Police Forces

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on securing this important debate. She was right about many things, in particular that the police struggle to speak for themselves—they are one of those services that cannot strike—so it is right for Members to have police debates, when we can speak up for them.

I have the pleasure of being on the police parliamentary programme, spending about 15 days with the police this year. I am always cautious speaking in a police debate, because if I say anything that they do not like, the chances are that I will find that out the hard way on the next day that I spend with them. My next day with them involves going up in a helicopter, so they will have scope to show me whether they like the things I say.

The police are facing a variety of what they probably regard as attacks from all angles, such as the funding cuts and the changes to the pay and conditions of police officers, although we should draw a distinction between those for uniformed police constables and those for police staff, who, I suspect, are often in an even worse position. The Government are also making structural changes to the accountability of the police force, which the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) discussed.

This is the fourth or fifth policing debate that I have spoken in over the past year, and I always start by urging the Government to review how they allocate funding to various police forces around the country. If we look at the impact on forces, we need either to implement the existing funding formula, so that forces actually have the funding that the formula calculates for their needs, or to find a better formula and implement that. We cannot, however, remain with a formula that calculates for Derbyshire police £5 million more than they actually get, and yet each year say, “That’s difficult, we will leave that for another year.” I am sure that the Nottinghamshire police force of the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) is in a similar situation and that we will get the same pleas from his force. If we need to be more efficient, can we start with fair funding in the first place? Derbyshire police force thinks of itself as extremely efficient—it has had to be for years, because in its view it has been underfunded. The concern of Derbyshire police is that, while it accepts the scope for more efficiency and further savings, it is hard to keep getting more blood out of the stone when it sees other forces not being forced to make the same level of efficiency savings. I have made that plea almost half a dozen times now. I hope that a different Minister will give a more encouraging answer to my police force, but I fear that that might be beyond his role today.

In common with all Members present, I have been lobbied by various serving and retired members of the police force about the impact of the proposed changes to their pay and conditions. All of us who have been in employment, and who have experienced threats to the business in which we are working or announcements of change and redundancy reviews, know that such times are horribly unsettling and uncertain. One lesson that I have learned is that the time of uncertainty should be as short as possible for it to be as fair as possible on the people affected, so I am concerned that many weeks have gone by since the Hutton and the Winsor announcements. Serving police officers do not yet have any idea which of the proposals will be implemented by the Government, which will not and how the proposals will impact on individuals. If we want to get police morale trending back upwards, we need to resolve what the Government proposals actually are, although I understand that they are under negotiation and that it is hard to come up with any public statement. Human nature, however, is to flick through the reports, find all the worst possible scenarios, add them all together and envisage a situation that, I suspect, is far worse than the reality will be.

[Toby Perkins]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has highlighted the situation in Derbyshire, which we both represent. At the Police Federation conference, Derbyshire representative Sarah Adams reminded everyone of what the Home Secretary said at an earlier conference:

“If you come with me, I will make this promise: I will always back you, I will always support you, I will always fight for you.”

Sarah Adams finished by asking the Home Secretary

“how can you expect police officers or the communities we serve to trust you or your Government?”

Our representative from Derbyshire said that to the Home Secretary. Does that make the hon. Gentleman feel neither that the police have misunderstood nor that the Government have failed to explain, but that the policy is wrong?

[Nigel Mills]

I have had some great times with the police going around the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, because we are advised on the police parliamentary scheme not to go around our own seats in case we attract more attention than the police do themselves. I would not go as far as he did in his intervention. Without doubt, we have a huge deficit, which has to be tackled, and there is no way that police forces can be shielded from that—they will have to pay their share, and I think that they accept that. I am sure that we will disagree about how large the share should be, but, when pay accounts for three quarters of police budgets, there is no way around the fact that that is what must take a fair chunk of the strain.

My point is that it is only fair on people to tell them what the changes will be as quickly as possible, rather than dragging out the uncertainty for months. Some things in the Winsor review and, in particular, the Hutton review are welcome. Hutton singles out the police force for a better deal on pensions than other public sector workers can expect, because they will be allowed their pension at 60, rather than the age rising to 66 or 67.

[Mr Burley]

Does my hon. Friend accept that some police officers may receive their pension as early as the age of 48? Police officers have unique job security. It the only job in the public sector that I can think of which people may start at 18, and have a job for 30 years, and a guaranteed pension of around two thirds of salary with no chance of being made redundant. Police officers cannot be made redundant, unlike people in every other job in the public and private sector. That unique job security should be reflected in the overall pay and conditions and, indeed, pension.

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention, but I think he is leading me down a line that would cause some difficulty. There is merit in considering whether police officers should sign up for 30 years, or whether they should join on a shorter contract. There is logic in signing up for 10 years, and if that works out for the force and someone wants to stay longer, they can do so. If it is not working out after 10 years, they may want to do something else. I was encouraged that Police Federation representatives from Derbyshire whom I met a few months ago were keen on that idea, and could see some advantages.

My hon. Friend tried to tempt me down the line of police redundancy, and my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) has introduced a ten-minute rule Bill on that topic. I think that that would probably add more uncertainty to police officers’ views on their future. Some to whom I have spoken have colleagues who are unfit for work or have lost their enthusiasm for it, and a mechanism allowing them to leave would probably be a positive step, but I suspect that that is not the general view of the police force.

I want to plead for police staff whose terms and conditions are not as generous as those of serving police officers, but who have borne the brunt of some previous savings rounds. They do not have redundancy protection, and they fear that they are being even more unfairly squeezed when police forces are looking to make savings. I have certainly had representations from them saying that they do not have the same generous pension to look forward to and cannot retire at the same time. We must ensure that the balance of savings is spread fairly.

When we talk about front-line and back-office functions, it is easy to blur the fact that some of those functions that are key to the front line, but are not strictly uniform, are being squeezed. I have had representations from scene-of-crime officers saying that compared with years ago when a team would sent to almost every burglary, there is now a squeeze on and it is hard to get an operative to go to a crime scene. Certainly that service is not available for many burglaries. That is not the way to improve the rate of crime detection.

There are many challenges, and at a time of funding constraint, it is important that the Government give the police all the necessary powers to tackle crime as efficiently as possible. I will cite one example from the burglary division of Derbyshire police. I am sure that the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) agrees that Derbyshire police has made great improvements in recent years in tackling burglaries and in providing a service to victims of such crimes. It has told me that many burglaries are carried out by people who want to steal jewellery to fund their drug habit. They rob a house, nick the jewellery and take it straight down to the local jeweller, who sometimes has a melting pot. The jewellery is sold for cash, and even if the police receive a tip-off about where the jewellery has gone, there is no trace of it or whom it was bought from. Previously law-abiding jewellers are being snared by the high price of gold into that route of crime. There are no regulations that the police can use to tackle jewellers or to force them to keep details of jewellery that they buy or whom they bought it from.

Regulations apply to scrap metal dealers, and even to pawnbrokers, but not to jewellers. If we are to help the police tackle crime, we must tackle the demand side and give them the powers that they need. I hope that the Minister will encourage his colleague, Baroness Browning, to look at the matter a little more closely than she suggested a couple of weeks ago.

I want to touch on accountability, because it is important that the police are brought back closer to the communities that they serve. There have been many welcome developments on neighbourhood consultation, but the introduction of elected police commissioners will do that, and I hope that the Government will proceed with that and not bow down to Lords wrecking amendments. It will be an important development, and even serving police officers have told me that they are looking forward to it, because it will make the force seem more accountable. Perhaps even at chief constable level it will encourage focusing priority on the area and not on the national, high-profile matters that chiefs sometimes focus on. That reform is essential to bring the police back to their trusted status with the public. I urge the Government to progress with that.