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24 Feb 2003 : Column 97—continued
8.17 pm
Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire): I will say a few words, as we have time available. I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) on obtaining this Adjournment debate. It could not be more timely, as the effects of the settlement from the Government become known.
My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Page) mentioned the specials. On Saturday, I was in Royston with the specials, trying to advertise the work that they do as part of "specials week". I pay tribute to the eight officers in Royston and
district who do such a fantastic job in supporting the regular officers. They enable operations such as the bike marking that I saw on Saturday, and they allow patrols on the streets of Royston, Baldock and Letchworth to take place. Without the specials, it would be a sorry picture. They help to provide a much more visible police presence than would be possible if we were to rely solely on the regular officers.In the paper this week, I noticed that the leader of the Labour group on North Hertfordshire district council—Councillor David Kearns—was outlining his concerns about antisocial behaviour in the Grange estate in Letchworth. Elsewhere in the constituency—in Royston and Baldock—concerns are regularly expressed to me about antisocial behaviour. Recently, in Buntingford, the deputy manager of the Co-op was assaulted when he refused to serve alcohol to youngsters. His mother attended my surgery on Friday to express how worried she was that a small market town such as Buntingford suffered from such incidents. She expressed concerns about law and order and the behaviour of young people, and made the point that there is not an adequate police presence in our area.
I have the highest regard for our local constabulary. I have spoken to Chief Superintendent Andy Wright about the incident over the new year in which Mr. Llewellyn was assaulted. The chief superintendent is doing his best, with extra patrols, to try to reinforce the sense of public safety and order in Buntingford. However, such problems are not new: during the past four or five years, I have received regular complaints about the lack of officers in that rural division of Hertfordshire. It is not good enough that we have such vacancy levels, which are not caused by a lack of recruitment; retention is the real problem in Hertfordshire.
I have made the point to Ministers over and again that, because of the railway or the good transport links that we have with London, officers live in Hertfordshire and work for the Metropolitan police in London. Many officers go over the border into the Met area because of the incentive to do so—the extra £6,000 makes such a difference.
I should also like to point out that rural areas are often discounted. It is often said that they are very safe and that the area that I am talking about is the safest part of one of the safest counties, but when burglaries occur in remote rural areas, the feeling of vulnerability is extreme for those who live there. They are a long way from help; it is not like the situation in a town, which is bad enough. Burglary is a very serious invasion of privacy, but it is really very worrying in rural areas.
Mr. Prisk: I am sure that my hon. Friend will be familiar with the village of Hunsden, which is further south in east Hertfordshire, and those who live there share that sense of vulnerability. Every week for the past six months, the parish council has reported to me different incidents, some involving people coming from Harlow. That sense of vulnerability is underscored by the fact that the elderly often suffer the most.
Mr. Heald: It is particularly sad that elderly people, many of whom have been through the conflicts of the 20th century and survived, should now be worrying,
in their 80s and 90s, about going out of the door early in the evening. The only way to tackle that is with a combination of the sort of targeted, intelligence-led policing that I am sure the Minister supports. Of course we need that, but we also need an adequate, visible police presence on the streets. The fact is that Hertfordshire is 200 special constables short. I did my bit to try to recruit a few more, but we could do with more. We have often been 200 regular officers short. Although figures are given for the police force's strength, we are always down on those figures because we lose officers at such a rate.We in North-East Hertfordshire face another particularly rural problem: illegal hare coursing. Gangs of up 50 men have often come up to the area in the past to gamble on illegal hare coursing, which creates huge public order problems. Policing something like that takes a large number of officers. After a campaign in the early 1990s, it was possible to put much more police effort into tackling illegal hare coursing in the Royston and Buntingford area, and the problem pretty well subsided. However, in the past year or so, there have been about 90 incidents involving illegal hare coursing and it is becoming more of a problem.
Those policing illegal hare coursing need four-wheel drive vehicles, as well as a considerable number of officers skilled in dealing with what is a difficult public order problem. When working against a background where recruitment and retention is difficult, the officers coming through are still new and learning what they should do, and where resources are thinly stretched because there are not enough officers in the county and because the Government have provided a hopelessly inadequate settlement, it becomes difficult to deal with some of those peculiar rural problems, such as illegal hare coursing.
I should like to end my speech by saying how much I support my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere in raising this issue, by paying tribute to the work of the chief constable, Paul Acres, and the chairman of the police authority, Peter Holland, who is about to retire after many years excellent service in that role and by telling the Minister that it is sometimes necessary, even in a peaceable county like Hertfordshire, to have enough money to do the job properly, and we really did not get what we needed in the latest police settlement.
8.25 pm
The Minister for Policing, Crime Reduction and Community Safety (Mr. John Denham): I congratulate the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) on securing a debate, not for the first time, on crime and policing issues in his constituency and the other hon. Members who have spoken on taking the opportunity of slightly less pressure on parliamentary time than normal to contribute to the debate. Some very important issues have been raised, and I shall try to address as many of them as possible.
It is always important in such debates, without any suggestion of complacency, to put the overall crime picture into context. The best measure that we have of crime in this country comes from the British crime survey, which shows that overall levels of crime have
fallen by some 27 per cent. since 1997, including significant falls in vehicle crime, burglary and so on. In fact, according to the BCS, the chance of being the victim of crime is at its lowest level since the survey began under the previous Government in the early 1980s.Those figures are generally regarded as being more reliable because they do not require individuals to report the crime to the police or, indeed, for the police to have recorded it. Recorded crime figures need to be followed carefully—particularly at police force level, as the BCS has insufficient coverage to give force-by-force data—but we need to be a little cautious about drawing to much from the month-by-month or year-by-year recorded crime figures at force level, not least when forces have been introducing new crime recording standards.
To say all that is, yes, to undercut the idea that crime is running out of control across the country—there is no evidence that it is. There is rising public concern about certain types of crime, such as street robbery and antisocial behaviour, which the hon. Member for Hertsmere mentioned, and we have worked very hard to get on top of them. Having said all that and put things in context, of course we are committed to continuing our efforts to reduce crime, which must include Hertfordshire, Hertsmere and every other community.
I am glad that the hon. Member for Hertsmere paid tribute to the Hertfordshire constabulary, and he will have been pleased—as will the chief constable and the members of his force—when we published the police performance monitors for the first time last week. Although they do not cover everything, they give a rounded assessment of police performance. Hertfordshire was compared, as it should be, with the most similar police forces: Suffolk, Sussex, Thames Valley, Kent and Avon and Somerset, all of which contain a mixture of urban areas, deprived community problems and rural communities that may have both prosperous and deprived areas. Hertfordshire did very well in comparison with its most similar forces. It had higher levels of crime detection and offenders brought to justice and lower levels of crimes such as robbery, vehicle crime and burglary, as well as somewhat higher levels of citizen satisfaction with the police. I therefore think that it is worth building on what the hon. Gentleman said to congratulate Hertfordshire on what it has done. Some specific issues remain, however, with which we need to deal.
First, in relation to the overall picture on resources, the casual listener to the debate might have got the impression that the Government had set out to starve the police service in England and Wales of resources. The reality is that, in the past three years, including the new financial year, the overall funding increases for the police service have been 6.2 per cent., 7 per cent. and 10 per cent. The increase in cash terms in funding over the spending review period will be 16 per cent. That is why, across the country as whole, we have record numbers of police officers, and we have a target to reach 132,500 in 2004. There are particular issues in Hertfordshire, to which I shall refer, but that is clearly evidence that the investment that we have been making in the police service is making a direct difference in police numbers.
The hon. Gentleman is right that examining the pattern in Hertfordshire over recent years is made more complex by the fact that his constituency used to be covered by the Metropolitan police service and others, it was transferred into Hertfordshire, and a secondment took place of officers from the Metropolitan police to Hertfordshire, many of whom have now made their way back to the Met. I entirely accept that, but let me say two things. First, Hertfordshire has not been immune from the benefits of the increased Government investment in the police service over the past couple of years, in which numbers have been rising. Hertfordshire has a particularly impressive record on recruitment—I shall refer to retention in a moment. In the April-December period 2002, 223 officers were recruited, and the force plans to recruit another 60 officers in the January-March period this year. That would give recruitment figures for 2002–03, if achieved, of 283, compared with 183 officers recruited in 2001–02. That is a significant achievement by the Hertfordshire police force.
I understand that Hertsmere is now part of the central area basic command unit in Hertfordshire. On 31 March 2002, the basic command unit had 481 officers. That represents an increase of 61 in comparison with the number deployed on 1 July 2001 in the three divisions that now form the central BCU. The hon. Gentleman quoted figures that were possibly slightly more localised than those that I have just quoted. We can probably sort out the matter in correspondence afterwards—I do not have the figures that he quoted. My point, however, is that the number of officers available to serve his part of Hertfordshire has increased over that period.
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