Crime: Birmingham, Edgbaston

Chris Philp Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) on securing this evening’s debate. Let me start by providing some national context before answering some of her questions. She mentioned a number of crime figures in her speech, and it is important to put on record that two sets of crime statistics are published: there is police recorded crime, which are the figures she is quoting, and then there is the crime survey for England and Wales produced by the Office for National Statistics. The police recorded crime figures depend on the propensity of the public to report and how good a job the police do in recording those crimes. Over the last five or seven years, the police have become a lot better at recording all the crimes reported to them, and that is why those numbers have gone up.

However, the Office for National Statistics tells us that the most reliable set of figures for long-term crime trends are not the police reported crimes figures for the reasons I have set out—they depend on the public’s propensity to report and the police’s ability to record them—but the crime survey. Let me give the hon. Lady some of the crime survey figures since 2010, which she mentioned as a reference period. On a like-for-like basis, all crime has come down by 54% since 2010, according to the independent Office for National Statistics, while violence is down by 46%, theft by 47%, domestic burglary by 55%, and vehicle theft by 39%. There is a lot more to do, particularly on shoplifting, vehicle crime and knife crime, which I will come to in a moment, but the overall crime trends are down.

On resources, which the hon. Lady mentioned a few times, across England and Wales as a whole, we now have record numbers of police officers. On 31 March last year, we reached 149,566 police officers. That is more than we have ever had before, and it surpasses the previous peak, which was in March 2010, by about 3,500 officers. So we have record police numbers, and those have broadly speaking been maintained since that record was reached in March last year.

On West Midlands police specifically, its budget this year was £790 million, which is an increase of £51 million year on year, or about 6.4%—considerably higher than the current rate of inflation. I think many of the questions the hon. Lady is asking are questions she should be addressing to Simon Foster, the police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands, who somehow managed to get re-elected a couple of weeks ago, because he has those financial resources. Whereas other police areas around the country have hit record numbers, as has the total, that has not happened in the West Midlands. That is a question I would strongly encourage her to ask Mr Foster, now that he has somehow got himself re-elected.

The hon. Lady asked several questions about specific crime types. She went through quite a long list, so I will quickly go through some of the more important of them. She mentioned, for example, knife crime, which is a concern. The number of people getting admitted to hospital with an injury by a knife has come down by 26% in the last five years, but there is further to go. London is conspicuously much worse than the rest of the country. In the rest of the country, a lot more progress is being made, but there is an exception in London.

We are doing quite a lot to combat this. First, we are encouraging a greater use of stop and search—done respectfully, of course. That takes knives off the streets, and we would welcome cross-party support for the police to lawfully use stop and search more to get dangerous knives off the street. Secondly, we are investing in various forms of technology. In fact, just this lunch time I was with a company—an American company—that is developing a new technology that can scan somebody walking down a street to see whether they are carrying a knife, and it can distinguish a knife from a mobile phone or something else. It is not quite ready to deploy yet, but I think it will be ready to deploy experimentally this year. I think that could revolutionise our ability to look at a crowd and detect who in that crowd is carrying a knife, and then make sure they are stopped, the knife is taken off them and they are arrested.

We are also doing quite a lot of work on prevention, and the hon. Lady mentioned youth services. Notoriously, Birmingham City Council went bankrupt, but the Home Office is directly funding violence reduction units, to the tune of more than £50 million a year across the country, which are designed to work with young people—whether it is with mentoring, work experience, cognitive behavioural therapy or youth activities, sometimes in partnership with football clubs—to help get them on to a better path.

The Youth Endowment Fund does lots of work here—it has £200 million—and I commend the work of Jon Yates, the chief executive. From next year, there is going to be a £75 million increase in violence reduction unit funding over three years, which is about a 50% increase because, as the hon. Lady says, supporting those young people is so important. This autumn, we will also be piloting, with the Youth Endowment Fund, a new initiative to try to identify the 50 or so of young people or early teenagers who are most at risk of getting into serious violence and serious crime. That includes looking at a range of indicators, such as mental health, education, housing or having an older sibling who is involved in a gang—indicators that go beyond criminal justice, so that interventions can be made to stop a vulnerable or at-risk 12 or 13-year-old becoming a violent 17 or 18-year-old. That initiative has the potential to make a real difference.

The hon. Lady talked about car crime, and crime more widely, which is a concern. I recently met the chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover to discuss exactly this point. We are stepping up work on car crime, and are working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead, Assistant Chief Constable Jenny Sims of the Merseyside force. Stolen cars are often sold and rapidly exported in containers to countries including the United Arab Emirates and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We will do more work to stop that export at the border. We will also increase the amount of intelligence work done, so that we can spot patterns and identify the organised criminal gangs who are often stealing these cars.

[Preet Kaur Gill]

The testimonies that I shared were so powerful because they are people’s experience of being victims of crime. Those people say that given that the West Midlands police are still 800 police officers short, the resource is just not there, so they are given a crime reference number, and that is it. That does not make people feel safe. The Minister is talking about youth crime and various initiatives, but youth services have been decimated. There is nowhere for young people to go, and there are no opportunities for good jobs or training, so they get exploited. Those are the kinds of things that young people need. They need hope and aspiration.

[Chris Philp]

Youth unemployment is of course a great deal lower today than it was under the last Labour Government. On resources and police numbers in the west midlands, as I mentioned, the police and crime commissioner in the west midlands has £51 million more this year than last year, so the hon. Lady ought to ask him, ideally publicly, what he is spending that money on, and why he is not addressing the issues that she raises.

I agree that car crime and other crimes affect the victim terribly. That is why police across the whole country, including of course in the west midlands, have committed to always following reasonable lines of inquiry where they exist, including in relation to car crime. A big technological change that we are already exploiting is retrospective facial recognition. If the victim has an image of an offender—a Ring doorbell image, a mobile phone photograph of someone taking a car, closed circuit television footage from a shop where shoplifting has occurred—even if the image is blurred or partially obscured, it can be run through the police national database for a match. The facial recognition algorithm is now extremely accurate. That is a way in which we are already catching a lot more criminals, including some involved in car crime.

I encourage victims who have a picture of a suspect to please give it to the police, because they have committed to always—not sometimes—running it through the facial recognition database; and they have committed to always—again, not sometimes—following up reasonable lines of inquiry where they exist. That is for all crimes, even crimes that some people would historically have considered minor. That commitment was made last September, and it is vital that the police deliver on it and support victims, for the reasons the hon. Lady set out.

[Preet Kaur Gill]

Will the Minister give an example of where that technology has been used, because I have never known that to happen? When residents send images that seem to be blurred, the police are very clear that they cannot do anything with them. Can the Minister tell me how many forces are using the technology, and when there has been a conviction?

[Chris Philp]

I wonder how much longer I have, but the technology is being used across the whole country. This year, over 100,000—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. To answer the Minister’s question, he has until 7.30 pm, which is some 57 minutes away. How long his speech takes is of course a matter for his discretion; I am putting no pressure on him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

I am tempted to use all 57 minutes, and I am sure the hon. Lady has interventions that would take up a fair chunk of that, but I will be a lot briefer, which I am sure will be popular with colleagues.

Retrospective facial recognition is being used thousands of times every month, and there are all kinds of examples of it being used successfully. For example, a murder was committed in a Coventry nightclub a couple of years ago, and the only piece of evidence was a photograph of the suspect taken in the nightclub. Running that through the police national database got a match, and the police went to the suspect’s address and found the suspect there, with clothes covered in the victim’s blood, and he has now been convicted. There are hundreds of examples just from the past few months of retrospective facial recognition being used. A photo that is blurred or dark can often be matched. Obviously there needs to be some sort of image that the police can look at, but it is remarkable to see the images that can now be matched, using that algorithm. I strongly encourage everybody to send images to the police. If the police do not run them through the facial recognition database, people should ask why and push the police to do so, because they have committed to doing that.

We now deploy live facial recognition in a way that allows suspects who are wandering around a high street or a train station to be identified and arrested. I have also mentioned technology such as knife scanning. Facial recognition has the potential, in the coming years and months—this is not a long way off; it is being used now—to transform how we catch criminals, so that we do a better job for victims.

The hon. Lady also asked about scrap metal. Interestingly enough, I had a meeting today with the all-party parliamentary group on metal, stone and heritage crime, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous). Lord Birt, who is a member of the APPG from the Lords, also attended. We discussed what more we can do. Scrap metal theft is estimated at about £500 million a year. When the Scrap Metal Dealers Act was passed in 2013—it was a private Member’s Bill from my predecessor Sir Richard Ottaway—the figure was about £800 million a year, so the value has come down by more than a third since 2013, but we would like to go further.

The hon. Lady mentioned the NPCC group on metal theft; it is my intention to invite myself to that group and attend its next meeting, which I think is on 11 June, to press for more action in this area. The theft of catalytic converters and lead are the areas of most pressing concern.

The hon. Lady briefly mentioned shoplifting, which is a matter of extreme concern. The police have a national retail crime action plan, which includes a plan to target prolific shoplifters, and to follow reasonable lines of inquiry, including by always running the pictures from CCTV through the facial recognition database. The Government published our additional action plan just a couple of weeks ago, which includes a plan to meet the calls from Members of this House, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers and others to create a stand-alone offence of assaulting a retail worker. That has been widely welcomed.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be relieved to hear that I am not taking up all 57 minutes. I have set out the actions that are being taken and, more importantly, the results that are being delivered. There are some disappointing trends in the west midlands, but I know the hon. Lady will take those up with the police and crime commissioner, Simon Foster, and will ask him what he is doing with the £51 million extra he has got this year. I will work constructively with her and other colleagues to make sure that our communities are kept safe.

Question put and agreed to.