Criminal Justice Bill

Chris Philp Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the impact of shoplifting. If town centres do not feel safe, it is local businesses that are hit and can end up going under as a result, undermining local economies and putting off local residents who want to go shopping. Sometimes elderly residents, in particular, will simply not go into town anymore if they do not feel safe, and if they feel that laws are just not being enforced when they watch people leaving the shops with a big bag of goods stolen from the shelves and see nothing being done. It is just not good enough.

That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) rightly called for stronger measures to tackle assaults on shop workers. The Government did finally agree, as a result of his campaigning, to an aggravated sentence for assaulting shop workers, but that is not enough. The whole point is to make it simpler for the police to take action and to send a clear message from Parliament to police that this is an offence we take immensely seriously. That is why Labour will be tabling amendments that reflect the campaigns by USDAW, the Co-op, Tesco, the British Retail Consortium and small convenience stores for a new law and tougher sentences for attacks on our shop workers. Everyone should have the right to work in safety and to live free from fear.

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

We do take retail theft and shoplifting very seriously and agree that more needs to be done, but may I draw the shadow Home Secretary’s attention, and that of the House, to the retail crime action plan, which the Government agreed with the National Police Chiefs’ Council just a few weeks ago? In that plan, the police commit to investigating reasonable lines of inquiry for all shoplifting cases, including running CCTV evidence through facial recognition software, attending the scene of a crime where that is necessary to gather evidence, where there has been an assault or where the offender has been detained, and using data analytics specifically to go after prolific offenders. All that is in addition to Project Pegasus, a joint project with retailers to go after serious and organised crime. I hope she will join me in welcoming the plan, which I believe will be very effective.

[Yvette Cooper]

I would gently say to the Minister that the fact that it is an announcement—

[Chris Philp]

It is a plan.

[Yvette Cooper]

It is a plan; it is not even an announcement of something that is going to happen. It is an announcement that there is a plan for the police to check CCTV when a theft has taken place. That just shows how bad things have got over the past 13 years. We welcome any work that is being done, including by the British Retail Consortium with the National Police Chiefs’ Council. However, the Government are not taking the action that they should be taking to underpin this. In particular, they are not changing the law either on assaults against shop workers or on the £200 limit, and neither are they supporting the neighbourhood police we need to do the work to deliver the plan. There are 10,000 fewer neighbourhood police and PCSOs on our streets and in our communities, and communities know that. It does not matter what the Policing Minister says or what figures he plucks from thin air: people know. They can see it. We all see it in our own towns in our own constituencies, and half the country now say they never see the police on the beat.

[Chris Philp]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way, because the Policing Minister is a glutton for punishment on this one.

[Chris Philp]

The shadow Home Secretary is very kind to give way. I am sorry that facts and figures get in the way of her argument but, as I said at oral questions yesterday, the neighbourhood policing figures that she keeps quoting are unintentionally misleading. Local policing numbers cover neighbourhood policing, emergency response and others. Since 2015, which is the year that she cites, those numbers have gone up from 61,000 to 67,000, and overall policing numbers are at record levels, at 149,566—3,500 higher than under the last Labour Government.

[Yvette Cooper]

This is the problem with the Policing Minister: he just thinks that the country has never had it so good on crime and policing. As far as the country is concerned, he is incredibly out of touch. That is not what is happening in towns and cities across the country. The idea that we can just merge neighbourhood policing and response teams, which are different things, shows that he simply does not understand the importance of neighbourhood policing or what it actually does.

Neighbourhood police are the teams who are located locally. They will not just be called off for a crisis at the other end of the borough, district or force area; they are the police officers who can deal with local crimes. They are not the officers who have to deal with rising levels of mental health crisis, which we know so many of the response units have to deal with. There has been a big shift away from neighbourhood policing and into response policing because the police are being reactive, dealing with crises that this Conservative Government have totally failed to prevent for 13 years.

The Government have demolished a lot of the prevention work and teamworking between neighbourhood officers and other agencies in local areas, and as a result the other response officers are having to pick up the pieces instead. The Policing Minister’s approach just shows why the Tories are failing after 13 years. It is not the answer.