Alex Easton

I beg to move, That this House has considered Government support for the Police Service of Northern Ireland training college. Thank you for your chairmanship, Sir Roger. It would be remiss of me not to mention, at the start of the debate, the appalling incident that happened in north Belfast last night. I am sure that hon. Members agree that we roundly condemn that serious assault. Our prayers and thoughts go out to the individual assaulted. We hope he makes a speedy recovery and we call for calm in the protests that will occur right across Northern Ireland tonight. It is up to this Government to address the serious concerns of the public. As the Member for North Down, I rise to speak about an issue that is at once local, regional and national: the future of police training in Northern Ireland and the urgent need for the United Kingdom Government to step up and fund a modern, single-site police college as a matter of national security. It is not a luxury project; it is a core part of the critical national infrastructure. Northern Ireland police officers past and present have stood on the frontline of threats that have not been confined to Belfast, Bangor or Newry, but have reached to the hearts of London, Birmingham and Manchester, and beyond. The skills those police officers develop, the intelligence they contribute and the partnerships they underpin with UK-wide agencies all flow from the training that they receive. If we value their contribution to the safety of every citizen in the United Kingdom, we must be honest about the state of the facilities that we expect them to train in and about the scale of the investment that realistically only the UK Government can provide. At the heart of the proposal for a new training college is a 54.8-acre site in my constituency of North Down. It is a site of sufficient scale to bring together on one campus the full spectrum of modern policing training: recruit training, specialist firearms and public order training, cyber-crime and digital forensics training, and training in road policing and marine policing, as well as leadership development and continuous professional training. On the 54.8-acre site there is space to do that properly by designing purpose-built classrooms, scenario villages, driving tracks, ranges and simulation suites that reflect the real world environments that officers face. That is the future we could and should build, but today we do not train our officers in such a place. Instead, we rely heavily on Garnerville—an ageing and constrained estate—and on a patchwork of split-site arrangements across Northern Ireland. It is time that we were candid about what that actually means. Garnerville has served with distinction for decades. Many of our finest officers have passed through those gates, but sentiment does not mend roofs, rebuild tired accommodation blocks or magically transform 20th-century buildings into 21st-century digital training hubs. The maintenance realities at Garnerville are stark. Every year more and more of the already stretched budget of the Police Service of Northern Ireland is poured into simply keeping the lights on and the structures safe by patching up old wiring and maintaining leaky roofs, into trying to retrofit modern information and communications technology into buildings never designed for it, and into constantly working around the constraints of a campus that has quite simply reached the end of its usefulness and economic life. Engineers have been clear at best: with ongoing remedial work and ever-greater maintenance bills, the existing core facilities have perhaps 10 years of realistic lifespan left—10 years at most. That is to keep an outdated model limping on, not to deliver the standard of training that a modern UK police service facing complex, fast-moving threats truly requires. We face a choice. Do we continue to sink millions of pounds into life-extending repairs on a site that cannot by its very nature deliver what is needed, or do we invest once in a modern, consolidated college on a 54.8-acre site that is available, appropriate and future-proofed? The truth is that the current split-level model is no longer financially or operationally defensible. Training being scattered across multiple locations leads to the duplication of facilities and staff, increased travel time and transport costs, ineffective scheduling, wasted officer hours, a fragmented culture, inconsistent training experiences and logistical complexities that pull focus away from core training qualities. In an area in which we ask our officers to handle everything from neighbourhood disputes to international organised crime, we should not be asking them to shuttle between sites because one campus cannot meet their needs, nor should we accept a model where some specialist training must be compromised or curtailed because the facilities are not available in the right place at the right time. A single, purpose-built college on the site in North Down would end the split-site inefficiency and bring recruits, specialists and leaders together. It would allow shared use of high-quality simulation environments—digital labs, scenario streets and lecture theatres. It would foster a genuine shared professional culture across ranks and disciplines, and crucially it would do so on a site that is large and flexible enough to evolve with the threats we know are coming over the next 30 to 40 years, and not just the next five years. Some might say, “This is a devolved matter—let Stormont pay.” That argument simply does not stand up when we consider the nature of the work that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does and the national security dimension, which in Northern Ireland is inseparable from policing. Let us be clear: the PSNI works hand in glove with the security services, the National Crime Agency and police forces across Great Britain on counter-terrorism, serious and organised crime, cyber-threats and the protection of critical national infrastructure. Threats that are planned or incubated in Northern Ireland may be executed across other areas of the United Kingdom. Intelligence gathered on the streets of Belfast or Londonderry can keep people safe in London or Glasgow. Northern Ireland is not a distinct, separate theatre of operations; it is an integral front in the security of the whole United Kingdom. The officers we train in Garnerville or Antrim are not just local officers; they are part of a UK-wide network of professionals protecting all of us from terrorism, paramilitary criminality, people smuggling, drug trafficking, cyber-attacks and hostile state activities exploiting our unique geographic and political context.