Town Centre Safety

Louie French Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman wishes to express confidence and ease, but I am afraid he is not doing a very good job of it.

There is a better way: where the Government have failed, the Opposition have a plan to wrest back control of our streets. [Interruption.] Government Members might be interested in some of the concepts, including the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who chirps at me despite having asked me a question that I am going to address.

We make a community policing guarantee to our country. It starts with policing back on the beat, with 13,000 more police and police community support officers in neighbourhood teams. With funding based on conservative estimates of available savings identified by the Police Federation, we will restore visible police and PCSOs back on the streets, deterring and detecting crime, and building relationships and confidence.

[Mr Louie French (Old Bexley and Sidcup) (Con)]

The shadow Minister will be aware that here in London, the Metropolitan police and Sadiq Khan, the Labour police and crime commissioner, were given significant funding by the Government to increase police numbers, but the force was the only one in the country not to hit its recruitment target, costing London over 1,000 police officers. How would his plan work here in London, with Sadiq Khan?

[Alex Norris]

I will not take lectures on police numbers from a member of a party that cut them. As I said to his hon. Friend, the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford), those are devolved matters. As a Government, we will make available the resourcing for 13,000 more police and police and community support officers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I wholeheartedly agree, and I was going to come on to the very powerful speech by the right hon. and learned Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis), outlining exactly the situation that faces us all. Everyone in our country should feel safe in their high streets, their communities and their homes, regardless of their colour, their religion or their background. I join him in paying tribute to the CST and Tell MAMA for raising awareness of the situation. Sadly, it has worsened as a result of the horrendous attacks in Israel on 7 October, but everyone should feel safe. I hope that this House has a greater opportunity to debate that as time goes on.

As we have heard, the Government have ignored challenges ranging from antisocial behaviour on our streets to retail crime and violence against shop workers for far too long, and ordinary people are paying the price. By contrast, as I have said, Labour has made bold commitments because we recognise that people deserve to be safe in their communities. In government, we will halve serious and violent crime and raise confidence in the police and the criminal justice system within a decade.

Let us be clear: the challenge ahead of us, as we have heard, is significant. Thanks to this Tory Government’s shameful record, we are now seeing record instances—up by more than 30%—of criminal damage to shops, schools, leisure centres and businesses in our town centres. In the year ending September 2021, 41,500 offences of criminal damage to a building other than a dwelling were recorded by the police, yet the latest figures show that this has risen to almost 55,000, which is about 150 incidents every single day. How can this be allowed to continue?

The reality of the situation is that the Conservatives have failed to tackle the root causes of crime and violence. Over the last 13 years, the role of crime prevention work has been heavily downgraded by the Home Office, and leadership has been practically abandoned overnight. Rather than keeping people safe here in the UK, we have a Government who are more focused on wasting taxpayers’ money and chasing headlines for their failing asylum scheme. The Tories are simply out of touch.

[Mr French]

On crime prevention, one of the best tools used in London is stop and search, which removes about 400 knives and weapons from London’s streets each month on average. Can the hon. Lady outline what the Labour party’s official position is on stop and search?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I welcome the intervention, and I know that stop and search has an appropriate place, particularly in targeting knife crime and offensive weapons. It can be an appropriate tool if used appropriately, with the police obviously having the appropriate training and support to do so. It cannot be a blanket policy to target everybody in our town centres; it has to be used appropriately, proportionately and effectively if it is to be used at all. It can be used as an appropriate tool and I recognise that it has a place, but there are other schemes and, as I have said, crime prevention has been overlooked far too much by this Government. There are many schemes to deal with that, and I will be outlining our plan.

I will welcome an intervention by the Minister if he wants to reach out to me, but I offer him an olive branch. I invite him to come and spend the day with me in Pontypridd, because I am confident that it will take him all of 10 minutes to understand the real issues that we are discussing.