Policing and Crime — House of Commons, 2020-01-29
Topic: Law and Crime
Joanna Meriel Stevens (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger), and I welcome him to the House. It was an articulate and beautiful speech, and I am sure he will be a very good advocate for his constituents. Many of us in this House support prisoner rehabilitation and the ability of most offenders to turn their lives around, so it is good to have another person join us in that cause This is a timely debate, because yesterday evening I and other Members representing constituencies across south Wales met the chief constable of South Wales police. I pay tribute to South Wales police, who epitomise the best of public service. Since being elected in 2015, I have learned a lot about the nature of the challenges South Wales police face every day in Cardiff Central and across our city. I have had the privilege of spending time with officers and control staff at their headquarters in Bridgend and with officers who patrol Cardiff city centre, seeing and hearing all about policing. Schemes such as "Give a Day to Policing" are excellent, and the continuing dialogue and co-operation of police in Cardiff Central helps me and my constituents a great deal. I thank the police community support officers in my neighbourhood policing team who have provided a lot of support to me and my staff in difficult circumstances, particularly over the past couple of years, to ensure our safety. I really appreciate it All of this has broadened my knowledge and understanding of policing, which had previously centred on trying to get my clients out of police custody as quickly as possible when I was a practising criminal defence solicitor. I now know so much more about what it is like on the other side South Wales police are underfunded, under-resourced and overwhelmed with work. Conservative Members will point to the recently announced money to recruit officers—136 of them for the whole of south Wales—but there is no escaping the fact that this does not get near to reaching the officer numbers we had in 2010 before the decade of austerity and cuts Of course I welcome the money for recruitment this year but, in the context of Cardiff growing faster than any other major UK city outside London, it is not enough. It is not enough for the whole of south Wales, and it is certainly not enough for Cardiff As one of our four UK capital cities, Cardiff hosts more than 400 major civic, political and royal events every year and, on top of a decade of police funding cuts, my constituents are having to find money to contribute to the extra £4 million for the annual cost of policing these events—that is the equivalent of more than 60 police officers. I have repeatedly raised the anomaly of capital city funding with successive Home Office Ministers, Policing Ministers and Wales Office Ministers over the past few years. There is no valid explanation for why Cardiff is discriminated against in this way when it comes to capital city funding, so will the Minister please confirm that he will meet me and my Cardiff constituency neighbours to discuss how this unfair and unequitable situation can be resolved? During each of those 400 events, police officers have to be drawn from around the South Wales area into Cardiff and the city centre, which has a knock-on effect on the ability of the police to do their jobs, and protect people and property across the whole of South Wales That pressure comes on top of the daily pressure of rising crime, particularly violent crime, drug offences and domestic abuse. South Wales police have 30,000 reports of domestic abuse a year, never mind the reports of all the other crimes. In July last year, they had their highest total number of calls in a month in their history. As the chief constable was telling us yesterday, in the past year the force has seen an increase of 140% in reports of sexual violence; drug offences, both dealing and possession, have rocketed; and serious violence and knife crime has doubled. Drugs are at the heart of much of the crime in my constituency, as they are across the country The police cannot possibly deal with this challenge without much greater funding, and I now believe, having taken time to come to a firm view on this, that we need to look much more urgently at the issue of the drugs epidemic and at how it is driving the rise in crime. We need to think about options and solutions that have previously been unthinkable. This is a major public health issue, a major policing issue and a major criminal justice issue, but none of those policy areas can tackle this alone. I worry that even in combination they cannot tackle the crisis that we face, and that decade of cuts is making that crisis worse. We now need to look at safe drug consumption rooms My constituents are deeply concerned about rising crime and decreasing community safety, and many of them gave me their views in a survey I ran just before the general election last year. Overall, there were three broad themes to what they were concerned about: violent crime and knife crime; drugs, both dealing and their use in front of people, including children, and the associated antisocial behaviour; and theft and burglaries. Many constituents made it clear to me that the Government’s cuts to police funding and to our Welsh Government’s budget were having an impact on local services, and that that in itself was playing a major part in all these crimes and the increasing number of them. My constituents overwhelmingly want to see more police on our streets. Neighbourhood policing is vital to them, as I know it is to many Members from across the country. My constituents want more funding for Wales, to provide services and resources to help people who are homeless or who have a drug addiction—or face both those problems. They want to see the police in their neighbourhoods and their communities, both to prevent crime and to protect citizens and property. So my message to the Government is: 136 new officers across South Wales is not enough—we really need many more.