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Mr. Letwin: The hon. Gentleman is making a serious speech and we accept that an inevitable consequence of a serious-minded localist approach is that there will be differences between places. Some will be better at some things and some will be bad at others. That is why we place our faith in local democracy. It is our impression that when people see that something is being better done somewhere else, they will want to apply pressure through their local democratically elected police authorities for the place where they live to do it better.
Dr. Palmer: I accept that the right hon. Gentleman's intentions are good, but that intervention brings us to the dog that did not bark in his speech—sheriffs. He did not mention them once. We are all aware of the dangers of elected sheriffs—
Dr. Palmer: I am sorry that I cannot give way again; I want to conclude, so that the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) can speak.
The risk in having elected sheriffs is simple, and we should be open about it. The election of mayors has produced many charmingly eccentric people, but in the emotive matter of crime there is a danger that election could produce British National party or extremist sheriffs. With the complete operational independence that the right hon. Gentleman proposes to give chief constables, the likely outcome would be a state of permanent confrontation between populist, tub-thumping sheriffs with no real power, setting wholly unrealistic targets, and chief constables who ignored them and did their own thing. There is a genuine hole at the heart of the right hon. Gentleman's strategy.
As I want to allow the hon. Member for Upminster to speak, I shall not pursue the matter further. With respect, however, if the right hon. Gentleman wants that Conservative policy to be taken seriously, it requires considerably more detail.
6.34 pm
Angela Watkinson (Upminster): In view of the lateness of the hour, the House will be pleased to learn that I have abandoned my speech, although I am sure that hon. Members would have enjoyed it. Instead, I intend to make three brief points.
My first point relates to the 40,000 extra police officers proposed in the Conservative policy. Some hon. Members have referred to that as though it were an extravagant or even unnecessary number, but I understand that 8,000 of the 40,000 might be allocated to the Metropolitan police and, as there are 32 London boroughs, Havering is likely to receive about 160 of those 40,000 police officers. With absences through sickness, holidays, courses, and officers being off duty and other abstractions, 150 officers might be left. Shared out over three shifts, 50 officers are not even enough to have two additional officers in each ward, so by no means is the figure over-generous; it is perfectly reasonable, and no more than is necessary in the prevailing circumstances.
My second point relates to a particular problem in the London borough of Havering. My constituency is one of the three component constituencies of Havering. Romford is one of the others. Romford town centre has the largest concentration of late-night entertainment centres and nightclubs outside the west end of London, which places enormous demands on Havering police. Those demands should be enough to make Havering a special case, but that is consistently ignored in the Metropolitan police resource allocation formula. We live in hope every year, but so far those hopes have been dashed.
On Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, 10,000 additional people come into Romford—that is a conservative figure; it has been put as high as 13,000—to avail themselves of the delights of those nightclubs. The on-duty police officers quite rightly concentrate the lion's share of their resources on Romford town centre at that time. It is a public order issue, and the divisional commander is right to do that, but the effect is that there is no neighbourhood policing in the rest of the borough.
I have been out on night duty with Havering police, and they have one car to use to react to radio messages relating to incidents the length and breadth of what is a very large borough. They get there too late every time. The incident is over; the culprits have escaped. The police then hear of another incident at the far end of the borough, and the car chases after that. In effect, the borough is not policed, with the exception of Romford town centre, when those nightclubs are in operation. I add another plea—I make no apology for doing so again—for additional police in Havering because of the special demands placed on it by Romford town centre.
My third point relates to the criminal justice system, which does not always give the police the support that it should or could. I should like to give just one example of co-operative working between my local council and the local police in dealing with what we all recognise as a neighbours-from-hell situation. I have received a long list of complaints from some residents who live in some flats over a small block of shops. When I visited them, it became obvious in conversation that all the problems emanate from one flat: there was abusive behaviour, drug taking and drug paraphernalia left in the stairwells, drunkenness and loud music night after night. One of the gentlemen who complained was a newsagent in one of the shops below, who had to get up very early in the morning.
It was council property, and the council looked very carefully at the tenancy and worked with the police, but the council decided that withdrawing the tenancy was the right course of action, as a last resort after it had tried everything else available to it. However, the outcome was that the court listened to the case, which had taken many man-hours of preparation and a lot of council tax payers' money and funding, but the court decided to give those neighbours from hell another chance. So they are back in the flat, and all their previous behaviour is being repeated. That is just one of many cases where the system lets the police down. If we ask the police to provide neighbourhood policing, which is what local residents want, it does not matter how
many additional police we have—if the 40,000 were available tomorrow, it would have no effect—unless the criminal justice system plays its part and backs them up.6.39 pm
Mr. James Paice (South-East Cambridgeshire): This has been a short but important debate, and it has become clear that there is a remarkable degree of consensus about the solution in principle to part of our problems in our neighbourhoods—a substantial increase and improvement in the concept of neighbourhood policing. The only exception to that consensus was the contribution of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle), but he is used to being in a minority on many of these issues.
What is also clear, however, is that neighbourhood policing must involve all local agencies. It is not something that can be achieved by any one police officer, police force, local authority or anybody else. The crime and disorder reduction partnerships—introduced by this Government, as I am happy to recognise—are a step forward. Like all partnerships, however, they lack the direct accountability that I believe is essential if we are to achieve the step change that we want.
Let us look for a moment at the difficulties faced by effective neighbourhood policing. First, there is the issue of what I call the reassurance mindset. The hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) touched on it by suggesting, I think, that there was some sort of conflict between the reassurance role of neighbourhood policing and getting on with policing real, major crime. I do not see it that way. Reassurance is the inevitable consequence of people feeling safer in their streets and neighbourhoods and of the reduction of the fear of crime or of being victims of crime. To that extent, neighbourhood policing has a major role, not just in dealing, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) described, with disorder issues such as louts, foul language and the other things about which Members have spoken, but in gaining low-level intelligence.
It is a fact that three-quarters of all people who receive a custodial sentence receive their first such sentence before they are 24. There are plenty of statistics to demonstrate that virtually every major criminal started life as a minor criminal, doing the sorts of things about which we have all been complaining, so there is a vital role for neighbourhood policing to help to nip the problem in the bud, to use an old phrase. If it can reduce by only a relatively small proportion the number of people who go on to become ever more major criminals, the purpose of neighbourhood policing will have been achieved.
Neighbourhood policing also faces the problems of abstractions about which we have talked: the frequent changes of personnel as officers move on and are promoted, so that there is no continuity; the problems of bureaucracy, to which I will return; and the problems of the judicial system, a precise example of which has just been described by my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) whereby police officers feel let down by the system of which they are part. We also have abysmal levels of rehabilitation among young people in our young offenders institutions, with the result that many go back to the same locality and continue their previous life.
There is no simple, single answer. All those problems have to be put right, and in many cases the Home Secretary agrees, certainly on the basis of some of his comments today and especially in relation to issues of reassurance and the judicial process. I am not sure whether he is having any more joy with the new Lord Chancellor than he had with the previous one in getting the changes that he wants in that regard. He recognises the importance of police numbers; otherwise, he would not keep on talking about the numbers that he has already provided. He also talks about the importance of bureaucracy and local accountability. Over a year ago, in May 2002, he said:
- "we have deluded ourselves if we believed we could simply deliver from the centre."
What is it that people really want? They want a society in which they can go about their daily lives free from the fear of abuse, assault or intimidation and in which their children can play safely, free of the risks from burnt-out cars, used needles, vomit, foul language and all the other things that beset parts of our communities. None of those things can be achieved from a police car or from a council office, let alone from Whitehall or in national plans. The only way such problems can be cleared up is if we have real police officers actively involved and responsible to the community.
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