Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, it is a pleasure, as ever, to support my noble friend in her Amendments 436 and 437. She is an expert in intellectual property, but she might want to copyright the term “Wild West of street crime”, as we have got used to it. Amendment 436 goes to the heart of a police accountability. That is the wider issue here. It seeks to put on a statutory footing the imperative to provide timely data in respect of enforcement, openness and transparency. It is not necessarily about interfering in the operational effectiveness or decision-making of the police, but it is about openness, transparency and restoring the faith and trust that taxpayers should have in their local police. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, is not in his place. I am sure he discharged his duties commendably in Leicestershire, but, frankly, the police and crime commissioner model has not worked. I speak as someone who used my maiden speech in the other place in June 2005 to call for elected police commissioners. I am afraid that it has been a damp squib. The relationship between senior police officers and the commissioners, to whom they should have had accountability, has not worked out in the way it should have done. I applaud the Government for the decision to discontinue that. We see egregious examples of apparent two-tier policing. Robert Peel is probably turning in his grave now when he looks at the antics of the chief constable of the West Midlands, who colluded with Islamist thugs and their representative, the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Perry Barr, in preventing Jewish fans from attending a game in our second city. He also lied twice to a parliamentary committee, seemingly with impunity. He has now left the service with a large taxpayer-funded pension. The question is: do the police actually care what elected politicians and Ministers think? I am not sure that is the case. There have been lots of cases of alleged two-tier policing. More recently, one has to look only at the comparison between the policing of the Palestinian hate marchers in our capital from October 2023 and, for instance, the banning of a Walk with Jesus rally in east London or the heavy-handed policing of farmers protesting at the Government’s tax policies at the end of last year. This is not a political issue. It is an issue of the undermining of policing by consent and that is bad news for all of us. Data is needed for the justice system, particularly the police force, both to work effectively and so that they can be scrutinised by lawmakers and the public. Public perception of our police matters. We want our police to be perceived positively by the public based on evidence that they are doing their jobs well. Public perception of the police is currently low, and crime rates appear to be high. Data on enforcement would both be a motivation for effective policing and help them to be held accountable—and, more importantly, give an accurate public image. We currently have a crisis on our hands in respect of law enforcement in England and Wales. Knife crime in England and Wales rose by 78% between 2013 and 2023; even when the population growth was factored in, this was still a 68.3% rise. In 2024, 31.5% of all robberies committed in London’s Met police area involved stealing mobile phones—this increased from 21.6% in 2021. Noble Lords will know that the Committee considered my amendment on the theft of mobile phones, ably introduced my noble friend, earlier this month. In-person theft offences—which, according to Policy Exchange, is where an item is stolen from a person but, unlike a robbery, no force is used or threatened—the percentage of cases is even higher and represents between 68.5% and 72.6% of offences during the last four years. London has faced a dramatic surge in theft from the person offences: a 170% increase in the three years up to 2024. Also, there were nearly 95,000 shoplifting offences in the year to June 2025, a 38% increase on the previous year. This amendment is about enforcement data. The police are not always effective in dealing with these crimes. In the year to March 2025, the Met solved 5% of burglaries and robberies reported to it. It solved less than 1.5% of reported bike thefts and less than 8% of shoplifting offences. In 2024, only 0.6% of theft from the person offences were solved. This declined from just 1.1% in 2021. Public perception of the police is becoming worse. In 2022, 50% of Londoners thought that their local police were doing a good job; in 2025, that had dropped to 45%. Police forces across England and Wales should publish data annually on the enforcement of offences so that the public and lawmakers know how successfully crimes are being policed. The public also deserve to know this information. If the rate of crime is increasing, so then should the rate of enforcement. We must support the Peelite principle of policing by consent. We need to collect, collate and analyse data to restore public confidence. That is why we need to support my noble friend’s amendment, as I have today. I hope the Minister will give consideration to what is essentially a cross-party amendment.