Thank you very much, good evening everyone, and thank you as ever to the Police Federation and of course Police Mutual for organising the event this year, and thank you for the invitation to speak and to present this inspirational award.
I’m very conscious as well of being asked to speak before everyone gets to eat as well.
I’ve actually been an MP now for 28 years, of which 15 of them I have had the honour to be able to come here to this event.
It was an early mistake that I tried to learn from in my first years as an MP, where I had been invited to the annual dinner from a local community organisation. I had all of the briefing notes from my new office, and they said, they wanted to speak for three quarters of an hour.
Three quarters of an hour? And then they asked me to speak before dinner as well – seriously? And I got to 25 minutes into this speech, and I could see everybody just getting really, you know, picking up the glasses, getting increasingly irritable.
We’ve got a chair next to me, obviously rustling bits of paper, and I’m thinking, and it still says speak for three quarters of an hour. And I kept going. I had said literally everything I could think of about this community organisation. And finally I sat down and the chair said to me, said “right, well, we’ve cancelled the first course. We’re going to move on.”
I said – what have I done? He said “so we did ask your office if you could speak for four to five minutes.”
So I will learn from that experience and try not to speak for too long. But I did want to just have a chance to pay some tributes and to say a huge thank you, because it’s many times I have been here in shadow roles, in different roles, and to see a huge amount of work that policing does, the bravery that policing shows.
But this is my second time here and at the end of just my first year as a Home Secretary, and it has been a huge honour to see every single day this year the incredible work that policing does in so many different parts of the country, so many different ways.
But I actually wanted to start by paying tribute not to the officers who’ve been nominated, not even to all of the officers and staff that support them, but to all the family members who are here and who do so much to support all of the officers, all of our police family in the work that they do.
The policing family includes all of those family members who are here, who have to put up with, who have to get the kids to school, who have to sort out everything, and also deal with the stress and the worry and provide the support so that every one of you can do your job. So please join with me in saying a huge thank you and paying tribute to all of the family members.
I want to say thank you as well to not just all of you, but everyone within policing and the the officers, the officers who’ve had to face the most difficult situations, but also all of the colleagues, all of the PCSOs, the staff, from the forensics officers to the family liaison support officers, everybody within policing who holds policing together, that in turn holds our communities together and keeps all of us safe.
And we often talk about the way in which you have to run towards danger when the rest of us get to walk away, but you also have to run towards the trickiest, the most difficult situations that the rest of us can’t solve. And when everybody else has given up, it’s you that have to pick up the pieces. And as one officer that I spoke to this evening said, he was saying “well, it’s just the job we do.” He said “who else are you going to call?”
And it’s true, when everything else goes belly up, you are the ones that we call. So I just wanted to say a huge thank you, because we owe you a huge debt of gratitude for being the ones we call when everything else has gone wrong, and for being the ones who are there to pick up the pieces too.
So I want to thank you too to recognise the impact and the consequences that that can have for all of you, because I know too that this really isn’t an easy job, and it’s a special job, and you do it with the most incredible dedication, but it also has consequences, and there’s a price to be paid for doing such a difficult job as well.
And so I wanted to just also say we’re drawing up now, and Diana Johnson, the Policing Minister, is here today as well. We’re drawing up now a policing reform white paper that recognises many of the challenges that are faced across policing. And we’re trying to do this in a different way, working with police forces, working with policing in a way that I don’t think governments previously have done.
But we will also make sure that respect for the workforce and the support the workforce needs is also a part of that white paper.
And I wanted to particularly to thank everyone for the work that has been done to roll out, based on some of the pilots that’s been done, the first police specific mental health crisis line, to be able to provide that added support that we will need to build on to make sure that we recognise the impact that this has, this incredible job also has on those who do this.
I want to say a huge thank you to all of them, the award nominees here tonight, and to pay tribute and to honour the huge bravery shown. You will hear the stories later on. And some of those who I’ve spoken to have said, well, I’ve heard everybody else’s stories, but really, you know, I shouldn’t have been nominated, because look at the bravery that everybody else has shown. And I think everybody has, I’ve heard say something similar, and would really just say to all of you, please do, let us pay tribute to you, because the bravery you’ve shown in those split second moments has been truly incredible and has helped save lives and has helped change lives, and has been the crucial things that we depend on you to do. And we are saying thank you, both to you and also to all of your colleagues, through you as well.
Those stories of total selflessness, where we’ve had people trapped in burning buildings or freezing waters with no hope of survival, until our police officers from Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Essex, Manchester and Sussex came running to their rescue.
The stories of the sheer instinctive courage, where dangerous men were stopped from doing huge harm to others only because officers from Bedfordshire, Cheshire, Dorset, Durham, Hampshire, Leicestershire, Leyton, Suffolk, Surrey, Thames Valley, Tower Hamlets and Wiltshire were willing to put their own lives on the line to keep everybody else safe.
And the stories of the incredible compassion where people who were ready to end their own lives were pulled back from the brink by the interventions from officers from Kent, from Humberside, from Norfolk, South Wales, West Yorkshire.
And stories of officers from Cambridge and North Wales, Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire, dealing with apparently routine cases, issues that they were responding to, suddenly found themselves dealing with the most serious and deadly situations that they had to respond to with the utmost calm as well.
And if the stories tell us anything, it’s the way in which all of you need to respond and be ready to respond to anything that you face, whether it’s the off duty officers in Lancashire or Southall breaking up fights in the street. Or in Cleveland, Cumbria, West Mercia, West Midlands, dealing with the mobs or gas explosions or speeding vehicles or dangerous dogs. Or in Northumbria, responding to the disgraceful disorder that broke out on the streets last summer.
I am so sorry that so many of you who had to deal with frankly that disgraceful way, you should never have had to face the attacks on police officers by mobs, by missiles, and I will always back you in the job that you do to keep people safe.
I think what the awards also show us is the fine line, the close margins between the miracles and the tragedies, and between the lives that you were able to save and the lives that no one could have saved.
But you were still there, and you still did your best to help them, and the stories that we have this evening from Avon and Somerset, from Dyfed-Powys, from Gwent, from Northamptonshire and Warwickshire of officers trying to rescue individuals trapped in the most terrible of situations.
So as we celebrate the lives that were saved, we also mourn the lives that were lost, and think of the victims too, and thank every officer for the incredible, incredible courage that was shown.
And the same is true, perhaps most of all for our colleagues here this evening from Merseyside police, and I know they would give anything not to be in the room tonight and not to have their story be one of those that we once again, remember or be forced to relive that awful day once again.
But we all know, and we’re all so grateful, because it was if it was not for you, and if it was not for your courage or the instinct that told you and your colleagues to run towards danger that day, there would be many more mums and dads in Southport today without their little girls to hold.
So it’s a reminder, it’s a recognition of what something Sir Robert Peel said in a speech in Parliament 180 years ago when he talked about recognising the very best of public service, but also recognising you and through you, all of those that you work with too, because the service you have given, in his words, was “remembered, marked and honoured by a grateful country.”
So I’m hugely grateful, but I say this on behalf of people right across the country. We’re hugely grateful for the bravery that you’ve shown, not just to face the really difficult things, but also then to get back up the following morning and to face it all again.
So thank you for doing that. Thank you for caring so much for the job that you do, and thank you so much for being part of the amazing thing that is British policing. Thank you for keeping us safe.