Angela Watkinson

Conservative Party | Upminster

Neighbourhood policing

In view of the lateness of the hour, the House will be pleased to learn that I have abandoned my speech, although I am sure that hon. Members would have enjoyed it. Instead I intend to make three brief points.

My first relates to the 40'000 extra officers proposed in the Conservative policy. Some hon. Members have referred to that as though it were an extravagant or even unnecessary number, but I understand that 8'000 of the 40'000 might be allocated to the Metropolitan police and as there are 32 London Boroughs, Havering is to likely to receive about 160 of those 40'000 police officers. With absences through sickness, holidays, courses and officers being off duty and other abstractions, 150 police officers might be left. Shared over three shifts, 50 officers are not even enough to have two additional officers in each ward, so by no means is the figure over generous; it is perfectly reasonable, and no more than is necessary in the prevailing circumstances.

My second point relates to a particular problem in the London borough of Havering. My constituency is one of the three component constituencies of Havering. Romford is one of the others. Romford town centre has the largest concentration of late night entertainment centres and nightclubs outside the West End of London, which places enormous demands on the Havering Police. Those demands should be enough to make Havering a special case, but this is consistently ignored in the Metropolitan police allocation formula. We live in hope every year, but so far these hopes have been dashed.

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings 10'000 additional people come in to Romford- that is a conservative figure; it has been put as high as 13'000- to avail themselves of the delights of those nightclubs. So the on-duty police officers quite rightly concentrate the lion's share of their resources on Romford town centre at that time. It is a public order issue and the divisional commander is quite right to do that, but the effect is that there is no neighbourhood policing in the rest of the borough.

I have been out on night duty with the Havering Police and they have one car to use to react to radio messages relating to incidences the length and breadth of what is a very large borough. They get there too late every time. The incident is over; the culprits have escaped. The police then hear of another incident at the far end of the borough and the car chases after that. In effect the borough is not policed, with the exception of Romford town centre, when those night clubs are in operation. I add another plea; I make no apology for doing so again- for additional police in Havering because of the special demands placed on it by Romford town centre.

My third point relates to the criminal justice system, which does not always give the police the support that it should or could. I should like to give just one example of cooperative working between the local council and the local police in dealing with what we all recognize as a neighbours-from-hell situation. I have received a long list of complaints from some residents who live in some flats over a small block of shops. When I visited them it became obvious that all the problems emanate from one flat: there was abusive behaviour, drug taking and drug paraphernalia left in the stair wells, drunkenness and loud music night after night. One of the gentlemen who complained was a newsagent in one of the shops below who had to get up very early in the morning.

It was a council property and the council looked very carefully at the tenancy and worked with the police, but the council decided that withdrawing the tenancy was the right course of action, as a last resort after it had tried everything else available to it. However the outcome was that the court listened to the case, which had taken many man hours of preparation and a lot of council tax payers' money and funding, but the courts decided to give these neighbours from hell another chance. So they are back in the flat and all their previous behavior is being repeated. That is just one of the many cases where the system lets the police down. If we ask the police to provide neighbourhood policing which is what local residents want, it does not matter how many additional police we have- if the 40'000 were available tomorrow it would have no effect- unless the criminal justice system plays its part and backs them up.