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Transport Committee 1 December 2005 Transcript of Item 5 – Crime

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Transport Committee 1 December 2005 Transcript of Item 5 – Crime Appendix Transport Committee 1 December 2005 Transcript of Item 5 – Crime and Safety at Suburban Railway Stations Roger Evans (Chair): Can I welcome our witnesses to the Committee this morning, to talk about crime and safety at suburban railway stations. We have a whole bunch of questions to ask you this morning about this important issue. Can I just start with our witnesses from TfL, Mr Burton we have noticed, looking at the things we have been provided, an increase in levels of crime at stations in suburban London, both on the Underground and on surface rail. Could you just tell us a little bit about policing policy on the Underground and how that differs from what goes on on the surface railway? Steve Burton (TfL Transport and Policing Enforcement Directorate): Essentially, over the last two to three years, we have invested additional resources – 200 additional officers on the network. We have used those officers to do, probably, what, in traditional terms, would be termed 'beat police'. We have broken the Underground network up into 43 units, which are called groups of stations, which is mapped out to the London Underground management structures. We have then put a number of local Police Constables (PCs), who only work in those geographic areas. Therefore, they have some stations that they are responsible for and they are known locally to the staff and the passengers. It is a bit similar to the Safer Neighbourhood scheme within the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). We like it, because it provides local accountability and the officers get to know the local areas and they work very closely with local management. That has taken almost the entire 200 additional officers that we have put on. London Underground British Transport Police (BTP) originally had 470 officers and then we added 200 to give the current total of 670. Almost all those officers have been overlaid on the network. We think that has worked really well with our identified local priorities. As I say, they work very much with the local staff, because many of the issues at a local level cannot necessarily purely be solved by police action. If it is a lighting issue or an issue around access to the rail through fencing problems, that has to be dealt with by the local management and the local rail operator. We build those links quite actively. Roger Evans (Chair): Looking at the figures that we have in front of us here, we see crime is going up. Reported crime is going up in suburban stations. However, it appears to have gone up much more on London Underground. Steve Burton (TfL): That is right. I think Ian Johnson might want to come in after me on this. Essentially, the reassurance layer, as we call it, which is a layer of local officers, undertake a large number of what we call proactive operations. They will do gate line checking, which is working with revenue officers to check tickets and ensure that people are travelling legally on the network. They will work very actively with local youths around stone throwing, criminal damage. They do a number of operations with drug dogs to check on drug issues around the station. What that tends to generate is a large number of reported crimes. The phrase that is sometimes used 1 is ‘victimless crime’, which I am not sure is entirely true, because of course there are victims of all crime. Essentially, if you look at the figures, the vast majority, if not all, of the increase is the sort of crime that you tend to generate initially when you put a large number of officers down on the ground. Linked to that, we think our passengers and our staff are also much more actively reporting these low- level issues, because they recognise that the police and ourselves are now taking a much more keen interest in these and dealing with them. Ian Johnson (Chief Constable, British Transport Police): I support everything that Steve Burton said. I think the reassurance and policing capability that you have got through the funding that TfL have given us is absolutely brilliant. It is intended to mirror the neighbourhood policing arrangements within the Underground arrangements. I wish we could get the support to do the same on the overground network, because I think it would be a very effective way of policing that part of the network. I think things like staff assaults, which have gone up, are very difficult to isolate, whether that is an increase in actual violence on the staff or an increase in confidence by members of the Underground staff who are now coming forward to tell us about that. Anti-social behaviour – the incidences of crime of anti-social behaviour get into our books based on the back of arrests. It is very much the product of additional police work. Things like hate crime, which obviously are a big concern to us, we have been advertising our willingness to embrace people who have been victims of hate crime. I think there is, underlying the increases, a fair amount of additional reporting. However, obviously, we are watching it very carefully. Roger Evans (Chair): You say you cannot get the same proactive approach with surface rail. What would you like to do there and why can you not? Ian Johnson (BTP): It is essentially a funding issue. We are into quite a major encounter with the train operators about funding issues, because the force has, over many years, been, in my terms, massively underfunded, and, indeed, in terms of the Inspectorate of Constabulary and many other people who have looked at us formally, including the Department for Transport (DfT). That underfunding is currently being redressed, but of course it can only be redressed at a pace. That pace has not allowed us to take on board the sort of support that we had from TfL. We have actually now got about 150 Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), which, 18 months ago, we did not have, which is a really good step forward. We also get good support from the Special Constabulary – 150 of those in London. I think it is fundamentally a resource issue. We are always going to be stretched. We are a relatively small force, 2,500 for England, Scotland and Wales, 1,000 of which are in London, broadly speaking. We are always going to be pushed, with something like 700 stations and a lot of railway lines between them to police. Police numbers are important. I think things like better intelligence systems, better partnerships… We did not get picked up in all the Crime and Disorder Partnerships across London. Not every borough picked up on the transport issue, which I think is an opportunity for us in the future. Network Rail has been persuaded to increase its level of investment in Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). Over the last 18 months, they have invested about £15 million in CCTV and have just put forward a programme for about another £40 million worth of it nationally. I think there are a lot of things that could be done, but underlying it all, I guess, essentially, is a funding issue. John Biggs (Assembly Member): I would like to push you on this. You are all splendid people, I am sure, but there has been a big increase in police funding in London generally and you have not been completely exempt from that. There has been quite a significant increase in your resources. Yet this seems to be the one significant area of London’s police jurisdiction where there has been an increase in reported crime. There has been a reduction everywhere else. I would have to ask you what you are doing with the money, when, on the face of it, you must be a bunch of incompetents, all of you, because you are getting more money and yet crime is going up. Ian Johnson (BTP): I am not likely to agree with you on that. John Biggs (Assembly Member): No, of course not. Ian Johnson (BTP): I am not likely to agree with you that crime has gone up, either, because the figures for crime in London last year showed a flat perspective on two parts of my empire and a 1% reduction in the other. I do not agree with you that crime overall is going up. Certain categories of crime are going up. John Biggs (Assembly Member): The figures we have suggest 35% increase over the last two years, I think, in the number of reported incidents within London. Ian Johnson (BTP): You are looking at particular categories of crime. I am looking at the overall crime levels on the network. John Biggs (Assembly Member): I do not understand. You have other crimes that you are not reporting to us, or what? Ian Johnson (BPT): No, no. I have a set of crime data that lays out what happened in my London North area and London South area and in London Underground area. John Biggs (Assembly Member): I do not want to get bogged down in figures, but the numbers we have suggest there has been an increase from 26,000 to 30,000 reported crimes on the rail network in London. 26,000 in 2003/04 up to 30,428 in 2004/05. Indeed, that spurred the question about increase on the Underground, but there has been an increase on the other parts of the network as well. The fact is that you, BTP, are responsible for the Underground and the national rail network.
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