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6.25 pm
David T.C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): I, too, declare an interest as a special constable and a member of the Home Affairs Committee.
Virtually anyone who takes an interest in justice and home affairs would agree that the crime figures have gone up—unless, of course, they happen to work in the Home Office. But even Home Office Ministers now admit that crime is likely to increase over the next few years as a result of the recession, so we are certainly agreed on that. I personally think that it is very difficult to trust the statistics, whether one uses the recorded crime figures or the British crime survey, which is little more than an opinion poll. It does not take into account crimes committed on people under the age of 16 or property offences, and drug offences are unlikely to show up. So a gamut of offences is unlikely to show up, and the people behind the survey are simply asking a small sample of people, rather than the entire population, to give their opinions about crime, so it is as accurate at best as a political opinion poll. Recorded crime statistics are no real gauge either, because much of the violent crime that takes place on Britain’s streets is carried out between young people, who very often do not report it, even if they are the victims.
If the Government want to get an idea of what is really going on, they could do a lot worse than to ask someone such as Cherie Blair, who has undertaken work with the Street Weapons Commission and found out that the number of people with knife wounds who enter accident and emergency units has gone up by 85 per cent. over the past five years. However, most of those crimes will not be reported to the police, because there is no obligation on hospitals to do so. One of the best things that the Government could do is to ensure that information on anyone who goes into hospital,
showing signs of having been either beaten up or stabbed, should be passed to the police. Not only would that help to tackle gang violence, but it could be used to help to tackle the curse of domestic violence.
David T.C. Davies: I am happy to give way, unlike the Home Secretary.
Mr. Woolas: The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting speech. The statistics on A and E admissions and knife crime were, of course, at the centre of the controversy, but we felt that it was right to publish those figures, because of the point that he is making.
David T.C. Davies: The Government are right to publish those figures. Some good work is being done by the Government at the moment, and I will come to that before I make too many criticisms, but I shall first return to the picture of crime and follow some of the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins).
All sorts of reasons are given about why crime is so high—as another hon. Member said, it is certainly too high—but I do not accept that poverty is one of them. Of course, one can find a statistical link between poverty and crime, but simply not having money does not cause people to commit crime. Happily, I come from a reasonably comfortable background, although perhaps not as privileged as some. My mother was a miner’s daughter. She grew up in relative poverty. She says that there was hardly any crime in her community. My wife is from a family of agricultural labourers in eastern Europe. They live in a block of flats, where there is no crime, no graffiti and people are nice to one another.
What causes crime? Although this sounds a little old-fashioned, I think that the cause in many cases is a lack of proper family structure, but I take issue with people who talk about single-parent mothers. Such comments are lazy and an insult to the vast majority of people who do an excellent job in bringing up their children. I would never use that term, and I hope that other Members would not use it either. However, we ought to be honest enough to admit that there is a problem in some estates that have high levels of poverty with young people who become pregnant. If we ever talk about single-parent mothers, let us admit that it takes two to tango; there is a single father somewhere who has behaved in an irresponsible fashion.
We in this Chamber all have relatively comfortable lives and are responsible people, but we all know how difficult it is to get our children to say please and thank you, and to mind their manners. How much harder will that be for somebody with very little education and money who lives on a difficult estate? It will be impossible. Sadly, children who grow up surrounded by crime, drugs and benefits are likely to fall into the system. I do not know whether I put that tactfully enough, but it is true and we all know it. We should be able to address that.
We need to do more to support schools. It is a cliché, but by the time people are in the clutches of the police, it is too late. We need to be able to tackle bad behaviour before things get that far. That is why we should be doing more to support schools that want to take disciplinary
measures against pupils—and not just pupils who walk in carrying knives, or who assault teachers, but pupils who walk in without their top button done up, or not wearing the proper uniform. That way, children will know that there are boundaries and things that they cannot do, and that if they transgress those boundaries, there will be consequences. That message does not get through at the moment.
I have some experience of the police, and experience of some of the good things that the Government are doing. I do not want to be critical all the time; there are Government initiatives that I fully support. For example, I support greater use of the Taser. I saw the most ludicrous Liberal Democrat press release this morning. It refers to “Taser guns”. Clearly, the Liberal Democrats are not aware that a Taser is not a gun at all; it is not a firearm, in the sense that it does not fire a projectile bullet. A Taser is far less dangerous than the baton that all police officers carry. That is why it is possible for police officers to fire a Taser at each other to experience the effects. Nobody in their right mind would stand there while somebody hit them with a police-issue baton, which could be absolutely lethal if it caught somebody in the wrong place. I notice that the press release refers to “children”. In their inconsistent fashion, the Liberal Democrats refer to “children” whenever somebody aged between 16 and 18 is involved in the criminal justice system, but to “adults” when coming forward with other ludicrous policies, such as giving voting rights to 16-year-olds, a subject that we will not go into now.
Tom Brake: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
David T.C. Davies: I could not say no, could I?
Tom Brake: I could not stand it any longer; I had to intervene. May I recommend that the hon. Gentleman look at Amnesty International’s report on the use of Tasers, and that he consider, in particular, the number of people who have died as a result of being tasered but who did not present a real danger or threat?
David T.C. Davies: I have looked at the Amnesty report, which deals, I think, with America. America has a very different system of policing from the United Kingdom and any other western European state. It is not a system of policing that I would recommend. If Amnesty were to consider the issue in context, it would have to look into how many people would have been shot dead with a bullet by American police officers had Tasers not been available to them. If a 16 or 17-year-old armed with a knife, and possibly high on drugs, came towards the hon. Gentleman, and the only person in the way was a police officer, I think that the hon. Gentleman would prefer the police officer to have a Taser than to rely on gas or anything else.
Of course, the training given to police officers who use Tasers is extensive. First and foremost, however, they are trained not to use them, but simply to show them. When the press release refers to hundreds of people being
“exposed to the use of Taser”,
it includes cases in which the police officer has shown somebody who is acting violently that the Taser is there and is an option, but has not actually used it. In any case, Tasers all have microphones, which means that the chances of them being misused in this country are very slight indeed. The Government are absolutely right on the issue, and they went about things in the right way; they used a pilot study, and have allowed chief constables to decide on the subject for themselves.
Willie Rennie (Dunfermline and West Fife) (LD): As the hon. Gentleman thinks that Tasers are such tame weapons, will he volunteer to be tasered?
David T.C. Davies: I would be happy to do so if the hon. Gentleman let somebody wallop him over the head with a baton; that is the alternative that police officers have at the moment.
What the Government have done on forms is quite good. The stop-and-account form is going, but there is more that they could do. The stop and search form is still very lengthy. I accept that there are situations in which it needs to be fully filled in, but when members of the public are stopped and subjected to a random search under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, often the problem is not so much that they find the search intrusive; it is more that they are irritated about the fact that they have to stand around for five or 10 minutes while the police officer takes down all sorts of information, which is often unnecessary. That delays them in getting to where they want to go. The search that is usually carried out is no different to the one that we all experience when we go into an airport. The public are getting used to the idea that a quick frisk is sometimes necessary for their own safety. The issue is the length of the form and the fact that the public are not aware that they do not have to wait for the police officer to fill it all in. Police officers should be encouraged to say, “You don’t have to wait, but if you want a record of the search, I am happy to get it for you.”
As I have mentioned before, it is inconsistent that police officers who stop people who are committing offences, who simply wish to talk to a person, or who detain a person so that they can be summonsed for a revenue offence, cannot carry out a quick search. Very often, those people are involved in criminality, and I would change the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to allow that to happen. If the Minister for Borders and Immigration wants to make a quick hit and get rid of a whole load of paperwork, he could give the British Transport police the power to issue penalty notices for disorder for revenue offences. Transport for London can do so, but the police cannot, which means that they have to get through a whole load of paperwork if they want to prosecute somebody for such an offence.
To return to the big picture, the problem is not the number of police officers. There are adequate numbers of police officers. The problem is that a small number of people commit so much crime that they take up all the time that should be available to police officers. In 2003, the Carter report suggested that half of all crime in this country is carried out by about 100,000 people, of whom only 15,000 are in prison at any particular time. Every police officer meets those people almost daily. They are arrested; two officers take them to a police station; a whole laborious process is gone through; the
person is bailed and is then back out on the streets, and carries out further offences on the following day. That is why we need not more police officers, but more prison officers and prisons.
I do not accept the comments made about the cost of keeping people in prison. The cost of keeping somebody in a category D prison is about £25,000 a year. Most of the people who go to those prisons are on benefits. It was not I who brought up the issue of cost, but other Members have done so. The net cost of keeping somebody in prison is far cheaper than people realise. I believe that the net cost to the taxpayer of keeping somebody in a category D prison is not more than about £10,000 a year. The cost of keeping them out on the streets committing one offence after another is absolutely horrendous. It is also a huge burden on police time.
I agree with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Woking. There are two prisons in my constituency, which I have visited. I have also visited other prisons with the Home Affairs Committee. There is nothing like as much work going on in those prisons to help offenders as there could be. What I propose is not dissimilar to what my hon. Friend suggested. Yes, we should put people in prison, and make it clear to them that they should serve their sentence in full. It is a disgrace that somebody given four years in prison could be out in one year and seven months under some sort of early release scheme, and that somebody sentenced to a year in prison will be out after just three months.
One of the reasons why reoffending is so high is that prison is not seen as any sort of deterrent. A Faustian pact is made; because people are usually in prison for only a couple of months, the authorities effectively say, “Give us a quiet life and you can have your PlayStation and your television. Just don’t cause us any trouble,” so people spend all their time in their cells. We should get people out of their cells and get them working. We should give them practical skills. That is what happens in prisons such as Usk, which deals with special types of offenders. We should get that sort of culture into all prisons, particularly those dealing with younger people. Remission should not be automatic. Indeed, I am opposed in general to any form of early release. However, if we are to have early release, I would make it conditional on people getting rudimentary educational skills, passing exams and getting some sort of vocational skill that could give them a chance to work in the real world. Unless we start to tackle what goes on in the justice system, crime will continue to rise, and the police will find it harder and harder to cope.
6.39 pm
Mr. Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth, East) (Con): I am delighted to be able to participate in this important debate. May I start by saying how embarrassed I am that more colleagues are not present in the Chamber to discuss these important issues? I count just one Labour Back Bencher and one Liberal Democrat Back Bencher, who has just turned up. That is an embarrassment to the Chamber, and to the House of Commons. We should show the country a bit more honour when dealing with these issues.
The first objective of any Government is the maintenance of law and order. Without it there is no trust, no stability and no basis for a civil democratic society to
develop. I remind the House of a definition of law and order. It is a state of society where the vast majority of the population respect the rule of law, and where the law enforcement agencies observe laws that limit their powers.
The Government’s obligations are, first, to ensure that the appropriate laws are passed, and to allow the police and the courts to carry out their business fairly. The second objective is to provide the funds to ensure that there are sufficient resources for that to happen, for if law is poorly written or insufficient, it can be exploited by criminal elements. If law is too restrictive, it can place limitations on individual freedoms. Aside from the dictatorial tendencies that that can produce, it can hinder the free market and the potential prosperity of a nation.
With insufficient funding, police cannot enforce the law or train to understand the new challenges that we face—for example, cyberfraud and terrorism, neither of which has been mentioned in the debate. Cuts in front-line policing are likely to take place. We have heard that time and again from the constabularies. The reason is the recession that we are going through, which brings with it a wave of crime. Large numbers of police forces, unfortunately, are planning to cut thousands of officers. That is the case because the Government do not understand the priorities. I understand that 19 of the 43 constabularies are being forced to cut the number of officers, and that is simply to do with money.
The budget that has been set for 2009-10 is causing these cuts, with forces having to agree settlements of 2.8 per cent. Twenty of the police forces throughout the country have received only a 2.5 per cent. increase. One of those forces is Dorset’s. If we get only a 2.5 per cent. increase in our budget— [Interruption.] Does the Minister wish me to give way? I shall finish the point and gladly give way. If Dorset receives only 2.5 per cent., but has to meet a pay award of 2.6 per cent., it will clearly have to make budget cuts. It cannot pay the police salaries without a shortfall elsewhere. That is why there has to be a reduction in the police force. Does the Minister wish to respond? Silence.
Mr. Woolas: I caution the hon. Gentleman about using that tactic. First, if I have understood it correctly, his party’s policy would result in a reduction in public expenditure, so the 2.5 per cent. that he mentions would presumably be less. Secondly, does he not acknowledge that the Government have provided above-inflation settlements for police authorities, including Dorset, and does he not further acknowledge in respect of his party leader’s calls for devolution that there is a responsibility on the policy authority to balance its books?
Mr. Ellwood: I hate to educate the Minister, who is experienced, but he knows that I was prompting him to answer my question. Instead, he posed three of his own questions, so I go back to the point. If the police are given an increase of only 2.5 per cent. when they have to pay salary increases of 2.6 per cent., there will be cuts. That is exactly what has happened in Dorset, which has one of the best performing but worst funded police forces in the country. We lost 13 officers last year and we are about to lose another 50 posts. That is all because of the cuts.
About 20,000 tourists visit Bournemouth on a Friday or Saturday night. Is tourism considered in the manning formula? No. All the police working in Bournemouth have to focus on half a square mile in our town centre because no extra support is given to help the police deal with the influx of 20,000 visitors. We in Dorset are glad to host the Weymouth sailing events, but has one extra penny been provided to meet the extra security requirements for such events? Not one. That is another source of pressure on our police, making them resort to cuts.
As has been mentioned a number of times, law and order is not just about policing. It is also about a way of life and a set of values. Law and order exists to catch those who behave in an unacceptable way, but it should also be about teaching values that prevent somebody from choosing to break the law. Why not prevent criminal tendencies from developing at an early age and stop people committing crime when they get older?
I pay tribute to the Dorset Life Education bus. That organisation goes around schools teaching kids the difference between right and wrong, and good and bad, making them confront issues and talk about challenges that they may face in future which might take them into a world of petty crime and lead to further crime in their later lives. Unfortunately, that great initiative will have its budget cut because there is not enough money coming from Government. I would be grateful if the Minister looked into that, as the organisation provides an important means of preventing crime and teaching young people.
Role models have changed so much since I grew up, and certainly since my parents and grandparents grew up. In the absence of proper role models, perhaps as a result of broken families, people look at their television screens, see a premier league football player go up and swear at a referee, and they think that that is how to deal with authority. That is appalling. When they are out on the street and see authority—a policeman, for example—they respond in the same way. We need initiatives to prevent children growing up with such bad habits.
Statistics have been bandied about in the debate. Cautions are up by 28 per cent. A gun crime is committed every hour in England and Wales, and a knife crime every half an hour. An ASBO is seen as a badge of honour, and we have one of the highest rates of cannabis use in Europe. We also have one of the highest levels of antisocial behaviour, and the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe.
My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) spoke about the importance of prisons and rehabilitation, and the fact that so many people are going to prison and not getting the rehabilitation that they need. It is a horrifying statistic that 92 per cent. of those who go to prison for less than one year reoffend immediately, and about half of all prisoners reoffend. That suggests that they are not being rehabilitated and given the opportunity to do something better with their lives. They are not particularly good at crime as they keep getting caught, but they are never given the chance to do something else. The Government must address that. Instead, they are locking more people up in Titan prisons. There is not enough talk about what happens when prisoners spend time behind bars.
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