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Mr. Nigel Evans: Fascinating as all this is, would the hon. Gentleman care to say how much extra money a future Labour Government would spend and how many extra police in Lancashire that would pay for?
Mr. Prentice: The difference is that we would not allow crime to spiral out of control, as it has under the present Government.
Mr. Evans: Answer the question.
Mr. Prentice: I am answering it in my own way. All those extra police are needed because crime has spiralled out of control. It has doubled nationally since 1979 and it has more than doubled in Lancashire since 1979. Conservative Members should not try to lecture me on the way in which a Labour Government would approach that.
Mr. Matthew Banks: Look what has happened.
Mr. Prentice: Whatever has happened, it has not been the responsibility of the Labour party, has it? We have had no responsibility for central Government for 16 years.
Mr. Kirkhope: For all that nonsense, the hon. Gentleman cannot get away from the simple fact that, under the last Labour Government, the number of police officers in the country was reduced by 8,000. It is all very well to speak as he does, but those are the realities. I do
not think that the hon. Gentleman has convinced the House of any good intent on the Labour party's part.
Mr. Prentice: There has been a generational change since 1979. I do not know how many Opposition Members were able to vote in 1979. Yes, that Labour Government may have made mistakes--who knows? However, I say to hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), who is having a good laugh, that people outside the House are genuinely not interested in what happened in the 1970s. They are interested in what is happening now. They are interested in the present Government's record and in what Ministers have to say about respect for the law and trust for the institutions of the country, and they are squaring that with the cascade of sleaze that we have had from Conservative Members in the past few years--that is the difference between reality and rhetoric.
I shall now make the specific argument that I wanted to make about the consequence of that freeze and reduction in police officers in Lancashire.
I have had meetings with senior officers in the county about what is, I suppose, a policy of stealth to close down our police stations or change them from police stations open round the clock to part-time police stations. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley has that problem in Clitheroe, which is in the same police division as my constituency of Pendle. My hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Ms Anderson) had the same problem; the police station in Darwen was to change from full time to part time, but I believe that it has been reprieved.
Ms Janet Anderson (Rossendale and Darwen)
indicated assent.
Mr. Prentice:
I do not know the position.
[Interruption.] I will give way to the hon. Member for Southport (Mr. Banks) if he has an argument to make.
Mr. Banks:
The purpose was to get the bobbies on the beat. That is what mattered. When people are in trouble, they will dial 999, not necessarily rush to the police station.
Mr. Prentice:
The hon. Gentleman has not listened to what I have said about police strength in Lancashire and getting bobbies back on the beat. The county, spending at or above its SSA, has not been able to deliver the full police establishment. That is the very point that I have been making, but the hon. Member for Southport has not twigged it--perhaps it is too difficult a concept for him to grasp.
I shall return to the subject of police stations that are becoming part-time rather than full-time stations. When I spoke to Superintendent Rawstrone--with whom I get on well, who is a competent superintendent and who is well regarded in the area--I asked him why all the police stations were now going part time. He said that more police were needed out on the beat. That is a fair enough suggestion, although the police strength has never been up to establishment. Perhaps when the hon. Member for Southport reads Hansard he will appreciate the point that I am trying to make.
I spoke earlier about the process being carried out by stealth. I read all the reports of Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary for Lancashire dating back to 1990. All police authorities now have to publish annual policing
plans. The Lancashire police authority annual policing plan to which I shall refer was published in April 1995. It contains nothing about closing or changing the status of police stations from full to part time. It merely states that it wants to provide high-visibility policing. It continues:
My constituents, and doubtless the people of Ribble valley and Clitheroe, do not want a trade-off whereby they can have more police on the beat, but the police stations close or go part time. People want police stations as well as police on the beat. The police station is a place of sanctuary and refuge; if people are in trouble, they run to the police station and knock on the door and they do not want it to be locked. But that is happening in Barnoldswick in my constituency, where the police authority wants the spanking new police station, which was opened only two and a half years ago at a cost of £650,000, to be open part time.
I took up the problem with Pauline Clare, the highly regarded new chief constable of Lancashire. She wrote to me and said that she would consider all the representations being made. She said that opinion polls carried out by the local newspapers had resulted in minimal response, with 51 replies to a telephone poll conducted by the Barnoldswick and Earby Times and four replies to a postal poll carried out by the Craven Herald and Pioneer. She is based in Preston and she does not think that there is too much public agitation in north-east Lancashire, where my constituency is located. But she is living in a parallel universe and clearly does not understand what is happening in north-east Lancashire.
The local papers have been full of reports about our local police stations closing. The town councillor in Barnoldswick, Sandra Garnett, had a 2,000-name petition against the proposal. She was quoted in the local papers saying that the people of West Craven
Sally Lambert, who chairs Barnoldswick town council, has been outspoken, as have representatives of the Liberal party and, where they can be found, members of the Conservative party in West Craven. We want the police station to stay open. The hon. Member for Southport talks about police on the beat and the fact that people can always pick up the telephone or get in touch with the police in an emergency, but Mr. Michael Townson was quoted in the Craven Herald and Pioneer a few weeks ago. He saw some young people throwing fireworks at passing drivers. He ran to the police station and found that it was locked, but there was a hotline. He picked up the telephone link, but although he heard the police in Colne six miles away they could not hear him because it was a one-way hotline. That was not very good.
It was reported to the police at divisional headquarters at Colne that the telephone outside the closed police station in Barnoldswick operated in only one direction. A complaint was lodged, but a couple of days later Duncan Smith, a reporter from the Craven Herald and Pioneer, went to the police station at 6.30 pm--not in the
middle of the night--to pick up a photograph and found the door locked. He telephoned Colne police station from a friend's house nearby and was told to go back to Barnoldswick station and ring again on the telephone link, and an officer would be sent to meet him. However, he experienced exactly the same problems as Mr. Townson. He said,
We do not want any more false rhetoric from the Government about getting more police on the beat until they start staffing properly the police service nationally and in Lancashire. We need a halt to police station closures. I have tabled parliamentary questions to Home Office Ministers, but they have taken a Pontius Pilate approach and replied that it is not a matter for them but one for the local police authority. That is simply not good enough for people in my neck of the woods--and I suspect those in Ribble Valley and Rossendale and Darwen.
Mr. John Whittingdale (Colchester, South and Maldon):
I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in a debate on a subject that causes enormous concern to my constituents and to all honest citizens. The strength of the public's concern is probably the only point on which I agree with the Opposition; given its strength, it is strange that only two Back-Bench Labour Members are present. I believe, however, that that is twice the number that were here for the first part of the debate.
One point that has been raised is that crime figures have risen since 1979. That is certainly true. Rising crime is not a new phenomenon; it is accepted as a fact of life in almost every country in the world. In Britain, crime figures have increased steadily under Governments of every colour.
In 1946, the number of notifiable offences recorded in England and Wales was 472,500. In 1992, the equivalent figure was 5.6 million. The cost to the country that that represents is enormous. In 1992, the value of property reported stolen in burglaries totalled about £1 billion. I understand that only about £64 million-worth has been recovered. A further £2.7 billion-worth of property and £1.8 billion-worth of motor vehicles was stolen.
The cost of crime is measured not just in economic terms. We have to include the blighted lives of the victims of crime and the suffering of those who have had their homes violated and lost treasured and irreplaceable possessions. We must take account also of the fears of citizens who are no longer prepared to answer the door after dark, who are unwilling to let their children out to play and who are too frightened to walk the streets at night. Those fears are not experienced only by people who
live in confined areas or the inner cities--they are shared by my constituents who live in towns and villages where previously people did not even think to lock their doors.
In part, the fears might not be justified. They derive not so much from experience of crime as from reading the press or from watching the television news or programmes such as "Crimewatch UK". The lives of some people have, however, been touched by crimes that they previously thought unimaginable--such as the assault and robbery 18 months ago of a retired clergymen in his own home in the tiny village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy in my constituency.
For years it was taken for granted that the upward trend in the crime figures was inevitable and immutable. That counsel of despair was the accepted wisdom of sociologists, liberal academics and left-wing commentators. We were told that rising crime was not the fault of offenders but that society was to blame--that unemployment, poverty or simply boredom left offenders with no choice. We were told that it was all the fault of Hollywood, the materialist culture or income differentials in society. We were told that the threat of prison did not deter and that the effect of imprisonment was to alienate further and turn first offenders into repeat offenders.
Those theories were offensive and wrong. They offended anyone from a deprived background or broken family who had not turned to crime, but instead struggled to make their way and improve themselves through honest hard work. The experience of the past two and a half years has shown that punishment works, that the threat of prison deters and that imprisonment takes criminals off the streets and puts them where they cannot offend.
That assertion is evidenced by the drop of nearly 10 per cent. in recorded crime in the past two years--the largest and most sustained in the post-war period. Credit for that goes to the police, the Prison Service, the probation service and, most of all, the present Home Secretary, who had the guts to ignore received wisdom and to pursue the tough approach for which the police and my constituents have been crying out.
Not all the academics were wrong. I commend to my right hon. Friend the Minister of State the pamphlet by David Pyle, recently published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which surveys the work of economists in analysing criminal behaviour. As an economist by training myself, I am attracted to that analysis--although, like most good theories, it appears to be common sense.
Becker, a former Nobel economics prize winner, suggested that someone is likely to commit a crime if the expected net benefit is greater than the expected benefit to be derived from legitimate activity. The criminal will therefore be deterred by increases in the likelihood of being caught or the amount of punishment that he can expect to receive. The empirical evidence supports those conclusions.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary is entirely right to concentrate on improving the detection rate and imposing tougher sentences on criminals. I agree entirely with my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) in recommending that persons who are caught and convicted of burglary should expect to go to prison. By doing so, my right hon. and learned Friend will benefit from a
virtuous circle. As the detection rate improves, the potential criminal will know that more people have been caught and so will be less likely to commit crime himself.
Improving the detection rate is, in the first instance, a job for the police. The Government are absolutely correct to concentrate on strengthening the front line. The Prime Minister's pledge to provide sufficient funding for an extra 5,000 officers in the next three years will make a major contribution towards improving detection. I should like to take this opportunity to thank my right hon. Friend the Minister for the increase of £4.9 million in funding for the Essex police next year, and for the extra 28 officers that they will be able to recruit straight away.
The area that I represent is very rural; many of its small communities are remote and isolated. My constituents want to see more community officers living in villages. They want to see police stations continuously manned-- that is the one point on which I share the views of the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr Prentice). They also want to see more policemen out on patrol. To achieve that in an area as sparse as the Dengie peninsula in my constituency will always be hard, but it has been made harder by the diversion of manpower away from crime detection and prevention to police the demonstrations that have been taking place a little up the coast, at Brightlingsea.
Such demonstrations have to be policed, particularly in view of some of the disgraceful violence that has taken place there, but it is not acceptable that, as a result, police cover should be reduced to dangerously low levels elsewhere. The extra money that has been announced will help, but if prolonged events such as those at Brightlingsea become increasingly common, the Government might have to consider what additional measures are necessary to deal with them.
The Government are also right to give the police the opportunity to benefit from all the technology that we can bring to bear in the fight against crime. The establishment of a DNA database will prove an effective resource in enabling the police to identify offenders beyond doubt and to obtain their conviction. The installation of closed circuit television, to which my right hon. Friend the Minister rightly referred, is also proving extraordinarily effective in helping to catch criminals and to deter others. Since Brentwood, in Essex, installed its own security camera scheme last year, crime has fallen by nearly 40 per cent. Violence, vandalism, graffiti, shoplifting and credit card fraud have all dropped dramatically. With Government help, CCTV has also been installed in Chelmsford and Braintree, and it will soon be operational in Colchester as well.
Fighting crime cannot just be the responsibility of the police. It also requires the active co-operation of every citizen. Neighbourhood watch schemes have now spread into every village, street and community across the land. In Essex, we have 4,200 schemes involving many thousands of keen and enthusiastic members. In addition, we have schemes such as marine watch, farm watch, industrial watch and horse watch--and I shall not be at all surprised if we soon have pig watch and chicken watch schemes as well. That mobilisation of the public is having a tremendous effect in helping the police and in raising public confidence and their sense of security.
The second influence on the level of crime is the punishment that the criminal can expect if caught. For too long, criminals thought that if they were caught a clever lawyer could get them off; that if they were under age they would simply be set free; that if they were convicted they would get no more than a fine or a ticking off; and that if they were sent to prison they would be let out again after having served no more than half their sentence.
It is hardly surprising that the public began to lose confidence in our criminal justice system. It is again to the credit of the present Home Secretary that he is taking action to put that right. Under the Government, we have seen an increasingly tough approach to serious crime. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 will be seen as a landmark--the point at which we stopped listening to those who worried about the rights of criminals and started to listen to the pleas of their victims.
The reform of the right to silence, the tightening of bail conditions and the power to give custodial sentences to juveniles were vital measures. The measures in this Session's Criminal Procedure and Investigations Bill will help to reform the rules relating to disclosure which, at present, allow those who are guilty of some of the most serious offences to walk free.
"We will make every effort to increase the amount of time officers spend outside the police station and in public, although experience suggests that more officers on visible patrol does not always result in a corresponding rise in public satisfaction."
"felt betrayed by 'empty promises' in the police's own charter."
I agree with her entirely. Everyone in Barnoldswick and West Craven, regardless of their politics, wants the station to stay open.
"I could hear the operator"-- six miles away at the divisional police headquarters in Colne--
That is the difference between having a police station that is open and one that is closed.
"answer but he could obviously not hear me . . . Thankfully, it was not an emergency, but I shudder to think what could have happened if it had been."
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