Rural Crime and Public Services

Debate between Chris Elmore and Louise Haigh

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Louise Haigh]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. True community policing and neighbourhood policing work very effectively with Farm Watch, Neighbourhood Watch and other voluntary organisations in our communities. We are not just talking about a police officer walking down the street with his hands in his pockets. True neighbourhood policing requires officers to engage and build relationships with communities and to grow trust in the police. Having grown up in South Yorkshire, I know that the policing of so many communities, particularly the hardest-to-reach communities, requires that approach in order to be able to police by consent. On top of all that, we have seen numerous rural police stations close—the symbol of a rural community’s relationship with its local police service and a symbol of the police’s commitment to those communities. There is strong evidence that they have contributed to the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public. Little wonder then that the National Farmers Union has found two worrying trends: first, that four in 10 people in rural areas fear crime, double that of individuals in urban areas; and secondly, that two thirds think that the local police fail to deal with the problems that matter to them—twice as many as the national average. Those figures show that the ability of the police to interpret and respond to the needs of rural communities is fading away, leaving those communities isolated.

[Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab)]

As always, my hon. Friend is giving a very well-informed and impassioned speech. On this point about rural communities, does she agree that it is also very important that we think of rural communities not just as places such as Somerset, Devon or Cornwall, but as seats such as mine, former heavy industrial areas? For example, the Ogmore and Garw valleys in my constituency no longer have police stations, but what they do have now is high levels of rural crime. They are isolated and cut off because of deindustrialisation. That must be put into the mix of how we see rural crime moving forward.

[Louise Haigh]

I could not agree more. It is exactly the same in my own home force of South Yorkshire. The pernicious and long-term effects of deindustrialisation in communities are often the same issues that other rural forces and areas experience and are affected by.

The feelings of isolation can be strong and overwhelming, particularly for vulnerable individuals in rural areas such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore). If police do not have the ability to reach out, they will feel ever more vulnerable. The Conservative party used to be clear on this. A leaked internal communiqué said that

“police-stations are important to local communities and the sheer number of closures is worrying.”

But since that communiqué, closures have rocketed. Nearly 400 police stations have closed in England and Wales, with the number of front counters open to the public falling from over 900 in 2010 to just over 500 today. It is harder to ignore the knock-on effects that sales of police stations and closures of custody suites have had on policing. Particularly in large rural areas, officers now have to drive for long distances to take offenders into custody, taking them off the streets for a considerable period of time.