Future of Soft Power

Debate between Christina Rees and Khalid Mahmood

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mahmood]

rose—

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

Order. This being a 30-minute debate, we do not usually take contributions from other Members unless they have permission from the Member in charge and the Minister.

Stop and Search: West Midlands

Debate between Christina Rees and Khalid Mahmood

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Ms Rees. I thank the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Nicola Richards) for securing this important debate. As we have all said, stop and search is a constructive and useful power. The police service, with their cameras on, should be trained properly to respect the level of search they will be conducting and how that will be reflected in their numbers. It is important, it is needed and we should be working together to do that.

I had a meeting with the PCC last Friday and that was one of the issues we discussed. Another was resourcing my local areas with more police officers and more police community support officers. The reason I say that is that, on its own, stop and search is a weak tool. In the past, we had local PCSOs walking up and down the streets, speaking to people in their local areas and understanding what the issues were, where there was instigation of crime and what people were engaged in. What prevented the stop-and-search process was the intelligence that we had on the ground.

In my constituency, we had Rob Capella, who used to be a party member—in my first election, he delivered a lot of leaflets and I was sad to see him become a PCSO, but he is fantastic in the job that he does. He has built a huge relationship and a huge amount of trust in his local community and people come and speak to him. Unfortunately, about 85% of his team is no longer there. It is essentially just Rob doing most of the job that he had wanted to do. He does not have the police officers to report back to and carry out some of those necessary actions.

My constituency contains Lozells, Handsworth and Aston, which have had particularly high levels of crime. When I took over the constituency, very early on, we had the killings of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare—a hugely tragic event, which was difficult for me as a new Member of Parliament to handle. I got the community together, I got the black churches together, we got the local enterprise people together and worked to deliver that process. We delivered that because we all got over it together. We did the same recently, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) said earlier, with the murder of Dea-John, where we got the churches, the community and the police together and we responded very quickly. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) also joined us in that process. It was the right thing to do.

We are prepared to bring together whatever is needed to ensure that anything that happens is dealt with in a proportionate manner and the communities understand what has gone on. We are quite prepared to do that. However, the PCC explained to me how difficult it is for the officers to do that policing work without the support of additional resources and additional police officers on the streets. While we confine ourselves to stop and search, that is a small tool in the police’s armoury.

My colleague from the Westside business improvement district works very hard. He has a huge amount of entertainment venues in his BID district, mainly around Broad Street in Birmingham, which most people will know is quite well frequented from Thursday until at least Saturday night and sometimes Sunday as well. There is a huge challenge in trying to resolve some of the issues with people. He employs wardens to work alongside the officers in the area, but there are not sufficient resources. When the officers come in and try to apply stop and search, it causes issues for a number of people in the area and makes the situation tense, so other people come in, with the risk of causing another incident. We have to look at where and when we can apply stop and search.

In my constituency, in January of this year, we lost Keon Lincoln, a young boy of 15 who was shot and stabbed. It was another hugely tragic event, not just for his family but for the community as a whole, so we need to look at giving support. To that effect, at my meeting on Friday, I also had the violence reduction unit present to look at forging a multi-agency approach to dealing with this issue. I want youth services, social services, educationalists and the police to work together to provide a resolution. I know it works, because when we had real issues in the early ’00s, we got those teams together and it worked. By 2008-09, we had some of the lowest crime rates in my constituency because we worked together.

No one mechanism is good enough to effect change. I think we would all say that stop and search has a place but has to be done by properly trained officers. Again, more resources are needed to do that. We also need to have enough officers to do that properly, so that we can provide positive outcomes. In much of the city, it is probably not safe enough for officers to do that. They are professional servants of the community, but at times they put themselves at risk because they do not have enough support. It is very difficult. I praise them for the great work that they do in protecting us all, but they need sufficient resources.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook) mentioned the issue of lower crime rates. The way that crimes of domestic abuse have been reclassified has had the effect of lowering some of the crime figures in Birmingham and around the west midlands. That is something that we need to look it, rather than saying we are reducing crime.

We have a huge amount of work to do. I commend the police service, which does a fantastic amount of work in our area. The PCC is engaging with us all, and I hope the Minister will engage with him constructively to ensure that we all work together to provide the best possible policing for all our communities.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

I would like to call the Opposition spokesperson at 3.38 pm at the latest, and we have two Back Benchers left to speak. Please bear that in mind. I call Mike Wood.