Police

Hazel Blears Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

The hon. Lady did say that she supported the views of protesters, but if she is saying that she does not support how they are protesting, then good, we are on the same side of that debate. That is sensible, because people obviously have the right to protest peacefully, but they should do so peacefully, not in a way that puts unnecessary pressure on both police resources and local communities. I have every sympathy for local communities in those conditions and, as I have said, the special grant procedure has been there for a long time for precisely such types of event.

To return to the subject of the wider grant, the achievements of police forces in this time of austerity and funding cuts are evident. Overall crime has fallen by more than 10% since this Government came into office. England and Wales are now safer than they have been for decades, with crime now at its lowest level since the independent crime survey began in 1981.

It is important to set the funding debate in the wider context. When this Government came into office in May 2010, we inherited the largest peacetime deficit in history. Borrowing increased to unprecedented levels under the previous Government, without due consideration for the long-term economic health of the nation. We are proud of the progress that we have made in addressing this most fundamental of issues. Borrowing as a percentage of GDP is down by a third, and our economy is growing. On 22 January, it was announced that unemployment had fallen by 167,000, representing the largest ever quarterly increase in the number of people in work in our country. However, we cannot rest there. Although the Government have made strong inroads into addressing the deficit, more needs to be done. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced last month that further cuts will be required into the next Parliament. That means that difficult decisions need to be made, which we must not and will not shy away from.

Despite that overall context, we have pushed to secure the best possible deal for the police, and have again protected them in 2014-15, this time from the further cuts announced to departmental budgets in December’s autumn statement.

[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

The Minister is setting out a fairly gloomy scenario for support for our police service in the years to come. I am at loss to know why, if the Government are really intent on trying to do more for less, there has not been more integration, joint budgets and collaboration at national Government level. I am amazed that we are having two separate debates today, on the police settlement and then on the local government settlement. Surely this is a time for creative thinking, when we could come together, maximise our resources and make the real reforms that the Government are refusing to make.

[Damian Green]

I rather agree with the right hon. Lady’s underlying point. Indeed, I will speak later about precisely such ideas for collaboration not only between police forces—I will shortly come on to the many good examples of that—but between the police and other blue light services and between the police and local government.

I assure the right hon. Lady, who used to stand at this Dispatch Box doing my very job, that one of the more enjoyable parts of the role is visiting. For example, I recently went to Thrapston in Northamptonshire to visit a joint police and fire station: one building provides two emergency blue light services, which means not only that a better service is provided to the people in and around Thrapston, but that the two emergency services, as they have told me, work better together than they did before. She is absolutely right to say that this is a time for creative thinking, and I hope to reveal during my speech some of the creative activity that is happening in police forces in this country.

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[Damian Green]

I can only repeat what I said earlier to the shadow policing Minister. Given that the shadow Chancellor has said,

“The next Labour government will have to plan on the basis of falling departmental spending”,

the shadow Minister is facing the very problem that he seeks to point out. I therefore hope that he will not give false messages to the people of Tameside and elsewhere that, in the unlikely event that the British people hand the car keys back to those who crashed the car in the first place, he will have a new pot of taxpayers’ money. According to the shadow Chancellor, he will not.

[Hazel Blears]

The Minister is being tremendously generous in giving way. I think that it improves the debate if we ask these questions. He is right that hard decisions will have to be taken on all public services, including the police. Greater Manchester has just seen a £6.4 million cut in policing. Apparently, £100,000 of the money that is being taken off us is going directly to the City of London police, who are said to need

“more money to deal with events of ‘major national interest’ in the capital’s financial district”.

I think that the people of Salford and Eccles would far rather that money was spent on tackling antisocial behaviour and burglary than on protecting the financial district and the banks. Does he think that that is the right priority?

[Damian Green]

Given that the right hon. Lady has presided over this budget in her time, she knows perfectly well that money is not taken from one budget and given to another. One of the big things that the City of London police do is to fight cybercrime and fraud. People in Salford, like those in my constituency and in every other constituency, want the police to be as effective as possible in fighting fraud and cybercrime. That is why that money needs to be spent.

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[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. At the heart of neighbourhood policing is the notion of local policing: roots in the local community, the community knowing who their police officers are and being able to identify with them and develop relationships with them, both in terms of providing evidence of wrongdoing and diverting people from crime—preventing crime in the first place. The intimacy of those local relationships is of the highest importance. At our peril do we go down the path of moving away from the notion of neighbourhood policing and towards remote police officers touring areas in their cars when what the neighbourhood wants to see is that presence on their streets.

[Hazel Blears]

I was the Minister responsible for bringing in neighbourhood policing, which, in its day, was very controversial. Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the ways forward ought to be even more radical? We should integrate response policing and neighbourhood policing, so that instead of having two strands in our policing framework we can ensure that the underlying principles of neighbourhood policing are what drives the whole of our police service.

[Jack Dromey]

My right hon. Friend, with her formidable experience and the remarkable achievement of building modern policing, is right to make a strong argument in favour of that kind of integration. I pay tribute to her work in government. The lasting legacy is neighbourhood policing that this country so rightly prizes, albeit that the thin blue line is now being stretched ever thinner.

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[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) says “cuts”, which he has not promised to reverse; we say “reform”. We have the most reforming Home Secretary in the last 50 years when it comes to running and managing the police. When she entered office, she cleared away hundreds upon hundreds of Labour targets—key performance indicators, public service agreements; targets were coming out of constabularies’ ears—and she said, “We’re going to have one target—to cut crime”. And she is delivering on that target. Crime is down 10% since this coalition came into effect.

As the shadow police reform Minister in the last Parliament, I had occasion to study the history of police reform. What strikes me about the current plans is how coherent and effective Ministers have made their proposals. First, we have introduced locally elected police and crime commissioners, the idea of which was criticised even before it had begun. There was sniping about the low turnout at elections, but let us remember that 5 million people voted in those elections—5 million more than ever voted for local police authorities—and a single focal point of accountability for local people is now a reality.

My own PCC, Tim Passmore, in Suffolk, has frozen the police precept two years running, is driving collaboration with Norfolk constabulary and believes that we should, as other Members have said, look at forcing new savings from police service budgets by amalgamating and collaborating with other blue-light services. We have heard that fire services should be part of the PCC’s remit, and Mr Passmore is arguing hard for that. Also, we need to think much more imaginatively about the sharing of overheads, not just with the fire service, but with county councils. In my own area, it is shocking that the East of England ambulance service trust has four control rooms and mini-headquarters. Those should be sold off and joined up with the other blue-light headquarters of the police constabulary in Suffolk and the fire service.

The police reform agenda that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has begun contains some very coherent national themes. The new National Crime Agency brings coherence to level 2 crime, protective services and fighting organised crime, while under the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims, we have a new focus on increasing productivity among police officers. The numbers game that the Labour party wants to play simply will not wash. It talks about the loss of up to 15,000 uniformed officers since 2010, but it has not pledged to find the money to reinstate those officers, and there is a reason it probably should not bother: it is not just the number of officers that will lead to reductions in crime and better crime prevention; it is how those officers are deployed.

[Hazel Blears]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the reforms relating to serious and organised crime and the NCA depend on the success of neighbourhood policing, because the golden thread of intelligence, which every force relies on, starts at the community level? Unless we have that intelligence feeding all the way through to serious and organised crime and into counter-terrorism, we will lose that connection, and that requires numbers. We cannot build relationships unless we have people on the ground doing that job.

[Mr Ruffley]

The right hon. Lady misunderstands me. I am obviously in agreement that the bedrock of British policing, whether it is level 1, 2 or 3 policing, is neighbourhood policing and safer neighbourhood teams. That is a given. I am suggesting that with better productivity among existing uniformed officers we can deliver the falls in crime further into the future that we have seen in the last three years. How might we do that? The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims has talked about the new generation of productivity tools: electronic tablets, computerised forms and body-worn video cameras that will reduce the amount of form-filling back at the station. My right hon. Friend came to Ipswich a few months ago to see a pilot that Suffolk constabulary is running on body-worn video cameras so that police officers can spend less time behind a desk back at the station computing and filling in forms and can instead get on with visible policing on the front line.

In addition, Ministers have created something that was long overdue and which the Labour party had 13 years to create; a police ICT company that has offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy police technology in a joined-up way, so that we do not have 42 forces doing their own thing and wasting money, with interoperability being limited and the power of bulk purchasing completely ignored.

My right hon. Friend touched on the fact that we need to look not just at higher productivity, but at standards in policing. In that, the Home Secretary has been no slouch either. She has instituted the new College of Policing, which has taken a fresh look at how we professionalise the police service at all levels, with better training and an insistence on higher ethical standards. She is talking about direct entry so that very able men and women from other disciplines—whether the armed forces or business—do not have to do the compulsory two years’ probationary constable time before they can ever run a police force.

The Normington proposals, announced a few days ago, will radically reform the Police Federation and will also engender a higher sense of ethical responsibility among the 125,000 police officers that the federation currently represents. We also have the Winsor review, parts one and two of which are controversial as they make changes to overtime, salary levels and entitlements. But Winsor modernises the work force of the police service so that it conforms to the norms of every other part of the British economy, all other public services and the private sector. Winsor says simply that we should not just pay police officers according to time served, pretty much regardless of their performance. Instead, we should reward specialisms and capabilities so that younger officers who are going out and improving their skills, getting better training and producing higher performance, have that reflected in their remuneration. We are doing that in the teaching profession; it would be inexcusable to make the police an exception. Police exceptionalism in this regard is not sustainable in the public services today.

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[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). It is fair to say that we do not always see eye to eye on a range of issues, but it is always interesting to listen to his point of view, which is always well backed up by a scientific approach that he embraces—I find it very useful indeed.

I rarely speak in the House at length on policing issues, partly because I spent three years as police Minister and I do not think that reprising my experience is terribly helpful for Members in that same role. Today, however, I have made an exception, because I am becoming increasingly worried about the direction of travel of our police service. Part of my concern is about finance, but many of my concerns are about the stresses and strains on neighbourhood policing. This is not particularly about my introducing neighbourhood policing; this is about neighbourhood policing being such a fundamental change to the way in which we did policing in this country. I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee that there was reform during our period of government, and neighbourhood policing was the biggest bit of reform that we introduced. It is now established not only in this country—for all time, I hope—but increasingly in other European countries and countries across the world, where it is recognised that sustainable policing must be done with people, not to them. It must be done with consent, gathering the community around who then become the eyes and ears of the police. Much more intelligence is obtained that way, and the police become far more effective in fighting crime.

Convincing the police service that neighbourhood policing was not a fuzzy, warm community development project but a hard-headed reform to make the police service more effective was quite a job in changing culture. I well remember that when I started talking to chief constables about neighbourhood policing and how we needed to build relationships—to get to know the head teacher, the shopkeepers, the children and the people in the community—some of them looked at me as though I was from Relate marriage guidance, talking to them about relationships. When I hear our shadow Minister talking in the House today about the need to have relationships, it shows how far we have moved on police culture—recognising that relationships are often far more useful than the traditional tools of policing.

I am speaking in this debate because I am very concerned about what is happening to our police service. Greater Manchester’s force has had a fantastic record over the past 10 to 15 years, but we are now seeing cuts totalling about £135 million over the five-year period between 2011 to 2015, and already 1,000 police officers have had to go. Sir Peter Fahy, who is a very respected chief constable, just as he was when he was at Cheshire during my time as Minister, and who is scrupulously non-partisan and non-political, has said:

“When I took the post the force had 8,200 officers and it is now just below 7,000. We are now on our way to 6,400—and that’s incredibly painful.”

Sir Peter Fahy is not a man to cry wolf and everyone in the House should take notice when he says that this process is incredibly painful.

It is fair to say that crime, antisocial behaviour, drugs and family breakdown were the scourge of our community of Salford and Eccles 15 years ago. It was incredibly difficult to attract business and investment to the city because of the huge amount of crime that was going on. People did not feel that the police were in control of the neighbourhoods; they felt that the criminal gangs were in control of the neighbourhoods in my city. That caused massive unemployment and a huge amount of family disintegration. Some 15 years ago my city was in a terrible state, but the fact that we have a grip of crime is the most fundamental reason why it has become a much better place to live. It is why we have been able to attract investment, such as the MediaCityUK—home to the BBC and ITV—and the regeneration programmes we have seen happen. It is one of the reasons why we had, until recently, the fastest falling level of youth unemployment in the whole north-west and why we get £200 million from visitors to Salford—who would ever have thought that it would be a tourist destination, with people wanting to come to our city? It is also why we have more people employed in the MediaCityUK area than we had when it was at its height as a docks.

Those are amazing transformations. Probably the single biggest issue was getting a grip of crime, making people feel safe in their homes, and tackling drugs and some of the serious and organised crime gangs that we had in Salford. We have been incredibly successful. Yes, the figures over the past three years have continued to be good on some of those crimes, but they are not as good as they were on burglary—we saw burglary go down by 54%—and some of the other crimes.

I saw a worrying statistic from Greater Manchester police this week which showed that antisocial behaviour has started to creep back up. Antisocial behaviour, before it was even defined by the previous Labour Government, was sometimes dismissed as petty or low-level crime—the sort of crime that we almost have to accept if we live in an inner-city environment. We had a massive drive to tackle antisocial behaviour, with a whole new set of powers and the Respect campaign. We said that we wanted to be on the side of decent people in communities and to drive out the antisocial behaviour that made people’s lives such a misery. There was long-term harassment and really serious crime, which could not be dismissed as low-level incidents.

Huge warning bells ring for me when I see a statistic that shows that that sort of crime is now beginning to break through again. I look at some of the evidence around the statistics, the veracity of which people are beginning to question. Lord Stevens has said that we could be on a tipping point for another rise in crime. If we start to see crime rise again in places such as Salford and Eccles, all of that good work over the past 10 to 15 years will be at risk. The business investment will be at risk. People will feel that it is not the kind of community in which they want to live. I am absolutely determined not to say that we need more money. I have no doubt that the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) will ask me the same question he asked my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). Yes, money is tight, and that means that hard decisions must be made. I would have supported a 12% cut, not a 20% cut, but we could argue that for the whole afternoon. There were things we could have done through collaboration and better procurement. Those were all on our agenda for making those cuts. In hard times, we have to use creativity, innovation and imagination. I am afraid that I am not seeing enough of that in the present Government’s approach.

When I was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, I used to say to local government that, in order to face the coming years of austerity, we would have to have community budgets and a Total Place organisation in which all the public sector pooled its budgets, rationalised its inspection regimes, shared the same targets and had a system whereby all that public money, whether it was for policing, regeneration or whatever, was in the same pot. We thought that that was the way to survive these years of austerity without having an absolutely disastrous effect on our public services. We said that to local government, and if I get a chance in the next debate, I will reinforce these matters for the Secretary of State.

Local government has stepped up to the plate. The 10 authorities in the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities have a community budget; they are pooling resources. The police in my area have co-location with the local authority, the health service and mental health. We have a system of sharing information, which is the multi-agency system for data sharing. It is in that way that we have been able to survive some of the tremendous cuts.

The Minister will know about Operation Gulf in Salford, which has been going on for three years. It tackles the serious crime gangs—there are at least 32 of them—and it has had amazing success. It has won the Home Office national award for an operation over the past two years. Much to my delight it has put some serious criminals behind bars for a good number of years, and it has done that because it has used smart policing, imagination and creativity. It has taken the Al Capone approach: if we cannot get the criminals on the particular crime we want them for, we can get them on money laundering, employing illegal immigrants and not having tax on their cars. The police can be in their face every single day of the week, and that is the way we get results. They have been able to do that because they have had co-operation from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the local authority, the Department for Work and Pensions, the mental health services and every other bit of the system. That is the kind of creativity that is required now and over the next few years. It would mean central Government saying to local government, “Get your act together. Pool your resources. Get yourself in shape. Line yourself up. Have a strategic objective, and that is how you make an impact.”

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

It is fascinating to listen to my right hon. Friend speak on this subject. When we talk about how to provide policing at a time of great cuts, we must also consider the creativity that will be necessary in rural areas. Does she agree that rural police forces will need to get together and think creatively?

[Hazel Blears]

I do indeed. Part of the challenge facing police services is the need to deliver in many different environments and circumstances. We must consider sparsity and the difficulty of travel. In more rural areas, for example, the need for technology and communications is perhaps even greater than it is in concentrated inner-city areas. Again, creativity in the use of technology is really important.

In Greater Manchester we now have this top-slice application to the innovation fund. The chief constable is working on redesigning Greater Manchester police to see how we can get through the next few years, and I absolutely support him in that. In the process, he has taken one of my superintendents, Wayne Miller, off my Salford beat. I wish Wayne well in his new role in that change project. I want to place on the record the fact that he has been a tremendous superintendent. He brings with him real hands-on experience of neighbourhood and community policing and will make a great contribution to the plans for the future.

My chief superintendent, Kevin Mulligan, has recently retired. He was the architect of Operation Gulf. He is a fantastic, hands-on police officer who has done a tremendous job. He has made several arrests on his own and goes out policing on new year’s eve and Christmas eve—that is the kind of dedicated officer he is.

I spent a good period of time with our new chief superintendent last Friday. Chief Superintendent Mary Doyle is an incredibly impressive woman in Greater Manchester police. I have no doubt that she is up to the challenge of policing Salford and Eccles, with all the issues we face. She has also been given Trafford, so she now has double the number of people to look after and try to keep safe in our area, double the number of police officers to lead and double the number of police staff. She will be looking after 450,000 people, so her job is actually bigger than that of looking after the centre of Manchester, which has its own chief superintendent. I am worried about that. When we talk about the thin blue line being stretched, we also need to think about leadership capacity, because if we are to be creative and to do innovative things, we need really strong leadership. Chief Superintendent Mary Doyle, impressive though she is, will have her work cut out to try to take policing forward in our city.

What I think really needs to happen is something I raised with the Minister earlier. When we introduced neighbourhood policing, there was extra money available, so in some forces neighbourhood policing was layered on top of the existing response capacity. I hope that the Minister will consider integrating response policing with neighbourhood policing. Yes, we need response policing, because we need to have someone in a vehicle who can go and sort out a particular incident, but the way that they hand over the incident to the neighbourhood team is a misuse of resources. Getting the response police officers to own the neighbourhood as much as the neighbourhood police officers do would enable us to get more for less.

We recently decided to put our criminal investigation department officers out as part of the neighbourhood teams. That was incredibly controversial, because CID officers are not used to that role. However, it has made a really big difference, because our neighbourhood teams now include the people who are good at community and the CID detectives. If we get the response people in there as well, we will have a range of resources that we can draw upon, even when numbers are shrinking, to enable that extra capacity. I ask the Minister to look at some of the things Greater Manchester police have been doing to try to get that capacity to go further.

What I would say to central Government, and I say it to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, is that five years ago I said to the then Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, that I was amazed that the success of a Cabinet Minister is judged by how big their budget is, how big their legislation is, and how big a beast they are in the Cabinet jungle. The new world requires people to be collaborative. Why do not several Cabinet Ministers have jointly shared budgets? Why are they not incentivised to collaborate? Why are they not judged on their success in terms of their ability to do teamwork? Why do we still have so many silos in central Government? When we said to local government, “You’ve got to break down your silos”, people there stepped up to the plate. It is about time that we changed the way in which national Government works so that my success as, say, Education Secretary is dependent on another Minister’s success as Justice Secretary or Home Secretary.

At the end of the day, the people who use the public services the most are all from the same families. We know this from the troubled families project, which is making a difference but is still primarily run by one Department. Why do we not have joint commissioning of the services we need to be able to deal with all those families? I could tell Members here and now the top 20 or 30 families in Salford and Eccles who use public services disproportionately, whether it be the police, education or the national health service. That is why we need joint commissioning systems, incentives to collaborate, and, I hope, an end to the days of stand-off bilaterals between Cabinet Ministers who simply seek to protect their own empire and their own Department rather than being prepared to collaborate for the greater good.

My final point is about reform. I am never short of ideas about reform and I like to talk about it. I remember that somebody once said that we are at our best when we are at our boldest, and I have never forgotten that. I make this plea to the Minister and to all Ministers involved in public services. If they want to get the best out of people and to get innovation and change, and if they want to get more for less, they have to be prepared to empower the people at the front line—the people in the service—to be able to make that change. There is a culture in Government—I do not make any allegation in respect of any individual Minister—of keeping power at the centre despite fine words about localism. It is about time that central Government acted in a way where they modelled good behaviour, as any good leader is required to do. If we want to survive these next few years, the funds are inevitably going to be less, whichever Government are in power, and therefore central Government must take a lead in being innovative, creative, collaborative and independent, just as on the board of any company where the directors would be collaborating together for the greater good. I urge the Minister to take that message back to the Home Secretary, and perhaps he could be the champion of innovation and change at the centre.