Police Funding

Luke Myer Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton) on securing this debate. Although his focus is of course on the PSNI, the general issues he raised concerning policing are echoed across the United Kingdom. I hope to raise some of those issues that are affecting my constituents.

Last week in my constituency a fire was started in Marton, shop fronts smashed in Guisborough, a pharmacy broken into and its contents burglarised and staff assaulted. Police officers responded and arrests were made, but those are not individual, isolated incidents—that is a pattern and picture of crime across the country. It is a picture of criminals who feel emboldened and residents who feel unsafe. I am grateful to the Policing Minister for taking the time to meet me to discuss police funding in Cleveland, the area I represent.

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise these issues here as well, because this is what people are dealing with every day. People feel afraid to leave the house; they do not feel safe in their communities, They do not feel confident that when they call the police, the police will come, or that crimes will be investigated when they report them. They do not feel confident that the courts will see justice done, and certainly not timely justice. That is why we need a change.

In my part of the world, we have seen major cuts to our police force. We have lost more than 200 officers net since 2010—a 12% reduction in full-time equivalent officers—and all the while demand has gone up. Our officers work incredibly hard under extraordinary pressure, and although they make arrests, the broader criminal justice system is creaking at the seams. Prosecution rates have fallen over the past decade, victims wait months and even years for cases to come to trial and judges have been advised to delay sentencing because of the lack of prison capacity. The system is in crisis and it has been allowed to get to this point after years of systematic underfunding and a lack of support. That is why investment in our criminal justice system is crucial.

Investment has to come at all four stages of the system. It has to come into our prison estate, and I welcome the £2.3 billion investment announced in the Budget last week to expand our prison capacity and ensure that we have the necessary prison places. Investment needs to go into bringing down the court backlog so that cases are heard in a timely fashion and victims feel that justice will be served.

We need investment in visible community policing again. Residents desperately want a named officer for every community, who understands their village or town, knows the families and the history, and can tackle issues before they escalate. That was the cornerstone of the consent-based model of British policing for decades, and it has been eroded in recent years; it must be restored.

We also need investment in prevention. The previous Labour Government were famously tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. They provided funding for Sure Start and targeted schemes such as the safer school partnerships and the family intervention projects. That is what the new Labour Government need to do.

When I was in local government, we invested heavily in setting up a specialist team to tackle the exploitation of vulnerable children and young people by organised criminal gangs. It was about getting upstream of the process and making sure that vulnerable children were diverted. That saved the state money in the long term and ensured that those young people had opportunities. This Government need that kind of ambition, and I believe they will have it. We need that investment; we need to make sure that our police have the resources they need to do their jobs; and we need to take back our streets and make them safe again.