Police Station Closures: Solihull and West Midlands

Debate between Julian Knight and Jack Dromey

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Julian Knight]

The Government have been pretty clear that police funding has been protected in real terms once local funding is taken into account, and they are investing £1 billion more in policing in 2017-18 than in 2015-16, despite continued pressure on public finances. Labour always likes to insist that someone else will pick up the tab, but if PCCs want the power to help their police forces, they must expect the responsibility that comes with it, including questioning by Members of Parliament.

Mr Jamieson has announced plans to close Solihull police station, leaving my constituency without a single proper police space. The commissioner claims that it is under-utilised, but why should that come as a surprise when he has been paring back our local police services for years?

I strongly believe that for local politicians to be held accountable, the devolution of power must be accompanied by the devolution of responsibility, including financial responsibility. The public elect representatives to take decisions, not simply to shift blame and demand more money from someone else. In 2015, I joined my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) in urging Mr Jamieson to take responsibility for his powers and to raise the funds needed by the West Midlands police, and lobbied Ministers to grant our region an exemption from the usual 2% ceiling on raising the precept.

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman says that police funding was protected. He has just referred to the precept—the precept flexibility raises £9.5 million. The police service needs £22 million to stand still. It is not true, therefore, that police funding has been protected, is it?

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[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Hollobone. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

The last Labour Government built neighbourhood policing. We put 17,000 extra police officers and 16,000 police community support officers on the beat. We did so because we took seriously the first duty of any Government: to ensure the safety and security of their citizens. That model of detection and prevention was popular with the public and saw crime fall by 43%. That was slammed into reverse when this Prime Minister was Home Secretary. The number of police has fallen by 20,000 overall, and by 2,000 in the west midlands. Crime is up 14% overall, with gun crime up 15%, serious acquisitive crime up 17% and burglaries up 8%.

The Tories frequently praise the police but then fail to stand up for them in this place. Do they not hear what we hear in our constituencies? I organised a public meeting for local people who were deeply concerned about rising crime, and one woman had spent 66 years—

[Julian Knight]

The hon. Gentleman said that the Tories do not do a lot in this place to try to get the best deal for the police. He and I, and my colleagues, have worked together on this issue for a long time. Does he not recognise that decisions such as these and the way they are taken break the bonds of trust between us?

[Jack Dromey]

The decisions are actually proposals from the chief constable in the first instance—I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is criticising the chief constable—and then they go to the PCC. The simple reality is that our police service in the west midlands faces increasingly impossible pressures because of the cuts that have been made by the hon. Gentleman’s Government, and he has not once stood up and opposed those cuts or voted against them.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Julian Knight and Jack Dromey

Thursday 9th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

Yesterday, the Chancellor trumpeted one nation. If one nation means anything, it is that Britain cannot succeed through London and the south-east alone. Building on Labour’s great devolution legacy in Scotland, Wales and London, we are pleased to see the devolution agenda for England moving forward, but we in the west midlands were surprised that there was but a throwaway reference by the Chancellor yesterday to the midlands powerhouse. Little wonder that the Birmingham chambers of commerce accuse the Chancellor of hot air and say it is time that he backed the midlands engine.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that the midlands engine and the devolution we are undertaking in this country are supposed to take a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down approach? It is up to the authorities in the west midlands to come to the Chancellor with their proposals, rather than for the Chancellor to dictate to them.

[Jack Dromey]

On this issue, we are as one. We are working together in the west midlands to construct the midlands powerhouse and realise the full potential of the midlands. What was surprising yesterday was that the Chancellor waxed lyrical about the remarkable Greater Manchester, mentioned the northern powerhouse in considerable detail and referred to just about every other part of Britain, and at the end of his remarks made a throwaway reference to the midlands powerhouse. That has not gone down well in the midlands.

Crucially, at the next stages what the Chancellor cannot do is empower but impoverish. One of the great problems with this Government is that everything they do is characterised by a fundamental unfairness of approach. Some £700 million has been cut from the budget of Birmingham City Council—£2,000 for every household—yet in the Chancellor’s own constituency there has been an increase in spending power of 2.6%. Likewise, the West Midlands police have been treated unfairly. If they were treated fairly, they would be entitled to £43 million more—enough for 500 police officers back on the beat.

We will never be one nation while the Chancellor and the Government continue to demonise and divide, with their talk of shirkers or strivers, work or benefits. I was born in poverty—my father a navvy, my mother training to be a nurse; they worked hard to get on. I have always believed that those who can work should work, but I object to wicked caricatures of the sort we heard yesterday in relation to the young homeless—“they come out of school, they go on benefits, then they want to get a flat”.

Three years ago, I hosted in the House of Commons the Homeless Young People’s Parliament in Parliament—quintessentially middle England, middle Scotland, middle Wales young people, the best of Britain, who had ended up homeless, overwhelmingly through no fault of their own. Last Friday, I was at Orchard Village, which serves young homeless people in my constituency. It is substantially dependent on housing benefit for its income and now faces closure.

If we are to be one nation, the Chancellor cannot continue to play politics with the United Kingdom, posing one nation against the other. EVEL—if ever there was an accurate acronym, that is it.

As for the Tories being the party of working people, they introduced in the Budget a tax on aspiration, saying to working families in social housing, “If you get on, you have to pay much more or move out.” The party of working people? On Sunday trading, I agree with what was just said. One of Labour’s greatest achievements, the weekend, is now threatened by this Conservative Government, who would compel seven-day working, in reality forcing millions of retail workers, particularly women, to work on Sunday and putting at risk thousands of small stores all over the country.

The party of working people, with the so-called living wage? Yesterday, when the Chancellor spoke about this, he grinned like a Cheshire cat and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions punched the air, as if England had scored the winning goal in the World cup. The living wage? Twelve years ago, I was a founder member of the drive for the living wage, working through the former Transport and General Workers Union, with the East London Citizens Organisation and London Citizens, to organise, for example, thousands of cleaners in Canary Wharf and the City of London and the first-ever strike in the history of the House of Commons to win the living wage. This is not the living wage or a “new contract” with the British people, as the Chancellor called it this morning; this is a con trick by a cunning Chancellor, who gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

In the west midlands, 56% of families are on tax credits and 300,000 children depend on tax credits. Yet a family with two children and one full-time earner on £20,000-plus now faces losing £2,000: for every £1 they get from a higher living wage, they will lose £2 in tax credits. What is the Government’s answer? They say, “Ah, the £9”. That is £9 in 2020, but they are cutting tax credits in the here and now.