Crime

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, and congratulate her on securing this debate. Our association goes all the way back to the 1970s, when I was a very young and, no doubt, rather callow divisional commander in Cambridge and she was already flying high a large flag on the local authority scene in Cambridge. It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. I endorse what she said about Crimestoppers. I have long admired what it does and the way it achieves results. I declare an interest because, as many of your Lordships know, I served in all ranks in the police up to 1997. We face an acute problem. Despite government reassurances that volume crime is falling—as indeed it is, for which the police and the Home Office can take credit—public confidence remains stubbornly and understandably low. Only 42 per cent of people believe that the system is effective in bringing criminals to justice; only 40 per cent believe that it deals with cases promptly and efficiently; and, even worse, only 34 per cent believe that it meets the needs of victims. More than half of criminals apprehended by the police do not go to court; most of them are dealt with by caution, on-the-spot fine or cannabis warning. This growth in non-court dispositions has led a number of senior police officers to criticise the Home Office’s preoccupation with targets to increase what are termed ““offences brought to justice””. They say that this preoccupation with targets has led to a police culture of neglect of the serious. On 13 November 2007, in a front-page article in the Times, Richard Ford reported at length about this. He quoted a senior officer who said that the target-driven culture was diverting the police from investigating more serious crime and was causing a concentration on minor, easy-to-detect offences. The officer called for an improvement in the way in which the police deal with violent and sexual attacks, as well he might, because the number of under-18s committing violent crime has risen by 37 per cent in only three years and the number of those in that age group committing robbery has increased yet further, by 43 per cent. In last Wednesday’s Question Time in your Lordships’ House, I asked the Minister whether he anticipated that the police’s task would diminish in the future. He did not answer that question, but he might have been aware of the Cabinet Office briefings to which I referred on 7 June last year in the last major debate on policing in your Lordships’ House. Those briefings forecast significant future trends that would affect the police, including a growth in low-aspiration cultures, as they put it, which I take to mean an extension of the underclass; continuing high reoffending rates; crime becoming more global and therefore more difficult to combat; and no real-terms rise in police budgets. That debate was seminal and raised fundamental questions about the shape and nature of policing in the 21st century. Nine months later, however, we still await answers. In your Lordships’ House last week, the Minister was thin on detail when replying to questions on policing, but he was no doubt working to an impossibly tight Home Office brief to avoid detailed comment while further discussions took place and further responses were considered. We have been in the dark for months. First we waited for the Flanagan interim report and then we waited for the Flanagan final report. Now we are asked to wait for the Green Paper on policing that was due this January. We are still waiting. Sir Ronnie’s final report is tightly focused. The Home Office terms of reference to which he had to work were concerned with only three major issues: reducing bureaucracy to free up officer time; embedding neighbourhood policing; and better resource management. All those are important, but there was no focus at all on altogether more fundamental issues that should necessarily have been addressed before any detail was considered. There was nothing at all about level 2 crime, which is the category that most affects the general public; nothing about the growing influence of central government; little about the place of local authorities and police authorities in accountability; nothing about the essential issue of structure, which has already been referred to in this debate; and nothing about dealing with major issues and events. That list is not exhaustive—I could go on—but so far as we have been allowed to judge progress to date, I see only a continuation of Home Office micromanagement. One has only to turn to the glossary in Sir Ronnie’s final report and count the organisations, bodies, partnerships, assessment units, programmes and initiatives—I counted 29—that bear down collectively on the service. That is not so much a minefield as an area that should be signposted, ““Danger: Unexploded Bureaucracy””. However, Sir Ronnie did very well with a limited brief, and peeping out from under the skirts of the final report are occasional glimpses of some of the matters that I have identified. These critical issues are vital to the future efficiency and development of a service that for far too long has been subject to far too much interference and far too much constant, small-scale adjustment. Those adjustments have done little to advance the professionalism of the service, while major questions that go to the root of the problem have been ignored. The growth of central government influence and control sits uncomfortably and paradoxically with the stated intention of central government that local involvement should be championed—an intention that seems simultaneously to diminish and sideline the local issue. How can local police divisions, which are now clumsily labelled BCUs, demonstrate real local authority while contributing at the same time to national initiatives and demands? What about the funding model, now that central government contributes so much more than it did even 10 years ago? What real role is envisaged for police authorities, as the police’s task becomes ever more stretched between the requirements for national and international responses on the one hand and local demands on the other? Is there not a case to revisit the question of regional crime squads after the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency or, at a lower level, the question of greater involvement of community and business partnerships, which have already been referred to in this debate, in the work of the police? As the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, said, where are the future leaders of the service to come from? Despite the Minister’s sanguine reassurance last week in this House, many experienced observers of the police scene remain very concerned about recruiting the best and encouraging the development of not only managers but leaders in a service that is urgently seeking a redefined role and direction. Only when those and other questions have been answered should we finally turn to the vexed question of the structure and the shape of the service—in other words, mergers and amalgamations. Form should follow function, not the other way around. I hope that I have said enough to encourage the Minister to recognise that the police task is too complex, too multilayered and three dimensional and too fundamental and integral within society to benefit from further tinkering with peripherals. Those of us with a detailed knowledge of the service and with a concern for its future all hope that the Green Paper—shortly, one hopes, to be published—will demonstrate a new high degree of courage and vision that will set the service confidently on a new path. I close on a point that is important to me, to the general public and to the Minister, given his special responsibilities in the field; namely, the London Olympics 2012. In the light of what I have said today, I ask the Minister to tell us now whether he is confident that the present structure and state of readiness of the police service in England and Wales are resilient enough, robust enough and flexible enough to provide a first-class response to the undoubted additional pressures and challenges that will arise in 2012. Those pressures will fall not only on London but generally throughout the country. I harbour serious doubts about whether we could cope as we stand at present. We have four years to do something not only about the lower-level, volume-crime issues that this debate is primarily concerned with, but about the much more important and obvious challenges that 2012 could bring. Within the bounds of sensible discretion, I hope that the Minister will feel able to help us on this fundamental point, for much will turn on his assessment of that situation.