Rules governing police strip-searches of children and the vetting procedures for new officers will be tightened under a Labour government, Yvette Cooper has promised, as the party sought to attack the Conservatives’ record on crime.
In an annual conference speech on Tuesday that outlined plans to overhaul immigration policies in place under the Conservatives, the shadow home secretary said she would drop the “deeply damaging, extortionately expensive, unworkable and unethical Rwanda plan”.
Following an outcry over police vetting procedures in the wake of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, and revulsion at the treatment of Child Q, who was strip-searched by female Metropolitan police officers in 2020 after she was wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis, Cooper said there would a review of rules under a Keir Starmer-led government.
“Labour will strengthen police standards – overhauling training, vetting and misconduct procedures. And new mandatory rules and safeguards on the strip-searching of children so that an awful case like that of Child Q, a black teenage girl in east London, can never happen again,” she said.
The Home Office under Cooper would review the rules around strip-searching of children under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and introduce mandatory national standards on police conduct issues – such as vetting – where rules are currently voluntary, it is understood.
Cooper pledged her party would “rebuild community policing” and work with France to prevent small boat crossings in the Channel.
She announced a “fully funded £360m programme” to put 13,000 additional police and community support officers into local teams to rebuild neighbourhood policing.
In her strongest language yet, she condemned the plans from former home secretary Priti Patel to deport people seeking asylum to Rwanda, which Liz Truss’s administration has pledged to implement.
“Unlike the Tories, we will work with France to prevent dangerous small boats crossing the Channel and putting lives at risk with a new cross-border police unit to crack down on the criminal gangs who make millions from trading in people and profiting from their lives, paid for by cancelling the deeply damaging, extortionately expensive, unworkable and unethical Rwanda plan,” she said.
Cooper confirmed that Labour would tackle the “epidemic of violence” against women and girls if elected, with plans including putting domestic abuse experts into 999 control rooms and rape investigation units in every force.
Earlier, the conference was told that Labour would end the “era of criminal impunity” and change the law to make it easier to prosecute major corporations for fraud.
Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, said Labour would introduce a new law to hold to account directors who are complicit in their firms’ fraudulent practices.
At present, investigators must prove that executives are complicit in any fraud before the company itself can be prosecuted, which Labour argues is an “increasingly impossible task within the vast and complex management structures of today’s multinational corporations”.
Thornberry said only seven companies in the UK had been convicted of corporate fraud since 2013 while 5,000 times as many people had been convicted of benefits fraud in the same period.
“That shows this government’s double standards, but also their downright indolence. Faced with a complex challenge, they have simply waved the white flag to white-collar crime, and stopped trying to convict those responsible,” she told delegates.
The shadow justice secretary, Steve Reed, also took part in the debate on “safe and sure communities” on Tuesday morning, and confirmed a Labour government would bring in a so-called Hillsborough Law, so that victims of major tragedies “get the same legal representation as the authorities that failed them”.
He also confirmed his party would force convicted abusers to sign a domestic violence register, so they are “no longer free to seek out fresh victims”.
