Fighting Crime (Public Engagement)

Absolutely. Police officers and PCSOs visibly out and about together is reassuring and good news. However, it is frustrating for local communities if the sworn officer gets taken away to do other things. For a while, local residents see neighbourhood police officers, but then they disappear. That is confusing. Neighbourhood police officers should be ring-fenced for that activity and not extracted for other purposes. I am worried about whether local councillors and local people have sufficiently bought in to neighbourhood action groups. We have heard much about the involvement of local people in electing those who might be responsible for holding chief constables and others to account. However, we now have neighbourhood action groups, and I visited those in my constituency, as I am sure other hon. Members have done in their constituencies. They work well and bring all the statutory agencies together. However, although there were some good and dedicated volunteers and members of the local community, there were not as many as I had hoped, and not enough to make one feel that it was a genuine neighbourhood body. Part of the problem is that neighbourhood policing areas have to cover quite large areas, by definition. For example, one neighbourhood policing area in Banbury covers three wards of the town. The reality, however, is that councillors and local residents tend to think of neighbourhoods as much smaller areas. Indeed, the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East said that the key was for people to be neighbours to one another. However, I am quite sure that people in Leicester do not consider their neighbourhood to be the equivalent of three wards of the city. They consider their neighbourhood to be, if I may use a parliamentary term, their local polling district equivalent or part of their housing estate at most. The neighbourhood action group areas are perhaps too large. If neighbourhood action groups are to mean more than the local representation of local statutory agencies, they will need to engage a lot more local people in their running. That leads me to my final point, which is about partnerships more broadly. I can see obvious strengths in partnerships. Many issues, such as alcohol and drug dependency, to which I have already referred, involve a number of different Departments and agencies. The work done by the safer community partnership in Oxfordshire, in bringing together the county council, district councils, the Thames Valley police and a number of agencies, is impressive and worth while. However, I have two concerns about partnerships. The first is a somewhat cynical, world-weary concern that Whitehall can use them as a device to blur which Department is responsible for the cost of delivering various public services. If we are not careful, the default position is for such costs to fall on local authorities. Partnerships then become a way for central Government to shift financial burdens on to local government and local taxpayers, but without any compensating mechanisms. I am also not sure that there is sufficient political buy-in to all partnership arrangements. In other words, I am not convinced that local councillors and local people are always fully aware of all the partnership arrangements. If I had not spent a day with the Oxford safer community partnership, I would have known little of its workings, and I suspect that the same goes for other parliamentary colleagues. My neighbour, the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris), might be more up to speed than me, but there can be a tendency for such initiatives to become officer-led. We are therefore talking about ““touch on the tiller”” stuff, to do with how we keep local councillors and local people briefed and involved in what is happening in such partnerships. I found my experience with the Thames Valley police very valuable, however, as it brought to my awareness certain things that I did not expect I would see. My last point—we still have plenty of time, although I promise my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) that it really will be my last point—is about hearing from the police. The Police Federation and police officers generally are quite shy about approaching Members of Parliament if they have concerns. They come and tell us about police pay, which is understandable, but they feel constrained about talking to us about operational issues, even though the police parliamentary scheme has given them licence to do that. Police officers talk to the Police Federation, but the only time that the Police Federation comes and talks to colleagues is to discuss pay and rations. However, there are all sorts of useful operational issues about which the Police Federation can talk to Members of Parliament. I hope that it will do so more, because policing is an incredibly important part of all our constituents' lives. Members of Parliament want it to work successfully and we are all supportive of our local police forces, but we cannot help to sort things out if we do not know when there is a problem. I therefore hope that more police officers will, through the Police Federation, come and talk to Members of Parliament about their concerns.