Fighting Crime (Public Engagement)

I entirely agree. How appalling it would be if we said ““Let us leave it to the members of the jury. Let them be the people to decide, exercising their discretion at the time. Let us leave everything hanging over this individual for six months until a conclusion is reached.”” That is why the Crown prosecutors must have clarification of what is in the public interest. I am surprised that the Minister does not seem to grasp the point. There are other ways in which people can become involved: through neighbourhood watch schemes, about which we have already heard this afternoon, through participation in community police beat panels, and by holding those responsible for community safety to account. We strongly believe in giving better information to the public through crime mapping, which allows people to assess crime levels in their areas and hold the police to account. In cities all over America, police forces regularly publish information about crimes in their areas: the type of crime, when it took place and where. Anyone can take the information and overlay it on an online map. It is a way of giving people unprecedented information about crimes in their areas and enabling social entrepreneurs, drugs charities and a host of other organisations to pick out the hot spots, see what needs to be done, and transform neighbourhoods. Crime mapping has revolutionised the way in which crimes are fought in American cities, and it could do the same here. We would be able to map a large number of offences at street level for the first time, while being sensitive to issues of victim protection and privacy. I welcome the lead taken by Mayor Boris Johnson on this important innovation in London. I also welcome the Home Office's late conversion to our way of thinking. At the same time as mandating every force to release local crime statistics each month, we would ensure that quarterly beat meetings were held in every neighbourhood. That would give local people an opportunity to assess the preceding three months' crime figures and make the police responsible for taking action. We would cut the bureaucracy and targets to get the police out on to the streets to engage the public day in day out, week in week out. The Government, however, have opted for a much more cumbersome and bureaucratic approach. Their latest supposed new idea is the ““councillor call to action””—an idea so cutting-edge that it first appeared in the White Paper ““Building Communities, Beating Crime””, published in November 2004, which has been languishing on the statute book shelf gathering dust since Royal Assent was given to the Police and Justice Act 2006. It creates a statutory duty for councillors to respond to complaints made to them within a specified time, with the ability to escalate the matter to an overview and scrutiny committee, which can then take written reports and call police officers and other agencies into meetings to explain what they are doing. Given more paperwork, more reports, more police time off the street and less action, it is hardly surprising that when it was debated during proceedings on the Police and Justice Bill, it was considered to be a last-ditch measure. We begin to wonder for whom! Then there is what is described as ““participatory budgeting””, a further bureaucratic process to engage the public in budget-setting and priorities. Described as a key activity in the Government's entertainingly entitled White Paper ““Communities in control: real people, real power””, the national consultation on participatory budgeting was so successful in engaging the public that it received a massive 14 responses from individuals. Yet again, it looks more like ticking the boxes than tackling the problem—mistaking meaningless public-sector posturing for meaningful public engagement. The latest initiative, announced this week, is the creation of neighbourhood crime and justice co-ordinators in what have been described as ““pioneer areas”” in the brave new world that the Government are trying to conquer. The problem is that it is a world entirely of their own making. These council co-ordinators will largely have little more than a public relations role of telling the public about a policing pledge that has largely been implemented by forces in any case—the policing pledge criticised by the TaxPayers Alliance as wasting time and public money on ““stating the blindingly obvious””. It will amount to more publicity and less proactivity. Instead, we need to promote active partnerships on the ground, working within communities. Cutting antisocial behaviour and underage drinking can be achieved by co-ordinated practical steps, such as initiatives like the community alcohol project in St. Neots in Cambridgeshire, bringing together parents, pupils, businesses, police and council trading standards, and by giving councils a much stronger say over licensing and the terms attached to alcohol licences. Rather than focusing on more rules, regulations and procedures, we need to focus on how we can give greater power and authority to communities. Part of this local engagement will come through greater local accountability. We believe that effective policing is neighbourhood policing—the closer to the community, the better. For that reason, we believe it is necessary to reform the governance arrangements for the police force as a whole. Instead of being directed by, and accountable to, the Home Secretary, police forces should be directed by, and accountable to, the communities they serve. We would make each police force accountable to an individual directly elected by the citizens of the police force area. Police commissioners would be responsible for setting the budget, appointing and dismissing the chief constable, setting local priorities, monitoring how well the police perform against local targets and ensuring best value from the local police budget. Chief constables would remain in place, free to make decisions in accordance with their professional judgment and oath, and accountable to the elected commissioner in terms of explaining their decisions and how their force is run. The operational independence of police forces will be strengthened, not weakened, as ministerial micro-management is scaled back. We believe that this governance arrangement with police commissioners working with the local delivery partners of the crime and disorder reduction partnerships provides a much clearer and more effective mechanism for bridging the accountability gap and ensuring that services to fight crime meet the needs of the local community and engage the public.