Police Employer Pension Contributions

Debate between Gareth Thomas and Graham P Jones

Wednesday 14th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to participate in this debate on the increase in employers’ pension contributions that is expected of the police. I want to reference in particular the situation in London. If the House will forgive me, I will be largely parochial in my comments.

The context for my comments is the potential demand facing London for £130 million to meet the gap resulting from how the Government have decided employer pension contributions should be calculated. As I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, has identified that the change will potentially cost the Met police £130 million, which is equivalent to some 2,000 police officer positions. As my hon. Friend rightly set out, that comes in the context of some 3,000 police officers having already been lost from London since 2010.

In my London Borough of Harrow, we have seen just shy of 200 police officer positions lost since 2010. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) effectively challenged the Minister for Policing to go to the estates in his community and hear the concerns about rising crime. The Minister has already been to many of the estates and roads in my constituency and already heard many of the concerns, because every general election he is to be found knocking on doors in Harrow West. He is ostensibly campaigning for the Conservative opponent to the sitting Labour and Co-operative Member for Harrow West, but perhaps he is quietly canvassing for me—I do not know. He is assiduous in ostensibly trying to help every Conservative candidate, and as a result will have consistently heard the concerns about policing in Harrow.

The Minister will know, for example, of the rise in violent crime. That is noticeable in particular over the past 12 months in Rayners Lane and the Grange Farm estate, where we have seen guns used in incidents of violent crime. That is an unprecedented situation in my time living in the borough. Many of my constituents are well aware of the prevalence of drugs being consumed and traded in South Harrow and along the Northolt Road. They are also aware of that in the Harrow part of the Racecourse estate. They are concerned about incidents of antisocial behaviour, particularly aggressive drinking, in Wealdstone and South Harrow. They ask where the police are in dealing with that.

What has happened in recent years has been the slow reduction in police numbers. If the Minister for Policing and his boss the Home Secretary again fail to persuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer in advance of the police grant report to make good the £400 million-odd that is required nationally to stop further cuts to policing due to the increase in police employer contributions, the concern is that there will be further cuts to policing in Harrow, and that is profoundly worrying. As a result of the merger of police borough command units that Sadiq Khan has had to make happen, Harrow—a still comparatively low-crime borough in comparison to its neighbours—Barnet and Brent have been merged. We face the very real prospect of the police officers assigned to the three boroughs increasingly being used to fight crime in Barnet and Brent and more police being diverted out of Harrow for that purpose.

The concerns of my constituents have been exacerbated by the fact that the response teams for the new borough command unit will be based not at Harrow police station, but in the police stations in Colindale and Wembley. That will, inevitably, increase the response time for violent incidents in Harrow. Let us bear in mind the fact that the custody suite at Harrow police station has been earmarked for closure for some time, so those who are arrested in Harrow will be taken primarily to Colindale, but potentially also to Wembley. That will increase the amount of time for which police officers are outside our borough and unavailable to respond to crime.

Like, I suspect, many other Members of the House, I took time out over the summer to go on patrol with the police. It was striking to me just how thin the thin blue line is in Harrow. Officers who are required to be part of response teams also have to deal with ongoing police matters. Because of the small size of the response teams, it takes longer and longer to gather evidence and deal with incidents of crime. Unsurprisingly, the number of people who are taken to court and convicted of crimes is substantially down. If the money cannot be found to make good the increase in the shortfall in employers’ pension contributions, the situation will get worse.

I am struck by the rise in gang tensions in outer London. When I was first elected as a Member of Parliament, gang tensions—to the extent that they existed—were a feature of inner London, but they have now become a feature of outer London. There have been many good initiatives, and I take the opportunity to praise in passing the Ignite Trust, a superb charity that operates in my constituency, for its efforts to resolve some of the tensions between a gang based in my constituency and another based in the neighbouring borough of Ealing. Despite such work, without the support of a more visible police presence, I suspect that we will continue to face difficulties with rising gang crime.

Other hon. Members have raised the significant impact on neighbourhood policing of the loss of police numbers. I remember when the last Labour Government introduced neighbourhood policing, and what a difference it made in the south Harrow part of my constituency. At one high school, unsavoury characters used to collect outside the school gates. When police from the ward-based neighbourhood policing team were deployed outside the school gates for half an hour, those unsavoury characters instantly disappeared, and any who did show their face could be pursued. The neighbourhood police were able to provide an immediate and effective response. The visibility of PCSOs and police officers substantially reduced the fear of crime in my constituency and across London. It is profoundly concerning that the Government have not grasped the scale of the fear of crime in inner and outer London.

[Graham P. Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend talks about the effectiveness of neighbourhood policing and PCSOs. Does he agree that they are the eyes and ears of the police? The reason for the rising crime rate under this Tory Government is the removal of neighbourhood policing, which gathers intelligence for the whole police service.

[Gareth Thomas]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Whether in the north of England or in our great capital city, it has been a false choice to allow the funding cuts to the police that have led to the reduction in neighbourhood policing. Unsurprisingly, there has been a reduction in the number of people convicted for committing crime as a result. There are not the police officers to access the necessary intelligence to find those who are guilty of offences or to process them through the courts. I hope it will not be long before the Minister comes to Harrow West again. I am willing to take him on a tour of the hotspots of crime in Harrow to help him better understand his responsibilities, not just to my constituents and the constituents of London, but to all the people of this great country who deserve far better than they are getting from this Government in terms of funding to fight crime.

I end by paying tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) for securing this debate. I hope that at the conclusion of this debate, and if not today then perhaps at the police grant report or at Prime Minister’s questions next week, we hear an announcement that there will not be a requirement on police forces to find an extra contribution to pension funds and that we will not see the substantial reduction in police numbers many of us fear will happen if the Government go ahead with this measure.