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Mr. Hayes: The right hon. Gentleman speaks of benchmarks, but will he concede that they should not be just reactive or crime related? At present, police funding is largely to do with the level and nature of crime. If he gets the benchmarks wrong, he will exacerbate the problems to which he referred.
Mr. Straw: I agree with all that the hon. Gentleman says. We seek to make the police service and the partnerships involved in dealing with crime more proactive. That is why we are putting £400 million into crime reduction, for example. The police are heavily involved in those partnerships, and it is possible to move from being reactive to being proactive.
Mr. Straw: I shall give way in a moment.
Let me give an example: if an area has a high incidence of crime and disorder, the police can firefight it day by day with response vehicles, but the way to solve it is to find out who is committing those crimes and to jail them.
Mr. Vernon Coaker (Gedling)
rose--
Mr. Straw:
I promised to give way to the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Sir D. Madel), and I shall later give way to, as they say in pantomime, the one behind me.
Sir David Madel:
The benchmarks that the Home Secretary wants the police to achieve are met in Bedfordshire, and partnership is improving. However, the population of the county is increasing all the time. Why is Bedfordshire's settlement so incredibly low? Even at this late hour, can the Home Secretary help us?
Mr. Straw:
It is a timeless verity that, under the police spending formula, some forces gain and some do less well. No one should accuse me of favouritism, because Lancashire has also done less well than other forces, and so has Bedfordshire. We have considered Bedfordshire's
Mr. Coaker:
My right hon. Friend remarked earlier that police numbers are not the only important thing. They are important, of course, but, if we are to reduce crime, the partnerships created by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 will be important. Local people will work with the police to reduce crime so that everyone is involved. If we simply reduce the debate to a question of how many police are on the streets, we shall not tackle the causes of crime. We might feel good, and we might have a good debating point, but we would do nothing to make our communities safer.
Mr. Straw:
Chief constables, among others, have sought the freedom to decide how police money should be spent. We are all grown-ups here, and we all know that people will argue for more in the run-up to any Budget settlement. In opposition, I quickly learned when I drew the short straw--[Hon. Members: "Short straw!"] Some might prefer to call the position of Labour local government spokesman a poisoned chalice. I remember that, when I was local government spokesman in the halcyon days of 1983 to 1985--when we dealt much more with the enemy behind us than with the Government in front of us--local authorities, and mainly Labour ones, used to scream and shout every year at Budget time about how services would collapse if the Budget went ahead, but, hey presto, it never happened.
The police want flexibility. They have used the flexibility that the previous Government granted with our support in 1994 to make sensible, rational decisions about whether to put more money into, for example, having more uniformed, warranted police officers or civilian staff, or into more information technology and better equipment. It is far better that they have that flexibility.
The final point made by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield related to non-police patrol. I looked perplexed as he spoke because I remembered a debate in February 1996 on non-police patrol. In those days, we did not call it non-police patrol; it was the private security industry. Even under the Conservative Government, there were twice as many people in the so-called non-police patrol--the private security industry--as in the police service. The number increased substantially under the Conservatives, but I make no complaint about that.
A large number of people who were not police officers were involved in patrolling and public safety duties, as there are today. A report from the Select Committee on Home Affairs said that the private security industry had to be regulated. During an Opposition day debate, we moved a motion to that effect, but it was voted down by the right hon. Gentleman and his party. As ever, however, the right hon. Gentleman faced both ways: he went through the Lobby to oppose what we said, but stood up in the House to support it.
The right hon. Gentleman may have forgotten what he said, but, for the benefit of the wider public, I have
it here. He first criticised me for saying that we could not have a police officer on every street corner. He said:
Sir Norman Fowler:
The Home Secretary is being absurd. What I was saying was utterly different. I challenge the right hon. Gentleman to give any quotation of mine in which I advocated using the private security industry to patrol the streets. I simply have not said that. In the quotation that he gave, I was referring to the movement of remand prisoners and other such matters. Whatever he says, I do not support the private security industry patrolling the streets as a replacement for the police. I have never supported that, and I have made several speeches on the subject. We are not even talking about the private security industry; we are talking about local authorities. Mr. Blair is talking about local authorities.
Mr. Straw:
I can only answer by reading one sentence:
Mr. Straw:
No, I shall not give way; I am answering the right hon. Gentleman's question.
Those local authorities that are in the vanguard of non-police patrol are not new Labour but old Tory local authorities, namely Westminster and Wandsworth, and I commend them. Those authorities sensibly realise that there are complementary roles for so-called non-police patrol--whether undertaken by local authorities or by private security industries under contract--and the police service. That has always been the case. What the right
hon. Gentleman said three years ago was wise and I hope that he will support our White Paper on the private security industry, when my hon. Friend the Minister of State, Home Office publishes it.
Mr. Bob Russell (Colchester):
The past is the past. May we now deal with the present and the future? The shadow Home Secretary said that he is opposed to the privatisation of the bobby on the beat. Will the Home Secretary assure us that he, too, is opposed to the privatisation of the bobby on the beat and that Group 4 will not be patrolling our streets?
Mr. Straw:
Of course I am opposed to the privatisation of the bobby on the beat, and I want to make that absolutely clear. The police service must be directly delivered. However, I must also make it clear that, as we speak, throughout the country in Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat areas, members of Group 4, Securicor and many other private security firms are, for example, patrolling so-called private shopping areas, and quite rightly too. That complements the work of the police; it does not detract from that work, but assists the police in preventing and detecting crime. Instead of suggesting that that practice does not exist, has not existed and should never exist, it is crucial to accept that it is a reality and to work out ways in which we can improve it, not least by the regulation of the service.
"The implication for the public is that there will never be, under any Government in any circumstances, enough regular police to investigate every burglary and house break-in that happens in our great cities, such as London or Birmingham. That has not happened in the past"--
there was no praying in aid of a golden age from the right hon. Gentleman then--
"and there is no reason to believe that it will happen in the future."
He went on to say:
"We may regret that, but we should learn a lesson from it . . . we must all learn to take crime prevention seriously".
We have accepted his advice, and we are taking crime prevention seriously. Today, he is saying that non-police patrol is some sort of left-wing plot or a figment of the imagination of the Liberal Democrats. He certainly says that it is nothing to do with him. But in 1996, he said:
"Too often in the past 20 years, policy makers have not recognised what the private security industry can and should do in a modern society. It can help the citizen and the company to prevent crime by guarding premises, by supplying alarms and by handling cash in transit. But the private security industry's role goes beyond that and it is equally sensible to consider the duties carried out by the police and prison officers and ask whether those roles can be performed by the private security industry."--[Official Report, 13 February 1996; Vol. 271, c. 887-88.]
What Mr. Ian Blair is saying now is no different from what the right hon. Gentleman said then.
"But the private security industry's role goes beyond that and it is equally sensible to consider the duties carried out by the police and prison officers and ask whether those roles can be performed by the private security industry."--[Official Report, 13 February 1996; Vol. 271, c. 887.]
As for local authorities, which are in the vanguard of so-called non-police patrol--
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