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Policing in London

No, I will not. Given the nature of north-west London suburbia, especially in my constituency, which has the Edgware road as one boundary and the Kenton road to the south as another, cross-borough talks and discussions take place and the safer neighbourhoods teams work together. Rigidity would be rooted in the borough commander, not the system. It is not terribly mature to say that someone who has never been to Chicago cannot comment on the Chicago model of policing, which I thought was a bit of a low point of the comments made by the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). I take on board completely a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North: there is an utter corrosiveness about those who offer nothing but doom and gloom and suggest that nothing works, that everything is terrible, that there are no lessons to learn from anywhere, that there is nothing positive to say about policing at all, that everyone is being let down, that the policing model does not work and that everything is corrupt or bankrupt. That is not the experience of policing of most people in London. I am not saying that if someone disagrees with that position, everything is suddenly smugness and complacency. In all the productive contributions that we heard today, I do not think that there was any smugness or complacency. Everyone, including me and the hon. Members for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) and for Arundel and South Downs, suggested that wherever we are, we certainly have more to do and a lot of improvements to make. No matter what stage we have reached on driving out unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy, there is still more to do. Whatever the successes in many aspects of the Met, there is, of course, much more to do. I did not hear any smug contributions. I accept that the Met needs to keep up with new and emerging areas of crimes to the same extent as dealing with existing crimes. The hon. Member for Richmond Park and others made a point about the effect of high-end and low-end business crime on our small retailers. We could add the growing problem of e-crime to that. Such crimes have massive financial and material consequences for people, especially those with small businesses, but they are seen as victimless crimes in the broader sense that they are not part of the violent crime about which we are all worried. None the less, I accept that we should be doing more to address such crime. One hopes that the forces abutting London are working with safer neighbourhoods teams in London to try to avoid displacement, about which a fair point was made. My hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Ms Butler), who is soon to be the new Member for Brent Central, correctly defended the record of the police in Brent. Again, in Brent, some people from the community and other parties have taken the line that everything is doom and gloom, that nothing works and that everything is terrible, but they are slowly being brought around because huge achievements have been made in Brent, where the police have really got down to working among the community so that they can reflect people’s concerns. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett) about liaising with areas beyond the riparian boroughs when it comes to issues as important as Blackwall tunnel and when it will close, and I will pass that back; that is an entirely fair point. I am grateful for his comments about PCSOs, too. Most people had a degree of scepticism about the initiative at the start, and it has been a learning process for many people. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Richmond Park about the fact that many fine PCSOs use the job as a stepping-stone and become full-blown constables, but there are many more who do not choose that route, and not necessarily because they are at the end of their careers. Some want to give something back early in their career and then go on to do something else that they want to do. It is precisely that variety among PCSOs, and the fact that they are not simply reflective of the police force, that is much of their great strength. There is a huge debate within the police family, in London and elsewhere, about whether PCSOs should, as some suggest, be subject to the same fitness requirements as police officers. I think that that would be counter-productive in terms of ensuring that people from a variety of backgrounds come to be PCSOs. If they are not doing a police job, and they are not the full equivalent of a warranted officer, they should not simply reflect the police. However, as I said, many PCSOs can and do go on to become police officers, and that is good. My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Khan) made a number of points about how policing in general needs to fit in with, and be seen in the context of, everything else that we do. People—mostly Opposition Members—wax lyrical about what we need to do about rowdy and antisocial behaviour, and other things, and then do not deliver when it comes to the legislation passed by the House. Similarly, in the borough, the Opposition parties do not deliver out on the streets. When devices and tools are put in front of them, they are all dismissed as gimmicks, which they profoundly are not. I take my hon. Friend’s point about the fact that all that the Met and the Government are doing on counter-terrorism goes right to the heart of community cohesion, in the broader sense, and needs to be seen alongside what is happening daily and weekly in communities. This is not a cop-out on my part, but although I take the point made about the balance between the allocation for inner London and the allocation for outer London, that is a matter for the Metropolitan Police Authority and the RAF—I mean the infamous RAF, the resource allocation formula, rather than the more famous RAF. As the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) said much earlier in our deliberations, the question of what elements go into that formula has been—I do not say flogged to death, but at least considered, reviewed and constantly re-reviewed. I know that people have tried to deal with the issue in part, but the difficulty is that we can no longer talk about affluent outer London and poor inner London. Both have changed significantly, so that there are affluent pockets of inner London, and very poor pockets of outer London, and I would say that that is probably not picked up as readily as it should be in Government statistics generally, but I would say that, because I represent an area of outer London. That is a fair point. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about the improvement of the British Transport police more generally overland. South Eastern Trains will always be the last to improve, because of the Connex connection, and because of the way in which it got to where it is now, but that improvement will happen. The points raised by colleagues about more readily available local statistics were well made. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) alluded to the Smith review on statistics, on which there was a cross-party presence. My right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) insisted that it be cross-party, because it was about Government statistics. That review has reported and we are working through it with a range of interested parties. From memory, I think that we will report more formally on how we think we should go forward on the issue when we report on the July crime statistics, but we will take it forward only on a consensual basis. There is a good-news story to tell about the Metropolitan police. There are difficulties, but we should, collectively, be proud of what it is doing. Yes, we should always demand far, far more from it—that is right and proper—but we should do it in a constructive fashion, rather than in the dirty little doom-and-gloom, ““everything’s terrible and nothing’s been right since Dixon of Dock Green died”” fashion that we have heard today. We have had a constructive debate, and we have the consensus that the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs talked about. We should be able to take that forward, both in terms of policing in London and more generally. I commend him for parts, and only parts, of the 250-page report that he so eloquently advertised about 10 times in his opening address. It being Six o’clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put. Resolved,"That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Alan Campbell.]"