Fighting For Our Police Desk

On the 19th of November, I asked Havering Council to unite in calling for the Mayor of London and Met Police to reverse their decision to reduce the hours of our 24hr police desk, in Romford.

The chamber united behind the motion and sent a clear message, with only a few Labour councillors voting against.

I also provided the response on behalf of the Conservative Group. At the start of it I defend the Labour MP for Dagenham, who got blamed for the closure by some, as she secured funding for a station in her constituency. You'll also notice I joke about not knowing a councillor's name, this was because he kept being called the wrong thing by someone else!

Watch my speech and reply, or read the text, below

Text of Speech

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Before I go into the details of my motion. Let's remember I've see where fast approaching an election. And as we approach elections, issues that are quite important to our residents become a little bit of a political knockabout instead of being about the residents.

So when I'm standing here this evening and I'm talking about a police station, I beg of you all that this isn't just an opportunity to knock a bit out of each other and score some points for your election leaflets, which I don't have to worry about. But it's an opportunity to make sure that the people of Havering know that we can be united as a chamber in standing up for them, because I think this is one of those cross party causes where we're all concerned about what's going on with the police, we have different views about whether the borough safer, whether we're doing enough, but we all want to see better from a police

Madam Mayor. There's two ways we can look at police front desks. We can look at the data and then we can look at the people.

So I'm going to start a little bit with the data, but then we'll get to the people this really, really bad data. I spent ages looking for the data. How many people are using Romford's police desk?

There's just none. Madam Mayor, this decision that we've been told has been made based on the needs and so on, There's no publicly available information that I can find as to how many people are going into Romford Police Desk. What I can find is some London wide data. And you know when that data was from 2016?So all I can do is tell you the state of the situation in 2016 and in 2016.

The data I've got here from MOPAC is about 8% of all crimes were reported at front desks. So if we presume that crime hasn't got any worse since 2016 that were at those levels, you're looking at around 60,000 crimes reported in police front desks in London. In just one year. And if we assume Havering's proportion of that is on track is about 1400 crimes a year will be reported at Havering's front desk.

There's not many front desks in Havering, Madam Mayor, so I'm going to attribute a good chunk of those 1400 to Romford. So there's a little bit of mathematics. Playing a little bit statistics playing, but it shows something that shows that actually these front desks are important to the public, they are in use. And what we've been told is that there is an in depth consultation that happened.

We apparently were consulted as politicians as reading the the Met engaged thing and said we spoke to the politicians about I don't know if anybody here. Heard anything and got any kind of consultation about what they think of the police discs coming through. I didn't get anything and it's in my ward, but if the assembly member got something then he is very privileged. But we didn't get this consultation through.

And then we look at the the stories of the individuals and I think especially if the residents that contact me and talk about their fears of what's going on in Romford. And when you have this debate with the public, you get the push back. Well, that's the right they can ring 999.

Madam Mayor ringing 999 when your phone's been nicked is not the easiest thing to do. And when all the phone boxes have been ripped out and replaced with LED screens trying to sell me fried chicken. It's not that easy to report the crime. Or you can ring 101.

You'll be lucky if you get a crime number out of 101. Or you can just go online and fill in a web form. None of that takes into consideration someone that might be walking home late at night and feels like they're being followed and wants somewhere safe to go. Well, now if they feel it fear and it happens to be 8:00 PM on a Saturday, they don't have a police desk to go to.

Madam Mayor, my motion is quite simple that we're asking for the closure of the front desk to be reversed and we're asking that because it's the only 24 hour front desk in Havering. Because the data that we've got that is very, very poor suggests that there is still a need for it. I don't know if it's in the middle of the night or at lunchtime, but I know people are afraid and people will be able to report these crimes.

To Labour's amendment, all I would say is this.

You're calling for the decision to be reviewed well, the decisions only just being made. And there isn't sufficient data in there. If you want it reviewed, you must think there's something wrong with that decision. And if you think there's something wrong with that decision.

You've gotta call for it to be reversed. Thank you, Madam.

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