Crime and Neighbourhood Policing

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I thank the Home Secretary and look forward to her response. She will know how important that is.

I turn to neighbourhood policing. The number of people who say that they never see the police on patrol on the streets has almost doubled since the Conservatives took office, from around a quarter of the population to half. Half the country say that they never or hardly ever see a police officer patrolling the streets, according to the national crime survey. That is what 13 years of the Conservatives have done.

At the same time, the number of criminals being caught or punished has plummeted. Since 2010, arrests have halved; prosecutions have almost halved; community penalties have halved; and crimes solved have halved. The proportion of cases that collapse because victims give up and drop out has trebled. More crimes are reported and recorded, but hundreds of thousands fewer crimes are solved, hundreds of thousands fewer victims are getting justice, and more criminals are getting away with it.

Every one of us will have these cases in their surgeries: the residents who have complained about drug dealers on the corner, and nothing is done; the street drinkers who make them feel unsafe, and nothing is done; the broken windows and shop break-ins that go ignored; the antisocial behaviour that escalates; the kids who have been expelled from school who just wander the streets and get drawn into gang violence instead, and nothing is done; the repeat offender back out of prison who nobody is following up on; and the domestic abuse victim who has no one to turn to because the police are overstretched and the court delays are so long. More victims are giving up on the whole thing and walking away.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I understand that the right hon. Lady’s mission today is to paint a dystopian picture of crime, but before she elaborates, will she take the opportunity to congratulate the police on the significant falls we have seen not just in specific crimes such as burglary, robbery and knife crime, but in overall crime? She will know that the recently published crime survey of England and Wales shows that, in the year to September, overall crime was down 10% on pre-pandemic levels. Surely she wants to congratulate the police on that before enumerating their sometimes obvious but none the less difficult failings.

[Yvette Cooper]

Let me be very clear. I welcome the huge amount of work that police officers do every single day of the week to keep our communities safe—the police officers and police community support officers who are overstretched; and the detectives juggling huge caseloads, which they struggle to keep up with because of huge shortages of detectives, because there has been no workforce planning by the Government year after year.

I welcome some the long-term trends in crime that started 25 years ago, but the Government’s amendment eliminates online crime, despite it having soared over the past few years. That is where we have seen some of the big increases in crime. Government Ministers may want to dismiss the huge fraud against pensioners who have lost their savings, the online scams or the grooming of children online, but we should take those sorts of online crimes and fraud immensely seriously, because they devastate and ruin people’s lives.