| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Blunkett: Regrettably, that is true and there is always someone with an eye to a quick buck, especially if the Government are paying. I do not know where the resources to compensate the alleged 50,000 owners would come from. I suspect it would come from the money for the additional police officers requested today, including officers for Nottinghamshire. I will come on to that later. We cannot pay people for doing what we expect them to do under the law.
The amnesty that we had 18 months ago was the most successful ever. Some 44,000 weapons, some of them very serious, and more than a million items of ammunition were handed in. It was a great success—a greater success than after the tragedy in 1996. It was a success because a lot of people joined together: church groups, Afro-Caribbean community groups, young people's groups and people giving concerts. The movement of people who are now prepared to help to change the culture is encouraging. As I said in Home Office questions, that means that the communities that are most affected, and affecting, will be part of the solution. If that can happen in Nottingham, as it has in other parts of the country, we will be able to build optimism.
We do not want to frighten people to death, which is why I support what the head of the police standards unit, Paul Evans, said about getting things in proportion. If we scare people—if they are worried and concerned—the chance that they will come together and do something is diminished rather than increased. What we need is not doom and gloom and a negative response; we need to address the true facts, be prepared to come up with sensible policies and work together to implement them. Do not take my word for it; take the word of someone who has a lot of experience of dealing with the issue, who said we should stop indulging in
"the national passion for denigrating good news".
That was said by a Home Secretary—the current Leader of the Opposition—in September 1995. He should know because, when he first took over as Home Secretary, gun crime rocketed. [Interruption.] Yes, it did. It then came down.
I am happy to deal with true statistics. I have no problem with addressing the reality, but I am against myth and things being made up, such as when people go down to Brixton and pretend that there are no police available, that crime has risen, and that things have gone drastically wrong and the Government are to blame for not putting the police in. If there is to be no hiding place and no wriggle room—or whatever the term might be—for any Conservative politician, good luck to them. How long does wriggle room last? Does it last 24 hours or 12 months? Take the words of the previous shadow Home Secretary, who said just 12 months ago in October 2003:
". . . back in June, I saw Inspector Sean Wilson and his team reclaiming the streets for local people. Burglary is down, robbery is down, graffiti wiped away, abandoned cars towed away. Central Brixton is a safer, happier place than it was a couple of years ago. What made the difference? I'll tell you: real and sustained neighbourhood policing, bobbies on the beat."
That was said at the Tory party conference on 7 October 2003 and was contradicted a year later by the Leader of the Opposition.
We do not even have to go that far back. On 6 October this year, a question was asked about the commencement of the Conservative policy for more police—whether we will ever get 1,000 more officers in Nottinghamshire, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden has just asked me to affirm that I will do immediately. I cannot do it immediately, so I will not promise to do it. It would be a silly thing to do. There would be no wriggle room. We are in government, not in opposition, so we would not be able to wriggle anywhere. We will not promise 1,000 more officers in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire immediately.
When people get on television programmes on the same day—6 October—they need to be very sure what they are saying. I want the House to hear what two Front-Bench spokesmen said on the same day. The shadow Home Secretary was challenged about funding for the extra 40,000 police offices, which would help him give Nottinghamshire 1,000—that is slightly disproportionate, but I am sure that Nottinghamshire would get 1,000 police officers from somewhere—and he said that he thought that it would take about a billion pounds in the first Parliament. He said that the Opposition were talking about 5,000 officers a year. We do not dispute that. That is 5,000 officers a year to get to an overall figure of 20,000—not 40,000. Those extra officers in the first Parliament would cost around a billion pounds, but it would not get them to 40,000 officers, because, unless the Opposition plan to extend the franchise, if they do ever get elected, they will have a maximum of only five years, not eight years, to do it.
The shadow Home Secretary talked about the billion pounds being lopped off the nationality and immigration budget, which he said he would be able to halve in the first four years. Actually, he could not do so because we have already built into our forward plans, as part of the spending review, hundreds of millions of pounds worth of reductions in the figure that he proposes to halve. We have already allocated that money for the extra community support officers, police officers, technology and investment in CCTV that we are undertaking. The real dilemma is that, having taken a billion pounds out, where are the border controls and the extra people to stop the drugs and guns coming in which the right hon. Gentleman demanded this afternoon? People are needed to do those things, and those people have to be paid.
What we have is a billion pounds being lopped off the nationality, immigration and border control budget, a pledge to meet half the commitment that the Conservatives have made for 40,000 extra police officers, a demolition of the promises made this afternoon to increase border controls and stop people getting in, and the honest words of the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan). In an appearance on News 24 on the same day, she said that the Conservatives would be "held accountable" and deliver, and would
"start recruiting those police officers immediately".
How can one start recruiting police officers immediately if it will take a Parliament to raise the money from cutting the immigration and nationality budget at the
18 Oct 2004 : Column 670
same time as increasing border controls? [Interruption.] When does immediately not mean immediately? It is when a Tory Front-Bench spokesman says it. [Interruption.] I am happy to give way to the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham so that she can tell the House what immediately means, and put me straight.
Mrs. Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con): Immediately means immediately. If the Home Secretary thinks that it is outwith the wit of man to place an advertisement or ask his officials to place advertisements to recruit more police officers, I do not know what he is doing in his job.
Mr. Blunkett: It is not about recruiting police officers; we are recruiting them. We have recruited 10,000 over the past two years. We have a budget to retain those numbers and invest in 25,000 community support officers. We have identified the money, but promising to raise the number of recruits by 5,000 a year, plus everything else that the Tory party has promised, including 20,000 extra prison places in their first Parliament—there is no budget for that either—is different. If they are promising 5,000 officers over and above what we have allocated and promising to provide them immediately, they must say where the money will come from. Keep on wriggling, and we will keep on governing.
Mr. Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con): The Home Secretary says that he has just recruited 10,000 new police officers. Does he recognise the very real anger felt by ordinary coppers on the street about the amount of time that those 10,000 officers and their colleagues have to spend filling in forms?
Mr. Blunkett: Absolutely. When the Conservative Government of 20 years ago introduced the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the PACE codes, the amount of paperwork legitimately shot up. There is a tendency for all Governments to demand extra statistical information. We are asked at the Dispatch Box to do so. We are asked whether we can find out from any part of the country—[Interruption.] It seems that we have returned to Nottingham, despite the fact that I gave the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden a perfectly reasonable answer earlier. [Interruption.] I was not able to give the figures on drive-by shootings, because we do not collect them. I was asked to comment on what the National Crime Squad had done in terms of operational matters, but I could not do so as I did not have the statistic to hand.
The more statistical information the Opposition ask us for and the more we are asked to break it down, the more we have to ask somebody to collect it. It does not drop from the sky. We cannot put on a database data that we do not have. We cannot disaggregate a database that we do not have. There is a challenge to reduce the amount of paperwork that is being demanded nationally and locally, and we are doing that. I have set up a gateway blockage involving all ranks of the police service so that no form or data requirement is put in place without the clearance of that gateway.
We have also introduced fixed penalty notices. Some 20,000 have already been levied, which is a terrific boon for constables who do not have to take people down to
18 Oct 2004 : Column 671
the station and go through the process of arrest. We are spending £1 billion on the criminal justice information technology system, so that the police can at last use technology to tap into palm-top computers that go straight into the mainframe computer, available through the criminal justice system, instead of writing something on a pad, going back to the station and writing it in a book and then tapping it themselves into a computer, as I saw them doing when I became Home Secretary. That transformation in technology includes the introduction of Airwave, allowing police officers to communicate properly with each other and the station. There are also new methods of ensuring that they do not have to wait in court. [Interruption.] I am just telling hon. Members the answer to the question that I was asked: what about getting more police officers on the beat and in the community, doing the job? That is precisely what we are going to do.
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |