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Policing in the 21st Century

I congratulate the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), on his usual excellent work. I have already heard him speak on policing once this week. He is always assiduous in chasing issues in Parliament that relate to his Committee's work. I also congratulate the members of the Committee on their contribution. The report is a superb example of exactly what Select Committees are supposed to be about. It is a tour de force, if you will excuse the pun, Mr. Williams. It looks ahead at the policing issues that will be relevant in the 21st century. Select Committees are good at producing such work. I declare an interest as someone who has been a member of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, which was formerly the Education and Skills Committee, for most of the past eight years, so I have seen the process from that side of the fence. Select Committees are excellent because their reports are largely impartial. Obviously politics gets in the way sometimes but by and large, in my experience, including from reading reports by Committees with which I was not directly involved, Committees tend to avoid the pitfall of politicisation. They tend to be impartial and to fulfil the hope that was behind them when they were set up in their strengthened form in the great reform of 1979. Select Committee reports are not Government reports—the information is not obscured by or filtered through the Government or the civil service—and they are not Opposition reports that are written purely for political purposes. Committees take a huge raft of evidence from expert witnesses of every variety. For example, a section of the Home Affairs Committee's report deals with alcohol. Although the Committee heard from the alcohol trade, which obviously had a certain point of view on minimum pricing and controls on pubs, it also heard from the police, community bodies and local authorities. Committees produce excellent, up-to-date summaries of expert opinion on issues, and their reports are presented coherently and concisely. They provide ammunition for a two-hour parliamentary debate such as this, but they will also be referred to over and again for years to come. This report will be referred to every time policing is raised in Parliament, during elections and in the press. Select Committee reports rumble on for many years after they are produced. As I said, the report is an excellent, outstanding example of what Select Committees do so well. There is a lot of talk at the moment about reforming the way in which this place works, and we have heard various suggestions even in the last day or two about how to strengthen Select Committees. I hope that we go a long way down that path so that Select Committees can better fulfil their potential. I will not try to cover every aspect of the report—the Chair of the Committee, in his excellent summary of the report, could only scratch the surface—but I will pick out some things that particularly stood out for me. One, which has already been referred to, was the general issue of targets and expectations for the police in the 21st century, the situation on which has been both improved and worsened by the advent of modern communications, the internet and rapid communication such as e-mail. People now expect a much faster, if not instantaneous, response. They send a complaint by text message or e-mail to their beat officer at the appropriate address and want an immediate response. MPs have had the same experience, as the volume of casework has increased massively for MPs and councillors in local government. It has put a lot of extra pressure on the police. In some ways, that is quite right, because it makes the police more accountable, but in other ways it raises people's expectations and they can be easily disappointed. There is a danger that some current legislative changes concerning community calls for action are creating more expectations for the police—and on local councillors in partnership—to do something. If the residents of a council ward make a community call for action, they want the police and local authority to do something now. If the resources are not there and the police cannot respond immediately, there will be disappointment. Those issues are highlighted in the section of the Committee report dealing with what the police do, what is expected of them, what targets are being set for them by central Government, and what local residents are demanding. One interesting point about recorded crime that stands out is the question of whether the crime situation is getting worse. All the statistics tell us that the position on crime is getting better. Page 10 of the report cites an interesting statistic. It says:""Changes in society led to a steady rise in recorded crime levels between the 1950s and the 1990s, with recorded crime per officer increasing dramatically in the 1980s from an average of 26 crimes per officer in 1982, to 42 per officer in 1992. This figure has since remained fairly constant."" It is instructive to bear those bald statistics in mind. Crime levels rose steadily in the UK and the western world from the 1950s onwards—it did not particularly matter who was in government. The Conservatives were in government for 13 years from 1951 to 1964. In the later '60s, there was a Labour Government, and then there was the Conservatives again, then Labour and then the Conservatives for 18 years. Now we have had Labour for 12 years. However, crime figures went up steadily—with some dramatic jumps, as in the 1980s—for the best part of half a century in the western world and the UK. Across the western world, they have tended to level off or decrease, as with the famous example of New York, which some people attribute directly to zero-tolerance policing and others simply explain by pointing out, "Well, you've got a change in age demographic in the population of the USA, and crime has gone down all over the country, regardless of whether there has been the zero-tolerance approach of New York policing." When we try to apply those lessons to English policing, we need to bear those statistics in mind, rather than following the knee-jerk reactions in the headlines. The newspapers tell us that we are in the midst of the worst crime wave ever, even though the statistics, as evidenced in the report, do not bear that out. Equally, the report asked the valid question of whether we can always trust the stats. The public certainly do not. As the report points out, only a few months ago, in 2008, we discovered that some police forces had not been recording certain types of criminal offence in the right category, which meant that the number of crimes of serious violence, far from falling, should have jumped by 20 per cent. That was due simply to errors or differences in how police forces collected the stats. That situation makes the clear case that we must take the collection and presentation of statistics on sensitive issues such as crime out of the hands of the Government—they must not be seen to be political or be changed for political purposes—and put that into the hands of an independent body. In that way, hopefully, we would get to a point at which the public and the media would trust the stats, instead of saying, as the public so often do, "Well, your statistics might show that crime has been falling fairly steadily, but we don't believe it. We think it's much worse—although not around here." As the report points out, people say that they think the crime situation is quite good where they live, but that it is generally bad. It is the same for education. Lots of people say, "Schools are really bad these days, but the one my children attend is very good". Indeed, recent surveys show that people say, "Members of Parliament are all crooks, but my local MP is actually quite good." We need objective statistics in which people can have a bit more trust. The question of what the police do has been raised. I was struck that the borough commander of Hackney police, Chief Superintendent Steve Dann, asked what the police were there for and what the public and the politicians wanted them to do. He said:""I think we need some clarity around that…Why do we take lost property? Why do we take lost dogs? Is that what we should be doing?...You have some people saying: 'Enforcement. Let's enforce. That is your job'; other people are saying we should be in prevention, education"" and community outreach. Where is the balance between all those things? I have a local example of what is happening throughout the country. In the past few months in Derbyshire, we have seen a shift in the enforcement of minor traffic legislation, such as parking and so forth, because it has been taken away from the police. They had often said, "We haven't got the time to do that. We have other, more pressing demands on our attention," but people in some places were getting irritated that local parking regulations were not being enforced. As across the country, therefore, enforcement in Derbyshire has gone to the local authorities—the county councils and the boroughs and districts in collaboration—and they have put it out to a private organisation known as the "green giants", because of their new green uniforms. Since they took over from the police a few months ago, they are much more visible and enforce the rules and regulations more proactively. Some motorists are not happy about that, because they are now being stopped from parking illegally, but lots of residents are happy about it, because residents parking and similar measures are now being enforced, whereas before the police would just say, "We haven't got the time to do that." Chief Superintendent Steve Dann's comments are apposite. We need to talk to the public, to politicians at all levels and to the media to ask what we expect the police to do. On the issue of Government directives about what the police should do, we see the same tension at a much higher level. On the one hand police forces have been told, "You've got to look very carefully. You've got to assess crime threats, serious crime and the terrorist threat. You've got to have more collaboration"—perhaps involving the super-forces that were mooted but have, thankfully, been dropped recently—"so that you can tackle the most serious forms of crime, like terrorism and organised crime." On the other hand, we want much more neighbourhood policing and a greater uniformed officer presence out on the streets to tackle what members of the public are most concerned about: low-level, everyday crime such as vandalism, petty nuisance and drunkenness in the streets. We need more clarity on who decides the priorities and to restore much more local control and accountability. Some of the evidence in the Select Committee's report made those points extremely well. Brian Paddick, a former assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan police, said:""The problem with the Home Office was nationally imposed targets, some of which were having perverse outcomes"," although they were set with the best of intentions. He continued:""For example, in terms of offences brought to justice, I am sure the Committee will realise that it is one point on the score board for a complex case of murder which might take 18 months to investigate and six months to try in court, provided there is a conviction that counts as one offence brought to justice"," but it is also one point for""a cannabis warning that takes 20 minutes to deal with"." If police are getting pressure from the centre as well as from the inspector who assesses police forces—if they are being told, "You've got to have so many cases brought to justice. Why are you behind the national average? Why are you behind your target?"—there is an inevitable pressure, as in education with league tables and Ofsted inspections, to work to the target and do the things that tick boxes, even if that is not the best example of how policing should be done in a particular area. Some might point out that at the time when Brian Paddick gave that evidence, he was the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of London, but Chief Superintendent Dave Hudson of Essex police made exactly the same point in his evidence. His division""had a daily target of 20.5 'sanction detections', with the same weighting accorded to every detection, regardless of the seriousness of the offence."" The more serious the offence, the longer it takes to investigate and prosecute, and the more trivial the offence, the easier it is to deal with, but the two get exactly the same weighting. That is a consequence—unforeseen, I am sure—of a Government initiative to hold police forces to account. So how should police forces be held to account? That is where there is a need to go back to local control and accountability, not through the elected sheriff model that the Conservative party talks about, and on which its spokesman will doubtless elaborate later, but through locally elected police boards. That is not the macho individual in charge of everything, who gets the headlines and creates a stir, but a more responsive, democratic model, through which the local electorate, rather than distant central Government in London, can hold things to account.