Contribution
I congratulate the hon. and gallant Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) on securing this important debate. As many Members present will attest, there appears to be a rising use of catapults, as well as an increase in antisocial behaviour more broadly, especially in areas with large bodies of water but also in towns and cities.
Since the election last year, I too have heard sickening reports of catapults being used to fire metal ball bearings in attempts to kill or injure wildfowl and other birds in our local communities. Videos of such acts tend to end up on social media and spread quickly. The footage is deeply disturbing to anyone decent and respectful of our natural environment and wildlife. The consequences are felt acutely by organisations such as Brent Lodge wildlife hospital in my constituency. During a visit earlier this year, the people there told me that they are treating an increasing number of birds injured by solid projectiles.
Those acts fundamentally represent wider societal failings. We must do more to educate children and their caregivers so that they understand that this behaviour is completely unacceptable. It is especially pertinent—this was alluded to by the hon. Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin) —given the known link between those who injure animals and those who go on to think it is acceptable to injure humans. Societal investment in addressing such behaviours as early as possible would prevent further harm in the future.
With social media a prevalent way of young people engaging with society, it does not take long for a trend to catch on, and injuring wildlife is one of the more appalling recent trends to have spread quickly. Brent Lodge hired an outreach officer who has been spending time going to schools and talking about wildlife crime to educate and inform, and I applaud those efforts. An X-ray of the brain of a swan that has been hit repeatedly by an air gun is not an image that a young person who is shown it will be quick to forget.
A concern expressed repeatedly by those who write to me is the feeling that, despite reporting such acts to the police, nothing will happen—certainly no form of punishment or intervention by the schools, even when the local community could identify the people who carried out the crime. Their experiences reflect a troubling national picture: just 6% of crimes reported to the police lead to a suspect being charged, and 6,000 cases per day are closed without a suspect being identified.
Responsibility for those statistics lies firmly with the previous Government, who in the decade prior to this Parliament hollowed out our local police forces. Since 2015, the number of police community support officers has fallen by more than 4,500, leaving our local police forces with a near impossible task. In particular in rural communities, where officers must cover huge areas, the police are overstretched, under-resourced and unable to focus on the crimes that affect our communities the most. The lack of visibility is clear, because individuals engaging in criminal and antisocial behaviour feel emboldened to continue when no one is following it up, even when they are caught in the act.
Beyond the barbaric use of catapults, I have received further complaints from constituents about individuals climbing public buildings, threatening and abusive behaviour in our high streets, and the dangerous riding of high-speed e-bikes. There is also a persistent issue in constituencies such as mine with specific rural crimes such as hare coursing and theft of farm equipment. Those who contact me about those crimes say, again, that their faith in the police to address them is low, but they understand that the pressures on the police are such that they are going to the most serious cases, and often a farmer reporting people in their field chasing hares fundamentally is not understood at a police call centre.
Everyone deserves to feel safe in their own home and walking down their own streets, and that applies to the wildlife that we live with as well. Everyone deserves to feel that their property is protected and that if someone tries to take it, a real effort will be made to recover it. However, for too many people in the UK today, that is simply not the reality. The Government must take urgent action to address that—first, by reversing the trend of decreasing numbers of PCSOs and special constables, and ensuring that forces have the resources to deal with the issues that society is facing.
The Liberal Democrats are also calling for the creation of a national online crime agency to tackle online fraud and abuse, which would free up local police officers to spend more time doing the thing that they want to do and is why they joined the police in the first place: community policing. They would be able to spend more time dealing with burglaries, neighbourhood crime and antisocial behaviour such as that we have discussed today.
We also need a renewed commitment to tackling the declining number of police desks, which dropped by 25% between 2015 and 2025. That has contributed significantly to the sense of police disappearing from our streets. We would ensure that police desks were placed in community hubs, including libraries and shopping centres. What steps are the Government taking to provide specific support for police forces such as mine to deal with rising antisocial behaviour and the use of catapults against wildlife, and what are they doing to reverse the trend of declining numbers of PCSOs and police desks in communities, which would ensure that a visible police presence returned to our rural constituencies?