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Neighbourhood Policing

Good morning, Mr. Hood. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, and we are privileged indeed to have you in firm but fair-minded command of our proceedings. When I heard that I had secured the debate, I was tickled to learn—hon. Members will be able to tell that I had not planned things this way—that this is the first week of a two-week national campaign to promote neighbourhood policing and enable people to learn the names and identities of their local police officers and how to contact them. The debate has turned out to be very well timed, but that was entirely accidental. By April, every community in England and Wales will have in place neighbourhood policing teams of police officers and police community support officers. As it happens, Staffordshire anticipated that requirement and set up its neighbourhood policing teams more than 12 months early. Such teams—whether in Staffordshire or nationally—are dedicated to working with their local communities, agreeing priorities for action and informing the public of their progress. It should now be possible for residents everywhere to find out the identities of the members of their neighbourhood policing teams. They need only ask their local police or local council, inquire at a local library or look on the internet, including on a new national website which has the names and numbers of members of their local teams. There has been some debate about giving out the mobile phone numbers of individual police officers, but all I can say is that there has been no reticence among community police officers and PCSOs in my constituency about giving them to local residents. In Staffordshire, we are certainly interested in sharing best practice on neighbourhood policing. We want to learn from what police services elsewhere are doing well and we are happy to share our successes with them. In his final report on the review of policing, Sir Ronnie Flanagan speaks of a vision of successful 21st-century policing. He says that its components include having"““the right people in the right places at the right times, doing the right things, in partnership, for the public.””" Specifically addressing neighbourhood policing, he speaks of the need for effective partnerships, flexibility and innovation and what he calls ““citizen-focused policing””. Like Sir Ronnie, I believe that neighbourhood policing is effective in cutting crime and popular with the public because it provides reassurance. Let me illustrate that belief using some recent experiences in my constituency. Last summer, I walked a beat with a community police officer and another beat with two PCSOs. I also joined a whole neighbourhood policing team to try to solve a specific problem in a particular community. Community engagement and the accessibility of officers are given high priority in Staffordshire, and I have worked with the police and their partners in establishing a number of police surgeries in various public premises. Members of the public can now approach police officers in confidence in settings as diverse as a converted shop, a charity drop-in centre, a university campus and a children's centre, to give just a few examples. In the year in which neighbourhood policing is being rolled out in my constituency, I joined the police to present a roadshow. Together, the police and I explained at a series of public meetings how neighbourhood policing will work. Additionally, I encouraged residents to join existing neighbourhood watch schemes or to start new ones in areas where none existed before. The message that I put very strongly to the public was that if the police are to put in this extra effort to be visible and up front in the community, it is time for members of the public to respond positively to support them—as eyes and ears, as providers of information and by putting peer pressure on people in their localities to behave in an acceptable way.