Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Guy Opperman and Toby Perkins(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Guy Opperman
My hon. Friend is right in his estimation of the dates. A decision will be made in a matter of months, and certainly by the summer. I am very happy to sit down and have a discussion. I will be visiting the site very shortly.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
People across Chesterfield were delighted when the long-standing campaign for the Staveley regeneration route was given the thumbs up by the Government, but were then sent into despair when Derbyshire County Council said it did not have the funds to provide its small contribution towards it. Will the Secretary of State update us on whether it will be delivered? What concerns does he have about the fact that the poverty of local government sometimes gets in the way of money that his Department has allocated?
Guy Opperman
I have looked into this particular scheme and met other colleagues in the House about it. I will write to the hon. Gentleman in detail. I am sure we can continue with the project.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Guy Opperman and Toby Perkins(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Guy Opperman
I am happy to write to the hon. Lady through the Department when she gives me a more detailed version. I can just answer that we have 500 kickstart jobs per day, and from 20 locations—from Bradford to Barnet, Glasgow to Leicester, and Manchester to her own Ealing community—jobcentres are specifically helping BAME people.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Crime and Policing
Debate between Guy Opperman and Toby Perkins(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)
At the heart of this debate is a single issue: what would we all cut? How would we all approach the difficult dilemmas that we face? Police budgets are, by definition, an emotive subject, as anyone who has sat in the Chamber this afternoon can appreciate. Every one of us wants to have the maximum possible number of police. However, health, education, defence, justice and all the other matters that we have to address are also emotive. To look at the police budget on its own without considering other issues is naive and does not approach the full problem.
The simple question is this: is anyone above budgetary cuts? I do not believe that we are, or that the police are. All the police officers whom I speak to—I have done nine murder trials and spent the best part of 20 years working with officers—accept that things have to change. We do not have to explain that in terms of class or Thatcherism. Those things do not apply, because it is simply about maths. As we all explained up and down the country, if someone spends £400 but earns only £325, the maths simply does not add up. I see no problem in approaching that problem by saying, “This must change.”
Toby Perkins
Seeing as the hon. Gentleman has set up his contribution based on the economy, he might choose to reflect on the fact that there is a fundamental difference between our parties. The Labour Government proposed to reduce the deficit, but not by nearly as much as the new Conservative Government. Because they are increasing the pace at which we are repaying the deficit, they will have to cut more and there will be fewer police on the beat and more crime. That is a fundamental difference in approach.
Guy Opperman
I disagree totally, because we are tackling the deficit earlier and will not have the problems that we would have had if Labour had kept delaying the cuts and spending as though there were no tomorrow. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that 6 May was the tomorrow, and his party lost it.
In Hexham, the police have already taken a small budgetary cut. I walked the beat with them barely three weeks ago. They are doing an amazing job of looking after their area and are perfectly able to cope with the difficulties that they have had thus far. Who knows where the future will ultimately lie? However, they understand and appreciate the problems and they know that there are ways forward. As the assistant to Barack Obama put it, “We should not waste a crisis.” It is often in the difficult times that we can re-evaluate who we are, assess what we are doing and review what we are going to spend our money on in future.
I endorse the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) and by the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) in his excellent speech. The latter spoke with great eloquence, having been a police officer himself until nine years ago. He indicated, for example, that higher police numbers do not necessarily equal less crime. The example of Belgium is well known. There are very significant numbers of police—the highest numbers in Europe—yet the crime level is massively increased.
I hope that the Government will consider the fact that in a constituency such as mine, which is 1,150 square miles, the vital issue of rural crime has been treated very differently from other crime over the past 13 years, and I hope that things will improve. That point encompasses why I oppose the closure of the magistrates court in my constituency. The proposal is that we will have no magistrates court in our 1,150 square miles. I do not believe that that is the right way forward, hence my strong opposition to such a measure.
My final point is this. I ask myself why the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), the shadow Home Secretary, gave the speech that he gave today—it has been mentioned this afternoon on several occasions. Some described it as an application to the post-election shadow Cabinet, but I am not sure that it was. I take the view that he expressed amazing reverence for Lord Michael Howard. He seemed to disregard all Home Secretaries between Lord Howard and himself, when we reached, as others described it, the delightful sunlit upland of “the year of Johnson”, as he called it. That was very eloquent. According to him, the world went from the “prison works” policy of Michael Howard to him, but he disregarded the ASBO age of John Reid as Home Secretary and the CRASBO—criminal antisocial behaviour order—age of Charles Clarke, and indicated that we simply arrived in the year of Johnson when everything was sunlit and perfect.
I thought that the Howard-Johnson alignment had a future, but then I remembered that that was the name of a rather dodgy hotel chain in America that provides a kind of cut-price service. Lord knows where we could go with that. I support the Government, and I urge people to reconsider their approach. I accept that there are contrary arguments—police budgets are always emotive—but the Johnson alignment is not the right way.