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Policing in London

The hon. Lady misunderstands me. I was making an argument about value for money and pointing out that the increase in resources that is claimed for London has largely been funded by London taxpayers and council tax payers. They want a return on their investment. Value for money in our public services is an important concept to which we Opposition Members subscribe, even if the hon. Lady does not. The fact is that London remains a high crime area, although we may have arguments about statistics. I would say to the Minister that I believe, and we have formally proposed, that the time has come to put the publication of the statistics on an entirely independent basis. The Statistics Commission criticised the Home Office for the way it spins the figures that are produced, but we should also consider the fact that there are two different measures of crime. The British crime survey is valuable in some respects but problematic in others because it does not measure key crimes. There is also the problem of the trading and spinning of statistics once they are published by the Government. That makes it difficult for everyone—Members of the House, commentators and, most of all, the public—to know what is really going on. If we are to measure the performance of police forces fairly, we should have robust and independently produced measures of crime in which we can all have confidence. We propose that responsibility for the figures be taken out of the Home Office and given to an independent body. That would assist us greatly in debates such as today’s, and it would enable Members of all parties to make points without the basis of their claims being challenged. Let me tell hon. Members a few home truths about crime in the capital city which cannot be disputed. There is 30 per cent. more crime in London than there is nationally. We might expect that in a capital city with a large concentration of people and a great deal of economic activity, but people are also 30 per cent. more likely to be mugged in the capital than they are in the rest of the country. That is despite the fact that there are far more police officers in London. The average population per officer outside the capital is 372; in London it is 239, or, to be fair, 262 if we allow for the commuters who travel into London every day. As we heard, the detection rate in the Met has improved in recent years, and, in fairness, that is a significant improvement and should be welcomed. It is good news, if the fact that 78.9 per cent. of crimes are undetected can be classed as good news. However, it remains the case that the Met’s detection rates are consistently worse than those of other metropolitan police forces, even though crime levels and trends across urban forces are similar. That is an important discrepancy that we should debate. Greater Manchester police’s detection rate is more akin to the national average of 24 per cent., and that is significantly higher than the rate in London. I welcome the improvement in the Met’s detection rates, but we should be cautious about how that improvement has arisen. There are two particular concerns that I shall draw to the House’s attention. First, it appears that an increase in sanctioned detections has been achieved partly through a significant increase in the number of cautions issued by all forces, including the Met. For example, in London last year the police issued more than 14,000 cautions for serious crimes, including assault, robbery, burglary, car crime and hard drugs offences. The cautions were then counted as sanctioned detections, enabling the police to claim that their performance has improved, but I doubt very much whether the victims of those crimes would consider the offenders to have been really been brought to justice. The second way that forces may be improving detection rates is by considerably increasing the number of penalty notices for disorder that are issued. I do not have to hand the figures on the number issued in London, but there has been a significant increase nationally, so I can confidently say that there will have been a big increase in the proportion locally, and that may well correspond with a falling-off in the number of offenders brought to justice who are accounted for through convictions in court. If we consider that half of those penalty notices are not actually paid, in the first instance, by the person who has been given the fine, it is deeply questionable whether penalty notices should count towards the number of offenders brought to justice at all. Some of those enforcement tickets are being used to deal with matters such as serial shoplifting, although it is quite inappropriate for them to be used in that way.