How police treat women, and Army on fuel patrol

Two senior members of the government have given interviews in which they demand more of the police in tackling violence against women and girls, in light of the Sarah Everard case.

“I think the public feel that they aren’t,” is his answer, adding: “And they’re not wrong.”

The prime minister describes the situation as “infuriating”.

In the Daily Telegraph, Home Secretary Priti Patel says detectives must not treat flashing and harassment as “low level”.

The paper says she has insisted that police forces have been given sufficient resources to treat all reports of crimes “with parity”.

The Telegraph also reports the Home Office is drawing up plans for a national communications campaign to increase women’s confidence that, if they report offending, the police will enforce the law.

The Guardian leads on a data analysis it has carried out indicating there were more than 10,000 cases of indecent exposure recorded last year – but fewer than 600 suspects were taken to court.

The Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales calls it an “epidemic”.

Dame Vera Baird tells the paper she “hardly knows a woman who hasn’t been flashed”, and says the offence needs to be taken more seriously as a “potential precursor to more serious sexual offences”.

A number of the other papers focus on the ongoing supply chain crisis.

“Caught short” is the Daily Mirror’s headline, as it says “every sector” of the economy has been hit by what it calls the “worker crisis”.

A “dithering” prime minister has finally called in the Army, it notes.

But it says, nonetheless, that everything from “warehouses to factories, buses to pubs, pharmacies to schools” are being “battered” by a shortage of workers.

The Daily Mail has spoken to the chancellor who, it says, has warned there could be more months of food shortages ahead.

Rishi Sunak tells the paper the government is “determined to mitigate as much of this as we can”.

But, he suggests, the underlying problems are global, so “can’t be fixed by Britain alone”.

It says key producers have “slashed” the number of birds they have reared this year by a fifth because Brexit “cut off their supply of cheap labour”.

With the poultry industry unable to turn to EU workers, British supermarkets will instead turn to EU farms.

“Millions of Christmas dinners are to be saved by turkeys imported from Poland and France,” the FT says.

The same cannot be said of thousands of German citizens in the UK who, the Independent reports, are bemused to have received invitations from the Department for Transport to take up work as lorry drivers.

The confusion has arisen because some German driving licences theoretically allow people to drive medium-sized trucks – although, in reality, most have no experience whatsoever of lorry driving.

One man contacted by the department tells the paper: “I’m sure pay and conditions for HGV drivers have improved, but ultimately I have decided to carry on in my role at an investment bank.”

His wife has also declined the “exciting opportunity”, he says, as “she’s never driven anything larger than a Volvo”.