Town and City Centre Safety

Danny Beales Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Baggy Shanker]

I congratulate Inspector Ditta and my hon. Friend on all the work she does to help her local police, coupled with the additional investment in the police from our Government.

Nobody here will want to talk down their city centre and I am not here to talk down Derby. Like our constituents, we are proud of the places we represent but, up and down the country, years of Tory austerity and mismanagement have eroded that pride. Austerity took bobbies off the beat and out of our city centres, with PCSO numbers halved and an estimated 600 police stations shutting their doors for good. It left our high streets boarded up, with shops closing at a rate of 37 a day in 2024. It also let retail crime run rampant, leaving shoplifting at its highest level since records began, with hard-working staff worried about their safety at work. A Co-op campaign to protect retail workers shows that, shockingly, there are more than 1,300 incidents of violence and abuse every day, with shop workers threatened just for doing their job.

The catastrophic austerity experiment left our communities feeling less safe than ever. Research by the University of Southampton demonstrates that austerity led to a 3.7% increase in total crime and 4.8% increase in violent crime, with those increases hitting deprived neighbourhoods the hardest. In Derby, we have seen that play out in the streets and places we love. Pride for one’s city is stretched when the high street is littered with empty or plain dodgy shops. In 2024, Derbyshire Live estimated that more than 80 shops in the city centre were for sale or to let. That is an increase of about 60% on the previous two years. Any sense of safety was shaken when last summer residents watched masked thieves smash their way into a pawnbroker’s shop on St Peter’s Street in broad daylight.

[Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech about an issue that is important to many of us. He talks about masked thieves. Councils have the power to ban face coverings, particularly in town centres, by introducing public space protection orders. Does he agree that councils should work with the police to do that where appropriate? Is he as shocked as I am that Hillingdon council is refusing to ban face coverings in the town centre, despite the community and the police asking it to do so for exactly the sorts of reasons that he mentions?

[Baggy Shanker]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. The police need to work with local authorities to tackle these issues sensitively.