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Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham): He got paid by the word.
Mr. Blunkett: As the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) says from a sedentary position, the hon. Member for Winchester's predecessor was, like Dickens, paid by the word. We understood his words, and we heard them often and tediously. Nevertheless, we are very pleased to welcome the hon. Member for Winchester, who I believe is the chairman of the Peel group. That group aims at uniting moderate Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and will no doubt give new meaning to the adage that, if one peels a Liberal Democrat, one will get the taste of the Conservative underneath. We look forward very much to seeing the unity of purpose between people in Dorset and in Hampshire—and wherever else the Liberal Democrats can manage to take Conservative seats in the next general election.
Mr. Peter Kilfoyle (Liverpool, Walton): Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Blunkett: How could I resist?
Mr. Kilfoyle: Before my right hon. Friend moves on, does he share the suspicion that some of us have about what the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) means when he speaks of local democratic accountability? Does he suspect that the right hon. Gentleman does not mean the accountability to the broader community that my right hon. Friend and I understand, but accountability to a group of the local great and good? That might be acceptable to the right hon. Gentleman, but not necessarily to the communities involved.
Mr. Blunkett: My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. These days, the word "sheriff" refers to those who are appointed to represent the Queen's interests and to attend dinners and banquets. I am sure that the role is
very important, and I commend the people who perform it. However, times have changed since the days of the sheriff of Nottingham, who it must be said did not have too good a reputation in mediaeval England. I should be interested to hear the definitions that will be produced in due course.However, I was going to say that the one matter on which the right hon. Gentleman and I appear to agree is that we require more law enforcers and crime fighters. We are very proud that there are 136,386 police officers now. That is some 9,000 more than when we came to office, and 4,110 more than at the beginning of this year. We are proud that we have almost 2,000 community support officers, who did not exist until we pushed the idea through this House and encouraged local forces to take them on. At the time, it was claimed that that would not happen, but of course it has, and the new officers are welcome on the ground.
I want to remind the House, and the Opposition, about street wardens. We supported that initiative, and funded it through what is now the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. People are very keen about including those wardens in the police family.
Mr. Mark Francois (Rayleigh): Will the Home Secretary give the comparable figures for the numbers of special constables in the police service over the years to which he is alluding? He will be aware that there has been a large decline, with many special constables leaving the force because they were so disillusioned.
Mr. Blunkett: Yes, there has been a decline in the number of specials. I regret that, as the civil renewal agenda requires that people who are not full-time police officers but who are prepared to devote some of their own time to the job—often between six and eight hours a week—should be encouraged to do so. I want to find ways to encourage employers to release people for a little time each week. I want to look into new ways to encourage the badging of those involved in crime prevention and protection with the powers that special constables have at present. Yes, there has been a reduction. Of course, my figures are for full-time equivalents. The number of people employed as full-time police officers and CSOs is a great deal higher than the 9,000 extra people I mentioned because some of them are part-time. We should bear that in mind.
In the past six and a half years, there has been a drop in crime of more than a quarter. That has been true of burglary and car theft. Under the street crime initiative, there were 17,000 fewer theft and mugging offences last year and I am proud of that. We took that initiative. It made a difference to people's lives. Returning to what the right hon. Gentleman said about Jan Berry's comments, the public demanded that initiative because people were being mugged and robbed on our streets. If we had the right hon. Gentleman's system and the Home Secretary and Prime Minister had no powers, we would not have been able to act.
The interesting aspect of this debate is that there would be no point in having it under a Conservative Government. Why debate community policing, the role of the Home Secretary and what the Government want, if the Government have no power and if full autonomy means that the Home Secretary merely does as the right
hon. Gentleman suggests? I suppose that the idea has been drawn from the ideological vacuum in which the Conservatives have been living—it is what Nicholas Ridley once described as a situation where a Secretary of State would convene a lunch once a year, let contracts and then go on holiday. I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman, who is gentler, more convincing and more understanding than the late Nicholas Ridley—for whom I had a lot of time as an ideologue but not as a politician—actually believes the same sort of garbage. Nicholas Ridley once said that we could solve London's traffic problems if we did away with traffic lights. There was a free market logic to that. When people were so snarled up that they could not get their cars out of their driveway, they would go on the tube. The only problem is that unless one invested in public services to improve the tube, they would not be able to get on that either.Yes, we want investment and accountability, but we want it in the real world, to reflect what is happening on the ground. The motion talks about the return of powers. The return of powers to whom? Is it to the chief constables? Which powers have this Government taken away from them? How have we diminished the powers of constables on the street? We have increased them. We have given them greater powers, although they do not always know that they have them. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) said on the radio yesterday that he had just discovered a local constable who did not know of the powers on off-road vehicles and their confiscation in the Police Reform Act 2002 .
The motion talks of decentralising to "local policing". Does that mean the sheriff, the board, or the chief constable alone? Are we simply to say that there should be 43, 80, 140 or whatever number of fiefdoms, which is what would happen under the Tory plan? Who will be the powerful person? Who will make the decisions? Who will be able to wield influence on behalf of the public?
That brings us back to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle). In the end, we need to find a system that at the local level, in the neighbourhood, holds to account those who are working there and the commander of the unit, and gives them power and resources. Who has delegated the £50 million directly to basic command units? It happens to be this Home Secretary and this Government. Who has devolved to 30 of the basic command units with the highest levels of drug-related crime—under the new initiative on criminal justice and drugs—the locally decentralised resources? It happens to be the same centralising, overbearing and over-powerful Home Secretary who is being criticised this afternoon.
Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North): Some years ago, we tried the sheriff system in the city of Nottingham and it was found wanting.
Is not the test for all parties what happens when there is consensus for community policing, or neighbourhood policing as it is referred to in this debate, but the local chief constable decides not to enact it, even when that chief constable has more police officers to deploy than at any time in the past? What do we do? What can local
Members of Parliament, members of the public and indeed the Home Secretary do when confronted with that test? How do we surmount that problem?
Mr. Blunkett: That is an important question and I invite chief constables, police authorities and Members of Parliament to assist us during the year ahead in a sensible dialogue about how to make the tripartite system work. This afternoon, the shadow Home Secretary has done away with the tripartite system, or he would do so if he had the power, which God forbid. The system cannot be tripartite if one of the three legs is taken away. The right hon. Gentleman would remove one leg—the Home Secretary; he would remove the power and relevance of the post that he wants to occupy. He is asking the electorate to give him a majority to put him into a position that he could no longer occupy or take power to use. Secondly, he has made it clear that the rest of the tripartite approach would be disabled overnight by giving full autonomy to chief constables. The police authority would be able to think, but it would be unable to act.
I want a dialogue about accountability in the neighbourhood and about how to achieve responsiveness without taking away the operational rights of the police. We cannot second guess or put in place the action necessary to catch criminals, to deal with criminal gangs and overcome antisocial behaviour, but we can give support and provide additional powers and resources. We can legislate, but we cannot do it all.
There is a real issue about how we ensure that the extra police and those who work with them are visible, available and accessible on the street. How is it that we have 136,000 officers and all their additional support staff, including 10,000 additional civilian staff, amounting to a staggering 200,000 crimefighters—36,000 more trained and uniformed police officers than 30 years ago—yet people see fewer officers on the beat and in their communities and certainly feel that the police are not as accessible or responsive as they used to be? That question is profound.
Even if we left aside the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which had to be brought in to overcome the injustice and misuse of power that was taking place, and if we stripped away the requirement to monitor at least basic equality of provision across the country, how could we get rid of the remaining burdens that are, it is claimed, the obstacle to the police being out on the beat? I said "claimed" because when we actually ask people—not just chief constables, but commanders—to manage, they are inclined to suggest that it is not their job. However, I suggest that it is and that the six forces that have removed 2,800 surplus and unnecessary forms are the leaders in getting rid of bureaucracy. I cannot get rid of bureaucracy purely from the centre; we need local forces to do it, too.
That exercise was started by my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen who examined the diary of a police officer to see what was keeping officers in the station. We found that local forces were duplicating national forms. They were collecting data that had never been requested by the Home Office and asking constables to do things that were no longer required.
Let us join things together. The O'Dowd taskforce, which included police officers of different ranks, came up with a set of proposals, some of which have been
acted on. Some remain to be acted on and that must be done swiftly. However, the cry that all we have to do is remove the Home Office and get rid of any central involvement is nonsense. The moment that we did so there would be cries from across the country to reinstate the system.Yesterday, I met some of those people in the Conservative party who have embraced what the Government have done. I met those in the community protection department of Westminster city council who have effectively used the powers granted to them by using CCTV or embracing the new powers that we have given to local government through antisocial behaviour orders and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which has been so often ridiculed, but which is so often praised locally. I commend my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary for what he did in introducing that Act, which is being used.
I shall tell the House what those in Westminster council told me. They told me that, two years ago, 1 per cent. of the borough's landmass accounted for 25 per cent. of the crime and that Leicester square was virtually unusable. They have used the powers in the 1998 Act and the resources that we have given them, as well as their own initiative, to pull together in that new community protection department, working hand in hand with Metropolitan police, to clean up Leicester square and the surrounding area, so it can be used by local people and visitors alike. I commend that Conservative council for its initiative in that respect, although not in any other way, and for using Government money—after all, Westminster gets enough of it, as those of us who were in local government know. If my city received anything like the per capita investment that Westminster receives, we could do a damn good job with it.
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