Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Hazel Blears]

Indeed, and I am about to put forward an idea that would meet many of those concerns. One way of achieving the greater visibility for policing that the hon. Lady talks about would be having a directly elected person in each local authority area who would be responsible for local policing but would also have a duty to operate within the rest of the local public service framework to mobilise all those resources to make communities safer. Those directly elected local commissioners could act collectively at force level to hold chief constables to account and to provide direct, local links to their communities. I am genuinely concerned about the ability of a single police and crime commissioner to be visible and accountable to 2.5 million people across Greater Manchester in communities as diverse as those in Rochdale, Wigan, Stockport, Oldham, Manchester city centre and Salford. I wonder whether the Minister has considered having directly elected local commissioners. There is all the rhetoric about localism, but then this policy of having a single police and crime commissioner for millions of people. That is not localism.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Is not the right hon. Lady effectively making the case for an elected official for each basic command unit? In such a system there would not be co-ordination between different parts of Greater Manchester, because those people would compete with one another for resources and to work and co-operate with other state agencies. That would be a recipe for duplication, expense and confusion.

[Hazel Blears]

It is a difficult circle to square and I shall suggest how we might address some of those issues. There is no perfect system, but I do not believe that having a single person who is supposed to be visible and accountable to millions of people will work.

I understand that the police and crime panels, which are to be made up of local authority representatives and which will be remarkably similar to the police authorities that have been criticised for their lack of visibility, will have the power to advise and scrutinise the work of commissioners, but would it not be better if those local representatives were elected and therefore had a direct local mandate and accountability? I am very concerned that there will be a lack of consistency between the plans and strategies of local authorities and the health service, plans on tackling drugs and the possible crime plans of the police and crime panels. The local reps could come together and pool the sovereignty of their elected mandates to consider issues of serious, organised and trans-border crime—issues that are properly the concern of whole force areas. Currently, there is concern that police and crime commissioners will concentrate almost solely on very local issues, because of the electoral impetus, and that they might ignore some trans-force, serious and organised crime issues as well as national priorities.

It is inevitable that commissioners will be pressed to prioritise local, visible neighbourhood policing. I do not argue against that, as there is no greater advocate in the House than me of neighbourhood policing. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and I drove a culture change through the police service to ensure that neighbourhood policing was properly valued and rewarded. Hon. Members will remember that 10 years ago the sexy end of the police business was going out in the squad car with the blues and twos blazing and a helicopter circling overhead. People thought that was real policing. It was not entirely dissimilar from Gene Hunt’s kind of policing and it took a great deal of effort to bring the police back to tackling antisocial behaviour, closing crack houses and tackling prostitution on our estates. That was the really important part of policing for local people. I believe that the police get that now and know that being visible in their communities is hugely important to restoring and improving local people’s confidence, but we still need to keep the pressure on to make sure that that happens.

Some crime is not immediately visible to people on the streets, but is hugely important to address—whether it is counter-terrorism, serious and organised crime, the emerging problems of cybercrime, drug enforcement or tackling knife and gun crime. All that work needs to be done. The Home Secretary can talk about the national policing priorities in the Bill, but there is no provision for those second-tier regional priorities. In my own area, Salford, we have just had a fantastic operation called Operation Gulf, which entailed the long-term surveillance of organised crime gangs, using a range of powers—not police powers, particularly, but bringing in, for example, the Department for Work and Pensions to examine tax and benefits fraud, working with the Security Industry Agency, and investigating illegal protection rackets and pubs that have been used for organised crime. All that is not immediately visible to people on the street, but it is tackling those serious criminals who are role models for many of my young people. It is about confiscating their assets, and it is long-term police work that costs money. I worry enormously that a police commissioner will not give that the priority that it needs.

In the short time left to me, I shall say a word about the people whom we ask to carry out all that work on our behalf. We spent a long time trying to get a proper skill mix within our police service, recognising that we do not need fully warranted officers to do every single job in the service. Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester, has been a tremendous champion of work force modernisation. When I met him last week, he was desperately worried that with the very severe cuts that we have to make in such a short period of time, the people who will be most vulnerable are the PCSOs and the civilian staff who, because of their employee status, can be made redundant, unlike police officers.

I worry that we will go backwards, rather than forwards. We have got police officers away from being escort officers, custody officers or scenes-of-crime officers, and we have got them on the front line. As a result of cutting so quickly and so deeply, we will find uniformed officers again in the back-office doing file preparation or escort duties. That is utterly ludicrous. It is a backward step which will lead to much less effectiveness in our service. Our chief constable must get rid of 3,000 people over the next four years. He has said publicly that that will affect front-line policing. As a result of the speed at which it needs to be done and the arcane employment regulations in the police service, we will find ourselves making the wrong decisions about effectiveness.

The public will judge success not simply by elections. They will judge it by what happens on their streets and in their communities. If they can go to bed at night and not wake up with the fear of being burgled, if they can get up in the morning and find that their car has not been slashed and trashed, that will be the sign of success. Accountability, as commissioners will find, will be a pretty tough thing.