Crime and Policing

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson]

I knew that that one would be on the crib sheet. Of course it was right to say honestly to the public that no Home Secretary could guarantee that police numbers would not fall by a single police officer. The number of police and recruitment for the police are matters for chief constables and police authorities. What we guaranteed, as I will explain in a second, was that the central funding that the Home Office provides—which has led to the recruitment of 17,000 more police officers and 16,000 police community support officers—would continue to be provided, index-linked, because we considered crime and policing to be a priority.

The savings that we set out included £70 million in reduced police overtime, £75 million from business support and back-office functions, £400 million from procurement and IT, and £500 million from process improvement. My deal with the previous Chancellor—the one who did produce progressive Budgets—was to prioritise the police and security services by maintaining the 2010 level of central funding necessary for the continued employment of record police numbers, thus reducing the Home Office budget by around 12%, or £1.3 billion,without hitting front-line policing.

We have had a report from Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and the Audit Commission endorsing that approach. The report, “Policing in an age of austerity”, concluded that

“cost cutting and improvements in productivity could, if relentlessly pursued, generate a saving of 12% in central government funding …while maintaining police availability.”

This is therefore not an argument about whether there need to be cuts to the police budget over the next four years; it is an argument about a cut of 12% or, as the Chancellor announced on 22 June, a cut of 25% for the Home Office, which he describes as an unprotected Department.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I assure my right hon. Friend that I thought of this question myself. On Monday I met the chief constable of Kent, who was concerned about the lack of information coming out of the Home Office. I do not know whether things were done in the same way when my right hon. Friend was Home Secretary, but although the Policing Minister said on Monday that we had to wait until 25 October for the comprehensive spending review, chief officers are now having to prepare their budgets without knowing even a ballpark figure for the cuts. Would it not be helpful if the Government could give an indication as to how much the figure could be, so that chief officers could prepare for what is inevitable?

[Alan Johnson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that question. I do not think that the collegiate approach in this House has stretched as far as Members on the Opposition Benches getting the Government Chief Whip’s crib sheet. I know that that was his own question, although I suppose that it might have come from our crib sheet. The issue is this: we would not have revealed before a CSR what the settlement was. That is why it is difficult to itemise the savings in advance of a CSR. What can be done—and what we did with the police in the policing White Paper—is to identify those areas that I have mentioned and ensure that the police and the security services understand that we were prioritising police and security. Also, in this year Parliament, including those now on the Government Benches, approved the allocation of funding, knowing that there would be another pay increase in the three-year police pay deal. What has happened now is that the Government have not only demanded more savings this year, despite having to meet that pay increase, but frozen the precept. The police are in a far worse position, including the chief constable of Kent, than they would have been had we been in government.

It is extraordinary that the Government should refuse to add policing to health, education and international development as an area requiring special consideration. The Chancellor is fond of quoting Canada as a precedent for the kind of savage cuts that he heralded in the emergency Budget, but the Canadian Government were not foolish enough to slash police budgets. Expenditure on policing fell by just 0.1% in the years following the Canadian Star Chamber cuts, and then rose steadily thereafter. The number of police officers dipped by at most 3%. In this country, the budget will be slashed by at least 25%, which means a cut in police numbers of between 35,000, as estimated by Professor Talbot, the respected criminologist at Manchester university, and 60,000, according to the magazine Jane’s Police Review, which took what I hope is the exaggerated view that the cuts might amount to 40%.

The HMIC report means that there can be no further pretence that front-line policing can somehow emerge unscathed from this kind of budgetary carnage. As well as failing to protect central allocations, on which police forces rely for between 50% and 90% of their funding, the Government have placed a two-year moratorium on any increases in the local precepts. So much for localism. As a result, plans are already being drawn up in every police force throughout the country to cut the number of officers, as my right hon. Friend has pointed out. The 16,000 police community support officers, who are popular with the public and central to neighbourhood policing, are bound to go if there are cuts of 25%. As civilian staff, they are more easy to dispose of, which is why police forces such as Durham have already put every PCSO under notice of redundancy.

There was nothing about this in the coalition partners’ manifestos. Indeed, the Lib Dems, who believed that this country was under-policed, were promising to use the money saved by scrapping identity cards to recruit 3,000 additional police officers. We now have the Government’s own figures for the amount of money that will be saved by scrapping ID cards. I will willingly take an intervention from anyone on the Lib Dem Benches if they want to tell me how many police officers that equates to. Is it 3,000? No. Is it 2,500, 2,000, 1,000, 500, 200? No. If we used all the money saved by scrapping ID cards, we would get 117 extra officers, not 3,000. Would that we could look forward to any increase in officer numbers at all. It is now likely that the Lib Dems will preside over the loss of 3,000 officers every four months over the next four years.

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[Mrs May]

Either I or the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice would be very happy to meet delegations of colleagues, but I must say to my hon. Friend that the Lincolnshire Members of Parliament have already got in before him to discuss their bid on formula funding. However, as I have said, I am happy to meet such a delegation, as is the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice.

Let me turn to the point about the accountability of the police and the policing reforms that we will put forward in the police reform and social responsibility Bill. Our changes to the accountability of the police will be crucial in ensuring that they once more become crime fighters instead of form writers. Central to those reforms is the idea that we want to get rid of the inefficient and ineffective processes of bureaucratic accountability, where power rests with Whitehall civil servants, and replace it with direct democratic accountability, with power placed back in the hands of the people. Not only will that make the police truly responsive to the needs of the public, but it will mean a more efficient and innovative police service, free from the meddling of central Government. We can be as aggressive as we like in cutting police paperwork—and we are—but we will never achieve the culture change we need until we deal with the driver of the problem and that is Whitehall.

As I noted earlier, according to the recent report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary that is cited in the motion, only 11% of police officers are visible and available to the public at any one time. It is not as if the Opposition were not warned about that when they were in power. The shadow Home Secretary has quoted Sir Ronnie Flanagan, but he said in his review that the difference in paperwork now compared with when he was a front-line officer was “truly staggering”. Jan Berry, the last president of the Police Federation, said:

“As a result of Government diktats, the service has been reduced to a bureaucratic, target-chasing, points-obsessed arm of Whitehall”.

The last Government did not listen, but we will. Already we have cancelled the top-down public confidence target and scrapped the policing pledge. We are reducing the reporting requirements for stop and search and we are scrapping the stop form in its entirety. We will return charging decisions to officers for minor offences and we will reform the health and safety rules that stop police officers intervening to protect the public.

That is just the start. Shifting the model of accountability from the centre to local communities removes the need for pages and pages of bureaucracy and it removes the temptation to Home Secretaries to issue initiative after initiative.

[Keith Vaz]

Of course, we welcome the steps taken by the Home Secretary to reduce bureaucracy, but the previous Government were also committed to reducing bureaucracy. That goes back, as the Home Secretary has said, to the Flanagan report. Will she commit herself to ensuring that Jan Berry, when she delivers her final report, can continue the good work that she is doing in monitoring the level of bureaucracy and advising the Government from outside the Home Office about the need to continue along this path?

[Mrs May]

We obviously look forward to the results of the further work that Jan Berry has been doing in this area. The right hon. Gentleman started his intervention by commenting that the last Government intended to reduce bureaucracy, but the problem was that they did not. We have come in and within a matter of months we have shown specific examples of where we can reduce that bureaucracy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), who for a long time was a member of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. I congratulate him on his recent appointment as the Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs.

It would be unfair to talk about the Government’s record on crime and policing, as they have been in office for only 16 weeks. Quite rightly, therefore, the debate so far has been focused on their reform programme. It is an ambitious programme—I know it, and so do members of my Committee, some of whom are in their places, such as the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe). At every single meeting of the Committee so far, there has been discussion about how on earth we will respond to the Government’s crowded agenda on crime, policing and other Home Office issues.

I should like to begin by welcoming some very important policies that the Government have initiated, because they are all recommendations of the Home Affairs Committee of the previous Parliament. The establishment of the National Security Council, the work on alcohol- related crime, the announcement today of the extradition law review, even though we have not yet had a decision on Gary McKinnon, what the Government are suggesting on reducing bureaucracy, the decision to implement the law on wheel-clamping, which the Committee has been on about for the past five years, and the proposals on a fast-track means of banning legal highs are all welcome moves by the Government because, of course, the Committee recommended them in the previous Parliament.

My concern is that the good intentions will be put at risk by the comprehensive spending review. The Government will have serious problems with police numbers. I accept that the law and order and policing debate should not be around numbers, although every Member of Parliament has always told their constituents that they want to see more bobbies on the beat. In exchanges with me and others, the Police Minister has said—indeed, he told the Committee this—that he does not believe that there will be a reduction in front-line policing as a result of proposals in the CSR, but I do not believe that that is possible.

On Monday, at the invitation of another member of the Committee, the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), I went to Medway, where I spoke to the chief constable about his statement last Friday, in which he said that if the Government’s proposals to cut expenditure by 20% go through, he will see a reduction of £35 million in his budget, which would mean the loss of 1,500 police officers. That is a huge number for a county such as Kent. Therefore, although the Minister feels that he cannot be specific on numbers and the effect that the CSR will have on local police forces, the fact is that it will impact on each and every Member of the House. Will he seek at the earliest opportunity to give an indication to local police forces of how much the cuts will be, because at the moment, an enormous amount of senior police officers’ time is spent trying to guess what the percentage will be? The earlier they get a response from the Government, the better. Even a broad indication of the proposals would be extremely helpful to them.

I listened to the excellent speech of the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, who is absolutely right that the reduction of bureaucracy and the saving of money is a crucial part of our view of policing, but the previous Government started us along that route. Perhaps they did so later than anticipated, but as the Minister may find out, Ministers cannot do everything immediately—things take time. The previous Government initiated the Flanagan review, and Jan Berry was appointed by Jacqui Smith, the previous Home Secretary, and she has done some valuable work on the reduction of bureaucracy. We all have an interest in ensuring that police officers are back on the beat and that they provide front-line services rather than waste their time on unnecessary bureaucracy. That is why the Government should give a commitment to keep Jan Berry in post after she delivers her final report in July. It is important that someone who knows about policing acts as an external force, because such a person can deal with the vested interests that try to prevent real change.

However, the Government should also give special attention to good practice. When I was in Kent on Monday, I saw that the local police were doing some excellent work on the reduction of street prostitution and on offender management. When I went to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), I saw effective engagement by the police with local people—the essence of community policing is the ability to engage with local people. It is important that such good practice is shared as quickly as possible.

I remember a visit to Burton I made a year ago with the then MP for the area. Staffordshire police had done good work in reducing paperwork from 24 sheets of paper to one, but that good practice has still not been rolled out by the Home Office to other areas of the country, and that would save a great deal of time.

I shall not go into the issue of procurement now, but I am sure that the Minister knows what I mean. Kent police have bought Skodas, but the next-door forces in Sussex and Surrey have bought different makes of car. We cannot have 43 police authorities all buying different vehicles. Procurement is vital. Indeed, it is a no-brainer and I do not know why it has not been done in the last 20 years, let alone the last 13. Successive Governments have failed to get the procurement policies right, but it is time to break down the vested interests and give some clear direction.

The big change will be in the landscape of policing, including in effect the abolition of the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the National Policing Improvement Agency, and the creation of the national crime agency. This is a great opportunity to change the landscape of policing. For the first time, one can achieve policing on a national level with specialist interests. This is an opportunity for the Government to pause and hear the advice of stakeholders before they rush in and create a new organisation. The danger in abolishing existing organisations—which have budgets of £470 million and £430 million, almost £900 million—without thinking carefully is ending up with the problem that the NHS has of almost constant reorganisation. I ask the Minister to pause and ensure that he thinks very carefully before coming to his final conclusions.

Because the Government’s agenda is so large, the Select Committee has decided to put together the proposals in a major stakeholder meeting to be held in the constituency of the hon. Member for Cannock Chase. I hope that the Minister will accept the invitation to attend that meeting, because we seek to bring together the 43 chief constables and other stakeholders to discuss all the issues that are before Parliament and the public. So everybody will have the opportunity to have their say and consult the stakeholders carefully before the Select Committee embarks on the four policing reports that we will undertake. We have decided not to have one big policing report, because that would take too long and we want to keep up with the Government’s suggestions.

We need to engage with local communities and stakeholders, and actually ask local people what they want. Politicians can discuss structures until the cows come home, but the issue comes down to the ability of the public to pick up a telephone and call a police officer if a crime has been committed or to see a police officer on the beat. That is what policing is all about, and if the Government engage with Parliament and we do this— as far as possible—on the basis of consensus, we can make a lasting change to our policing structure.