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9.32 pm
Mr. Ian Taylor (Esher and Walton): I, too, am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) for initiating this debate. As long as the Minister does not get too excited or relieved, I shall start by saying something complimentary. The Home Office grant for the CCTV cameras that were launched today in Walton-on-Thames is greatly to be welcomed. It is an interesting benchmark project. The hon. Lady was due to unveil the plaque, but other business unavoidably detained her. Therefore, I carried out that duty for her. I was called Hazel Blears—that is in the sense of a quotation, Madam Deputy Speaker, before you call me to order—because that was the name on the plaque. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the Home Office for the money. I was delighted to see the reassuring effect that it has on the community.
The second compliment that I would pay is that we are grateful for the reassurance money that has come into Surrey and certainly into Elmbridge, which is the borough in which my constituency resides. That is of great importance and it is much welcomed by the police.
Given those two positive items, I hope that the Minister will listen carefully when I say that there are some big negatives. The chief constable genuinely believes that if he can prove that reassurance projects work—I know that there is a trial period—their funding will not be withdrawn if a new initiative comes along or if pressures elsewhere in the country demand that Surrey makes further cuts. If that were to happen, it would be catastrophic and would hugely damage the morale of police officers who are working extremely hard on the project. Like my colleagues, I am extremely impressed by the dedication of all the officers, right up to the chief constable.
The police have serious problems in achieving what they want to achieve on the front line. I have had several conversations with the key officers covering my constituency, who understand the pressures. Each part of the country differs; nevertheless, the borough of Elmbridge has not done well recently on crime. I do not blame Surrey police for that. There is not a great deal of violent crime, although recently there have been worrying instances of gun crime. The problem has not got out of hand but, like other parts of the country, we are increasingly suffering from drug-related crime, which leads to petty theft and sometimes more serious theft. If the police are stretched at the front line, it is difficult for them to respond to such crime.
Another problem arising from the county's adjacency to London is the fact that London is an avid exporter of criminals. Our road network, not least the M25, means that we are sometimes a target area for criminals from Liverpool or Bristol, who decide that Surrey is a soft touch. In addition, there are unreasonable strains on the police. My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) mentioned the tragedy of Milly Dowler, whose family live in my constituency. She was abducted from Walton station in my constituency; we know not how or why. We do know that she is dead. At various stages in the inquiry, 100 officers were involved, based at the headquarters in Staines. A core of officers is still involved—the case cannot be allowed to rest unsolved, because it is possible that the perpetrator of the crime lives locally. If so, history tells us the perpetrator will strike again. I do not wish to worry my constituents or other people in Surrey, but we must be concerned about that possibility. We cannot abandon the case simply because we do not know why Milly disappeared in full daylight at 4 o'clock outside Walton station, only to be found in woodlands just over the county border.
That is a real burden, but other issues in Surrey are stretching resources. Surrey police are ready and willing to react, but there is the problem of whether retrospective compensation is available. The presence at Heathrow, for example, is not an inexpensive burden: it is an added strain on an already stretched budget. We must then consider the points made by my hon. Friends. In my own constituency, I have heard that there are apologies if two policemen or women are spotted walking around together—the explanation is that one of them is being trained. There is a constant loss of trained officers. It is a bit like London buses—you wait for one, then suddenly two come along together. In the case of the police officers, the trouble is, of the two, one is untrained.
That is a serious problem. I do not know the economics of trying to compensate Surrey for the loss of trained officers to other forces, but it is a big problem
that deserves serious consideration, not least because Surrey invests in training. Another problem in Surrey is living costs. It is not uncommon for recruits to Surrey police to live a long way away. They do a five-day shift, sleep on someone's floor, then go home to another part of the United Kingdom. That is good for Surrey while they are there, but it is not a sustainable basis for a police force. However, it is the result of the cost of living in Surrey. House prices in my constituency average £410,000, so the problem is not trivial. Our debate is about the police, but other public services are seriously affected by the difficulty of living locally.I urge the Minister to bear in mind the fact that some of us willingly negotiated with the Home Secretary of the day the transfer of the bulk of what was then my constituency to the Surrey police area. I have no criticism of the willingness of Surrey police to police. They have a profound interest in community policing, which pleases me, but they are stretched. If Surrey is considered one of the best police forces in the country, the squeeze under the formulae will turn it into one of the less good. I ask the Minister to consider that. It cannot be a Government objective. They surely want to maintain a good force, not with a largesse of resources, but not through under-funding, which means that what the force does well today, it will not be able to do tomorrow.
My balanced approach is to thank the Minister for what the Home Office has done, which is welcomed. On a non-party political basis, we recognise that certain initiatives that the Government have taken are good. Please will the Minister make sure that those initiatives are not suddenly withdrawn, and please will she realise that, underlying my praise, there is deep concern that she is presiding over a decline, year by year, in the capacity of the Surrey force to deal with a front-line county problem.
9.41 pm
Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley): I shall add a few points to those that my hon. Friends have, I hope, managed to hammer home. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) for allowing us to take part in the debate.
The biggest problem facing the police force, not just in Surrey but throughout the country, also faces organisations such as local authorities and the national health service. It is the unpredictability of the funds that they receive. The Government seem unable to resist the temptation to top-slice the funding and maintain control of it even after it is allocated locally. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has a similar approach to local government. Control is maintained by introducing targets, allocating funds for specific purposes and top-slicing, so there is no predictability. Local authorities, the police force and the NHS all have to go through loops and hoops to gain funding, which they receive part of the way through the year. That leaves the police force unable to implement the service in such a way as to meet the targets and demands set by the Home Office.
Policemen and bureaucrats in the police force in Surrey and elsewhere spend an astronomical amount of time and money to meet demands for best value, Audit
Commission targets and the requirements of the various inspectorates that descend on every police force. I have not done my homework, but I should do so in preparation for the next occasion we meet the Minister. Can she give us some information about the amount of money spent by various police authorities and the proportion of their time spent providing documentation in response to demands from the Home Office and the Audit Commission, and the demands of best value and all the other targets imposed on the police force? If the top-sliced money were returned and the pressure to meet targets removed, the money could go directly into policing.I shall touch on the disadvantage of being close to London, which has already been mentioned and applies to all the surrounding local authorities. The unique feature of Surrey is that the two major London airports are located nearby. The international aspects of crime have been felt by London for many years. As London policing improves, international crime is starting to hit places like Surrey dramatically.
The other disadvantage is that Surrey's attractiveness to those seeking housing has led to high prices. As my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor) said, the average cost of a house in his constituency is £400,000, and it is not much less in mine. The efforts to establish housing associations to secure low-cost home ownership will achieve a temporary, short-term advantage, but the net effect will be to fuel the fire, as the cost of housing in the area is likely to rise as an indirect result of low-cost home ownership. We need to persuade the Government to consider the problems more broadly and take a regional—if I dare use that phrase, as there is no such thing as a south-east region—and economic approach across the nation, rather than simply taking a national approach.
Other difficulties in Surrey include traffic problems. There is a list of major roads, including the A25, A24 and A29, as well as the M25 and A3, which are motorways, that have to be policed because they go through villages that have narrow pavements, tiny bending roads and ancient houses, with a constant threat of enormous accidents. As far as I can see, the crime prevention officers dealing with traffic in my patch number only one man, yet there are areas throughout my constituency along the A25, A24 and A29 that are used literally as race tracks. It is well known that motor cyclists have race tracks running through our area.
The police have to concentrate all their traffic work force on specific areas at specific times to try to deal with that problem, which deprives other areas, including some villages. I have just received a huge petition from Ockley, a little village situated on the A29 that has three fabulous old pubs. In the village, that road is called Staines lane. It is a dead straight Roman road and the speed limit is 40 mph. In much of the area, only one side of the road has a pavement, and it is approximately 1.5 ft wide. Cars and motor bikes travel along it at well over 100 mph at all hours of the day and night. The petition is huge. Indeed, to my dismay, at the bottom of the covering letter, the signatory said that only part of the petition from that tiny village had been sent. The police cannot handle the problem.
Another problem has been highlighted by the National Farmers Union, which has lobbied me and local police in Surrey about crime on agricultural land
involving not merely theft of small hand tools, but robberies in which vehicles such as combine harvesters and so on have been removed. The flow of wheeled vehicles from Surrey's agricultural areas to areas as far away as Ireland is becoming notorious. The police have diverted extra efforts, funds and personnel into special campaigns in an attempt to stem the problem, and they have had some success. While they are doing that, the gangs to which my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell referred get back on the trains, come out of London and move through Epsom, Leatherhead, Great Bookham, Effingham and Guildford. The havoc that they create at each of the stops, given half an opportunity, is the sort of thing that I used to expect when I lived in central London, but the policing there was very much greater.There is a lot that can be done, even with the little budget that I am sure the police will get, but I ask the Minister above all to consider ways of reducing the strain on the Surrey police force and every other police force in terms of demands to produce papers and meet targets that may not be relevant, as well as to reduce the demands of best value and cut bureaucracy. She and her colleagues have said that they will do that. We hear a lot about it, but see no results. If we do not get such action, policing in Surrey, which is good but slipping, will slump.
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