Extract from end of day
adjournment debate (Commons) on Policing: Somerset
Mr (Bridgwater and
West Somerset) (Con): For many reasons, I am pleased to
have secured this debate, even though some of what I have to say
may be distressing to hear because crime, unfortunately, knows no
boundaries.
It will come as no surprise that policing in Somerset is a matter
of enormous concern to my constituents and to hundreds of
thousands of others across the county. To an outsider, Somerset
conjures up the image of a peaceful backwater, full of cider
orchards and friendly folk with old-fashioned values.
Unfortunately, as in so many other parts of our nation, life is
no longer like that. Rather alarmingly, the National Crime Agency
says that there are 90 organised crime groups operating in the
Avon and Somerset area. It is no longer a few light-fingered
thieves we have to worry about; it is big-time crooks. Organised
crime in the United Kingdom costs £37 billion every year—that is
almost as much as the Brexit divorce bill to Brussels. Organised
crime causes more deaths than terrorism, wars and natural
disasters put together, and there are 90 organised crime groups
in my county alone. Frankly, it does not bear thinking
about...
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Extract from
Westminster Hall debate on Knife Crime
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory
Stewart):...At the core of all this is crack cocaine and
crack cocaine gangs, although the innocent victims have nothing
to do with crack cocaine. Although drug use in general is coming
down, crack cocaine use is going up. It went up 18% between
2016-17 and 2017-18. County lines, which are an incredibly
important part of this, are also contributing. The same gangs are
involved in both. That means that we have to get on top of mobile
phones. We have had to bring in new ways of intercepting mobiles,
which are central to the way that county lines gangs operate. We
have set up a new National Crime Agency taskforce to focus
on county lines, and we have had to be much smarter about data.
In partial response to my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John
Howell), who made a very good speech about that, one of the
things we are learning is that our data has not been good enough.
For example, we have not been coding knife crimes properly.
Setting up smart software that allows us to pick out as knife
crime something that was simply registered as GBH makes a huge
difference to our ability to target hotspot areas...
To read the whole debate, CLICK
HERE
