Police Funding

Clive Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton) on securing this debate. Everyone deserves to feel safe in their own home, walking down their own streets, on public transport and in their town centres, but for far too many people in the UK today, that is simply not reality.

The previous Conservative Government failed to keep our community safe from crime; their unnecessary cuts left our police forces overstretched, under-resourced and unable to focus on the crimes that affect our communities the most. Every day, 6,000 cases are closed by the police across England and Wales without a suspect ever having been identified. Meanwhile, just 6% of crimes reported to the police result in a suspect being charged, and three in four burglaries and car thefts go unsolved. From 2015, the Conservative Government slashed the number of police community support officers by more than 4,500.

My constituency of Wokingham is served by Thames Valley police force—the largest non-Metropolitan force in England and Wales—which does incredible work and is led selflessly by officers and civilian staff.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Thank you, Sir Roger, for giving me the chance to intervene; I appreciate it very much. I wanted to come along and support my friend, the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton), because the same police force, chief superintendents, constables, sergeants and police cars that service his area also service mine. The clear issues for us are antisocial behaviour, under-age drug use, vandalism, petty crime and paramilitaries. Does the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) agree that community officers’ knowledge of their local areas is so important in order to ensure that the communities can gather behind them and that forces can thereby address local crime?

[Clive Jones]

I absolutely agree that local police officers and PCSOs are invaluable. If they have a connection with the local community, they do a very good job.

Thames Valley police protect 2.5 million people and cover 196 miles of motorway, and I am proud of the manner in which they serve our community. It is, however, a disgrace that their hard work is severely let down by the previous Government’s reckless mismanagement of police forces. In the Thames Valley, we have only 198 police officers per 100,000 people. That is below the national average of 245. Only 88.1% of police officers in our area are in frontline roles, which is below the national average of 90.3%, and we only have seven special constables per 100,000 people, which is also below the national average of 10 per 100,000; that is a complete failure. Thames Valley police force needs more resources.

The Conservative party’s dereliction of duty is evident in the consequences of the previous Government’s under-investment. Between October 2021 and September 2024, retail crime surged by 35.4%, from 10,306 cases to a massive 18,208 cases. Robberies have also surged, with a shocking 143% increase in robbery from businesses. In fact, within the Bracknell and Wokingham area, robbery from business property has risen by the higher figure of 147.4%. Whether at the national level or the local level, our communities have been failed.

I recognise that the Government have inherited a mess, but they must urgently restore the proper community policing that people deserve. We must get more police officers out on to the street, and that should be funded by scrapping the wasteful, expensive police and crime commissioner experiment, and investing the savings in frontline policing instead. We also need to address the dramatic cut in the number of PCSOs, and free up existing officers’ time so they can focus on local policing. That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling for a new national online crime agency to take over the policing of crimes like online fraud and abuse, leaving local forces more time to tackle burglaries and other neighbourhood crimes.

For years, the previous Conservative Government failed to keep our communities safe from crime, but the new Government have said that they will act, so I ask the Minister how and when the new Government will deliver their manifesto promise of recruiting more neighbourhood officers. The details should be brought forward urgently.