Crime and Policing

Debate between Christopher Pincher and Alan Johnson

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson]

When we were in government, we decided to pick the priority Departments, and the chosen areas were health, education, international development and crime and policing. It is extraordinary that the present Government—[Interruption.] Hang on! I am answering the question. It is incredible that the present Government believe that international development, health and, to a certain extent, education must be prioritised, and that they are more important than crime and policing. Quite frankly, I can say as a former Health Secretary that we did not commit to increase the health budget above the rate of inflation. That budget was £110 billion. I went from the Department of Health, which had a £110 billion budget, to the Home Office, which had a budget of about £10 billion. We would have saved £73 billion; we would not have gone for a saving of £113 billion, which Boris Johnson described only yesterday as cutting too savagely and too deeply. It is a central feature of this argument that the Government are going too far with the cuts and that they are failing to treat crime and policing as a priority in the comprehensive spending review, even though it is a priority for constituents everywhere.

During the summer, the Home Secretary made a speech saying that we needed to “move beyond the ASBO”. I want to make two things clear. First, the antisocial behaviour order is the most serious of a range of civil powers introduced in 1998 so that the police, local authorities and other agencies could tackle the problem in a co-ordinated way. They needed to tackle the kind of behaviour that falls short of criminality but nevertheless destroys people’s lives. These powers are not driven from Whitehall, as the Home Secretary suggested, but through community safety partnerships that involve community groups and social enterprises.

The second thing that we need to be clear about is that, where those powers are used effectively, they work. I shall lapse into what I hope is uncharacteristic immodesty for a moment when I say that they worked particularly well during my year as Home Secretary, when an additional emphasis was placed on the victim and on intensified activity in localities where public perception of antisocial behaviour was above average.

The social affairs correspondent of The Guardian said recently that these measures had had no discernible effect, but they had a discernible effect in the one place where an effect can be discerned—namely, the British crime survey. The Home Office, under the current Home Secretary, stated on 15 July that, whereas previous reductions had been in one or two specific areas,

“the reduction between 08-09 and 09-10”—

the glorious year of Johnson—

“reflects falls in the proportion of people perceiving a problem with almost all types of anti-social behaviour that make up the overall measure”.

That refers to reductions in abandoned cars, noisy neighbours, drunkenness, drug use, youth nuisance, litter, vandalism and graffiti. Those are all issues for which there were insufficient powers prior to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. The statistical release went on to say that antisocial behaviour was now at its lowest level since records began, with, for the first time, a majority of the population agreeing that the police and councils were dealing with antisocial behaviour in their local area.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman cites statistics. Forensic Pathways, an organisation in my constituency, has used Home Office data to show that, although the volume of crime has fallen in the past seven years, the detection and clear-up rates have not fallen. So the cost of crime, per crime, is going up, and the police are becoming less efficient. Does he not think that, rather than ploughing money into a broken system, it is better to get the bureaucracy off the backs of the police so that they can do the job we want them to do, which is to detect more crime?

[Alan Johnson]

It is great to hear Conservative Members accepting that crime has fallen, as they spent so long dancing around the issue under the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). They were told off by the UK statistics authorities and by everyone who looked at the matter. Some people in the police force are looking askance at what this Government are doing. I mentioned the record under the previous Conservative Government. The hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) is right that the conviction rate needs to be tackled as well, but under the previous Conservative Government, it was not just the conviction rate and the detection rate that had not been tackled, as crime reached 4.6 million—a doubling—under the Tories. There was a 168% increase in violent crime and a 405% increase in burglary. Of course, the Labour Government can be criticised for aspects of what happened over the last 13 years, but what no Conservative Member can do is to suggest that somehow crime has gone up when that was in fact their legacy. If Britain were ever broken, it was broken between 1979 and 1997. The statistics I am citing are not mine; they are the Home Secretary’s.

The death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter last year shocked this House and shocked the country. It had a profound impact on me as the incoming Home Secretary. That is why I wanted to intensify action. There is no evidence from this tragic incident that it is time to move beyond the ASBO. All the evidence, summarised so astutely by the coroner in that tragic case, showed that the police and local authority in Leicestershire were acting as if they lived in the pre-ASBO era, when no powers existed. One police officer said at the inquest that antisocial behaviour was nothing to do with the police. He was wrong. It is certainly not the responsibility of the police alone, but the police are responsible for it. That police officer was wrong, but 13 years ago, he would have been right. We have to be careful not to return to those days. The Home Secretary speaks of the need to tackle the root causes of this kind of behaviour as if she is unaware of Sure Start, free nursery education, family-nurse partnerships, family intervention projects, the education maintenance allowance, the huge increase in apprenticeships, the 30% increase in the number of kids from deprived areas going to university and all the other measures introduced by the Labour Government—yes, to be tough on the causes of crime, as well as on crime itself.