Police

Julian Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ruffley]

I am delighted to respond to both points.

First, I did not say that the number of police officers on the streets does not matter, but I will make it clear that the number of uniformed officers in any force does not equate to the number of police officers on the street; we absolutely can have more visible police hours on the street with a theoretically smaller number of police officers, and I shall explain how that comes about. Let me repeat: we can have more visible police hours on the street with fewer officers than we have now, and if the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton will bear with me, I will explain to the House how that is possible.

Secondly, on the Liberal Democrat manifesto, let me say why the party political to-ing and fro-ing is not terribly productive or profitable. The right hon. Gentleman’s party is campaigning—it would appear, from today’s debate—against the reductions in policing, which, it says, are cutting the number of uniformed officers and really will not do, but I just remind him of what the previous Labour Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), said on “The Daily Politics” just before the election. When he was asked whether Labour could guarantee that the number of police officers would not fall if it formed the next Government, he replied really rather elegantly, that no, he could not guarantee that police officer numbers would not fall. Most of us have a great deal of respect for the right hon. Gentleman, who has one other virtue, which is clear honesty. He was not guaranteeing that more officers would be paid for if Labour won the election; he was not even promising that the same number would be retained.

I shall explain briefly what I mean by “visible hours on the street”. There is a shocking statistic from Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary—it was true under the previous Government and was still true last year—and it is that at any one time only 11% of the police officers in this country, of whom there are more than 140,000, are available for visible policing on the street. That is an amazing statistic: only one in 10.

The question is, how can we get more police visible on the street, given that there are more than 140,000 of them? There are two ways. First, we should reduce bureaucracy. Now, I do not suggest for one second that reducing bureaucracy will make up for the current tough public spending round, but the Government have already taken incredible steps in their first 18 months in office. They have abolished the policing pledge, the public service agreement targets, more than three dozen key performance indicators, the fatuous local area agreement targets and the stop and account form, which in fairness the previous Government had also proposed.

The current Government have also streamlined stop and search procedures. In addition, they have made changes to health and safety, and in addition to that they have abolished the quite nonsensical target, which police thought unnecessary, of drug tests for 95% of those arrested on trigger offences. That is quite an impressive reduction of bureaucracy in a first few months, and there is more.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the introduction of police and crime commissioners will also bring more rigorous oversight to police budgets? From the perspective of north Yorkshire, where our local police authority spent £250,000 on legal proceedings against the chief constable, that will be a welcome move later this year.

[Mr Ruffley]

I am confident—it is my hope and, indeed, expectation—that with one person we will engender a greater and sharper sense of focus and accountability, which we lack under the current regime of 17-person police authorities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

I should say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) that the Policing Minister was generous in giving way many times during his speech.

The debate is of enormous import to the people of this country. A reference was made to chief constables having said that we had enough police to invade a small country. My constituents do not want to invade small countries; they want to feel secure on the streets of central Manchester and to know that their policing is adequate for their community.

The vast majority of my constituents are decent, law-abiding people, but crime is still too high in Greater Manchester. The differential impact of the spending cuts is of itself a matter of enormous concern in a community such as mine. To be honest, the perception is that the patterning of spending on the police is being dictated more by political preference than by the objective needs of police forces. Government Members have argued that the cuts are much less, but Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary’s own reference points for Greater Manchester police say that we will lose 20% of our uniformed police services between 2011 and 2015.

I pay tribute to the Greater Manchester chief constable and police authority. Greater Manchester has made enormous strides in recent years. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary said, it is possible to make reductions in police spending, but it is not possible to make indefinite such reductions. That is our problem.

Crime has been falling. In an earlier exchange, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), the shadow police Minister, rightly made the point that crime fell by 43% during the last Labour Government. That was a function, at least in part, of the increase in spending provided by that Government. It is not possible to say that cutting out 20% of the uniformed police in Greater Manchester will not have a detrimental effect on the police’s ability to detect and deter crime. One cannot argue about that with reference to efficiency savings.

Nor is it possible always to use the sleight of hand that says that only the front line matters. If the police are not supported by proper back-room staff—sometimes uniformed police, sometimes civilian—they simply cannot properly do the job that we expect of them. It is important for us to remember that and to recognise that there are strong limits.

As it happens, and happily, crime has continued to fall in Greater Manchester. That is a great tribute to the police service and those involved. However, the real concern is this: a number of things begin to come together. For example, we have seen the continuing rise in unemployment. I do not intend to discuss the causes of that. Whatever our arguments about the economy, most people accept that unemployment, a lagging indicator, is likely to continue to rise. We are seeing the largest number in a long time of young people unable to find employment. It is not certain, but we know from historical precedent that that will place pressure on those young people in terms of the potential for a rise in certain types of crime. Faced with that, police numbers still continue to drop, and frankly that is both reckless and irresponsible.

The Policing Minister is bravely sitting alone, unaccompanied by the Home Secretary and not surrounded by his colleagues. He has had to plough through and justify the fact that the Home Office caved in to the Treasury when the current comprehensive spending review settlement was made. As a consequence, we can ask the police service to make efficiency savings, but that will begin to peter out.

In the case of Greater Manchester, we know what will happen this year and next year; the real concern is that 2014-15 will be the point when we fall off the edge of the cliff. Neither the Policing Minister nor the Home Secretary nor the Prime Minister can give us any kind of reassurance that the police service will not then be in a state of enormous difficulty.

The chief constable of Greater Manchester is already on the record as having said that this year’s settlement means

“the most difficult financial year for policing in living memory”.

If this is the most difficult year, but we continue to see cuts year on year beyond that, we have to ask the Policing Minister and others to look at the situation. I know that he is not in a position to give a commitment that the situation will be reviewed, but if that indefinite abyss is to open up in front of us, we will have to have change from the Government. There will have to be a reversal of the speed and depth of the cuts that apply to communities across Greater Manchester.

I have said before to the Policing Minister that during the riots the police force across the country was stretched. Serving police officers rightly went from Greater Manchester to help in London. However, that meant that when the riots broke out in Manchester, some of our officers were helping out elsewhere. We had the advantage of being able to call in police officers from places as far away as Strathclyde, but while the riots broke out in Manchester Central and in Salford, there were strong rumours that there was the capacity for riots to break out elsewhere in Greater Manchester that night. Had that happened, the already thinly stretched line of police officers would have been stretched to the point of there being an enormous problem, even with the capacity to back-fill from other police force areas.

I do not want to predict a repeat, but notwithstanding the Minister’s view that there would not be problems, there is a concern in Greater Manchester that if there were a repeat—the riots did come out of nowhere—we would simply not have the capacity to deal with the situation. That issue has to be taken on board. However we magic the arithmetic, of the 140,000 police officers nationwide, 16,000 needed to be deployed in the capital to quell the riots. That would have left precious little margin for the rest of the country if things had begun to go wrong elsewhere. In policing our communities we must not only think about what happens on a regular Tuesday morning, but recognise that catastrophes happen. Those are real issues for us to take on board, whether in the west midlands, Greater Manchester and other metropolitan areas, or in rural areas.

The Minister rightly paid tribute to our serving police officers. During the riots, officers were asked to confront rioters and those dangerous situations, and it is easy to say that we expect an enormous amount from the men and women who serve in our police force. At the moment, however, morale is not good across the police service for a number of reasons. The police rightly believe that they are being asked to take not a pay freeze, but a real-terms pay cut, and that problem touches on morale. Perhaps such measures are needed during this period, but when they are added to the sense of grievance and uncertainty felt by the police because of what they—and large numbers of the public—regard as the arbitrary nature of the cuts, they amount to a serious impact on morale which we must register. If we praise our serving police officers when, as expected, they take the risks that society places on them, we as a community and a society must deal with morale when it is a problem.

[Julian Smith]

I have had a contrary experience in my constituency. I had a meeting with Inspector Robert Thorpe in Ripon last week. He was relishing the challenge of doing more with less, and looking at productivity and at how he could play about with rotas and make his staff more productive. I pay tribute to his work, and I am sure that there are examples of such work in Manchester’s police force that the hon. Gentleman will highlight later in his speech.

[Tony Lloyd]

Had the hon. Gentleman been listening to my speech, he would have heard that I spoke at the beginning about the great strides that have already been made by the chief constable, the police authority and the police to make the service more efficient. There is no doubt that numbers of people have gone, and that that process has been managed so far. My argument—the hon. Gentleman may wish to ask his own police force about this—is that there is a point beyond which we cannot go. The loss of 20% of Greater Manchester's uniformed police by 2015 and a similar loss in numbers of non-uniformed staff cannot happen without its impinging on our ability to provide the visible policing that the Minister and others claim to want.

People in Greater Manchester are desperately concerned that the cuts are too fast and too deep, and that when push comes to shove, problems will emerge not in the Prime Minister’s constituency but in the inner-city areas of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, and other equivalent areas. We are not getting the Boris bung that the Metropolitan police force has received, and the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) ought to raise that issue with the Policing Minister. Historically, the Metropolitan police force has been better funded than the police in other metropolitan areas, and in a difficult financial year and when other metropolitan areas are being denied, it is hard for us once again to see London given an increase in spending. These cuts are too fast—