Police Station Closures: Solihull and West Midlands

Debate between Julian Knight and Jack Dromey

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Julian Knight]

The Government have been pretty clear that police funding has been protected in real terms once local funding is taken into account, and they are investing £1 billion more in policing in 2017-18 than in 2015-16, despite continued pressure on public finances. Labour always likes to insist that someone else will pick up the tab, but if PCCs want the power to help their police forces, they must expect the responsibility that comes with it, including questioning by Members of Parliament.

Mr Jamieson has announced plans to close Solihull police station, leaving my constituency without a single proper police space. The commissioner claims that it is under-utilised, but why should that come as a surprise when he has been paring back our local police services for years?

I strongly believe that for local politicians to be held accountable, the devolution of power must be accompanied by the devolution of responsibility, including financial responsibility. The public elect representatives to take decisions, not simply to shift blame and demand more money from someone else. In 2015, I joined my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) in urging Mr Jamieson to take responsibility for his powers and to raise the funds needed by the West Midlands police, and lobbied Ministers to grant our region an exemption from the usual 2% ceiling on raising the precept.

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman says that police funding was protected. He has just referred to the precept—the precept flexibility raises £9.5 million. The police service needs £22 million to stand still. It is not true, therefore, that police funding has been protected, is it?

--- Later in debate ---

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Hollobone. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

The last Labour Government built neighbourhood policing. We put 17,000 extra police officers and 16,000 police community support officers on the beat. We did so because we took seriously the first duty of any Government: to ensure the safety and security of their citizens. That model of detection and prevention was popular with the public and saw crime fall by 43%. That was slammed into reverse when this Prime Minister was Home Secretary. The number of police has fallen by 20,000 overall, and by 2,000 in the west midlands. Crime is up 14% overall, with gun crime up 15%, serious acquisitive crime up 17% and burglaries up 8%.

The Tories frequently praise the police but then fail to stand up for them in this place. Do they not hear what we hear in our constituencies? I organised a public meeting for local people who were deeply concerned about rising crime, and one woman had spent 66 years—

[Julian Knight]

The hon. Gentleman said that the Tories do not do a lot in this place to try to get the best deal for the police. He and I, and my colleagues, have worked together on this issue for a long time. Does he not recognise that decisions such as these and the way they are taken break the bonds of trust between us?

[Jack Dromey]

The decisions are actually proposals from the chief constable in the first instance—I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is criticising the chief constable—and then they go to the PCC. The simple reality is that our police service in the west midlands faces increasingly impossible pressures because of the cuts that have been made by the hon. Gentleman’s Government, and he has not once stood up and opposed those cuts or voted against them.