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Neighbourhood Policing

I too start by congratulating the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) on securing this debate. He deployed a rare quality in a politician—frankness—in admitting that he secured this debate without knowing that it was opportune. It is indeed opportune and we are all grateful to him for securing it. The debate has been consensual. All the parties that were represented here—the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) has left us now—agree that neighbourhood policing is a good thing and the Liberal Democrats certainly support it. As a party, we are very much in favour of ““pavement politics””, so it is no surprise that we are in favour of ““pavement policing””, which is what neighbourhood policing is largely about. We have some concerns about the level of resources that are available. We know from research that in the period up to March 2007, 20 out of 43 police forces experienced a drop in the number of police officers. We can only hope that when the figures for the period up to March 2008 become available, we will see that that trend has been reversed in those forces. Of course, we know that the total number of community support officers who were going to be deployed was reduced from the 24,000 that the Government had pledged to 16,000. No doubt, when the Minister responds he will point out that that lower number was the number that the police thought they could work with. However, I think that all hon. Members who have spoken here today are aware of areas in their own constituencies where there is still a high level of antisocial behaviour, for example, and where additional resources, if they could be brought to bear, could make a significant difference. There is one thing that is perhaps surprising about neighbourhood policing. I suppose I am slightly too young to have been brought up on ““Dixon of Dock Green””. None the less, I was under the impression that intelligence about individuals in a particular neighbourhood was something that was accessible to the police and that they had people on their force who knew who the local hoodlums were and so on. However, it is only as a result of neighbourhood policing that there are now sufficient police resources available to enable that very individual identification of potentially problem people or households. When that was revealed to me three or four years ago, it was a source of some surprise. Like other Members, I am happy to endorse the activities of my own safer neighbourhood teams, and have joined several of them on patrol to witness first hand how they work. We did some canvassing in one road where one of the residents raised concerns with me about allegations of drug dealing going on close by. When I went out a few weeks later with the relevant safer neighbourhood team, I reported the matter to the lead officer, who raided the property a few weeks later and found that cannabis plants were being grown there. It is clear that safer neighbourhood teams are working, in that intelligence gets to the right people and can be acted on promptly at the right level. Like other Members, I attend the panel of my own safer neighbourhood team when I can, just to see how it and local councillors and leading members of the community identify what the priorities will be in their ward in the upcoming quarter. That works effectively. That is not to say that bureaucracy, to which Members have referred, is not real; it needs to be tackled. The Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate, Brian Paddick, who has experience in the police force, will be looking carefully at it. Let me give the Minister one concrete example of bureaucracy, which was raised in the Home Affairs Committee yesterday, in the hope that he will be able to write to me and other Members about it. I do not whether the Minister has seen the Committee transcript, but Mr. Gargan, who is an assistant chief constable, raised a problem relating to CCTV cameras. He gave evidence that to change the direction that a CCTV is pointing—not to install a camera, but to change its direction—officers are required to fill in a 17-page form. That applies regardless of whether the surveillance is covert or overt. I questioned him further on that and asked whether the police were required to do that, or whether there is some scope for interpreting the law in one way or another. He said that it was probably because of the latter—interpretation of the law rather than a clear command—that the form had to be filled in to change the direction of a CCTV camera. If nothing else results from this debate, I hope that the Minister will be able to clarify for our benefit and for that officer's benefit whether that is, in fact, a requirement. If it is not, could it be made clear that it is not, so that if the police want to make such a change—perhaps to move a CCTV camera so that it focuses on a particular parade where there have been significant problems—they can deal with it more effectively and without the need to complete a 17-page form? We need to tackle problems of bureaucracy, but neighbourhood policing requires other actions to be taken as well. Such actions are not necessarily about policing but to do with licensing, particularly licensing regimes and ensuring responsible behaviour on the part of off-licences, bars, clubs and so on, and ensuring that we design out crime in our town centres. Those matters need to be addressed before we come to the question of neighbourhood policing itself. My party can happily sign up to the four key principles that the Government have set out for neighbourhood policing: having visible and accessible police, influencing community safety priorities, interventions that solve local problems, and answers that give solutions to problems and feedback on results. The hon. Member for Stafford said that police accessibility was not simply about bricks and mortar. I agree that it must not simply be about that, but making the police accessible often does boil down to bricks and mortar, or at least to there being a contact point that people know about. It could be a mobile police station as opposed to a permanent base; what is needed is a known location to which people can go to visit their police officers. That is why at local level and, indeed, in London and beyond, the idea of safer neighbourhood teams having their own permanent base in their ward is appropriate. The police certainly are more visible and accessible. The surveys that we have done over many years confirm that to be true. When we put out surveys five or 10 years ago that asked, ““When did you last see a police officer?””, the responses that often came back were, ““Never,”” or ““Twelve months ago.”” Now it is almost not worth putting out such surveys because the responses tend to be much more positive. Progress is being made on the key principles, and Liberal Democrats support that. It is clear from the statistics that community support officers and safer neighbourhood teams are increasing public confidence in the police through their extra visibility, and, as in the concrete example to which I referred, through ensuring that local intelligence is passed on to the appropriate people and acted on. One of the key recommendations in Sir Ronnie Flanagan's review of policing was that partnership working between the police and local communities and councils should be prioritised. I commend the example of my own borough, the London borough of Sutton, which for several years has had joint working and a joint appointment. The person happens to be a police officer, but someone from the local authority or, indeed, from outside the local authority could have been appointed. One person is responsible for the parks police, the safer neighbourhood teams, the wardens and aspects of enforcement that the local authority takes on, so that all the resources can be brought to bear in an organised fashion when local problems are identified. I conclude by drawing attention to concerns about neighbourhood policing that other Members have referred to and which have been raised by the Police Federation. The Minister will be familiar with the report that the federation produced in December 2006, ““24/7 Response Policing in the Modern Police Organisation—Views from the Frontline””. Things have moved on, and the level of resources is clearly now much more significant, but the concerns that the federation raised then—only 18 months ago—were about whether staffing would be sufficient to provide the safer neighbourhood teams, and whether 24/7 response officers would be drawn from their activities and put into safer neighbourhood teams. The federation was also concerned that safer neighbourhood teams would not reduce the work that 24/7 response officers had to do but might, in fact, increase it. I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that discussions with the federation indicate that those issues have either gone away or are not as salient now as they were then.