Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Andrew Griffiths Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

That is certainly an interesting point, and I hope that it will be explored more thoroughly in Committee. Many of the elderly people who would otherwise be keen to go to the Grand theatre for an evening’s show do not do so because they do not want to have to form crocodiles for safety, weaving their way through the town centre to find a local taxi rank because they are scared.

[Andrew Griffiths (Burton) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

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[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I begin by paying tribute to the police in my constituency, who have been helping to deal with the protests over tuition fees. We have had a few minor actions and in each case the police have demonstrated fantastic support.

It has been a great pleasure listening to the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). She is heading in the right direction, though not far enough and certainly not fast enough. It is right that we consider the question of accountability in the policing of Britain.

Let us talk first about the commissioners. It is important that they are elected, that there is just one of them, and that they are responsible for planning, as outlined in the Bill. The electorate want an interface with a single person who will speak on their behalf and deal with the issues that arise in everyday policing. My one concern about the disqualification list is whether a recently retired chief constable is the right person to be elected as a commissioner. That needs to be discussed in Committee.

I listened carefully to the shadow Home Secretary. He mentioned Councillor Rob Garnham, the chairman of my police authority in Gloucestershire. Councillor Garnham is well known, probably because he has launched a campaign to save police authorities, not because of the work he did as chairman of the police authority. I believe that the membership and function of police authorities are not properly understood by the electorate. We could test that by asking people who they think is on their police authority. Some people would look rather surprised. They certainly would not be able to provide an answer, because the police authority is just not recognised as the equipment for maintaining police accountability.

It is right to introduce commissioners, and it is right to get rid of police authorities. It is also necessary to improve value for money in our police forces, because police authorities have just not exercised that function terribly well. I heard only today just how many police forces buy the same equipment from the same old firm, without going through proper competitive tendering, driving down the price or saying, “If you don’t do a better price, we’ll go somewhere else.” The process is too sloppy, and it needs to be tightened up.

The Bill includes some other interesting areas, one of which is licensing and the role of local communities and local authorities, because it is important to ensure that decisions are properly enforced locally. That is one of the key things. Local authorities already have a useful set of powers, but the question is about ensuring that they are deployed and that the decisions are made to stick.

The Localism Bill will enhance the role of the community, so we need to link it to the Bill before us. We have to engineer a change not just in powers, but in culture, so that local authorities are keen to make decisions properly, to be ambitious, to work hard for their communities and to be ready to make different decisions from their neighbours’ and more interesting decisions for themselves.

On the cost of drink, I am sympathetic to higher prices, because it is important that we deal with binge drinking. One can go to France to buy cheap beer—there it is, at LeClerc, the local supermarket. One can also buy lots of cheap wine, so other countries have cheap drink, but the French, for example, do not have much binge drinking. That is something to be discussed, and we need to look at the causes of binge drinking, because it is a cultural issue.

[Andrew Griffiths]

My hon. Friend knows that 70% of all alcohol sold in this country is sold through supermarkets. Is not the danger that all the measures before us put extra burdens on pubs, which have to deal with the consequences? The Minister will say that supermarkets can be controlled within the late-night levy, but the problem is clearly not supermarkets selling alcohol after 12 o’clock, but people buying alcohol at 6 o’clock in the evening and drinking it before they go out. The pubs and clubs then have to deal with the consequences. Do we not need to tackle binge drinking and supermarkets’ irresponsible pricing if we are to tackle the problem of alcohol-fuelled violence?

[Neil Carmichael]

That is why I am sympathetic to dealing with the problems in supermarkets. My hon. Friend is right: we do have cheap booze; it is bought in bulk; it is consumed in a bingey way, which does cause huge problems; and we have to address the issue.

We had a debate about pubs last week, but let us repeat the point that we must recognise the pub as a useful, controlled environment in which people can drink.

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) was absolutely right in saying that the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) was making an excellent speech. He did make an excellent speech—not just in his comments on alcohol-related crime, but in what he said about procurement—and it is a pleasure to follow him. If ever there is a vacancy on the Select Committee on Home Affairs, I hope that he will apply to join us because his speech was really excellent. I will speak very briefly, as all hon. Members must, and will make just four points. I agree with much of the Bill, as many of its provisions reflect the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendations in the previous Parliament.

As the House knows, 50% of crime in this country is alcohol related. All hon. Members who have spoken on that subject have talked about the effect that alcohol-related crime has on local communities in their town centres, and the enormous amount of police resources that have to deal with it. The Government have taken a very important step in terms of licensing. I was reassured during my intervention on the Home Secretary when she said that the Government would continue to consider the issue of minimum pricing. Tonight’s speeches reflect the fact that there is concern not necessarily about the pubs and clubs in our town centres, but about the supermarkets.

If one goes to Asda or Morrisons—I am not suggesting that hon. Members on either side of the House may choose to do this; the Chamber may be about to empty—one can get 36 cans of lager for £18, or about 50p a can. [Hon. Members: “How do you know?”] I do not drink alcohol, but one of my researchers looked into this over the weekend. There is no doubt that it is cheaper to buy alcohol in supermarkets. As we heard earlier, people get tanked up before they go out because of the very cheap cost of alcohol there. I am glad that the Government are doing something about minimum pricing, and we look forward to seeing what they do.

[Andrew Griffiths]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that when one can go to a supermarket and buy a can of strong lager more cheaply than a can of Coca-Cola, that sends out an extremely damaging message to young people? That is why so many young people are pre-loading. Before they go out for an evening, they drink far too much, and we see the effects on our high streets, in our police cells and in our emergency units.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, although some may say that drinking Coca-Cola is almost as bad for young people as drinking alcohol.

My second point is about drugs. The Government are taking absolutely the right powers in the Bill to be able to ban legal highs. Mephedrone—commonly known as meow meow—has been a big problem. The Select Committee heard very eloquent evidence from the mother of a young girl who had died as a result of a legal high. It was clearly taking too long to ban such substances, so we warmly welcome putting into the hands of the Home Secretary the power to be able to bring a statutory instrument before the House to deal with these matters.

I also warmly welcome what has been proposed about Parliament square, especially after what happened last Thursday.

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[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate on a Bill that will fulfil many Conservative manifesto commitments, namely electing police commissioners and tackling the antisocial behaviour that is caused by excessive drinking in some of our towns. It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee for the second time in a week. I found myself losing concentration thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to summon Batman to tackle the crime in our towns, but I sense that that solution is not possible.

I will start with the less high-profile measures in the Bill and leave police commissioners for the end of my small amount of time. Even areas such as mine, which lack a large city and its attendant problems, face the problems of alcohol-induced antisocial behaviour in the early mornings; people finding back routes home from the pub that take them past people’s houses, where they disturb people with their noise; and people’s frustration when they are not allowed to object to a licence because a vicinity test does not quite work. The reforms on those matters are greatly to be welcomed.

We must be careful that in the well-meaning attempt to tackle these problems, we do not create a different problem or use the proverbial sledgehammer to crack the nut. An example is the late-night levy, which is an important measure and a great tool for councils. My understanding of the Bill is that if a council such as mine introduces the late-night levy, it has to do so for the whole borough. My seat contains three towns, so all three towns would be included and not just the one where there might be a problem. We could therefore end up imposing a provision that is not required on establishments that are completely responsible and in areas where there is no issue to be tackled. Perhaps that point can be addressed in Committee so that the words achieve what we want them to.

[Andrew Griffiths]

rose—

[Nigel Mills]

I am sorry, time is too limited.

Police commissioners, as the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) said, are not something that one reads about and at once thinks, “Oh, marvellous.” People do not come to our surgeries and say that they want a police commissioner by May 2012. However, when one works through the ideas and looks at the problems that we are trying to tackle, it is clear that constituents feel divorced from the police. Perhaps unfairly, they think that the police are not accountable to them and are not doing what people want. In comparison, people are usually quite happy with the safer neighbourhood team with which they associate. There is a general view that the police are happily sitting behind desks or racing around in cars, rather than doing policing. That is a real problem that we need to tackle, because we all believe in policing by consent.

No one is arguing that we do not need some kind of authority or body to hold the police to account. We would not want to leave it to the chief constable to do whatever he felt like. We all accept that there have to be policing priorities. We cannot have police everywhere doing everything on every issue all the time. It is right that when difficult choices have to be made, there is some democratic accountability.

No Member has argued tonight that police authorities are a great success. I imagine that most of my constituents would struggle to name a single member of their police authority, and I do not recall an election leaflet saying, “This guy’s been on the police authority for the past four years. Hasn’t it been terrible? You should vote him out because of his record on that”. It just does not happen.

Nobody appreciates or values what police authorities do, and despite the costly newspaper that appears through my door every so often, nobody really understands what on earth they are for. There is a vacuum, and I cannot imagine that the way to fill it is through each district electing its own commissioner and all of them coming together to try to agree on something. I cannot see that working. The right answer has to be to elect an individual whom the public will recognise. People will understand that that is the person who is there to be accountable and to whom they can complain. That is the person to blame, who can set the strategy that the police force will follow. People will know that if it does not work, they can vote that person out four years later. That has to be the right way forward.

I do have some concerns about the electoral system for police commissioners included in the Bill. It is a bit strange that we will have a referendum next year to decide how we elect our MPs, yet we have jumped almost to the other side of that debate in the Bill. I might have preferred us to use the same electoral system for commissioners as for MPs. That would be far more understandable for the public.

I understand the argument that the method proposed will ensure that we do not end up with an extremist person having a commissioner’s power by mistake on a flukily low vote, but frankly, I would trust the people of Derbyshire not to end up in that situation. Those of us who represent a seat where there are British National party councillors can be a little nervous about that, but we can trust the people to elect a responsible person as commissioner. They will see that it is a very important job, and it will be valued, so I do not think people will do unfortunate things with their vote.

I wholeheartedly welcome the Bill. It meets a whole load of the promises that we made at the election, and it will be a great step forward in bringing the police back closer to the people. We should all welcome that wholeheartedly.