Crime and Policing

Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[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.