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Community Policing

7. Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe) (Lab): If he will take steps to introduce a policing career structure specialising in community policing. [219834]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Fiona Mactaggart): We are in discussion with the police service about the development of career pathways for police and police staff, including community support officers. It is important that officers who remain in front-line neighbourhood policing are valued and have a clear career structure that reflects their commitment.

Dr. Palmer: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's reply. In teaching, when the best teachers used to be promoted to department head they no longer did any direct teaching. The position is similar in community policing, because the best community support officers become beat officers and the best beat officers become detectives, so we lose that base of expertise in the community. Will the Minister consider creating the police equivalent of the super-teachers who dealt with the educational problem? We would then have community policing specialists, and officers would feel that such policing was a long-term career, for which they would be rewarded if they stayed in the community.

Fiona Mactaggart: My hon. Friend is right to highlight the issue. We want to ensure that, in the words of Lord Scarman 25 years ago, beat officers should be seen

"not as occupying the bottom of the police pecking order . . . but at its apex, in the forefront of the police team".

The development of a career pathway has been made more   achievable through the development of teams of community support officers, which gives neighbourhood police sergeants and constables the chance to lead a team. Those are some of the ways in which we are developing a career pathway at neighbourhood level. I know that that is much wanted in my hon. Friend's constituency, because that is what I was told when I met a group of community support officers in Broxtowe last year.

Miss Anne McIntosh (Vale of York) (Con): How can a county such as North Yorkshire fund a structure for community policing when we are so heavily dependent on targeted grant funding? If that aspect were removed, there would be an extra £1.25 million in the police precept each year.

Fiona Mactaggart: I know that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has visited the hon. Lady's police authority and discussed the matter with the chief constable. The main issue concerning funding of our police service is that on police funding, the Labour party does what it says on the tin. We have increased the number of police officers on the streets to 140,000. The former Prime Minister from the hon. Lady's party promised in October 1995 that he had found the resources over the following three years to put not 500, but an 5,000 extra police officers on the beat—yet what   he actually did was cut the police service by almost 500.
 
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Lawrie Quinn (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab): To the list of colleagues on the Government Front Bench who recently visited North Yorkshire may I add my hon. Friend the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing and Community Safety? During her visit she saw community policing successfully deployed in North Yorkshire. I do not recognise the comments made by the hon. Member for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh) about the county. The core of the matter is to work closely with the community, so will the hon. Lady listen closely to the great messages that my hon. Friend will be able to play into the process, and into the Home Office, to help build a proper community support officer structure in the police force nationally?

Fiona Mactaggart: It certainly can be done. Within our current promotion and retention strategies, there is an opportunity to provide special priority payments and other mechanisms to enable police officers to stay in the front line in the community. North Wales police authority and Devon and Cornwall police authority have already used those structures to enable officers who are committed to being in the front line in the community for two or three years to receive additional payments in recognition of their work.

Mr. Mark Francois (Rayleigh) (Con): A vital component of community policing is the special constabulary which provides important reinforcement for regular officers. Special constables also need an effective career structure. Will the Minister tell the House how many special constables were serving in 1997 and how many are serving now?

Fiona Mactaggart: The hon. Gentleman is right to celebrate the fantastic job that special constables can do. I was proud to be part of a team giving awards to specials who had gone far in the course of their commitment to the police service, and I am pleased to announce that this year the number of specials has increased. I am also confident that in this year of the volunteer, their number will continue to increase. We will focus on the contribution made by volunteers in the justice system in the year of the volunteer in a couple of months, and that will give us a chance to build on and accelerate the progress that we are making in special recruitment. The hon. Gentleman and I share the ambition to use the talents of people who will commit their time voluntarily to our policing and work side by side with professional police officers.

Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab): North Wales police have introduced a scheme whereby community beat managers commit themselves to a three-year term in a particular area of the town. As a consequence, Sergeant Darren Jacks and his team in the Caia Park area of Wrexham have achieved a huge increase in confidence in policing in the area. Will the Minister commend Sergeant Jacks and his team on that work and encourage other police authorities to look at the North Wales experience, because real community policing has a huge beneficial effect on confidence in policing in communities?
 
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Fiona Mactaggart: In an earlier reply, I mentioned that the North Wales police service had introduced special priority payments. The example that my hon. Friend mentions is important, because Caia Park is a difficult place to police. However, fantastic strides have been made by using the present career structure imaginatively and intelligently. The special priority payments have been used to encourage officers to commit to the front-line role and achieve the ambition that Lord Scarman described of putting the neighbourhood police officer at the apex of our policing strategy.

Drugs

8. Mr. Bill Wiggin (Leominster) (Con): if he will reassess the merits of the private Member's Bill of the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans). [219835]

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Charles Clarke): The Government opposed that private Member's Bill because its proposed measures are already available, so its three provisions are redundant. The Drugs Bill contains further provisions to strengthen the law against drug dealers, while aiming to offer prompt and effective treatment to all who need it. I hope that all Opposition parties will assist it in its passage through Parliament.

Mr. Wiggin: I am grateful for that answer, but it is a shame that Marjorie Wallace, the chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, commented:

"We would urge the Government to reverse its decision on classification, backing that with a multi-million pound education and awareness campaign on the dangers of cannabis for young people who are developing."

I hope that the Home Secretary will do that.

Mr. Clarke: I understand the point made by the hon. Gentleman, but it was not addressed in the private Member's Bill to which he referred. That Bill suggested that the Government set up a commission to examine the effects and classification of cannabis. Such a commission already exists. It is a statutory body that reviews the harm caused by drugs and it is called the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. That professional, statutory body considered the classification of cannabis in March 2002 and made the recommendation for reclassification to which the hon. Gentleman refers. We do need to debate these issues, but to suggest that the decision was based on anything other than professional opinion at the time is mistaken.

Mr. Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con): The United Nations figures show that the amount of heroin flooding into this country has increased. We have the third largest number of heroin users in Europe and the price has come down dramatically. The Home Secretary says that we have the powers on the statute book, but is he surprised that so few people have been given the mandatory seven-year sentence for being persistent class A drug offenders? Can he assure the House, and the country, that during the general election we will not hear anything about the Government being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime?
 
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Mr. Clarke: First, it is good that more drugs, in particular heroin, have been seized. Secondly, on the question of drug dealers, I remind the House that in 1994, 30 per cent. of dealers received custodial sentences of more than two years. Now, 66 per cent. of such offenders receive a sentence of at least two years, and the proportion getting five years or more has doubled. There has been a dramatic increase both in the numbers of drug dealers who get custodial sentences and in the time to which they are sentenced. That is a substantial contrast with what the Opposition did during their time in government. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it would be as well to judge such matters on the facts—such as those that I have just described.

Mrs. Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con): During proceedings on the Drugs (Sentencing and Commission of Inquiry) Bill, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) told us that arrest for cannabis possession had been cut by a third over the past year. During that time prices have dropped to their lowest level, the market is flooded, increasing evidence is showing the damaging effects on health, and more and more children are thinking that it is safe to try cannabis. When he was a junior Home Office Minister, the Home Secretary himself admitted in a written answer that

"most users of class A drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, started off by using . . . cannabis".—[Official Report, 31 October 2000; Vol. 355; c. 430W.]

When will he reassess the disastrous reclassification of cannabis and put the police back to work on stopping the spread of the drug that is the foundation stone of the drugs problem—or has he changed his mind?

Mr. Clarke: I welcome that question, from this point of view: I want to make it absolutely clear that nothing justifies the consumption of cannabis by young people or anybody else. All the education that we work on with the Department for Education and Skills and the teaching profession makes that clear. The reason for making such intelligence available is to make it clear that the consumption of cannabis is wrong, illegal and a mistake. Of course the hon. Lady is right to say that it is necessary to continue to prosecute that argument, and we will do so, but she should not seek to mislead in her description of the situation.

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