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Neighbourhood Policing

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): We now come to the second debate on the Opposition motions. I must inform the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

4.17 pm

Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset): I beg to move,

That this House welcomes the emerging political and professional consensus about the need to increase the level and effectiveness of neighbourhood policing in Britain in order to restore the confidence of the public but regrets that the Government is seeking to achieve this through a burdensome and ineffective bureaucracy; and urges the Government instead to return power to decentralised local policing and to make local policing more accountable to local people.

As I will mention some things on which the Opposition and the Government are not in total agreement, I begin by acknowledging the significant overlaps and degrees of consensus that exist between us on neighbourhood policing. I am heartened that all three main parties agree, I think, that we need to do something serious to improve the effectiveness of national and international policing by increasing the co-ordination of the many bodies involved in that endeavour. That includes not only parts of the Metropolitan police, but other agencies—the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and parts of Customs and Excise, the immigration and nationality department and the security services. I hope and trust that we can advance on the basis of agreement, although we may be at variance over time, and sustain change in that aspect of our national life. I add that it is remarkable for a senior chief police officer to make a speech in which he applauds both the Home Secretary and myself for moving in the same direction on something, as he did on that policy.

The second and last matter of consensus is that the Home Secretary and I agree—I suspect that the new spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten), whom I welcome to his position, will also agree—on the need for effective neighbourhood policing. That is not as anodyne as it might seem. Some years ago, many chief constables and the political parties would not have regarded that as a priority. For some years we were all under the sway of the idea that real, proper, professional policing involved turning away from the neighbourhood and towards the pursuit of the serious criminal by means of the intelligence model and other devices rightly and admirably developed by Sir David Phillips and others in our police forces.

I think that, partly as a result of seeing what has been done in other countries—primarily in some American jurisdictions—we have all now concluded that we need, in one way or another, to add to the splendid pursuit of effective means of containing the serious criminal a renewed emphasis on neighbourhood policing. I think that we also agree that this is not just a matter of reassuring people and making them feel comfortable, but of taking ownership of the neighbourhood—a matter of putting the police officer into the

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neighbourhood and making him feel that he is its custodian. It is a matter of ensuring that the low-level intelligence that comes from a police officer's really knowing the people for whom he or she is responsible, and from their really knowing the officer, can be used to benefit the control of not just crime but—equally important—disorder.

I believe that those aims are shared by Members throughout the House; it is about the means that there is so much debate. The Home Secretary and the Government have adopted a number of means to try to achieve the neighbourhood policing of which I have spoken. For instance, a huge amount of energy has been poured into initiatives, most recently—in the last 36 hours—the initiative on antisocial behaviour. [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] We shall see whether Labour Members' delight persists.

There have been many initiatives from the Home Secretary—I believe that they are currently running at roughly one a week—but the record has not been entirely good. The night courts turned out to cost £8,000 a case, and have been abandoned. The cash point fines did not cost anything, because they were abandoned before they could. The child curfews have cost nothing, because there have been none. The proposal most apposite to the antisocial behaviour initiative—the proposal to withdraw housing benefits from bad tenants—has never been implemented.

It might be regarded as a mere piece of cheap politics to point out that many of the initiatives do not exist, but a deeper issue is at stake. It must be admitted that some initiatives have been carried through and that some, in their own terms, have enjoyed some success. The question is, has anything sustainable been left behind?

Let us take the street crime initiative. I have admitted publicly, and will go on record as admitting today, that it has succeeded to some extent, for a period, in the places to which it has been applied. It is true that it has been rather expensive—I believe that it costs about £14,000 per mugging eliminated—and that it has, to a degree, distracted the attention of the local constabulary: in the areas where street crime has fallen, burglaries have increased. Those, however, are not my main points, and over time they may no longer apply. The situation will vary from area to area.

The real issue is that the lasting effect is unlikely to be great, because an initiative cannot deal with underlying problems. Drug-related crime is an example. The street crime initiative rightly identified, for instance, the need to ensure that the young hard drugs addicts who, I regret to say, are responsible for a huge proportion of acquisitive crime—especially acquisitive street crime—were treated, and correctly stated that they would be treated very quickly. It failed to note, however, that no effective intensive treatment was available. As we all know, a large number of those young people were led up the garden path: they secured appointments, but they never secured intensive treatment. That is a serious failure to tackle the underlying problem.

It is not just me who says these things. The Lord Chief Justice, who I do not believe is a supporter of the Conservative party—not that he is a supporter of any party; he does not speak from a political position—said:

"You can have initiative after initiative . . . but if you don't touch the basic problems, you will never achieve public confidence."

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I know that from time to time the Home Secretary comforts himself with the thought that members of the judiciary are wholly out of touch. I do not believe that, but the Home Secretary does, so let us hear from Jan Berry, the head of the Police Federation—one could not get much more in touch with reality than that—who said:

"There is a real danger that with the centre increasingly dictating police priorities, police resources will increasingly be skewed to respond to the latest high profile cause célèbre"—

she uses the term "cause célèbre" because she is an intellectual; I use the word "initiative"—

"to hit the media. Policing is not just about quick wins or one-dimensional responses. We are in the business of delivering long-term sustainable solutions to crime and disorder."

That is indeed the business that we ought to be in. I do not believe that initiative after initiative is likely to deliver that result.

It would be very unfair—I hope that I have some reputation for being fair about these matters—to accuse the Home Secretary of merely engaging in initiatives. His energy is limitless, and initiatives occupy only a small part of it. He is also fond of creating bureaucratic structures. He inherited many and he has much amplified them. In the Home Office there are 63 units, 10 teams, six directorates, five groups and 25 miscellaneous bodies. In case that seems too abstract, let me retail to the House—my hon. Friends will be surprised by this, as I was—a small sample of the units particularly concerned with a topic close to the Home Secretary's heart, criminal justice.

There is the criminal justice performance directorate, the criminal justice local performance and delivery support, the criminal justice confidence team, the criminal justice strategic planning and analysis team, the criminal law and policy team, the Criminal Justice Bill team, the criminal law policy unit and the criminal procedure and evidence unit. I do not know what the ladies and gentlemen in those many directorates and units do or say to one another, but I rather imagine that there is some connection between confidence, performance, local performance, strategic planning, policy, Bills and procedure. If there is a connection, one wonders why there must be eight such units in the Home Office. And it is not just a matter of units. There could be a small number of people divided into a large number of parts, and that might be an effective way to proceed, but the Home Office statistics show that those are not small bodies. The criminal policy group has 537 members. The police and crime reduction group has 663 members. The community policy directorate—I do not know what the community policy is, but the directorate is undoubtedly responsible for it—has 216 members.

Of course, these hard-working and no doubt stressed-out officials, who probably need stress counselling because they are so busy talking to one another, are complemented by a tremendous apparatus for ensuring that the public are aware of their efforts. That is why the national publication directorate within the Home Office—a remarkable term—has 233 members, and the communications directorate 232. I do not know why the communications directorate deserves one member fewer than the national publication directorate, or whether the

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communications are published by the communications directorate, or whether the publications are communicated by the publication directorate, but one way or another these 465 people are involved in communicating and publishing I know not what.

I must inform my hon. Friends and the House as a whole that great effort goes into administering these administrators. The corporate development and services directorate and personnel directorate have 952 people between them—952 people administering the administrators.

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