Security in Northern Ireland

Part of Opposition Day — [10th Allotted Day] – in the House of Commons at 3:25 pm on 21 November 2012.

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Photo of Ian Paisley Jnr Ian Paisley Jnr Shadow DUP Spokesperson (Work and Pensions), Shadow DUP Spokesperson (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 3:25, 21 November 2012

Throughout this debate we have heard perspectives—perspectives of the troubles and an attempt to put the current situation in Northern Ireland into a new perspective—and it has been very valuable. We heard a thoughtful contribution from Stephen Lloyd, whose constituency bears the scar of Irish terror. As each Member walks into this Chamber, under the scarred and broken ramparts of the Churchill arch, and as we see above us the memorials to Robert Bradford, Airey Neave and Ian Gow, we are all reminded of just how far we have come. It is a miracle; there is absolutely no doubt about it.

Naomi Long mentioned her pride at having grown up as a Belfast woman and a citizen of Northern Ireland, understanding where she has come from and where her city has come from. All of us on these Benches whose formative years were spent in those times remember an average body bag count of 80 or 90 souls sent into eternity by the assassin’s bullet. That was our daily news intake as we grew up. Only now, in normal times—and thank God they are normal times—do we realise how perverse and awful it was and what a harrowing vista it is to look back on. As a father, probably the happiest occasion for me was when my daughter was 14 or 15 and said to me one day, when she had started her GCSE course, “Daddy, what are the troubles?” As a person who grew up in Northern Ireland and knew when I was 14 or 15 how bloody the troubles were, that was a great question to be asked as a parent—a powerful question, and something that should spur us on, as fathers and grandfathers in this House, to hope that our children and our children’s children never go through or witness that awfulness again, as the hon. Lady said. It is important that we have that perspective, because the security needs of the country we live in are now very different, but they are still incredibly real. We should face these things head-on.

In the current spending round the police have been given sufficient resources. We campaigned for that before the devolution of policing and justice powers—we made it a red line and we achieved that. That was job done, because it was essential to put our security services on a fair and good footing, so they could take us forward, hand in hand with economic progress, political stability and, of course, security gold-plating. We needed all that, but the current Chief Constable and his senior team now have to put forward their bid for the new spending round, and that involves a leap of faith. Their calculations are not being made using clear, understood figures from the Secretary of State, the Northern Ireland Office and the Government of Northern Ireland. They are being made with a leap of faith. The police need to retain the same level of spending that they got in the last spending round; otherwise, they will be under severe pressure.

The Police Federation for Northern Ireland has called for an increase in police numbers. My hon. Friend Sammy Wilson and I served on the Policing Board for about seven years—I think that we were among the longest-serving members—and we constantly heard that call. We saw the numbers in the police service drop from 12,000 to 7,000. It now has about 6,800 members. The fact is that, this week, the police are going to have to start recruiting about 300 more police officers. They have not asked permission to do so yet; they are taking a leap of faith. Because of the new training mechanisms and the long gestation period between starting as a probationer and becoming an active, serving officer on the street, they need to push that button now, but they are taking a leap of faith because the money to recruit an additional 300 officers simply is not there.

The Chief Constable and his team are going to go to the Policing Board and ask for that money, and I believe that we in this House, across the parties, and the Secretary of State should encourage them. We should tell them not only that they can ask for it but that they will have the resource to get the number of full-time police officers back up to 7,150. Why do we need those extra officers? Why do we need that money? We need them in order to sustain our security capability in a practical way. An example is the air support unit that the police service runs. It requires a huge amount of resource to keep it going. The air patrols allow the police to watch people as they travel along certain roads. The main road from Dublin, from the border at Newry through to Belfast, is a smugglers paradise. Many millions of pounds-worth of contraband cigarettes and smuggled fuel go up and down that road every day. There is a multi-million pound enterprise run by gangsters and criminals, and the police need air support as well as ground support if they are to stop it. There are other measures that can be taken, and I shall come to those later.

The police also need money for close protection work. As my right hon. Friend Mr Dodds said, they need money for surveillance operations. One of the things that galls many Members is that, although we know that certain individuals in Northern Ireland are responsible for particular crimes, the police have been unable to get sufficient evidence to secure successful prosecutions. Those people are loose on our streets. A great deal of effort is going into providing proper surveillance of a certain person on the streets of the mainland at the moment. Every effort is being made to ensure that he is being properly tagged and that, at the first opportunity, he will be kicked out of this nation.

We need the same surveillance equipment to be made available for certain people operating in Northern Ireland. One particular individual there is responsible for five murders. He was brought to trial for three of them, but got off on a technicality. That is the way the law works, and we all accept the rule of law, but it galls us that the police in Northern Ireland do not appear to have sufficient resources to watch that man day and night, so that the next time he tries to plan what was planned on the Lurgan bypass, he can be prevented from doing it. I hope that the police get the money and the surveillance equipment they need to undermine individuals such as those.

Any diminution of the police’s ability to do their work has a morale-eating impact not only on police officers but on the entire civilian population of Northern Ireland. The police have to balance their books this year, but they can do that only if they know that they are not taking a leap of faith and hoping to get resources next year and in the next Government spending round. They need adequate resources to do their job.

I mentioned in an earlier intervention that the level of churn in the police force had increased. More police officers than ever before are now resigning after only a short policing career. The level does not yet represent a spike on the charts, but it is starting to illustrate the existence of a problem. Police officers used to identify their work as a calling, and they would spend 30 years or more serving their community in that way. The new regime encourages police officers to see it as a short career, and many now go on to work in business or management or some other profession. That has an impact on the police force’s ability to hold on to recruits and to do the job. If that becomes a problem in the future, we will need the resource to address it.

The police certainly will need resources to police the G8 summit; they will need them to police the world police and fire games; and, as we approach 2016, they will certainly need them to police any public disturbance or anything that arises as a result of those who will try to turn their memories into the commemoration of the Somme or, in the south of Ireland, those who will try to turn their memories into the commemoration of the Easter rising. Those things will present policing challenges, so we must ensure that the police have adequate resources to address them.

Each year, we spend £37 million of policing money on policing the past. We have to do that because in order to get justice for what happened in the past, we have to gather evidence, pursue those cases and hopefully bring people to trial—but that is a huge draining resource that does not affect policing in any other part of the United Kingdom. Next year, we will spend £6 million on the Historical Enquiries Team; we will spend £6 million this year on inquests; and we will spend £25 million on legacy investigations—current detectives involved in policing the past. That has to be done, as I say, but it is at a cost. I want policing for the present and the future, but I know we have to continue with the project of getting through these cases and ensuring that we bring justice to people who rightly have questions that need to be answered.

We have to recognise, however, that if that huge demand is there, the police cannot step forward on a leap of faith when it comes to their budgets for next year and the next Government spending round. They have to know now that they will be adequately resourced to police the issues I mentioned, to furnish the HET, inquests and legacy investigations and to get on with tackling sex trafficking and other serious and organised crime in Northern Ireland.

One of the biggest crimes that goes on in Northern Ireland is fuel laundering. I am glad that our Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee is studying the problem. This is a multi-million pound crime. As I said, there is a highway—the A1 between Newry and Belfast—that is a smugglers paradise, and fuel is smuggled there every day. We need more resource put in to prevent that from taking place. We need resource put in to find a proper fuel marker to diminish the current nonsense of officers from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs pouring orange dye into fuel and then saying, “There—the problem’s solved”. It is not solved. I do not care about the colour poured in; whether orange or green dye is used, it does not solve the problem because all that happens is that it is laundered out of the fuel. The more dye poured in, the more kitty litter needs to be stolen to launder it through the process. That just perpetuates this cycle of crime. We need a new fuel marker in our fuel as soon as possible to stop the crime and put those gangsters out of business.

Just this week, gangsters in Belfast had a huge petrol station dug up. It was owned by a man in South Armagh, but it was dug up and the tanks were removed. Will the gangster be charged? No. Will he go to jail? No. How much has he stolen from the Secretary of State’s Government? Tens and tens of millions of pounds in this year alone—and he is getting away with it. We need that matter to be addressed—urgently.