Fighting Crime (Public Engagement)

Let us hope that the case discussed by my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) is resolved satisfactorily. I am sure that any district judge would be appalled if they made an injunction with an arrest order which was regularly breached without being brought back before them so that they could deal with the case appropriately. During the parliamentary recess, I spent time with Thames Valley police as part of the police parliamentary scheme. Colleagues may know that it is analogous to the armed forces parliamentary scheme. Members spend 20 days with a police force and see different aspects of how the police work. For me, the experience highlighted the complexity of policing in the 21st century and the considerable professionalism of Thames Valley police. I have now been a Member for 25 years and know that the only police officers most Members get to meet are the chief constable and area commander. The Thames Valley chief constable usually asks us to exhort Ministers to deal with the outflow of police officers from Thames Valley to the Met, and our area commanders always want to tell us—probably with good justification—that everything is okay on our patch. The police parliamentary scheme provides the opportunity for Members to talk to other officers, police constables and sergeants and gives them the opportunity to talk to us. One spends some days with a specialist department and others on beat patrol on early and late shifts. I did mine at Cowley police station in Oxford. It is worth while sharing with the House my impressions from my 20-day experience. First, it struck me that far too many people caught up in the criminal justice system should be treated by the NHS as mental health patients. If I have the misfortune to break my leg in the street, I will be taken immediately to a local hospital with an accident and emergency department where I will be treated unconditionally by the NHS. However, if I were to go out into the street and behave abnormally because of mental health problems, it appears that my admittance into NHS mental health treatment would be entirely conditional on whether the relevant mental health trust decided to treat me. Let me give one practical example. On one of the early shifts that I joined at Cowley police station, there was a young female overseas student who was threatening to commit suicide. Obviously, she was in a very emotional and distressed state and needed professional support. The local mental health trust refused to help her. As a consequence, the police were obliged to take her to a place of safety—which, in reality, meant the cells at St. Aldate's in Oxford. A police officer had to be taken out of the shift and spend all day looking after her. Given that the shift comprised just seven police constables for the whole city of Oxford, losing one was not insignificant. Let us think of the situation from the perspective of the young woman: there she was, in a foreign country, very unhappy and seriously contemplating suicide, finding herself—as she would see it—arrested and put in a police cell. That does not seem an appropriate place for her, and nor does looking after her seem an appropriate use of a police officer's time. I am told that the mental health trust refuses to treat anyone who is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but people with mental health problems often also have problems with drink or drugs; I suspect that the two often mutually reinforce each other. It is extraordinary that we have got to a situation in which one part of the NHS decides whether it wants to treat patients. I fully appreciate that resources at mental health trusts are tight, but it would be better if there were a frank discussion about the mental health treatment of the community rather than people being caught up in the criminal justice system simply because the NHS cannot cope. That brings me to alcohol and drug abuse. A large amount of police officers' time seems to be spent on dealing with people who are committing criminal acts in order to find the money to meet a dependency on drugs or alcohol, whether it is the heroin addict who needs £60 a day or the alcoholic stealing a £5 bottle of wine from the Co-op in Jericho. If I had known how much paperwork goes into sorting out the latter, I would have given that person the £5 myself. It took two police officers four hours to do that paperwork, which is crazy. These persistent offenders place disproportionate demands on the police service. I appreciate that there are no easy answers as regards drug or alcohol treatment and that for it to work there must be a degree of buy-in by the person concerned. However, I am sure that money spent on initiatives such as Smart CJS in Oxfordshire is money well spent. We should be doing more to see how we can improve alcohol and drug treatment, not least because if we could help people to get off drug or alcohol dependency we would substantially reduce the reoffending rate. If all the people with serious mental health problems and substance abuse issues were taken out of local community prisons such as Bullingdon in my constituency, there would be comparatively few left. My impression is that funding of organisations such as Smart CJS is something of a lottery, probably due largely to Whitehall problems of how spending is allocated. Does money spent on drug and alcohol abuse come from the budget of the Department of Health, or is it money that will help to reduce reoffending and should therefore come from the Home Office budget? Wherever it comes from, in terms of the effectiveness of public spending overall it must make sense to try to reduce reoffending. We will not reduce the volume of reoffending by those with drug and alcohol problems unless we help them to resolve those problems. Another thing that struck me during my time on shifts with the police in Cowley was that a small but growing number of persistent young offenders are committing a disproportionately large number of offences. One young teenager in Oxford seemed to commit burglaries in the city on a daily basis. We should bear in mind all the associated stress that is caused by such offences. For people such as that teenager, antisocial behaviour orders and community sentences appear not to be working. I recognise that over the years there was much criticism of detention centres and borstals, but there are few fundamental principles involved. The community is entitled to be protected against persistent offenders irrespective of their age. Persistent young offenders need to understand that continuing to offend will result in punishment, which must ultimately mean curtailment of their liberty. Given that these youngsters have a whole range of other problems at home and elsewhere, it may well be in their interests to put them in an environment where they can get some decent schooling and learn some life skills. The present system of youth justice is not dealing with persistent young offenders, of whom there are a worryingly growing number, on any statistical analysis. I am not sure whether that is dealt with by the youth crime action plan. I also noticed the growing and worrying trend of youth-on-youth violence, which usually involves a gang of youngsters preying on other youngsters for their mobile telephones, cash, watches, and so on. These are really nasty offences, with youngsters often being attacked in public parks where they have gone to play. That is very distressing for the youngsters and for their parents. Increasingly, an element of violence is used in these crimes. They are classified as robberies, so statistically the number of robberies in areas such as Oxford go up, although much of it is youth-on-youth crime. Tragically, for far too many young people, particularly in cities such as Oxford and other urban areas, violence or the fear of violence is becoming an everyday occurrence. That is wholly unacceptable. In Oxford there is the added dimension of groups of local youths attacking foreign students, which can only be very damaging to the reputation of Oxford as a place of learning and to Britain's reputation abroad. Such crimes are difficult to detect. Even if the police react immediately to allegations of robbery, by the time they get to the park or street concerned, those involved will have run off. I would have thought that neighbourhood action groups, schools, communities and local police working together would have an interest in identifying ringleaders and making it clear that such behaviour will not be tolerated. If I had not seen the paperwork that the police have to deal with, I would not have believed it. I am no stranger to the criminal justice system: like my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright), I began my practice at the Bar, some 35 years ago on the midland and Oxford circuit, both prosecuting and defending. We have got ourselves into an Alice in Wonderland situation where police officers, particularly beat officers, feel under pressure to meet certain targets, but to do so they need to spend a disproportionate amount of time completing paperwork. In this target-driven culture, issuing a fixed penalty ticket for antisocial behaviour in Bonn square, in the centre of Oxford, gives a police officer as many points as detecting and making a successful arrest of someone who has committed an offence such as grievous bodily harm. An offence that almost certainly would be taken into consideration involves as much paperwork as one that would be the subject of a contested case in the Crown court. All sense of proportion seems to have gone out of the window. There is a great risk of looking at the years of one's youth through somewhat rose-tinted spectacles, but my recollection is that in the days when Thames Valley police officers prosecuted cases in the magistrates court those courts were run efficiently, and the prosecution quite rightly secured a significant number of convictions without an ever-increasing mountain of paperwork. It is difficult to find anyone who can explain how this collective insanity started, or what public mischief it was meant to tackle, but I cannot believe that any objective observer thinks that it has improved the efficiency or the effectiveness of the police. I hope that on day one of any new Administration it will be possible for an incoming Home Secretary to announce the setting up of an inquiry under the leadership of someone such as Lord Stevens on how seriously to reduce police paperwork.