Schedule 2 - Amendments to the Police Act 1996
Police and Justice Bill
12:00 pm
Hazel Blears (Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety), Home Office; Salford, Labour)
I do not know whether these are probing amendments, but they would return us to our current position of having to have a national policing plan. That is a rigid requirement because we have to publish it by 30 November every year and so on. With the national community safety plan, the first of which was published in November last year, I have tried to move towards working across government on such things and to recognise that trying to build safer communities is not simply a job for the police.
Probably half the work of making people safer is done by local government and the health service. The national community safety plan involves 12 different Departments and discusses what contribution they will make—for example, the health service might help with drug treatment and the education service might help divert youngsters away from crime and antisocial behaviour. The amendments would take us back to a more rigid and siloed approach to policing which would be more about the Home Secretary dictating from the centre the police’s priorities and what they should be getting on with. We are trying to implement a much more integrated plan for tackling the problems that beset many of our communities and to draw in all our partners from both national and local government to ensure that we work together to tackle such problems.
Last week I was with a safer neighbourhood team in Hackney, where there is a problem of drug dealing on the streets. In the past, the police had simply used their enforcement powers to tackle it; they tended to move the drug dealers on, so there was displacement. That solved the problem in the short but not the longer term. However, the past 12 months have been different: the police have worked with the local council, involved drug treatment agencies and got youngsters involved in more constructive activities. The problems on the Holly Street estate have now been removed for the long term. I spoke to a lady there who said that she had slept the whole night through for the first time in 18 months because of the more holistic approach.
I am concerned that the amendments would take us back to the rigidity of simply having a national policing plan. I am trying to get localism into the relationship between the police, the local authorities, the health service, the primary care trusts and the education service, all working at the local level. I hope that the hon. Members for Cheltenham and for Hornsey and Wood Green will think about that.