Public Disorder

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about that. We plan to spend additional money on the 20,000 most troubled families in the country, with more early intervention and much better co-ordination. So often with those families, we find that they have contact after contact with the authorities, but that it is contact with them rather than work to change behaviour and address problems. The problem is manageable. I know that there are 20,000 such families, and there might even be 100,000, but it is still a manageable number which we can deal with during this Parliament.

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

Two hours and 40 minutes ago the Prime Minister in his statement referred to the British model of policing. My understanding is that that model is policing through and by the public’s consent. Does he accept that he now has the public’s consent in such situations for a police force to rebalance its concerns about individual freedoms with its own freedom to act?

[The Prime Minister]

I know that my hon. Friend has been waiting two hours and 50 minutes to say that, but he puts it absolutely beautifully. None of us in the House wants to break with the British model, whereby the public are the police and the police are the public. They come from our communities, they are known to us and we know them, and it is a very special thing that we have, but that model has to be refreshed and updated with new tactics, resources and technology, as appropriate, so that it meets new threats. One message of the past few days is that police chiefs should feel that they have the political backing to make the necessary changes to meet new threats. “Don’t be stuck in the old ways of doing things if they are not working”—that will be one of the real lessons that we learn in the coming days.