Rural Crime and Public Services

Debate between Louise Haigh and James Cartlidge

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Louise Haigh]

I could not agree more. It is exactly the same in my own home force of South Yorkshire. The pernicious and long-term effects of deindustrialisation in communities are often the same issues that other rural forces and areas experience and are affected by.

The feelings of isolation can be strong and overwhelming, particularly for vulnerable individuals in rural areas such as that of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore). If police do not have the ability to reach out, they will feel ever more vulnerable. The Conservative party used to be clear on this. A leaked internal communiqué said that

“police-stations are important to local communities and the sheer number of closures is worrying.”

But since that communiqué, closures have rocketed. Nearly 400 police stations have closed in England and Wales, with the number of front counters open to the public falling from over 900 in 2010 to just over 500 today. It is harder to ignore the knock-on effects that sales of police stations and closures of custody suites have had on policing. Particularly in large rural areas, officers now have to drive for long distances to take offenders into custody, taking them off the streets for a considerable period of time.

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

Is the hon. Lady actually saying that she would reopen those police stations?

[Louise Haigh]

No. I am saying that we would properly resource the police to be able to do their job, unlike the Conservative party. In reducing the police, as the Conservatives have done, to nothing more than a flashing blue light that only arrives when the absolute worst has happened, not only have they destroyed the police’s ability to prevent crime from happening in the first place; they have rolled back all the progress of the previous generation in building trust with the police in the hardest-to-reach communities. That is the danger of the loss of community officers from rural police forces.

The devastating assault on the strength of our police service as a result of decisions taken by the Conservatives has undermined the fundamental foundations on which policing in this country has been based. Chief among these is the notion that every community matters and every community deserves a police service that is able to respond to the challenges that it deems important. Although the challenges and risks for each community may vary, each is deserving of a community police service, and the priorities of local communities are of equal merit.

The independent inspectorate of constabulary laid bare the breathtaking pressure that the police are now under thanks to the financial constraints imposed on them by the Government and by rising demand. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary said that

“policing is under significant stress. On occasions, that stress stretches some forces to such an extent that they risk being unable to keep people safe in some very important areas of policing.”

Not only have we lost more than 21,000 police officers; thousands of emergency calls are waiting in queues with not enough officers to respond. Some victims facing an emergency get no response at all. The police have yet to assess risk posed by more than 3,000 individuals on the sex offenders register. We do not know whether those individuals are a threat to the public. There is a shortage of more than 5,000 detectives, as unsolved crime rose to 2.1 million crimes last year.