Antisocial Behaviour and Illegal Bikes

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank the hon. Member for Tipton and Wednesbury (Antonia Bance) for bringing this important debate to Westminster Hall today. Everyone deserves to feel safe in their own home and on their own streets, but for far too many in the UK, that is simply not the reality.

It is pertinent to begin by considering just how widespread the problem of crime is in our country, and how universal the concern that police forces are not being given the resources they need to clamp down on it is. Every single day, 6,000 cases are closed by the police across England and Wales with no suspect identified. Only 6% of reported crimes result in a charge. Three in four burglaries and car thefts remain unsolved. This is not just a failure; it is a crisis, and the British people are right to expect us to do something about it.

The previous Conservative Government made a disastrous decision when they slashed the number of police community support officers. We have lost more than 4,500 since 2015. That reckless move created a vacuum where crime could thrive completely unchecked in our communities. In London alone, the number of PCSOs in the Met fell from 4,247 in 2008 to only 1,215 in 2023. That was an astonishing cut in capability, losing almost three in four officers, from an average of around 56 in each London constituency in 2008 to only 16 in 2023.

I stood here a few weeks ago and outlined the need for a public health approach to knife crime—a strategy underpinned by a return to good old-fashioned community policing. The argument I used then—not just more bobbies, but more beats—is equally applicable to tackling antisocial behaviour more widely, including and especially in the case of illegal use of off-road vehicles. The legacy of the previous Government has left outer London boroughs understaffed and vulnerable. The few PCSOs we have left are stretched thin, often pulled away to cover the city centre, leaving our local neighbourhoods defenceless against this kind of criminal activity. Such activity does something more nefarious than just instil a heartbreaking lack of security in communities; it actively undermines the sense not just of safety, but of comfort. We should be able to relax and trust that our neighbourhoods are and will remain good places to live. Perhaps more fundamentally, when someone sees a young person speeding down the street on a modified scooter, loitering around in intimidating groups, snatching phones, waiting for drug dealers, or even harassing passers-by, it cannot surprise us that they lose some fundamental faith in the system and feel that something is rotten in our country. I am sure that many of us in this place have been that person themselves, witnessing first hand in our constituencies vehicle abandonment, drug use or utter disrespect for fellow citizens.

This is not just a problem in rural areas. Off-road vehicles and the wider problem of antisocial behaviour plague us even in communities such as mine in the suburbs of London. In Sutton, I have witnessed the use of Sur-Ron dirt bikes travelling at speed on our largely pedestrianised high street. Policing Sutton high street is already a complex task. Stretching almost 1,500 metres, it is one of the longest high streets around. Some of these bikes are legal, but most are not. All of them are motorised, high-powered and capable of evading police capture, helping them to commit not just disruption but crime.

Sutton’s Liberal Democrat-run council has worked incredibly hard to rejuvenate the high street, and we are making great progress, as part of our vision of a high street fit for the future of Sutton. To finish the job, we need our great local police to get the resource they need to return to proper community policing. Having great shops, cafés and community spaces is fantastic, but all this great work will be undermined if the people in places just like Sutton all around the country are worried about antisocial behaviour.

[Chris McDonald (Stockton North) (Lab)]

The hon. Member makes a really interesting point. I was reflecting on my own constituency, where, from leafy Thorpe Thewles to the infinity bridge in the centre of town, we have this issue with off-road bikes as well. Does the hon. Member agree that no community around the country is immune from this scourge?

[Luke Taylor]

I completely agree. It is about the feeling of powerlessness, as a resident—as a citizen—just standing on the high street and seeing these things whizz past, not being able to do anything about it, and knowing that that person could be long gone by the time the police are able to respond.

It is clear, from all the words spoken around this hall today, that the Government must urgently restore proper community policing. To do this, we must get more officers out on the streets, funded partially by scrapping the costly police and crime commissioner experiment and investing the savings directly into frontline policing. We must also, as I have said, reverse the disastrous cuts to PCSOs and to safer neighbourhood team officer numbers.

On the specific point about the illegal use of off-road vehicles, I know that many forces have made some great initial efforts, from increasing patrols in hotspots, to using drones—as we have heard from the hon. Members for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) and for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams)—to the use of trackable forensic sprays, but we need more.

I hope the Government will bring forward effective measures on this issue in the Crime and Policing Bill—I look forward to scrutinising it in greater detail on Second Reading next week—but it is also important that everyone in this place urges forces to feel confident in using the powers that are already available to them, despite the flaws with the legislation that have been commented on already.