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Mr. Heath: Without wishing to be in any way unkind, to the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield, this may be another matter in relation to which he is on a journey: the Conservative party's position on community support officers is changing incrementally as time goes by. As I have made plain on previous occasions, we have always felt that community support officers were a good idea. Some are now deployed in my constituency, and I am extremely pleased that they are there. I have been to see them and shaken them by the hand, and I am delighted to have them patrolling the streets of some small communities that would otherwise not see a police officer regularly, because of the paucity of officers in the rural county of Somerset.
Mr. Mitchell: Just to be clear, I assure the hon. Gentleman that I do not take his remarks as any unkindness; since the day I became the shadow police Minister I have made it clear that, in the narrow terms that I define, we welcome PCSOs. Our great concern is that the Government are moving too quickly and too fast, and giving them powers for which they are not trained. That has been the burden of my speech. They have a valuable role in policing, but it must not be overstated. That was my view on Second Reading, and I said so on the Floor of the House.
Mr. Heath: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has been consistent in his personal position; I am not sure that that position has always been adopted by his colleagues in relation to previous legislation on this matter. However, he gave us an example of his work with community support officers—indeed, I am getting slightly worried about the Conservative Front Benchers, who seem to be acting as a sort of vigilante force. It is entirely commendable, but one wonders what risks they are running fighting crime in such a hands-on way.
Mr. Mitchell: I should like to make it absolutely clear to the Committee that there was no act of personal bravery on my part, as there was in the case of my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield. I merely reported matters to the PCSOs and disappeared behind my front door.
Mr. Heath: I shall not tease the hon. Gentleman further.
Many of us support the concept of CSOs and see them as a potentially valuable part of the policing family, as I believe we are supposed to call the variety of officers now available. However, we also recognise—this relates to the point made by the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield—that there is a huge danger of expecting too much of them. They have a particular role to play—a role that should perhaps be more carefully circumscribed. I can think of no purer illustration of the concerns of many than the Prime Minister's response during Prime Minister's questions a couple of weeks ago. Inadvertently, he talked about community support officers supplanting full-time
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police officers—we know that he meant supplementing, but he said supplanting, and it appeared in Hansard as supplanting, even though No. 10 is normally assiduous in having such misspeaks removed. That is precisely the concern that many people feel.
To return an important point that I made earlier in our consideration of the Bill, when the Minister of State was not present, there is a real fear that the role of community support officers is expanding from below, as it were—that there is an incremental approach to their powers. SOCA and the officers who will be involved with it—we are told that they are not police officers, irrespective of the fact that they are—are taking on specific roles at the top. There is a danger that the real police force, the attested officer, will become a narrowly circumscribed rump between the two—the police will become more like a gendarmerie whose primary function is the keeping of the peace instead of genuinely omnicompetent constables. The Minister must be aware of that very real fear among those who are watching what the Government are doing. That is why we need to test carefully any proposal to extend the powers of CSOs beyond what they should be. As I said earlier, they should be the eyes and ears of the police service, providing a visible presence on the streets to offer reassurance to the population and to report to and pass information on to the police service.
Inevitably, somebody who is put on the street in a blue uniform will at times face circumstances in which he wishes he had greater powers than he has been given by statute. That is not the test, however. The test is not whether it would be useful in such circumstances for a CSO to have the power; it is whether it is sensible for CSOs to be diverted from their primary function in order to exercise a power for which they have not been adequately trained or prepared. That is why we have to consider the Government's proposals critically.
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I have no problem with some of the suggested powers—for example, I have argued almost from the start that community support officers should have a bigger role in traffic offence policing in villages, because it is nonsense to require the attendance of a police constable rather than use such officers to deal with minor traffic offences. I get much more twitchy when we deal with powers of search and seizure, because we are coming close to, if not exceeding, the proper powers of a police constable.
Mr. Mitchell: The point about the placing of traffic signs on which I need reassurance is this: signs placed incorrectly could confuse a motorist coming into an area, who is unused to the way in which the signs are positioned. Therefore, without people receiving the right training, such powers and responsibilities, if wrongly used, could lead to accidents and worse. I need to be satisfied that that will not be case under this creeping increase of powers, and I agree with what the hon. Gentleman has said about the inherent dangers.
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Mr. Heath: I am grateful for that explanation. We are talking about supervision rather than anything else; I do not believe that someone will be recruited as a CSO who is so deficient in common sense as to not understand their basic duties. However, they put themselves at risk and there is a question about their capacity to react to unforeseen circumstances when dealing with search and seizure powers. I also have a fundamental concern about whether such powers are intrinsically linked to the attested officer, the office of constable or the equivalent in bodies such as Customs and Excise, rather than to CSOs. The Minister needs to persuade me on that.
I can understand the rationale behind the proposal, especially in the case of community support officers patrolling areas set up as alcohol-free zones by byelaw in a town centre and effectively acting as—I hope that this is not an inappropriately disparaging term—security officers. There is an argument that they should be able to deal with whatever nuisances they find in those circumstances. However, the Minister must assure the Committee about how those powers will be used, because they raise question marks about what happens not when it all goes right, but when it all goes wrong. That is my concern.
I do not want to put community support officers at risk, nor do I want them to be diverted from their principal duties. I do not want to put police officers at risk through having to put right the deficiencies of their colleagues. I want the criminal justice system to work effectively. For all of that to happen, the Home Office has to have a clear idea of where the boundaries should be set, but I have a feeling that they are shifting in the same direction and that the police service is being squeezed in the middle. I do not want that to happen.
Mr. Djanogly: My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield and the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome have advanced a wide variety of arguments that I would have made, and I support pretty much everything that has been said so far. However, the key question that arose in the debate was at what point does an effective CSO become an untrained and cheap policeman? That point will come. Despite supporting CSOs and continuing to do so, we have grave concerns, first, that the measures proposed in the Bill will shift the balance and, secondly, that because CSOs have been in place for only a short period, it is too early to understand fully what their proper role should be and how they have settled into their role to date. The Government have not done enough research or put together enough information to explain the position of CSOs across the country and where we should go from there.
Whichever way we consider the matter, CSOs amount to policing on the cheap. We support them, mainly because we are desperate to see uniformed people in our towns and villages, but CSOs are no alternative to fully trained police officers. More to the point, CSOs do not come free from central Government. They are normally provided on a matched funding basis. There is always a cost to the local taxpayer, because central Government will never pay the whole amount. There is a good side to CSOs,
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in that they are not tied to central Government targets. For instance, at one point Cambridgeshire was not meeting the arrest targets set by central Government—something that the Conservatives will get rid of. The chief constable's response was to send all the local police officers into the local cities so that he could meet the then Home Secretary's targets for the year; however, the CSOs at least were not moved from the villages in which they were policing. There are therefore advantages in having CSOs, but it is still policing on the cheap.
There are risks, most of which have been set out. Those that come to mind particularly are the concerns that many have expressed about CSOs intervening in public order situations, including searching people, dealing with beggars and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield said in broadening the debate, dealing with drugs crimes. On average, CSOs will have three weeks' training. That may be enough to enable them to perform their basic tasks and to train them to use the basic equipment, such an anti-stab vest, effectively, but is three weeks enough time to train them to use a baton or CS gas? Such issues are of concern.
The discretionary exercise of CSOs' powers varies from police force to police force. Each chief constable can decide on the applicable powers that he or she feels are appropriate to his or her area. That seems right if we consider CSOs' basic powers, but as those powers grow the need for uniformity becomes more persuasive. I share the concerns that have been voiced so far in this debate and look forward to hearing what the Minister says about the monitoring of CSOs once the powers in question are given, in different ways, across the whole country.
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