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Policing in London

The hon. Gentleman is right. The fall in many crimes, as the Minister conceded, was expected because of technology, but the increase in other crimes, such as mugging, is particularly serious and worrying for the public. The fact is that the Government knew that that was going to happen, because a strategy document produced by the Prime Minister’s strategy unit in December 2002 noted that London had a particular problem with mugging and street crime. It noted that mugging occurred principally in 10 London boroughs—the figure is 60 per cent.—and that an increase in violent crime was likely. We should have seen that coming to a greater extent than we have done, but everyone in the House would concede that the solution to the problems does not lie just with the police. I agree with much of what the Met commissioner said in his interview in The Guardian this morning, and that the solutions are wider than a simple question of enforcement. Enforcement is important, as, of course, are sufficiently robust penalties, which the Government have now accepted in relation to knife crime. Police officers on the streets are important, but what is going on has wider societal implications, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has constantly tried to impress upon us. The solutions lie in what the Prime Minister used to want to discuss—the causes of crime—so the point made by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) is well made. I suspect that we will be preoccupied with the issue a great deal in the next few months. I have been talking largely about the importance of getting police officers on to the streets, and I welcome the fact that, in London, the development of neighbourhood policing teams funded by Londoners, with one sergeant, two police constables and three police community support officers in 630 wards has been rolled out ahead of schedule. In 87 wards, the number of PCSOs will increase further, which is important if we are to develop the kind of policing that the public want and that operates successfully in Chicago, for instance, as I have seen for myself in the Chicago alternative policing strategy, on which much of this is modelled. There is still a problem with the visibility of police officers, and the survey to which the Met and Metropolitan Police Authority drew attention shows that, astonishingly, it is still the case that less than half of London’s population see a uniformed presence on the streets every week. The development of neighbourhood policing must address that problem. One way in which we can ensure the effectiveness of neighbourhood policing teams is to take a resolute—and, I propose, steely-eyed—look at the effectiveness of PCSOs and what they do. PCSOs are an important development and component of neighbourhood policing teams. I understand the reason why PCSOs should not have certain powers—it is to avoid their abstraction into police stations and to maintain a constant presence on the streets—but it is important that people see PCSOs engaging with them. There are specific problems to which commanders are alive and that need to be addressed. For instance, is it really necessary for PCSOs always to patrol in pairs? The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, proposed at one point that there should be proximity policing so that police officers and PCSOs could patrol on either side of the street. They would still be in safe reach of each other, but not only would that effectively double the police presence on the streets it would encourage them to engage with the community much more. Given that the Government have legislated to allow greater powers to be given to PCSOs, we will have an ongoing debate about the extent to which PCSOs should be given greater powers to make them more useful while avoiding their being taken back into police stations. That leads me to reform. In the past, we tended to have a debate about the need to increase the visible police presence on the streets, thinking that that purely involved an increase in resources and the hiring of more police officers. All political parties fell into the trap of believing that that was the only way of increasing the presence of police officers on the streets. However, a considerable diversion of police officer time as a result of the bureaucracy and the way in which they have to record and process crime confronts the police.