The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones)
I thank the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) for securing the debate. As he knows, I am a week into my new role as Policing Minister, but I did the shadow role for several years while we were in opposition. During that time and in the last week, I have spoken at some length and in some detail about these issues.
I pay tribute to Adam and Gregory, the police officers who he mentioned, for the work that they do. I also pay tribute to Lisa and Kye for the campaigning that Lisa has been forced to do because of the situation in which she has found herself, which must be devastating for her as a mother. The hon. Gentleman described Lisa’s frustration very well, and I think that we all felt it too.
The topic of professional standards in policing in the widest sense is enormously important. The hon. Gentleman was right to make the point that confidence in policing has been tracking in the wrong direction in recent years. It is always worth having the humility to accept that politicians have a substantially lower level of trust, but we have seen levels of trust in policing go down over recent years. The latest figures in the crime survey for England and Wales show a small increase in trust levels, so maybe there are shoots of improved confidence, but that has followed several year-on-year declines.
When we came into Government, public trust had been shaken by some very high-profile cases, as the hon. Gentleman will know. The visible reduction in neighbourhood policing had also badly eroded that sense of trust. At the same time, crime has become more complex: there are intense investigations into long-standing crimes, an explosion of fraud and online crime, and a high expectation, rightly, from the public that crimes will be dealt with, although there may not necessarily be the resources available to do that.
I am keen to carry on the work of the previous Policing Minister to ensure that standards are as high as they can be. We owe it to the vast majority of excellent police officers who are doing a brilliant job that we ensure that those standards are high. Last year, the previous Home Secretary announced some reforms to police standards, leading to a raft of legislative changes that strengthened the misconduct, vetting and performance systems. New regulations were laid to enable chief constables to dismiss officers who failed to maintain vetting. I understand that is separate to the issues raised by the hon. Gentleman, but having a force where the leadership drives standards, whether through vetting, recruitment or valuing the work of professional standards teams and ensuring that their work is in the front of police chiefs’ minds, is part of the same picture.
We have already made some changes on that front, and we will continue to do so. We will put the vetting standards on statutory footing through regulations that we expect to lay this year. The Crime and Policing Bill that is currently going through Parliament also contains measures to strength misconduct and performance systems, so, for example, when officers fall seriously short of the high standards expected of them, they will be swiftly identified and dealt with robustly, including through a new presumption of dismissal for proving gross misconduct. Those measures will change that landscape.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned some very upsetting crimes: we have to work harder and do better when it comes to violence against women and girls. Last year, the former Home Secretary announced plans to strengthen the requirement on forces to suspend police officers who are under criminal investigation for matters such as domestic abuse or sexual offences. Strong progress has been made, and I expect new legislation later this year.
Steve Darling
I alluded to the fact that we have sadly lost an awful lot of police officers with deep knowledge, and many of our police officers are relatively new to the position. Will the Minister reflect on how we can build that long-term knowledge back into the police force, because that can drive better standards where services are being provided, rather than looking for where things have already fallen over?
Sarah Jones
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We saw a collapse in the numbers of police then huge recruitment under the last Government, which meant that we lost a lot of officers and gained a lot of new officers. The turnover of officers is higher than I would like it to be, for lots and lots of reasons; there is a whole other debate about keeping our workforce where it is. We have to have people with experience and expertise, and we want to try to develop that through our neighbourhood policing plans, for example. We want an increased number of people working in those neighbourhood roles, and we want them to stay in position.
In previous years, neighbourhood policing was very much a turnaround profession in which people would work for a short period of time then move on to something else. We want neighbourhood policing to be seen as a brilliant thing to do in the long term as a police officer, and I hope that will help. It is very much our intention that those officers will be better police officers as a result of the expertise they develop about their communities—the people who they are there to serve. The hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) makes a good point. I do not have all the answers, but it is absolutely key that we try to get that expertise and to get people to stay in the force for their whole career.
As I was saying, the Angiolini inquiry is considering a range of issues in policing and the safety of women. We are already working to deliver the recommendations from part 1 of the inquiry, and we will look very carefully at part 2 when it comes out.
The hon. Member for North Cornwall mentioned the challenges in Devon and Cornwall police in recent times, and we all know about them. I acknowledge the significant progress that has been made by the force under the leadership of Chief Constable James Vaughan. The force has recently come out of the “engage” stage of monitoring by the inspector, which is a clear indication of progress, and I hope that the professional standards team is also on that journey of progress. When I meet the chief constable, I am sure that I will raise today’s debate.
Regarding the complaints system, the hon. Gentleman quite rightly talked about his constituents’ frustrations. People who are dissatisfied can apply for a review to the police and crime commissioner or the IOPC, but whether the case gets reviewed or not depends on its nature. I was interested in the suggestion of other forces policing each other, as it were, and the White Paper on police reform considers some of these things; we are looking at that at the moment and hope to publish it in the autumn. We can learn lessons from local government and elsewhere about how we ensure our policing is done in a way that means that where there are problems, there are good and effective ways of trying to resolve them.
I also hope our police are available to Members of Parliament, have good relationships with them and speak to each other, because that in and of itself is important. I would not undervalue the important role of Members of Parliament in raising these cases, and I hope that everybody has good relationships with their local police.
Police and crime commissioners have an important role in this space as well. They are the ones who are directly elected and responsible for holding their chief constable to account for the force’s performance, and they are also responsible for the appointment, suspension and removal of chief constables. They have the ability to determine which officer is best placed to lead the force.
Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
I am an MP from Sussex. We are about to go through local government reorganisation and see the creation of a Sussex mayor, and as part of that process, the role of the police and crime commissioner is going to become redundant. How does the Minister think that new mayoral responsibility is going to work in practice? Is it going to be exactly the same as it currently stands with PCCs, or will it be different?
Sarah Jones
The hon. Lady makes an interesting point. We are moving to a system with an increasing number of mayors, and the functions of police and crime commissioners will roll into the mayoral authority. The responsibilities vary from place to place—the larger devolved mayoral combined authorities are more developed and have bigger teams. We will see these systems develop over time, but it is an interesting development, and one that I think can work. I have worked with mayors who have that policing function who have had a deputy mayor who has the police and crime commissioner role. That works very well—it can be a powerful thing—but of course, people do not like the changeover. If the hon. Lady identifies particular problems or challenges, I am happy to have conversations with her and pick those up.
I should conclude, or we will run out of time. I thank the hon. Member for North Cornwall for securing the debate and for remembering his constituents, on whose behalf he has brought these issues before Parliament. I would like to think that as we move towards the reform of professional standards across the whole of policing, we will recognise that a lot of the challenges we face are matters of resource. It is not that the people who are doing the policing are not great people; it is often a matter of time and resource. However, it cannot be right that people have to wait such long periods of time and feel such frustration. Of course, I will look at the case that the hon. Member has raised—if he writes to me with more detail, I will be happy to look at it in more detail—but I thank him again, and thank everybody else for their useful contributions tonight.
Question put and agreed to.