Town Centre Safety

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Laura Farris)]

I am glad to have this opportunity to speak and hope to set the record straight. Forgive me if I do not recognise the counsel of despair emanating from the Opposition Benches. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) invites us to believe that there has been a catalogue of failure and that everything is getting worse, but the facts tell us something different. I do not pretend that everything is perfect—of course we need to protect our town centres and the people who use them, and I will come to all that in a moment—but for all the noise that these debates can generate, we do the public a disservice if we seek to distil everything into a row across the Dispatch Box without sometimes acknowledging the merits of the other side and the meaningful progress they have sometimes made.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

On that conciliatory note, could we all just pay tribute to what the police do, because they are the focus of the debate? They put on the uniform in the morning and say goodbye to their loved ones not knowing how their day is going to turn out. As we argue about where things should go in future, perhaps we can all agree that they do such an important job for our society and that we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

[Laura Farris]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I accept without reservation that there is considerable courage and selflessness in being a first responder whose job and duty is to run towards danger when everybody else is running away from it.

Let me begin with the simplest facts. Since 2010, neighbourhood crime—the crimes that undermine the fabric of communities and make people feel unsafe in their homes and on their local streets—has fallen. The crime survey for England and Wales, which the Office for National Statistics described as

“the best estimate of long-term trends in crimes against the household population”,

shows that since 2010 overall crime levels are down by more than 50%. Violent crimes as a whole, which include crimes that involve any form of offensive weapon, are down by 52%. Theft overall, which includes domestic burglary and the theft of a vehicle—some of the most invasive thefts that go directly to a person’s sense of personal security—has almost halved since we came into office. Domestic burglary currently stands at its lowest ever level.

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[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins), and I recognise what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis) said about communities. Without speaking out of turn, I hope that we might have a debate on that very issue—whether it be in Government or, indeed, Opposition time—because it is so important and so current. I very much welcome today’s debate, even if I do not necessarily welcome the motion that goes with it.

Keeping our town centres safe is absolutely critical, but let us remember that they look different from a decade, two decades or three decades ago. Our fast-changing, ever digital world is impacting on every aspect of life: how we live, how we work, how we do business, how we communicate, how we socialise, how we entertain and, of course, how we shop. That has inevitably had a knock-on impact on our town centres, and we also have the global shocks to our economies of covid and the war in Ukraine, fuelling the cost of living crisis and the jump in employees no longer going to work but working from home. It has all been tough for our town centres. All these factors require local communities, councils and private sector stakeholders to reinvigorate a sense of purpose about what our town centres are for in the modern age, because if they do not, any reduction in activity, attraction, footfall or busyness in our town centres can and does lead to a vacuum that is then filled with antisocial behaviour, which further deters people from coming into our town centres.

Bournemouth has not only a vibrant town centre, but some attractive commercial, retail and hospitality hubs—for example, Tuckton, Boscombe High Street, Charminster, the huge Castlepoint shopping centre, our seafront and Southbourne, where I was delighted to spend Small Business Saturday. If Members are ever in that neck of the woods, I strongly recommend Syd’s Slaps coffee shop, where the staff are very hospitable and certainly look after their customers. I thank them very much for their hospitality.

I welcome the Government’s initiatives to support our town centres, which is what the almost £5 billion levelling-up fund is all about. For Bournemouth, this equated to over £18 million to support our seafront offering, and £21 million from the towns fund for Boscombe. However, when it comes to safety, I am concerned that ever more young people across the UK are choosing to carry knives. That is what I want to focus on as the main part of my speech, because it is leading to ever more people being harmed or killed by the use of knives. In the last decade, knife crime has jumped by 75%, which is already impacting on the night-time economies of too many town centres across Britain.

As a popular seaside town, Bournemouth has a vibrant nightlife, with thousands of visitors enjoying the night-time hospitality on any Friday or Saturday night. If we are to prevent Bournemouth from experiencing a similar rise in knife crime to that we have sadly seen in other parts of the country, we need action in Bournemouth now. As I have learned from joining Bournemouth’s police on a number of night-time patrols, the cause of the increase both is understood and can be tackled. The increase in the prevalence of young people carrying knives stems from peer pressure and a false belief that it is the best way they can defend themselves if they get into a serious confrontation. Of course, they are cheap and easy to get hold of.

I am pleased that the Government have banned the carrying of zombie knives, but we need to do more. I propose two initiatives—I am pleased to see the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire in his place, because he will be familiar with what I am about to say. The first, relating to police resources, is a violence reduction unit. Such police units in other parts of the country have a proven track record in reducing knife crime in town centres. They do so not just by increasing policing but through working within the communities, including schools, to educate youngsters on the dangers of carrying knives. I have written to the Home Secretary and the Minister to request that.

Secondly, let us obligate all entertainment premises such as nightclubs licensed to operate after 11 pm to have metal-detector systems—either archways or handheld devices called wands—to guarantee that no one entering the premises is carrying a knife. I stress that that is not to point any fingers at the sector—there is rarely trouble inside those premises—but that would really deter the small but growing minority who choose to carry lethal weapons. It would also offer reassurance to the majority of the public who simply want to experience an enjoyable Saturday night out. Such measures are already in place in venues across the country, including for sports functions and in public buildings such as where we are today. I have written not only to the Home Secretary but to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council asking the licensing committee to make that part of any licence to run premises. A statutory instrument will be required here to empower licensing committees to operate in that way.

Bournemouth has developed an enviable reputation over the decades as an attractive, safe seaside town for all the family. Today, there is a vibrant night-time economy trying to avoid knife crime, but we need robust action now to stamp out the worrying trend of carrying knives.

I am pleased to see police numbers now at record levels, even compared with 2010. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), was keen to repeat that police numbers had indeed fallen over the period. He was less eager to clarify why tough choices were taken by the Government at the time that impacted on every Government budget across Whitehall. He really does need to recognise that and put the figures into context. I did not want to see police numbers go down, and I certainly did not want to see any reduction in any Government Departments. Unfortunately, we inherited a financial crisis that we had to endure and recover from.

I am pleased—and I hope the hon. Member for Nottingham North concurs—that numbers have returned to what they should have been over the last decade and are at record levels, as we heard from the Minister in her opening remarks. I end by repeating my earlier intervention. There are other factors as well, but our town centres are largely safe because of what our police do, and it is worth giving them gratitude for what they do and the service they provide. They do so with less thanks than they should be given. As I have stressed, they start the day not knowing how things will unfold. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. I am pleased by what they do in Dorset and in Bournemouth. I give them thanks for the service they provide.

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[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

As a member of the wokerati, I absolutely will. I gently point out that the wokerati were coming alive in Woke-on-Trent under the current Government. I urge the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) not to be so fearful. I will take my lead from him in praising some of the officers. I want to praise our local copper, a police officer called Orla Jenkins. Such a rock star is she to my staff that when she came to visit my office recently, they put a countdown on the board to show how excited they were to see her. Local police officers who do the beating heart of the work in our communities deserve all of our praise.

On the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) about the findings of lots of different people, the Social Market Foundation last year revealed that police officers’ pay had declined by 17% in real terms. Not last week but the week before, 24 coppers came knocking at my door—[Laughter.] Not last week but the week before, I got in a cab from Euston to an appointment that I had in London and the person driving my taxi was a sergeant in the Metropolitan police. He told me that on his off days he drives cabs. He also told me that his inspector, also in the Metropolitan police, did Deliveroo. That is the reality, and what I have heard today, certainly from the Minister and from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North in his rousing speech, is fantasy. I respect the hon. Gentleman’s electioneering—it was absolutely top class—but does he know what the British public absolutely hate? They hate it when we stand in front of them and say, “Everything’s fine, isn’t it great, we are world leading,” but then when they call for a copper, nobody comes.

I had a security guard from the local B&Q in my constituency come to see me. He had previously worked in the Prison Service and he wanted to talk to me about strategies for preventing people who end up in prison from ending up there, and I was grateful to him for that. He also came in to tell me that he gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to call 101 to report the crimes that have happened in B&Q that day because he cannot get through in the daytime. He told me that the impunity that he sees in his store is such that, on the day he came to see me, somebody had stolen a hot tub from B&Q. If people think they can get away with that level of crime, it is because criminals have never had it so good. There has never been a better time to break the law, with charging rates on the floor and hardly any crimes being detected. To bring people back to reality—in this amazing world we are pretending we live in—this applies even to the most serious cases. I recently dealt with a case where a woman whose husband was on bail for trying to kill her turned up at her house with a machete—the evidence was on a Ring doorbell camera—and five days later the police officers came.

I could stand here and say that all sorts of things need to change in police forces. I am here all day for better standards and better training, and for much more prioritisation of the kind of crimes I am talking about, but the reality is that that is like hoping for something that cannot exist while police officers across our country are expected to pick up the pieces of a crumbling society in every other regard.

[Mr Ellwood]

I have a lot of respect for the hon. Lady, and we have done a few gigs together, including “Question Time”. I hesitate to pose this question, because I do not want to take away from where she is going, but she mentions society, which is quite personal to me. I am concerned that there is too much of a “walk on by” society. She mentions the theft of a hot tub, for example. Would she concur that there is a role for the general public? I do not want to encourage them to put themselves in danger but, collectively, the people who are around, not the police, are the first responders. They should perhaps react a bit more positively and proactively in calling out bad behaviour.

[Jess Phillips]

I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman, in that I am a proper intervener. I will cross the road to have a fight. I have intervened in many domestic abuse situations while out door knocking. In fact, when I was door knocking for my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater), I walked into somebody’s house to break up a domestic abuse incident. After years of working with offenders and victims, I am more than capable of accurately risk assessing a situation and intervening. I do not suggest for one second that anybody else who was door knocking with me could have done the same thing. We have to be very careful in how we manage that.

The trouble is that people in my constituency will tell the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), as they tell me, that they try to intervene. They see drug deals on their street every single day and they try to do something about it—they organise neighbourhood meetings, the local neighbourhood police come along and we all agree that it is a terrible problem—but when they ring about these hotspots, nobody comes and nothing changes. It is the same drug dealers, with the same dispossessed people walking up the street like zombies, every single day. They do not bother to report it any more, because there is no point.

On burglary, the police have become a third arm of the insurance companies. For a lot of people, the police are just there so that they can get a crime reference number. Orla Jenkins is a cracking copper and, more than anything, she just rings up people to give them a crime reference number. That is not why she went into policing. Officers are pulled away, and I have given the example of officers sitting and waiting in A&E for hours and hours.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) mentioned, the proliferation of unregulated exempt accommodation is one of the single biggest reasons for call-outs in the city where I live. Hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is spent on putting vulnerable people in inappropriate accommodation in our neighbourhoods, and the police are repeatedly called out. When I went on response with the police, every call we went to was to vulnerable people’s exempt accommodation in the city, and I was much better suited to that work than the police officers, because I ran vulnerable people’s accommodation for years.

For years, we have been asking the Government to regulate. Every single time I have asked a Minister for regulation to address this terrible, dangerous, exploitative accommodation, which causes antisocial behaviour on every street in Birmingham, on every street in Manchester and all across Oldham, as has been said—it might not be happening in rural communities, but it is happening in our urban communities, and it will be happening in Stoke-on-Trent—the Government have said to me, “We just don’t have parliamentary time to legislate on that yet. There isn’t parliamentary time.” I have been told that twice. So hundreds of thousands of pounds—hundreds of millions of pounds—of taxpayers’ money is going to bad landlords, housing crack addicts alongside rape victims. This is the country that has been created. It is causing harm, and the Government have the power to stop it, to regulate that accommodation and to end what would be at least half of all antisocial behaviour in the city where I live. They have the power to do it, but they do not, so the police get called out, and called out, and called out forever. That is a waste of their time, and it is something that the Government are directly responsible for, and could end.

I could make the same speech about the degradation of mental health services across our country, for every police officer who sits for 24 hours in a house because there is no emergency response any more. There is no protection for people when they are suffering suicide ideations, so a copper sits with them for hours. By the way, in my area there are 800 fewer police officers than there were in 2010. So much for “the best since records ever began!” If population is taken into account, the situation is even worse. [Interruption.] Would the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) like to intervene? No? Okay. I would welcome it; as I said, I am big on intervention.

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[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to close this important and timely debate on behalf of the Opposition, and to follow the hon. Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt), who gave us a fresh dose of reality. I welcome his candour in outlining the actual situation that is faced by so many of our town centres up and down the country.

Many hon. Members from across the House referenced issues with their own town centres, particularly knife crime. The hon. Member for Ipswich, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) and my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) all talked about the rise in serious violent crimes in our town centres. Sadly, our police are having to deal with those crimes more and more. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to my hon. Friend for all her work on the Protect the Protectors campaign: she has been a vocal champion for looking after those who run towards danger when we all run away from it. It is absolutely imperative that we do more to protect not only our protectors—our first responders—but our shop workers and all those who are in our town centres, working hard to improve those town centres, boost our local economy, and make our towns better places to live and to enjoy retail and leisure activities. Sadly, because of the situation that has been described today, those people face significant challenges.

From the contributions of colleagues from across the House, it is clear that safety in our town centres is a growing concern for all of us and for our constituents. My hon. Friends the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon), for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) and for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards) all referenced the challenges faced by the businesses on our local high streets. They are not only having to deal with bank closures up and down those high streets, as well as pub closures, rising business rates and a cost of living crisis, but with a spate of retail crime that is yet another hammer blow.

My hon. Friends for Luton South and for Tamworth also mentioned assaults on shop workers, which has been a key focus of this afternoon’s debate. Our retail workers go out to work not to be assaulted, to be verbally abused, or to have to protect their stock from shoplifting; they just want to earn a decent wage to take home to their family. Sadly, far too many of them are being put in harm’s way and are not receiving the adequate protections that they deserve.

My hon. Friends the Members for Mid Bedfordshire (Alistair Strathern) and for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater), as well as the hon. Member for Ipswich, also outlined the harsh reality that so many of us in the UK face. Our town centres are the lifeblood of our communities; they are a valuable resource that nobody should take for granted, but far too often, they have been. People do not feel safe—that is the reality for many people in our country. They do not feel safe walking up and down their high streets or their residential streets, and the reality of exactly why that is has been laid bare before us all. Labour has a plan, but the Conservatives have failed to deliver any meaningful change for the past 13 years.

Later in my speech, I will outline exactly what the situation is, but I will first comment on the contributions made by my good and hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). As always, she is a very vocal champion; she reminded us all not to be bystanders. Just last week I attended really important bystander training organised by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. I implore all right hon. and hon. Members across the House to take part in that training. There was an interesting exchange between my hon. Friend and the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East about exactly what society should do—how can we intervene? How can people feel empowered to do more?

Sadly, I think we have been far too desensitised, and this has become the norm. It is a sad indictment of the situation that people feel like this is just part and parcel of everyday life, but it should not be and it does not have to be. People can all do more, and they can all be active bystanders if they have had the appropriate training. If they feel it is safe, they can do more and can feel empowered to do more.

[Mr Ellwood]

I want to link this point to what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis) said. We all need to do intervene more when we see some of the terrible behaviour prompted by what is happening in the middle east, and to call it out. I hope the hon. Member would agree with that.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I wholeheartedly agree, and I was going to come on to the very powerful speech by the right hon. and learned Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis), outlining exactly the situation that faces us all. Everyone in our country should feel safe in their high streets, their communities and their homes, regardless of their colour, their religion or their background. I join him in paying tribute to the CST and Tell MAMA for raising awareness of the situation. Sadly, it has worsened as a result of the horrendous attacks in Israel on 7 October, but everyone should feel safe. I hope that this House has a greater opportunity to debate that as time goes on.

As we have heard, the Government have ignored challenges ranging from antisocial behaviour on our streets to retail crime and violence against shop workers for far too long, and ordinary people are paying the price. By contrast, as I have said, Labour has made bold commitments because we recognise that people deserve to be safe in their communities. In government, we will halve serious and violent crime and raise confidence in the police and the criminal justice system within a decade.

Let us be clear: the challenge ahead of us, as we have heard, is significant. Thanks to this Tory Government’s shameful record, we are now seeing record instances—up by more than 30%—of criminal damage to shops, schools, leisure centres and businesses in our town centres. In the year ending September 2021, 41,500 offences of criminal damage to a building other than a dwelling were recorded by the police, yet the latest figures show that this has risen to almost 55,000, which is about 150 incidents every single day. How can this be allowed to continue?

The reality of the situation is that the Conservatives have failed to tackle the root causes of crime and violence. Over the last 13 years, the role of crime prevention work has been heavily downgraded by the Home Office, and leadership has been practically abandoned overnight. Rather than keeping people safe here in the UK, we have a Government who are more focused on wasting taxpayers’ money and chasing headlines for their failing asylum scheme. The Tories are simply out of touch.