Ben Maguire

I am going to carry on for a moment. Without proper enforcement and action, we are leaving the van door wide open for thieves. While rural crime grows, police forces remain underfunded, overstretched and lacking the specialist knowledge needed to combat these offences. In many cases, local police do not have the resources, staff or capability to track and recover farm equipment and power tools at the rate at which they are stolen. These crimes are committed across wide areas and are often too small to warrant the attention of large-scale organisations such as the National Crime Agency but too big for individual forces to deal with on their own. That is where the national rural crime unit comes in. The unit is a vital national co-ordination centre, and does excellent work in the recovery of stolen property, sharing intelligence across forces and disrupting these organised criminal gangs. Shockingly, the national rural crime unit is set to lose its single national crime co-ordinator this year due to a lack of funding. That role has been essential in tackling cross-border rural crime, linking intelligence between forces and co-ordinating national efforts to combat criminal gangs. However, without continued funding, that vital work will collapse. Furthermore, the NRCU is entirely industry-funded, yet as it stands the Government take 50% of all cash assets seized from criminal gangs, which cannot be returned to the victims. That 50% could instead go directly back into fighting the criminal gangs, and supporting the work of organisations such as the NRCU. I ask the Minister to commit to providing long-term funding for the NRCU to allow it to continue its critical work and deliver greater co-ordination between local forces to tackle rural crime. As it stands, the Government are relying on the insurance industry to fund rural crime policing, and my constituents and I view that as unacceptable. County line drug gangs have increasingly infiltrated Cornwall and other rural areas across the country, exploiting vulnerable individuals, including children, to traffic and sell drugs across the region. In Bodmin, for instance, gangs took over the homes of vulnerable residents—a practice known commonly as cuckooing—to establish bases for their illicit operations. These gangs operate across vast rural areas and often in sparsely populated towns and villages, and proper resourcing is required to ensure that they are properly policed. The costs of rural crime extend beyond humans, often harming our natural environment and the animals that live in it. Illegal snaring, hare coursing, poaching and other criminal activity have decimated and traumatised wildlife populations in North Cornwall and across the country. That is not to mention the huge problem of fly-tipping, which comes up time and again from my constituents, with rubbish being illegally dumped in our towns and across our countryside. To combat that issue specifically, the Government could consider a single reporting mechanism for fly-tipping, so that landowners and farmers need report an incident only once and will have the confidence that it will be followed up on. Despite facing unique challenges, rural police forces such as Devon and Cornwall police continue to receive some of the lowest funding per head in England. In Cornwall alone, the population swells by over 3 million during the summer months, placing enormous strain on an already overstretched police force. Meanwhile, the police and crime commissioner for the region costs around £1.5 million a year, factoring in expenses and office costs. That money could instead go directly into funding into rural crime teams—officers on the beat, instead of office administrators. Furthermore, more than a third of officers in Devon and Cornwall have less than three years of service, due to difficulties in retention and recruitment caused by chronic underfunding over many years. Despite those clear pressures, the Government have failed to reform the funding model to reflect real-world policing demand in our rural communities. Policing should not be a postcode lottery, where the most in need are often the least supported. On all these issues, we still seem to have no clear Government strategy to tackle rural crime. We do not appear to have national co-ordination, proper funding structures or a commitment to equipping rural police teams with the resources they so crucially need. The Government could look to organisations such as the Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime, which has had an official rural crime strategy in place since 2019. That strategy focuses on gathering intelligence and raising people’s confidence in reporting crimes to the local authorities. As a result, the cost of rural crime in Scotland reduced by £2 million, from £5.6 million to £3.6 million in just one year. The rural crime team established within the Lancashire police force is also proving to be an excellent example of a specialised rural crime unit. One resident served by their work said that the police “just showing their faces around here has had a massive impact on rural crime for us” and that it had even led to a “massive decrease” in fly-tipping. That is why, on 14 January, I introduced the Rural Crime (Strategy) Bill, which would require the Home Secretary to establish an independent taskforce to develop and implement a comprehensive rural crime strategy. The taskforce must bring together stakeholders from across industry, police and rural communities to advise the Government, ultimately leading to a strategy that could take vital steps such as ensuring that properly funded dedicated rural crime teams or specialists are embedded in police forces—currently, less than 1% of police officers are assigned to rural crime—providing training for police and 999 control room staff on how to tackle rural crime, and improving intelligence sharing among the different forces. Rural crime is a serious, organised and devastating issue for our countryside communities. It is time for a cohesive national strategy that puts an end to the chaos of underfunded police forces and unco-ordinated responses and that gives teeth to legislation to tackle these problems. Organised crime is thriving, and the Government need to act now, starting with bringing forward a comprehensive rural crime strategy, because our rural communities deserve so much better.