Rural Policing and Hare Coursing

Debate between John Glen and Andrew Murrison

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Glen]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention: I absolutely agree. Again, I will come on to set out more examples and give the Minister some suggestions on what could be done to deal with the problem.

I want to outline some of the implications of hare coursing. First, when entering these private lands, hare coursers and poachers regularly cause criminal damage to gates, hedgerows, fences and growing crops. This creates financial costs arising from repairs to the damage and the need to increase security infrastructure, probably involving CCTV cameras. It also wastes a huge number of man hours as farmers are forced to look for damage and repair it. This is extremely time consuming, frustrating and upsetting for many farmers, whose land is the single most important asset of their business and their livelihood.

My constituent Chris Swanton, whose family have farmed on his farm for several generations, has regularly experienced at first-hand on his farm in South Wiltshire the problems I have described. He wrote to me saying:

“I get upset because I am very passionate about my farm and I have a certain amount of pride in the appearance of my fields and crops. I find it gutting and very depressing to drive around my farm after hare coursers have been all across my fields.”

It is totally unacceptable for farmers like Chris who have worked 80 hours a week preparing seed beds and planting crops to find them ruined by mindless vandals. His experiences are by no means unique, as this happens right across my constituency, and, from what colleagues have been telling me in the past few days, over large tracts of rural England.

The impact for victims is not merely economic. Many face unjustifiable intimidation and antisocial behaviour on their doorsteps. Hare coursers will often threaten and behave violently towards landowners who attempt to challenge them or collect evidence to report to the police.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[John Glen]

I would be delighted to give way to my hon. Friend and neighbour.

[Dr Murrison]

It is a great pleasure to contribute briefly to this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend and neighbour on bringing this matter to the House’s attention. Does he agree that these are not good people and that these groups probably contain within them individuals who are intent also on acquisitive crime? Not only are they violent people, but they are probably also eyeing up the property of our rural constituents, which, as he will know, is very much under threat at the moment from bespoke criminality focused on thieving to order. The suspicion is that this population and the hare coursing population are very often one and the same thing.

[John Glen]

Those are characteristically wise words from my hon. Friend and neighbour, and I absolutely agree. This speaks to some of the suggestions that I am going to make about the nature of resourcing of rural policing. I am delighted that the Minister is here to hear those words and, I hope, respond positively.

Lincolnshire police found that the majority of people involved in hare coursing in their county already had the criminal histories that my hon. Friend refers to and often travelled for hundreds of miles to participate. This is particularly distressing for farming communities, who are genuinely vulnerable. The average age of farmers is now 59, and they often work alone, so there are few or no witnesses to the crimes that are perpetrated on their land. Farmers know too well the repercussions of trying to deter coursers from their own land—from targeted break-ins and theft on their farms, to extremes such as arson and direct physical attacks.

Another of my constituents, who understandably did not want to be named, lives on a farm with their teenage daughter. While on their own land, the constituent was confronted by three men with dogs who threatened that they would “do over” their car and carve up their crops. My constituent’s daughter now worries for her parent’s safety and is concerned that the coursers know where they live and what their car looks like.

It is completely unacceptable that constituents do not feel safe on their own land, and these are not isolated cases. In January, the BBC reported that violence and intimidation have escalated in the recent hare coursing season. One farmer, who also wished not to be named, fearing for his own safety, stated, “They would kill us if they could.”

I emphasise to the Minister that, for rural communities and farmers in particular, hare coursing is not simply a nuisance; it is a serious blight on livelihoods and wellbeing.

I want to turn to how we can ensure that there is an effective and coherent response by the police and the magistracy. In preparing for this debate, I was struck by the exasperation of constituents who tell me that they regularly reach out to the police but feel as if nothing is being done and that they are fighting hare coursers on their own. One constituent remarked that his tactic of digging ditches around the farm to stop the coursers’ vehicles felt almost medieval—building a moat to prevent the enemy from entering.

I pay tribute to Wiltshire police force. Its officers do very difficult work in challenging circumstances, and they should be commended for the innovative steps that they are taking to improve their response to rural crime. The general quality of their work was acknowledged by last week’s report from Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, ranking them good across the board. Wiltshire police have put in place a number of initiatives, including funding six dedicated wildlife crime officers, and I welcome the news that further funding has been secured to train another five.

I recognise the apparent logic of weighting police funding by population size and demography, but cases such as hare coursing demonstrate that rural areas require specialist resources to ensure that isolated and sparser populated communities do not feel abandoned by law enforcement.

Mobile Infrastructure Project

Debate between John Glen and Andrew Murrison

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[John Glen]

I am extremely grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. That is where we need to get to by the end of the debate: a real sense of what can be achieved, with a call-out to those communities that are most keen to secure a mast location under the MIP or a successor project, if there is one, so that we can make things happen. Raised expectations that are dashed after two or three years is a most frustrating phenomenon for constituency MPs to deal with.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[John Glen]

I will happily give way to my parliamentary neighbour.

[Dr Murrison]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing this important subject. Does he agree that it is not so much that the project is at fault, but that perhaps it was a bit over-ambitious in the timeframes in which masts can be brought forward, noting difficulties with planning permission, which as he will fully know can be protracted, and issues around the powering up of masts? Perhaps he may want to encourage the Minister to extend the programme.

[John Glen]

As ever, my hon. Friend and neighbour alights on the right points. I would like to talk about the short timeframe, because Wiltshire Council tells me that Arqiva contacted it on numerous occasions but the project was dropped at the first sign of local difficulty in obtaining a planning consent because the short timeframe to deliver on a completed mast made it too difficult. The other issue Arqiva said it experienced was that initially the coverage was intended to be for 2G voice and data services, but there was a subsequent extension to future-proof the project with capacity for 4G. I suspect that change of scope mid-way through the project did not help the smooth delivery of masts.

Junior Doctors’ Contracts

Debate between John Glen and Andrew Murrison

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I declare my interest as a doctor, and a veteran of truly awful rotas of the 1980s, involving one in two very often—that is every other weekend, every other night on duty, as well as a normal working day, which I would not recommend to either patients or practitioners. Thankfully, they are a thing of the past.

I welcome very much the Health Secretary’s statement today and the guarantees that he has given. On that basis, I am more than happy to support the Government this evening. However, I would say that we need to insist on evidence-based policy making. It is important to understand the difference between a causal effect and an association. My worry is that perhaps the Front Bench has been more influenced by Euclidean theorem than a proper understanding of statistics. My reading of the Freemantle paper and Professor Sutton’s remarks lead me to conclude that no causal link has been established between doctors’ rostering and excess weekend deaths. If we are serious about reducing weekend deaths, and reducing the difference in health outcomes between this country and countries with which we could reasonably be compared, which I know that my colleagues on the Front Bench are, we need to properly understand what are the drivers of those differences, and I do not think that junior doctors’ hours are a principal driver in the problem that we are trying to address today.

I think it is also right to appreciate that we are heavily dependent on the good will of all doctors—consultant grades and junior doctors. Most doctors that I know work well beyond their contracted hours—I know I certainly used to when I was in hospital medicine—and in dealing with them and in communicating with them, we need to keep that in mind and not take that good will for granted.

I very much regret the BMA action, and I very much regret the ballot on 5 November on strike action. The last time such action was taken was in 2012 on, ironically, the subject of pensions. It ended ignominiously and the only outcome was a reduction in the esteem in which the public held the medical profession. I would urge the BMA, armed with the assurances we have had today, to think again. I say “ironically” because, of course, the proposals, as I understand them to be, would increase core hours, which are pensionable—out-of-hours are not—and I have yet to see the BMA make any comment on that, or indeed reflect it in its pay calculator. Maybe a belated understanding of that has meant that it has chosen to take it down.

In trying to reduce weekend deaths and in trying to reduce that gap between our health outcomes in this country and those in the rest of Europe, we need to be focused much more broadly than on junior doctors’ hours. I know the Health Secretary is trying to work out how we can best configure the health service of the future. It is a dynamic thing; it never is fixed in one place. In my opinion, part of that means looking at our NHS estate all the time to make sure that we are getting the best from our assets. In my opinion, it means concentrating our specialist services in larger, regional and sub-regional centres. Those centres find it much easier to roster junior doctors and to concentrate expertise in one place. I am talking about stroke, heart attack and upper gastrointestinal bleeding—all things where we do less well in this country than in countries with which we should be comparable.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and parliamentary neighbour for giving way. Does he agree that in the rural communities in south Wiltshire that we both represent, there does need to be a certain minimum proximity in order for patients to be able to access their hospital with confidence?

[Dr Murrison]

I agree with that, which is where networks come into our national health service, and making sure that we have specialist centres that can deliver the right outcomes for people, and that there are protocols to ensure that ambulance services take people to the right place at the right time, so that they can receive the treatment they need. What we cannot do is continue with the current situation, in which our constituents can expect lower life expectancy and health in later life than, say, French or German patients. That is not sustainable and it is not right. It means looking again at how we configure our national health service. It may mean some difficult decisions in some parts of our NHS, but that should not be a barrier to making sure that we do it right.

What I would say to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench is that this is not really about junior doctors; this is about consultant grades, who deliver the therapeutics and diagnostics in relation to upper GI bleeds, heart attacks and strokes. They are now, in our new NHS of the 21st century, at the coalface of delivery in a way that they previously were not. So, if I may say so, I would like a greater focus on consultant grades, perhaps at the expense of some of our junior doctors who are the principal subject of our debate today.