Rural Crime and Public Services — House of Commons, 2018-06-06
Topic: Law and Crime
James Roger Cartlidge (Conservative, Centre-right): I am unaccustomed to being called this early in a debate; it is something of an inversion of the norm First, I want to respond to the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant), as it takes a brass neck for the SNP Front-Bench spokesman to complain about the over-centralisation of this country when it is a system that massively benefits his constituents, and in particular his party as it does not have to make the tough decisions we face in other parts of the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) was absolutely right: my constituents are net contributors, whereas those of the hon. Member for Glenrothes are net recipients. That is a great unfairness, and I would prefer it if his party recognised that now and again. But I am going to move on to the subject in hand As an MP for a rural constituency, I am particularly concerned about this subject and I welcome the fact that Her Majesty’s Opposition have tabled this motion. I last spoke on the subject in the final stages of the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Bill—the Bill of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)—on Friday 27 April. I said that I was concerned that we seemed to be living in more violent times, and that comment then unexpectedly appeared all over the local radio and newspapers because many of my constituents share that sense This debate is not about the sort of stats we bandy across the House in political fashion; this is about the experience of recent months in South Suffolk, where we have unquestionably had a spate of serious incidents. In the last week in Sudbury, the main town in my constituency, there was a very violent rape, for which I am glad to say there has been an arrest of an individual today by the police in Sudbury. I pay tribute to them, because at the same time as they have been investigating that crime, police in our part of the world have been focused on a very serious murder in Ipswich, of a 17-year-old, which was raised by my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) at Prime Minister’s questions today. The sense of greater violence is therefore impossible to escape, and is, I am afraid, borne out by the figures for Suffolk: there has been a 29% increase in violent crime in Suffolk in the year to September 2017 The context of this, however, is an overall fall in recorded crime in the independent crime survey for England and Wales of 38% since 2010. That is a very large decrease in overall crime, and it has occurred at a time when, because of the funding pressures we were under—because of the deficit we inherited—we have seen significant reductions in police numbers; I would be the first to accept that But this is the thing: if we have seen such a fall in crime when police numbers have been falling, it cannot simply be the case that police numbers are the sole determinant of the level of crime. This spike in violence, which has been seen in other parts of the country too, is a relatively recent phenomenon, and I want us to move away from these political brickbats about how many police stations have been closed—I should point out that some 400 police stations were closed between 1997 and 2007. Instead, we should try to understand why we are seeing this change. I want to try to understand some of those causal factors in my brief remarks.