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11 Jun 2009 : Column 315WH—continued
The rationale that the Government gave in the debate two days ago for what they were doing was very confused—they said that Derbyshire, for example, was setting an excessive budget. The extra money on the council tax would have raised about £1.6 million, but the Government have said that Derbyshire police are £5 million underfunded. How can raising an extra £1.6 million towards a £5 million underfunding be an excessive budget? It still does not reach the spending that the Government say is needed. It is ludicrous and illogical—and completely undemocratic. Derbyshire and Surrey police authorities, and others last year, consulted their council tax payers and all the different councils and elected bodies at different levels, as well as getting MPs from different parties on board, and central Government said, “You cannot do this.” There is an utter dislocation between local police forces and the Government, who told them
that there must be localism, that they must be accountable to local people and that they must do what local people want.
People in Derbyshire want police on the beat. They do not understand why Derbyshire has 380 fewer people in uniform on the streets than an equivalent shire county, or why some have more people on the beat because they have been given the money that should have gone to Derbyshire. However, Derbyshire cannot do anything about that. It cannot raise the money through local taxation, even if local people are willing for that to happen, because the Government say no. There cannot be localism and police forces cannot be accountable to the local area if that is not allowed to happen. That is why we must change completely the resourcing of police forces.
There must be local accountability. That is why we argue that police authorities cannot continue to be, in effect, appointed quangos, albeit some of their members have been elected to other authorities. There must be properly elected police boards to deliver the finance and local accountability that the Government say is needed, but prevent from happening, and towards which the Select Committee report shows in admirable detail and clarity we should move.
The immigration and foreign workers section of the Select Committee report was interesting, if only for one sentence. The evidence shows that the policing issue related to immigrant workers and communities—contrary to public or media opinion—is that
“foreign nationals are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime.”
In areas such as Chesterfield, where significant groups of eastern European workers have arrived in recent years, the cost of providing interpreters is a great burden on police forces, especially given the range of languages that are spoken. However, they are more likely to be interpreting for a victim of crime than for somebody who has been charged with committing a crime.
Government funding for interpreters is too slow and ineffective to meet the problem. It is based on the 10-yearly censuses, so it does not take account of quick population movements. Only two years ago, a large number of eastern European workers came to this country. Many of them are now leaving because of the recession, or because they have earned the money they wanted to raise and are going back to set up businesses in their home countries. We benefit from their work and the economy in places such as Poland will benefit in return, which is what the European Union is all about.
The Government funding formula does not respond to the problem of the cost of interpreters quickly enough. We see the same problem in education, housing and elsewhere. It was worth pointing out just that one sentence of the Select Committee report to show that foreign nationals are more likely to be the victims of crime than the cause of it. However, the problem of the cost of interpreters must be dealt with.
Alcohol has been dealt with today by the Chairman of the Select Committee, and it has been discussed at length during the passage of the Policing and Crime Bill and in other debates. There is a missed opportunity. The 24-hour café culture that the Licensing Act 2003 envisaged has not come about. Instead, we have more drinking in town centres and it is more spread out. The police used to need extra numbers on duty from 11 o’clock at night
to 2 o’clock in the morning on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. That police presence must now be spread out right through to 6 o’clock in the morning. That is the experience in Chesterfield, and it causes more difficulties for policing and makes it more expensive.
According to my local police and the evidence given to the Policing and Crime Bill Committee, the main problem is not town centre drinking venues and the results of the Licensing Act 2003, but under-age drinking. The problem is cheap booze in off-licences and off-premises, with cheap super-strength lagers and ciders being sold at rock-bottom prices as loss-leaders to get people into supermarkets. Regrettably, the Government sidestepped that problem in the Policing and Crime Bill. There is much talk of strengthening powers to control licensees and pubs, but in that proposal, too, there is far too much direction from London, instead of local authorities being able to decide where the problems are. Local authorities know their areas far better than anybody sitting here in London. All the emphasis has been on that issue and there has been nothing about stopping super-strength, cheap booze getting into the hands of under-age drinkers on the streets so easily.
Whenever I am on patrol with the police, police community support officers and special constables in Chesterfield, I ask what is the biggest source of problems. They always say that it is the early-evening nuisance around the high streets, shopping centres and play areas where kids congregate with cheap, super-strength booze that they have bought from off-premises. It is much harder to control that problem than town centre pubs, because it is scattered across the community.
The Government seem to be closing their eyes to that problem, as the eloquent testimony of the Chairman of the Select Committee showed. I agree with the Select Committee recommendations on alcohol disorder zones and the “polluter pays” principle, under which the pubs and all-night drinking establishments that cause these problems should help to pay to solve them. I also agree with minimum pricing and the control of loss-leading sales of cheap alcohol. Unfortunately, the Government seem to be avoiding tackling these issues.
What I said in my opening comments is also true of knife crime. Although crime has been falling, nobody believes the statistics. Many people have a fear of crime, but they do not read the statistics. The statistics on knife crime, if they can be believed, show that it has slowly decreased over the past seven years. However, especially after last year’s feast of press coverage on some of the tragic murders, everybody believes that knife crime has soared through the roof. In truth, the press suddenly paid major attention to these tragic deaths, having not done so for the previous six years. There was a debate about knife crime in the main Chamber on Tuesday, which was repeated in part in yesterday’s debate on youth crime in this Chamber, in which I participated. Nobody disputes the seriousness of the issues and the need to deal with knife crime, but the interesting statistics in the report suggest that knife crime is in slow decline rather than soaring through the roof.
There has been much discussion in the debates of the past two days of how we should deal with knife crime. Intelligence-led policing is one method, and there are good examples of that in the past 18 months in London. Targeted stop-and-search powers have been used in
problem areas, and mobile arch metal detectors have been used. On a recent Select Committee visit to New York, we saw those arches in use at the entrance of every school that we visited. We are a long way from having to go down that road, but the use of mobile arches and intelligent stop-and-search powers has a big role to play, as long as we never go back to the heavy-handed days of the sus laws, which caused such problems in the 1970s.
One example of intelligence-led policing that has been mentioned in recent debates comes from Cardiff, where the accident and emergency unit logged anonymous reports of exactly where stabbing incidents occurred. Such schemes can cause many problems, as the medical profession does not want to report all stabbing and gunshot incidents to the police because of issues such as patient confidentiality. However, in Cardiff, incidents were reported anonymously. The police used the information not to pursue individuals, but to create a crime map and identify where the stabbings were taking place. They then diverted resources into the problem areas. In Cardiff, there was a 40 per cent. reduction in knife crime and stabbings simply through sensible, intelligence-led policing. The use of computers to analyse hot spots on weekby week has worked well in other areas of policing.
Regrettably, although the Government have looked at that experiment and introduced some pilots—we have heard that they have more pilots than the Air Force—it has not been rolled out. It is such an obvious and simple technique and has been proven to work. It means that less police time is wasted, because efforts can be targeted most effectively. Why are successful examples, such as the one in Cardiff, not being adopted more widely?
The Minister of State, Home Department (Mr. David Hanson): We discussed this matter in Tuesday’s debate in the main Chamber, so the hon. Gentleman knows that the Government have spoken to the consultant involved in the Cardiff example, who addressed the ministerial group dealing with the tackling knives action plan. From memory, we have increased the number of hospitals in knife crime action plan areas that use data sharing to about 45 or 46. The Government have focused on those key areas, because knife crime is not a problem in every part of England and Wales. Data sharing should be used where it is appropriate, which is in areas that have a high level of knife crime.
Paul Holmes: They are welcome steps forward, and that comes into what I am going to say about the use of personal digital assistants.
We are moving in the right direction, but I wonder why it has taken so long, given the successful examples that have been shown to work so well. A 40 per cent. reduction in stabbings is a win-win result: the health service saves money because it does not have to treat those people, the police save money because they are able to target particular areas and reduce knife crime, and society as a whole benefits because there are not lurid newspaper headlines about yet another teenager being stabbed and perhaps dying, so everybody wins. The same approach could be applied in accident and emergency units when people are drunk and disorderly, and when incidents of grievous bodily harm have occurred, to pinpoint the pockets where trouble arises. I hope that there will be more widespread use of that approach. It requires joined-up government down to local authority
level, with areas such as health and policing pushing together get that kind of collaboration.
We have heard about police time, so I shall deal with that quickly. It is a long-standing and perennial cry that the police spend all their time filling in bits of paper instead of being out on the beat. Indeed, there are reports from 30 years ago saying that. However, there is certainly lots of evidence that has been true in the past few years. The Flanagan recommendations on revising the stop-and-account process under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 are very welcome. We heard the Staffordshire example about cutting down a form from 14 pages to one, which is an obvious thing to do.
When I went out on patrol with some of the Chesterfield officers, we stopped a group of eight or nine teenagers and people in their early 20s who were possibly drunk and disorderly in the street, but were mostly being loud and in high spirits. If the police had filled in the required forms for all nine of them, which would have involved asking their names, addresses, and why they had stopped there, it would have cut an hour or more out of their patrol time. Police officers on the front line therefore tend to find ways around filling in reams and reams of paperwork, even though they are told that they have to do it. We need to make the paperwork system as streamlined as possible. We have heard about the good examples and the good pilots, but we need to move beyond pilots.
The same is true of personal digital assistants. We have been debating and arguing about this issue for months now and the Government are moving down that road much faster. Let me give an example I have used before. Four years ago, Chesterfield borough council’s housing department equipped each of its housing repair teams, which deal with its 10,000 council houses, with a van that is logged by computer and global positioning system by the people at head office. Those people know what stock is on board each van, so if they get a call for a plumbing repair, they send not the van that the GPS satellite tells them is nearest, but the one that the computerised log tells them has the correct part on board. The repair man can get the job signed off by the customer on his hand-held PDA, that information is sent back to central office, then he can get his next job from his PDA. That system saves a lot of time, because he is not driving backwards and forwards between the centre of town and the outlying areas. Those repair men are gaining a great deal of time in the day to do their jobs more effectively, cheaply and responsibly. If my borough council’s housing department could do that four or five years ago, why is a similar system only just being rolled out across police forces after the pilots? Why does that common-sense usage take so long?
As the report points out, the technology is cheap. It can save at least an hour per officer per shift, and it can cost as little as 80p a day. In one authority, the use of hand-held BlackBerrys delivered £8.8 million of non-cashable savings a year. It provides secure access for the beat officer straight to the police national computer and other intelligence databases, so it is win-win all round.
Keith Vaz:
As someone who is still using a mobile phone, I sometimes watch as technology develops. The point is not only that the police should be given that new technology, but that it should also be compatible with systems throughout England and Wales. One problem with the computer system is that one authority buys its
own set of computers, which does not really speak to others set of computers, so it is about not only purchasing the technology but getting the procurement right so that we save money in the end.
Paul Holmes: Yes; that leads me to my penultimate point about collaboration. The Chair of the Committee has made the point that he does not want Leicestershire’s police force to be directed from Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire. Equally, I do not want Chesterfield to be policed from Leicester, Nottingham or anywhere else in the vast area known as the east midlands. A few years ago, we were facing the threat of enforced mergers of police forces into super-bodies. I see that idea as a major threat, although it would be an accountant’s dream. In the past few weeks, the CBI, I think, has said something like, “Let’s save lots of money by merging all the police forces together, because that is what an efficient business would do.” But what would happen to the customer in that situation?
The customer is the individual out on the street who wants a local policeman to respond to their local needs. If we had super-forces covering the east midlands and all the other regions in England, there would be a danger that the policing needs of Leicester, Nottingham and Derby would take priority over the rural policing needs of supposedly crime-free areas in rural parts of Derbyshire. However, rural Derbyshire is within one hour’s driving distance of 20 per cent. of the rest of the UK population. Indeed, it is a selling point of the Peak District national park in Derbyshire that so many people can get to that green lung. That access causes a problem with tourist numbers, which is a good problem to deal with, but it also means that all the serious organised gangs from Sheffield, Nottingham, Leeds and Rotherham can be there in no time.
The small local shop around the corner from where I live, on Newbold road in Chesterfield, was held up at gunpoint a few months ago when we had the heavy snow, and a number of other businesses around north Derbyshire have also been held up at gunpoint. Gun crime is pretty rare around Chesterfield, so it was pretty shocking when that happened to the shop that I use regularly with my kids. The gang who did it have been through court in the past few weeks. They were from Sheffield, and they drove into north Derbyshire, because they thought they would be less well known there and that the police would not be as big, organised and on the ball as the big city force in Sheffield. They were arrested fairly quickly, and they have been sent to prison, which is good. The Surrey MPs talked about something similar in the recent Westminster Hall debate on the capping of Surrey police funding. They said that organised crime gangs come out on the motorway to the London outskirts, to what they see as easier pickings.
We do not want collaboration and super-forces to be imposed. We have backed away from that idea now, but I am sure it will rear its head again. We do not want city policing issues to dominate, so that policing is stripped away from smallish, rural areas such as Chesterfield to some super-force elsewhere. I am absolutely against enforced collaboration—I think that the Committee Chairman has made the same point—but there are areas in which collaboration makes absolute sense. Indeed, the east midlands forces have undertaken some pioneer
case studies in England showing where police forces can collaborate on serious and organised crime, terrorism and high-level policing threats without having to force a merger of police forces.
There is a role for a national strategy in one area that the Chairman has raised—the purchase of certain technology and equipment. Police officers have pointed out to me that some things are much more standardised in America, where police cruisers all tend to be the same type of large vehicle with plenty of room. The problem with many British police cars is that there is no room on the dashboard for bits of computer kit, because of the type of cars that the police buy. Moreover, they do not get the benefits of bulk purchase and standardisation across forces that have been mentioned. There is a place for intelligent collaboration and co-operation, and for national purchasing strategies on some things, but certainly not for removing local command, control and accountability, which we should strengthen.
The title of the report is “Policing in the 21st century”. As we came to the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, we faced many new challenges in policing, which is very different from what it was. The Government rightly boast that we now have more police officers per head of population than at any time in history. That is true, but we also have more need, as there are now crimes that did not exist 20 years ago. The scale of internet fraud is one example. Another issue that the Committee looked at that has not been discussed today is the fact that fraud attracts such a low rating for the police. Even though about £14 billion a year is taken in criminal fraud, it still is not a No. 1 priority for policing.
Police forces have to have dedicated teams to deal with internet fraud, internet paedophilia and, as was the case before the internet came along, child abuse. Even in the 1960s, people would not admit that child abuse existed, and did not believe that families were the main perpetrators. It simply was not talked about. Likewise, there are now police teams dedicated to dealing with domestic violence against women, and they can be extremely effective, but it was not very many years ago that that was not seen as a problem. If a husband hit his wife, it was simply seen as something that happened. The concept of policing has shifted much for the better in relation to such issues, partly because of shifting social attitudes on rape, domestic abuse or child abuse and admitting that those problems exist and that we need to do something about them, and partly because of a new wave of crimes that have come into existence, particularly in relation to the internet.
The advent of widespread car ownership has made it much easier to spread crime from one place to another. Criminals have made maximum use of the anonymity of being able to drive to a community in 20 minutes, where no one knows them at all. Again, there has been intelligent use of police technology to deal with such problems, such as car number plate recognition. Derbyshire police have told me that where automatic camera recognition has been piloted, they get so many hits that they cannot deal with them all. I have read a report of an experiment in London where cars were checked as they came across bridges over the Thames.
As we enter the 21st century, new demands are being put on police forces—for example, international terrorism is yet another problem with which they have to deal. We cannot just carry on in the same way and it is good that there are many signs of how police forces and politicians are moving in their thinking, but we have to move much faster. It is important to get that local accountability and democratic control back so that local communities can have a real say—not just in what they want, but in how it is going to be paid for. If local communities want something, they need to put their money where their mouth is. However, at the moment, central Government do not allow that to happen.
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