I beg to move,
That this House has considered a Royal Commission on police funding in the 21st century.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Ms Moon, and it is excellent that I am three minutes ahead, so we have 33 minutes for this debate. I am delighted to have secured the debate and to see the Minister for Policing and the Fire Service in his place. I am sure that his father is watching Parliament with great interest, but I will not go on about that.
The purpose of the debate is to implore the Government to implement a police royal commission. The last one was in 1962, which was before the Beatles; it is that long ago. It was the time when Elvis Presley was in his pomp, but this country has changed quite a bit since then, to put it mildly. In the ensuing 57 years, some elements of policing have remained the same—for example, there are 48 forces, all of which are very independent—but much else has changed. Governments of all complexions have made a few piecemeal adjustments here and there. Funding has gone up and down; it has been feast or famine. Now we are in 2019, and the vista for crime-fighting and the police force is completely different from how it was 57 years ago.
The idea of having a police royal commission has been around for about seven or eight years. My view is that over the last year or so, it has really begun to gain traction. The public understand it, and more than 370,000 people have signed a petition on it. In Parliament, there is growing cross-party support for it. In total, 51 MPs—from, importantly, all the different political parties—have signed my early-day motion. My objective in calling on the Government to establish a royal commission is not partisan, because I am absolutely certain that in this Parliament, in particular, anything partisan has absolutely zero chance of happening. My whole approach is to make this cross-party call; to engage with the different representatives of the police forces, from the national Police Federation to the superintendents to the Association of Chief Police Officers; and to engage with the media.
This is all about securing a royal commission, but why? I have talked about how it is 57 years since the last royal commission reported, and crime has changed so much in that time that I am not even going to labour the point—the Minister knows about that very, very well. In those days, we did not have cybercrime or the supranational, global crime that we are dealing with today. Equally, on a basic level there have been significant changes in how the police deal with crime. The Minister will be aware that research tends to indicate that the fêted bobby on the beat does not make a huge difference in driving down crime. He will also be well aware that there are good reasons why the public like to see police on the beat, so that they feel secure. The job of our police forces is to serve us and the public, and to ensure that the public feel secure.
To be blunt, in today’s climate, morale within the police is, as the Minister knows, perilously low, and it has been for the past couple of years. I do not want to say that it has never been lower, because that sounds like grandstanding.