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12.30 pm
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster): The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck), my immediate parliamentary neighbour, opened the debate from the Back Benches, and I agreed with a great deal of what she said. I geographically have been bracketed on the Opposition Benches by my hon. Friends the Members for Orpington (Mr. Horam) and for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall). Now, I speak for the heart of the capital.
It is a pleasure to follow directly the hon. Member for Eltham (Mr. Efford), who, if I may say so as a Londoner, always speaks most effectively on London problems. It is a genuine privilege to speak after him.
The Home Secretary opened his speech on the cusp between the first 171 years of the Met's history and the new era which is now opening out. Veterans of the Greater London Authority Act 1999 Standing Committee--whom I have seen in the Chamber today from all three parties--will remember our debates on the very provisions that are now being introduced. The template of legislation for rural forces obviously had to be significantly modified for the Met and for the special problems of Greater London.
I wish the Met and the Metropolitan Police Authority well, as I do Sir Paul Condon. I saw him on new year's eve. It was an evening when the Government set some of us a challenge by telling us to dress appropriately for one of their events. In Sir Paul's case, there was no problem, for he was in uniform. It is a great pleasure that that particular night passed off so well at the end of his career. I wish well, too, Sir John Stevens, with whom I had connections in Northern Ireland.
Inevitably, there is a constituency tendency to this debate. However, I should like to open with one or two general London and pan-London issues. I congratulate the Government genuinely and sincerely on the working of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and on the spirit of collaboration with local government that they have inspired by that. The Association of London Government has welcomed borough-based policing, and hopes that borough-based recruitment initiatives can be developed.
In that context, it is worth remarking on the subject of ethnic minority recruitment, for which the targets are well known. The general officer commanding, London district wrote to a number of London Members with large ethnic minority communities in their constituencies on the subject of recruiting ethnic minorities into the armed forces. Although not all of those Members acceded to his
request, he has paid tribute to the quality of advice and help that he received from hon. Members on both sides of the House. It is an initiative that might have relevance to the Met as well.I do not want to dwell at length on the issues of attraction, motivation and retention, very important though I recognise them to be, for they were dealt with at considerable and admirable length by my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald). On the other hand, although of course we welcome the Government's housing announcement, which has been foreshadowed in the past couple of days, and has now been announced in this debate by the Home Secretary--I genuinely admire the way in which the Home Secretary deflected the Commissioner's thoughtful reaction to the announcement, which was quoted by my hon. Friend, the Member for North-East Hertfordshire--we shall need to continue to watch the practical effects of that housing announcement.
We cannot forget--I am talking about history, not seeking to make a partisan point--the loss of experienced police sergeants around the age of 35 that we sustained in the 1970s, until the Edmund-Davies report was introduced, and subsequently implemented by the incoming Conservative Government. The Met paid a very heavy price in the quality of officers that they lost in the middle of the 1970s. There is, therefore, a concern to see how that particular initiative works.
There is a genuine problem that effective policing can lead the commanders of those particular borough forces not to be reinforced, as there are greater problems elsewhere, which obviously creates problems for morale in the forces under them. There is no doubt at all that concern about police numbers is being reflected at sector working group meetings in south Westminster, as well as in the constituency of the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North. It is being noticed and then reflected in comment.
Still at the pan-London level, there was concern on the Standing Committee that considered the Greater London Authority Bill about the police community consultative groups' statutory cover being removed in that legislation. Westminster has always had strong groups, with three groups throughout the city and sub-groups on specific issues such as homelessness and licensing. I suspect that, over the years to come, one of the most valuable developments in that sector will be new sub-groups looking at specific issues such as licensing and homelessness, as the new sector working groups, of which there are 15 in Westminster, themselves gather strength in working within the community on the ground.
As I have mentioned homelessness and licensing in that context, let me dwell briefly on them in a police context. I am an admirer of the integrated approach to issues of rough sleeping, led by Louise Casey, but derived from earlier work. In the past year, that has been deployed effectively in Westminster, as it had been in Camden and Lambeth.
In terms of licensing, the police community consultative sub-committee, which is chaired by a notable west end licensee, my constituent Matthew Bennett, produced a very good report and has since taken central Government officials around Soho at three and four in the morning, which, I will remark neutrally, has had the effect of opening eyes. Of course, one can build in conditions
for licences, and licence holders can make commitments when they are securing their licences, but if, overall, three times as many licensees are operating in the west end compared with 20 years ago, and the number of police monitoring them remains static, inevitably, the quality of monitoring must fall.Licensing takes one with natural elision to the Government's enthusiasm for a 24-hour city. Let me make it clear that I realise that a lot of crime, especially robbery, occurs on commercial premises and in entertainment outlets. I salute the work in collaboration with Westminster city council and the police to prevent and to make crime less likely through a series of management initiatives on those premises, but, necessarily, entertainment outlets feel less responsibility for their patrons once they have left their premises. That is where much of the problem can occur, which makes for sleep-disturbed nights for local residents.
I am told that there are more people in Leicester square at 3 am than there are at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. There is a real risk of the police losing control of order in those circumstances. Westminster city council has already had to have second thoughts about pedestrianisation schemes in Soho. It is bound to have third, fourth, fifth and sixth thoughts about the pedestrianisation of Trafalgar square. It is close to Leicester square. The record thrower of a cricket ball in cricket history could just about cover the distance between Leicester square and Trafalgar square, but if there are potential problems in losing control in Leicester square, they are a fortiori worse in a space as large as Trafalgar square.
It can be safely policed on great occasions, but, if it is pedestrianised, we are talking about a 24-hour city, 365 days a year. It took three deaths at a Garibaldi demonstration in Hyde park in 1862 to persuade the then Government to create the narrower focus of Speaker's corner. The scale of space does matter.
I am conscious that the nature of my constituency in several ways--the size of the non-resident population and its high profile--attracts crime. In 1978, Home Secretary Lord Merlyn-Rees warned me when I visited him to discuss the El Al shootings in Mayfair that I had to expect at least half the terrorist crime in London to occur in the constituency. He and the Commissioner were extremely good in their response to a major street prostitution problem in Shepherd Market in the same year, to which 24 women police constables were posted for a prolonged and effective period. Prostitution is an activity that has been subject to local displacement throughout London's history, which one can trace in Stephen Inwood's new book.
In paying contemporary tribute to the Home Secretary and the Commissioner for the resources that have been put into combating street trading in drugs in Soho, I note that exactly the same displacement effect is occurring--which is at least a temporary index of success and effectiveness--and moving the problem to the top end of the Charing Cross road, which brings the London borough of Camden into the issue. I hope that the Met can continue to sustain the campaign, with all its implications for the tourism industry.
The same collaboration with the private sector to which I referred in connection with robbery also relates to the work in designing out crime, as previously done in
housing estates, which is now being done on major thoroughfares in the west end, under the auspices of Sir John Wheeler, a most distinguished former Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee.The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North referred to closed circuit television in the west end. Of course, that played a significant part in the nail bombs detection and the Soho drugs campaign. The Minister of State is always good enough to write and tell me about CCTV developments in my constituency. However, as with police speed cameras monitoring motorists, running costs are a problem and CCTV's effectiveness necessarily depends on its being switched on.
I want to say a quick word about drunks in custody. My constituency is not immediately affected by the current trend towards joint custody suites shared by more than one station, as mentioned in the Evening Standard. Given the problems of both cost and nimbyism surrounding detoxification centres, on which there have been no swifter developments under this than under the previous Government, I am delighted that the Kent experiment of having resident nurses on duty to help with drunks in custody is now being tested at the Met's Charing Cross police station. It will be interesting to see how it develops.
The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North referred to the commander in the royal borough. The last time she spoke in such a debate, she referred warmly to the commander in Westminster, Bob Currie. He is about to retire after 32 years in the police service, initially in Cumbria and latterly--and for a long time--in the Met. Westminster is grateful to him for his leadership.
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