Police Grant Report (England and Wales)

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

I think that the hon. Gentleman is wrong. Not only have I met South Wales MPs in the last couple of days, but the very vocal PCC—whom I know very well, as, I am sure the hon. Gentleman does—has not raised those figures with me. I suggest that, before South Wales police asks for any more money—which I do not think that it will need to do—they should look very closely at the size of its reserves, which are astronomical.

We need to take account of what the police have already been able to achieve, and the collaboration that has taken place with the help of extra funding from the Department, in order to find ways of providing better day-to-day policing out there. We should not sit in our silos, as we have for many years, allowing money to be spent in a building that is being only half used while another building up the road is just sitting there and could be put to full use.

Hampshire MPs are rightly proud of their emergency services. I am sure that we are all proud of ours as well, but the innovation that has taken place in Hampshire is quite astounding. Money has been saved that can be used in other front-line work, and that has been absolutely brilliant. Winchester has a brand-new fire station. On the first floor are the fire officers and on the next floor are the police, because it is a police station as well as a fire station. More than half the fire stations in England and Wales are within 1 kilometre of an ambulance station or a police station. We are starting to see the same sort of innovation elsewhere in the country, and we should ensure that it continues.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

The Minister is right to commend the hard work of the police in very difficult circumstances, but he has asked for comparisons. In Greater Manchester, violent crime is up by 36%, sexual offences are up by 46%, and overall crime is up by 14%. We have had 20% fewer police officers and 4% fewer police community support officers, and we are looking at an £8.5 million cut in real-terms funding in the next financial year. Those figures do not add up, do they?

[Mike Penning]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that crime has fallen in Manchester since 2010, as it has in the rest of the country. There is real concern about certain elements of crime, which the hon. Gentleman’s chief constable and PCC will be addressing, as we are at the Home Office. However, I ask him to look closely at the figures that he has given. We must be careful not to scare people away. We want people to report sexual assaults, but historically they have not done so. We want them to report domestic violence, but historically they have not done so.

[Andrew Gwynne]

rose—

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

We are seeing that sort of collaborative work across the country and some of it is being paid for by the innovation fund, for which the different forces, emergency services and local authorities are putting in bids. But this goes much further than just working in the same station; it is also about training together. As you might know, Mr Speaker, I used to be a fireman years ago. I may have mentioned that before and I may have to mention it a few more times. There are only two of us in the House, but we are very proud of what we did.

In those days, it was very rare to train or work with the other emergency services unless you were physically on the same job. If hon. Members go round their constituencies and ask people in the emergency services when they last did a forward exercise with the fire service, the ambulance service or, in some parts of the country, the coastguard service, they will find that it happens very rarely. That is often due to logistical pressures, but those pressures do not exist if two or more services are in the same building and can share the same yard and do the same training.

Going back to Winchester, not only is the fire station in the same building as the police station but the yard is jointly used and at the back of the yard is the armed response unit, along with the armoury and the ranges. All this has been built on what was going to be just a fire station. When we talk to those brilliant professionals who look after us every day and ask them about the training they are doing, we find that firefighters are being trained as paramedics, as is the case in Hampshire. Sadly, in the case of a road traffic collision, the ambulances might not always get their first, even though the incident has been reported and people are trapped. I know how difficult it was when we were at incidents such as those. It is not just a question of how many ambulances there are. When you have a really bad smash on the motorway, it is really difficult to get the emergency services through. You would think that everybody would get out of the way, but I can tell you, Mr Speaker, they do not.

What is happening now is that fire personnel are being trained to keep people alive. I am not just talking about first aid certificates or the use of defibrillators, although that is a really good innovation. By the way, the cashiers at my local Tesco’s know how to use defibrillators, and that is a great asset, which also saves people’s lives. However, when dealing with a major trauma, it is vital to have the skills that I saw the firemen and women in Hampshire using. I was crying out for those skills when I was in the fire service.

[Andrew Gwynne]

I want to take the Minister back to the answer he gave me some moments ago. Of course it is not my intention to scare people, but the statistics show that crime numbers are going up in Greater Manchester. Of course this might be due in part to people now reporting crimes that they would previously not have reported, but does the Minister accept that people also need to have confidence that there are adequate numbers of police officers to investigate those crimes? Surely the 20% reduction in the number of police officers in Greater Manchester will not help to create public confidence.

[Mike Penning]

That really depends on where those officers were in the first place. Were they working in the communities and on the beat, or were they doing desk jobs? The truth of the matter is that, while we have had a decrease in the number of officers around the country, there are more in front-line duties now than there were in 2010. The other thing the hon. Gentleman might want to ask his local police and crime commissioner, if he is really worried about the funding—even though there would have been a 10% cut under a Labour Government—is why his police force is holding £71 million in reserves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jack Dromey]

We will oppose this settlement today. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice said from the Dispatch Box that police funding is being protected. That is simply not true, and I will lay out my case in due course.

We are still learning some painful lessons from the past. There are still wrongs to be righted; the police are not perfect. We need to raise standards, and we should always hold the police to the highest standards in the public interest. The first thing I wish to say to the Policing Minister and the Home Secretary is that the British model of neighbourhood policing is celebrated across the world. The model was responsible for a generation of progress on crime, but the Home Secretary’s remorselessly negative tone about the police, taken with ever fewer police officers doing ever more work, has demoralised the service, and we are now seeing soaring levels of sickness and stress.

[Andrew Gwynne]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. He is absolutely right to go back to the Labour success of neighbourhood policing. Is he as dismayed as I am about what is happening now? In my own constituency, neighbourhood policing is withering away, and officers are now being put on response duties. I accept that such duties are necessary, but so too is neighbourhood policing. This is undermining public confidence in the ability of the police to listen to the needs of communities.

[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Typically, what we see all over the country is a neighbourhood sergeant responsible for perhaps one or two teams and a number of PCSOs. Those who were previously part of the neighbourhood teams are now being put on response duties. Following a Home Office decision in 2012 there was a reclassification whereby some people on response were given local neighbourhood policing duties, even if they spent all their time on response, so the earlier assertions about our having more officers on the frontline are simply not right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jack Dromey]

There has been an £8.5 million cut in real terms, contrary to what was said at the Dispatch Box. After a generation of progress, and despite the heroic efforts of the police and crime commissioner, Tony Lloyd, and the Greater Manchester police service, we are seeing profoundly worrying signs of crime starting to rise once again.

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is right to point out the sleight of hand by the Government. The real unfairness to areas such as the west midlands and Greater Manchester is this: we have a relatively low council tax base, so the precept brings in relatively small amounts of funding—nothing like the amounts of funding that are being cut by the central Government grant. Added to that, those are the areas that tend to have higher crime rates, so need is not matched by resources. It is a double whammy for the urban areas and it penalises places such as Greater Manchester.

[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend sets out the case powerfully. There is no question but that need does not determine the way this Government allocate funds, whether to the police service or to local government. I will return to that point.

There was another broken promise. The Prime Minister said in 2010 that he would protect the frontline. Not true—12,000 front-line officers have since been lost. It was a broken promise and, to add insult to injury, not only are the Tories continuing to slash police funding, but they are expecting the public to pay more for it. The Tory sums rely upon local people being charged an extra £369 million in council tax. Our citizens and the communities we serve are being asked to pay more for less.