Salisbury Incident

Luke Graham Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

We always make sure the police have the resources they need to keep this country safe. On this particular incident, on this attack, I have made it absolutely clear to the police and the emergency services that they have our entire support to do whatever is necessary to get to the bottom of this investigation. I understand the hon. Lady’s willingness to raise the issue of resources, but I reassure her, this House and this country that the police have the resources they need and are full tilt on this investigation.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

I wish to add my tribute to the Wiltshire police force. My best friend from school serves in that force, and I know how dedicated he and his colleagues are to the security of the county. How are Wiltshire police working with national teams collaboratively to progress this investigation? What lessons will be shared with police forces throughout the UK?

Vote 100 and International Women’s Day

Luke Graham Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Inspiring people to get involved in politics is such an important part of our job.

I want to talk about inspiring women. I might have been the first woman to be elected to Parliament in North Hampshire, but I am now joined by five other female Conservative Members of Parliament in Hampshire, including my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies). Where one woman treads, others will follow. I am very proud indeed that 60% of my borough councillors in Basingstoke are female, led by the incredibly impressive Councillor Terri Reid. It is important to recognise that as Members of Parliament, we can inspire others to become involved in politics through our work.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

On that point about inspiring women, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is important that as Members of Parliament, we get into our schools to speak to young women and show them that being an MP is exactly the sort of job they should be aspiring to do, as is being the leader of a company? As a male MP with two female bosses, I know that women are at least as good at this job and probably better. Does she agree that a woman’s place is not, as some old-fashioned people might say, in the kitchen, but on the Front Bench?

[Mrs Miller]

What we are trying to say is that a woman’s place is in the House, which is a similar thing. I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution. He is absolutely right that we need to recognise the importance of encouraging more young women into politics.

Seasonal Migrant Workers

Luke Graham Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. When employers have access to a ready supply of relatively cheap labour, they may choose to use that workforce rather than invest in technology. We know, though, that there are particular challenges with the automated picking of soft fruit, which I will come to in a moment. Although we would like to see more automation, it is not going to be achieved overnight. We need a near-term solution to the immediate labour problem, hand in hand with investment in the technology that can help us to shift to a less labour-intensive industry.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making some valuable points. Will she not only join me in welcoming seasonal migrant workers to help in constituencies such as mine, but work with me and others to put pressure on the Government to ensure that we are championing our agricultural industries and increasing their prestige and the jobs that they create? They will then become viable options for young people, and we will show young farmers the great contribution they are making in constituencies such as mine and hers.

[Helen Whately]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We absolutely should be championing our agricultural industries and encouraging and enabling more young people to go into careers in agriculture. There is a challenge for farmers: they would hope to be able to recruit skilled British labour for all sorts of jobs, but young people are tending not to go into the sector. We should absolutely encourage British people to do that.

Community Policing

Luke Graham Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) on bringing this important debate forward. I will try to keep my comments concise. I want to look specifically at community policing in Scotland and draw a few comparisons with the rest of the UK. As many Members will know, policing is a devolved issue in Scotland, but that does not mean that we should not consider how policing is handled in Scotland, draw conclusions and perhaps pull out a few lessons from Scotland for other parts of the United Kingdom.

As many Members have already said, community policing is an effective way of tackling antisocial behaviour. It helps to build community relationships through officers’ visits to schools, local businesses and local community groups, and it means that police officers are not a faceless voice of authority when dealing with troubled people in our communities. They are known, they know the individuals and their backgrounds, and they can often recommend a more informed course of action than many centralised or unknown police forces. Crucially, as has been stated, we can steer away from having a police force controlled by politicians many miles away.

In Scotland, we used to have eight regional police forces, which were centralised into one: Police Scotland. Sometimes, centralisation does make sense. When we are looking at issues of national security—we have touched on terrorism—we need to co-operate across the entire country, so a centralised force makes sense. That is also right in transport, with the British Transport police—it is important that we do not change forces at certain parts of the country when trying pursue a criminal from one area to the next. However, it is far less effective when we are talking about policing in our towns and villages, especially in rural constituencies such as mine. In Ochil and South Perthshire, I have a number of small towns and villages, which require a car and a fair bit of journey time between each. Therefore, having local officers who know the towns and streets is very important.

A lot of the people and officers who work in Police Scotland are very hard-working, as I am sure they are in other parts of the United Kingdom. They give their best, working under stressed conditions, and they have to deal with many difficult situations on a regular basis. However, since the centralisation of Police Scotland, it has unfortunately faced a number of high-level blunders. There have been address mix-ups, especially when it came to the closure of the Aberdeen control centre. There was also a horrific incident near my constituency where a call handling error left a couple in a car wreck on the side of the M9 for three days. That is not acceptable.

When Police Scotland started out, it had the Strathclyde model—it was very centralised—and I am pleased that gradually we are moving back towards more of a community-based model. However, it has not been embraced quite as fully as some community policing measures have been down in England and Wales. We have heard examples of where that is effective.

A couple of weeks ago I had the great fortune of accompanying two officers in Clackmannanshire, which is part of my community. I shadowed them on a Friday evening, and we walked through the high-street in Alloa and the estates in the Hillfoots, and I was able to see at first hand some of the challenges that they face, and some of the issues that blight our communities. Some of those issues are more extreme, such as the increase in knife crime, but others include lighting and the use of CCTV, where through underfunding—that is not necessarily all the Scottish Government; it is local government as well—some of our CCTV cameras are not working in the town centres, and police officers do not have the support and coverage that they require when dealing with situations, especially on a Friday night.

One major cause of crime, certainly in my constituency, is mental ill health. Again, community policing can help with that—this does not need to be a devolved or centralised matter, and it is probably something that colleagues across the United Kingdom will experience. In almost every situation that we encountered on that Friday night, whether talking to young people or attending incidents in residential flats, it came back to issues of mental ill health. When I asked the officers whom I was lucky enough to be accompanying, they told me time and again that the biggest cause of crime was mental ill health.

Mental ill health was not just the cause of crime; it also had a knock-on effect on community policing because of resource restrictions in the area. If a person who has committed a crime has mental health issues, they might require some form of medical treatment, and the officer will have to accompany them to the local hospital, taking the officer off the beat for two to four hours that evening. Mental ill health is an enormous issue, and I encourage the Minister—I would be more than happy to engage with colleagues in the Scottish Government and in Westminster—to consider what we can do for community policing across the whole United Kingdom to try to improve mental health services and prevent crime, and to consider how we can help the treatment of mental ill health once a crime has been committed so that we do not put a further drain on frontline police forces in our communities.

One of the downsides of centralisation as part of Police Scotland is that there are now no local cells in Clackmannanshire or Stirling. Police officers in my patch have to go to Falkirk to take someone to a cell, and if they have to queue that takes them off the beat for a considerable time. On a busy night—we were out on Halloween weekend, although I was not dressed up—with eight to 10 officers out for the evening, if one or two had to take someone to the cells or deal with a mental health issue, the rest of the team was put under significant pressure.

Community policing is incredibly important. It is not just about money—I know a lot of colleagues in England and Wales are facing money constraints, but in Scotland the block grant has gone up by £612 million in real terms—it is about choices. The SNP Administration in Edinburgh chose to centralise all police forces into one. They were warned about the impact that would have, and the fact that a centralised police force would incur VAT payments, but they still went ahead and did it. That took upwards of £25 million from Police Scotland. Instead of focusing on community policing as we should, they are fast-tracking the scrapping of the British Transport Police which, as I said at the beginning of my speech, is one area where centralisation and co-operation across our country is incredibly important.

As I have said, I have seen community policing first hand with officers in my constituency, and as colleagues have said, it is incredibly important and must be correctly resourced. However, this is not just about money; it is about where the police forces put the resources. I hope that we can work together as MPs, MSPs and councillors to find solutions that ensure not only the right frontline resources, but the right policies to look at the causes of crime, especially those involving mental ill health.

--- Later in debate ---

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) for bringing the debate to the Chamber this morning. I pay tribute to my local community police in Partick and Drumchapel police stations, who work together with police across Glasgow to get to know the communities, and attend community council meetings and local events. That is all about building relationships, which is important in dealing with local issues.

The right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton painted a picture of rising crime and budget cuts, and some Conservative Members seemed to suggest that possibly those two things are not linked. I think there is probably a delay: when budgets are cut it takes time for crime to build up, and when they are reinstated it will take time for it to disappear. I suggest that something must happen now if we want a reduction in crime over the next 10 years. The right hon. Gentleman also mentioned violent crimes and high levels of complex crime, and the fact that many police forces in England and Wales are stretched operationally.

The hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) talked about parish policing, which is an important point. Across the UK there are many diverse communities and one size certainly does not fit all. An urban police force will not have the same expertise in particular areas as a police force in his constituency, or indeed in many areas of rural Scotland. It is important that communities are not defined necessarily by geographical boundaries but by the demographic issues particular to them.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned that budget cuts have meant that the Police Service of Northern Ireland is less able to attend the community events that I have already spoken about. He also talked about the importance, especially in Northern Ireland, of members of the public being able to pass on information confidentially and the fact that relationships had to exist for that to take place: we all understand the seriousness of that. He mentioned that dropping police numbers were affecting police resilience and wanted to see some ring-fencing of police budgets to ensure there was no further erosion in that area.

The right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) talked about the massive budget cuts in the West Midlands, coupled with massive cuts to the number of officers on the beat. I think he mentioned a figure of 2,000 officers being cut. He made an important point about the fear of crime that some people experience and how that affects their liberty, especially in less affluent areas. That is something we can all understand. In possibly one of the best points of the debate so far, he also asked what would happen if the tables were turned, his party were in government and the Government were in opposition. That certainly made a number of hon. Members sit up and think, so I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that.

I was surprised to hear the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham) start with some positive comments about Police Scotland; that was good. I am also glad that the police have now shown him around his constituency. However, he struggled to stay positive, and started to get caught up in minutiae. I will talk a little more about the picture in Scotland—

[Luke Graham]

The hon. Lady said I was getting caught in minutiae. I was talking about two specific incidents, one of which left a couple in a car wreck on the side of the M9. That is not minutiae, but an abject failure and a very serious point.

Knife Crime

Luke Graham Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

It is something that we need to look at. Teachers are overstretched in many ways: many support staff posts have been cut and teachers have to deal with children with special educational needs without the necessary resources. It is therefore hard to give them extra responsibilities for intervening if they believe a knife has been brought into school. However, we have to take action. The 10-year knife crime strategy, which would comprise a suite of actions and many different interventions, is the solution rather than one thing or another. There is talk of screens to walk through to go into school, but to me and many others that is an alarming prospect that we need to try to avoid if we can. However, if people are taking knives into school, we have clearly reached the point when intervention is required.

My final point is that we might look at the growing body of evidence that suggests we should view knife crime and youth violence as a public health issue. There is much good work on that in this country and abroad. The Minister will know that in America, across major cities such as Chicago, Boston and New York, youth violence is approached as a major public health issue, and tackled as an infectious epidemic. That includes interrupting activity at source, with people from the local community trained to intervene and work with young people; outreach workers working intensively with young people for six months or a year; and a programme of community and education activity to shift the norms around behaviour and expectation.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on winning the ballot to hold the debate this evening, and I thank her for raising the issue, which affects the whole United Kingdom. It is especially pertinent to Clackmannanshire in my constituency, where there has been a significant increase in knife-related incidents in the past year alone, including one incident involving samurai swords in Alloa town centre. I welcome many of the measures that the hon. Lady has suggested and I hope to work with my hon. Friends to help to progress them. However, does she agree that measures on knife sales and imports of weapons to the UK should also be included in a future strategy?

[Sarah Jones]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I welcome the steps that the Home Secretary has already taken and I think we could do more. It is abhorrent that young people—children—find it easy to buy knives online or in shops. We should do everything we can to prevent that.

The direct intervention in America and in pockets here works and has high levels of success. I have visited projects and met people running projects here who are ex-gang members mentoring children, youth workers working with children in hospital directly after they have been stabbed, or former offenders working with kids in PRUs on training for job interviews and looking for other options in life. Those sorts of direct intervention work, and those pockets should become our response across the board. They need to be funded and co-ordinated.