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Police Restructuring

The Government claimed that the O’Connor report forced them to restructure our police forces. They started a panicky, so-called consultation exercise, which was too hasty, and now they are providing a financial bung to those who kowtow to them before the ridiculous deadline of Friday. A week last Wednesday, I asked the first question at Prime Minister’s questions, when I mentioned an extraordinary letter from the chairman of my police authority, who is a Labour councillor. The Prime Minister said that a full consultation is taking place, but that is not what Cheshire police authority expects. In a letter that was copied to the Minister, Councillor Peter Nurse has stated:"““Policing should be at the heart of our communities and your proposals do nothing to safeguard or develop this. Your timetable is so absurd that it is impossible for us to have a meaningful dialogue with our communities . . . Your direction in respect of Cheshire is severely flawed . . . Restructuring policing with such haste and without considering the long term implications is dangerous and not in the interests of the people of Cheshire.””" I have not yet seen a reply to that letter. Two days after Prime Minister’s questions, I attended a meeting with Cheshire police authority and the chief constable, where I paid tribute to the hard work of the Cheshire constabulary and all the policemen and women within that force. Performance has been middling, and nobody would say that there is not vast room for improvement, but the force has specialist policing capabilities, and, as we have heard from both sides of the House, it has engaged in fantastic collaboration with not only North Wales police, but Merseyside police, Greater Manchester police, Staffordshire police and, in north Shropshire, West Mercia constabulary. My constituents in Cheshire are served by tailor-made collaboration, co-operation and co-ordination, while national threats are met by national strategies. In terms of a criminal market, as it was rather delicately put by the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), crime is either local or national. There is no such thing as regional crime. Logic does not impel the Government to design a response that is regionally based rather than nationally based or, as at present, locally based. What is the answer? It is not what is on offer in the House today. We are not allowed to maintain the status quo or to look across National Assembly or regional development agency boundaries; instead, we have to look at this precisely as the Government want us to, for the convenience of Ministers and Whitehall mandarins, who no doubt see it as a nice dotted line that will not disturb their administrative flows. We need to tell the Government to think again. This hasty timetable can easily be extended and the financial bung can be removed so that there is not a perverse incentive for rushed responses. There should be a proper, considered and serious response so that we get to the point where we have an organisation that is equal to the threats and meets the needs and demands of our local citizens. All the constituents that I represent in south-west Cheshire want good collaboration with north Wales to continue. They do not need a national police force to make that happen, because it happens already. As we have heard from Welsh MPs, a national Welsh force is not needed either, for much the same reasons. When my good friend and neighbour, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), asked whether there should there be a national police force, the Minister replied with a categorical no. Let us therefore assume that it is not going to happen. I very much support that. We could, however, expand national organisations such as the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the British Transport police and the National Criminal Intelligence Service in order to collaborate, co-ordinate and co-operate nationally to deal with national threats, be that through counter-terrorism or anything else. Deep down, the consent of the British people is required for us to have confidence in our policing, because policing, as it was originally set up, has to be by the people and for the people, just like our mandate in this place. Not for the first time, the Government’s proposal has been presented to the House in a panicky way, with no votes and no chance to make corrections—only an opportunity to urge a Minister who is not necessarily going to respond positively, although she is giving a good impression of listening. We are being offered a false prospectus. This is not about improving the service of policing to my constituents; it is about mapping an organisation on to a pre-conceived regional agenda that has nothing to do with meeting the additional threat that my chief constable rightly said has gone national, while continuing the local neighbourhood policing strategy. That is what is so inconsistent, and that is why we should not be shy of holding the Government to account and accusing them of issuing a false prospectus for an agenda and a strategy that is below-the-table stealth regionalisation that we should reject out of hand.