Crime and Policing

I am grateful for the opportunity to address the House. I hope that I shall not use my full allocation of time because I know that several hon. Members still wish to play their part in this wide-ranging debate. The shadow Secretary of State went through the gamut of policy in general, talking about not only policing but wider issues of criminal justice, and I shall be as faithful as possible to the parameters that he set in his opening speech. The preceding speech made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) was revealing in the sense that he said that the Labour party learned a lot about what people wanted during the '80s and '90s. However, it seems to me that Labour learned a lot about what tabloid headlines demanded rather than about what was happening on the ground. The Labour Government's increasing distance from the reality of people's lives was reflected by their culture of legislative incontinence and increasingly centralised control that must have made police officers—from chief constables down to those at ground level—feel that at times they were being made to revolve on the spot. The consequences of the lack of clarity—the ever-changing parameters set for the police—were manifold. I shall concentrate on several that were worrying. The first casualty of the previous Government's obsession with centralism and targets was trust in the ability of constables and more senior police officers to take decisions—decisions on the priorities that they wanted to set in their localities, on the appropriate responses to complaints of crime, and on whether a suspect should be charged. One of the most fundamental powers available to the police was rudely taken away from them, and I am delighted that the new Government will restore in part that discretion to the police. I take this opportunity to agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) in urging the Government to go further and to restore the power of charging completely to police officers. Let me tell the House why I believe that. In recent years, there has been an increasing obsession with the need for the investigating authority to get everything precisely in order before the decision to charge. That fad—that obsession—has led to debates in this House, before the election and since, and in the media about detention periods prior to charge. We have hotly debated the subject, here and elsewhere, with wildly and dramatically conflicting views expressed about civil liberties. I am left wondering why we have ended up in that position. Why is there that obsession with the need to delay everything before the decision to charge? Time and again, when police officers made the early decision to charge, it provided the key incentive to the investigating authority to get on with the job of investigating the case thoroughly, preparing it for trial and making sure that victims and witnesses were not kept waiting. Then, the decision to charge was removed to the Crown Prosecution Service. The advice before charge system involves an often experienced police officer having to telephone a CPS lawyer, probably located some distance from the police station, and reinvent the wheel by explaining everything to that lawyer, only to be told that the lawyer was not seized of all the necessary information and the key decision to charge would have to be put off. That has led to real frustration, not only on the part of police officers, but also, and crucially, on the part of witnesses who, having made their statements, have been asked to wait for months—sometimes for more than a year—before giving evidence. What effect does that have, first, on the ability of the witness to remember events clearly and, secondly, their enthusiasm to come to court? Those are fundamental problems that I saw at first hand, time and again, during my years in practice in the Crown court. Another consequence was the culture of clear-ups—the driver whereby the police had to resolve unsolved crimes. It did not seem to matter what the crime was; what was important was getting that clear-up. The outcome was essential. It did not matter if the crime was serious; as long as the box was ticked and it was moved off the system, everything was okay. That is not a reflection of public opinion or public confidence, or of a Government who are learning the lessons and listening to people. It is a complete negation of what the public interest is and what the public really want.