Police Grant Report

Calvin Bailey Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Calvin Bailey (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

I want to thank the police officers and PCSOs of the Metropolitan police, who bravely serve the communities of Leyton and Wanstead. I also want to thank the Minister for her leadership in this area. Her attentiveness to these issues was manifest in her visit to Leyton and Wanstead, where she saw at first hand the problems the additional funding will address. The visit was valued by our police force, council and constituents alike.

More broadly, we welcome the Government’s significant investment in our police services, which is much needed after a decade in which real-terms funding for the Metropolitan police was cut by £1.2 billion. In combination with the actions being taken by the Mayor of London, who has doubled the mayoral funding for policing, the investment needs to enable better policing for our communities of Leyton and Wanstead. I particularly welcome the largest increase in the national and international capital city grant in a decade, which responds to concerns I have been raising about the impact of police officer abstractions on our communities. At some points last year, a number of our wards had no community response officers at all because of the number of abstractions taking place. In total, we lost more than 26,000 hours of officer time from Waltham Forest alone, and in Redbridge, we have areas that have no identifiable community support officers at all.

Last Friday, I again met a group of constituents from Leytonstone who are being blighted by persistent antisocial behaviour and criminality, including allegations of drug dealing, fencing of stolen goods and other organised criminal activity being run out of premises in the local area. I have been working closely with the community support officer locally and the council’s ASB team, both of whom are actively engaged but struggling to make a difference with the resources they have. I want to thank Councillor Limbajee and Sergeant Mubasher for their efforts. When it comes to tackling crime and antisocial behaviour, Labour’s commitment to putting 13,000 additional bobbies on the beat in our neighbourhoods is essential for laying the foundations for change. It will give the reforms and better leadership we require the space they need to work.

Last week, on the Redbridge side of my constituency, we saw the opening of a community police hub in Woodford, from which officers will cover South Woodford and Wanstead. As we know, Boris Johnson as Mayor of London downgraded the neighbourhood policing presence, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal), and closed Wanstead police station and the front counter in Woodford in 2013. That failed to recognise the value of bricks and mortar in connecting policing with our communities. Thankfully, that is being redressed due to the hard work of the outstanding Labour council in Redbridge under the leadership of Councillor Kam Rai.

A neighbourhood policing presence is seriously needed in the area. The Co-op on George Lane in South Woodford has had at least 30 shoplifting incidents in the last 12 months alone. Increased police numbers and the improved police presence will be essential to addressing that tyranny. There is also good, responsive policing being done across our communities. Yesterday, for example, I bumped into the territorial support group officers in Langthorne Park—I think they were rather shocked to see me. It is a known hotspot, and that is why I and they were there. They told me that they were acting on information from local people and proactively targeting criminal activity that had been identified. It is that kind of visible policing, backed by strong community engagement, that helps to restore trust in our police and their ability to protect us. There are, I hope, some early signs of this co-ordinated work paying off, with a significant reduction in ASB reports in one of our most affected wards during the final months of last year. That was due to a reduction in the number of abstractions.

Sadly, too often, when our neighbourhood police engage with serious antisocial behaviour issues locally, all it does is move the criminality to a different location, or suppress it only temporarily. To resolve these problems, we need better joined-up work as well as the resources to make policing more effective. Today’s announcement of funding for our councils as well as for our police is doubly helpful.

I would like to see our council licensing departments working more closely with the police to shut down premises that are being used for organised crime, even where the evidence is not yet strong enough for the police to make arrests and secure prosecutions. Alongside the Government’s action on respect orders and on wider work to strengthen prevention, there is more that we can do to ensure that these additional resources deliver a sense of greater safety and peace for our communities.

Finally, I want to amplify a point made by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney). The police must be of the people, for the people. However, in London, there are many structural challenges that prevent this from being so, including pay, which this Government have chosen to tackle with their significant uplift in the Budget. Housing is another issue. When I was a child, I recall Mr Abbott, our local bobby, living in police housing. Although this might not be appropriate today, similar housing support is necessary to encourage more Londoners to contribute to the peace and security that they hope to enjoy. This grant must be the start of such a journey.