Policing

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner). I start by paying tribute to our brave police officers and staff up and down the country for the work they do, and particularly the work of Bedfordshire police. I will read briefly from a letter published recently in the Dunstable Gazette describing just one example of what our police officers do day in, day out:

“My elderly parents…were the unfortunate victims of a burglary at their home in Dunstable on July 5. I live in Norfolk, some 130 miles away, so was unable to get to their home for several hours. During that time they were visited by two officers from Dunstable Police Station who not only took control of the situation by reassuring my parents and contacting me, but also called the paramedics as they were concerned that my mother was going into shock. By the time I arrived they had cleaned up as best they could, removed the broken glass and mud from the kitchen, made them tea and tidied the bedrooms. They did not leave until the premises were secure and someone was with my parents. I must say thank you for the professional and compassionate approach taken by these officers. In these difficult times it is good to know that there are people like them who are prepared to do that bit extra.”

Is not it fantastic that we have police officers up and down the country who will go to those lengths to look after our constituents?

We have a goods news story in Bedfordshire: crime has fallen by 10% in the year to June 2012, according to the independent Office for National Statistics. That is better than the 6% fall nationally, better than nearby Essex and better than neighbouring Cambridgeshire. Bedfordshire police have done extremely well, and they have had to do that with a reduction in their grant funding. There has been a 5.6% fall in the money the police authority receives, although there was a slight increase in the money it got from the council tax precept.

The Government have to save money because the previous Government continued to spend money we did not have year after year. Despite that, we are increasing money for the health service, honouring our obligations to the poorest of the poor and maintaining cash to schools. We have to save money in other circumstances to ensure that this country does not return to the financial mess we are rescuing it from.

On budgeting, I ask the Minister to look again at damping, which has already been mentioned. Bedfordshire police suffer from the use of damping as an accounting policy within the Home Office. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to go back to the Home Office and request that this issue be reconsidered, because at the moment it is not fair.

Our excellent new chief constable in Bedfordshire, Alf Hitchcock, has, in effect, managed to add 92 officers to those involved in neighbourhood policing work by rearranging the shift patterns. Many officers used to work from 8 am to 4 pm, but that is not when the burglars and criminals were generally out and about, so he reordered the shifts to make sure that more officers were out on the streets during evenings and weekends. In addition, the Home Office’s scrapping of form filling has saved the police 4.5 million hours of police time, which is equivalent to 2,100 extra police officers being out on the streets.

Bedfordshire police went even further when they introduced a novel police station exclusion zone policy, led by excellent officers such as Inspector Frank Donnelly. This meant that any officer found in a police station, particularly during the winter evenings when most burglaries take place, would be challenged by a senior officer as to why he or she was there and not out on the streets. Such policies show that it is possible to reduce crime even with a reduced budget caused by having to deal with the deficit left to us by the previous Government—and all credit to Bedfordshire police for showing the way.

Police stations are very important and we do need them, particularly in Leighton Buzzard and Dunstable; I have been clear with the chief constable about that. I am not wedded to any particular building, and I leave to the police the decisions as to which are the most appropriate for them to use. I also pay tribute to Bedfordshire police’s pioneering use of technology. They were one of the first forces to make sure that all their officers had BlackBerrys so that they are kept out on the streets on patrol where we need them.

I pay tribute to those who have in the past served as members of police authorities up and down the country. In Bedfordshire, Peter Conniff has done an excellent job as the chair of the authority, as have long-standing members such as Councillor Peter Hollick, one of my constituents. They have done a good job. However, the election of a police and crime commissioner means that that individual will have a mandate from the people and will be accountable back to the people. That will sharpen up the oversight role of the police, and that is important. In Bedfordshire we have a candidate, Jas Parmar, who is a former police officer. He has the necessary experience and credibility with the police because he will not ask them to do anything that he has not done himself.

It is incredibly important to look forward to the work of the College of Policing as from 1 December. That will lead to improved evidence-based outcomes, it will improve cost-effectiveness, further improve police professionalism, and it will enable the new commissioners to use the work of the college to audit police practice. This is an excellent innovation that has not yet been focused on sufficiently. In tandem with the police and crime commissioners, it will greatly help policing in our country.