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11.2 am
Mr. Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey): I am very happy to follow the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) and I will return later to her central point--the need for affordable housing in London for people in the public service. I share her view on that absolutely, and we need to go much further in public policy.
Since before I was elected, I have campaigned for London to have a democratic police authority, so it gives me pleasure to think that this is the last of these debates when the Home Secretary is the police authority and that next month there will be a transfer of power to the Greater London Authority. I pay tribute to the Government for implementing that commitment.
One of the reasons why that is important is that it is nonsense to have a system whereby the police authority is not present for the whole of the annual debate on policing. I know how often the Home Secretary is at the Dispatch Box, because I am normally here when he is, but the move to an accountable authority is welcome. In passing, I thank those in the Home Office who have supported Home Secretaries past and present, and look forward to working with the Mayor, the GLA and the police authority in the months ahead.
The Met police have wanted an accountable police authority for many years. At last, London will have a voice that is properly independent of Government and will put the case to Government. The failure in London has been the inability to speak independently to the Home Secretary and the Government with the same effectiveness as elsewhere in the country.
I thank those who were doing Met work outside the Greater London Authority boundaries before the handover to the three county forces. Again, that was a completely logical move and it is right for Surrey, Hertfordshire and Essex to do their own policing. I am glad that the change has taken place.
I join the Home Secretary in paying tribute to Sir Paul Condon for his work as Commissioner. He bemoaned the fact that, as the longest-serving Commissioner of the previous century, he lost 2,000 police officers--not, I might say, through any lack of effort on his part. He certainly kept up the pressure on Government to ensure that London was given the resources that it needed. We welcome his successor equally strongly. He has started well, has the confidence of his force and is ensuring, as he said at the Press Gallery lunch yesterday, that the voice of London and its policing needs will not go unheard.
In the year since we last had this debate, I have had exceptional reasons to be thankful to the Met police. As the Minister knows, for the first time in my life I suddenly found that I needed police protection in the way that normally only people such as Home Secretaries need it. Following the three or four months when the Met police accompanied me pretty well everywhere, looked after my home and guaranteed my security, I can testify to their competence, professionalism and dedication.
That experience was a very useful way of catching up with the issues of concern to special branch and others in the police and gave me the opportunity to check my presumptions about them. I had people with me 24 hours a day who were competent to talk about those matters. We owe an especial obligation in London to special branch officers, who play a background role but do it with thorough professionalism. I am personally very grateful to them.
The backdrop to today's debate is, first, the amount of crime in London and, secondly, whether we have the resources to deal with it. On the first, the sad reality is that crime figures in Europe's largest capital are still going up. Last year, we reached for the first time the sad figure of 1 million recorded crimes. That is just about a fifth of the recorded crimes in the country as a whole. That is not a trend with which any of us can be happy.
Crime is not the police's but society's fault. Unless we prevent and deter it, we have a hopeless task. We must also note that violent crime is the area about which people are rightly most concerned. The Home Secretary was right to say that stop and search is important in dealing with that. That is why I asked about the clear-up rate for murders. There was an inspectorate report in January about how murders and serious crimes have been dealt with in the Met. They have not been given the resources in the past that such crimes in other areas have got, probably because there are more of them, so they get downgraded.
I cannot stress too strongly that when murders are committed in London, as they are only too often, it is vital that they are given the necessary resources. Killings--murders or manslaughters--must be perceived to be as important here as they are in the rest of the country. More police are needed in big cities because there are higher rates of violent crime.
I have never moved from the position that, if the police have to put more officers in certain areas or communities in London because certain crimes are more common there than elsewhere, they must have our support in doing that. They must not be held back. A member of one of the neighbourhood consultative groups in my constituency, now a pensioner, whom I respect highly, complained that he got the impression that often the media, by hyping up particular issues, prevent the police from getting involved.
My constituent chose the example of the arrest of Neville Lawrence. That was a wrong stop, but the way in which it was reported carried the danger of making the police feel unable to go about their job. We must not be overly sensitive. The police must be able to operate without fear or favour. If people get stopped, so be it, provided that the way in which that is done is properly monitored and managed.
The other big issue is the fall in police numbers, which fell significantly in the last five years of the Conservative Government. During Sir Paul Condon's tenure, they have gone down by about 2,000. The Commissioner has made
it clear that the numbers have sunk below a level that is acceptable and that allows him to do his job properly, and they are still going down.The decrease has had an effect throughout London. Over the past eight years, the number of officers in each of Islington's police stations has gone down: in Holloway the number has decreased from 260 to 226 and in Islington it has gone down from 287 to 284. The same is true of the borough in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) and other outer London boroughs such as Bromley. In my borough, the number has decreased from 900 in 1990 to 851 in 1999.
What do we do about that? Yesterday, the Commissioner said that there are three issues to be tackled: bad morale, bad perception and bad pay. The last issue is important in dealing with the others, so the Home Secretary's remarks today are welcome. Rightly, he speedily accepted the arbitration proposal, and it will make a significant difference although the Commissioner said that it will not be the answer. We have to make sure that police pay in London is kept at the level necessary for recruitment.
That brings me to the point made by the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North. Whatever one-off pay increase we make, we will be unable to get public sector workers to stay in London if the city does not have a decent quantity of affordable housing for them. That is an absolute priority. The public policy position is that 25 per cent. of development in inner London boroughs, and certainly in constituencies such as mine, should be affordable housing, but I think that the proportion should be 50 per cent.
If the three main parties were to reach a consensus on that and were able to persuade the Government and the Greater London Authority of that view, we would begin to be able to persuade people who are making large profits by building homes--often second or third homes--for people on large incomes that meeting demand is not as important as meeting need. We cannot run a capital city unless we have a police service and the civilians to support it. Many of those people have to work anti-social hours at weekends and at night; they have to get in very early before public transport is running and they have to stay late.
One of last year's amusing episodes was when the Home Secretary miscounted extra police numbers and his Bournemouth conference speech had to be revised. In the process, he happened to leave out all the people being trained at Hendon. I am not sure who did the tallying up and was responsible for Hendon being discounted, but it was rediscovered. The only problem is that Hendon is not full of police trainees; there are many spaces because it is not getting enough recruits.
I have a proposal that I want Ministers seriously to consider, although I realise that the responsibility will move, in part, to the Metropolitan Police Authority. They should do as the armed services and industry have done and give young people a financial incentive to join by sponsoring them during their post-16 training in A-levels or City and Guilds and then at college or university. That could be done through public money or through the private sector. In return, those young people would be
required to stay in the service for, say, 10 years. Such sponsorship persuaded many people to go into the services and into big firms such as ICI.We need to consider ways of recruiting not just more people, but people of the quality that the Met needs. Policing needs people with good A-levels and degrees and those without. No academic background should disqualify someone from having as successful a career in the Met or another police service as they would have anywhere else. The Met does not consist of a few elite managers who are academic and who have done degrees and everyone else who is straight out of school with no qualifications. It needs a mix, and it needs to offer in-service training. Londoners want that because, at the moment, every London council tax payer is paying more for less: the council tax and the precept go up and the number of police goes down. Given the crime figures, that does not reassure people.
Over the past year the Met has done many things very well, such as policing the millennium, although it was not reimbursed for the cost of that. It managed the May day demonstration well, although there were criticisms. It did not handle the Chinese President's visit well, and we have had an explanation for that, but I hope that in future there will not be behind-the-hand briefings from Government Departments which mean that people's civil liberties are not respected. However, the Met has responded well to the Macpherson report on the Lawrence inquiry.
Many police officers were unhappy about the previous Commissioner's policy on tenure, which meant that they were moved around a lot. The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North made a similar point about a senior police officer. We understand the dilemma because there is a career structure for police officers, but that tenure policy is not good for community policing. The hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock), whose constituency is next to mine and has the same problems, knows that an area gets a community police officer who is well respected and manages their local team well, and then suddenly they are moved.
Many officers were told that they could do a particular job, in firearms, special branch or CID, for five years and then they would have to do something completely different for which they were not skilled. We need a career structure that makes use of expertise but takes account of the fact that the police are a public service for individual communities, so people cannot be moved around without consideration.
I turn now to my own patch. Southwark has suffered from the reduction in numbers, which is the unhappy and unpopular consequence of police stations having their hours cut, and being rationalised and closed. The test of that policy will be whether people get more responsive policing and more police on the ground. Our local police know that people are watching them like hawks to ensure that we do not lose local police stations, which does not help to reassure the public, and that the police respond speedily enough.
We must ensure that police attention continues to be focused on the area. There was a murder in Rotherhithe, which was then heavily policed, but the pressure on the police means that they may have to move on and the problems will reappear. The police, with the help of the public, must reassure every part of the community in Greater London.
I pay tribute to the police because their comments on asylum seekers, refugees and the people begging on our streets have been much more sensitive and intelligent than those of the tabloids and the rest of the press. My constituency has many refugees and asylum seekers, and there are hundreds in one building. The police said that if they had put some 700 male police officers aged between 18 and 30 into one place, left them without work and without anything to do all day and given them £40 a week or nothing at all, there would have been far more trouble than there has been from the asylum seekers who are waiting for their cases to be dealt with.
Of course there are problems, but we must realise that the police and the community can deal with them. London has had supportive policing and very little trouble from asylum seekers or refugees. There has been little trouble from beggars, although the police have had to deal with spates of aggressive begging, particularly in the middle of London. Westminster police indicated that most of those beggars do not come from outside the UK.
As Parliament loses control of the Met to the Greater London Authority, we wish them well. Police officers have our support because they do a very difficult job extremely well. We want more of them, and we want people to believe that it is a good career because the capital is still under-policed. London needs to be better policed by more officers if Londoners' wishes are to be met in the year ahead.
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