Town Centre Safety

Debate between Jess Phillips and Tobias Ellwood

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

As a member of the wokerati, I absolutely will. I gently point out that the wokerati were coming alive in Woke-on-Trent under the current Government. I urge the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) not to be so fearful. I will take my lead from him in praising some of the officers. I want to praise our local copper, a police officer called Orla Jenkins. Such a rock star is she to my staff that when she came to visit my office recently, they put a countdown on the board to show how excited they were to see her. Local police officers who do the beating heart of the work in our communities deserve all of our praise.

On the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) about the findings of lots of different people, the Social Market Foundation last year revealed that police officers’ pay had declined by 17% in real terms. Not last week but the week before, 24 coppers came knocking at my door—[Laughter.] Not last week but the week before, I got in a cab from Euston to an appointment that I had in London and the person driving my taxi was a sergeant in the Metropolitan police. He told me that on his off days he drives cabs. He also told me that his inspector, also in the Metropolitan police, did Deliveroo. That is the reality, and what I have heard today, certainly from the Minister and from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North in his rousing speech, is fantasy. I respect the hon. Gentleman’s electioneering—it was absolutely top class—but does he know what the British public absolutely hate? They hate it when we stand in front of them and say, “Everything’s fine, isn’t it great, we are world leading,” but then when they call for a copper, nobody comes.

I had a security guard from the local B&Q in my constituency come to see me. He had previously worked in the Prison Service and he wanted to talk to me about strategies for preventing people who end up in prison from ending up there, and I was grateful to him for that. He also came in to tell me that he gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to call 101 to report the crimes that have happened in B&Q that day because he cannot get through in the daytime. He told me that the impunity that he sees in his store is such that, on the day he came to see me, somebody had stolen a hot tub from B&Q. If people think they can get away with that level of crime, it is because criminals have never had it so good. There has never been a better time to break the law, with charging rates on the floor and hardly any crimes being detected. To bring people back to reality—in this amazing world we are pretending we live in—this applies even to the most serious cases. I recently dealt with a case where a woman whose husband was on bail for trying to kill her turned up at her house with a machete—the evidence was on a Ring doorbell camera—and five days later the police officers came.

I could stand here and say that all sorts of things need to change in police forces. I am here all day for better standards and better training, and for much more prioritisation of the kind of crimes I am talking about, but the reality is that that is like hoping for something that cannot exist while police officers across our country are expected to pick up the pieces of a crumbling society in every other regard.

[Mr Ellwood]

I have a lot of respect for the hon. Lady, and we have done a few gigs together, including “Question Time”. I hesitate to pose this question, because I do not want to take away from where she is going, but she mentions society, which is quite personal to me. I am concerned that there is too much of a “walk on by” society. She mentions the theft of a hot tub, for example. Would she concur that there is a role for the general public? I do not want to encourage them to put themselves in danger but, collectively, the people who are around, not the police, are the first responders. They should perhaps react a bit more positively and proactively in calling out bad behaviour.

[Jess Phillips]

I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman, in that I am a proper intervener. I will cross the road to have a fight. I have intervened in many domestic abuse situations while out door knocking. In fact, when I was door knocking for my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater), I walked into somebody’s house to break up a domestic abuse incident. After years of working with offenders and victims, I am more than capable of accurately risk assessing a situation and intervening. I do not suggest for one second that anybody else who was door knocking with me could have done the same thing. We have to be very careful in how we manage that.

The trouble is that people in my constituency will tell the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), as they tell me, that they try to intervene. They see drug deals on their street every single day and they try to do something about it—they organise neighbourhood meetings, the local neighbourhood police come along and we all agree that it is a terrible problem—but when they ring about these hotspots, nobody comes and nothing changes. It is the same drug dealers, with the same dispossessed people walking up the street like zombies, every single day. They do not bother to report it any more, because there is no point.

On burglary, the police have become a third arm of the insurance companies. For a lot of people, the police are just there so that they can get a crime reference number. Orla Jenkins is a cracking copper and, more than anything, she just rings up people to give them a crime reference number. That is not why she went into policing. Officers are pulled away, and I have given the example of officers sitting and waiting in A&E for hours and hours.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) mentioned, the proliferation of unregulated exempt accommodation is one of the single biggest reasons for call-outs in the city where I live. Hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is spent on putting vulnerable people in inappropriate accommodation in our neighbourhoods, and the police are repeatedly called out. When I went on response with the police, every call we went to was to vulnerable people’s exempt accommodation in the city, and I was much better suited to that work than the police officers, because I ran vulnerable people’s accommodation for years.

For years, we have been asking the Government to regulate. Every single time I have asked a Minister for regulation to address this terrible, dangerous, exploitative accommodation, which causes antisocial behaviour on every street in Birmingham, on every street in Manchester and all across Oldham, as has been said—it might not be happening in rural communities, but it is happening in our urban communities, and it will be happening in Stoke-on-Trent—the Government have said to me, “We just don’t have parliamentary time to legislate on that yet. There isn’t parliamentary time.” I have been told that twice. So hundreds of thousands of pounds—hundreds of millions of pounds—of taxpayers’ money is going to bad landlords, housing crack addicts alongside rape victims. This is the country that has been created. It is causing harm, and the Government have the power to stop it, to regulate that accommodation and to end what would be at least half of all antisocial behaviour in the city where I live. They have the power to do it, but they do not, so the police get called out, and called out, and called out forever. That is a waste of their time, and it is something that the Government are directly responsible for, and could end.

I could make the same speech about the degradation of mental health services across our country, for every police officer who sits for 24 hours in a house because there is no emergency response any more. There is no protection for people when they are suffering suicide ideations, so a copper sits with them for hours. By the way, in my area there are 800 fewer police officers than there were in 2010. So much for “the best since records ever began!” If population is taken into account, the situation is even worse. [Interruption.] Would the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) like to intervene? No? Okay. I would welcome it; as I said, I am big on intervention.