Robbery and Theft: Carshalton and Wallington

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the second time in an afternoon, Mrs Latham.

Let me start by congratulating my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) on securing this debate on such an important topic. These issues affect both our constituencies, and indeed many others. I join him in referencing and thanking our local south London basic command unit specifically for its work on robberies around the border between his constituency and mine—the problem extended to Purley and south Croydon, as well as the areas in his constituency that he mentioned.

Let set the national scene for where crime trends are heading. The only reliable source of long-term crime trend data, according to the Office for National Statistics, is not police-recorded crime, because that goes up and down depending on the public’s propensity to report crime, and on how good a job the police do at recording crime—they have got better at that in recent years and have therefore recorded more crime. Rather, it is the crime survey for England and Wales.

The crime survey for England and Wales, which according to the ONS is the most reliable source of crime data, shows that since March 2010—just to pick an arbitrary date—overall crime, like for like, is down by 55%, while violence is down by 51%, criminal damage is down by 72%, theft offences are down by 46%, theft from the person is down by 40%, and vehicle-related theft is down by 39%. Crime is declining in the long term, which is very welcome indeed. Crime is still happening, and we want to go further to push down those crime figures even more. That is why we have delivered record police numbers. I was a bit mystified by the intervention that called upon my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington to lobby the Front Bench to deliver more police. We have done that. We have delivered record numbers of police—about 3,500 more than we had in 2010.

London also has record police officer numbers, but as my hon. Friend quite rightly said, London could have had an extra thousand officers, all of which would have been funded by the Government—in fact, slightly over a thousand; 1,066, to be precise—had the Mayor of London bothered to recruit them. It is a shocking indictment of Sadiq Khan’s ineptitude that he failed to recruit those thousand extra officers that would have been funded by the Government. I strongly endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington said about Sadiq Khan. As Minister for Police, I see the performance of all 43 police forces across England and Wales, and there is no question but that under Mayor Sadiq Khan’s tenure as London’s police and crime commissioner, the Met’s performance is the worst of all those 43 forces. Not only is it the only police force in the country to have missed its recruitment target; it has the worst clear-up rate of any police force in the country. Sadiq Khan should hang his head in shame, and the electors in London will no doubt have this in mind when they elect a Mayor in a few months’ time.

We are pursuing a number of initiatives to bear down on robbery and theft. The first is an agreement that we reached with the police, including the Met, to always follow all lines of inquiry for all crimes where they exist. I can answer the question my hon. Friend asked me: that applies to all crimes, including theft from shops and criminal damage—everything. There is no such thing as a minor crime in our view. Previously, some police forces had wrongly been screening out certain crimes and not investigating them, even where there was evidence, because they were perceived as minor. We have now agreed with policing nationally, and put it in writing, that that is not appropriate, and the police will always follow reasonable lines of inquiry where they exist. That includes any crime, including shop theft, for which there is video evidence showing a suspect’s face.

That also involves always running such evidence through the retrospective facial recognition database. The algorithm is driven by artificial intelligence and is now very good. Often a match can be obtained even where the suspect’s face is caught on CCTV, a Ring doorbell or a mobile phone and their face is partially obscured or the image is fuzzy or blurred. Police forces should always run those images captured at a crime scene through the police national database to see if they can get a match—and they very often do. That applies particularly to shoplifting, but to many other crimes as well. We have an action plan for shoplifting—we really ought to call it shop theft; it is theft. As I have said, the police have committed to always investigating all lines of inquiry where they exist, including for shop theft. They will attend in person where a suspect has been detained by the store security staff. They will attend in person if there has been an assault on a shop worker and they will attend in person if that is necessary to secure evidence. If there is CCTV evidence that can be emailed, that is quicker for everybody, but they will attend always in the circumstances I have set out.

The police have also agreed to identify and target prolific offenders in particular. We have done work on this: taking out a relatively small number of offenders leads to a dramatic reduction in shop theft. For example, in Sussex, the excellent police and crime commissioner Katy Bourne and her police force identified and arrested 20 or 30—I think it was—prolific shoplifters. That dramatically reduced shop theft in the towns where those arrests were made. Targeting prolific shoplifters is important. There is also a project to identify criminal gangs who are stealing from shops on an organised basis, through intelligence. That is part of the retail crime action plan as well. I hope those measures show what the police are doing to combat shop theft in particular, and all crime more widely.

The approach that I described earlier—following all reasonable lines of inquiry—was first pursed on a large scale in Greater Manchester; the relatively new chief constable, Stephen Watson, introduced that about two years. It led to a 44% increase in arrests. Some magistrates courts that had previously been closed down had to be reopened to deal with the extra volume of criminals who were being apprehended.

I would like to say a word about live facial recognition, which is an opportunity to catch wanted criminals. That is where there is a watchlist of criminals who are wanted because they are suspected of committing a criminal offence. Maybe the police have a picture from the crime scene, but they have not been able to find the individual because they have left their home address or something. Maybe they know their name, but cannot find them, and they have the photograph. They can be people who should have turned up to court, but failed to show up to the magistrates court or the Crown court on the day of their trial or hearing.

This watchlist could be thousands of people who are wanted by the police, for the reasons I just set out. The camera is set up in a place with high traffic and lots of passers-by—it has been trialled recently in Croydon town centre—and as the public walk past, they are scanned and we see if there is a match. If there is not a match, which obviously happens in the vast majority of cases, the person’s image is immediately and automatically deleted, which addresses privacy concerns. But if there is a match, the system alerts the officer operating it and they can stop the person and establish their identity.

That system has been trialled about eight times on Thursday and Friday afternoons in Croydon town centre in the last two months and has led to more than 50 arrests, including, last Friday or the Friday before last, somebody wanted for multiple rapes who had been at large—wanted—for the last seven years. It also included people who were wanted for theft and robbery offences, drug supply or violent offences including grievous bodily harm, and many people who had failed to attend court. There were more than 50 arrests—50 people who would not have been arrested were it not for that simple deployment of live facial recognition in Croydon town centre. When I explain that to my constituents—that it led to these arrests and that if someone is not on the list, their image is deleted—people understand that it is a reasonable thing to do.

My hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington might want to talk to the BCU commander for south London, Chief Superintendent Andy Brittain, or his borough superintendent, and ask for the experimental deployment that we had in Croydon to be replicated in Carshalton or Wallington town centres, to see if as many wanted criminals are in circulation in Carshalton and Wallington town centres as were in Croydon town centre. The system has certainly been effective at arresting people who would otherwise have gone free.

I suggest to any Member that if they are interested in catching criminals in their constituency, they should talk to their chief constable and their PCC about this kit. Currently, the Metropolitan police and South Wales have it, but they are willing to share it with other forces. For example, Essex has borrowed it from either the Met or South Wales police—they are willing to share the equipment with other police forces around the country.

I see that colleagues are gathering for the subsequent debate; let me just conclude by thanking my constituency neighbour for calling this debate and for the work he is doing in this area standing up for his constituents. I look forward to continuing to work with him in this extremely important area. My voice is probably about to stop working, so now would be a good time to sit down.

Question put and agreed to.