Crime and Policing

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I recognise the right hon. Gentleman’s concerns. He makes particular reference to his constituency, and there will be others who will share his concern. That is why, as I said, we are reducing the reporting requirements for stop and search. We fully recognise that we need to do that in a sensitive way that notes and deals with the issue that he has raised.

In addition to dealing with bureaucracy, we will introduce directly elected police and crime commissioners—single, named individuals who will be democratically accountable to their communities. That accountability will be real and will be provided not by invisible police authorities—surveys show that only 7% of people know that there is a police authority they can go to if they have a problem with the police—and not by Ministers hundreds of miles away in London, but by people themselves. The police commissioner will be somebody whom people have heard of, whom they have voted for, whom they can hold to account and whom they can get rid of if they do not cut crime. So we will leave local crime fighting to local crime fighters, but we will not forget cross-border, national and international crime. It is an irony that for years the Home Office has tried to micro-manage local policing from the centre while it has neglected policing at the national level. That is why we will establish a national crime agency with a proper command structure to fight serious organised crime and to control our borders.

I understand that it was only yesterday that the Opposition added antisocial behaviour to their motion. The shadow Home Secretary spent quite a bit of time on it in his speech, but he forgot to mention his own quote about the last Government’s record on antisocial behaviour, when he said:

“We became a bit complacent…we…dragged our feet by not making it a priority.”

He claimed that the police have the powers they need to deal with antisocial behaviour and that there is a range of 15 options that they can use, but the fact that there are so many options is precisely the problem. We have individual support orders, acceptable behaviour contracts, antisocial behaviour injunctions, antisocial behaviour orders and criminal antisocial behaviour orders. There is a whole list of options that increases the bureaucracy and complexity and means that in many areas, the police, councils and local people find it very difficult to decide what is appropriate, and that all too often things are not applied.

The shadow Home Secretary should also know that three quarters of incidents of antisocial behaviour are not reported and that more than half of ASBOs are breached. Again, that is not a record of which to be proud or on which to be complacent. That is why we need to look at the whole toolkit that is available to the police in dealing with antisocial behaviour. No number of sanctions is a match for local policing that is responsive to local needs. That is what this Government’s police reform agenda will deliver—simpler, smarter sanctions that are faster to obtain, easier to enforce and that provide a strong deterrent and a real punishment.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

One of the main problems encountered by those dealing with ASBOs has been the inordinate length of time it can take for applications to succeed, only for people then to find that the problem that they were dealing with has gone away or has transmogrified into something else. Secondly, CRASBOs, or criminal ASBOs—I am sorry about using that acronym, or euphemism; it does not matter—are totally ineffective. They are afterthoughts that are bolted on to convictions and their enforcement has been nothing short of lamentable.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes a very strong point about the panoply of ASBO powers that are available. The important point is that the bureaucracy involved in getting an ASBO means that, all too often, nothing is done, because it takes so long to get something enforced. That is why so many communities up and down the country find that the orders are not working and why they continue to suffer from antisocial behaviour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I would be happy to let the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) intervene for three minutes if she feels that she has been robbed.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Lady’s thoughtful speech. She is right to say that there is a difference in analysis, but none the less, she brings her experience to bear and it was a pleasure to hear it. However, after listening to her speech and many of the other contributions that we have heard, I also felt that there was a bit missing. She says that she has spoken to her chief constable and she is in no doubt that there will be fewer police stations, but with the cuts that we are talking about, the reality is that we will have fewer police officers. Some 80% of the police budget goes on people. We will not save that money simply by shutting a few buildings down. When she says that an excellent chief constable will look at the current situation and create a better service with less money, she is indulging in a myth. It is really unfair to the people in our communities, who rely on the Government and the police to keep them safe, to continue to allow them to believe that the police will be able continually to achieve more with less.

When the hon. Lady says that Labour would have had to face the same choices, she is not quite telling the truth, because the Conservatives have chosen to double the speed with which the deficit is paid off. Now that they have made that decision, we will have extra cuts. The shadow Home Secretary made it absolutely clear that there would have been cuts; he listed some of them for the second time, for the benefit of the Home Secretary, who had missed them the first time round. He was quite specific about them.

We also put in our manifesto that front-line policing would be protected, and that is key. A Government’s first duty must be to do all that they can to keep their citizens safe, and that is a duty that Labour understood well. It was demonstrated by the 17,000 extra police officers—compared with 1997—who are now patrolling Britain’s streets, 350 or so of them in Derbyshire, and by the 16,000 police community support officers introduced by Labour. The PCSOs have moved from being scorned by the press to being greatly valued by the public, who can see the contribution that they are making. As the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice admitted yesterday, the Labour Government were the first in history to preside over a consistent reduction in crime.

In addition to fighting serious crime and tackling the new threats of more complicated terrorist networks, more sophisticated paedophile rings and increasingly complex international drug and crime cartels, the Labour Government also gave the police far more significant powers to reduce antisocial behaviour than ever before. It was interesting to hear the Home Secretary claim that one of the problems was that the police had too many different powers. She implied that they were like joiners with too many tools, standing by a wall unsure which hammer to use, and that the extra powers at their disposal were somehow slowing them down and preventing them from getting on with policing. That was a rather strange thing to say.

The antisocial behaviour powers gave the police the ability to deal in a different and more effective way with the low-level antisocial element that exists in every constituency in the country. The Home Secretary showed us a window into her mind earlier, when she said that there was an increased perception of antisocial behaviour in poorer communities. Was she suggesting that, in regard to antisocial behaviour, the only difference between a poor community and a wealthy one was that poor people felt as though they were suffering as a result of it, and that if the millionaires took the trouble to look out of their castles, they would see all the terrible things going on outside the castle walls? Her reference to the perception of antisocial behaviour was quite revealing about her mindset and her view of the job that she has come into.

Like me, the police I have spoken to were staggered by the Home Secretary’s decision to abandon the antisocial behaviour order powers. They say that those powers have done much to help them to work with community groups, with tenants and residents associations, and with local councils to clean up the streets. It seems incredible that the Government should choose to strip the police of a power that is clearly working, at a time when all parties are concerned about reoffending rates. About 65% of recipients of an ASBO did not reoffend, and 93% desisted after their third one.

We have also heard a lot of talk about the effect on communities of antisocial behaviour orders. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) spoke of the situation in his community. Chesterfield has a different environment, but our antisocial behaviour problems also lead on to low-level crime and, if those problems are not tackled at an early age, people can go on to become serial offenders who will be found guilty of much more serious crimes. I know that that is the experience of Members on both sides of the House. People have been driven out of their homes by vandalism to their car, for example. Every morning, when they come out to go to work, they do not know whether their tyres will have been let down or their wing mirrors smashed, or whether a big scratch will have appeared on the bonnet. Those might be considered lower-level crimes, but if they are not dealt with, the perpetrators will decide that they are above the law and one thing will lead to another and their crimes will become more and more serious.

We need real honesty in this debate about what we expect from the police. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) made the important point that we now have an opportunity to reconsider the role of the police and decide what we want them to do. With the level of the cuts that are coming, the role we expect of the police is going to change drastically. There is no point anyone pretending otherwise.

The Home Secretary said that she wants to strip all the targets away so that the police have just one basic target—to cut crime. That fails to acknowledge the many different aspects of police work where no crime has been committed. If we see a man on a bridge who looks as if he is going to throw himself down on to the motorway, we are going to call the police—but no crime has been committed; it is just a man stood on a bridge. I would like to think that the police of the future would still turn up at such an incident. If not, we would be living in a very strange world.

When I was out with the police, they explained to me another problem they have with the mental health wing of a local hospital. There is a secure unit there and patients from it are sometimes given a pass to go out. The pass might be for three, four or 24 hours. At 23 hours and 59 minutes, there is no problem, but at 24 hours and a minute, the police are called out to find a missing person. Again, no crime has been committed, but the police are called.

We need to be sensible in this debate about what to expect from the police. I would certainly like to think that all Labour Members would join me in assisting the Police Minister in fighting his corner to get recognition for the message he wants to send out about what we want the police to do. Road traffic accidents provide another example. A huge amount of police time is taken up attending them, but no crime has been committed in most cases. If the responsibility of the police is only to stop crime, they might stop going out to road traffic accidents. Again, this shows the simplicity of the message; it might be attractive to the readers of tabloid newspapers, but it does not reflect the complexity or reality of what the police do. I am not advocating that the police should not turn up to road traffic accidents or should not turn up when a man is about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. What I am saying is that if we take the Home Secretary at her word, we need to think about the sort of service that we will end up with.

[Mr Buckland]

The hon. Gentleman, in making his point attractively, risks missing the point of the scenarios he has described. I can think of a number of crimes that might have been or could be committed in the circumstances he describes, particularly in the case of road traffic accidents—starting with dangerous driving, to name but one. Frankly, he is not making a good point; if he has any better ones, I would like to hear them.

[Toby Perkins]

I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman could understand the basic point I am making—that the police do a hell of a lot of work that does not actually involve cutting crime. I simply gave a number of examples.

We also need to look at what some of the backroom people do in the police service. I would not pretend that if we spoke to 100 police officers, none of them would complain about bureaucracy. I have spoken to senior police officers and I know that they do complain about it. Equally, however, I have not met a single police officer who believes that 25% cuts to the budget can be made by cutting the forms. That is not realistic. Much bureaucracy falls outside the Home Office remit and, as some of my hon. Friends said earlier, much of police bureaucracy arises from the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS requires such high evidential standards before it will take cases to court that the police have to provide a tremendous amount of evidence to back the service up. A lot of it takes up time. If we are going to remove such bureaucracy, we will have to accept that the police are likely to achieve fewer prosecutions. The CPS might have to take more cases to court, but that might increase the justice budget, so we would be saving on the one hand and losing out on the other.

My hon. Friends have also referred to other back- office functions—the massive amount of work done on counter-terrorism, for example, or on breaking international drug rings and international crime syndicates. The police also have people whose work is dedicated to the reduction of domestic violence. What often happens there is that the police put in a great deal of work to get the evidence together to achieve a prosecution, only to find that the victim of the violence has subsequently patched up the relationship and decided not to prosecute. The police have specialist teams dealing with child sex abuse. Such people may not be considered to be front-line police officers, but I should like to think that in any civilised society they would continue to work in the police force, and I believe that the narrowness of the new police target will be counterproductive. Far from being a Whitehall diktat, the policing pledge was put together by senior police officers who wanted to specify the standards of policing that people could expect wherever they lived.

I referred earlier to Liberal Democrats’ contribution to the policing policies pursued by the present Government. People ask what the Liberal Democrats are doing, but in this context their influence is clear, whether it involves their wish to get rid of ASBOs, their opposition to the DNA database—without which, as we have heard, 26 more murderers would be out on the streets—or their justice proposals, which mean that yobbos and criminals would not go to prison, but would be out on the streets as well. It is hardly surprising that someone who was on the run decided that it was well worth supporting the Liberal Democrat party financially: he may have felt that there was some benefit in doing so.

I wonder what happened to the Conservative party. I suspect that Lord Tebbit is turning in his crypt at the current Tory policies. The Tories seem not to understand, as he did, how poorer communities and people in deprived areas have been badly affected by crime. The Government are showing a lack of honesty about what will be faced by people on the streets if cuts of this magnitude are made, and a lack of awareness of what it is like to live in a deprived community that is under pressure from criminals. They do not seem to understand what it is like for people to wake up not knowing whether their properties will be left alone that day, or to go on holiday not knowing whether their properties will be broken into.

The current lack of vision about the best way in which to spend police resources leaves our police force, our communities and the value of a law-abiding, decent society dangerously exposed. I urge the Government to think again before pulling the rug from under the feet of our police.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to address the House. I hope that I shall not use my full allocation of time because I know that several hon. Members still wish to play their part in this wide-ranging debate. The shadow Secretary of State went through the gamut of policy in general, talking about not only policing but wider issues of criminal justice, and I shall be as faithful as possible to the parameters that he set in his opening speech.

The preceding speech made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) was revealing in the sense that he said that the Labour party learned a lot about what people wanted during the ‘80s and ‘90s. However, it seems to me that Labour learned a lot about what tabloid headlines demanded rather than about what was happening on the ground. The Labour Government’s increasing distance from the reality of people’s lives was reflected by their culture of legislative incontinence and increasingly centralised control that must have made police officers—from chief constables down to those at ground level—feel that at times they were being made to revolve on the spot. The consequences of the lack of clarity—the ever-changing parameters set for the police—were manifold. I shall concentrate on several that were worrying.

The first casualty of the previous Government’s obsession with centralism and targets was trust in the ability of constables and more senior police officers to take decisions—decisions on the priorities that they wanted to set in their localities, on the appropriate responses to complaints of crime, and on whether a suspect should be charged. One of the most fundamental powers available to the police was rudely taken away from them, and I am delighted that the new Government will restore in part that discretion to the police. I take this opportunity to agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) in urging the Government to go further and to restore the power of charging completely to police officers. Let me tell the House why I believe that.

In recent years, there has been an increasing obsession with the need for the investigating authority to get everything precisely in order before the decision to charge. That fad—that obsession—has led to debates in this House, before the election and since, and in the media about detention periods prior to charge. We have hotly debated the subject, here and elsewhere, with wildly and dramatically conflicting views expressed about civil liberties. I am left wondering why we have ended up in that position. Why is there that obsession with the need to delay everything before the decision to charge?

Time and again, when police officers made the early decision to charge, it provided the key incentive to the investigating authority to get on with the job of investigating the case thoroughly, preparing it for trial and making sure that victims and witnesses were not kept waiting. Then, the decision to charge was removed to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The advice before charge system involves an often experienced police officer having to telephone a CPS lawyer, probably located some distance from the police station, and reinvent the wheel by explaining everything to that lawyer, only to be told that the lawyer was not seized of all the necessary information and the key decision to charge would have to be put off. That has led to real frustration, not only on the part of police officers, but also, and crucially, on the part of witnesses who, having made their statements, have been asked to wait for months—sometimes for more than a year—before giving evidence. What effect does that have, first, on the ability of the witness to remember events clearly and, secondly, their enthusiasm to come to court? Those are fundamental problems that I saw at first hand, time and again, during my years in practice in the Crown court.

Another consequence was the culture of clear-ups—the driver whereby the police had to resolve unsolved crimes. It did not seem to matter what the crime was; what was important was getting that clear-up. The outcome was essential. It did not matter if the crime was serious; as long as the box was ticked and it was moved off the system, everything was okay. That is not a reflection of public opinion or public confidence, or of a Government who are learning the lessons and listening to people. It is a complete negation of what the public interest is and what the public really want.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

If that point is juxtaposed with the other part of the Government’s plan to have democratically elected leaders of local police authorities, if a candidate stood on a manifesto of clear-ups and won, would such a policy be allowed?

[Mr Buckland]

Obviously, there will be a distinction between police commissioners getting involved in day-to-day operational duties and their other role, but I think it will be perfectly in order for candidates to debate that question and how we deal with the clear-up issue. That is a matter of legitimate public concern and debate, so I do not see any problem with dealing with that. It would be a different matter if on a day-to-day basis, a particular case were in some way influenced by a commissioner. In terms of the remit of that elected official, that would be to stray into the wrong territory.

There was a rather absurd reversal of roles, whereby senior Ministers—a succession of Labour Home Secretaries—wanted to outdo each other in order to sound tough on crime. The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) is not in his place, but he described his era as a golden age: a year of broad sunlit uplands, peace and tranquillity, as he stood with a shining sword in hand, on his way to the new Jerusalem. Juxtaposed with that, senior police officers increasingly sounded like politicians and had to defend the indefensible. Their language became more and more obscure, and they did not sound like police officers anymore or like the representatives of a police force—a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe made and I strongly support. Something was rotten in our state, and, if this Government had not acted quickly to recognise that, something would continue to be wrong.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Buckland]

I shall not give way at this point, because I need to develop this point. I am delighted that in place of that rotten rhetoric, we have a sense of honesty and reality when it comes to addressing what is going on at the coal face of the criminal justice system.

A major part of the right hon. Gentleman’s speech was on antisocial behaviour, but by assuming that there will be a wholesale abolition of the structure, an assumption that other Opposition Members repeated, an Aunt Sally has been set up. When the Home Secretary in her paper described the process of moving beyond ASBOs, she meant development and improvement, rather than wholesale abolition.

I shall propose a few sensible simplifications of the system. The criminal ASBO, or CRASBO, is a waste of time and should be removed. At the end of a Crown court trial, when a defendant has been convicted, punished and has received his sentence, an application is made, almost as an afterthought, for a criminal antisocial behaviour order, which is often poorly drafted, ill thought-out, unworkable and unenforceable.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Buckland]

I shall not give way at this point, because I have only four minutes left, and the couple of points that I want to make are rather detailed.

When it comes to the rest of the ASBO structure, we have a system of “Thou shalt not”, a prohibitory system telling the subjects of those orders what not to do. There is a case for allowing the greater use of mandatory orders. They encourage positive behaviour and particular steps that an individual should take to improve their behaviour, rather like what was done with antisocial behaviour injunctions under the Housing Act 1996, the year before Labour entered government, which was amended in later years. I met representatives of my local authority in Swindon during the recess to discuss those issues, and I am grateful to them for their constructive submissions in this respect. The authority has a very proactive antisocial behaviour team, and it will make submissions to the review in due course.

I turn to my other concern, which I share with the local authority. The Government have rightly said that the rather lengthy and cumbersome process of obtaining ASBOs in court must be streamlined. There has been a discussion about whether the forum for the imposition of ASBOs should move wholesale to the county court, but I agree with my local authority that we should urge caution. I would suggest that the magistrates court is a quicker, more effective and better forum for the resolution of a lot of antisocial behaviour orders. If new, streamlined procedural rules need to be developed, then that can be done.

My fundamental point is that we need to move away from what has been a tendency by authorities to reclassify crime as antisocial behaviour. The whole thrust of the legislation passed by the previous Government was what one might call the Heineken approach—to refresh the parts of our social problems that the criminal law could not reach. I am afraid that the principle has been undermined to a worrying degree as a result of the target culture and the need to avoid “criming”—that is a dreadful word, but I have heard it used many times; I do not accept that it exists in the English language—particular complaints, driving them down the antisocial behaviour route.

That is not the approach we should adopt. We should use ASBOs as a bolt-on to the existing criminal justice system. They should be used judiciously and carefully—not with a scattergun approach—to try to deal with a range of wholly unsuitable scenarios. Local authorities such as mine in Swindon use many stages before they resort to ASBOs. I encourage that approach across the country, while recognising that in each different locality local bodies should be free to make decisions based on their own priorities.

I did not recognise in any way the remarks made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) about centralist authoritarianism as regards the new Government’s approach to dealing with crime. I oppose the motion and commend the Government’s approach.