It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner). Like him, I want to concentrate on levels of crime. In my constituency of Coventry North East, draconian cuts to police budgets have had a terrible impact on local communities. Although I welcome the fact that the Government now seem alert to the damage they have caused, my Opposition colleagues and I have been warning for years about the problems their policies create, yet all our warnings have fallen on deaf ears. To listen to the Government over the past few weeks, we could be forgiven for thinking that the problems are new and have emerged only in the past 12 months. However, when this Government took over in 2010 and started imposing their austerity measures on communities across the country, crime, particularly violent crime, also began to rise. On this side of the House, we have always understood the reasons for that, and have always been committed to investing not only in the police service but in all the ancillary support and community services needed to give young people and others the opportunities they lack, and to give offenders the support they need to prevent them from reoffending.
The real question my constituents are now asking is why they should trust the Government to tackle crime and violent crime when it has skyrocketed on their watch. In the west midlands, we have one of the highest rates of violent crime, homicide and sexual crime in the country, with rates of violent crime rising by more than a third in the past 12 months. In addition, we have the third highest rate of knife crime in the whole of England and Wales. In Coventry over the past 12 months, children’s
lives have been shortened because of knife crime, police officers have been severely injured, and the communities are slowly losing faith in the ability of the police to respond to their needs. This has all happened on the Tory Government’s watch, and it is questionable to think that this Tory Government can ever put it right.
As a result of the Government’s abject failure to tackle crime and their ideological refusal to invest in our public services, the people of Coventry simply do not trust the Government to deliver. The Conservative party is no longer the party of law and order; it is the party of crime and disorder, and the people of Coventry have no faith in its ability to reverse the rise in violent crime seen on too many of the streets on which our friends and families live.
References have been made in this debate to tougher penalties for causing death by dangerous driving, promised in the last Parliament. I myself have asked questions about this after two little boys in my constituency were killed by a speeding driver high on drugs who received a paltry sentence for his crime. I share the concern that these measures have not been included in the Queen’s Speech.
This Government have an appalling record on crime, and however hard they might try with the measures in this Queen’s Speech, my constituents in Coventry will not forget about the damage that they have caused.
5.22 pm