Retail Crime Prevention

Martin Vickers Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2019 Westminster Hall

[Kit Malthouse]

There has already been a debate in the House on the use of facial recognition technology, and it is obviously within the purview of Members and Select Committees and others to examine the issue. It has just been through the courts—South Wales Police has been challenged on its use of facial recognition technology, and the courts found the current framework satisfactory. I have no doubt that when we get back from this election there will be an urge for the issue to be debated in the House, given the enormous success that is being seen with facial recognition technology.

The right hon. Member for Delyn raised the issue of local police plans, suggesting that we put pressure on police and crime commissioners to include retail crime in their plans. If this was a pressing issue in the high street, one would hope that the police and crime commissioner would commit to having it in their plan anyway. However, we have created a new National Policing Board, which is looking at systemic issues across the country that should be addressed by the whole policing family in a concerted effort, and one area we are looking at is neighbourhood crime. What we put into that basket has yet to be fully agreed, and I will certainly consider putting retail crime in there.

I am very alive to the connection between drugs and alcohol misuse and the impact on shops and retail crime. First, on alcohol, I hope Members will have noticed that we are planning to roll out alcohol abstinence monitoring orders across the whole country. From memory, we have been given about £22 million to do that. The orders have been very successfully used in Croydon and in a pilot in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Humberside recently. They are for low-level offending and those convicted of a crime where alcohol was the compelling factor in its commission. Compliance rates with that disposal are up at 93% or 94%, and there is enormous potential there.

With drugs, we have been given some money to start to combat the awful scourge of county lines, which is causing mayhem in many small towns across the country, not least in my constituency. I hope that when we return after the election we will see even more assertive action on that.

There is more that we can do on treatment and rehabilitation for those who fall into drug addiction. We must look imaginatively at schemes around the world that can be used to divert from offending those who have been convicted of a drug offence and are out in the community on probation. I point Members to a very interesting programme in Hawaii called the HOPE programme—Hawaii’s opportunity probation with enforcement—which I would be very keen to try to establish in this country as a way to deal with people who are low-level offenders because of a drug addiction. That could be managed in a much better way than I think we are managing it at the moment.

A number of Members mentioned the £200 threshold. I hope they are aware that police can still prosecute somebody who steals something worth less than £200.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

I met Chief Constable Lee Freeman of Humberside Police and raised the £200 threshold. As other Members have pointed out, it causes great concern, particularly to small shopkeepers. He pointed out that the police are flexible in how they interpret the guidance in Humberside. Will the Minister make sure that other forces up and down the country treat the matter in a much more serious way? It is very serious for small shopkeepers. The flexibility that Humberside is showing should be replicated elsewhere.

[Kit Malthouse]

That is exactly right. If a chief constable decrees that it is a problem in their area, it is perfectly possible for them to have a policy of prosecuting thefts of a value under £200. I am certainly willing to make sure that chiefs across the country are aware of that.

Given the depth of concern expressed this morning, if I am returned to this job after the election, I am happy to look at the data and see what it tells us about the operation of that policy, now that we are four or five years in. I do not think there is any problem with us reviewing that data internally and deciding whether the policy is working, and then promulgating some kind of best practice.

A number of challenges were made on the recruitment of 20,000 police officers. The right hon. Member for Delyn asked me when they would be recruited—recruitment has already started. A number of police forces are recruiting, not least because we have 3,000 police officers to recruit from last year’s budget settlement. With the allocations to all forces, we have already signalled what the recruitment targets should be over the next 15 months or so.

We expect the first 6,000 of the 20,000 to be recruited by the end of the financial year next year, 8,000 in the year after and the final 6,000 in the year after that. It will not be a straight progression, not least because police officers tend to retire at unpredictable times. When we add in retirees, we have to recruit somewhere between 45,000 and 50,000 police officers over the next three years, which will be a huge job. Nevertheless, we have been given £45 million in-year this year to start, and I hope we will be announcing the allocations of that money relatively soon.

Some forces are going for this in a big way straightaway. I know the Met police is recruiting between 300 and 400 police officers a month at the moment, which is all good news. However, I would just counter the direct connection that a number of Members make between levels of crime and numbers of police officers, because the connection is not just about inputs; it is also about what we are doing. I remind Members that, notwithstanding the fact that we have fewer police officers today, overall crime is 35% lower than it was 10 years ago. For example, police officer numbers were much higher in the ’80s and ’90s than in the ’50s and ’60s, yet crime was much higher too. Focus and priority is as important as the number of police officers.