Stop and Search: West Midlands

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

Thank you, Ms Rees, for presiding over a tight and passionate debate about crime in the west midlands. Given that I devote pretty much every waking hour to crime generally, it has been great to hear. I start by paying tribute to the police officers who are tackling the incidents in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Nicola Richards), as she outlined. She and I have conversed often about crime in her part of the world, and I will do my best to try to help her now, as in the past.

I am pleased to hear that Project Guardian is now in play in my hon. Friend’s constituency and I hope that it will have an effect. Notwithstanding its impact, she is right to bring her constituents’ concerns to this place, along with other hon. Members. Fighting crime is a priority for most of my constituents, as it is for all hon. Members present. As a result, it is one of the chief priorities that the Prime Minister has placed before the Government for us to make progress on and drive numbers down.

I am very pleased that hon. Members are feeling the effect of Operation Sceptre, our national programme of weeks of intensification in the fight against knife crime, which has been mentioned. However, it is obviously always tragic to hear about these terrible incidents, particularly the killing of young people.

I make no apology for being a stout defender of stop and search, and I am very pleased to hear that consensus across the Chamber today. It has not always been thus, and I hope that Opposition Members who have spoken passionately about the use of stop and search will speak to their colleagues who have, for example, opposed our recent proposed expansion of section 60 stop and search—the deregulation, as it were, of section 60 to a certain extent to make it more dynamic and usable. As a number of Members on both sides of the House have pointed out, stop and search is about saving lives, particularly against the background of knife crime.

I have seen that effect for myself: back in 2008, when I became Deputy Mayor for policing in London, we were facing a rising tide of knife crime and teenage killings in London. That was at a time of enormous expenditure by the then Labour Government, with the numbers in London at an all-time high, yet the number of young people being killed was rising on a weekly basis. Against the background of the previous Mayor’s rather relaxed attitude, we came in and sorted that out, driving numbers down. In 2008, 29 teenagers were killed, and by 2012 we had got that figure down to eight. That was eight too many, but that decrease was due to the assertive use of that particular tactic in a critical emergency situation. That is why stop and search, particularly section 60 stop and search, is so important. As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) mentioned, it is preventive. We know that the knives are out there tonight in people’s hands. We need to find them and remove them, because otherwise some of them may be used, often to deadly effect.

Stop and search is also preventive because taking knives away from people means they are less likely to be victims. A person is much more likely to be stabbed and injured, or even killed, if they are carrying a knife themselves. Stop and search is unequivocally about saving lives, but it is also preventive because of the psychological effect of raising the likelihood of being caught—the perception of detection. We know that the perception of the likelihood of being caught is the greatest deterrent to any type of crime, so by making sure that stop and search is high-profile—that it is seen, that there are knife arches at transport nodes and at schools, and that stop and search is being done in the community—we will stop people carrying knives in the first place, because they will think they are more likely to be caught. I urge all parts of the country where there is a violence problem to use stop and search judiciously and proportionately, but nevertheless recognise it for the vital tool that we all agree it is.

As my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East has said, we need to be careful about the use of data on stop and search, because although data can inform when properly interpreted, it can also deceive. There is a famous case of a pair of drug dealers who went from London to the Purbeck coast, down in the south-west. They were intercepted, stopped and searched, and drugs were obtained. However, because they were from a different background from the local population, being stopped and searched in that part of the world became 44% more likely for a person of black, Asian or minority ethnic background, just because of those two cases.

Understanding what the data is telling us is key to maintaining the legitimacy of stop and search, and while we often talk about the disproportionality in those who are stopped, searched and found with knives, or stopped and searched anyway, we never seem to talk about the other side of the argument, which my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) outlined. That is the disproportionality of victimisation: those people who, sadly, are killed also display a disproportionality that the police cannot ignore. Understanding what is actually happening in the data is a critical part of the mission.

Stop and search can be done well—there is no doubt about it. There are parts of the country where it is done extremely well. Liverpool, for example, prides itself on the way it conducts, handles and promotes in the community its stop and search. Of course, transparency with local people is absolutely critical. Buying in their consent is critical, particularly in those communities and neighbourhoods that are disproportionately affected by knife crime. As a number of Members have said, that takes political leadership. If the police are going to get out there and do this work, they need the political top cover. We politicians are the living consent, by the people of the areas we represent, to do this kind of work and we should be the interlocutors, as should police and crime commissioners.

All those years ago, when we were doing this work in London, the then Mayor, who is now Prime Minister, and I toured London, speaking to audiences large and small, in village halls and the Brixton Academy, to buy in this idea that what we were about was saving the lives of their young people. That is the mission that we all need to be joined on, shoulder to shoulder, including police and crime commissioners. I know that the actions of the police and crime commissioner in the west midlands is the subject of this debate, but I know that he will stand for that purpose and that he will do his best to try to sell this tactic, as Government Members have said, as a critical one for the police to use.

I say that because we are all concerned about crime in the west midlands. We need to reinforce constantly the often difficult and confrontational things that the police do, underline the legitimacy of what they do, and illustrate to our electors and the wider community that the police have a difficult and challenging job, which sometimes involves doing unpalatable things, but that fundamentally their purpose is to save life and build neighbourhood safety. If we could all join on that mission together, I think we can point towards success.

[Mr Mahmood]

Will the Minister give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

I do not have time, I am afraid; I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

I am hesitant to engage in what I have to say is this rather hackneyed debate about cuts, which I have heard the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak engage in many times, and I have certainly heard his party’s Front Benchers engage in it many times. It is now getting on for over a decade that that debate has been had, through numerous elections, most of which we have won, not least the last one. Indeed, we also won the last round of police and crime commissioner elections, when—I must point this out to the hon. Gentleman—we won 70% of the seats available. By the way, the votes for the Conservative candidate in the west midlands increased to 239,000, from 44,000 back in 2008, so we might catch his party at the next election—let us see where we get to.

Notwithstanding that, we have given commitments at the Dispatch Box about the funding formula. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East and other Government Members from the west midlands have certainly engaged with me about the need for that change in the funding balance, and we will be running that programme over the next couple of years. I have given a commitment that we will have the formula in place before the next election, assuming that the next election is at the end of this Parliament—who knows when that will come?

However, I urge Members to recognise that police and crime commissioners make a difference, and that someone cannot walk away from the decisions that were made in the intervening 10 years and say, “Nothing to do with us, Guv.” Decisions made over that decade by police and crime commissioners mean that as we get into a time of investment in policing—I am very happy about that, and we are now over halfway through our growth in the number of police officers—where we start from is a product of those decisions. There are some forces in the country that fought hard to preserve police officer numbers, not least in London, where I did the same, because we faced the same cuts during our time, or the same reduction in resources, because of the crash and the needs of the country’s finances. We fought to preserve numbers and, as a result, London is in a better position now to advance on police officer recruitment. I am afraid that the west midlands made a different set of decisions during those 10 years, driven by the thinking and the priorities, or whatever it might be, of the police and crime commissioner there.

I understand that the imperative on the Opposition side is to blame us for everything that goes wrong, and we want to blame the Opposition, but I am not walking away from some of the decisions we made during those 10 years—absolutely not. They were driven by bigger issues than us: geopolitics and economics; and a desire to get the country’s balance sheet back into good shape. At the same time, Opposition Members have to accept that the police and crime commissioners of those years—there have been three of them—made a set of decisions that put the west midlands in the position it is in now. If that is not the case, I am not sure what they were saying to people in elections about what difference they were going to make.

I hope that in future, as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak quite rightly said, all of us can focus on making sure that the west midlands is as safe as it can possibly be, and I will join with everyone here on that mission.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

I am sorry, Nicola Richards, but there is no time left for you to wind up. I apologise.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the use of Stop and Search in the West Midlands.