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6.18 pm
Bob Spink (Castle Point): We need a balanced approach to what is a sensitive and important subject for all our constituents. Neighbourhood policing is essentially about antisocial behaviour, and juveniles are largely responsible. But the kids should not be stigmatised. Kids in this country are generally great and we must allow them to go out and enjoy their childhood, to grow up, to play games and to gather together socially. We must understand that they will occasionally rebel and experiment, especially with alcohol, and we need to seek tolerant and caring ways of dealing with the problem.
The children need more facilities to distract them from bad behaviour. We owe that to them, and I congratulate Legacy XS in my constituency on the project that it is running. The kids also need a disciplined framework, with clear boundaries and consistent enforcement. They also need to know that tough consequences will ensue if they break the rules. We need much more parental involvement in ensuring that children behave. I know that not all children these
days have two parents, and we all appreciate the difficulties of single-parent families, but we need parents to take responsibility in stopping bad behaviour by children. For instance, my Confiscation of Alcohol (Young Persons) Act 1997 enabled the police to involve parents in connection with incidents of under-age drinking. It should be more widely used. I contend that greater local control of the police would ensure that such action is taken, as local people would demand it.My second point has to do with the police. Like some other hon. Members, I went out on patrol with my police force on a Friday night in the summer. I encountered some good behaviour among youths gathering together, but other youths displayed a great lack of respect towards the police. My respect for front-line officers certainly grew as a result of that experience.
I believe that the police should not have to deal with so much bureaucracy. They need to have access to new technologies such as palm-top computers. They need more resources, as well as the 40,000 officers that the Conservative party promises. The number of special constables needs to rise, not fall as has been happening lately.
The law needs to be clearer and more consistent. In their six and a half years in office, the Government have failed abysmally in that respect. Initiative after initiative has been introduced, often by the Prime Minister himself, and then failed. For instance, child curfews were introduced in 1998. They were a total failure. In 1999, antisocial behaviour orders were introduced. They were an almost total failure, and they died because of bureaucracy. In 2000, the Prime Minister suggested cashpoint fines.
Bob Spink: My hon. Friend is right to say that that was a farce. In addition, fixed-penalty fines were introduced, followed by the suggestion in 2001 about night courts, which copied what happens in America. The Government also promised to remove housing benefits from bad tenants. None of that made a lot of difference, so what happened next? In January this year, the Government established the antisocial behaviour unit, which was designed to "tackle anti-social behaviour" and
- "make an immediate and lasting difference to the lives of people who experience anti-social behaviour day after day."
Under-age drinking is a particular problem. It leads kids on the street into bad behaviour and the first use of drugs, and it needs to be tackled. My 1997 Act gave police the power to remove all alcohol from under-age kids on the streets. It was designed to keep kids out of trouble and to save communities from the trouble that they cause. So what did the Prime Minister do in the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001? He removed the very power that I had given police to take alcohol away
from kids. Fortunately, that power was given back to the police on 18 September—and about time too. We need a consistent approach on this matter, but that is not what this failed Government have delivered.What can be done now? We can show the kids more respect, and give them more in the way of facilities. We can give the police more resources—and the Opposition have promised 40,000 more police officers. We can try to keep police stations open so people have greater access to them. We can cut bureaucracy, introduce new technology, and ensure that the police involve parents in their children's behaviour. We can try to deliver more treatment for drug addiction.
We must put an end to gimmicky Government initiatives and get down to introducing simple, tough and consistent laws and to enforcing them with rigour. Finally, we must ensure that local police are truly accountable to local people.
6.24 pm
Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe): As we know, there is widespread concern about crime and antisocial behaviour. The thoughtful new Liberal Democrat spokesman asked why that is, given that there has been a steady fall in crime in recent years according to all the seriously accepted statistics. That started in 1995, when mass unemployment began to fall, as it has continued to do under the Labour Government. The Home Secretary put his finger on it when he said that people constantly read in the media about the most horrific crimes and see intensifying antisocial behaviour locally. They extrapolate from the latter to the former. If they see youths being disrespectful to the police and seemingly out of control and read about horrific murders, they think that the two are linked and that there are more horrific murders. Antisocial behaviour is a serious issue in that it engenders fear of more serious crime. That is one reason why we need to take it so seriously.
Increasingly, people understand the complexity of the issue. As has been said, we have had something of an auction in the number of additional police that we want to put on the beat. People realise that we have more police, but that they have not solved the problem of antisocial behaviour. Gradually, they are perceiving that the issue is complex. We are talking about the number of police, their role—exactly what they do, what they are allowed to do and how they are deployed by chief constables—and the number of support staff.
In this political auction, we tend to talk about the number of police officers as opposed to the number of civilian staff. There is a danger of undervaluing the role of support staff—as happened in the national health service—in enabling existing police officers to get out on to the beat. I accept the point that everyone makes, which is that certain types of paperwork could be avoided. Few people would say that we should not be reacting to many of the initiatives that the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) listed, such as the Climbié inquiry. It is much easier to say that there is too much paperwork than to identify specific papers that do not need to be filled out. In many cases, it may be possible to reduce the paperwork, but we may also need more civilian staff to take that burden off the police. One constituent recently had a lengthy statement taken down in longhand by a police sergeant. That does not
make sense. The Conservatives attempted almost to demonise support staff in the health service by saying that 20 per cent. of them ought to be sacked. I hope that we will not do the same with policing, as we may well need more support staff more urgently than we need more police.People are also looking at police powers and the willingness to use them, which the Prime Minister raised recently, as well as at the role of the courts and sentencing. I want a simple, practical change to transparent sentencing. The sentence announced should be the 50 per cent. tariff that we know will result in incarceration, rather than the 100 per cent. that could theoretically be applied. That would be a sensible change, and one that people would understand.
The Conservative party has complained in the past week or so that the media have been concentrating exclusively on the Leader of the Opposition's secretarial arrangements at the expense of examining the Opposition's policies. I have some sympathy with that complaint. The way in which the media work in Britain is dispiriting. I therefore wish to take the remaining five minutes of my speech to consider quickly the concrete policies that the Opposition propose.
I am second to none in my admiration for the courtesy and honesty of the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin). We have met in various Committees and it is always a pleasure to debate with him. One of his characteristics is that he does not try to conceal vagueness, as we saw on the issue of the island to which several Members have referred. He had obviously been pressed by his leader to come up with something, so he said that we ought to put all asylum seekers on an island. When he was asked which island, he did not say, as perhaps most of us would have said—I certainly think that I would have—"We have a number of islands in mind, we are weighing things up but it would not be right to disclose it at this time." Instead, with characteristic honesty, he said, "I haven't a clue." I admire him for that. We have to accept that that element of his policy is currently shrouded in considerable vagueness.
We find the same vagueness in the motion, which urges us to have more local policing that is more accountable to local people—words that have no discernible meaning, or which, if they have a meaning, it is a meaning to which we can all subscribe. Why not have more local policing and local accountability? It sounds good.
In the right hon. Gentleman's speech, he tried to fill the gap. He advocated greater decentralisation. On that point, he uncharacteristically allowed himself to stray into vagueness. Decentralisation can be a good thing but it can also be a formula for postcode policing. Nottinghamshire, part of which I represent, offers an example. We have an unusually low detection rate, for reasons that we could debate, but there is no ambition in the county to set up a protectionist barrier against the use of best practice from elsewhere. We would like to achieve in Nottinghamshire the successful detection rates that we see elsewhere, and if that meant a centralist initiative, it would be just fine with most people. There is a danger that if we chop the country into too many
little bits, there will be bits where policing works well and bits where it does not. With respect, that policy is half-baked.
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