Police Detention

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert]

I do not understand why Labour Members are trying to pursue a point that I have already answered on a number of occasions. I am happy to repeat that officials were informed in May about the oral judgment, but it was only in June that we received the written judgment of the High Court judge. Officials then began to appreciate that the implications extended beyond that which was originally understood from the oral judgment. I am happy to go on repeating that timeline to hon. Members for as long as they seek to ask these questions.

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

I am sure that we all appreciate that these legal judgments can be complicated and that their full implications can take some time to work through, but does my right hon. Friend agree that there is a bit of concern about how long this took to reach Ministers? Is there perhaps scope for reviewing the interaction between his officials and ACPO to see whether a better process can be put in place to deal with the unlikely event that something as horrible as this ever happens again?

[Nick Herbert]

I note my hon. Friend’s point, but I think that officials wished to ascertain, with ACPO and in consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service, what the full implications of this judgment were before they came to Ministers with advice, because they needed to be able to advise Ministers properly on the extent of the implications. We will continue to work very closely with ACPO to do everything we can to support the police in doing the job that they have to do.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

On the point that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) just made, I note that my hon. Friend’s amendment states that

“the police and crime commissioner shall have no involvement in decisions with respect to individual investigations”.

If there were a high-profile murder, would my hon. Friend think it appropriate for the commissioner to say to a chief constable, “I think you should put more resource into that investigation. What you are doing now is not sufficient and there is real community concern”? Or is my hon. Friend saying that that would be inappropriate?

[Mark Reckless]

That is a very good example, which helps to elucidate the point. It would not be appropriate for the elected commissioner to say, “On this particular individual investigation I would like fewer”—or more—“police”, or, “You should investigate it in this way rather than that.” We do not look to the elected commissioners to do that, but I see a strong role for them in ensuring that justice is colour blind and that the police do not make assumptions about a witness or potential suspect on the basis of ethnicity or any other inappropriate basis. We have seen strong progress by the police in that area, but, with the Macpherson inquiry and the way in which some measures have been rolled out, there has not necessarily been the sensitivity that there might have been. The elected commissioner will have a relationship with the wider electorate, however, so they will sometimes be in a position to lead the police in particular areas regarding social attitudes.

I have huge respect for the police, given my work with them in Kent, but there are particular traditions in policing and the work force are made up in a particular way. Those things have changed, with a very welcome and greater number of women now working as police officers, and there has been a significant improvement in black and minority ethnic representation. In Kent, we had the first black chief constable in Mike Fuller, who did an extraordinary job of engaging with the public and involving them closely with the work of Kent police. The police have a significantly smaller proportion of graduates, although it is higher than it was, and the elected commissioner will be able to lead in those areas. I look to him to do so.

I emphasise to the House that the distinction I draw, going back to the 1962 royal commission at least, works both ways, and I am very concerned about budget setting, priorities and some of the management of public protest. My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) asked some probing questions of various witnesses, but the question of whether there should be a presumption that police officers will travel in pairs, and the extent to which officers might be on bicycles, on foot or in cars, are very properly areas for elected oversight, and inevitably political decisions. If we do draw that distinction, the Bill will help chief constables.

Police Funding

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, and this is the third time in seven months as a Member of Parliament that I have spoken on this issue. It is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), a fellow east midlands Member. I am sure he will agree that the east midlands forces have generally fared relatively badly in terms of funding in recent years. We all hope that, as the Minister finalises his funding settlement for the individual forces, he will look favourably on our local forces.

I commend the police for work they do in my constituency and across Derbyshire. I also commend their positive approach in responding to the anticipated level of cuts. They have not thrown their toys out of the pram and panicked that they will not be able to deliver effective policing across Derbyshire. Instead, they have looked at sensible steps that they can take. To be fair, they have been taking such steps in recent years in preparation for this situation, which they knew was likely to arise. Earlier this year, they reduced their control districts from four to three, moving the control district that covers my area from my constituency to Chesterfield, a move that has been achieved without any real damage to the quality of policing in the area.

We have to be realistic about police funding and accept that there is only so much that forces can do if they do not have the right money in the first place. Making straight-line cuts from the wrong starting position will not leave us in the right finishing position. Derbyshire police estimate that the impact of the comprehensive spending review will result in their needing to make straight-line savings of £6 million in the next financial year. However, they have lost roughly £5 million a year from the damping mechanism, which has cost them some £26 million in the last five years. It is a little much to expect a force that is already £5 million behind where it should have been—which is the equivalent of some 200 police officers compared to how many they would have had with the right amount of formula funding—to be able to absorb a straight-line cut in the same way as other forces that have received much more generous funding. Such a cut is bound to have a serious impact on local policing. It is a little over-ambitious and I hope that the Minister will be able to assure us that he will look to reverse some of the negative impact of the damping mechanism, especially during the CSR period. By the end of that period, our police forces need to be in a fair funding situation; otherwise some of them will have received far less money than they should for an entire decade.

It is worth mentioning that forces can do things to save money that do not rely on cutting front-line officers. I have had meetings with people who have given me information about the waste that exists in police forces, and there is scope for tackling that. I have concerns about how a uniformed, qualified officer has to supervise specialist functions within the police force—for example, on forensics. Somebody in a managerial role ends up trying to supervise something that they are not really an expert in and to which they add little value. That is not a necessary part of the structure. I also question whether it is necessary to have quite so many different silos considering different areas of responsibility. It is a struggle to integrate them and bring together a joined-up seamless force. There must be huge scope for making savings but, fundamentally, there is only so much blood we can get out of a stone before we end up without an effective force.

We are in a bit of a strange position in terms of timing. The review of police conditions is ongoing, yet we want forces to start to make significant savings before they have had a chance to work through the impact of that. It would be unfortunate for forces to lose skilled and trained back-office staff or PCSOs because that is the only way they can make head-count reductions as forces cannot currently make uniformed police officers redundant. If we change the rule halfway through the process and decide that having uniformed officers performing back-office functions is not a great idea, we will find we will have already put ourselves in that position by having to proceed too quickly.

I hope that the timing of the spending reductions will be consistent with the pay and conditions review. It is hard for the public to understand why police officers enjoy an almost unique protection from redundancy whereas PCSOs and skilled back-office staff do not. I do not think the uniformed officers in the constabulary in my constituency will be desperately keen on changing that or on hearing such a change being advocated, but such an approach would give a level playing field for all employees of the police authority.

I do not wish to detain the House for much longer. However, when the Minister considers funding, I urge him one last time—this is the third time I have done so in the Chamber—to acknowledge that straight-line cuts on average will not deliver a fair outcome for forces across the east midlands, especially in Derbyshire. I hope that, over the CSR period, that will be taken into account and that we can move towards having the fairer funding that the formula states Derbyshire police ought to get.

Police Grant Report

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe). I seem to have spent most of my short career as a Member listening to him in the Identity Documents Public Bill Committee and in the Chamber—his tones are deceptively Birmingham-sounding.

I shall confine my remarks to the amending report on the police budget and the reasons why I am prepared to support it, despite Derbyshire’s police funding problems. I campaigned on the need to tackle this country’s humungous budget deficit, and we cannot escape the fact that the Home Office will have to do its fair share of dealing with the problem. As much as we would like the savings to be found from admin costs in the Home Office—and perhaps by addressing the 6,500 pages of national guidance about which we have heard—we must accept that police forces will have to find their share of the cost.

My worry about the approach that has been adopted is that a straight-line saving is to be applied to each and every police force throughout the country, despite the different funding that those forces enjoyed—if I can use that word—under the previous Government. Following my discussions with the Minister about this point, I accept that if he was to bring about in-year funding, he had no alternative but to take such an approach. However, if we are to achieve value-for-money, efficient and effective police forces in the long term, we will need to ensure that each force receives fair funding and to implement the existing funding formula fully, instead of showing what each force needs and then giving it a vastly different amount, perhaps to help more preferred regions.

It is easy for a Back Bencher to accept the need for cuts in theory but then to demand that those cuts do not affect their own force and constituency. As a Derbyshire Member, I would find it particularly easy to cite facts to support that argument—I shall talk about them later—but I assure the Minister that I am not asking him to increase the police budget. I even accept that he cannot maintain the current budget for forces, but I hope that he will implement the funding formula properly so that forces such as Derbyshire get the funding that the formula says they need, rather than a significantly smaller amount.

The Derbyshire force is the 10th lowest spending force per head. The previous Government’s failure to implement the funding formula has cost Derbyshire £26 million over the past five years, and £4.5 million in this year alone. That money could give Derbyshire an extra 200 police officers, perhaps 20 of whom would be in my constituency, with seven for each town. Hon. Members can imagine the improvement that that would make to my constituents’ lives.

The cause of the lack of funding is not that Derbyshire is a low-crime area; I am comparing the funding given by the previous Government with the amount for which the funding formula should provide on the basis of Derbyshire’s crime needs. We have heard a lot about how forces could collaborate to save money, but the problem affects not just Derbyshire, because forces throughout the whole east midlands are significantly underfunded. East midlands police forces receive the lowest grant per crime in the country—£1,459—while the Met and north-east forces receive more than £2,400 per crime. That is not fair to the people of the east midlands, Derbyshire or Amber Valley.

I urge the Minister to address the problem. I am not saying that the east midlands and Derbyshire forces cannot make efficiency savings or do things better—the forces themselves would not say that—but surely it cannot be right that we expect the Derbyshire force to make efficiency savings on its grant of £1,459 per crime when other forces receive an extra £1,000 a crime. Such forces must find it easier to make efficiency savings than those that already receive less funding.

I am asking not for a wholesale, lengthy and expensive review of the funding formula, just that it is implemented properly. I am not asking the Minister to do that today, or even in full from next year. However, he needs to accelerate the progress towards removing the damping process so that, by the end of this Parliament, the police receive their fair share of the funding and can therefore do their fair share of tackling crime.