Police and Justice Bill

This important issue has not received the airtime that it deserves. I shall confine my contribution to police structures. The Bill generally is a missed opportunity and will do nothing to tackle the underlying issue—the scourge of crime and disorder. The Prime Minister, we are told, is always looking for actions that will be his legacy. In the wake of the removal of the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) from the post of Home Secretary, one could have been to listen to the massive opposition of people throughout the country to these ill thought-out proposals and to tackle the last bastion of restrictive practices, sclerotic working practices, bureaucracy, inefficiency and buck-passing. I am not speaking about ordinary policemen and women. Under the Bill, we are moving, although the Government would no doubt deny it, towards a national police force, entrenching central control by the Home Secretary and the Home Office and reducing local accountability, not least by changing the role and responsibilities of members of police authorities. Some of the proposals in the Bill begin to infringe on operational police matters. Through the Bill, we are embedding the general concept that senior police officers should be accountable upwards from their local area to the Home Office, not accountable downwards to residents, taxpayers, or even Members of Parliament and local elected councillors. We have strategic plans, police performance assessments, national policing plans, frameworks, the national policing improvement agency and so on. They are all part of a centralised, top-down, tick-box culture. The views of long-suffering residents are largely irrelevant. More importantly, the proposed reforms will have no discernible effect on the reduction of crime. Nothing so perfectly sums that up than the obdurate disdain for the views of local people that we have seen from the Government over the past six months. In the teeth of opposition from hon. Members in all parts of the House, not least hon. Members from north Wales and other Labour Members, the forced police amalgamation plans are unwanted and unworkable and are being foisted on local authorities by the departed right hon. Member for Norwich, South. I pay tribute to Cambridgeshire and Suffolk police authorities for refusing to be bullied into a so-called voluntary amalgamation. I commend to the House the views of Councillor Ian Bates, the leader of Huntingdonshire district council in Cambridgeshire, who challenged the Home Office unilaterally to submit its proposals for Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk to a plebiscite of local people, to gauge whether the Government have a mandate to wreck the police service in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. Like the councillor, I believe that the Government’s plans are hasty, intellectually incoherent, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) said, and flawed. Councillor Bates asked some pertinent questions of the Home Office, which bear repetition. He pointed out that the amalgamations will detract from the ongoing operational improvements that we have seen in Cambridgeshire, such as Operation Harrier, a major drugs operation in Peterborough three years ago. The amalgamations will have a major impact on operational and financial risk. They will undermine the concept of neighbourhood policing. It is interesting that the Minister fought his own successful by-election campaign in Hodge Hill on neighbourhood policing and other policing issues, yet there is a dichotomy between neighbourhood policing and the drive towards regional government and regional policing, which he must know is motivating many of his hon. Friends to oppose the proposals. As I said earlier, morale is a major issue. Cambridgeshire could be construed as a failing authority, but we are through the worst, things are improving and the force has the strong leadership of Chief Constable Julie Spence. Yet all the senior officers in the three counties are now engaged in a game of musical chairs to try and get the best position. They are, therefore, focusing not on crime, but on new badges, new management suites, new structures and new buildings. Questions remain. Will the Home Office meet all the net costs associated with mergers? I listened to the Minister but I remain unconvinced by the damascene conversion. What will the impact be on my constituents’ council tax bills? Will democratic and lay justice representation be the same in Cambridgeshire as in Norfolk and Suffolk, under the proposals? Will the Home Office grant remain the same to fund more police, community support officers and other specialist police operational needs, in 2007 and in 2008? We know that the Government are obsessed with change, reform and altering structures. There will inevitably be consultancy costs for the amalgamations and reorganisations. Who will pay them? I do not want the taxpayers in the Peterborough constituency to pay for the Government’s administrative folly. I fear that the Bill focuses on structures and ignores people’s everyday experience of crime and disorder. Last week I visited South Bretton, part of the Peterborough Development Corporation development in the west of my constituency, where residents were plagued by youth crime and appalling antisocial behaviour. They were miserable about that and about the response from the police. I am taking the matter up with the chief constable. One lady who works on the night shift in a local factory told me in tears that she fears coming home from her shift. She knows she will not sleep because she is worried about criminal damage, harassment and youth crime. Is that any way to live? What will be the outcome of the amalgamations? Will decent tax-paying people see a reduction in crime? Yes, we have action areas, a prolific and priority offender strategy, a joint working party locally, a safer schools partnership and a local respect action plan, and goodness me, there is a respect academy in the pipeline.