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6.19 pm
Ms Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab): Three children have died as a result of knife crime in my constituency in a little over a year—Kodjo Yenga, Jevon Henry and Amro Elbadawi. I have sat with the parents of the two children who were my constituents, as has Ken Livingstone, who made a private visit, not making political capital, unaccompanied by the media and cameras. I have listened to their grief and to what they had to say about young people and the culture and the problems that have led in some instances to gangs and in some instances to conflicts that have got out of hand.
This problem, which has claimed the lives of 27 young people, is monstrously misrepresented as a failure of the Mayor of London and the Government. It has its roots in something wider and deeper, which requires a co-ordinated, strategic and investment approach, on which we must all work and reflect on the gravity of the situation. We should by all means have a political debate about why such things are happening, but we cannot reduce this to slogans, as we have sadly heard again to some extent this afternoon.
It is distressing to have listened to the mayoral debates, to have watched some of the media coverage of the mayoral contest and seen the Mayor of London accused of ignoring, belittling and failing to grasp what has happened to our young people. An example of that was when a London newspaper ran a story in January 2008 saying that Ken Livingstone had announced new measures to deal with youth and knife crime, and then a week ago ran a story saying that he was speaking out for the first time on knife crime. I do not have the articles with me, but that is part of a calculated misrepresentation of the response of the Mayor of London and other agencies to a deeply worrying trend that we must deal with together.
In response to that, we must continue with that non-accidental choice of investing in effective policing on the streets—the 10,000 additional police officers that have been put on the streets of London by the Mayor and the Government since 2000, reversing the long-term trend that my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) described so clearly as having gone into reverse in the 1990s. Our safer neighbourhoods police are doing a superb job, not just in helping to bring down crime, as they have done, but in building up relationships and intelligence about what is happening in the streets, which is so important.
They must continue to use their enforcement powers as effectively as they can and we can constantly refine the strategies for so continuing, as the Flanagan report helps us to do. They must use the new powers that we have given them, including stop and search, which is a vital tool, and stop and account, and they must ensure that never again do we return to that calamitous collapse in confidence and trust between the communities, particularly our minority ethnic communities, and the police that occurred in the 1980s, because that does not work. Whether people choose to bandy around the term political correctness, as they so frequently do on these occasions, let us just remind ourselves that that collapse of trust, confidence and community intelligence leads to more crime and lower detection rates. It fails on its own terms. We must all do better, which includes my local authorities, at integrating services and information
between schools, youth services, housing managers, residents and the police. We must continue rebuilding our youth services, which were shattered, and the £79 million investment by the Mayor will help. It is no good having youth clubs, if they are not open.
Angela Watkinson: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Ms Buck: I will not, because I want to finish my contribution to allow others to participate.
It is no good having youth services, if we do not have skilled outreach workers on the streets. We must ensure that we have not only warm words, but money to increase access to sport, rather than introducing charges that deter people from taking part.
I urge the Minister to laugh in the face of the dismissal by the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) of the
“anti-yobbo programme, parenting classes and all”
and press ahead with preventive work with families. Unusually for me, I support the leader of Westminster City council, Sir Simon Milton, on this issue, who has said that he wants
“to continue important work tackling family breakdown...meeting the desperate need for support to improve their and their children’s chances of living positive and fulfilling lives.”
He clearly disagrees with the dismissal of parenting classes and family work advocated by the hon. Member for Henley.
Crime is coming down, because extra policing works. It has not happened by accident; it has happened because we have invested in the police, youth services and preventive work. Every crime is one too many, but it is critical that we do not fall into the trap set by Conservative Members, who say that nothing works and that nothing can be done. They selectively quote statistics to try to indicate that crime is rising, when crime is falling.
6.26 pm
Justine Greening (Putney) (Con): I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate on an issue of great concern to many of my constituents, who regularly get in touch with me about it. Like many hon. Members, I have been disappointed by the tone of the debate. I am also disappointed that I am again the only Wandsworth MP to contribute to a debate about crime in London, which is a concern not only for my constituents, but across my London borough. My constituents have a number of concerns about crime. They are worried about their children; they are worried when they come home from work late, which I do when we have late votes here; and my constituents who run businesses are concerned about the lack of policing when they open their shops late, which I shall briefly discuss later.
Although we have heard a lot of talk about safer neighbourhood policing—we welcome our local safer neighbourhood teams—beat policing is nothing new. For years, having the police out in the community has been the bedrock of keeping crime down in communities across England, let alone London. The Government have rebranded beat police as safer neighbourhood teams, but community beat police officers are critical whatever name is used to describe specific teams in specific wards. In my part of London, we have to wait
far too long for our safer neighbourhood teams to get their full complement. As I have said, compared with the number of warranted officers in the Wandsworth borough command unit a decade ago, we have fewer officers. We have police community support officers, who play a vital role in tackling crime locally, but they were never meant to be a substitute for the officers whom we have lost in Wandsworth. When my constituents find that their London precept for the Met has quadrupled to fund a lower level of warranted police officers in their local community, they do not think that they have got a good deal.
The officers work extremely hard. I pay tribute to the safer neighbourhood team in Roehampton, which is led by Sergeant Pete Salmon. Given the number of officers, it has done a fantastic job in getting out into the community. They work with the local community in not only places such as the Alton estate and the Lennox estate, but the university of Roehampton, which forms an increasing part of the Roehampton community as it grows. The team’s problem—and one that we as a community have in areas such as Roehampton—is that although it works hard, there is not enough of a police presence alongside it. I am thinking not only of the day time, when many of the safer neighbourhood teams operate; I am thinking particularly of the night time, when there are an increasing number of crime-related issues across my constituency. Safer neighbourhood teams that patrol during the day are simply not there at night, so they cannot address those issues.
I particularly want to talk about local businesses. Like many London constituencies, my constituency, which includes places such as Putney, Roehampton and Southfields, does not contain large companies. The lifeblood of our local economy is small businesses, which are particularly prone to crime. The window of the Putney Tandoori on the Lower Richmond road, for example, has been smashed two or three times. Time and money has to be spent, and the shop has to be shut down, for the windows to be repaired. That has a real impact on the profitability of a business. When businesses on Danebury avenue are constantly being raided, the circumstances do not make for viable businesses; I know that Greggs bakery there has had such problems. If we are to regenerate parts of London—and we certainly want to regenerate Roehampton—clamping down on crime and making sure that people feel safe at any time of the day or night is really important.
My concern about today’s debate is that it has not been on behalf of people; frankly, too much of it has been about point scoring by the Labour Benches. If any of my neighbour MPs in Wandsworth had been here to speak in this debate, they would have been able to make the points that the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) was left to read out. I look forward to finally having a debate on crime in London in which my colleagues—
Mr. Slaughter: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. That is the second time that the hon. Lady has criticised fellow Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Khan), for not being here. She knows full well that he is a Whip and cannot take part in this debate. Her point is very unfair.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Comments about who is or is not in the Chamber are always really a waste of time.
Justine Greening: I am grateful for that, Mr. Deputy Speaker. However, I have to say that issues have been raised about the commitment of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson); apparently, that does not cut both ways. [Interruption.] Well, I could ask where the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) is. What I am saying is that we can all make such points.
Crime is an issue for my constituency. When I conducted a crime survey, more than 3,000 people responded. They largely said that they felt as if their local area was getting less safe. They raised issues of antisocial behaviour, being mugged, their children being mugged and crime on transport. My constituents want those issues to be tackled because they do not feel that they are being so at the moment.
Nor do they feel that the money that they are paying as part of the mayoral precept is giving them any sort of return in terms of policing per pound. In the eight-year period of the London mayoralty, my constituents have paid £66 million more than before into the Met police precept. We have not had any sort of return on the money that we have invested. Frankly, we would rather have spent the money locally and had more police, who can arrest people on our streets, to complement the PCSOs. That has not happened. Most of my constituents want a Mayor who will genuinely try to make the city safer instead of living by headlines. We want a Mayor who will seriously tackle youth crime, about which parents in my constituency worry every day.
I shall finish by citing one statistic. In recent years, about one in 20 secondary-school-aged children who live in Wandsworth reported having been a victim of mugging. That statistic is surely unacceptable to any of us in this House, whichever side we sit on. If we can at least agree on one thing, it is that crime is too high and that we need to bear down on it by spending our money smartly so that communities such as my own can feel safer.
6.34 pm
Mr. Andy Slaughter (Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush) (Lab): I will use the little time that I have to express my disdain at the motivation of the Conservatives in their conduct of this debate. It is a perfect example of calling a debate to obscure and confuse the issue under discussion.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister for laying to rest some of the bogus facts that have been put forward about the undeniable fall in crime of 20 per cent. over the past five years and the record numbers of police—35,000, with a further 1,000 promised. The double standards of the Conservatives show that they are confused and in denial. As my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) said, they claim credit locally for falls in crime but, on a London basis, claim that crime has not fallen. They oppose the investment that has gone in. We just heard the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) say that she does not believe that anything has changed in London and that community policing is exactly what it was previously, but we know that there has been huge investment and that that is connected to what has happened to crime rates.
I am afraid that the hon. Member for Putney and my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham know less about the situation in Hammersmith and Fulham than I do because I am the only MP here from that borough. In reality, the money for the police officers who were put into the ward, as mentioned by my hon. Friend, was taken out of another ward that had even higher crime, the reason being that, under the Labour council, those officers had been paid for by the council, but the Conservatives have moved them into wards that receive Government funding through the new deal for communities or section 106 moneys. Once again, they are using statistics and money to manipulate figures in a way that can disadvantage people locally.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham that if this debate is about reviving a flagging campaign, it certainly has not worked. I would say in defence of the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) that perhaps the reason why he walked out of the Chamber was that he was listening to his own policies being recited by Conservative Front Benchers. When one compares 1,000 extra police officers with being given maps or ending accountable stop and search, I am not surprised that he decided to leave the Chamber.
When people vote in London next Thursday, they will vote on the issue of crime, and they will make a decision primarily about whether Ken Livingstone or the hon. Member for Henley is in a better position to deal with that. They will see on the one hand somebody who has a track record of investing in and reducing crime and on the other somebody who is not fit to take over that role—somebody whose own record does not allow him to take over that role. I refer in particular to the disgraceful episode that is documented on tape, where the hon. Member for Henley agreed to give details of a journalist to someone who became a convicted fraudster, on the basis that he was an old school friend of his, in order to allow that journalist to be beaten up. Somebody who is prepared to do that— [ Interruption. ] I can quote the details if hon. Members want. The only things in that conversation—
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Gentleman has made a very serious charge. [ Interruption. ] Order. In this House, we ought to debate matters in a calm way. I am not sure that the proximity of elections of whatever kind helps to enhance the reputation of the House. It would help if the hon. Gentleman said that he would put those words aside; he has already put them on the record in a way. It does not help when we have the kind of exchanges that have been going on this afternoon.
Mr. Slaughter: I entirely accept what you say, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I do, however, have the transcript of that conversation in front of me, and I am prepared to make it available to any other hon. Members, who can make their own judgment about it. I simply say that I do not believe that the hon. Member for Henley is a person Londoners would trust to run policing because of his own personal record as dictated in that phone conversation.
6.38 pm
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con):
I shall be very brief and not go down the route taken by the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush
(Mr. Slaughter). I think that the tetchiness that we have seen from Labour Members indicates that a raw nerve has been struck and that our points have hit home.
I do not seek to talk London down or to denigrate good work that is done in London. However, I want to know, as do all of us who have constituents in London, how we can make things better and why, against this background, London’s great competitor city of New York has done better at dealing with crime than we have and is now safer than London. I have two key points to make on that.
First, I went to New York recently and spoke to a precinct captain in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn—a tough area. He made the point that the political commitment of Mayor Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg was a key factor in giving the drive necessary to support police officers and the community as a whole in tackling crime.
Secondly, the specific technical advantages of the CompStat system and crime mapping had given the police and the community the material that they needed to work together to tackle crime in one of the hardest parts of New York. I am sorry that that proposal from my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) has been so airily dismissed by Labour Members. London deserves better than that. It is a serious proposal, accepted by serious people tackling crime in another city. I would have hoped that we were broad-minded enough to work together and take that on board. I would have thought that we all wanted to do justice to the tackling of crime in this city in such a constructive spirit. I am sorry that that has not always been achieved in this debate.
6.40 pm
James Brokenshire (Hornchurch) (Con): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), who made an important point in his comparison of London and New York.
I join other hon. Members in paying tribute to the work of all police officers in the capital in their daily fight against crime. The Metropolitan police, the City of London police and the British Transport police all work hard on our behalf to secure the protection of everyone who lives and works in the capital. It is right that we should recognise their service, commitment and dedication to duty. But the inescapable fact highlighted by the debate is that the Labour Mayor and the Labour Government are letting London down on crime. Violence against the person is up, with over 3,300 crimes committed each week. Drug offences, with their links to organised crime and gang violence, have increased by an astonishing 200 per cent. since the Mayor came to office, and nearly half of Londoners say that they simply do not feel safe in their communities at night. If that is a measure of success it shows just how out of touch the Government and the Mayor are with reality and with real Londoners.
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