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Policing in London

I agree. Information is key, especially in the highly sensitive times that we are living through. Knowing that history teaches us that this system has not always been fair and that a great cultural change is necessary, if we are to have a fair system for all it is incumbent on us to ensure that we have the information that we need, and that the commissioner has the information that he needs to monitor the system. When I speak with police officers, by far the major complaint is the paperwork that gets done at the police station. The core of the problem is not the content of what has to be written down, but the endlessly non-communicating IT systems that require that that is done time and again. I cannot believe that it is beyond the wit of man to pull all the relevant strands together and free up police time. I am glad that Sir Ronnie Flanagan will be looking into this. No Member thinks that it is clever that the moment an officer makes an arrest they will probably be off the streets for the rest of their shift. That does not make sense, and there must be a way around it. Business crime is key in London, but we have not yet addressed it. I accept that in the City large-scale and highly organised business crime receives a great deal of attention and considerable resources from the City police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. However, there is also a great deal of business crime in the rest of London. That is inevitable in a city that is as wealthy as ours and that has so many small businesses. Fraud in that area is not addressed in anything like a meaningful way by the Metropolitan police. The Minister must address that. He might have constituents with similar experiences to those of some of my constituents. They might, for example, have been defrauded by someone who has set up a company as a builder, started a job and deliberately taken the cash for it, and then worked for only two days before disappearing. Such a person might then have done the same thing to someone else—perhaps to someone who lives across the borough boundary, so that the crime falls within the scope of yet another police unit. I have spoken to many firms that are the victims of serial liquidators—people who start doing business with them, take the cash, do not deliver the service and go into liquidation. I have spoken to business after business that has gone to the civil courts and secured a judgment, only to find it impossible to enforce it. I have asked one layer after another of the Met how such crimes can be addressed, and it is clear that the necessary resources are not available. I fully accept that the process is very time-consuming, and that it is necessary to go through computer records and, sometimes, to understand a range of financial issues. Such crimes do not have the immediacy of crimes against the person—the victims have not received a blow to the head—but people often lose crucial savings as a result, and families are put under stress and companies collapse. They look to the police and to the system for justice, but it simply is not available. Under the present structure and given the current level of resources, I see no way that it ever will be available. One underlying problem—this feeds back into our discussion on statistics—is that there is no line item that captures such crimes in the British crime survey; they fall into the category of ““other””. The police, being human beings and knowing how the press will report the next set of crime statistics, inevitably focus their attention on the eye-grabbing statistics, be they on robbery or murder, which of course matter greatly. Because there is no line item for such fraud and no police focus on it, a significant number of criminals have sussed out this gap in the market, as it were, and decided that they will fill it. They know that they can function with impunity, as long as they keep the scale of each separate little activity at a level that will not trigger an adequate police response. That is not fair to the people of our city.