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11.32 am
Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham): I am grateful to be able to speak in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey). I apologise to the House because I shall have to leave shortly after my speech. I have to speak in my constituency on the Government's new deal; I think that that is a sufficiently worthwhile reason for making a rapid exit.
My motives in speaking are similar to those of my hon. Friend. We can all see that cuts are taking place. I campaigned against the cuts in police funding that took place under the previous Government. Since 1997, that process has not merely continued but accelerated; in the Twickenham-Richmond area, we have lost 29 officers--more than 10 per cent. of the establishment--and the effects are felt every day. I echo the comments of the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam): although the police have received some bad publicity recently, they are an extremely popular and respected public service. The message is simple: people want more police officers, not fewer.
There are two essential levels at which we must analyse the economic problems of the police budget. The first relates to overall public financing and the familiar debates, which we do not need to go into, on such matters as Government public allocation and the role of taxation. In that context, the police service has seen a real reduction in expenditure. Although we have touched on those matters, they are not the essence of this debate.
My hon. Friend has already mentioned the one-off requirements, but he did not mention others; for example, if the Lawrence report is implemented in full, considerable additional costs will be required of the police service for training, additional effort in recruiting and compliance procedures. That will require additional budgets of millions of pounds, for which there is currently no provision.
In respect of national funding, I reinforce the points made about pensions. The hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Mr. Fitzpatrick) is in the Chamber; he is
the leading authority on public service pensions, especially in the fire service where there is an analogous problem. I appeal to the Minister to consider that matter carefully. The fire service and the police have a uniquely difficult problem with unfunded pensions; pension obligations are now eating up well over 10 per cent. of their budgets, and that percentage increases every year. They have to make a trade-off every year between service provision and pension obligations. In the fire service, that has already led to a virtual breakdown in the service; in three to five years' time, the police service will be in a similar position. That needs to be anticipated and a radical solution found that does not merely start new pension arrangements, but deals with the outstanding stock of pension obligations. The Government have the opportunity and the obligation fundamentally to address that problem.
There is a process by which national funding is allocated between different police authorities. I confess that I do not fully understand it, but I hope that the Minister and others can help me to achieve a better understanding of how the funding formula works. Who sets the weighting between different police forces? As I understand it, the weighting is established by a committee of chief police officers who are not properly representative of the weighting of different forces, in that small police forces have equal weight with the Metropolitan police. That is wholly inappropriate.
I hope that the Government will consider carefully not so much the sums of money as the structure within which the formula is set, because it seems to be inequitable and unsatisfactory. It does not fully capture London's genuinely distinct problems. Some of those problems are acknowledged--for example, the obligation of the Metropolitan police to deal with the problems of terrorism or to cover the royal palaces. Some of those problems are more subtle: the fact that London is a centre for organised crime and is at the centre of the big end of the drug business. I am not sure how much those problems are reflected in the formula, either.
An even more subtle problem, but one that totally disrupts the funding of the Metropolitan police, is the labour market that prevails in London. It is exceptionally difficult to recruit high-quality police officers on current pay and conditions. The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis has made it clear that he is exceedingly disturbed by the way in which current pay and conditions affect the influx of new police officers. He has to recruit people with extremely low educational qualifications, or even no qualifications at all. He cannot recruit from those people who would be available if pay and conditions were substantially improved; he cannot recruit enough women, or enough people to achieve the correct ethnic mix. That is partly because the formula, set nationally by the committee of chief constables, does not fully recognise the distinctive problems. I hope that that factor will be taken into account.
There are some other relevant issues. The first is priorities; most of us want to talk about our own areas and the way in which they have been affected by the cuts, but broader service sectors in the Metropolitan police have been especially badly hit. The traffic police are severely affected; they have a relatively low priority within Metropolitan police objectives. Many traffic police officers have been redeployed and their posts are no longer filled. The traffic police admit freely that
enforcement of serious traffic offences is no longer being carried out with the necessary thoroughness. The dog service is another relatively low-profile police service which has just, rather precariously, been saved from extinction. Such low-priority areas tend to suffer in a tough budgetary environment.
We shall always argue for more money; given the pressures on public services, that is inevitable. But there are ways in which the Government could encourage the Metropolitan police and other police forces to be more imaginative in raising funding. There are two particular methods of doing so. The traffic police could become almost self-financing if they were allowed to retain revenues from funds; hypothecation might be productive in that instance.
A matter more parochial to Twickenham, and one that I have raised with the Home Secretary, is the completely inexplicable practice of large commercial organisations, such as the Rugby Football Union, that organise public events charging the costs of policing the event outside the ground to the public through the Metropolitan police. A major rugby international costs the Metropolitan police about £40,000 in overtime for extra police officers to police traffic and pedestrian movements outside the ground; those costs add up to about £500,000 a year. The number of events organised by such large commercial organisations is growing.
With other events and activities taken into account, each year several million pounds that should properly accrue as revenue to the public sector are being spent on providing services free. The Home Secretary should consider that matter. I realise that there may be technical difficulties: ring-fencing the problem areas; deciding whether to charge in respect of, for example, Chelsea flower show or only big sporting events; and drawing the dividing line between a big event and a small one. However, the issue remains important.
Mr. Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey):
I shall be brief, as I am conscious that the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) speaking for the Conservatives and the Minister should have the opportunity to respond fully to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey).
I hope that I betray no secrets in saying that my hon. Friends and I tried to organise an opportunity for this debate, and that my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton struck lucky. We wanted to have it before the end of this month and before the beginning ofthe financial year to which the debate is addressed. Like the Minister, I am conscious that this is the third policing debate that we have had within about a week. We had a sometimes fairly aggressive and heated debate in the Standing Committee on the Greater London Authority Bill, which was attended by the Minister in her capacity both as a Home Office Minister and a London Member of Parliament. Also present were the hon. Members for Poplar and Canning Town (Mr. Fitzpatrick) and for Upminster (Mr. Darvill), and my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton.
In that debate, we considered the whole range of policing issues as they stand and how they will be affected by the new arrangements for London. We are aware that the enactment of that Bill--which we strongly support on the question of police arrangements and in other respects--will mean that, from next year, the London police will have their own police authority, independent of the Home Office, which in years to come will allow the force to speak more boldly to the Home Office as the responsible Department.
Mr. Fitzpatrick:
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is appropriate to acknowledge the establishment of the all-party group on police, and the role of the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), who chairs the group, as a measure of how much more attention police matters now receive in the House?
Mr. Hughes:
I certainly do. I am grateful for the acknowledgement of the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), who, as a member of our London team of Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament, has led for us on police and fire services matters since the general election, in establishing that all-party group. It is important that the police should know that parliamentarians support them, want to work with them and are well informed about some of the difficult issues affecting them.
Let me reinforce and add to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton about the need for the Home Office not to be governed in its formula for allocating resources by the European Union-style, non-weighted voting system, whereby each police force has one vote, which results in the Met, because of that voting system and because of the common perception of the Met as a big, well-funded force, not being able to win the votes required to get them the money that they need. Of course the Met is a big force--it polices the biggest area and the largest number of people. Of course that force is numerically large, with 26,000 officers, which is more police officers than almost everywhere else; but no one has ever argued that capital cities do not need that intensity of policing. There should not be a simple formulaic response which states that police forces throughout the country must have the same ratio of police officers to population, and that is the end of the argument.
We must take into consideration the intensity of effort and work that London requires. I hope that the formula and its workings will properly reflect the fact that, like other London services such as fire, education and social services, London's police services have to cater for the demands of a highly complex and diverse community in terms of ethnicity, language, and so on. London police have to deal with people who speak no English and so have to call in interpreters far more often than police in other parts of the country. In the interests of solidarity and understanding, the London police need officers who come from the various communities. The issues are extremely complex, so to say that we must have the same ratio of police officers to people in London as in, say, Herefordshire--an area I know well--simply does not work. Each case must be judged on its merits.
As a capital city, London, by definition, has an intensity of demand for complex policing that requires a particular concentration of resources. My hon. Friend the Member
for Kingston and Surbiton argued that the number of personnel should not be cut. London, sadly but inevitably, has more serious crimes than places elsewhere in the country; there are more murders, homicides, manslaughters and killings. As I told the Standing Committee, I have been involved, to a greater extent than I would have liked, in working with the police to tackle such crimes in my area over the past few years. I can testify to the time and effort, the plain hours of work, required to discover who has committed such a crime.
It is no good saying that police must seek greater efficiency savings. Police officers trying to discover who killed Jamie Robe on the streets of Rotherhithe nearly two years ago have spent days tracing all the possible witnesses, talking to them, trying to persuade them to give evidence, dealing with their concern that if they give evidence they will be at risk themselves, protecting witnesses, and negotiating to ensure that people will be moved if they give evidence. Such an effort cannot produce efficiency savings in simple mathematical or formulaic terms, because the job must be done and more than one officer is needed to do it. A murder inquiry requires many officers, or a few officers dedicated to the task for the vast majority of their time.
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