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6.12 pm
Mr. Roger Gale (North Thanet): I greatly appreciate this opportunity to thank the Metropolitan police. In the past year, with the Met police, I have been privileged to pilot the police and Parliament scheme, which is born out of the successful Parliament and Armed Forces Fellowship and the Industry and Parliament Trust. During that time, I have been allowed to spend some 25 days with the Met, both at Scotland Yard and out in the suburbs.
I have been out on patrol with the police. I have sat with them in the charge room. I have been allowed to hear their private conversations in their canteens. I have visited the police scientific research and development unit near St. Albans and the air support unit at Lippitts Hill. I have witnessed public order training and crowd control. With my own eyes, I have seen some of the grim evidence available in the paedophile unit at Scotland Yard.
I have spent time with flying squads, special branch, surveillance and intelligence units, the traffic police, the fraud squad at Holborn, the firearms unit and the murder squad. With the Federation Against Copyright Theft and the Met police, I have been out on a raid against a pirate video factory. I have also spent a day with the river police. I do not wish to see again--but appreciated at the time--the pictorial evidence they have of their work.
I have also spent time seeing the less glamorous, more mundane, but equally vital operations undertaken by the people who support those running the computer data bases
for the police. They provide the information that the men on the beat need to do their job. I expect that everyhon. Member would wish to join me in offering a voteof thanks to the civilians and police who are engaged in anti-terrorism, in protection and in explosives disposal. Much of our safety depends on their work.
I am grateful to the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and to all those at Scotland Yard who have made that experience possible, to Bill Troke-Thomas, to all the men and women on his team at Ealing and Acton, and to the others who have worked hard to make the pilot scheme both informative and challenging. I hope thathon. Members on both sides of the House will be able to learn from the scheme--as, I hope, I have done--both in the Metropolitan police area and, most probably, in county forces.
I have a general impression, as hon. Members would expect, of a highly professional, dedicated, hard-working and fair police force. It does its best to make the most of sometimes limited resources, in the knowledge that the modern criminal is sometimes using more sophisticated electronics and communications systems than are currently available to the police. They and the people who resource them are working hard to correct that.
In the past year, the Metropolitan police force has had to accommodate change in structures, while at the same time waging its war against crime. The results have been impressive. My right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary outlined some of them earlier. Operation Bumblebee has led to a fall in recorded burglary of many per cent. In the past two years, there has been the biggest fall in recorded crime for 40 years.
The other thing I have learnt--of the many thingsI have learnt--involves the dangers that the men and women of the police force face from the effects of alcohol and drug-related crime. In April last year, Police Constable Steve Collins, a young man whom I had met at his police station only a few days before, was out on patrol in a car with a woman police constable. They saw a car that they believed to be stolen. They pulled it in. Steve Collins got out and went to accost the driver. The passenger in what was a stolen car leaped out, and, without any compunction, drew a gun and shot Steve Collins in the gut. Fortunately, that young man lived, is fully recovered and is back on duty. I was told, with black police humour, that, on his first day back at work, he was punched on the nose.
The police welcome the opportunity to use longer batons. Police in Ealing and Acton certainly welcome the trial use of CS gas. When I visited the black museum at Scotland Yard, I could not help noticing on the wall the roll of honour of policemen and women killed on active service, and the fact that two thirds of the people on that list, running from 1900 until the present day, had been killed since the abolition of capital punishment.
It is a fact of police life in London, and probably throughout the United Kingdom, that today's professional criminals go about their business carrying weapons as a matter of course. That is the threat that policemen and women face on the streets of this and every other city of the country every day of the year on our behalf. Many policemen and women--they do not complain much--feel that the dice has been loaded too heavily against them.
I am now going to do what I promised myself and some of those policemen and women I would try not to do: cherry-pick just a few of the issues that have been raised with me. In doing so, I know that, if they read any report of this, those whose concerns I have not raised will say, "Why did he miss mine out?" I can only say that, ifI were to touch on all those issues, I should be here for rather longer than I promised.
The one issue that more than any other fundamentally concerns men and women in the Metropolitan police is that of disclosure. I know that that is currently being addressed by legislation, but the police find it quite intolerable that ingenious--for want of a better word--lawyers are able to go on fishing expeditions on behalf of the defence in the knowledge that, by so doing, they will waste time and money, cause confusion and delay, and perhaps--who knows?--secure an acquittal for a guilty man.
Some three or four weeks ago, I watched a video of an armed raid. Two armed men were robbing a jewellers in Regent street, and they were under surveillance from the time they entered the shop. The extremely courageous staff slightly upset police plans by chasing the armed robbers out of the shop with fire extinguishers. The two men were pinioned on the pavement, and the bag that one of them was carrying went flying. It was all very clear.
The two men were held on the pavement, arrested, and handcuffed and, heads lifted, they were identified straight to camera in an unbroken sequence. The camera zoomed in on the bag that had flown from the hand of one of them. A police officer opened it and revealed the guns and the handcuffs that the robbers had intended to use on the shop staff. Nothing could have been clearer but that those two men entered the jewellers intent upon armed crime.
The judiciary, the judges who criticised my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary for some of his measures, in their wisdom decided that in this case the police should name the informant who gave the tip-off. The police know perfectly well--and, of course, so do defence counsel--that, if the police ever named an informant in such a case, their sources of information would dry up. The police had no option but to drop the case. The men were released and are now free, walking the streets of London and presumably planning their next armed crime. The police cannot understand how we can allow them to be treated in that way by the judges, the courts and the system.
The police also find it strange that so many criminals are able to salt away the proceeds of crime; that the system does not work fast enough; and that our banks operate differently even from those in Switzerland--all of which sometimes makes it difficult for the authorities to gain sufficient evidence to be able to say, "Yes, that money, that car, that boat and that house were paid for solely out of the proceeds of crime, and can therefore be confiscated." We need to address that, to make certain that those who commit crimes cannot serve a couple of years in gaol and then enjoy the fruits of their criminal labours.
I should like our police to be allowed to do what American police, and certainly those in Washington, can do. They should be allowed to have the benefits of the proceeds that are seized as a result of successful arrests and convictions. In their fight against crime, they should
be allowed to use the cars that criminals have been using. That works well in the United States, and is a tremendous encouragement to the police, who feel that they are getting a little bit of their own back.
I suspect that I will not be popular with my Front-Bench colleagues, with certain echelons in the Metropolitan police and possibly with people elsewhere for saying that the principle of transferability is incomprehensible. I spent a little time with the fraud squad. I met teams of very experienced detectives, who told me that, even with the experience that they had built up by the time they joined the fraud squad, it takes perhaps two years to become fully conversant with the intricacies and technicalities of the crimes with which they have to deal. That is equally true of many other specialist departments: it is a cry that I heard throughout the Met.
Those officers have deep and detailed knowledge and experience, but it seems to me as a layman that, using the HMI 1993 tenure guidelines, almost arbitrarily after five or possibly seven years--if we are allowed to stretch it a bit--we can say, "Chum, you are going back into uniform and back on the beat, or back into uniform anyway, to do something else." That does not make sense, and it could make nonsense of training and efficiency arbitrarily to put people back into uniform at the peak of their specialist efficiency. That seems quite wrong. The hon. Member for Vauxhall (Ms Hoey) touched briefly on that in connection with community policing, but I suggest that it goes much wider.
Of course we must create room for manoeuvre, for advancement and opportunities. We cannot have a block in every branch of the Metropolitan police or, indeed, in any other police force. But, by the same token, simply to say, "You have done your time and you must now move," will certainly do a disservice to the policing of London.
I should like to touch briefly on the question of inspectors' pay, because in that there is a lesson for us to learn; I have learnt it with hindsight. It is that, if it was right to buy out inspectors' overtime, it was most certainly wrong to do it retrospectively. It has benefited some men and women in uniform who work reasonably fixed hours, but some other people, especially detectives, who are used to working long hours and earning overtime, have overnight had their incomes dramatically reduced.
That is not right. We cannot suddenly subject loyal officers who have organised their domestic commitments on the basis of one set of expectations to a different set of contracts. But that is what we have done, and it has caused considerable concern and, in some cases, serious financial difficulty. It has been suggested that the buying out of overtime may be extended to sergeants. If that happens, I hope that we do not make the same mistake again. We have dissatisfied inspectors, and in some cases we shall have dissatisfied sergeants.
The Minister knows my concern about the misuse, the abuse, of material that has been obtained by closed circuit television and about--I hesitate to call them videos--the junk that is marketed under the name of "Caught in the Act". Closed circuit television is clearly a vital tool in the police armoury in the fight against crime, and it is vital that the public have confidence in that tool and understand why and how it is being used. They must know that it will not be abused.
In our review of the Data Protection Act 1988, we should consider the case for covering by that legislation material that has been obtained by the use of closed circuit television cameras so as to make it a criminal offenceto use such material for any form of personal or public gain in the way that was tried and, happily, in that instance, failed.
I mentioned that I had spent some time with the fraud squad. It has taken a battering in the courts, and has been subjected to press ridicule. The fraud squad consists of a number of dedicated officers who work in highly specialised departments and have achieved very many unsung successes. It is always the big, bad, complicated cases that go wrong and get reported. The press does not find the successful results of painstaking police work quite as attractive.
I stand to be corrected--I think that I wrote it down correctly when I heard it--but I understand that fraud costs the United Kingdom £18 billion a year. I believe that I am right in saying that it costs the country more than the total of all other crime. If that is so, we need to put more resources, not fewer, into curbing fraud at every level. From this place at least, the fraud squad deserves the accolade that it appears to be denied byHer Majesty's press.
I was very interested to learn about the working of the air surveillance unit. Air surveillance is another valuable tool, not only in traffic control, but--sometimes--in the solution of armed crime. "Eyes in the sky" are extremely valuable in dealing with public order disturbances as well.
It seems quite extraordinary that our police air force has to fly from Lippitts Hill, and that it is not permitted by London authorities to have a floating helipad on the Thames in the heart of the City. I am not suggesting that helicopters should be based on the Thames all the time, but there is a very strong case for seriously reconsidering the establishment of a helipad--alongside HMS Belfast, for example. We should use the river corridor, as any other sane city would, to enable the police to do their job better.
Unless things have changed since I visited Lippitts Hill, police helicopters using air-to-ground cameras are able only to transmit pictures back to command control at Scotland Yard, where the information is relayed to the controller on the ground at the scene of an incident. If that is so, at little greater expense, it would and should be possible to have a mobile ground unit that is capable of receiving pictures at the scene of the incident from a police helicopter.
When I visited a firearms unit, it struck me as bizarre that arms dealers do not keep standard records. I am not suggesting for one moment that the professional criminal would not, could not or will not obtain the weapons that he or she needs from some source. It is far too easy to go into virtually any market in northern France, buy a handgun fitted with ammunition and bring it back across the channel.
We make it doubly easy for criminals, however, if they are able to go to a crooked gun dealer, hire for a day a handgun and eight rounds of ammunition for, say, £500, take it back at the end of the day like a tool from a hire shop, and say, "Thank you very much, but I didn't need to use it," or, "I used it, and here's another £300 to launder it." The gun can be taken away, washed out, have its
barrel profile changed by repeated firing, and passed to another crooked gun dealer in another part of the country, where it can be used again.
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