Police Employer Pension Contributions

Owen Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 14th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am really grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I say without any prejudice towards inner London that, in reality, inner London has always had to grapple with violent crime. For MPs in boroughs such as Lambeth and Lewisham, gun crime, knife crime and gang crime have always been part and parcel of their work as constituency MPs. We know that there are problems concentrated in inner cities. That is an unfortunate fact of life, and it is one that we are working really hard to try to tackle. Frankly, no one should have to tolerate violent crime, wherever they live. My hon. Friend has just mentioned suburban London. My constituency borders the county of Essex, and I did not expect to see these levels of knife crime and violent crime there when I was elected to this place three years ago.

At Prime Minister’s questions today, I referred to an awful incident, which I would actually not associate with the police cuts, but I would draw to the Minister’s attention the stabbings and the gang crime in my constituency, as well as the county lines activity. Young people are being actively groomed at school gates. They are being identified because of their vulnerability and because they are the kids that are falling behind at school, and they are being groomed to run drugs across the country. We need police on our streets to deal with this. It is not just about grabbing people and nicking them; it is about the intelligence that community policing provides. It is about intelligence gathering and relationship building. It is about building trust so that people will come forward and speak to the police. All that is put at risk by the impact of the cuts to police budgets and police numbers. Given that that is the overall context, it is totally unacceptable to throw on top of that these changes to employer pension contributions, which are adding to the budgetary pressures.

To his credit, the Mayor of London has tried, with the resources he has available, to stem the tide of police cuts. Sadiq Khan has put in £140 million to fund 1,000 police officers, who would otherwise not be there. That has come at the cost of diverting into the policing budget money that the Greater London Authority gathers through business rates. It has also come at a cost to my constituents and to residents right across our capital city, who are paying more through their precept for policing.

It is so difficult to have a conversation about this with voters on the doorstep—this applies to council tax generally, by the way. I knock on people’s doors, and they say really clearly, “Hang on a minute. How is it that my local services are getting worse and there are fewer police officers on the street? My precept is going up—I am paying more. Why aren’t we getting more police?” That is a perfectly reasonable question. I have to explain to my constituents something I think is unjustifiable, which is that the Mayor of London is having to put up their precept because he is doing his best to stem the tide of cuts from central Government. This is a repeat pattern of behaviour: central Government make decisions here and pass the buck to local decision makers, who are responsible for implementing the cuts.

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an extremely powerful speech. Does he agree that it is not just in London that there is this deeply familiar pattern of deep cuts to police budgets, consequent cuts in police numbers and consequent rises in crime? Crime is getting ever more complex. The police are having to deal, as he said, with county lines issues and drugs issues more broadly—the use of new psychoactive substances, which are spreading throughout many of our communities—and precepts are having to be put up to try to stem some of these cuts. Is my hon. Friend surprised, as I am, that 1,600 officers and staff have lost their jobs in Wales over the past 10 years of Conservative and Conservative-led coalition Governments? That is deeply damaging to the ability of the police to deliver effective policing. I am sure that he agrees that it is completely unacceptable for this additional burden now to be placed on policing.

[Wes Streeting]

That is a powerful, well-made point, and it really does emphasise that this is a UK-wide problem and a common experience in a diverse range of communities up and down the country. It is so difficult to tell constituents that their taxes are rising, while their services are getting worse. It will be even more difficult to say that there will be fewer police officers on the streets of my constituency because the Government have changed some pension rules. My constituents will wonder what on earth the Government are playing at.

The Chancellor managed to find 500 million quid here, 500 million quid there and 500 million quid virtually everywhere to get a few good, cheap headlines the day after the Budget to create the illusion that the Government are putting money back into public services, even though we know that these sums were largely one-off grants for, as he so badly put it, the nice little extras. What I found most astonishing was that, even as the Chancellor, like Father Christmas a few months early, was sprinkling money across Departments, he did not find a single penny for policing. I genuinely found that astonishing; it suggests that the Treasury is out of touch—in fact, what it is doing with these rules, given the impact on police budgets, tells me that it is out of touch.

I am sure that I am not alone in having policing and crime as the No. 1 concern in my constituency. As I said at the outset, this place is understandably focused on Brexit and its generational consequences for years to come, but the discussion around dinner tables in my constituency tonight is more likely to be about crime and community safety, particularly given recent events. My constituents will be horrified at the way the Treasury is conducting itself in relation to these pension changes and the resources it puts into policing.

[Owen Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way; he is being extremely generous with his time. I put it to him that it is not true that the Treasury is out of touch on this; I think it knows exactly what it is doing. It is not just in respect of police pensions that it is changing the rules, pushing extra cuts on to policing. The same is true in respect of further education colleges and university pensions. There is a consistent pattern; it is repeat offending by the Treasury in this regard. It is not just policing that we should be addressing this evening; it is all the other public services that are equally subject to these sorts of changes, which will entail cuts.

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. I could give chapter and verse on the impact of pension contribution changes across a range of public services.

[Owen Smith]

It is not just policing.

[Wes Streeting]

As my hon. Friend says, it is not just policing. Before I was elected to this place, I was deputy leader of the London Borough of Redbridge. I had the enormous privilege of representing my home community on Redbridge Borough Council for eight years, and what I consistently saw across local government services was exactly the same pattern of behaviour: decisions taken in the Treasury brutalised the budgets of Government Departments, and then the Government Departments devolved the cuts, and the responsibility for those cuts, to local authorities. That is absolutely outrageous.

When the austerity agenda first began, I think everyone would acknowledge that some cuts were made to services that, frankly, some people did not really notice. What has changed over the past eight years is that the Government started by clamping down on some of the inevitable inefficiencies and waste that exist in any organisation with big infrastructure, then they began to impact on services—particularly specialist services that do not necessarily benefit the largest number of people but that have a substantial impact on particular service users—and now we are in a position where these cuts and the austerity agenda are not just widely felt, but deeply felt. That is why the Government have felt compelled to change their narrative on austerity.