Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Time to get a grip on the problem of rural crime
Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger is less than impressed by what the latest national rural crime survey tells him, as he explains to Defra Secretary George Eustice
DEAR George I suppose that most popular of the oft-repeated lies ‘the cheque’s in the post’ will soon become obsolete what with the banks wanting to do away with all paper transactions.
We could, I suppose, adopt instead ‘I transferred the money last night: can’t think where it’s gone’. But in any event I am proposing a new candidate for inclusion in the list of frequently-uttered untruths, this one being ‘we have not reduced policing levels in rural areas’.
Because if you start sifting through the statistics and setting them against the physical evidence of closed-down police stations and shrinking manpower allocations it becomes clear that that is a five-star, 24-carat porky.
In fact, so habituated have farmers become to the actual, rather than the claimed levels of policing in rural areas that there is now a weary acceptance among the agricultural community that attempting to get the police interested or involved in investigating any kind of rural crime is pretty well a waste of their valuable time.
We suffer particularly from this problem in Avon and Somerset where the demands of policing large urban settlements such as Bristol and Bath have taken precedence over the rural hinterland ever since the time when the force was created.
I have indeed, amassed a very thick correspondence file, the distilled essence of which makes it plain that farmers and other rural-dwellers feel they are being considerably short-changed when it comes to policing – and furthermore that the almost invisible police presence outside town and city has now emboldened the criminal classes to become even more audacious in their activities.
Not, of course, that this is merely a local issue. I have just finished perusing the NFU’s latest rural crime survey which makes it clear the pattern is repeated across the country.
A third of those farmers questioned reported being the victim of crime during 2020 with the average loss suffered put at £4,473. That’s bad enough.
But now we get to the really interesting part where the survey report informs me that 39 per cent of those victims didn’t report the crime to the police, 40 per cent of them because they thought the matter too minor but 60 per cent – and this is the nub of the whole issue, George – because they didn’t expect a response.
That is a shocking statistic, George, but one which, I would suggest, stems from years of dismal responses to most kinds of rural crime, these all too often consisting of a visit a day or more after the complaint has been lodged, a shrug of the shoulders and the offer of a crime number so an insurance claim can be made.
It’s almost so though police authorities have concluded that since farmers carry insurance then (except in the extreme cases) it’s the insurers’ responsibility for sorting these things out, an argument which holds little water because farmers also pay for policing through their council tax the same as everyone else and are just as entitled to the same quality of service as people living in urban areas.
George, police and crime commissioners can argue with me until they are blue in the face but on the circumstantial evidence they stand guilty as charged.
Hundreds of rural police stations have been closed under various fancifully-titled reorganisations when the real motivation has been to save money – money which can then be spent elsewhere.
Policing has been stretched transparently thin out in the sticks to the
point where a single officer may be covering a patch of several hundred square miles – which is as good as sending written invitations to every sheep rustler, poacher, or tractor thief to come and help themselves on the basis that the odds of them ever being detected are as good as zero.
The survey also informs me that 60 per cent of farmers have upgraded building security in the last five years, the better to protect themselves. But the real issue is not making farms more secure; it’s tackling the root cause of the problem.
And there is an obvious and unfortunate parallel here, too, with the various initiatives which have been launched to make farmers improve bio-security to protect against TB: all a bit of waste of time and money if you aren’t going to control the badgers.