Community Policing: Government Support

Jess Brown-Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for community policing.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests; I am a trustee of Chichester Festival Theatre, which I will be talking about in my contribution.

Today’s debate could not be timelier for my Chichester constituents. Last week, a cast member in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, which was on at Chichester Festival Theatre, was followed through the city by a group in balaclavas, riding bikes, shouting abuse and harassing them. Police subsequently arrested a 16-year-old male for a homophobic hate crime. Earlier this week, the prominent comedian and actor Munya Chawawa spoke out about the experiences of the whole cast he had been performing with at CFT, including the racist, homophobic and xenophobic abuse that they had encountered during their six-week stay in my city. It was heartbreaking to hear his and others’ accounts. The hate that they experienced in no way represents the majority view, and is not the Chichester that I know and love.

The fact that that happened in a city that I am constantly told has very low levels of crime should be a cause of concern for all. I have no doubt that the pipeline of hatred fed into our algorithms and screens is feeding this beast. Antisocial behaviour more generally is a growing theme in my work as the Member of Parliament for Chichester.

[Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. My area also supposedly has a low level of crime, but residents in Tring talk about antisocial behaviour, residents in Harpenden have taken up private security, and Anna from Berkhamsted says she has not seen a police officer for years. My hon. Friend mentioned that online crime and community policing go hand in hand. Does she agree that one way of tackling this is by looking at it holistically and having a proper online crime agency, funded by big tech, so that we can then properly fund and resource community policing?

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

My hon. Friend pre-empts one of the things that I will call for later in my speech.

Antisocial behaviour is happening in all corners of the country. In Chichester, I am seeing it in the balaclava-clad young men riding e-bikes at terrifying speeds along pedestrian streets or pavements, the people feeling intimidated and threatened when they are out in the evening, the growing use of catapults to harm wildlife or the shoplifting epidemic that plagues our local businesses. It is seen across my constituency, whether in the city centre, the town of Selsey, Westhampnett or the Witterings. Charity venues have told me about young men forcing entry and threatening their volunteers or elderly members of the public who have gone along to watch a film. Another constituent told me that the local bowls club is struggling to retain members after some were hit with ball bearings that were being shot at pigeons.

Today’s debate is on community policing. Much of that antisocial behaviour is driven by a lack of visible policing in areas like mine.

[Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend for calling this important debate. In my constituency, we have a serious problem with antisocial motorbike noise from modified exhausts. Does she agree that we should have more public spaces protection orders to help the police enforce against antisocial behaviour, and funding for trials of acoustic cameras to try to stop this?

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I thank my hon. Friend for his important intervention. I agree that we need more access to things like PSPOs, but there is an acute challenge in actually policing the PSPOs that we manage to get in place. That was a suggestion that we had to cull the wildlife crime that we were seeing locally, but the police rightly said that a PSPO is effective only if there are police to manage it.

This is not the fault of local police officers—they are diligent, well trained and dedicated to keeping our communities safe, but they are also asked to achieve the impossible. The Government’s neighbourhood policing guarantee makes all the right noises about ensuring that policing is local, but in coastal and rural areas such as mine, it is near impossible to have a meaningful presence in the huge areas they are asked to cover. Selsey has nearly 11,000 residents, and the number nearly doubles in the summer months thanks to tourism, but the area does not magically get any additional policing during that time.

[Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)]

The hon. Member is painting a vivid picture of her constituents’ experience. I associate myself with her comments about the cast of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. No one should be subjected to racist or homophobic abuse anywhere in the country.

On the point about Selsey, Bournemouth West gets more than 10 million visitors in the summer, while Dorset police is one of the lowest funded forces in the area. We get no additional resources, and the funding formula does not adequately take into account the seasonal pressures or the rurality of the rest of the county. Does the hon. Member agree that that needs to change?

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

The hon. Member is absolutely right to highlight that the funding formula does not reflect the seasonal pressures I see in my coastal constituency.

To describe Selsey to those who have never been there—I look forward to welcoming colleagues in the summer—there is one road in and one road out. Selsey means “seal island”, and it is a very isolated community. There is one police constable and two PCSOs to cover not only Selsey but Sidlesham, Hunston, North Mundham and some harbour villages. On a summer’s day, it would take an officer at least an hour to travel from one end of the patch they are meant to cover to the other, yet they are meant to have an acute understanding of the area and its problems.

I went out last summer with a PC who had responsibility for Selsey. Local residents turned and stared at us as though they had never seen a police officer walking the streets of Selsey. When I asked the PC the last time he had done a walkabout, he had to admit that he had never done one before because of the administrative pressures in managing his workload.

At the other end of my constituency, towards the South Downs national park, farmers are creating WhatsApp chats to support each other in monitoring illegal activity on their land, whether that is equipment and tool theft or hare coursing, because of their isolation and the lack of provision in the Sussex police rural crime team. Why are we in this position? For starters, it is because police forces were recklessly hollowed out, and the number of PCSOs was decimated, by the previous Government.

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

The hon. Member is making some good points, but does she agree that the cut to police services’ budgets started in 2010 when her party was in government with the Conservatives? We saw a 25% cut across the country, which is what decimated neighbourhood policing in all our constituencies.

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I appreciate the hon. Member’s remarks. She is right that this is not a new issue; it has been going on for many years. We are now seeing the effect in every constituency.

[Dr Marie Tidball (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making an impassioned speech. On the point about cuts to community policing under Conservative and coalition Governments, they are having a direct effect on my constituents. Jane, who lives in Ecclesfield, recently told me of a terrifying experience when multiple electric bikes sped past her on the pavement as she was crossing the road. She told me they were going as fast as cars, with speed limiters disabled. She said that if she had set foot on the pavement a second earlier, she would have been injured or potentially lost her life. Does the hon. Lady agree it is vital to roll out the 13,000 neighbourhood officers by the end of this Parliament, which the Government are working towards, to ensure that the dangerous use of e-bikes is properly tackled, including in my constituency?

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I thank the hon. Member for getting on the record how important it is to have visible community policing. That needs to happen as quickly as possible so that the example she gave of her constituent and the fear she must have felt in that moment are addressed or alleviated by knowing that there is a police officer they can contact who understands the local area.

I also recognise that crimes are becoming more complicated. Evidence can come in many forms, with the rise of things such as Ring doorbells, CCTV and the use of WhatsApp chats being part of an evidence base. Models for dealing with the administrative burden differ from police force to police force.

We also have a real challenge with reporting. My local police force makes operational day-to-day decisions entirely predicated on the reporting data, yet I have called a number of times to speak to the police about an incident that is being widely discussed online only to be told that they have no such record of any incident ever occurring. I recognise the frustration that constituents voice to me that if they report, nothing happens anyway—but police forces are now so reliant on data that I cannot impress enough on people how important it is to report crime or antisocial behaviour when they witness it so that the police have an accurate record of where the hotspots are.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

The traditional bobbies on the beat were about more than just policing crime; they were about reassuring communities. The fact that the statistics show a reduction in crime does not necessarily mean that people feel safe. Does the hon. Member agree?

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I do agree with the hon. Gentleman. I would also reflect that when I was growing up as a teenager, I knew the name of my local police officer. That certainly deterred me from hanging around at the duck pond late at night, because I knew that if he spotted me, my mum would probably hear about it. That kind of community policing, and the understanding of where the issues are, where people are congregating and where the problems are occurring is so important for police officers. I will come on to that later.

Those are vital points of visibility, but they also provide people with a direct route to access support and to report crimes, especially for those who do not want to navigate complex online forms. A constituent recently told me that they called to report a crime and were told that it was over an hour’s waiting time to speak to somebody and to please go online. They were then asked to provide the exact postcode of where they had seen the incident. They could not move forward because they could not provide the postcode and they just gave up reporting it.

Something else that exacerbates the situation in my constituency is poor decision making at a local level, as in the case of the closure of Chichester custody centre. That contributes to staffing pressures because it keeps police officers off the streets and away from the communities they serve. Since its closure in 2018, officers making an arrest have had to undertake a round trip to Worthing, and in some cases, when that custody centre is full, all the way to Crawley. A recent freedom of information request revealed that just last year there were 1,100 such trips. Even without the traffic on the A27, each journey would take police officers away from Chichester for hours at a time. It is a monumental waste of time and effort, particularly when there is a purpose-built, workable facility in Chichester.

I know the police and crime commissioner would like me to stop talking about that, but I will not, because to me it would be a win-win if it put more police back on the streets. It would increase the time that officers spend out on our streets and provide the credible deterrent that we need. That is why I ask the Minister to outline in her response today the Government’s view on mothballed infrastructure, such as our custody centre, which could be brought back into use to improve community policing.

Beyond that, we need a clear commitment from the Government today to a return to what community policing actually means. When the Government made their health hubs announcement, about a health hub in every community, the definition used was somewhere with a population of 50,000. If something like that were to be used in policing, it would be no comfort to communities such as those in Selsey that I spoke of earlier, or in the Witterings or Pagham, who already see resources spread too thinly. Will the Minister please define “neighbourhood” and how that is adjusted for my rural and coastal communities?

[Monica Harding (Esher and Walton) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that when fully warranted neighbourhood police officers are put into civilian jobs to relieve pressure in places such as call centres, they are doing jobs that civilians should do? I support many of the Government’s priorities on policing, but if the police—whose job is to go on the beat—are pulled into different priorities, whatever they may be, that core policing is not available.

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

It is right to say that no police officer signed up to be a frontline service person and spend all their time at a desk; they signed up because they wanted to make a real, tangible difference in their communities. We do not need them to be glued to their desks doing burdensome paperwork, because that is not what they were trained for. We can free up officers’ time by, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) mentioned, establishing an online crime agency, for example. That would relieve local officers of the burden of complex and time-consuming work around highly sophisticated online crime.

Finally, I want to turn to the wider issue of resourcing, which I am sure many Members will discuss. It has been raised with me through various channels, including by the police and crime commissioner in Sussex. We know how we got here, but decisions made by this Government have contributed to the problem. The consolidation of funding pots has left my residents short-changed, for example. The funding model fails to take proper account of the genuinely rural nature of my constituency, which leaves our residents worse off in funding terms than the national average.

The Government have announced new policies aimed at addressing some of the issues we have discussed, but have not provided the resources needed to implement them. The newly introduced respect orders are an example: breaching them constitutes a criminal offence, which will once again draw on police resource. That requires additional funding to support it, but it is yet to be seen. The issues facing community policing are not primarily about a lack of powers. Any police officer will say that the most powerful tool in their armoury is not the one given to them through the law, but the ability to build relationships, understand the uniqueness of the community they serve and have a presence that serves in itself as a deterrent.

[Deirdre Costigan]

Many police officers I have spoken to have made exactly the point that they do not have enough powers to deal with antisocial behaviour in particular, and also shoplifting. The hon. Member was good enough earlier to take responsibility for her party’s role in cutting police numbers across the country. Will she similarly take responsibility for the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which the Lib Dems brought in with the Conservatives? It got rid of antisocial behaviour orders and the power the police had to take action against antisocial behaviour, and it brought in the £200 threshold for shoplifters, which meant that people could get away with nicking stuff left, right and centre.

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I am not confident that the hon. Member’s constituents would appreciate her using her time in this place to talk about things that happened 15 years ago, when Labour has the power of government and the opportunity to do all the things she rightly raises. There are things that need to change, and she now has the opportunity, the keys in her hand and the power to make those changes for her constituents. The police tell me that the issue is about a lack of resource and always being asked to do more with less. I therefore hope that the Minister will grab the bull by the horns and get on top of community policing. We want real community policing for the better.

[Emma Lewell (in the Chair)]

I am setting a time limit of three minutes for speeches.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

In my community in Selsey, which I spoke of earlier, Amazon was recommending cut-price balaclavas recently, which I think speaks to the problem. The Minister mentioned the seizing of e-bikes. It is brilliant that the police now have the power to seize; what they do not have is the power to catch the people on the e-bikes, especially the souped-up ones. A spray is being trialled that the police could use from a far distance, and it creates almost a fingerprint on an e-bike that is being used for antisocial behaviour. It is not being used in Sussex, but I know it is being used in police forces around Sussex. Would the Minister look at whether that is working well for those police forces and then encourage its roll-out in other areas?

[Sarah Jones]

We talked about this briefly in a meeting I was in earlier. We discussed what more we can do and the new technologies that can help us to follow some of these bikes and some of the individuals who are stealing them or using them in an illegal way. I am very interested in that. As the hon. Member said, there are already things being done in some parts of the country.

One big reason for our reform programme is that we have this frustration: if something is being done in some parts of the country, why is it not being done in others? We need more consistency, so that we have good practice everywhere. I want to point out the reforms we have introduced already as a Government. Some £2 billion extra has gone into policing, including to cover the cost of the national insurance rise, which was raised.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I thank Members for contributing to this really important debate. I want to put on the record that we have a local community warden who is employed by Chichester district council. His name is Jimmy Upton. He used to be a police officer; he spent many years being a community police officer. When he retired, he decided that he could still make a fundamental difference to his community, and now he is a community warden doing exactly the thing that he actually went into policing to do: supporting communities. They really are the best of us, and I am very grateful to all of those who work in our police forces to keep us safe.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered Government support for community policing.