Safer Neighbourhood Policing: London

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Safer Neighbourhood policing in London.

Thank you very much, Mr Evans, for giving me the opportunity to make a contribution on the issue of neighbourhood policing. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. Those of us who have been in Parliament for some time will remember that we used to have an opportunity every year to discuss policing in London, which is a matter of huge concern to us. We no longer do that, but I am pleased that we have the chance to discuss the issue for the next hour.

When the London safer neighbourhood policing scheme was formally launched in two wards in Brent and north Paddington in my constituency in 2004, it marked a new era in the policing of modern London. It was widely accepted that fundamental changes were needed.

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

I just want to slightly amend what my hon. Friend said. St Helier in Mitcham and Morden was also part of that pilot.

[Ms Buck]

I hope that does not establish a pattern by which all my hon. Friends seize the opportunity to claim the credit for launching safer neighbourhood policing. In a sense, it does not matter. It was launched in 2004 by the then Labour Mayor of London, and I hope it prefigures important changes in policing by our future Labour Mayor of London, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), who is sitting to my right.

Safer neighbourhood policing was an important response to a flaw in the way that London was policed over a number of years. It was always about more than just resources. Of course, it was partly about policing numbers, which had been falling for many years and were of great concern to Londoners, but it was also about having a different approach and attitude. The most unimportant aspect of it, although it was not wholly insignificant, was the fact that the area-based policing—the closest thing to the neighbourhood model that existed before 2004—was an unwieldly and clunky model of relating to communities. It did not work effectively, in terms of community participation and setting local priorities, and did not give local police continuity so they could establish the relationships they needed.

The safer neighbourhood policing model, which was introduced in 2004, reflected a commitment to return to communities, in all of their geographical, social and ethnic diversity. That commitment was, in part, informed by the experiences of the 1980s and 1990s. It encompassed, at the extremes, the important lessons we learned from the Scarman report on the terrible riots at the beginning of the 1980s and the Macpherson report. The Met learned important lessons from those terrible events, too.

Safer neighbourhood policing teams quickly changed the face of London policing. Indeed, they even helped to change the face of the police themselves. The police community support officer role was an important route for recruiting Londoners. One of the concerns that some of my colleagues will always have is that many of London’s police are drawn from outside London for different economic reasons. We want London’s police to reflect the face of modern London. The safer neighbourhood team route and the PCSOs, which were a part of that model, were a means of doing that. As Lord Stevens recognised at the time, they helped us to change the face of policing. It was obvious; when we, as local politicians, began to develop relationships with our police, we saw that changes were taking place.

The other critical issue about safer neighbourhood police teams in the early years was the commitment to a core team. At that point, they used the 1-2-3 model, comprising the sergeant, the constables and the three PCSOs. There was a commitment not to remove members of safer neighbourhood police teams to provide aid and assistance to other activities, but to provide the continuity that is crucial in keeping them connected to their local communities and give them time and space to develop important relationships with residents’ and tenants’ organisations, local schools, mosques, churches and youth clubs. In addition to a dedicated sergeant in each ward, they had someone with the skills and experience necessary to make those relationships work. The mere fact of being a sergeant does not give a person the ability to do that, but reflecting a degree of seniority within those police teams is important and it says something significant about the way in which relationships are built and sustained in communities.

I can think of several individuals—I am sure my colleagues and other hon. Members have faces that they can call to mind—who demonstrated a real change in policing style at the neighbourhood level. Stuart Marshall was the Queen’s Park sergeant for many years. He ultimately transferred to use the skills and knowledge he built up in the Queen’s Park ward—a deprived ward that includes the Mozart estate, which is a very challenging community—to continue to tackle antisocial behaviour with City West Homes. Ken Taylor built up a superb track record in the middle of the last decade in countering crack houses, which had become a plague in parts of London and required a new model of relationship building so the police could act quickly and close them down.

Ian Rowing was a long-term sergeant in Church Street. Only a few months ago—he had been in post since 2004—residents fought to keep him in Church Street because of the excellent relationships and local knowledge that he had built up. The residents said to me, “There is nothing he doesn’t know. There are no people he doesn’t know. He knows every corner of his ward. He knows what is going on, and he has built up a trusting relationship with people.” He was taken off, against all our wishes and advice, to fill some of the yawning gaps in the custody service, which are a huge challenge for London police at the moment.

Lawrence Knight is still serving Maida Vale and Little Venice brilliantly. Paul Reading, a member of his team, runs a boxing club in Little Venice. Anybody who wants to see the face of top-quality community policing should see the work he does. Over time, he has worked with hundreds of sometimes very challenging young men in that corner of London, and he has built up an enormous number of relationships based on trust and knowledge. Some of the newer people working now—I am not able to mention them all—include Sean Marshall, Ian Armstrong, Jason Emmett, John Marshall and Mohammed Nouri. They are relatively new, but their work has been absolutely superb.

But the model has changed, and I want to spend a few minutes talking about that. The continuity of the relationships that were built up and of the police teams themselves has largely evaporated. Under this mayoralty, since 2008 the Met has lost 23% of dedicated neighbourhood uniformed officers in London boroughs and more than 2,400 PCSOs since 2010 alone, and it has closed 63 police stations—we were told that their closure would lead to a huge reinvestment in community policing—due to the £600 million of budget cuts over the past four years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

As with clothes and interior design, there are fashions in policing, and we are seeing a backlash against the current fashion. What is happening is not just about money, although money may be the principal cause, but about the fact that some in policing circles simply did not believe in the community policing model—the one sergeant, two PCs and three PCSOs model—as set out by Ken Livingstone when he was Mayor and by a number of Labour Home Secretaries, because it “de-policed” the police. However, it actually enhanced what the police could do, particularly in areas that are more financially challenged and that have more people who are excluded. We began to witness more people willing to talk to the police than ever before.

With those increasing police numbers came more police bases. There is a huge issue about the enormous waste of money that has resulted from closing local offices that were opened in order to place safer neighbourhood teams at the heart of their community. In my constituency, Mitcham and Morden, we have seen the closure of the Lavender Fields and Graveney team office in Wilson Avenue, which must have taken thousands of pounds to open to standards that the Metropolitan police accept.

Pollards Hill is a ward right on the outskirts of Mitcham and Morden, bordering Croydon and Lambeth. People there feel out on a limb and excluded from their local area, and the police office there showed a real investment in their community. People felt that the police were close to them and dealing with the problems they face. I am sad to say that some of those problems relate to gangs and stabbings. We do not have the same level of such problems as other hon. Members will in their constituencies, but the fact that that office is no longer there for people to turn to when issues arise is a real problem for that community. Again, there is the issue of the costs involved in opening these offices and then closing them, leaving memorials to a police system that worked a great deal better than it does currently. That is really sad.

There is an idea that we can point to crime figures and say, “Crime is down, so it’s okay.” However, if we consider confidence in policing, and we look at the figures for the fear of crime in my borough of Merton, we see that about two thirds of people now fear crime, when the figure was once the lowest in London. Mitcham has 41% of the crimes that take place in the borough, but 68% of people fear crime—the fact that people can no longer see their police officers has tripled the numbers.

When there was a stabbing in Pollards Hill, where would people go? They would go first to the police officer or the PCSO at the local high school. We can be pretty sure that within hours those officers would have had a very good idea of how the incident came about and who was involved. That would then allow the police response teams—Trident or whoever—to go into action and to deal with the issue.

When we have our police meetings, some in the police—I suppose this is out of frustration at their situation—tell residents, “You don’t have a crime problem here. Crime is not high. You live in one of the safest boroughs in London.” That really does not wash if someone has seen a young man stabbed outside their kitchen window. Although people can absolutely rationalise that that would never happen to them as a middle-aged woman, an older dad or a young child, they have seen it happening in their neighbourhood and they want it dealt with. Their fear is for themselves, their children and their neighbourhood. When they know that the police office that used to be open behind their homes is no longer there, there is a real and severe feeling that, given the level of policing in their area, the possibility of dealing with these issues becomes less.

When we combine that with local authority cuts in youth services, we get a maelstrom. In Pollards Hill, in Merton, we do not have a huge youth service. The Pollards Hill youth centre was due to close in April this year. Luckily, we brought people together to build an alliance to keep it open. However, I suspect that, in areas more challenged than mine, a combination of police cuts, youth service cuts and the inability of services to take young people away from crime will create a legacy that will be with us for a long time. That will not save any more money, and it will cause far more challenges for many more vulnerable people.