Sir Julian Lewis: Is it normal police practice to handcuff a person who is lying helpless on the ground and clearly offering no resistance? Given the Home Secretary’s admirable and utter rejection of differential treatment of people according to their race, will she undertake to examine and withdraw the policing policy document identified by the shadow Home Secretary as embodying precisely such differential treatment?

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Shabana Mahmood): On policing practice and the specifics of this case, that is precisely what the IOPC [Independent Office for Police Conduct] is looking at, because it takes into account the context and the expectations of police officers given the specific dangers that they face. The IOPC will look into that and, once it has made its findings of fact, I will of course return to the House.

On the issue of differential treatment, the right hon. Member will know, as a long-standing Member of this House, that we have had many debates from the opposite end of the race spectrum, if I might put it that way. Today, we are talking primarily about the white community in this instance, but there have been many debates in this House about differential treatment for minority communities. That is why I do not think it is helpful for us to look at this issue through a community-specific lens; it is much broader than that. I will of course ensure that I always engage with the police on the specifics of their policies, but it is not my view that the police are institutionally or systemically operating a system of differential treatment. We will always make sure that we guard against that, and I will work with the police to make sure it never happens.]