The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, gave a speech at the annual Police Bravery Awards.
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
