Contribution
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak in this debate, and I look forward to the response of the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres. I will make a couple of points. The first concerns the central and important point made by my noble friend Lady Morgan about designing out crime as far as we can. Some of that is about the physical layout of stations and rolling stock, some of it is about CCTV and things like that and some of it is about how the services operate. That is welcome. There was a period when we successfully designed out—not entirely, but very significantly—the ability of people to steal cars. We made it much more difficult, and that was very successful. The thrust of her amendment is welcome, and I support it.
I want to talk about a specific issue about the British Transport Police that was raised with me at the weekend. I am a big fan of the British Transport Police and I had a lot of dealings with Lucy D’Orsi, its fantastic chief constable, when I was the Secretary of State. She has been a leader in the police service in weeding out bad officers who have no right to be police officers, and has taken significant steps in improving the standards of integrity in her force. I know that she also has a personal and clear priority for dealing with violence against women and girls; she takes it very seriously and believes in robust policing. Whatever correspondence the Minister has had, he would absolutely be pushing at an open door in terms of the leadership there.
I have also seen for myself the very successful work that BTP and its officers do at some of our busy transport hubs. I have seen the work that it does at stations in London in dealing with people carrying weapons or trafficking drugs. It is very effective at dealing with that, particularly when using some of its dogs. I have also seen some of the work it does—remembering it is a national police force—in Wales, for example, in combating county lines gangs and the movement of money using the rail network. That is all the good stuff I have seen.
My specific question arose from talking to a train manager on a recent journey on GWR. We were having a conversation and I happened to mention the British Transport Police; I cannot remember the context. Based on his experience, he was a bit less positive about it than I was. I made the point that I have just made about the work it does in some of our busy transport hubs. His point was that on more isolated, less busy services, he has had the experience of having to deal with people committing violence and break up big groups of drunken people—men, I suspect—and when he has tried to get support from the British Transport Police it has either not been forthcoming or not come quickly. How do we balance the priorities with the funding that goes to the force? We have to look at the numbers of people, and clearly we have to recognise that we cannot police our less busy stations and services to the same level that we police the busier ones, but how do we balance the resources and deliver effective policing?
The reason why I mentioned that in this context is because—my noble friend Lady Morgan put her finger on it in her amendment—this is about design and technology. Clearly, you cannot have infinite numbers of police officers everywhere, but it is about how we can use technology, first, to deter crime, and then to respond to it quickly and spot it coming so that police officers with the appropriate powers, skills and training can support railway personnel who do their best but who are, whatever training they have, not the right people to deal with people committing serious criminality on the railway. That requires officers who are properly trained and properly equipped with both the powers and, if necessary, the ability to escalate the support that they have if they face people committing serious violence or people with serious weapons. That is my question for the Minister, really: how do we balance that across the network? I will be interested to hear her reply.