Rural Crime

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I start by referring hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and by saying how glad I am to see the Minister in his place; I look forward to his addressing some of the points we are raising in this important debate. I pay great tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Gordon Henderson) on securing this debate on an issue that is of great importance to so many of our constituents.

It is for the Minister to answer on behalf of the Government, but the Government have made changes that devolve responsibility for much of these matters away from this place, away from the hands of Ministers and away from Government to police and crime commissioners. I confess to having been relatively agnostic about the creation of those posts when they were first mooted, but the more I look into it, the more I see what they are achieving, particularly in my area. I see the value of electoral accountability on such issues. If police and crime commissioners want to be re-elected by the large number of people who live in rural areas, they will have to address precisely the issues that my hon. Friend raised, if they are not doing so already.

I am pleased to say that Anthony Stansfeld, the police and crime commissioner in the Thames Valley, has made rural crime one of his top three priorities. I am also pleased that police and crime commissioners all across the country, working together on a number of issues, are developing a rural crime initiative. That surely is very welcome and a credit to them working across parties—of course, many of them are of no party at all—and making sure that they are joining up and sharing best practice and tackling rural crime.

My hon. Friend made a good speech, setting out precisely what rural crime is. He made the very good point that it does not accord with the quaint and slightly bucolic view that some might have—through some of our writers, painters and through other forms of culture—about historical areas of rural crime, such as how poaching may have happened for the pot in past years. This is a very serious area of criminality: it is often about the widespread stealing of plant and machinery; it can be about people trafficking; firearms can be involved; and there are many cases in which intimidation is used, not only of the victims or potential victims of crime, but to make people commit crimes. There is increasing evidence in the Traveller community that some people who are not willing participants in criminal activity are more or less forced, by a very few people in that community and elsewhere, into committing acts that they would not otherwise carry out.

It is also important that we understand that crimes that take place in towns are very often carried out by people who do not live in those towns and who travel a long way away from them, or that crimes committed in the countryside are carried out by people who live in towns. We should not assume that this is an isolated issue, or a niche area of criminality that we can deal with on its own. It has to be seen in the context of crime across the piece.

I mentioned Anthony Stansfeld, the police and crime commissioner for the Thames Valley. I have been looking closely at how he, by making rural crime one of his top three priorities in the highly complex area of the Thames Valley, where there are many other pressures on his resources, has approached tackling it.

Little things can make a big difference. The first thing is ensuring that a police officer turns up and responds to every single incident. It sounds strange to say that police officers did not do that in the past, but there was a way of reporting rural crime that often made it seem much more trivial than it actually was. The term “theft from unoccupied premises” immediately makes one think of an allotment shed perhaps when in fact it could be, as my hon. Friend mentioned, a farmer’s store, with large amounts of ammonium nitrate, large pieces of machinery or livestock. Ensuring that we define rural crime is therefore very important.

There is very good news about rural crime. In my area, it has dropped by 20% in one year. That is through a clear reporting system, lots of very good work by police forces and the priority being given to rural crime by the leadership, both at chief constable level and at police and crime commissioner level. If everything else I say is forgotten, this is the really important point, and I am sure that it is one with which the Minister would agree. This is not just about the police tackling the problem; it is about all of us who live in rural areas playing our part. I think that educating landowners, farmers and rural managers about crime and what they can do is very important.

I am particularly interested in the CESAR system—the construction and agricultural equipment security and registration system—which puts transponders and indelible marking on large pieces of machinery or high-value pieces of equipment and ensures, for all the equipment that a farmer buys, whether it is a new pick-up, a large piece of machinery or just a chainsaw, that the serial numbers are gathered and recorded at the start of his ownership of that equipment and stored so that they can be traced. That is important because, as my hon. Friend relayed, there can be cases in which large amounts of equipment are found and the issue is not just returning the equipment to the person to whom it belonged before it was stolen, but establishing a pattern of criminality that can lead to convictions. What we know about many aspects of rural crime is that a very few people are committing a lot of crimes, and if we can feel their collars, crime rates plummet. That has been proved to be effective in my area.

Another way in which we can all play our part is by joining schemes such as the countryside alert system, which 10,000 people are now part of in the Thames Valley. Under that system, we can use technology to help to beat the criminal by keeping people informed about suspicious activity and crimes that are being committed. It is about instantly being able to mobilise a large number of people to be aware of a problem that may be occurring in their area.

I want to touch on the issues of animal welfare that my hon. Friend also mentioned. We should be under no illusions about the fact that many of the activities relating to the theft or killing of wild animals in the context of rural crime are really unpleasant stuff. No one should be under any illusions that there is anything attractive about that activity at all. Gangs of people have caused havoc at times in parts of my constituency by coursing deer. It affects farmers and landowners such as Kirsten Loyd, who informed me of recurring problems on several nights running that involved 4x4s driving on to land, gates being smashed and deer being pulled down by running dogs and often just left. In some cases, they had to be humanely dispatched as a result. On my own property, I have found people coursing hares, from 4x4s, with long dogs, and when they kill the hare, they just drive round it in circles, wrecking the crops and leaving the carcase of the animal. These are not nice people, and if they are challenged, it is very often by one person, and that person is at severe risk of assault. Indeed, we have had circumstances in which firearms have been used in a threatening way.

There is also some good news, however. My hon. Friend talked about the difficulty of getting a fine imposed that means anything—that is a true reflection of the damage, fear and uncertainty that these crimes are causing among rural people, but also of the on-costs from the effects of these crimes. I sometimes have to rack my brains to think of really good things to say about the last Government, but here is one. They passed section 59 of the Police Reform Act 2002, which has given the police an invaluable tool in dealing with crimes that would otherwise attract a relatively cursory sentence. It allows them to seize a vehicle that has been used in connection with a crime. The vehicle can then be crushed or sold, but will not be returned to the perpetrator of the crime. It has had an enormous effect in allowing police to tackle some of the criminality in rural areas. I commend that legislation and hope that it is being used properly by police forces up and down the country.

My then neighbouring MP, just across the Thames in Oxford, Boris Johnson, and I, just after I had got elected, both identified a problem of dog theft. Sometimes when we raised it, people would smile or slightly roll their eyes as if that was not a big thing. It is a horrible crime. It deprives people of what are sometimes very valuable—they are certainly valuable to them—companions and working dogs. It particularly involves working dogs—sheepdogs, gundogs and so on—and it continues to be a problem. Dealing with it requires intelligence gathering, an understanding of how important the issue is to our constituents and a coherent approach, right across police forces; it cannot be governed just by the boundaries of the particular area. I am so impressed by the work that has been carried out by many people and organisations that encourage people to have their pets microchipped. There are all sorts of other methods that we can also use to take the battle to the criminal and reduce the risk of these very unpleasant crimes.

In conclusion, we can all play our part. I agree with my hon. Friend: the most depressing thing that we hear as MPs is people saying, “Well, there’s no point in my reporting this.” If people do not report crimes, however trivial—even if it has not been established that a crime has been committed, but there is a suspicion of a crime—we cannot then complain if the police say, “Well, we have no reports of serious criminality in that area. Therefore, we are putting our resources where we know that crimes are being committed.” Everyone has to report crimes.

There are small things that can be done. One might consider putting CCTV in farm buildings where there has been a persistent problem. We need to ensure that we put in the right quality of CCTV, so that it can be used as evidence to secure a conviction. People can spend a lot of money on anti-crime measures that are no good when we look at the product at the end of the day.

Much rural crime, as I have said, is down to a few—sometimes a very few—people who stalk the countryside prepared to steal anything that is not nailed down. They take advantage of the fact that many fewer people are working in the countryside and of the isolation of business premises and some of the places where high-value goods are stored. We need to ensure that rural crime is a priority at policing level, that we continue to offer support through our position in Parliament and the Government, and that we recognise the importance of this issue to our constituents. There can be a sense of siege if this activity is happening night after night in their areas. Only through a combined, partnership effort and this issue being a priority of elected politicians can we ensure that the problem of rural crime ceases to prey on the minds of people who live in rural communities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Green]

The figures I was citing from the DEFRA digest were, of course, aggregate figures. Within those figures, individual crime types go up for a number of reasons—not just in rural areas, but generally. Sometimes, the crime rate goes up because it is being better reported, as people think that it is worth doing something about it.

Perhaps now is a convenient time to deal with metal theft, as that is one of the points that the hon. Gentleman asked about. We recognise that it has a huge impact on communities, which is why we have taken a number of actions. We have increased the financial penalties and banned cash payments. We have supported targeted enforcement through the Government-funded national metal theft task force, which has led to a fall in metal theft. The Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013 further tightened the net around rogue dealers who flout rules. The task force is funded until September 2014. We have spent £5 million supporting it to give sufficient time for the reforms to become well established.

The statistics show that there has been a decline in metal theft in each quarter of 2012-13. There was a 40% fall between April-June 2012 and January-March 2013. I hope that the hon. Gentleman and others can take that as some reassurance that effective action can lead to falls in crimes that are often concentrated in rural areas.

Another important point is greater information and transparency. We have the police and crime commissioners who hold the forces to account, but the public need to be able, in an informed way, to hold PCCs to account and decide whether to re-elect them. That is why we are providing more local information about crime and what the police have done in response to it. That information is regularly updated on police.uk, the national crime and policing web portal, which provides the public, including those who live in rural communities, with local information about crime and antisocial behaviour. On police.uk, the information is presented clearly and concisely, allowing the public to access it in a useful way.

Hon. Members on both sides have made the point that some PCCs have prioritised rural crime, which is, of course, evidence of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury—that having elected local officials means that they have to reflect what local people want. If they are representing an area with a significant rural population, it would be sensible for them to reflect that, and several of them have. For example, in north Wales the PCC has put in place a rural crime plan, which focuses on engaging with the rural community and addressing their concerns, including theft of equipment and livestock from rural areas. The force is providing a presence at farmers’ markets, and a rural crime team has been created.

As has already been mentioned, the PCC in Suffolk has introduced a dedicated team of special constables, which seems to be the sort of innovative response that we would all welcome. Similarly, we have already heard about the PCC in the Thames valley and the introduction of the Country Watch messaging system, which I am glad to hear from my hon. Friend is proving effective.

A lot is happening at the local level, but a lot is also happening at the national level. We have the UK national wildlife crime unit, a police unit that assists in the prevention and detection of wildlife crime by obtaining and disseminating intelligence from a wide range of organisations. It directly assists law enforcement agencies in investigating wildlife crime. Some of its priorities relate to international crime and the enforcement of the convention on international trade in endangered species, but other priorities are some of the things that we have been discussing today—including poaching, which is one of the specific priorities of the unit.

The unit is jointly funded; this goes back to the point that I made to the hon. Member for Ogmore at the start. The Home Office provides some funding for the NWCU and will continue to throughout the period of the spending settlement. DEFRA provides the same amount of funding for the unit over the next two years.

[Richard Benyon]

My message to the Minister is: long may both Departments continue to do so. Some of the crimes that a police constable comes across in the course of his work may be unusual. To have that centre of knowledge to whom he can go, who will say to him, “Yes, you can prosecute this person under this piece of legislation in this way” is absolutely invaluable. Also, it is what the unit does through the partnership against wildlife crime that is of such value to the whole wider aspect.