Policing (England and Wales)

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I listened with interest to the Minister’s presentation. In particular, I listened when he described the Conservative party as the natural party of law and order. Not all of our constituents would agree with that, having seen the relative cuts in funding and the spike in violent crime. I shall return to that later.

I wish to say at the outset that the Opposition will not be opposing the police funding settlement, but we remind the Minister that it is not just about the total settlement but about the police funding formula. For five years Ministers have been promising to revise the police funding formula, and I argue that that is a concern not just for Opposition Members but for Members of all parties. Ministers have had five years. Perhaps they can make greater haste in something that is so key to the effective fighting of crime in all parts of our country.

Although we are far from satisfied with the Government’s plans for policing overall, the Opposition believe that this is the first time since the Labour Government that there has been a funding settlement for the police that does not in real terms undermine them further, so in the circumstances it would be wrong to oppose this particular funding settlement. Let me be equally clear, though: I do not want to be cruel, but the Opposition have no confidence in this Government to restore policing to its proper strength or to tackle serious crime. I strongly doubt—I shall explain why—that the Government will even meet their own pledge to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers. I see Government Members who are new to the House looking shocked, but I remind them of this Prime Minister’s track record on policing and police recruitment.

When the current Prime Minister was Mayor of London in 2012—those of us who are London MPs remember that well—he sent a list of nine promises to every household in London. His political marketing claimed that it was his “nine-point plan for Greater London”. No. 4 on the list was:

“Making our streets and homes safer with 1,000 more police on the beat”.

I have to tell the House that this pledge was never met, even though it was signed by the current Prime Minister himself, so I do not think that his record on policing provides much confidence that he will meet his manifesto commitment to recruit 20,000 extra police.

Secondly, I want to turn to an issue with the funding settlement, which is inadequate even in its own terms. When the Minister announced the funding settlement, the Home Office claimed that it was the biggest for a decade, but that was a decade of cuts in police funding—cuts made by Ministers now on the Government Front Bench. It is not much of a boast when the settlement represents an uplift only when compared with the cuts made in previous years.

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

Does my right hon. Friend agree that what the settlement actually means for West Midlands Police—the second largest police force in the country—is a funding gap of about £10 million, so it will have to make savings despite the settlement?

[Ms Abbott]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing some reality to the discussion.

The Opposition have learnt that police chiefs have also recently been told to find another £165 million in 2019-20 and up to £417 million in 2020-21 as a result of the overhaul of pension schemes recently announced by the Treasury. We of course support better police pensions, and indeed better public sector pensions in general, but we do so by arguing that they should be properly funded, whereas Ministers want the money to support them to come out of the extra moneys that they are announcing today. The amount provided in the funding settlement to cover the pension changes is nowhere near the amount it will cost the police. There is a real risk that, with this poor beginning, the Government will fail to meet their total recruitment target. I hope that Government Members are taking due note.

Thirdly, I want to question the Government’s entire approach to this matter, because although police numbers are a key factor, they are only one aspect of combating serious and violent crime. The Government’s goal must be to keep our citizens safe, but their track record is abysmal. I know that this set of Ministers like to pretend that the record of the past 10 years has nothing to do with them, but most of the Ministers now in office voted for the police cuts that have been made. This is continuity Toryism, and they are continuity Tories.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I congratulate the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) on her excellent maiden speech, which was thoughtful and thought-provoking. I lived and worked in Thatcham in the early ’80s. We may not agree on everything in our time here, but what she says about the area is absolutely true, and listening to her description of it brought back many happy memories. I think we have all seen that she is a truly worthy successor to Richard Benyon.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to beginning the process of restoring police numbers, although it is only fair to remind the House—including the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax)—that it was the Tory party, aided and abetted by their then friends the Lib Dems, who in 2010 embarked on the disastrous course of cutting police resources by 20% and ignored the warnings that it would lead to a rise in crime and undermine the police’s ability to cope. Those warnings have been repeated by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services, the Public Accounts Committee, the Home Affairs Committee and the chief constables of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, who all acknowledge that the cuts have undermined the police in the battle against crime.

When confronted with that, the Government often cite—as the Minister did today—the need for the police to change because of the changing nature of crime. I accept the need to change as crime changes, but it is easier to manage such change if there is not a constant preoccupation with managing cuts, which is the problem that most police forces are living with. The cuts have made it harder to recruit new people with the skills and talents needed to tackle modern crime. They have made it harder to acquire new equipment and technology and, as we have heard from a number of people, they have led to collateral demand or cost shunting for the police, whereby reductions in other services because of austerity place extra demands on the police; mental health is a particularly good example.

I acknowledge that the police have tried to deal with these resource shortages. They have tried to redefine the issue of visibility with new initiatives such as online reporting and telephone interviews, but that approach falls down because of staff shortages. The chief constable of my force in the West Midlands said last April that what is “cheesing off” the public is the police’s inability to get to grips with “the routine stuff” and the failure to return calls and follow up reports from the public. He simply does not have enough resources to do the routine stuff. That is seriously undermining public trust in the police, which is exacerbated by the switch to reactive policing because of the reduction in neighbourhood policing.

I want to raise two areas of particular concern: fraud and retail crime. Only last April, HMICFRS reported concerns about the lack of a national fraud strategy, which I am sure the Minister is aware of. It said that the disjointed approach to fraud was leaving

“fraudsters feeling they can act with impunity”.

Last week, I was alerted to a fraud affecting a 68-year-old retired teacher who has been robbed of £157,000—money he built up in his pension pot—in a scam where the fraudster hacks and mimics the email of solicitors engaged in house conveyancing. The response he received from the City of London fraud review team seems to be more concerned with how quickly they can close the case than tracking the fraudster and recovering this poor gentleman’s hard-earned cash. That is not right, Minister—something has to be done.

With retail crime, we see a problem that is reaching epidemic proportions. Traders have lost faith in the police. The value of goods stolen must exceed £200 before most forces will take the matter to court. Meanwhile, more than 100 shop workers are being attacked daily while simply trying to do their job. Retail crime is costing us around £2 billion per year. It is serious, and it ought to be policed.

I welcome any extra resources, but the problem of relying so heavily on the council tax precept to increase police resources is that it results in areas such as the West Midlands, which has the second largest force in the country and a complex range of crime, only being able to raise an extra £8.2 million through the precept because of the council tax base. I urge the Minister to review the demands made of forces such as the West Midlands and to help us find a better way of funding some of that demand. I hope he will be willing to meet a cross-party delegation from the West Midlands to consider some of the pressures the force faces. As I pointed out to the shadow Home Secretary, even after an increase in funding, the West Midlands will still experience a funding gap of £9.8 million this year, so further savings—further cuts—will be required. As the Minister knows, there will be significant pressures in the coming year in terms of pay and price inflation, and the force is wondering how that will be managed.

I genuinely welcome the Minister’s efforts, and I hope he is right that this is a down payment. I hope we are about to embark on a sustained period of increasing police resources, as well as a constructive review of how policing needs to change. I hope the Minister will consider how we fund the extra demands being made of forces such as the West Midlands. I hope he will take on board the impact that the decline in neighbourhood policing is having on the public. I hope he will look again at neglected areas—what Chief Constable Thompson of the West Midlands calls “the routine stuff”—and respond to the growing problems of fraud and retail crime.