Home Affairs Select Committee

Let me give you one example.

A couple of years ago, I was called upon to appear before the Home Affairs Select Committee as part of a one-off evidence session about asylum decision-making and conversion to Christianity.

The session was called following a series of media reports accusing the church of conveyor belt baptisms to aid asylum claims.

I didn't recognise this picture of industrial scale baptisms and I welcomed the opportunity to discuss this with the MPs on the committee.

Uh, again, whether or not this surprises you is, is, uh, a, a matter for you to judge, but it's certainly, it's not new news insofar as trouble with the Federation is concerned.

We go back to 2014 to look at the select committee report from the Home Affairs Committee, uh, reform of the Police Federation, in which they stated that the Police Federation does not command the confidence of its own members.

And they went on to be fairly prescriptive as to exactly why that was the case, because there was an independent review by Sir David Normington back in 2013, uh, which dealt with 12,000 members of the Federation, basically the rank and file of the police.

57% thought the Federation did a poor job of explaining the value of police officers to the general public.

Well, I'm in the fortunate position, Kevin, this was my second visit.

I went three years ago with the Home Affairs Select Committee.

On my first visit, it was noticeable that it was all men, young men from Eritrea, Sudan, and other african countries this time the camp was much bigger but there was lots of women and lots of children and i would suspect that these were from um countries like afghanistan maybe iran or iraq and that sort of country and a few from africa from somalia as well and you're quite right i mean the police don't give a monkey's to be honest they don't give a toss um they know that These migrants in these camps, once they're in a camp in northern France, they've basically got one foot in the UK.

It might take them six, seven, even ten times, or they might be looking at it the first time.