Wes Streeting
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(6 years ago)
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Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
Let me begin by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) on securing this important Adjournment debate. Let me also express my view, which I think is widely held—certainly among Labour Members—on how outrageous it is that while the Cabinet is making a decision that has the potential to affect this country for generations to come, it is the reported intention of the Prime Minister to make a statement to the press immediately after—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. This is a debate about pension contributions. I have allowed the scope to be widened, but we cannot take it this far. Are we going to stick to the debate? Brilliant.
Wes Streeting
Forgive me, Mr Deputy Speaker; I just wanted to make the point at the outset that my constituents will be appalled that this House is adjourning about three hours early.
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I am being very good, and I am going to keep this debate going, but these are the rules of the House. They are not my rules; they are rules that we have all agreed to, and the fact is that those are the rules. We have to work within the rules, and as much as everybody is disappointed, the rules are there; they are made by Members, so please do not complain about the rules that have been introduced.
Wes Streeting
I accept that, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I am certainly not criticising the Chair for enforcing the rules.
Wes Streeting
I would never knowingly criticise myself, Mr Deputy Speaker, and you will be pleased to know that my constituents care about and raise with me far more than Brexit the issue of policing and in particular the consequences of Government changes to employer national insurance contributions and what that will mean for the funding of policing in my constituency and every other community up and down the country, because, as was stated in the excellent opening speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East, the consequence of increasing employer contributions will be a cost on police forces of an entirely unexpected and unplanned £165 million for 2019-20, and, as has been stated, that employer pension contribution liability will rise over time, so by the time that we get to 2020-21 the liability will be more like £420 million.
Money, as we know, does not grow on trees, and those responsible for managing police budgets and resources and making sure the budget is properly deployed to keep our constituents and country safe will be faced with an invidious choice. Of course they will want to make the right contributions to people’s pensions, but, as the National Police Chiefs Council has warned, the reality is that this could amount to the loss of a further 10,000 police officers right across the country, with every police force in this land being affected.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
I apologise for missing the opening of this debate as I had a clash of business. In Humberside, we have seen police numbers rising in the past couple of years, but these changes would reverse that, and our chief constable has issued a very stark warning. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is completely unacceptable for these changes to be loaded on to police authorities? I make it very clear in this Chamber to the Minister that if this continues, I will vote against the police grant when it comes before the House next year, as I did between 2010 and 2015.
Wes Streeting
I am grateful for that intervention. I have known the hon. Gentleman for many years, including before I was elected to this place, in my previous role as president of the National Union of Students, and I know that when he says he is prepared to vote against his own Government he genuinely means it, not out of disloyalty to his party, but out of loyalty to the interests of his constituents and our country.
I could make the point that the Government Benches are almost entirely empty, but we know that that would be unfair because Adjournment debates are very rarely well attended and this one is better attended than most. But the truth is that Government Whips know that, even in parliamentary prime time, in debates about police budgets and employer pension contributions in particular, they have to struggle and strong-arm to get loyal Back Benchers in to defend the indefensible. Conservative Members know this is an indefensible position and that the consequence of these changes to employer pension contributions will be to cost police numbers in their constituencies, and which constituency MP in their right mind would, no matter what the size of their majority and however secure they might feel about their own electoral prospects, want to come here to defend police cuts that will affect public safety in their own constituencies? No one wants to do that; it is not why we come into politics.
We must see the budgetary pressures presented by changes to employer pension contributions in the context of what has happened to policing budgets more generally. The hon. Gentleman mentioned police numbers in Humberside, and we do not have a happy situation in my city either—our capital city. The Metropolitan police have had to grapple with budget cuts amounting to more than £1 billion. Ministers stand at the Dispatch Box and in Westminster Hall debates and try to justify their budget decisions. They try to pass the buck by blaming the Mayor of London for the police cuts, but the truth is that when central Government are cutting funding to local policing on the scale that they have done, there is only so much that Mayors and police and crime commissioners can do to offset the impact of those cuts.
The Home Secretary has finally acknowledged that cuts have consequences, and we are seeing those consequences in the rising violent crime in my constituency, across our city and across the country. The Government consistently attack the Mayor of London and try to make this a party political issue, but the facts speak for themselves. It is not just in Labour-led cities that violent crime is rising; it is rising in the leafy Tory-led shires. Violent crime has doubled in counties such as Hampshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk in the past three years. People do not have to be experts to understand the obvious: if there are fewer police on the streets to catch criminals and deter criminal activity, crime will rise. This applies not only to violent crime but to motor vehicle crime, for example, and it is leading to people feeling less safe and secure in their communities. It is changing people’s way of life. They do not want to go out of their homes or run errands of an evening because they are afraid of being mugged or attacked. That is the reality.
Every time I speak on policing in this House and publish the video on my Facebook page or on Twitter, it goes viral because people are really concerned about this. They cannot understand it. As one now former Conservative councillor in my borough told me, they cannot understand why any Government would cut policing to this extent. Before the local elections this year, even a Conservative councillor told me that Conservative voters were saying, “We know there are difficult choices to be made; we expect the Government to be tightening their belt, but we do not expect a Conservative Government to cut policing in the way they have.”
Gareth Thomas
My hon. Friend is making a very good speech, and he has talked about the attitude of his constituents in north-east London. Those concerns are shared in north-west London. I have lived in my constituency all my life, and I cannot remember a time before now when there was gun crime on the streets of Harrow. In the past 12 months, we have found ourselves in the unprecedented situation of having two significant incidents of gun crime. That is unparalleled.
Wes Streeting
I am really grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I say without any prejudice towards inner London that, in reality, inner London has always had to grapple with violent crime. For MPs in boroughs such as Lambeth and Lewisham, gun crime, knife crime and gang crime have always been part and parcel of their work as constituency MPs. We know that there are problems concentrated in inner cities. That is an unfortunate fact of life, and it is one that we are working really hard to try to tackle. Frankly, no one should have to tolerate violent crime, wherever they live. My hon. Friend has just mentioned suburban London. My constituency borders the county of Essex, and I did not expect to see these levels of knife crime and violent crime there when I was elected to this place three years ago.
At Prime Minister’s questions today, I referred to an awful incident, which I would actually not associate with the police cuts, but I would draw to the Minister’s attention the stabbings and the gang crime in my constituency, as well as the county lines activity. Young people are being actively groomed at school gates. They are being identified because of their vulnerability and because they are the kids that are falling behind at school, and they are being groomed to run drugs across the country. We need police on our streets to deal with this. It is not just about grabbing people and nicking them; it is about the intelligence that community policing provides. It is about intelligence gathering and relationship building. It is about building trust so that people will come forward and speak to the police. All that is put at risk by the impact of the cuts to police budgets and police numbers. Given that that is the overall context, it is totally unacceptable to throw on top of that these changes to employer pension contributions, which are adding to the budgetary pressures.
To his credit, the Mayor of London has tried, with the resources he has available, to stem the tide of police cuts. Sadiq Khan has put in £140 million to fund 1,000 police officers, who would otherwise not be there. That has come at the cost of diverting into the policing budget money that the Greater London Authority gathers through business rates. It has also come at a cost to my constituents and to residents right across our capital city, who are paying more through their precept for policing.
It is so difficult to have a conversation about this with voters on the doorstep—this applies to council tax generally, by the way. I knock on people’s doors, and they say really clearly, “Hang on a minute. How is it that my local services are getting worse and there are fewer police officers on the street? My precept is going up—I am paying more. Why aren’t we getting more police?” That is a perfectly reasonable question. I have to explain to my constituents something I think is unjustifiable, which is that the Mayor of London is having to put up their precept because he is doing his best to stem the tide of cuts from central Government. This is a repeat pattern of behaviour: central Government make decisions here and pass the buck to local decision makers, who are responsible for implementing the cuts.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an extremely powerful speech. Does he agree that it is not just in London that there is this deeply familiar pattern of deep cuts to police budgets, consequent cuts in police numbers and consequent rises in crime? Crime is getting ever more complex. The police are having to deal, as he said, with county lines issues and drugs issues more broadly—the use of new psychoactive substances, which are spreading throughout many of our communities—and precepts are having to be put up to try to stem some of these cuts. Is my hon. Friend surprised, as I am, that 1,600 officers and staff have lost their jobs in Wales over the past 10 years of Conservative and Conservative-led coalition Governments? That is deeply damaging to the ability of the police to deliver effective policing. I am sure that he agrees that it is completely unacceptable for this additional burden now to be placed on policing.
Wes Streeting
That is a powerful, well-made point, and it really does emphasise that this is a UK-wide problem and a common experience in a diverse range of communities up and down the country. It is so difficult to tell constituents that their taxes are rising, while their services are getting worse. It will be even more difficult to say that there will be fewer police officers on the streets of my constituency because the Government have changed some pension rules. My constituents will wonder what on earth the Government are playing at.
The Chancellor managed to find 500 million quid here, 500 million quid there and 500 million quid virtually everywhere to get a few good, cheap headlines the day after the Budget to create the illusion that the Government are putting money back into public services, even though we know that these sums were largely one-off grants for, as he so badly put it, the nice little extras. What I found most astonishing was that, even as the Chancellor, like Father Christmas a few months early, was sprinkling money across Departments, he did not find a single penny for policing. I genuinely found that astonishing; it suggests that the Treasury is out of touch—in fact, what it is doing with these rules, given the impact on police budgets, tells me that it is out of touch.
I am sure that I am not alone in having policing and crime as the No. 1 concern in my constituency. As I said at the outset, this place is understandably focused on Brexit and its generational consequences for years to come, but the discussion around dinner tables in my constituency tonight is more likely to be about crime and community safety, particularly given recent events. My constituents will be horrified at the way the Treasury is conducting itself in relation to these pension changes and the resources it puts into policing.
Owen Smith
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way; he is being extremely generous with his time. I put it to him that it is not true that the Treasury is out of touch on this; I think it knows exactly what it is doing. It is not just in respect of police pensions that it is changing the rules, pushing extra cuts on to policing. The same is true in respect of further education colleges and university pensions. There is a consistent pattern; it is repeat offending by the Treasury in this regard. It is not just policing that we should be addressing this evening; it is all the other public services that are equally subject to these sorts of changes, which will entail cuts.
Wes Streeting
I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. I could give chapter and verse on the impact of pension contribution changes across a range of public services.
Wes Streeting
As my hon. Friend says, it is not just policing. Before I was elected to this place, I was deputy leader of the London Borough of Redbridge. I had the enormous privilege of representing my home community on Redbridge Borough Council for eight years, and what I consistently saw across local government services was exactly the same pattern of behaviour: decisions taken in the Treasury brutalised the budgets of Government Departments, and then the Government Departments devolved the cuts, and the responsibility for those cuts, to local authorities. That is absolutely outrageous.
When the austerity agenda first began, I think everyone would acknowledge that some cuts were made to services that, frankly, some people did not really notice. What has changed over the past eight years is that the Government started by clamping down on some of the inevitable inefficiencies and waste that exist in any organisation with big infrastructure, then they began to impact on services—particularly specialist services that do not necessarily benefit the largest number of people but that have a substantial impact on particular service users—and now we are in a position where these cuts and the austerity agenda are not just widely felt, but deeply felt. That is why the Government have felt compelled to change their narrative on austerity.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman is doing very well, and I know he wants to keep it going, but he has to try to stick to the subject. By talking about austerity, he will widen the debate completely out of where we are meant to be. This is about police pension cuts. I do not mind a debate around policing, but we cannot go over everything. There are a lot of other speakers, so he does not need to filibuster.
Wes Streeting
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will take your advice.
In London we have already lost 3,000 police officers, which is having a serious impact on community policing. In fact, my constituents are now under no illusion. Community policing only really exists in speeches by Ministers at the Dispatch Box; it certainly does not exist in reality on the ground. The few stretched resources that we have left on the ground are really struggling.
The changes to police employer pension contributions are one of the most egregious changes that the Government have made to policing, and no doubt we will hear the same rhetoric as they try to make the contribution changes sound as technocratic and as irrelevant to people’s everyday experiences as possible. The reality is that people have really noticed the police cuts. This invidious language, saying, “Don’t worry, because we have cut out all the back office,” is not only disrespectful to public servants who did an excellent job, and who have now lost their job. I can tell the Minister that what police officers in my constituency tell me is that they are now spending more time processing criminals than catching them. That is not an acceptable state of play, and I fear that things will become far worse as a result of these changes to police employer pension contributions.
I give fair notice via the Treasury Bench that, when the Chancellor next comes before the Treasury Committee, he can be assured of a rough ride on the decisions he is taking and their impact on Home Office budgets, and therefore on police budgets. What he and his predecessor have done is absolutely outrageous, and I note the irony of editorials in the Evening Standard railing against police cuts and rising crime in London, and trying to pin responsibility on the Mayor of London. The editor of my local newspaper might like to look in the mirror before dishing out blame to others.
How the Government are proceeding is a terrible mistake, and we must not countenance it. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East for securing this Adjournment debate, and I am grateful to the Government, because their shambolic handling of the business of the House means that we now have so many hours to debate this subject before the House adjourns.
Wes Streeting
We have so long, but I will draw my remarks to a conclusion. [Hon. Members: “More!”] This is a novelty I am not used to. We know why we are here—obviously, we are trying to draw out the business—but this is a serious issue. We would not have stuck around for any old Adjournment debate on an obscure issue; this is so important to us in our constituencies. Whatever is going on in the wider world around Brexit, I cannot emphasise strongly enough that no issue is more important to my constituents than policing, police numbers, police budgets, crime and community safety, and therefore no issue is more important to me.
Mr Hurd
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for taking me on to my next point, which is a very uncharacteristically tribal one. I say with great respect to Labour Members who have stood up and talked with great pride about the amount that the last Labour Government invested in public services and policing that the honest, hard truth is that, as ever, they ran out of money. The Labour party likes to talk about cuts having consequences, but the frank truth is that cuts are themselves the consequences of the legacy of a Government in which, I may say, the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East served with great distinction as a Minister. The biggest legacy of that Government is the biggest peacetime budget deficit in the history of this country. Yet again, my party had to intervene to sort out a mess, which required radical action and tough decisions.
Let me make another point to the hon. Lady. There are two reasons—about which, again, we need to be frank—for the fact that, back in 2010, it was possible to reduce police budgets. First, demand on the police was stable at that time, and secondly, there was cross-party consensus in the House that the police system was inefficient. Even Andy Burnham, sitting opposite where I stand now, was quite prepared to admit that there was inefficiency in the police system that needed to be addressed, and it has been addressed.
Wes Streeting
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way so that the voice of Ilford can be heard.
Wes Streeting
I am almost certain that this is what my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) would have said, given the opportunity. Let us not lose sight of the fact that the challenge facing the Government after 2008 was the result of a global banking crisis. If it is true, as the Minister is suggesting, that the last Labour Government were profligate, perhaps he would like to explain why the shadow Chancellor and the Leader of the Opposition at the time, up to the crash, were backing Labour spending pound for pound.
Mr Hurd
The voice of Ilford should never be silenced, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is entitled to his own version of events, but the fundamental fact is that the coalition Government inherited the biggest peacetime budget deficit in the history of this country, and had to take some radical action.
I want to deal with the pension issue, which is the substance of the debate, but before I do so, let me make the point that when the situation has changed—and the situation in 2018 is different from that in 2010, because the picture of demand on the police has changed and the financial efficiency of the police has changed—so have the Government. We are not talking about cuts. We are talking about additional public investment in our police system: over £1 billion more this year than three years ago.
Let me now address the pension issue. There is a problem, and I want to be frank about it. As I stand here at the Dispatch Box, it remains unresolved, but, as I have said at the Dispatch Box during an urgent question and subsequently, our intention is to resolve it in the police funding settlement scheduled for early December.