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Mr. Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con):
The hon. Gentleman talked about the wider implications, then the national and regional implications, of the problem. Does he recall that the regional crime squads that used to operate have, for desirable reasons, largely gone? In the past, it would have been to the regional crime squads that Nottingham, Derby and Leicester would have turned for resources to tackle the issues affecting all those cities because of the gangs and all the rest of it. Is the hon. Gentleman satisfied that the new national unit is effectively replacing the old effort that we used to have on a regional basis—in other words, that enough national support is available to Nottinghamshire police service to tackle the drug and gun problems that are
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particularly acute in the city of Nottingham, but whose origins extend over the whole region, in many cases across the police force boundaries?
Alan Simpson: There are two elements in that question. Not enough national resources have been available to tackle Nottingham's current problems, but I remain agnostic about whether there is a compelling case for revisiting the regional crime squads as opposed to the National Crime Squad. It would be nice to feel that the drug and gun problems could be dealt with in an east midlands context, but in reality the networks run much further afield—from Nottingham to Manchester, from Nottingham to Birmingham and from Nottingham to London. At this stage, I do not want to create unnecessary boundaries that might allow someone to feel that they could escape surveillance if they simply crossed a boundary.
Mr. Clarke: I agree with that. I am not suggesting that we should go back to having regional crime squads. I am just wondering whether the hon. Gentleman shares my feeling that, having lost the regional crime squads, we are now at a time of crisis insofar as drugs and guns are concerned because not enough resources are getting through to a particular area from the national service that has been set up. The resources are being diverted to immigration crime and all sorts of other areas. We no longer have the specialist support that we might have had in the past and could, perhaps, have again if we were able to draw on more national resources.
Alan Simpson: Again, I do not know what the National Crime Squad has done in respect of diverting its resources. I made the point initially that Nottingham has not had sufficient support from the National Crime Squad to address or halt the problems with which the police, local authorities and local communities are being confronted. In that sense, I can say yes to the right hon. and learned Gentleman. It is for the National Crime Squad to come up with an explanation. My gut feeling is that local communities—and, to some extent, the police and local authorities—feel that they are on their own.
I was coming on to the point that local people do not feel that it is safe to come forward with information about the possession of guns that are circulating in their communities. One family said to me that it was very easy to talk about the problem from the outside, but that until someone has had the experience of having a gun pointed in their face with the threat that if they say a word to the police, they—or their kids—will be dead, they cannot truly understand it. It changes people's sense of how safe they can feel when they realise that to stay alive is to stay silent. We have to deal with that fear by putting mechanisms in place to allow safe channels for information that do not put the lives of others in the community at risk. I would like to set out how that might be done.
When I spoke to people about the problem, they were aware that the Government had successfully run a rat-on-a rat campaign. My belief is that we should now be telling people in Nottingham to grass on a gun. The experience of the tragic and completely senseless death of Danielle Beccan has forced people to cross a line. It is no longer seen as an issue between rival gangs, but as an issue that intrudes on innocent young lives. I believe that
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we will see a huge response from local communities and the local authority in Nottingham, but there must be mechanisms in place to make them feel safe.
People told me that it would be good to run a grass-on-a-gun campaign, but that more amnesty days would also have to be provided. If we are to say to our own kids in our own communities, "If I hear that you are carrying or stashing or that your mates, nephews or school friends are doing it, I will pick up the phone to send the information on", there has to be an element of security.
The problem is twofold. First, people have to know that there will be a police response, so the police need resources to back it up. It is not an effective message if people believe that the police will follow it up only in two or three days' time, when the guns may no longer be in the place reported or in the possession of the people reported. The police must be available to deal with the level of information at the point at which communities feel safe to provide it.
Secondly, people's own confidence and security is important. I am often asked to explain why we allow cars with blacked-out windows on our streets. It is easy to see what happens on the pavements when cars with blacked-out windows slow down—people back away. The expectation is that there is something untoward going on inside the car that could easily threaten their lives. People often ask me what is the case for allowing that to happen. A case could be made for allowing blacked-out windows only with special licences. The ambulance service and perhaps Securicor services need such windows. Licences could be extended even to people running stretched limos for certain social occasions, but why does anyone else who has nothing to hide require the right to drive round streets in vehicles that are perceived as constituting a threat to local communities? I cannot see any reason why we do not make it a requirement for all vehicles to have a special licence to have blacked-out windows. The police could then have the power to stop vehicles to check the licence and, if necessary, to check the vehicles. It would remove a completely unnecessary threat from the streets of the communities where people live.
Patrick Mercer: What consideration has the hon. Gentleman given to an extended witness protection programme?
Alan Simpson:
I know that that is a very weak area. Families who are willing to give information that could be traced back to them ask us how their families can be protected. They do not want much, but they do want to live. We have seriously weakened the ability of local authorities to offer emergency rehousing as part of witness protection schemes. I know of several cases in which people have given evidence and have been moved by the local authority. However, the details of their relocation in Nottingham have been discovered and they have asked to be moved to another part of the country, but the transfer system between local authorities has broken down. It requires a police officer to say that the people involved must be moved as part of a witness protection scheme. The bureaucracy stretches out across a time scale that does not equate to the day-to-day sense of risk that the families involved feel. That is a matter of cash resources and the inability of local authorities to put the safety of families before the bureaucracy of the system.
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I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and his team will visit Nottingham on 5 November. It will give Ministers an opportunity to talk directly to those involved in making the policies and driving the strategies that will intervene at a community level. It will give Ministers the chance to hear and co-ordinate what needs to happen nationally with what happens in local areas. I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends will be able to bring us some positive news about the resources that are needed. Piecemeal resources are no good—we need the clarity of a structured intervention.
I hope that the message that will come across in the press and to the people of Nottingham is that the Stand Together initiative in the city will be continued in the days and years to come. That has to involve the measures needed to tackle national and international sources of supply, as well as empowering communities to make a stand on their own behalf. The killing of Danielle Beccan was a watershed for the people of Nottingham. The outrage that it provoked will change the way in which communities feel willing to act in partnership with others. That amounts to a policy challenge for the Government and for local communities. People now know that the challenge at local level is to take the toys from the boys. We have to do that because they are not toys any more, but weapons that take lives—and not only of those involved in gang conflict or in drug and turf wars. They kill children. In many ways, the guns are now a threat to our future. Unless we stand together, we will not deliver a future safe for our children to live in. I hope that we can.
7.4 pm
Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath) (Con): It is a genuine pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson). He is a thoughtful, sincere and well informed Member of Parliament, as well as a diligent constituency representative. He has proved that once again this evening.
Like the hon. Gentleman, I grew up in the midlands, albeit a little further south. I also practised at the Bar, prosecuting and defending criminal cases involving drugs and firearms offences for several years from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, I share his concern about what is happening in all the midlands cities. Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Danielle Beccan at the moment, but we all share the same concerns about all our inner cities and the problems that drugs and crime cause.
This is my first set-piece speech from the Back Benches for more than five years. Since I was first appointed to the Front Bench in 1999, I have always been either a shadow Home Office or shadow legal affairs Minister—although at times I also had other responsibilities, such as sport. I mention that because I have therefore had the privilege of receiving detailed briefings on several of the issues that are the subject of the Opposition motion and the Government amendment.
I shall, for obvious reasons, refer to the briefings only in general terms, but I raised one particular issue in an intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis): the concern that many of the leading investigation authorities, such
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as the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, have had for several years about the greater prevalence of the use of guns by drug barons who have come to this country from other countries—in particular, from Albania. One of the sad effects of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia was a big increase in criminals coming into this country, sometimes surreptitiously from Albania or Kosovo, and sometimes openly, by claiming to come from other eastern European countries. We have seen the detection recently of a few of those drug and crime barons. When they entered the country, they claimed to be from Hungary, Bulgaria or the Czech Republic, but on investigation they were crime lords from Albania and Kosovo. We have also had an influx of serious criminals from India and Pakistan, and also from China.
The criminal gangs link the trafficking of drugs, people and guns, the exploitation of women and children and associated kidnap and ransom crime. It has been said that Albanian criminals have proved too wild and murderous for the Italian police and the police in southern France to cope with. They are a major problem that we ignore at our peril. The Albanians have in many cases taken over the drug rings from the Jamaican Yardies, who for many years brought in large quantities of crack cocaine, which is, as we know, both psychologically addictive and associated with a very violent culture. We now have an extraordinary problem, the like of which this country has not had to deal with before.
There are now far too many people using hard drugs in all our inner cities and even in our country towns. The hon. Member for Nottingham, South described all too vividly the kind of problems that his constituents face, with children being used as drug runners. I am sure that his description will have been chilling for anyone who heard it and for those who read it subsequently.
The police are doing their best to cope with these new problems and challenges. For my own area of Surrey, I wish to pay tribute to Denis O'Connor, who recently retired as chief constable but who has gone on to become one of Her Majesty's inspectors of constabulary. He was a superb leader of the Surrey county force and engendered the spirit within Surrey police that enabled many of his officers to produce great success in tackling crime, including major drugs seizures. Only recently there was a successful prosecution of drug dealers who were using a gymnasium in my constituency as the centre of their operations. I pay tribute to the work of Surrey police, led by Denis O'Connor, in tackling the drugs menace in recent years.
Unfortunately, people are concerned that the priorities in every part of the country and in the mind of every senior police officer are not the same as the general public would wish them to be. I was horrified, and I think that most law-abiding people were horrified, to hear a senior spokesman from the Association of Chief Police Officers recently say that the police will not spend much time on crime detection if there is no compelling evidence pointing to those responsible. Some crimes that are of huge concern to the public are so infrequently detected that informed commentators have pointed out
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that an air of hopelessness, which affects the victims of crime and the police, now sadly affects the whole process.
Official figures show that only 12 per cent. of burglaries are being cleared up. Even in the metropolis, where much good work has been done under Sir John Stevens, crime screening guidelines, which are being copied—in my view wrongly—in many parts of the UK, have downgraded some offences to "less serious crimes", which, to my amazement, include burglary. It is said that unless immediate and compelling evidence points to the culprits, such crimes will not be investigated further. We have reached a pretty pass if dwelling house burglary is no longer regarded as a serious enough crime to receive police priority.
The statistics relating to police clear-up—what are called detection rates—demonstrate that. In 1980, 40 per cent. of all recorded crimes were detected. The most recent figure that I have is for the year ending 2002, when the rate was down to 23 per cent. Moreover, the proportion of those detected crimes that resulted in a conviction fell from 18 to 9 per cent. There is a huge variation in detection rates between forces. The Audit Commission concluded that the variations are not explicable simply in terms of work load or local circumstances. It thinks that such patchiness is indicative of a misuse of resources. That is why Conservatives want a vast increase in police numbers and a guarantee that they will be properly deployed. One of the things that I find from talking to people about policing and crime is that the law-abiding population are, sadly, now far less confident that the police are being properly deployed and that they are concentrating on the right things. There is certainly huge concern that the law-abiding members of our community do not see police officers out on the beat.
I recognise that intelligence-led policing, as the vogue phrase has it, has a role to play when we talk about tackling serious and organised crime, but surely the first duty of every police force is to ensure that the law abiding are protected and feel protected. All too often in conversations with law-abiding people, I find that there is a lack of confidence in the police because there has been too much concentration on slogans and the kind of things that the Home Secretary talked about. If law-abiding citizens were to read what I can only describe as a contemptuous and dismissive speech by the Home Secretary of Great Britain, many of them would be angry because he complained that he heard nothing but doom and gloom, but the law-abiding people of this country know that the position in terms of guns, drugs and crime is, sadly, doom and gloom.
The Opposition motion makes it clear that the problem with the Government is that they think that having a strategy, initiative or announcement means that they are solving the problem. When the Home Secretary was challenged on that, he said that when the Conservatives were in government they did not have this initiative or that strategy, but it is not initiatives or strategies that the people of Great Britain want: it is criminals being caught and locked up so that they can no longer prey on the law abiding. Strategies, initiatives and bureaucracy do not achieve that.
There are few better examples of what I and law-abiding people are complaining about than the Home Office brochure that I have here entitled "Policing:
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Building Safer Communities Together". About half the questions in it are on things like the community advocacy service. It says:
"Would you like a community advocacy service in your area? . . . Who do you think should sit on the"
"boards? . . . Would you welcome the creation of a neighbourhood panel in your area?"
I do not know how much taxpayers' money was spent on producing a huge number of copies of the brochure, but I guarantee that every law-abiding person would rather give money to chief constables to have more police officers on the beat than spend it on producing glossy brochures asking nonsensical questions about new ideas that the Government have for bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is not the answer; it is the problem. It is not what the people want. Unfortunately, it is what the Government believe in.
There are few better examples of the problem than the Home Secretary's response to an excellent intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) about the collapse in the number of special constables. The Home Secretary simply did not understand my hon. Friend's point that if special constables are no longer available, and the number has reduced hugely since the Government came to power, they cannot patrol with the regulars. The Home Secretary's response was to say that some of the specials have become regulars. That is true and welcome, but it does not explain the huge collapse in the number of special constables. People are so upset about the lack of policing in their area because the Government have shown little interest in getting police on the street. It is all talk, strategies, committees, bureaucracy and no action.
The Home Secretary speaks as if all he has done is to improve the position, but that contrasts with what serving police officers say. A police sergeant was quoted in Police Review as saying:
"Officers spend so much time dealing with administration. The increased bureaucracy from"
Labour's proposals for more changes
"will further add to the time a sergeant spends on the whole process."
The Government are not taking any notice of that problem.
The Government are obsessed with their complex and expensive IT solutions. I predict here and now that their incredibly complicated and expensive IT project will turn out to be a disaster, just like every other IT project with which they have been associated. I predict that in a few years' time the Public Accounts Committee will have to inquire into the huge waste of taxpayers' money and the fact that the project has gone wildly over budget and does not work. It will be just like all the other IT disasters over which the Government have presided.
If I am right in predicting that the project will be another publicly funded IT disaster, all the taxpayers' money will be thrown down the drain instead of being spent on getting police officers back on the streets. I am not saying that there is no use for IT; I am just saying
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that the Home Secretary's decision to concentrate on the IT project as solving all the problems will not cut any ice with people who are worried about the rise in crime.
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