Police

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

That is a very interesting point. I do not know, but I understand that recruitment is not going terrifically well in certain areas of the country, although it is in some. That is why I am concerned about the £1,000 that people have to pay for the certificate in policing. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about recruitment when he sums up. Of course, rather than young people joining the service, I am talking about very experienced people who want to get out. We need to take that into consideration.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I am sure that my right hon. Friend and our Front-Bench spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), would agree that when we meet the police in the west midlands—and we have done so regularly over the years—we have seen that there is a morale problem. The police seem to be used as a political football these days and although we might well quote statistics and figures about how much is being spent on them, at the end of the day when somebody’s pensions, wages and conditions are attacked that is asking for a problem. There is no doubt that there is a major morale problem in the West Midlands police. The other problem is that a city such as Coventry will have a senior police officer for three or four years and just as the public get to know who they are they go off to another post. That cannot be right either.

[Keith Vaz]

I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend. That is an issue we must deal with and Ministers must engage with the police service much more than they have done.

I agree 100% with the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds about the revolution in policing. I am not sure that I can get away with being quite as nice to the Home Secretary as the hon. Gentleman was, given that I am an Opposition Member of Parliament. I cannot show favouritism because the Home Secretary appears before our Committee—that of the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and myself—on a number of occasions and I must be independent. I agree that there has been a revolution in policing and I am on the record as supporting what the Government have done.

If there was a fault of the previous Government, who presided over a golden age in policing in the amount of money given, it was that no questions were asked and no reforms were required. There was a very large cheque—of course, the shadow Minister was not a Member then—