transport in North than the South coming under the new Government. However, the long-running cross-party campaign for Hull rail electrification will need to continue until this investment is finally confirmed - as part of the high-speed upgrade of the rail network across the North.

Another notable constituency event I attended during March was the opening of the new Changing Futures Hub in Beverley Road. This Hub brings local services together to improve outcomes for adults with multiple problems such as homelessness, addiction, mental health, domestic abuse and contact with the criminal justice system. This is exactly the sort of ‘joined up’ working we need in improving our public services.

As well as my work around the constituency, it is always a pleasure to meet Hull North and Cottingham people when they visit Westminster. One such visit in March was from Adam Loubani, promoting National Supported Internships Day. These supported internships provide pathways into jobs for people with learning disabilities, autism and neurodiversity. Adam completed one such internship and it was great to hear that he is now doing well in his career.

Government announcements for Hull North and Cottingham

The shortage of Special Educational Needs (SEND) provision in Hull is a serious issue that Hull MPs have been discussing with Education Ministers in the new Government since last Autumn. I was pleased in late March to receive news that central government funding has been confirmed for the long-planned new SEND school at Willowfield, off Endike Lane.

We also had the good news at the start of April that three schools in Hull North and Cottingham are in the first wave of those receiving new Government investment to provide school-based nurseries. These are at St Anthony’s Voluntary Catholic Academy, St Mary Queen of Martyrs VC Academy and Bricknell Primary School.