Policing

Alan Johnson Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) for his kind words at the start of his speech, and I agree with him about the police. This Government recognise the vital job that the police do to protect the public. The courage and dedication of the thousands of men and women who work in police forces across the country make them outstanding. Police officers risk their lives in the line of duty every single day, and this year, more than ever, we have been reminded of the dangers they face. The tragic deaths of PC Ian Dibell, PC Fiona Bone and PC Nicola Hughes show just how brave our officers can be and the debt of gratitude we owe them all.

This year, with the Olympic and Paralympic games, we have seen the best of policing, but in the response to phone hacking and Hillsborough real questions have been raised about integrity and accountability, and we are determined to get to grips with both.

Before I talk about this Government’s positive agenda for policing to introduce reforms to deliver a more professional service responsive to the public and accountable for their actions, I want to address some of the points made by the right hon. Member for Delyn. He reminded us that his party opposed the introduction of police and crime commissioners—the introduction of democracy into police accountability. This is a fascinating conversion, because when Labour was in power the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), who was then police Minister, said that

“only direct election, based on geographic constituencies, will deliver the strong connection to the public which is critical”.

He was absolutely right then and the Labour party is absolutely wrong now.

The right hon. Member for Delyn also had the cheek to complain about privatisation, on which I do not need to quote his Labour predecessors on policing, because I can quote him. In 2009 he said that he was “very relaxed” about police collaboration with the private sector and that the police had Labour’s “blessing to do so”. His remarks should be put in that context; he thought something completely different three years ago.

[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

Will the Minister confirm that the previous Government’s consultation was on whether the whole police authority, not just one person, should be elected? Will he also confirm that it was a proper consultation and that because of the outright opposition of parties of all persuasions in local government the proposals were dropped?

[Damian Green]

The Opposition, who were then in government, expressed a view, changed their mind and have now changed their mind again. I am fascinated that the right hon. Gentleman did not address the issue of privatisation, which started under his tenure as Home Secretary but which I assume he is now prepared to attack as a loyal supporter of his party’s Front-Bench representatives.

What we have heard so far is the Labour party’s central obsession with spending more money. The right hon. Member for Delyn has made no admission that the Opposition are, in fact, committed to the same level of cuts as this Government, or to any level of cuts at all. There was no honest admission that police numbers would have gone down under their plans, and no expression of regret for the 25,000 police officers stuck in back-room functions under Labour’s top-down management of the police service. Most of all, there was no apology for causing the financial mess that led to these cuts in the first place. We have had no transparency or apology from the Labour party, and just one solution—spend more money. It is as clear as ever that Labour is not learning and is not capable of learning.

We cannot even credit the Opposition with being consistent on that point. As we have heard, the police and crime commissioner elections will deliver accountable policing that responds to public demands. Labour Front Benchers are arguing for both more and less spending at the same time. They complain about what they describe as the waste of money on holding elections, which is an interesting attitude for a democratic party, at the same time as they argue that we should spend £30 million more on publicising the elections. I suppose that they could, with intellectual coherence, hold one or other of those views, but they cannot hold both of them at once, as they appear to want to do.

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[Damian Green]

The hon. Gentleman has not quite got with the democratic project yet. As he knows, policing in London is the responsibility of the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor. The hon. Gentleman had his chance earlier this year to put his arguments against the Mayor of London’s crime policy, but those arguments failed. The people of London voted to re-elect the current Mayor of London, and he has an excellent Deputy Mayor who is dealing with those matters.

[Alan Johnson]

Will the Minister give way?

[Damian Green]

I will give way one more time as the right hon. Gentleman is a former Home Secretary.

[Alan Johnson]

I am grateful to the Minister, but I thought I just heard him say that there are no cuts of 20%. In his speech last Monday, the Prime Minister said,

“in real terms, central police spending cuts are around 20 per cent”.

Does the Minister disagree with the Prime Minister?

[Damian Green]

No. The right hon. Gentleman should listen to what I say. The claim is, I think, that forces are facing 20% cuts, but no force is facing cuts of that level. As he knows as well as anyone in the country, the police service receives about a quarter of its income from the police precept element of council tax, the exact proportion—[Interruption.] I am glad that I am able to educate the Labour party about how the police are funded in this country. That funding is not all from the Home Office; some of it comes from the police precept. As the right hon. Gentleman and, I hope, those on the Opposition Front Bench know—although there is no evidence that they do—the exact proportion that comes from the precept varies from force to force, and the level at which it is set is, I stress, a matter for individual police and crime commissioners to decide. In short, no force has seen anything like a 20% cash reduction.

We on this side of the House have long argued that there is no simple link between police numbers and crime rates, and I am happy that that view is shared by the Home Affairs Committee. The figures I have quoted show that that view is correct and widely accepted—the one place it has not yet been accepted is inside the Labour party.

Let me turn to the elections for police and crime commissioners. On this side of the House, we are getting behind our candidates and campaigning hard to ensure that the elections are a success and that the public get the PCCs they deserve—hard-working, dedicated people who want to deliver for their communities and improve policing. Opposition Members should decide whether they support or oppose the elections. I assume that they support them, and I am delighted that the right hon. Member for Delyn has said that he does. A huge number of former Labour Ministers are standing, determined to make 15 November the night of the living retreads.

The confusion on the Opposition Benches is summed up with a pleasing touch of nostalgia by a dispute between Blair and Prescott. Prescott is having an argument with a new Blair, Lord Blair, who is arguing that people should not vote—I think that is disgraceful, and I hope the Labour party will agree that to tell people not to vote in a democratic election is deplorable. [Interruption.] I am glad that the right hon. Member for Delyn disagrees with Lord Blair. I hope that will continue and that everyone in the Labour party will condemn Lord Blair for what he said, not least because, as we have seen in recent articles, Lord Prescott is—of course—campaigning in his unique and energetic fashion around Humberside.

The introduction of PCCs is the most significant democratic reform of policing ever. It will introduce greater transparency and accountability to a service of which we are all rightly proud, but which can sometimes be too distant from the public it serves and fail to reflect adequately their concerns and priorities. As I told the House in a debate last week, only 7% of the public know what a police authority is. That figure represents a huge failure in democratic accountability, because it is the job of a police authority—as it will be of a PCC—to spend the public’s money in a way that guarantees that the police in that area are doing what the public need. It is impossible to do that when 93% of the public do not even know what police authorities are.

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[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, whom I welcome to his new position, finished his speech by saying that Labour’s policies did not work in government. I remind him that we were the only Government in the modern era—going back to the first world war—who presided over a reduction in crime. That is to say that the amount of crime was less when we left office than when we assumed office. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), who was an excellent Policing Minister, understated the case. The Home Office statistics published in July 2010, from this Government, showed that overall crime fell by 50%, violent crime by 55% and domestic violence by 64%. The chances of being a victim of crime fell from a peak of 40% under the Tory Government to 21.5% under us. The murder rate in London was the lowest since I was wearing a tank-top and flares in the early 1970s.

[Tom Greatrex (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Last week?

[Alan Johnson]

Indeed; It was a retro week.

We can now all celebrate that success. The Conservative party—I do not include the Liberal Democrats in this criticism—argued year after year that the statistics were wrong. I remember the Prime Minister standing at the Dispatch Box in opposition saying that crime was not falling but rising, and that when they came into power they would change how the statistics were correlated, but they have done absolutely nothing. They have changed the name of the British crime survey to the England and Wales crime survey, but the statistics are collected in exactly the same way.

That is why the Prime Minister was able to celebrate a 6% fall in crime this year in his tribute speech to that great woman, “Laura Norder”, on Monday. That figure was based on exactly the same formulation of statistics that he once criticised. We should recognise that the momentum of falling crime seems to have continued into this Government, whereas crime doubled under the previous Tory Government between 1979 and 1997, with violent crime increasing by 168% and burglary by 405%. The downward trend has been maintained. It is crucial that all our constituents understand why that has happened and how we can ensure that crime and disorder continue to fall.

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he held a meeting with civil servants in the Home Office. They told him that if the economy was successful, crime would increase, and that if the economy was unsuccessful, crime would increase. No matter which way the economy went, people believed that it would inevitably rise. That counsel of despair convinced successive Home Secretaries until Michael Howard’s appointment that rising crime was an inevitability. The economy is weak now but crime has continued to fall, just as it did in the 2008-09 recession when it went down by 9%. We can compare that with the recession in the ’90s, when it went up by 16%. There is no doubt that advances in technology have helped. Car thefts have reduced dramatically thanks to computerised security systems and CCTV has been an effective tool—it is of course not the whole answer—as has the DNA database.

Police reforms have made the biggest contribution to the dramatic reduction in crime. People trot out the tired old phrase, “The police are the last unreformed public service,” but anyone who has been a Member of this House over the past 20 years will have seen a huge change in policing. The principal change has been the move away from a reactive force, whose main preoccupation was to respond to crimes that had already been committed, to a force with a role more in keeping with Robert Peel’s original concept of a police force, whose primary objective was the prevention of crime and the maintenance of what he described as “public tranquillity”. It was the “Life on Mars” culture of the 1970s that took police away from communities and off the streets and challenged the Peel ethos, whereas the introduction of the dreadfully named crime and disorder reduction partnerships and neighbourhood policing—a huge change in how the police operated—did the most to restore it.

Over 15 years, we have moved from a police philosophy that stated that antisocial behaviour and low-level crime were nothing to do with them to a recognition that the police have an important role to play in working with other agencies to tackle such behaviour, which has a far greater impact on people’s perception of crime than some more high-profile offences. We have moved from an era in which domestic violence was considered to be nothing to do with the police and to be a matter for the adversaries to sort out to its being a major focus of attention for police forces across the country. Plenty of evidence suggests that that concentration on domestic violence has had a far wider impact on the reduction in other crimes.

In that context, I believe the Government have made a mistake in cutting the number of warranted officers. The work the police do on crime prevention in schools, in homes, as part of family intervention projects and in youth clubs and hostels will suffer as a result of those cuts and the partnerships that require the police to work together with local authorities, the NHS and the voluntary sector to tackle the underlying causes of crime will be placed in jeopardy. I predict that such cuts will eventually feed through to the crime statistics, to the detriment of our constituents across the country.

The Minister mentioned privatisation, and in the context of what is happening in Lincolnshire, the west midlands and Surrey I am bemused and amazed that the Home Office has not stated categorically that the tasks of patrolling our streets, the investigation of offences, and arrest—together with the use of firearms and the control of public disorder—must remain with police officers. Of course there can be co-operation with the private sector in other spheres, but that is what the police want to see and the reassurance has not been given.

[Julian Smith]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the four Yorkshire forces could do much more to share and reduce costs? In his role as a local MP, will he call on those four forces to get their acts together?

[Alan Johnson]

Yes, I do. I completely agree and that was in our White Paper when I was Home Secretary in November 2010. I also believe that there are too many police constabularies. Charles Clarke tried and failed to reduce the number of constabularies, and we need to do it.

The late, great Conservative head of the Local Government Association, Sir Simon Milton, said that through the police and crime commissioners the Government were introducing

“a parallel and potentially conflicting system with a competing mandate”.

I believe that is true. I do not agree with Lord Blair, but I think that the public will register their disquiet by failing to turn up at the ballot box. I sincerely believe that after November’s elections, the Government will need to rethink the question and that part of the solution might be to recreate a form of machinery to run the police authorities that represents all parts of the patch. That should not be done by only one person and, if we elect anyone, we should elect the chair of that organisation. I also think that there should be closer working on prisons, probation and fire services so that there can be joined-up accountability for a wide range of these issues.

I genuinely welcome the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice to the Dispatch Box. I think he is a good Minister. He had an unfortunate experience with the police a few years ago, which always reminds me of the Tom Wolfe quote:

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

The right hon. Gentleman has a huge role to play in improving the relationship between the Government and the police. It is in a terrible state, and I believe that if the right hon. Gentleman works hard, with all the charm for which he is famous, he could make a great contribution to dealing with crime and disorder in this country.

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[Mr Browne]

I think that what matters is what one does with the police. The team that wins the premier league is not the one with the biggest squad; it is the one that gets the best results, and that is what we are trying to do in policing.

We see a hallmark of old Labour, new Labour and the exciting latest version that is somewhere in between in the second criticism in the motion: the casual authoritarianism of criticising the Government for

“restricting the use of CCTV”.

Yes, we do believe that there should be some restrictions on CCTV. We are striking the right balance between enabling the police to use modern investigative techniques such as CCTV and DNA evidence, and the police are using those techniques to great effect, but at the same time protecting the right of innocent members of the public to not be subjected to constant and unregulated surveillance.

Labour’s third criticism reveals hostility to the idea of having democratically elected commissioners to increase accountability and give the public greater say in the policing of their community. That was a recurrent theme of the debate. That hostility, it must be said, is not shared by many Labour ex-Ministers, including two recent MPs, Tony Lloyd and Alun Michael, or by the former Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Prescott. If Labour Members are concerned about the election turnout, perhaps they should start by getting those three to pull their fingers out, get campaigning and explain the rationale for their candidacy. Every Member of this House, elected as we are, should want election turnouts to be strong, and I am delighted that the profile of the elections is rising in Cleethorpes, Brigg and Goole, and Denton and Reddish. I believe that it will rise across England and Wales in the coming weeks.

Labour has to make up its own mind. During the debate, we have heard criticism of the Government on the one hand for spending too much money on PCC elections, and on the other hand, for not spending enough. Whatever the turnout, the House can be sure of this: the new PCCs will have a stronger mandate than the police authorities they are replacing. Many police authority members from all parties have done sterling work on behalf of their communities. We recognise and applaud that, but with the best will in the world, police authorities were hardly delivering public accountability and transparency: in the most recent survey, only 7% of the public were even aware that police authorities existed. We should not be fearful of giving the public a say, and parties in this House should not be discouraging people from participating in a democratic process. I hope that people will find out more and that they will vote.

[Alan Johnson]

Probably less than 7% of the public are aware that the hon. Gentleman exists. Does that mean he is doing a bad job?

[Mr Browne]

In the area where I stood for election, I got 49% of the vote, and I hope the figure will go up next time, but we will see; one can never take anything for granted. Labour got 5% in my area, which is 1% more than UKIP.

The final theme that runs through the Labour motion is deep, cautious, conservative resistance to fresh thinking and change. Beyond spraying around more and more borrowed money, we see no ideas, no imagination and a closed mind to reform. It is easy for Opposition parties to lapse into idle oppositionism—we have all been there—and in many ways Labour today reminds me of what the Liberal Democrats were like before we became a serious party of Government. The House may be interested to know that that trait is not new to Labour in opposition. Let me quote what a previous shadow Home Secretary said when his party was last out of government. I shall reveal the name: Tony Blair—