Rural Crime and Public Services

James Cartlidge Excerpts

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Louise Haigh]

I could not agree more. It is exactly the same in my own home force of South Yorkshire. The pernicious and long-term effects of deindustrialisation in communities are often the same issues that other rural forces and areas experience and are affected by.

The feelings of isolation can be strong and overwhelming, particularly for vulnerable individuals in rural areas such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore). If police do not have the ability to reach out, they will feel ever more vulnerable. The Conservative party used to be clear on this. A leaked internal communiqué said that

“police-stations are important to local communities and the sheer number of closures is worrying.”

But since that communiqué, closures have rocketed. Nearly 400 police stations have closed in England and Wales, with the number of front counters open to the public falling from over 900 in 2010 to just over 500 today. It is harder to ignore the knock-on effects that sales of police stations and closures of custody suites have had on policing. Particularly in large rural areas, officers now have to drive for long distances to take offenders into custody, taking them off the streets for a considerable period of time.

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

Is the hon. Lady actually saying that she would reopen those police stations?

[Louise Haigh]

No. I am saying that we would properly resource the police to be able to do their job, unlike the Conservative party. In reducing the police, as the Conservatives have done, to nothing more than a flashing blue light that only arrives when the absolute worst has happened, not only have they destroyed the police’s ability to prevent crime from happening in the first place; they have rolled back all the progress of the previous generation in building trust with the police in the hardest-to-reach communities. That is the danger of the loss of community officers from rural police forces.

The devastating assault on the strength of our police service as a result of decisions taken by the Conservatives has undermined the fundamental foundations on which policing in this country has been based. Chief among these is the notion that every community matters and every community deserves a police service that is able to respond to the challenges that it deems important. Although the challenges and risks for each community may vary, each is deserving of a community police service, and the priorities of local communities are of equal merit.

The independent inspectorate of constabulary laid bare the breathtaking pressure that the police are now under thanks to the financial constraints imposed on them by the Government and by rising demand. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary said that

“policing is under significant stress. On occasions, that stress stretches some forces to such an extent that they risk being unable to keep people safe in some very important areas of policing.”

Not only have we lost more than 21,000 police officers; thousands of emergency calls are waiting in queues with not enough officers to respond. Some victims facing an emergency get no response at all. The police have yet to assess risk posed by more than 3,000 individuals on the sex offenders register. We do not know whether those individuals are a threat to the public. There is a shortage of more than 5,000 detectives, as unsolved crime rose to 2.1 million crimes last year.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

I am unaccustomed to being called this early in a debate; it is something of an inversion of the norm.

First, I want to respond to the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant), as it takes a brass neck for the SNP Front-Bench spokesman to complain about the over-centralisation of this country when it is a system that massively benefits his constituents, and in particular his party as it does not have to make the tough decisions we face in other parts of the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) was absolutely right: my constituents are net contributors, whereas those of the hon. Member for Glenrothes are net recipients. That is a great unfairness, and I would prefer it if his party recognised that now and again. But I am going to move on to the subject in hand.

As an MP for a rural constituency, I am particularly concerned about this subject and I welcome the fact that Her Majesty’s Opposition have tabled this motion. I last spoke on the subject in the final stages of the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Bill—the Bill of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)—on Friday 27 April. I said that I was concerned that we seemed to be living in more violent times, and that comment then unexpectedly appeared all over the local radio and newspapers because many of my constituents share that sense.

This debate is not about the sort of stats we bandy across the House in political fashion; this is about the experience of recent months in South Suffolk, where we have unquestionably had a spate of serious incidents. In the last week in Sudbury, the main town in my constituency, there was a very violent rape, for which I am glad to say there has been an arrest of an individual today by the police in Sudbury. I pay tribute to them, because at the same time as they have been investigating that crime, police in our part of the world have been focused on a very serious murder in Ipswich, of a 17-year-old, which was raised by my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) at Prime Minister’s questions today. The sense of greater violence is therefore impossible to escape, and is, I am afraid, borne out by the figures for Suffolk: there has been a 29% increase in violent crime in Suffolk in the year to September 2017.

The context of this, however, is an overall fall in recorded crime in the independent crime survey for England and Wales of 38% since 2010. That is a very large decrease in overall crime, and it has occurred at a time when, because of the funding pressures we were under—because of the deficit we inherited—we have seen significant reductions in police numbers; I would be the first to accept that.

But this is the thing: if we have seen such a fall in crime when police numbers have been falling, it cannot simply be the case that police numbers are the sole determinant of the level of crime. This spike in violence, which has been seen in other parts of the country too, is a relatively recent phenomenon, and I want us to move away from these political brickbats about how many police stations have been closed—I should point out that some 400 police stations were closed between 1997 and 2007. Instead, we should try to understand why we are seeing this change. I want to try to understand some of those causal factors in my brief remarks.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is right to say that police numbers are not the sole determinant of a rise or fall in crime, but they must be a determinant. In Lincolnshire, fundamental flaws in the funding formula have left us short of funds, and that makes it very difficult for my excellent local police force to respond to crimes of the kind that he has just described.

[James Cartlidge]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. The way I would put it—which is kind of what he is saying—is that the fall in numbers does not, of itself, drive the social behaviours that cause a change in crime, but clearly, in an ideal world, we would have more officers to deal with it. It is a question of how we respond to the situation.

In terms of the primary causal factors, lots of hon. Members have talked about the county lines crime phenomenon, which was on the front page of The Sunday Times as recently as 6 May. It is a real problem not only in Suffolk but right across the country. The statistics show that 85% of police forces across England and Wales are dealing with county lines, and that 80% of those cases involve children. This is a serious crime phenomenon, and the growth in county lines, which involves increasing violence, leads to the spread of drug crime, knife crime and other associated crime.

There is another factor, which I find potentially the most interesting. I was at the Suffolk show recently, and I was talking to the chief constable. I asked him why he thought there had been this change in behaviour, and he said that social media were a really important factor because the videos and other media that are shared by the young people in gangs are being used to goad them. The gangs are goading each other into more violent behaviour in a competitive fashion. That is the type of behaviour that we see in the very worst crime areas such as Mexico, which has a terrible murder rate. The reason that crime escalates in such areas is that more violence is used to mark out and defend territory. We are seeing gang violence worsening here because the gangs are becoming competitive, and social media drive that competition because the videos—which, according to my chief constable, are often of very high quality—are being used to brag and to goad.

I do not pretend to have the answer on the social media issue, but I believe that the companies providing the media—they are private companies—have a social responsibility to involve themselves in this. I fundamentally believe that the primary responsibility of the Government is the defence of the realm, at home and abroad, and if the media companies will not get involved, we will have to start talking about the defence of the virtual realm. We cannot have any no-go areas in crime; we do not want them in a physical sense, and we cannot have them in a virtual sense either. I for one would support more powers to ensure that social media companies took action on these kinds of videos to ensure that they are not shown, not displayed and do not incite greater gang violence.

I also want to talk about funding. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes) said, police numbers may not directly cause the changes in crime rates, but we need the officers in place if we are to resource our forces to deal with the changing patterns of crime. There are two elements involved: national funding and local funding. On national funding, I recently tabled a written question to the Home Secretary asking him what assessment he had made of the different costs involved in policing rural and urban areas. The answer from the Home Office was that it had made no such study and that there was no such information. I believe that rural MPs should be engaging with local stakeholders such as the National Farmers Union and possibly the Country Land and Business Association to look into the hard stats and the evidence. If we want to go to a Government Department and ask for a change in the spending formula to favour our local area—or rural areas more broadly—we have to have the evidence to show that we need that extra funding. A study of the cost of rurality in policing would be very welcome, and I would certainly support one.

My last key point is about local funding. I disagree with Opposition Members on this point. I strongly support the use of the precept to fund the police, for the simple reason that it is a guarantee that the money will be spent in our county. If we increase the precept to fund the police in Suffolk, it might cost more than an increase in central taxation that people would not necessarily notice, but every pound will be spent in the county on the Suffolk constabulary. I want to see more of that, and I would go further. I would like to see more of what I call parish policing, where parishes—or perhaps groups of parishes in electoral wards—would have the opportunity to fund their own police community support officers. This is where we must be realistic about rural crime. When the police in Suffolk deal with a major incident, such as the stabbing we had in Ipswich, or when we have the threat of terrorism, it is unrealistic to expect the force to prioritise shed theft or the theft of tractors at the same time, no matter how many officers we have. If our villages and rural communities want the added value of an extra visible police presence, they should be prepared to see something on top of the precept and get direct policing as a result—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) wants to intervene—she is obviously very interested in what I am saying—I will be more than happy to take an intervention, because she completely failed to answer the question about police stations earlier. In fact, when I asked her whether she would reopen closed police stations, she confirmed that Labour would not, and I do not understand why on earth an Opposition would criticise something that they are not going to reverse.

[Ruth George]

I am sitting here fairly flabbergasted listening to the hon. Gentleman making the case for some of his poorest constituents paying the price of delivering the sort of law and order that he says is the Government’s responsibility—the first responsibility of the state is to keep its population safe. People are already paying an extra £12 a year in Derbyshire, so how much more does he want his constituents to have to pay to get back to proper levels of policing?

[James Cartlidge]

I would be more than happy for them to pay more. Is the idea that the poorest cannot afford 50p extra a month on their precept to get a police officer? The point is that it would be a choice for the community. Many communities would not choose to have parish policing or direct policing, but it is a new option for them.

[Mrs Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden) (Con)]

rose—

[James Cartlidge]

I will take one last intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker, because you will be pleased to know that I will then be concluding.

[Mrs Badenoch]

Does my hon. Friend agree that many of our constituents have requested the ability to pay more specifically for local policing? Constituents have written to me to say that if the Treasury could not fund it, they would happily pay extra.

[James Cartlidge]

Absolutely. I will finish by saying that the local funding formula means that funding is transparent—people will know that the money will be spent in their county. We should still look at the national formula, but the model of elected police and crime commissioners being responsible for the money raised locally in a clear and transparent fashion is the right one, and we should use it to get more officers on the beat, providing greater security and comfort to our constituents.