Chris Coghlan
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Jess Brown-Fuller
My hon. Friend pre-empts one of the things that I will call for later in my speech.
Antisocial behaviour is happening in all corners of the country. In Chichester, I am seeing it in the balaclava-clad young men riding e-bikes at terrifying speeds along pedestrian streets or pavements, the people feeling intimidated and threatened when they are out in the evening, the growing use of catapults to harm wildlife or the shoplifting epidemic that plagues our local businesses. It is seen across my constituency, whether in the city centre, the town of Selsey, Westhampnett or the Witterings. Charity venues have told me about young men forcing entry and threatening their volunteers or elderly members of the public who have gone along to watch a film. Another constituent told me that the local bowls club is struggling to retain members after some were hit with ball bearings that were being shot at pigeons.
Today’s debate is on community policing. Much of that antisocial behaviour is driven by a lack of visible policing in areas like mine.
Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
I thank my hon. Friend for calling this important debate. In my constituency, we have a serious problem with antisocial motorbike noise from modified exhausts. Does she agree that we should have more public spaces protection orders to help the police enforce against antisocial behaviour, and funding for trials of acoustic cameras to try to stop this?
Jess Brown-Fuller
I thank my hon. Friend for his important intervention. I agree that we need more access to things like PSPOs, but there is an acute challenge in actually policing the PSPOs that we manage to get in place. That was a suggestion that we had to cull the wildlife crime that we were seeing locally, but the police rightly said that a PSPO is effective only if there are police to manage it.
This is not the fault of local police officers—they are diligent, well trained and dedicated to keeping our communities safe, but they are also asked to achieve the impossible. The Government’s neighbourhood policing guarantee makes all the right noises about ensuring that policing is local, but in coastal and rural areas such as mine, it is near impossible to have a meaningful presence in the huge areas they are asked to cover. Selsey has nearly 11,000 residents, and the number nearly doubles in the summer months thanks to tourism, but the area does not magically get any additional policing during that time.