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Antisocial Behaviour

I and a record number—since the second world war—of my colleagues were elected on the 2005 general election manifesto. I do not recall—although I do not have the manifesto to hand—that proposal being in our manifesto, or in the Labour or Conservative party’s manifesto. The hon. Lady has entered a non-debate. I was talking about the crucial role that intervention at an early stage plays in schools, in parenting and in relation to role models. It is crucial that people exercise responsibility in their community and do not take a passive approach. I have met many local action teams and neighbourhood watch schemes, some of which are more successful than others. What unites them, however, is a willingness to stand up and say that the problem is not for the police to sort out for them, but for them to address. They recognise that they need to care about what their community is like and what children are doing in it. In my constituency, I have attended fetes, jumble sales and other events held by local action teams to raise funds to support local youth projects and such like. Those have been extremely effective in letting people know who is trying to solve problems in the community in conjunction with the police. I am also extremely supportive of community policing, and am pleased that there is a growing political consensus about that. People are seeing in their neighbourhoods a regular, identified police officer. They know that person and what they are doing, and they know that he or she knows the schools in the area, speaks to the head teachers and pupils, knows the local vicars and shopkeepers and is closely involved in day-to-day activities. The local action team and neighbourhood watch have close contact with that police officer. In some cases, they have that police officer’s mobile phone number, which they can ring if they have a particular concern or problem to bring to his or her attention. The police officer might have a small neighbourhood budget, which can be used to supplement the local action team’s activities, perhaps by funding community or youth projects. That is an extremely successful model. Not only do such police officers get to know the opinion formers and pillars of such communities, but often, to put it bluntly, some of the persistent troublemakers. I am also extremely supportive of police community support officers. So many people say that they want visible policing. They want people working in conjunction with their community police officer, and they want people whom they know and empathise with, and who understand the area and get down to the nitty-gritty of problems. Most of the time, people do not want armed response units, although, on rare occasions, those may be the necessary and appropriate response. Most of the time, people are worried about low-level issues such as late-night noise, graffiti, vandalism and even litter. What they want is someone who they feel has a finger on the pulse and understands their concerns. Police community support officers can hold surgeries. People can go and see them, and can feel that they have a direct link with them. For all those reasons, I greatly regret the Government’s decision to renege on their manifesto commitment and reduce the number of community support officers. In Avon and Somerset, the police authority area in which my constituency falls, the chief constable and chief superintendents carried out a large amount of consultation with community groups, local action teams, neighbourhood watches and others. They said ““You will have all these extra PCSOs. We want to use them effectively, and we want them to be part of the community. We will start recruiting soon, and we want to hear your thoughts.”” We were told that we would be given 541 PCSOs, which would be our share of the overall 24,000. After all that consultation, the police in my area and across the country have been left looking stupid. They have had to go back to those community groups and say ““We are awfully sorry; we told you that you would have an extra five PCSOs in your neighbourhood, but we have had to scale it down to three. And we are afraid that all the ideas for which we asked you have gone out of the window. We will have to go back to the drawing board.”” Avon and Somerset’s allocation of new PCSOs has been cut from 541 to 346, a reduction of 195, which has had an extremely significant and detrimental impact on police plans for my area.