Extracts from Parliamentary proceedings - Sep 11

Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab): London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan is investing in frontline policing, but like Police and Crime Commissioners across the country, he is swimming against the tide of deep Government cuts, which is why violent crime in the last three years has doubled in Essex, in Cambridgeshire, in Warwickshire, in Hampshire and in Norfolk—the Tory shires. Is it not time for the Government to accept that they need to refocus on cutting crime, not police, particularly in the light of the damning report from the National Audit Office today? [906804]

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Elizabeth Truss): We have protected the police budget in real terms since 2015. Is it not time that the London Mayor started taking responsibility for what is happening in the city that he is meant to be leading? When it comes to Crossrail and crime, he is not taking responsibility, and he needs to stop passing the buck.

Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con): It is understandable why the tone of the debate has changed today. We have had a very co-operative cross-party approach so far. However, I hope the hon. Lady will not make the mistake of saying that there is a simple answer. I think she was alluding to this at the end of her speech. There are such things as personal responsibility and parental responsibility for serious crimes and we should not ignore that fact. The Government are spending more than £800 billion this year and Government net spending is increasing, but the most important thing we need to consider is that local decisions are being made. I get the hon. Lady’s point about police numbers, but in West Mercia, for example, we had an announcement yesterday of an increase in police numbers of 100. That is because of the choices that individual Police and Crime Commissioners are making. We need to consider local responsibility as well...

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins): It concerns me greatly. Edward Timpson, a former Minister of State for Vulnerable Children and Families at the Department for Education, is doing a big piece of work. He is conducting a review of alternative provision and the vulnerabilities that may be posed by children being in PRUs. We are very much looking into it just as we are supporting the work of charities such as Redthread and getting youth workers into A&E departments in the major hospitals—they are seeing an increase in young people coming in with serious stab wounds. They get those youth workers into the A&E department to act as a friend to those children at the teachable moment, as they call it, as well as staying with them while they are in hospital recovering from what often turns out, sadly, to be major surgery. We help children through knife crime through the anti-knife crime community fund, and support many charities, including larger ones such as the St Giles Trust, that have specific projects dealing with the issues in specific parts of the country.

I was most concerned to hear the concerns of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley about inconsistencies in delivery and policing. We introduced the system of Police and Crime Commissioners in the coalition Government to try and draw accountability for policing closer to the communities served by police officers. The title is deliberate. Although policing is an important part of the brief, the “and crime” part is also an important part of their responsibilities—the prevention of crime, how they help victims in their locality and so on. If there are concerns about the consistency of delivery of services, I hope that we would all go to the Police and Crime Commissioners and ask them what they are doing. It is our role as parliamentarians to hold them to account, just as they hold us to account.

The College of Policing has been a major step forward in terms of professionalising policing and giving it the status it deserves. These are public servants who often put their lives at risk to serve the public. We want to give them the recognition and status that their day-to-day activities deserve. The purpose of the College of Policing is to achieve that, but also to help spread best practice. She will know that a great deal of work is being done on, for example, county lines. We set up the National County Lines Coordination Centre because we recognise that, while major urban centres may have experience of gang activity, rural areas probably do not. We want to tackle that new phenomenon by helping the police draw together all their experience and intelligence, and ease the lines of investigation between forces.

Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab): The concerns about inconsistencies are not mine alone—far from it. I spoke at the Police Superintendents Association conference, where the Home Secretary and the Policing Minister are today. The conference theme is failures of collaboration, which drive inconsistency. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary has consistently—ironically—raised inconsistencies in policing over the last 20 years. I would argue, as would many policing stakeholders, that those inconsistencies have been worsened by the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners, because they have put further obstacles in the way of collaboration and evening out the issues we see across 43 police forces in the United Kingdom.

Victoria Atkins: Our expectation is that Police and Crime Commissioners should collaborate. I am wandering a bit off my brief because this is technically the Policing Minister’s portfolio, but we have raised the point of collaborating on purchasing uniforms and so on. When I sat on the Select Committee on Home Affairs, I was surprised to learn that my local constabulary had bought the second most expensive trousers in the country. On any view, why would on earth would it do that?

...I return to the point that Police and Crime Commissioners and elected Mayors have budgets to help to prevent crime, and I would hope that the Mayor of London and PCCs elsewhere were looking to see whether they were spending those budgets in the most effective way to tackle knife crime or corrosives attacks—whatever type of violence is affecting their immediate area...

...When the Prime Minister was Home Secretary, she insisted on that protection. That was in 2015. This year, the Minister for Policing and the Fire Service met or spoke to every chief constable. With the help of Police and Crime Commissioners, we are securing an extra £460 million in overall police funding.