Police Funding

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is rightly concerned about that. I will be going to Birmingham in a week’s time at the invitation of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak to see how the CSR will affect visible policing.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

In response to an earlier question about the functions of police officers, it has to be said that many were affected by the previous Government’s ill thought out, badly drafted legislation. For example, the short-term, knee-jerk reaction dispersal orders simply moved one problem to a different street in the same area, which I often saw as a cabinet member for safety in Medway. Of course we must consider the various functions of police officers, but in the past 10 years the police have been tied up with functions they should never have been dealing with.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. One thing I hope we can avoid at all costs is the kind of knee-jerk reaction that he mentioned. I would hate the police service to be subject to the same kind of reorganisation that we have had in the NHS in the past 20 years under the previous Government and the one before that.

I do not intend to go on for long, because many right hon. and hon. Members wish to contribute to the debate. The Home Affairs Committee hopes to assist the Government in this difficult process—we want to approach the proposals in a comradely and constructive way. I am glad to see so many members of the Committee in the Chamber. Our longest-serving and most distinguished member, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) is here, as are my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak. The hon. Members for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) and for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) are members of the Committee, and sitting behind them on the Government Benches is a non-member, the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti). The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) is also in the Chamber. She was a member of the Committee but was poached within weeks of her appointment by the Minister to become his Parliamentary Private Secretary. I am sure she is doing a great job.

The Committee has decided to undertake a trilogy of reports on three different aspects of the proposals to assist the Government. It is rather like “The Lord of the Rings”. We have just published our report on police and crime commissioners. As the Minister knows, members of the Committee have different views on the desirability of police and crime commissioners, but I hope he found our report helpful. It outlined a number of issues that we feel could be of value to the country.

We were very concerned that the figures for the cost of police and crime commissioners came out only after we had published our report. Indeed, the proposals came out on the very day that we published our report. Perhaps we can improve our co-ordination. I am not saying that we should be like “Strictly Come Dancing”, but if the Government and the Committee communicated a little bit better, we might be able to see the proposals before we commence our reports, which would make what we say more valuable.

The second report was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak and my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, and we will look at the CSR in the light of the decisions that the Minister will make imminently about how much police forces will have as part of that second report on a reduction in police bureaucracy. There is common ground on both sides of the House about the need to reduce police bureaucracy. When my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) was the Minister with responsibility for the police, he also said that he wanted to cut red tape. In the 23 years I have been a Member of Parliament, Ministers have always said that they want to cut red tape, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we need to ensure that it actually is reduced. That is why I hope that Jan Berry will have her term as the police bureaucracy tsar renewed, so that rather than just writing a one-off report she can continue to monitor the situation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

It is my turn to follow the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills)—the sequence is normally the other way around—and I am very pleased to do so.

I recognise that the Minister has a tough job on his hands. Although I do not agree with a number of his proposals, I accept that his instincts are to try to make the police more efficient and to achieve a better level of performance with the resources he has. His difficulty is that the Home Office did rather badly out of the recent settlement. It is evident that, while other Cabinet Ministers went to bat for their Departments and secured good deals, the Home Secretary did not achieve quite as much. We must now live with the consequences of that. I genuinely and sincerely fear that crime will rise and that we will have terrible difficulties in some of our major cities in trying to combat the particular types of crime that we have been able to bear down on so successfully in recent years.

I do not oppose the Minister’s ambitions to achieve efficiencies and use more modern methods. In fact, I agree that change is needed. I support the better use of IT and better procurement, and I believe there is a clear argument for the police shift system to be changed, which would release more officers. We argue about the statistics—the Minister is very keen to gloat about the 11% figure—but the reality is that the police shift system is part of the problem, and I am in favour of changing that.

I welcome civilianisation where it frees police to do policing jobs. However, such an approach means there can be no benefit from the mass sacking of civilians. That is the conundrum. If civilianisation is a good process because it frees police officers to carry out policing functions, it logically follows that the mass sacking of civilians will mean that police officers are taken off front-line functions and sent back to doing civilian tasks. The Minister will have to address that problem. It is likely—my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) made this point—that the initial response of police chiefs will be to sack civilian staff, which will impact on front-line policing. As they struggle to continue to make the budget match up, they will be forced to consider how to sack police officers. The easiest way to do that will be to apply regulation A19, which will mean that some of our more experienced and senior officers will have to go. We will have the double effect of losing civilian staff while officers are taken off the street to do their work and, simultaneously, losing senior and experienced officers.

As I said to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), it seems that that will happen when there is also a freeze on recruitment and a freeze on pay. Those are not the conditions in which we can expect to get the best out of people, or motivate them to embrace change and improve performance; they are the conditions most likely to produce exactly the opposite effect.

I am particularly worried about the west midlands, because our gearing ratio means that we are highly dependent on grant. Earlier today, we met the Minister to discuss that very subject. If we experience a uniform cut in grant without any changes to the damping regime, we will lose out unfairly as a result of an exercise that means we must forgo money and resources, which will be transferred to other police areas. We will have to forgo those resources so that the council tax precept can be kept down elsewhere in the country.

That is a very good argument for what the Treasury want to achieve, and for what the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government might want to achieve. However, it is not an argument that someone who is worried about law and order and police resources should be too willing to embrace. Even at this stage, the Minister should consider whether he still has time to go back to his friends in the Treasury, explain the dilemma and see whether they can help him out of the hole that has been dug for him.

Project Paragon in the west midlands has shown that successful efficiency and reorganisation measures can be taken. However, such measures take time to deliver. Project Paragon cannot be turned on and off like a tap. If such things are to be done successfully, they need a long lead-in time. It takes a long time to deliver efficiencies. One of the by-products of such a change is that crime may rise during the reorganisation period, and there is some evidence in the west midlands to show that that is happening. I see that the Minister is nodding, because I think he also accepts that that is the case.

My concern about these very substantial front-loaded cuts is that such a reorganisation will occur far too fast in forces all over the country, at the very time when we are gearing up for major events, such as the Olympics. That is not something that we should be remotely complacent about. It screams out for re-examination, because the obvious dangers are right in front of us. We still have time to look into this issue, but if we delay too long, things will be upon us and our forces will be in chaos at the very time when demand for policing is at its highest.

I agree with the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. My view is simple: law and order always has to be our No. 1 priority. I genuinely feel that the Government have got the balance wrong. I am delighted that they have selected areas of other budgets that they feel should be protected, but there are times when I would like to hear a more convincing case for those decisions. However, I am disappointed that so little emphasis seems to be placed on law and order. Yesterday we detected the dangerous cocktail of police numbers dropping, crime rising and the courts prevented from sending offenders to prison when that is exactly where they should be, along with a promise of community punishments, albeit without the resources to make them work. That is a recipe for problems.

[Rehman Chishti]

The hon. Gentleman makes an assertion about allowing offenders to get away, but between 2007 and 2010, under the previous Government, some 80,000 prisoners were let out of prison early. Surely that was completely unacceptable, and if the hon. Gentleman’s previous comment is right, he should accept that that was wrong.

[Steve McCabe]

Actually, the reality is that under the Labour Government there was a huge rise in prison numbers. It is true that some people were allowed out one month early, but the Justice Secretary proposed yesterday that there should be a threshold in order to reduce the numbers who go to prison in the first place, which means that the courts will be hampered. Indeed, he went on to say that his preference was that people should serve half the sentence in prison and half in the community. I should tell the hon. Gentleman that his constituents will find that much less acceptable than the situation when we were in power. If he does not believe me, I would be happy to go with him to his constituency and talk to them about it, because from what my constituents tell me, I am pretty certain that I am right about that.

[Rehman Chishti]

The statement by the Secretary of State for Justice was quite clear: those who commit crime should be punished with the efficient force of the criminal justice system, and that includes going to prison. Can the hon. Gentleman show where in the Secretary of State’s statement it said that they should not be sent to prison?

[Steve McCabe]

I can show the hon. Gentleman where in the statement the Secretary of State gave the estimate for what he expected the reduction in the number of people going to prison to be. He stood at that Dispatch Box and said it, and everyone who was in the Chamber heard it—unless they have selective hearing.

I shall now return to what I was saying. There is a difficult balance. Perhaps the cuts are just too much, and the Home Office has got a particularly poor deal. I was surprised to discover, from the evidence that the permanent secretary to the Home Office gave to the Home Affairs Committee, that the Department has not carried out any research into the impact of the cuts on crime. That came from the very same permanent secretary who three years ago ordered a report on the potential impact of a recession on crime. It seems slightly strange that the man who feared then that a recession could lead to a rise in crime, and who said that we should investigate the potential outcomes, does not seem remotely troubled that a background of massive cuts and far too rapid reorganisation could have a similar effect. Perhaps it is just as well that he is planning to retire.