Oral evidence: The impact of serious and organised crime on local neighbourhoods, HC 36

Oral evidence, 13 October 2026.

Witnesses

Dr Kate Tudor, Robyn Munt and Dr Kreseda Smith.

Chair

I welcome our first panel in this evidence session as part of our inquiry on the impact of serious and organised crime on local neighbourhoods, with a focus today on rural crime—which, as an MP representing a rural constituency, I am very interested in. We have had some really interesting evidence sessions so far and learned about the way that organised criminality is invading the high street, and how the high street is being used to allow for a multitude of criminal activity behind blocked-out windows and behind counters. It has been very interesting, and we are really keen to hear about the impact of rural crime. I am going to let the first set of panellists introduce themselves, and then we will go into questions.

Dr Smith

I am Dr Kreseda Smith, associate professor in rural criminology and social science at Harper Adams University.

Robyn Munt

I am Robyn Munt, vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union, representing 42,000 farming members. I am also a farmer myself on the Isle of Wight and in Worcestershire.

Dr Tudor

I am Dr Kate Tudor, an associate professor of criminology at Durham University.

Chair

Thank you so much. We will start with another MP from a rural constituency, Ben Maguire.

Ben Maguire

Thanks, Chair, and thanks to the panel for coming in to see us today. First, I want to get some context and background. How has the scale and extent of rural, and particularly organised, crime changed in recent years? Have you seen any trends or patterns?

Robyn Munt

I will just give a very broad overview of how farmers feel about this. It is about the recognition of rural crime having a serious impact on their farming businesses, which I hope we will get the chance to talk more about. It is a range of criminal activity—everything from theft through to waste crime and hare coursing. All of these things cause immense disruption to our farmers and their businesses.

Dr Tudor

I would probably draw attention to the fact that it is incredibly difficult to get an accurate picture of what is actually happening for a number of reasons. If we take the concept of rural crime, we do not have reliable statistics on rural crime for a number of reasons. The first reason is the problems associated with policing statistics. Rural crimes are not generally separated from other crimes, so it is very difficult to ascertain how much rural crime even takes place in one police force area, and added to that is the fact that national figures are not currently collated. For that reason, when we talk about how much rural crime is going on, we usually see people make reference to the NFU Mutual claims data—that is really where the debate is at the moment. There is some really good work going on under the National Rural Crime Unit to try to clean up that picture and get a more detailed picture of what is actually going on. On the second point that you raised in relation to organised crime, it is very difficult to understand what percentage of rural crime would be considered organised crime for a number of reasons. Again, it relates to how we define it and then how we impose that definition in order to come to some kind of statistical measurement—but that does not happen, so we do not have clear statistics. The research that I have carried out into organised crime in rural areas indicates that a significant proportion of criminality that takes place in rural areas would be considered organised criminality, according to a number of different measures. Whether we take the UN definition or the NPCC definition, all of those definitions can be imposed on to the kind of criminality that takes place within rural settings. But if, for example, you looked at traditional measurements of how many organised crime groups we have operating within rural areas, that data would not give you insight into that, because the groups that are engaged in rural organised criminality have not been defined as organised crime groups.

Dr Smith

I just want to come back to what Kate mentioned about the NFU Mutual data, which is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we know about rural crime. That is insurance claims, so it is focused very much on acquisitive theft and damage—theft of property. But we know from various research sources that rural serious and organised crime extends far beyond that particular element. There is modern slavery and human trafficking; cyber-dependent and cyber-enabled crime, which is very much a concern in rural communities; drug trafficking; wildlife crime; food fraud and adulteration; agrochemical counterfeiting—the list goes on. While NFU Mutual gives us something—£41.5 million from its last report earlier this year—that is the tip of the iceberg. I did some rough calculations with a lot of assumptions included, but that brought my figures to approximately £1 billion in terms of just potential insurance claims. Again, that does not go into other criminality that would be considered organised within the rural space.

Robyn Munt

Just to reiterate, NFU Mutual is our partner insurance organisation. That is the data from only one insurance company. As has been said, this does relate to the loss of equipment or the loss of assets, so it also relates to the impact of livestock theft, but it is not covering everybody. It does not talk to the full cost of the impact of all these things. There is also an issue around reporting, and that fundamentally is down to the relationship between farmers and their local police forces. That varies massively across the country, and how these crimes are recorded is a fundamental piece, as Kate said.

Ben Maguire

Anecdotally, as the MP for North Cornwall, I get lots of constituents who have had farming thefts and other rural crimes telling me that they do not bother reporting them any more because there is no follow-up or further investigation. That is not a criticism of the local police because they are massively under-resourced. We heard from the Home Secretary in one of our previous sessions that the rural crime unit that Dr Tudor mentioned has, on average, about £8,000 per police force if you spread it out across all of them. Not all of them are rural forces, but even so, it shows you how little resourcing is going into this.

Robyn Munt

The National Rural Crime Unit is actually a separate entity that is largely funded by the industry. NFU Mutual makes a considerable contribution towards the cost of the running of that unit, whereas those designated teams within rural forces are a separate issue. We find that there are not always designated people who are able to stay in those positions. Again, that undermines the ability of our members to build relationships with their local policing teams.

Ben Maguire

Can I pick up on a point that Dr Tudor made earlier about the statistics not being recorded by police? What would best practice in that space be? We have heard about the evidence we have in terms of NFU Mutual’s statistics, but how can we tackle that?

Dr Tudor

There is a piece of work going on at the moment with the national rural crime co-ordinator. That is trying to identify best practice in forces nationally to come up with some advice to try to implement across all force areas. Again, that knowledge can be developed and disseminated, but the forces that we are asking to improve their practice need the financial input to facilitate that. Really, we are asking someone to do a huge piece of work collating figures within each force area. The National Rural Crime Network had a 10-point plan recently, and one of their recommendations was for each force to have a rural crime co-ordinator, because that is a role that we see as vital to improving things like statistics, intelligence collation and intelligence sharing, and improving the knowledge about rural crime. There are things that can be done, but they need investment to facilitate them.

Ben Maguire

It will be more than £8,000 per police force.

Dr Tudor

Yes, absolutely.

Ben Maguire

What examples of best practice in tackling serious and organised rural crime can you point to that you have seen, perhaps in other parts of the country?

Dr Tudor

There is some really good practice, but it is not on an even playing field. If we take TVP—Thames Valley police—for example, they have a really exceptional rural crime taskforce. They have huge numbers of personnel on that taskforce and they have taken the serious and organised element of their rural crime problem very seriously. That is probably a bit of luck, in the sense that they have a chief officer and a PCC heavily invested in this reality, but they have also a very unfortunate history that has made them prioritise rural crime and the more serious element of that—in the light of PC Andrew Harper. That is an exceptional example for all those reasons. What they do is incredibly impressive. They are really, really good at collating intelligence and creating operational outcomes on the back of that intelligence, using quite sophisticated SOC tactics within the rural arena. That is very rare nationally, because of all the problems that we see around funding. Rural crime teams, if they exist, do not have the resources, knowledge or capabilities to take on jobs like that. In a situation where they do not have those capabilities, they could, traditionally, escalate that to ROCUs—regional organised crime units—to draw on their specialist capabilities in order to help them out with that. What I have found, looking nationally, is that a lot of these jobs are far too big for rural crime teams to take on, because they are very complex and very serious. They often involve crossover with high-level drug supply. They can have a national element; they can have an international element. If you have one or two people on a rural crime team, they simply do not have the investigative capacity to take on a job like that. But when they are thinking about escalating it to a regional organised crime unit, that becomes problematic because they might not reach the threshold of threat, harm and risk to justify that intervention, because they are competing with things like child sexual exploitation, drugs trafficking, firearms, terrorism and so on. What I have found is that quite often the organised criminals who are operating in rural areas are able to act with impunity, because they slip through the cracks of policing. They are too large for local forces and too small for ROCUs, so—

Chair

We have some questions specifically on ROCUs later.

Robyn Munt

There is a piece about recognising the full breadth of the impact. Particularly when I visit members and when I talk with members who are affected by rural crime, I see the full breadth of the impact. This is not just about their businesses; it is also about their homes. You have members telling you that they don’t feel that it is safe to let their children play outside because of intimidation that they have suffered from criminal behaviour. There is also the disruption that is caused by the theft of machinery. Yes, there is an immediate piece about the particular item, but that has a knock-on effect on being able to vaccinate livestock for their health, to put crops in the ground or to manage crops. That is all very time sensitive. The loss of equipment for that process has an impact through the whole business and on the general food production of our country.

Chair

That machinery is very expensive compared with the kind of stuff that might be stolen on a driveway or something like that.

Dr Smith

There is a key thing that we need to take into account in terms of the activities of organised criminal groups in a rural space. Research recognises that serious and organised crime is a violence enhancer. With these threats, intimidation tactics and other violent incidents, if you think about communities that are socially and geographically isolated where there is not a general police presence, they further enhance this issue of the threats of violence towards these communities.

Ben Maguire

That is a really interesting point. I think Dr Tudor alluded to that—how criminals are exploiting that in those remote areas. Before I move on to neighbourhood policing, do the three of you feel that police leaders are taking this seriously enough? Do they recognise the issues that you have just highlighted?

Robyn Munt

There is a full-chain piece here about knowledge, because our members find that even when making the first call to a call centre, the people in the call centre do not always appreciate what is being reported to them and its level of impact. We do a lot of work at a county level with our teams and members going into call centres to highlight this to the people who are in those call centres. That is again about those relationships, but it is also about navigating that piece between urban and rural, and ultimately making sure that farmers are not limited or impacted by a postcode lottery of where they live. These communities are just as important, and it is about making sure that is recognised. The fragmented nature of where they live and the way in which we operate our businesses in those settings gets a bit lost in translation some of the time.

Dr Smith

I think that things are a bit patchy with police leadership. As Kate has alluded to, there are some really good practices. I have also spoken to Thames Valley, and what they do is great. There are other forces out there that are really taking these issues seriously, but at the other end of the scale, there are police and crime commissioners who do not even recognise that rural crime is a thing. I have heard that from my own police and crime commissioner in public fora; he said that there is no such thing as rural crime. That is not a great thing for rural communities to be hearing. But then in the next breath, you have some good responses; they have been working in partnership with the NFU locally to get experts in to talk to their call handlers. This kind of gives a mixed message to our rural communities about how these issues are being seen by the police and appreciated in terms of the extent of the impact it is having on them.

Dr Tudor

I think it is a mixed bag. It is very dependent on who is in place at any given time, but over the last few years, we have seen a kind of material and ideological withdrawal from rural policing generally. We have seen rural crime teams disbanded and reduced in size. That is not good enough, because of all the things that Robyn mentioned earlier around the frontline experiences of trying to contact the police. For rural communities, it is really important that the people they contact have that specialist knowledge, not only so rural communities feel heard and seen, but so the people they contact have the actual capabilities to deal with those crimes satisfactorily. Yes, we have seen rural crime teams disbanded, but we have not seen other frontline staff being trained with the specialist knowledge that is required to deal with this kind of criminality.

Ben Maguire

I wanted to briefly touch on neighbourhood policing. How important is neighbourhood policing in tackling crimes? Local officers in my constituency have the very large Bodmin moor to police, and with the best will in the world, I cannot imagine the Home Secretary suddenly announcing loads of money for lots of new rural crime officers. They have talked about things like drone technology, ATVs and other kinds of tech solutions, even wildlife cameras in some cases. What kinds of things could be improved in the neighbourhood policing space to tackle some of this?

Robyn Munt

You referenced the cameras, and we have heard from talking to members in York East that they have been really effectively used in that area to give more presence in a virtual space. Absolutely, the use of technology has to be the case, but we see some patches where they do not even have a 4x4 vehicle in order to access the sites they are dealing with. Again, it is about seeing more consistency across the country in how engagement is happening. I think farmers would welcome being recognised in that neighbourhood space, because it shows focus. When I met a roundtable in Essex—again thinking about things that work in other neighbourhood settings—there are roll-overs you can do and more targeted programmes to deal with crime. As Dr Tudor said, there is a real piece here about farmers being heard and part of the conversation. Neighbourhood Watch schemes, WhatsApp groups and all these things contribute to building a framework of partnership that helps us to address these issues.

Dr Tudor

An NPT definitely has an important part to play. You are quite right that it is possibly unrealistic to think that we will have 43 wonderful rural crime teams properly funded, but the NPT has to receive training. That has to be institutionalised through the college, or whatever will replace the college post reform. It has to be not just CPD or simply at the introductory level; it has to be part of the centralised neighbourhood policing offer. I would also agree that tech has a large part to play, but generally speaking across the country, the advancements in that area tend to have been funded by really insecure funding revenue streams, things like Home Office grants and so on, which inevitably run out. We have to think about much more permanent ways of funding those improvements, because if we take the National Rural Crime Unit, as has been alluded to, it was predominantly funded through private industry. The NPCC has to take its responsibility seriously to fund improvements in rural policing and not rely on those adjunct funding streams.

Dr Smith

I completely agree that neighbourhood policing teams have a really important part to play. They should be seen as almost the community policing face. Getting to know rural communities is a really important part of what the police need to be doing to gather the information they can then use to generate the intelligence that will lead their policing strategy. The problem we have at the moment—I allude again to the community confidence survey in my force area, which suggests 80% confidence in the police among communities—is that when I replicated that survey with rural communities, it is 50 points lower. There is a huge imbalance between rural communities’ experience of the neighbourhood policing approach, compared with that of urban or suburban areas.

Ben Maguire

I have a final question. How do you think we improve that relationship, particularly with farmers, as Robyn alluded to—building that trust between farmers, others and the police force?

Robyn Munt

Again, it is about improving and sharing best practice. We have some really good examples of where those relationships function well and where the sharing of information works to deal with the problem. Ultimately, farmers need to see results, because that builds their confidence to continue to contribute to the conversation and the reporting piece, as you started out with. Farmers will report if they feel that the problem is going to be dealt with; if they feel that they are not going to be heard, then they will not engage, and I think we can appreciate why. As we have talked about, there is knowledge, training and making sure that the people they deal with have a full appreciation of the impact, because it can just feel like things are not taken seriously enough. Having farmers feel that they are heard in those conversations will help to build trust.

Dr Tudor

Familiarity is obviously a major thing. We have had the guarantee that we would have a named officer for every community, which is fine, but they also need to be competent. By competent, I mean they have to have the requisite skills relating specifically to rural crime. That is really important. We also need to give them the tools to make them credible. There has been a lot of research on the role of WhatsApp across rural communities. If police officers are allowed to join those groups and engage in conversations with the community within that forum, again the impression of the police is greatly improved and the outcomes are improved.

Ben Maguire

We have heard that in previous evidence.

Dr Smith

I think we can add to that. We have a cycle. If farmers do not see a satisfactory—in their consideration—response to a report of a crime, they are less likely to report future crimes. That means that police do not know that these things are going on. They do not have the information, they cannot create the intelligence mapping and they therefore cannot request the resources to be able to tackle those issues. That means that police are not visible. Farmers and rural communities do not see the police, and the cycle continues. It is a self-defeating issue if there is not a visible presence. We know that police presence itself does not deter crime, but it is not necessarily about that; it is about building community confidence. I am not saying, “Let’s go back to having a village bobby,” because we know that that is just not feasible, but it is about being able to know who to contact and how to contact them if there is an issue. As Robyn pointed out, farmers, in particular, cannot separate home and work, which puts an added pressure on the farming community to protect their livelihoods and their homes adequately, and to try to deter being targeted in the first place.

Chair

The Staffordshire constabulary has invested in a rural crime unit, so I want to reassure people in Staffordshire. The reality is that a third of my constituency is in the Peak District national park. Trying to have a named officer covering an enormous amount of countryside and an enormous area that will take hours to cover is a logistical problem. How quickly could that named officer actually get to where they need to be if something happens? Is there a role for first responders? I know people normally think of first responders from a medical point of view, but they are there in the villages. Can we use them more effectively?

Dr Smith

That is a really interesting idea. Initially, my thought is that it would be great to have somebody within the community. I would caveat that a little bit by saying that sometimes people are reticent to get involved from that perspective, whether in a volunteer role, as a warranted officer, as a PCSO or whatever it would look like, because they might be seen as a snitch or a grass. It has been talked about in research internationally that some communities will not talk to that person, so it defeats the object. I think it is something worth exploring if it is done in the right way and the community is on board. I do not think it can be imposed on a community necessarily.

Chair

It must be the right solution for each community. We cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach, because every community will have different needs and different types of farming. My area is dairy farming predominantly, with livestock. We do not have arable. There will be areas with arable that will have different needs.

Robyn Munt

The severity of crime also varies; that is something else to bear in mind. Some areas suffer more from some crimes than others. Unfortunately, everywhere suffers from too much, but the type of crime does vary, which means, as you say, that the response also needs to vary. It is probably more about strategy than anything else. In the modern age, presence is a very different thing from what it was with a village bobby. We make an active effort to invite police forces to our farm safety and county events, just so they can build that connection. It has to be about relationships.

Dr Prinsley

I am Peter Prinsley, the MP for Bury St Edmonds and Stowmarket. It also has a big rural district, although we have some small towns. Do you think visible police stations in rural areas are important, in the same way that we have, say, visible fire stations? We have retained fire officers in some small, rural locations. They obviously need to be there because if there is a fire they need to get there quickly. Do you think we could have a model that looks a bit like that for police stations?

Dr Tudor

I think it might have symbolic power, but beyond that, it is largely irrelevant to achieving outcomes. You need investigative capacity. The seriousness of the offenders involved in that type of crime is often lost in debate. We are talking about first responders; you could use them for reassurance and familiarity, but certainly not in relation to any kind of response to criminality. That symbolic gesture may be advantageous, but in achieving outcomes it is largely irrelevant, because we are talking here about incredibly serious offenders. I have interviewed quite a few as part of my research and I have looked at their offending histories. They are not to be messed with, and they really are the preserve of regional organised crime units. Some of them are from abroad and involved in international drug supply rings. For tackling the organised nature of rural offending, it would not do much.

Chair

We will move on to drugs and county lines with Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

How are county lines operating in rural areas, and what impact do you think drug crime is having there generally?

Dr Tudor

We have seen a real transformation of county lines in recent years. Traditionally, they were conceived of as drug lines coming out of major hubs such as Birmingham, London and so on, running to more rural areas, the idea being that they could operate with impunity and not be noticed so much. They could also expand their territory and market share. However, in recent years we have seen a real contraction of county lines, so they are no longer as frequently running across those large geographical areas; they have significantly shortened. We do still see them running into rural areas, but we tend to see them within a force area. County lines do remain an issue within rural areas, but in other ways than you might traditionally think. I did some analysis of wildlife offenders within a couple of force areas, and when we looked at the nominals involved in those offences, such as badger baiting, hare coursing, poaching and so on, a lot of those nominals were county lines-affiliated OCG members from other force areas. When we are thinking about rural offending, it is not just the direct presence of a county line within a particular rural area; it can also be the nominals involved in those drugs networks coming to rural areas to engage in those other types of crime. We have been alluding to the kinds of acquisitive offences that we traditionally relate to organised crime activity, but actually when we are thinking about things like poaching, hare coursing, badger baiting and so on, they are the offences that rural communities really worry about, because they tend to be associated with much higher levels of violence, intimidation and aggression, over a sustained period. Violence during a particular act of theft is very rare, because the offenders do not want to engage in that—they want to get in and get out. However, in relation to those other types of crime, the people involved in county lines who are involved in poaching, hare coursing and other wildlife offences engage in much more sustained aggression towards rural communities and business owners. You have two elements there to think about. County lines are relevant to any community. It is no longer just rural communities, seaside communities, local towns and so on. It is a huge problem, but it has changed quantitatively and qualitatively in recent years. You also have that other link between traditional rural offences and county lines OCGs.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

How do policing strategies to tackle county lines differ in rural areas?

Dr Tudor

It is amazing. Actually, I think the county lines model is worthy of consideration in relation to rural crime. I work with the National County Lines Coordination Centre, which does some absolutely brilliant work. It has regional county lines co-ordinators for each ROCU, who act as a point of contact for the forces within those regional areas. To replicate that with rural crime co-ordinators would be a massive step forward, both in the dissemination of best practice that we talked about earlier and in intelligence collation and creating those jobs for some kind of regional-level force operational outcomes as well. There is a lot of best practice that sits in the world of county lines that could be replicated within this arena.

Robyn Munt

It is important to recognise that, from a farming perspective, when we talk about wildlife crime, the impact starts to get a bit lost in translation. As Dr Tudor said, the intimidation and violence that our members experience as a result of these crimes is a big part of it. That is what makes them feel very unsafe in rural settings. We tend to find that once a group has found a soft patch, as it were, for this kind of crime, they keep coming back. We have members who have unfortunately faced repeated instances of this, and it just gets worse. Our members have suffered some awful instances of assault. If you put that in an urban setting, there would be a much different response to it. It is important to recognise that impact piece. Our members also feel that if there is a push down on these crimes, they move somewhere else. How the intelligence is shared between forces means that it sometimes feels like you are starting from scratch again in a different space—it is that falling through the cracks piece. From an impact point of view, as well as intimidation, there is disruption and damage. With hare coursing, we rightly focus on the welfare of the animals involved, but there is also a lot of damage to fields, crops and food production, as well as issues with being able to access fields, because you have individuals there. It is not just happening at night time; this happens in broad daylight.

Dr Smith

We need to consider the information that is being provided to Government about the role of county lines and the impact it has on our rural communities. The 2020 report from His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary only mentioned rural once, and that was in relation to rural being an importing area—the drugs coming in. A 2025 evaluation report of the county lines programme did not mention rural at all. We need to consider that rural is no longer just an importing area. It should be seen as an exporting area in some places. There are plenty of locations in rural communities where drugs factories or drugs farms can be set up under the radar—abandoned barns or buildings. That is changing what drug production and trafficking looks like from a rural perspective. That needs to be recognised.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

What about the effectiveness of initiatives like the national intensification week? Have you found them productive?

Dr Tudor

County lines policing is a contentious issue, because it is dominated by a strong Home Office-driven vision of what constitutes success, which is based around the number of lines that are closed. If we think about the harms associated with county lines, we are thinking about serious forms of child criminal exploitation, so we should really be looking to measure the outcomes around safeguarding as well. Yes, we can say that the taskforces that have been set up have been a massive success in terms of line closures, but that has not done anything to chip away at the broader networks of drug supply. It certainly has not done anything to protect the children who are exploited within them.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

You touched on the issues of people using fields, abandoned places and so on, but obviously some places are legally allowed to grow cannabis under special licence from the Home Office. How do you think this impacts the issue of tackling county lines overall?

Dr Smith

That is an interesting point, and it is something that Harper Adams investigated. We wanted to do some research using cannabis, and we decided not to apply for the licence to do that, because of the potential threat of criminalisation and criminal activity that it could bring. From a criminal perspective, it is difficult to separate those licensed locations. They are still locations that they could target. If it is not something that is appropriately protected, they are just going to infiltrate it. Having those legal, licensed locations is great, as long as there is a reason for them. We decided against that approach and changed tack in our research. In terms of criminal thought processes, they will find anywhere and they just do not care, essentially.

Robbie Moore

Thank you for being in front of us, everyone. I am keen to focus on rural organised crime units. I know they have been touched on, but I would like to delve a bit deeper. They are made up of various organisations, covering a wide spectrum. I want to understand, from each of you, how effective you think they are.

Dr Tudor

Can you just clarify—

Robbie Moore

How effective do you feel that rural organised crime units—

Chair

Regional organised crime units.

Robbie Moore

Sorry. How effective are regional organised crime units at attacking organised crime in rural areas?

Dr Tudor

Regional organised crime units do not generally take on jobs. They offer specialist capabilities to forces that need support because a job would be too big for them. Generally speaking, they do not dip their toe into rural organised crime very often. The reason for that is essentially the scarcity of resources. When they are thinking about their capacity to take on jobs, they have to take on the jobs that have the highest threat, harm and risk. They are therefore oriented towards terrorism and all the things that were outlined earlier on. When I looked, as a kind of dip test at a particular time, the NCA had something in the region of 3,500 to 4,000 OCGs mapped, 22 of which, at that time, had a primary threat associated with rural criminality. When we think about which rural organised crime groups might be mapped or addressed by regional organised crime units, it is the groups that tend to be pushed up over the threat, harm, risk threshold, such as people who are stealing telehandlers to rip out ATMs and people who are using explosives in that context. It could be related to the volume of their offending, or to the networks that they are involved in, potentially involving trans-national drug supply and so on. Generally speaking, rural organised crime groups do not feature on ROCU radars very often, but when they do, it tends to be at that end of the spectrum.

Robyn Munt

That mapping piece is really important. Mapping and monitoring to get to the bottom of the cause and effect is surely where we can see most positive change. Ultimately, as the National Farmers’ Union, we want to see delivery on the ground and members feeling like there is change, but this all ties together. I made a point earlier about reporting. If farmers do not feel like they are going to get an action, they do not report it. If they do not report it, you do not have the data. That all drives back into the picture about where resource is targeted. We have to ensure that resource is placed where it needs to be, but if the impact of rural crime is not properly recognised, that is not where the resource lands. The full breadth of that impact is not currently being seen. Kate made a point about recognising that if the thing happening here that looks small was tackled, it could have a much bigger effect elsewhere. That has to be properly addressed.

Dr Tudor

Can I add one more thing? I looked at the groups involved in rural criminality across the UK: they look like an OCG, they act like an OCG and they are involved in organised criminality. They are committing cross-border criminality for material gain involving networks that are regional, national and international. They are also involved in multiple forms of poly-criminality involving really serious forms of serious organised crime. Just because they have not been mapped, as Robyn says, that does not mean that they are qualitatively different from the groups that have been. We have a huge problem that is not captured in the data.

Robbie Moore

Okay, that has been raised.

Dr Smith

I also think that ROCUs not being involved or having a part in policing or the oversight of rural serious and organised crime is missing the picture. For a lot of the NCA and Home Office priorities that ROCUs are dealing with, those crimes are happening in rural areas. Modern slavery and human trafficking, fraud, cyber-enabled crime, serious violence and drug trafficking—these offences are happening in the rural and, as Kate rightly points out, they are being committed by offenders who are not just offending in the rural space; they are offending anywhere. It is a business model, and geographical space does not underpin it. They can commit the crime regardless of the space.

Robbie Moore

Are there any drawbacks to the regional model? Do you feel that intelligence sharing and data collection, where it exists and can be captured, can be better distributed and shared from an intelligence point of view?

Dr Smith

Again, it comes back to the resources available and the interactions between the local force and the regional units. I have talked to various members of ROCUs, and they would love to get their mitts on some of these crimes that are happening in the rural space, but there are just not enough people to do that as well as deal with child sexual exploitation and the terrorist offences, which they really are focused on because of the high level of threat, harm and risk, as has been pointed out.

Dr Tudor

Intelligence sharing is a huge part of the problem. A central part of offenders’ modus operandi is to exploit the weaknesses in policing that exist around intelligence sharing. They know fine well that if they travel further afield, they may not be known because the information may not necessarily be shared between police forces. I said earlier that they are involved in crime series; they commit multiple crimes. You have talked about retail crime, and it is a similar model. They will disperse that criminality across multiple forces, so the extent and nature of the crime series is not necessarily immediately obvious to policing, because there is a failure to share that information. There is a huge improvement piece that has to go on around intelligence sharing. There is some really good work taking place under the National Rural Crime Unit around the introduction of Teams channels to facilitate that, and that should be supported and developed much further. Intelligence sharing has to get better, because that is the fundamental weakness that criminals are currently exploiting.

Robbie Moore

I want to ask some questions about police reform. Before we get on to that—this maybe picks up some of the answers that you gave to previous questions—I want to talk about where data exists and the confidence associated with how rural crime is being dealt with. Do you feel that there is a correlation between the confidence in how police forces are dealing with rural crime and the way the local police force’s police and crime plan and strategy refers to dealing with rural crime? I suppose the point I am getting at is this. I represent a constituency in West Yorkshire that is predominantly urban, although there are huge rural crime challenges on the periphery—the boundaries—but the neighbouring police forces naturally focus on rural crime, given that bigger, more rural communities are encompassed by those constabularies. Does the data that exists show a correlation between confidence levels and the police force’s reference to dealing with rural crime?

Robyn Munt

Both my colleagues will probably be able to talk about the data. Certainly, the feeling from members is that if their issue is not going to be taken seriously, they do not report it next time. We have to get out of that. Dr Smith called it a vicious cycle, and I think that is absolutely right: it is perpetuating a problem. Farmers must feel that they have been heard and that their issue has been properly recognised and taken seriously. We have incidents where people report, “We’ve got your crime number. What more do you want?” Functionally, that deals with an insurance claim, but it doesn’t address the problem. You find that these crimes often happen on a repeat basis because, again, criminals know where to exploit weakness. They have an awareness of the triggers that result in other teams being dispatched. Our members need a response; that comes back in some of the confidence data that we have seen.

Dr Tudor

For me, it is more operational matters than strategic matters that would influence public confidence. The police need investment, real outcomes, investigative capabilities and people with specialist knowledge. From my experience, I do not think that strategic-level conversations would influence their perspectives too much.

Dr Smith

I have spoken to farmers a lot about what is affecting their confidence and trust in the police. More often than not, the response I get is that the police just do not know what rural crime is. This comes back to a definitional piece; we do not really have a good working strategic definition at a national level of what rural crime looks like. It is more than just the acquisitive theft, as we have all talked about this afternoon. If a farmer or rural resident reports a crime and somebody comes out to them who does not have the first idea of what they are dealing with—again, this comes back to the importance of knowledge and training—the confidence that something is going to happen, and that there will be a positive outcome and that the report will not just be “no-crimed” and closed, is not great.

Dr Tudor

I will just make one more point here, because I think that the response I just gave you was very short-sighted. The operational outcomes are what will influence perceptions on the ground, but to facilitate better operational outcomes, you need the strategic investment that will begin in those crime plans. The people at the top making the decisions have to understand the reality of those on-the-ground experiences and provide the resources to improve them. So, it is both—operational and strategic.

Robyn Munt

Also, language is a fundamental underpinning of this, because the term “wildlife crime” does not give enough of the picture of the impact of that crime, just as “livestock worrying” really does not convey the impact of a farmer coming out to a field of animals that have been mauled by a dog.

Robbie Moore

The Government’s police reform White Paper has committed to significantly reducing the number of police forces. What do you feel could be the impact of moving to fewer larger forces and what would be the effect on their addressing rural crime?

Robyn Munt

In a general sense, we have contributed to the conversation around the White Paper, particularly around funding—making sure that those fragmented communities are properly represented with the resource needed to deal with the crimes in those areas. Our concern has always been that we really want to get away from this postcode lottery of provision, whether in terms of operational delivery or resource, because farmers in a rural area who are suffering from the consequences of rural crime should not be disadvantaged in what is available to them to access from police forces on the basis of poor calculations of resource allocation.

Robbie Moore

Does the NFU have a position at the moment on the White Paper? I know that you objected initially to the direction that it was going in.

Robyn Munt

I would be really happy to share with the Committee the full paper that we submitted, because it goes into all the available things, and probably in a far better way than I can convey in a couple of minutes. I think it would be very helpful if we sent that into you.

Robbie Moore

Okay, fine.

Dr Tudor

I think it can go either way; it provides both a beautiful opportunity and a real risk to rural communities. All the same arguments that we are having around current police provision are applicable in that context. We could build in rural perspectives, rural safety and taking the organised crime picture very seriously into the institutions and the organisations that we build, post reform. However, that will take police leaders, Government and the Home Office, and so on, taking the reality of organised crime in rural areas seriously, and building that knowledge into the actual institutions that we choose to create. It is not that it is automatically a bad thing for rural communities. There is a real danger that the creation of the larger forces draws resources away from rural communities to the high-demand areas, for sure, but that is not an axiomatic outcome of this agenda. If those of us sitting in this room take the knowledge around the seriousness of this form of criminality, and you build it into the institutions that you decide to create, it could be a wonderful opportunity and could mean that we start to take this type of crime seriously.

Dr Smith

I probably agree with that. I have had the joy of reading the 96-page document in detail, and my initial thought was, “Where is the detail?” I know it is a White Paper, so IT will not provide the detail, but I got the feeling that they are not taking rural serious and organised crime seriously. To echo Dr Tudor’s comments, if we can collectively put that position forward, this is the opportunity to make the change for rural. As it stands, the only mention of rural in the White Paper and its associated documents is in relation to response times to category 1 calls. I still do not have a clue where the figure of a 20-minute response time for rural areas came from, given that some villages in Ceredigion are a 40-minute drive from the nearest police station—I am sure it is the same in Devon and Cornwall.

Chair

And in Staffordshire and Staffordshire Moorlands.

Dr Smith

Absolutely. I do not know where these figures have come from. On the neighbourhood policing guarantee, which is one of the documents associated with the White Paper, introducing 13,000 new neighbourhood police staff would not introduce 13,000 new people—the majority of those people will be redeployed from other areas. Rural crime teams have a significant problem with that abstraction and the redeployment to other policing priorities of their staff, who then do not come back. On going forward with the reforms, the Government need to honour their commitment, as stated in 2025 and 2026, to rural-proof all policy. At this point in time, with the proposed policing reforms, I do not see that happening. If we have to work with this proposed system for the next 50 years, we cannot overlook the rural voice in these reforms.

Robyn Munt

Fundamentally, where we have seen positive change and good best practice, the last thing we want is regression. Some really good measures are being implemented in certain parts of the country, and rural teams are supporting rural communities, but that needs to be done more widely. The last thing we want from reform is backward steps.

Chair

We have overrun slightly, but I want to finish on this, so Ben Maguire will come in a quick supplementary.

Ben Maguire

One of the really big problems in North Cornwall, and in Cornwall more generally, is the county lines drug gangs. We see some horrible practices, such as the cuckooing of vulnerable adults and children, and, recently, the grooming of children to get them involved. One selling point of this police reform is that, by definition, larger forces will be able to co-ordinate literally across county lines, as you have mentioned. Devon and Cornwall recently led Operation Scorpion and worked with regional forces across the south-west, which was really effective. In your view, Dr Tudor, is it a case of carrying on doing that, rather than expanding the geography of police forces?

Dr Tudor

That is an interesting point. We see some really good practice with forces working together. In the north, Operation Hawkeye meets something like every two weeks to share intelligence and to identify nominals of interest who work across the region, not just within the area of a particular force. We also see that in the south-west, and in a number of other examples. That is really good practice that needs to be extended and facilitated more. In relation to rural crime, a really interesting part of the reform agenda is the potential creation of the National Police Service, particularly the more organised element of it. That is because of all the issues around intelligence sharing and facilitating cross-border jobs within policing that we are talking about. That potentially offers policing an important opportunity to get the policing of organised crime in rural areas right. However, the resources of ROCUs, the NCA and everything we have talked about are drawn towards high harm. It is about writing rural interests and the reality of the organised crime picture into the operating model during the creation of the National Police Service, and that needs to be done from the very beginning. These operations are really good and do help to tackle cross-border offending, but beyond the forces that are working together, there is still a border. We definitely need a much more joined-up, coherent approach.

Chair

Before I draw things to a close, I have to comment that, as the MP for a place called Three Shires Head, where Cheshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire meet, the idea that the east midlands, north-west and west midlands services will be able to understand what is going on there fills me with horror and deep cynicism, so I am yet to be convinced about the need for police reform. I appreciate everything you have said and the time you have spent with us today. I am sorry that we slightly overran, but it is a fascinating area. I bring this panel to a close. Examination of witnesses

Witnesses

David Allen, Donna Jones and Andrew Huddleston.

Chair

Welcome to our second panel in this evidence session for our inquiry on the impact of serious and organised crime on neighbourhoods, in particular rural crime today. Could the panellists introduce themselves?

David Allen

I am David Allen. I am the police, fire and crime commissioner for Cumbria. I am also the APCC joint lead on serious and organised crime. I spent 30 years in law enforcement, finishing up as the head of Interpol, Europol and the Schengen information bureau in the NCA.

Donna Jones

Hello, my name is Donna Jones. I am the police and crime commissioner for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, the sixth largest police force in the country and a very large rural police force, as well as having big urban areas. I was the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners lead for serious and organised crime for two years prior to Mr Allen taking it on.

Chair

Yours is probably one of the only forces that has a sea between parts of the area it covers.

Donna Jones

Sadly, yes—it is causing me much consternation at the moment.

Andrew Huddleston

Good afternoon, Chair. I am Andy Huddleston. I am head of the National Rural Crime Unit and the National Police Chiefs’ Council tactical lead.

Chair

I think you heard quite a lot of what was said on the first panel. There will be some repetition, but any additional things you want to bring in will be appreciated.

Dr Prinsley

Hello, I am Peter Prinsley, and I am the MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket in Suffolk, which is very rural, as you know. We have a lot of sugar beet and other things. I have a couple of questions for you. Can you prioritise rural crime effectively within the national policing policies, and what types of rural crime present the biggest challenges?

David Allen

That is a good question. This is probably an area that needs work, certainly within national strategy, and I would like to see the rural crime strategy come forward and be developed, which it has not been yet. In terms of rural crime, as part of my police, fire and crime plan I have consulted local people. Rural crime is a priority within Cumbria police—it is one of the four main priorities—as you would expect within Cumbria, which is a massive rural area; we have big urban centres in terms of our population, but rural crime impacts on us disproportionately. Part of it is making sure you have a local response and invest in that local response, but I would like to see a stronger regional and national approach to rural crime as well.

Donna Jones

It is an excellent question. As you will be aware, the Home Secretary sets the national policing priorities, of which there are six as of the last two years; there were five for many years before that. As police and crime commissioners and mayors, we set the local policing priorities. In my first term in office from 2021 to 2024, I was not able to give the focus on rural crime because we had so few police officers in my police force area, so my priorities lay in a different area at that point. From 2024 onwards, it has become one of my top three priorities. Rural communities are disproportionately affected by serious and organised crime. There is the competing challenge of the urban threat versus the rural threat for police forces—particularly those such as mine and yours, which are trying to police hundreds of square miles and keep communities safe in them. The really key thing for me around serious and organised crime is that it poses a significant, evolving threat to communities. Criminal gangs are highly adaptable. They are absolutely financially motivated. On that, I want to pause for a moment. Crime types, as we know, fall into three main classifications: they are either sexually motivated, violence-led or dishonesty-led. What we know about serious and organised criminal gangs is that they are motivated by money—that is exactly what they are doing it for. It might be black market gambling with hare coursing or plant and machinery theft, but the violence often comes in off the back of that, so those are the two main crime drivers. Modern-day slavery then plays out, and there are a whole host of other things that I am sure we will get into. Back in 2024, I made rural crime a priority for my chief constable. I have funded a rural crime taskforce. I put local bobbies into every rural community in January 2024. We have now got dedicated detectives in my force. I have paid for people to work in our police intel unit just to be developing leads from our rural communities. We have also got analysts developing those leads too. A whole lot of investment has gone in from me, which has driven up our charge rates, but we still have a way to go.

Andrew Huddleston

To summarise, we have 43 different ways of doing this. You are hearing from two PCCs who represent two rural forces that do it very well, but in terms of prioritisation, we have the National Police Chiefs’ Council strategic priorities and we have a strategy that is there for all 43 forces to work to. You are hearing that variation that we have across the country of forces where it does work very well, but equally, there are forces where that strategy has not been implemented as well. The strategies and priorities are there; it is about how they are followed in those 43 different ways. If you take nothing else away from today, the point I want you to take away is that rural crime is not green grass, taking a hare or rabbit. Rural crime is serious organised crime, and I will give you examples this afternoon where international organised crime groups are specifically targeting our rural areas to commit crime because it is advantageous for them to do that.

Dr Prinsley

There is a sense that rural districts are relatively under-protected by the police, as opposed to urban areas where there are very many more police. Is this question also about balancing organised crime in rural and urban areas and how you prioritise that?

Andrew Huddleston

It is very easy to make the statement that rural areas are not policed as well. Look at the size of Northumberland: it is twice the size of Luxembourg. You are never going to get the police officer footprint per square mile as you would for the City of London or anywhere else. We have to be realistic around what the policing model is that fits for that area. In my experience as the national lead for the last eight years, there is a correlation between a PCC’s priorities, a chief constable’s priorities and crucially the investment in delivery. What you have heard about Thames Valley earlier this afternoon is absolutely right, and that works very well. There are large areas where we have got a good policing footprint, but there are others where it is just not prioritised in terms of commitment on the ground.

Dr Prinsley

There is the question about whether the priority is something determined locally or nationally. Andrew, if you were to be given a whole lot more resources—suppose I had a chequebook here—what would you do with them?

Andrew Huddleston

To repeat, the strategy is set. We have got the priorities; we know what we need to be looking at. There are numerous examples that we could give of where organised crime groups are operating, and we would look for the assistance of the ROCUs—the regional organised crime units—to help deliver. When that has not been forthcoming, we have had to find other ways of doing it. If you look at the two international crime groups that have been committing the vast majority of the GPS thefts across the country, they were international groups that have actually not been taken out by the ROCUs; they were taken out through co-ordination of the national rural crime unit, working with the regional forces. Eighteen months ago, it was Cumbria and the west coast. In the last two months, it has been the south-east of England. Eight forces have been affected, and there have been multi-million-pound thefts. It was the work of those rural crime teams that actually caught the offenders and put them in prison.

Dr Prinsley

So that problem is solved.

Andrew Huddleston

It is like anything. It is often referred to as the whack-a-mole game: we deal with one group, but we know that it is a lucrative market. You heard from Robyn from the NFU this afternoon. You have heard from the PCC as well that there is a lot of money at stake here—millions of pounds. As soon as we take a team out, it is just a matter of time before the next team is sent. It is a constant recurring thing; we are focusing on following where the intelligence takes us and being able to be fleet of foot to be able to deal with it as quickly as possible. That is why the NFU Mutual’s figures will show an 80% reduction for 2025 in GPS thefts. That is not down to luck; that is down to a lot of hard work by some very good officers and staff.

Donna Jones

We are never, unless we close significant public services across the country, going to have enough police officers to be able to have Dixon of Dock Green stood on the corner of every village green. This is about working smarter, not harder. Where policing in England and Wales has been a bit slow to the table is in exploiting technology in rural communities. In the bigger rural forces that are really getting into this, led by Andy and the team, you can really see the difference. For example, in rural communities, you have very willing participants. The people who live there are much more willing to work with the police as a group of local residents than you get perhaps in some of our urban areas. What I have done in my patch, for example, is invest in rural CCTV—mobile, deployable CCTV—that we can lend to the farmers, landowners and gamekeepers who are being targeted by poachers. We know when the season is about to start and when they are going to be more vulnerable. I have invested in rural drones. I launched the first rural drone pilot in the country last month. I will give you an example from 18 days ago, when someone was catapulting livestock on a farm in Hampshire. A 999 call came in and, through the EyesOn app that I have launched, the police control room sent out a notification to everyone in that area registered as rural drone pilots to say, “We need to get a drone up in this area.” I have paid for those drones; they are tools owned by the police but given to local communities to use. The drone was up within five minutes. That meant that the police control room was able to see straight to what was going on through that drone, live, because it is all linked up. We were able to evidence-capture from that. We were then able to get another drone up a couple of miles away, so that, as the poacher was driving away, we could follow. The number plate was tracked to an address in Southampton. It is a live investigation. The person was arrested and is someone who already happens to be a person of interest to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight constabulary for similar linked offences. So we cannot have hundreds of police officers policing our rural communities on the off-chance that something might happen, but through working with willing communities, gamekeepers, farmers and landowners, we need to be exploiting technology so much more to give communities the tools that they need to make them safer.

David Allen

In rural Cumbria, most of our rural crime in the north and east comes from Durham, unfortunately. We work with our farmers and locals in Kirkby Stephen. We regularly have joint operations with Durham, North Yorkshire and Northumbria, and Andy’s team as well. We also co-opt the locals. They all have radios and are very active with their WhatsApp groups as soon as anything is seen, especially when we have the days of action, and we have many of those during the course of the year. That has reduced quad-bike theft by almost 50% in the last year, because we are working with the locals. As Donna said, there is a willingness in rural areas that you do not get in the urban centres. They know that the individuals are coming in from elsewhere to take their livelihoods and property away; they feel very strongly about that, and they are willing to work closely with us to tackle it. Technology is vital. Drones are the next thing coming along. We do not have an infinite number of police officers, and the areas that we are covering are massive, so drones are absolutely vital going forward.

Andrew Huddleston

While I would always take money from you—it is always helpful, and there is an element of that—we would actually have a greater ask in terms of support. This is not just about policing. This is not, as you have heard from many of my colleagues in the past, just about arresting our way out of this. This is also about the fact that there are many factors that make rural crime the problem that it is. To take it from the very beginning, I will give the example that you have heard this afternoon of cash machine rip-outs. We had a figure at one point where, of 17 cash machine rip-outs across the country that were done using farm machinery—telehandlers and things like that—14 were done using machinery stolen from a farm. The reason for that is that, in the vast majority of times that we go on to farms, we will find keys left in the machines. I say that publicly because the criminals already know that. This is absolutely not about blaming farmers, because we work very well with them and everybody has a role, including ourselves, but there is an element of this that goes from farmers leaving keys in machines through to manufacturers. It is absolutely wrong that you can buy a £100,000 or £200,000 tractor today and a single key will start every single machine that that brand makes. It is the same with quad bikes too. There are elements of that that need to be addressed. On legislation, my ask would be about the likes of the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023. Three years later, we still do not have what we were asking for, which was assistance to help make farm machinery and construction machinery more secure. Again, as you have heard today, this is not about one criminal who just picks on a rural area; this is about people who are targeting construction equipment as well. That is why our team, which is only eight people, is actually funded by the industry, rather than, as it was historically, by the Government as well. My ask would therefore be to say to the Commons and MPs, “Look, you could help us to better support what we do by giving us those powers.” Again, I would also like to think that the new power regarding searches with an inspector’s authorisation—which is in legislation now; we are just waiting for it to be pushed out—will be a game changer in helping us to recover stolen equipment.

Dr Prinsley

Did I hear that correctly, that there is one key that operates all the tractors that are manufactured?

Andrew Huddleston

I will be very clear on this because some manufacturers will be watching very closely what I say. Some manufacturers have machinery that is very secure. It has immobilisation and digital keypads, but there are manufacturers out there where one key will start every single machine in the range that they make. If you look at quad bikes as well, not every manufacturer, but for some manufacturers it is one key starts all. From a policing perspective, this should not just be about policing.

Chair

It is easier for the user, because you just need the one key, but it is not safe.

Andrew Huddleston

In fact, for most quad bikes you just need a screwdriver.

Dr Prinsley

That is heard very loud and clear in this Committee. Thank you for that. I would say that the television programme most relevant is probably “Heartbeat”, not “Dixon of Dock Green”.

Donna Jones

That is a good point: I stand corrected.

Dr Prinsley

I am from the North Yorkshire moors, so I know a bit about that. The police chief constable that I met in my district told me about domestic violence and how it is very under-reported in rural districts. I can believe that, not just on farms, but in villages as well. What would be your answer to that problem?

Donna Jones

Domestic violence is under-reported across the country, not just in rural communities, so I do not see a profile that stands out for me particularly about rural communities. If you were talking to me about some ethnic minority communities, I would say yes, because they try and keep things much more insular, but not particularly the farming community as a cohort, or rural communities. It is a problem across the whole country. It is the largest reported crime in every police force in England and Wales. It is not the largest committed crime; it is the largest reported crime. But we know it is very under-reported, particularly with male victims of domestic violence, too.

David Allen

I would agree with Donna in a lot of those respects. It accounts for 25% of all calls into the police control room, so it is the largest scale of offences reported, but what we find in the isolated communities—we have very isolated communities in Cumbria—is a husband and wife farming team who work together. It is very difficult if one of you is a victim of domestic abuse. How do you report that? That could be the livelihood of the farm gone—you have broken up the family unit and the farm. We do know that it is considerably under-reported. There have been many, many instances of domestic abuse before it is reported. That is in the national stats, anyway, but more so in a rural setting is what we found from local experience.

Dr Prinsley

Finally, I think the point about domestic violence perpetrated on men is also very much under-reported. In my constituency surgery last week a mother came in to tell me about her son who had been murdered by a partner who is now in prison. He had failed to report it. I think it is a big problem. I think it is a rural problem, actually.

Donna Jones

Yes. A new rule is coming in from I think 26 October, which is the domestic violence death review. Currently when someone dies in a domestic setting, it falls to the local council to lead the review. In some cases it is a very small district council. Some of them have community safety partnerships—CSPs—and some do not. For some of them this will be the first domestic violence homicide review that they have done in 10 years, and I do not believe that that is the right place for domestic violence homicide reviews to sit. Where you have a mayor, it could sit in the mayor’s office or as part of the command authority work. It probably should sit with your upper-tier council or your adult and children’s social care teams as opposed to—I would have said with police and crime commissioners, but as we are a finite commodity, clearly that would not be the place to put that now.

David Allen

I would agree with Donna on that. Evidence from Cumbria is that about a third of the cases are of male domestic violence that we are now seeing reported. We invest locally in help in that area with the domestic violence co-ordinators and victim support, etc. It is an area of concern. It is massively under-reported. There is no doubt about that.

Chair

Picking up on one of Peter’s earlier points, this is probably for Mr Allen and Ms Jones. This is about prioritising. You both have urban areas where it is probably easier to get a crime solved than it might be in a rural area. I understand that, but how do you, with your competing priorities, make sure that rural crime is properly prioritised? What is your technique for doing that?

Donna Jones

It is very difficult. I will be very honest: in my first three years, 2021 to 2024—in my first term of office—it was not one of my top priorities. I had come into a police force that had cut its frontline police officers. Hampshire and Cleveland were two forces that still had not recovered their 2010 policing numbers 18 months ago. It is a very large police force, as you said, with urban and rural push and pull, and competing demands. I have 360 parish councils across the 2.2 million people I represent. I spent years going around and saying to them, “I promise you that I am going to get to you, but at the moment we have people being killed, gun exploitation, drug exploitation, sexual violence and prostitution. We have a lot of things going on in the cities of Portsmouth and Southampton and some of our big urban areas. I need to make sure the chief constable has enough police officers, and I need to fund that to enable him or her”—I had a her at that point—“to do the job I am paying them to do.” In 2024, I was then able to have that reset. In the last two years, I have reopened 10 new police stations—particularly in rural communities—that my predecessor had closed. Giving people a front counter not only gives them the ability to come in and speak to the police when they need to, but provides reassurance. The people sitting on the front counters are not just sitting there waiting for someone to come in, but are processing all the online crime reports as well.

Chair

So you have administrative staff doing this?

Donna Jones

Absolutely. They are doing that to help police officers. The key thing for me has been having a visible presence and giving people back their local bobbies. In January 2024, I brought back a named local police officer for every single community, so every village and every hamlet has one. Those local bobbies are never abstracted to deal with 999 calls; they are proactive only. They should know the local headteacher, barber and hairdresser. They should really be a part of their communities, and that is what I have been striving to do. Investing in the rural crime taskforce was a significant investment on my part. That was about my priorities, but also about my representing a large swathe of rural communities across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. If you do not have buy-in from your mayor or PCC, it is incredibly difficult, because a chief constable will always have a greater threat and harm assessment in other areas. If it is not led by people like us, it is probably not happening, to be honest.

Ben Maguire

I was particularly interested in your point about the front desk. Have you seen an uptick in reporting of crime since that was reopened?

Donna Jones

Yes, we have, but the great impact has been something else. I will use the market town of Petersfield, which is in Damian Hinds’s constituency, as an example. In June last year, I opened a police station there for the first time in 10 years—it had been closed 10 years ago by my predecessor. We have seen a 19% reduction in crime in that market town, not so much because people are going in and reporting crime but because there is a more visible policing presence. I have both 999 responders and neighbourhood policing teams working from there, and that has been a visual deterrent—so prevention is better than cure. That has been really key, and we need it for rural communities too.

Ben Maguire

That is really interesting. In my rural community in North Cornwall, Launceston has been trying to get a front desk for a long time, and our PCC Alison Hernandez has refused to do that. I agree that it would increase confidence in policing, not necessarily from increasing the number of police officers, but from having the access to the police to report crime, and from having confidence and trust.

Dr Prinsley

The view of the professor from the first panel was that, if you had a pot of money, it would best be spent on investigations and zapping up your investigative capacity. I am sure you are right that it is reassuring to have something that looks like a police station in Petersfield, but the question is whether the money you spent on that would have been better spent on increasing the investigative capacity of the officers dealing with the complicated, serious crimes.

Donna Jones

I guess it is about whether you want to be reactionary or preventive, and there is a balance to be struck there. We do not want too few detectives, or for the detectives we do have to carry too high a caseload, because victims drop off, cases fall away and you end up with people being repeat victims and criminals getting away with it. To go back to Andy’s point, if there was a never-ending porridge pot, we would of course have more money and more detectives, please. I do think that prevention is better than cure, and that is very much the approach I have taken. I have weaved a trauma-informed practice into everything I am doing through my office: the £11 million of services that I commission, victim support and perpetrator support programmes, jointly with the Probation Service. Tackling the root cause of why someone has been a heroin or crack cocaine addict for the last 10 years is better than locking them up, because if you can prevent them from wanting to burgle houses and steal tractors, or whatever it is, that is surely a better thing.

Chair

Mr Allen, do you want to add anything?

David Allen

You asked me about priorities and how we prioritise. A lot of that is the function that we carry out—all being well, mayors and deputy mayors will follow us in it—which is to hold to account. I started off my life as a village bobby. I was a rural sergeant, when we had rural police stations in Cumbria. They were closed down in austerity—16 police stations. Unlike Donna, I have not had the funding to be able to reopen them. What I have done is invest 44% more into our neighbourhood policing teams. That is 44% extra staff—PCSOs and constables. That is how you start to restore trust and confidence. It is about the contact with the public. Policing is a contact sport; I have frequently described it as such. When I knocked on doors prior to my election in 2024, everybody was telling me, “I want to see a police officer; I want to know who my police officer is.” Yes, they cover huge areas—huge swathes of Cumbrian countryside—but if they are active, engaged and in all the community groups, they will get the trust and confidence, the reporting and the local buy-back. In relation to your question about whether you invest in investigation or prevention, I would always go prevention to start with because it is cheaper. For example, I invest heavily in youth and community groups from the community fund money we take from criminals. For every £1 that I invest, I can show you that we are actually saving £3 in terms of criminality, social care and so on. In the areas that we have invested in, antisocial behaviour has gone down by 40%, and crime has come down by 8%. Prevention works. You have to have an investigation capability as well, but if you invest in prevention first, you can reduce the burden on the back end.

Andrew Huddleston

Part of our role is to promulgate best practice across the country from all 43 forces. I regularly get asked, “What would be the one thing you would recommend to any rural area police force around rural crime?”. The one thing I repeatedly say is investment in their rural watch scheme. As you have heard, this is not about putting more police officers. You can move the deckchairs around the Titanic as much as you want, but the bottom line is that, if you have got the community and where we see the strength in the community, it works really well. For forces that use rural watch and use WhatsApp, which is a very contentious issue, it is very effective, to the point that—we know this from the research and the criminals we deal with—they think there is a secret society that occurs because there is this group. It is because the community has come together to help deal with criminality. It makes it a more hostile place for criminals to operate in. I would certainly encourage investment in that. It will bring you far greater rewards, but it needs the neighbourhood policing teams to help deliver it.

Chair

I am very conscious that we spent quite a long time on that section, so let us move on to drugs and county lines.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

What is your strategy for tackling drugs in rural areas, and how does it differ from your wider approaches on crime.

David Allen

Again, drugs is one of the four priorities for Cumbria police. I spent most of my career in the NCA and its precursors tackling that nationally, internationally and locally. I have invested in tackling drugs locally. There are lots of days of action, but I fund additional days of action using money taken from criminals. Thus far, I have spent about £800,000 on that—on one occasion, we recovered half a million pounds from a single job, so it pays for itself. It is about publicising very heavily and ensuring that the criminals understand that they will be targeted and tackled. It gets more people to report instances of drug use, drug trafficking and so on, especially in our rural areas. We did one in Penrith last week. That is a very rural area—a little market town—so you would not think it would have a drugs problem. We got quite a bit of drugs back-end money from that one job. That will lead to other jobs. Again, it is all about prioritisation and holding to account. It is also about the force itself working together—our force intelligence bureau working with the neighbourhood policing team, with roads policing and with response. What we find is that you have to do this locally. The ROCUs in particular are very good, and we fund part of that. But Cumbria never ever hits the MoRiLE score—the index that lets the ROCUs come and do work in your area. The bigger urban areas—be that Manchester or Liverpool—get all the resources in terms of ROCU function. We need some resource ourselves. We make good use of what we have and work really closely with our neighbouring forces. That causes a bit of an issue as well, because we are part of North West ROCU but a lot of our organised crime comes from the north-east, so we have to co-ordinate it. We do it very well, because we have to.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

Would you say that the major difference between your wider approach and the approach to drugs is the amount of resource applied to rural areas as opposed to non-rural ones?

David Allen

It is, but it is a difference of scale as well. We do not have the scale of drug use and drug trafficking that, say, Manchester or Liverpool do, but we are able to tackle it. A good example is Barrow-in-Furness, which had a problem with county lines. It is on the route from Liverpool, be that rail or road, and we had a real issue there. We focused on that and tackled it. We got assistance from a group called 1-CLIC, working with the Well, and it was able to go in with the addicts and the dealers and work with them. Now we do the enforcement and take out the level of drug dealers—that is manageable in a rural area, whereas in bigger areas it may be less so—and then 1-CLIC is going behind to put in the help and assistance around the addicts and the people affected by the drug dealing. That works really well: as of last account, Barrow had no county lines in it. There are still drugs—of course there are—but we have taken out the out-of-county involvement and the mass transshipment of drugs into our county, so we can keep a handle on things better in a rural small area.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

I will ask the same about your strategy, Donna.

Donna Jones

I will be absolutely honest with you: drugs consumption is everywhere. But the drug consumption in rural communities does not concern me. What concerns me about rural communities when it comes to drugs is the storage, concealment, processing and distribution of drugs. It is more about drug supply networks in rural communities, where you have areas with secluded premises, reduced footfall and lower visibility. Drug supply networks and organised crime gangs working in drug supply will suddenly pop up in the middle of a high street in a disused shop. They will then move their model to being out in a rural area. What have I been doing to try to tackle this? I have invested in a lot more ANPR cameras to cover some of our rural roads. We have the intelligence—we are good at developing intelligence in policing across England and Wales—but our ANPR cameras are largely on our key route networks, on busy roads and in urban centres. We need to ensure that we are adapting as the OCG model adapts with drug supply, so that that those rural communities are not left vulnerable. As I said earlier, OCGs working in rural communities are all about money—that is their motivation. It is about making income and as much money as they can under the radar as quickly as they can without being caught. Linked to that, as I said at the beginning, you also have violence. Where you have violence and drug supply, you have firearms, and then you have to look at how the OCGs working in rural communities are linked to the illegal black-market firearms supply and distribution across the UK. That is a real and present threat, and that plays out into our urban areas as well. As I say, I am not so concerned about drug consumption in rural communities; it is very much about how rural communities are being exploited for the distribution, concealment and processing of drugs coming into this country. You then have to factor modern slavery into that as well, because people who are in this country illegally get exploited by OCGs in the drug world and will be concealed in outbuildings and places like that in very remote rural communities.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

Forgive me, my geography is terrible and I cannot remember exactly where these places are, but have you had any issues with areas that have a licence to grow cannabis, for example? How has that been impacted?

Donna Jones

No. My biggest issue from an OCG perspective in rural communities in Hampshire is the port of Southampton. We have one of the busiest ports in Europe, and as a consequence, we get OCGs that operate very sophisticatedly, which Andy and the team nationally are focused on looking at. We had a big OCG operation about 18 months or two years ago. They were coming from the outer areas of Birmingham down into Hampshire, stealing plant and machinery to order. They would steal a trailer or quad bike at 1 or 2 in the morning, and it would be in the port of Southampton by 4 or 5 o’clock in a container and gone by 6 am. By the time the farmer has woken up, it is gone—it is in a container, leaving the UK and going to the eastern bloc, where they were literally buying things to order. The OCGs were just thriving on that. That has been a big piece of work. The NCA got involved in some of that; Andy will give you more information on it. We have been very vulnerable to that from rural OCGs across the country that come into a very large rural area in Hampshire because the port is right there at the end of the M3 motorway. They can steal in Winchester, Basingstoke and the beautiful shire areas we have and go straight into Southampton, to the port at the bottom of the motorway, and it is gone and away.

Andrew Huddleston

My counsel on this would be that OCGs—organised crime groups—are diversifying. They have seen that the risk for reward for the theft of high-value machinery is far more likely to bring you less attention from a police force or ROCU. There is lots of evidence to show that it is a commodity for drugs in return. Since 2014, we have seen a 75% increase in vehicle thefts, including farm vehicles. At the same time, we have seen a reduction in the number of qualified stolen vehicle examiners. When we are doing operations at ports and chop shops around the country, it is harder to find those machines and identify them as stolen. In terms of sophistication, as you have heard from the PCC, we had a machine stolen in North Yorkshire, and 24 hours later it appeared in Poland with a completely new identity. It had been cloned on the move in the back of a lorry. That is the level of sophistication that we are seeing from OCGs; the average member of the public would not know how to do that.

David Allen

To be honest, this is where I would like more involvement from the ROCUs. They do a great job in tackling drugs and firearms in the urban areas, but when it comes to rural crime, we are seen as a soft touch; big areas with low police cover because of the nature of where we live. A good example is a job that involved Cheshire, Cumbria and a number of other rural forces. More than £1 million worth of plant equipment was stolen. Cheshire eventually took it on because the ROCU could not or would not—it did not hit their MoRiLE score at the time—and individuals have been charged as a result. But the forces had to work to get there individually to bring them to account; it did not meet the ROCU criteria. That is one area where it is needed. Forces work perfectly well. We have got small but really well-performing rural crime teams and very good detectives and FIBs, but the ROCUs need to be more plugged into what is an emerging and developing area. Criminals will always go for the soft touch; if it is easier and has less risk, that is where they will go.

Andrew Huddleston

Operation Siren is a fantastic example of that working very well, but it is thwarted by the fact that we have a court date of May 2028. Early releases mean we are now dealing with the same people. We had an incident where somebody was released sooner than I could give the commendation to the officers for the job that they did. It is a big challenge.

Chair

Before we move on, how do you ensure that all officers are able to spot the signs of things like human trafficking, modern slavery and drug trafficking? Thinking about my own area, the PCSO or police officer attending the parish council meeting may come into contact with somebody or get some indication that something is not right. Donna, you mentioned the isolated places where the drugs can be grown or stored. How do you ensure that all those officers have the training needed to spot those signs and flag them?

Donna Jones

That is a really good point. We are asking a lot of our officers. Some of them are very young in service and they are coming up against issues such as modern-day slavery. They may not have known what that meant before becoming a police officer at the age of 18, 19 or 20. We are asking a lot of them. It is about regular training. With the rural crime taskforce that I funded about 18 months ago, we have given them very specific training on the risks of sheep worrying, hare coursing and the salmon season, which we came into a couple of months ago. I have invested in off-road vehicles, so that they have the right tyres on the right vehicles to be able to pursue people in Subaru Imprezas who are chasing across farms for hare coursing. We have also taught them about different sorts of guns and how to disarm them. A lot of them have never held a gun before even though they are a police constable—why would they if they have never been a firearms officer? We have given them all that training. In terms of modern-day slavery and some of the additional risks to look out for, that is part of their core training. They undergo annual refreshers and reviews, but it is difficult because it is asking a lot of them to look out for some of those wicked problems in rural communities, where you do not often see that.

David Allen

This is one where the rural crime comes in and definitely proves its worth. We have invested and put additional resources into ours. As Donna said, we have given them additional vehicles using money taken from criminals, so that they have got the latest, decent and best kit that we can get. We are also getting new recruits into the training school. In Cumbria, 60% of our frontline constables have got less than three years’ service, so it is a continual churn of training. The rural crime team does that well. There are only a few of them—there are five of them in the team—and they cannot be everywhere. A lot of the training is about, “This is what to look for, this is how to spot it and here is what to do when you do”, as well about as working with farmers so they lock up diesel and do not leave keys in vehicles. It is a strategic function, but it is one that delivers big results if you do the training and education properly.

Andrew Huddleston

We benefit from a really good relationship with industry. We get funding from the NFU and the Construction Equipment Association, and we do training annually across the UK. About 1,600 officers have been trained in the last two years in how to identify stolen equipment and how to work with the knowledge around livestock, because it is unreasonable to expect every police officer to know what a movement order for some cattle is or what a sheep book is. That is where, again, through the funding from NFU Mutual, we have been able to have a dedicated police staff member who can help advise police officers on how to investigate those offences. That is where it becomes really helpful to provide that specialist knowledge. It is not about everybody knowing everything; it is about knowing where to go to get the answer.

Dr Prinsley

I am going to ask you another question on waste crime, but I wanted to pick up on something you just said. Did you say that you take the money from the criminals and use it to buy equipment for policing?

David Allen

Yes, absolutely. It is the ARIS fund—our asset recovery incentivisation fund. We get half of whatever we seize. Of the half a million pounds from the one drugs raid I mentioned, half goes to the Treasury and half comes back to me as the arbiter for the force—the holder of the money. Then the force put forward certain suggestions of what they would like to use the money on. I also use some of the money for my community fund, for local youth groups and so on. It is a very good use of resource in Cumbria, because of our arterial links. I think that certainly last year we seized the fourth highest amount of money in the entire country—not per capita, but in total.

Dr Prinsley

Thank you. I didn’t know that; that is interesting. I am going to ask you something about waste crime now, specifically about fly-tipping, which is a big problem where I am from. I was at the Suffolk Show over the summer, and I was horrified to learn about this problem—there were people from the National Farmers’ Union there explaining what was going on. It seems that there is a massive problem in my bit of the world of fly-tipping on farms, and then it is the responsibility of the farmer to clear away, at their expense, the stuff that has been tipped on to their tracks and fields. I know that when the Prime Minister was campaigning to be the Prime Minister, there was a massive, great fly-tip somewhere close to his constituency, which has been cleared. My question is about this waste crime and how effective the current policing and associated strategies are at dealing with this in rural areas.

Donna Jones

I will go first. This is an issue largely led by local authorities that could be better at leading the prosecutions under the Environmental Protection Act powers that they have. We then have the Environment Agency on the larger, more complex scale, which has definitely started coming to the table a bit more. What we know from the Prime Minister’s recent announcements is that there is going to be a move towards empowering police forces—I hope that comes with some resourcing and some money—to help support the investigative skills that are required for the Environment Agency and for environmental health officers and councils. Some councils are really good at this, but for others, it is very hit and miss—it is a postcode lottery when it comes to this. But the impact is absolutely horrendous. Very often, with some good investigative skills, you can find out where a dump has come from by photographing it, putting it on social media and someone saying, “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff that came from my garden. I can tell you who came and picked it up.” Of the public, 85% of us or maybe more are generally law-abiding, and we do not want to see stuff from our gardens tipped in the local country lane. We also know that illegal fly-tips are costing the UK economy over £1 billion a year. In my area alone, we have had over 1,001 incidents of fly-tipping reported in the last 12 months in the south-east region. My colleagues, the police and crime commissioners for Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Thames Valley and I have set up a policing south-east rural waste crime board so that we can work with the Environment Agency and others. We have had a particularly horrendous case on the border between Sussex and Kent called Hoads Wood. That site will be out of action for five years because of the toxic waste that was there before it can be used again for its natural environmental habitat reasons. It is horrendous. What I would say is that you can stretch policing resources only so far, and I would really love to see councils utilising their quite effective legal powers a lot more. They are not doing that to their full capacity at the moment, and if they were, we could see some much lengthier custodial sentences given for what is actually a very impactful crime.

David Allen

I agree with Donna. For my part, Cumbria has not had the large-scale things like Hoads Wood or Kidlington in Oxfordshire, where 23,000 tonnes of waste was dumped—of course, we all saw that on the TV. But it is an issue; we have had over 5,000 incidents of low-level fly-tipping just in the north of Cumbria, which is one of my local authority areas. I would like to see clarity on how the councils deal with it. My asks are a clearer intelligence picture, so better intelligence-sharing, and prompt investigation. The police have a part to play and can do more, but this remains—and should remain—a local authority lead. Local authorities should have responsibility for it going to court and being prosecuted, but there is no reason why the police cannot assist. It is no different to what we do with dodgy shops and trading standards. Through prompt investigation, we should be able to identify who is doing the large-scale dumping—it is not that difficult—and then take the prosecution forward. Lastly, it is obviously limited to public land, but there has to be some recourse to assist private landowners; otherwise, they will not report and the dump gets bigger and bigger.

Dr Prinsley

There is a big difference between stuff that is tipped on to the road and stuff that is tipped into a farmer’s field. What do you think about the idea of councils actually collecting the rubbish themselves from people’s properties at no cost? The reason this is happening—I think—is because criminals are going around with their trucks, offering to take people’s stuff away for a small fee, and they are then dumping it. If the councils did that, there would be less of an incentive, which seems to be a preventive approach that is happening in some places.

Donna Jones

For me, the incentive to carry on fly-tipping would go up if it just got collected by councils. What I think would be fair for taxpayers would be councils collecting the waste for them, and then properly investigating and prosecuting the person who did it. Through the courts, the prosecuting officer or environmental health officer who went to court could then put in a compensation claim to say, “It cost us £3,500 to collect this waste, take it to a local tip and incinerate it”—or whatever it is they do with it. They should be keeping a log of those costs and then recharging that through the courts, as part of the conviction and compensation order to the perpetrator of the crime.

Andrew Huddleston

We work with the Environment Agency very closely, and we assist it with training. It will come as no surprise that a lot of the machinery used on these sites is stolen. The powers are there, but we have found that it is about the capacity within those organisations to prosecute. There is definitely a link to the organised crime that we are dealing with, as it is the same people who are doing waste crime. My only ask, if I can be so bold, is that we move away from calling this “fly-tipping”. Fly-tipping seems to suggest that it is a nuisance. I would much prefer that we refer to it as “waste crime”; these are criminals who are doing this, because they are there to make money from it.

Dr Prinsley

I agree.

Ben Maguire

I want to touch on the importance of partnership working. I mentioned in the previous session that Devon and Cornwall worked with other regional forces in the south-west on Operation Scorpion, which was quite effective in tackling county lines gangs. Can you tell us a bit more about partnerships with industry? Andrew, I suspect that we might come on to the Act that you referenced earlier, but it would just be interesting to hear about best practice.

Andrew Huddleston

I would be very happy to. In fact, I would not be sat here if not for what I would say is a groundbreaking partnership between the police, NFU Mutual, the Construction Equipment Association and, even now, finance companies, which are seeing a benefit in having a national co-ordination role that is performed by ourselves, working with those forces. All the 43 forces now benefit from that funding in training and assistance with on-the-ground operational deployments. Without a doubt, the partnership is key to both the national unit and, on the ground level, what you see from the local neighbourhood Rural Watch schemes, the parish council, the local NFU Mutual office that works there and the farming groups. They are fundamental to tackling the problems we face. In terms of support going forward and legislation, the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act came on the back of a big push from the NFU to help address these issues, and we have really seen the power of that in helping to improve things. Ultimately, while people may disagree over the necessity for it and the cost of implementing it, it is done and comes from a point of view of trying to make things better.

Ben Maguire

Can I pick up on that point? I think that Act was passed in early 2024, and we are obviously in late 2026 now. We have the opportunity to raise that with Home Office Ministers when they come before us. Why is that so difficult to implement? We have heard from all the panels today about billions of pounds-worth of machinery and theft from farms. Why can we not pass that Act and actually have the protection on that expensive machinery, which would massively undermine these gangs that we have heard about?

Andrew Huddleston

There are some very good people who you could call upon, including the likes of Greg Smith MP, who helped push for this. This was not just about machinery; this was also about tool theft. If you look into it, tool theft is actually one of the greatest acquisitive crimes across the country, but it is hidden behind theft from vehicle, burglary and things like that. This was about helping to get stolen property back to people and helping make it harder to steal in the first place. It is where those discussions have come to with manufacturers as to the cost to them of doing this and where the benefit sits. My request would be to say, “Look, what is the greater pressure here?” That is where Ministers have to make that difficult decision as to what the benefit of reducing crime is, what the cost to manufacturing is and the cost that might be put on to members of the public by it. Obviously, I sit on the fence of wanting to see crimes go down, and I think we should have better security on machinery and have forensic marking. At the moment, the Act is still waiting to come through, which would have forensic marking on quad bikes. Quad bikes remain a consistent problem every year for thefts, and it is organised crime that is behind those thefts. Hopefully, it will help, but as yet, it is not in place.

Donna Jones

Partnership working is absolutely key. I come back to the point I made earlier: with so many thousands of square miles of rural countryside area across this country, we cannot possibly ever imagine an Exchequer where we can afford to police every single village green; therefore, partnership working is absolutely key. I have a rural crime taskforce that I chair once a quarter. The senior police officer leads that with me; in my force, that is my assistant chief constable head of local policing. Our rural policing team sits under his watch. I have the NFU, the Countryside Land Association—the CLA—and BASC. They all sit on my rural crime taskforce, and we are sharing best practice. We also have barn meetings with farmers, landowners and gamekeepers. When we have a specific issue, we will surge in and help them from that perspective as well. I had a half-a-million-pound rural crime prevention fund that I launched last year. It was open for three months. Parish councils, Members of Parliament, councillors, district parish councils, community groups and neighbourhood watch groups could bid into that for anything from £500 up to, I think, £20,000. That could have been for some deployable CCTV, for some more lighting in a rural community, to cut back some hedgerows or something that enables criminals to work in a certain way. That has been really helpful, but the key thing for me is that, without rural communities, we could not possibly hope to have the levels of community safety that we have in the country. The final thing from me around partnership working is that, in Hampshire, we were the first police force in the country to have something called HADs, which is the humane animal dispatch scheme. We have 46 volunteers. When a deer or another animal is hit on a road, the police control room can deploy them, 24 hours a day, and they are all firearms trained and trained in how to dispose of animals in a safe way. It saves police officers or the firearms unit going out and spending half an hour driving across a rural community to deal with, let’s say, a very injured deer. Our volunteers do that. Wiltshire and Thames Valley police have now taken on the scheme that we are running, and it is now also part of the College of Policing’s best practice on how to humanely deal with animals injured predominantly on our roads.

David Allen

I will add one key thing. What PCCs, mayors and deputy mayors have is the power to convene—to pull the various partners together, get them round a table and get them to work together. I know Donna does this. I do this to great effect in Cumbria across a whole range of things from rural crime to drug dealing and dodgy shops. But also, Cumbria has twice the national incidence of male suicide in some of our areas, and one of the things we have started doing recently is bringing the key parties together and saying, “How can we fix this? How do we fix this major issue?” That works. You are sitting them down; you have the key players, they go out and task their teams, and you are bringing back intelligence and a practical ability to make a difference on the ground. To my mind, that is what the mayors and the PCCs bring to the table. It is the power to convene, the power to persuade and the power to get things done.

Chair

Can I ask about the clear, hold, build model? We have obviously been hearing about that in urban areas, and I am going to look at it in Staffordshire in a couple of days’ time. How effective is it in rural areas?

Donna Jones

We have used two clear, hold, build sites in Hampshire: one in Gosport and one in Southampton. We have not done one in a rural community. Could I see it working? Yes, I could, but in terms of competing demands, with 2.2 million people in my patch and the number of urban centres, I am going to estimate that I would have probably 100 other areas that I would put ahead of any rural community in terms of risk. It is just not on the same scale in terms of the impact on people, children, sexual exploitation, risk from drug supply and violence. It is in a different league. Our clear, hold, build sites are very much targeted towards serious violence and drug supply. That is where we are focused. We have not used that tactic in a rural community, and I am not sure there has ever been one, but Andy may be able to give you clarity on that.

Andrew Huddleston

No, there has not, as far as I am aware.

David Allen

I can add a bit. We have one in Cumbria, but not in a rural area. It is in a place called Hindpool in Barrow-in-Furness, which is on the edge of the town. We call it “Happy Hopeful Hindpool”. It works in an urban/semi-urban setting. As Donna said, your difficulty is that you do not have the scale or continuation of the issues and the offences. Some of the practices from clear, hold, build can be transferred—clearing out the issue, putting in the good stuff, dealing with the addiction and the problems that caused it, and then putting in actually decent living conditions for people and so on. You can put those principles in anywhere, and we should. However, I have only ever seen it in an urban setting, and I think it is probably more suited to urban than rural areas.

Chair

That is helpful; thank you. I will finish on policing reform. I will not make any preamble, because you have heard me previously, but I would like to hear your views on policing reform and how it might impact your ability to tackle organised crime in rural areas.

Donna Jones

If it happens—that would be my opening gambit. It has already been pushed back three times; I think we are now looking at February next year. You will probably be better informed than me on that one.

Chair

I am not sure we are.

Donna Jones

Fair enough. I am not actually against police reform. I think change can be a very good thing. We have 43 police forces across England and Wales, and some of them are very small, to the point where they have had to get rid of all their police community support officers. That is a real pity. Some of them are really struggling financially. Do you know what? There is a really practical issue here as well. We are struggling to recruit chief constables in this country—we really are. The number of police officers who want and aspire to get to that level is something that perhaps this Committee might want to look into. There is the creation of the NPS, the National Police Service—the central part that will run BlueLight Commercial and the Police Digital Service. David is the chair of the PDS; I was on its board for a couple of years. We can look at some of the centralised bodies, such as NPAS, the National Police Air Service, which has just been blighted with issue after issue, particularly recently, with a lot of its planes and helicopters grounded for servicing issues. That has been far from ideal. However, when you look at some of the national policing bodies, it is right that there should be some central co-ordination, and I am optimistic that that stuff will happen fairly quickly without any significant reform, because it is just business as usual—common sense. In terms of the police forces, I know it is rumoured that Lord Hogan-Howe’s review could take us from 43 police forces down to as few as nine, 12 or 20—who knows? I think it is right that the Prime Minister, if my information is correct, has intervened to say, “Let’s look at what we are doing with the mayoralties to see if we can tie that up with the boundaries of the new police forces.” That would make sense, rather than having a police force that perhaps had two mayors, with one covering only a section of it, which is messy. I am not against reform; I think it could be a good thing. However, I am very concerned about the scale that has been mooted, going down to as few as nine police forces. The country currently has nine regions, including Wales. Those police forces would be so enormous. There is no way that there would not be a slip in service for the public on that basis. Bigger is not always better. Policing as a public service is very constrained financially now. Times are really tough. Some of the smaller police forces are struggling to deliver the operational need that is required of them in their communities. We know that criminals will exploit gaps and voids that have been created. I am not against it, but let’s wait and see where the detail and the scale of it land. Then I will be able to form a proper opinion on it.

David Allen

They were talking about police reform 40 years ago, when I was a young constable, in much the same vein. I agree with Donna on having the national police service in the centre. I am the chair of PDS and I sit on BlueLight Commercial. Have your IT and procurement set up in one place. That should be mandated. As long as the vehicle you drive is a general purpose car, and it meets the criteria that policing need, the type of vehicle you drive does not matter. That makes sense. It also makes sense to look at the National Crime Agency and Counter Terrorism Policing. There are a lot of really hard to fill roles in there, from surveillance to interception—take your pick. A whole plethora of specialist services are competing against each other for the rare individuals who have gone through all that training. That makes a lot of sense: you get more bang for your buck. You have to have clear governance, oversight and holding to account, because it will be a very powerful body. It is probably not enough just to have the Home Secretary having the oversight and control. You need some local oversight from mayors or whatever. We should do the middle bit well, do the NPS well and create a centre of excellence that works. You have some good organisations that are keen to do this now. In terms of mergers of forces, I would go for evolution rather than revolution any time of the week. Cumbria is a good example: we are a small force with a tiny population—half a million people—but we have a very constrained geography. We meet all our KPIs, and that includes attending grade 1 and grade 2 incidents, both police and fire. We do it, and if we can do it in Cumbria, you can do it anywhere. Likewise, we are pretty financially viable. We have had issues through austerity, but we are coming through those, and our numbers are increasing and we are doing more. To my mind, we should look at the mayoralties and the deputy mayor model, which is a clear follow-on from the PCC model, which we know works. If you have engaged PCCs who care, get stuck into dealing with it and working, and hold their chief constable to account, that works. If my area merges with Manchester, Cheshire, Liverpool and Lancashire, what benefit does Cumbria get? We are the best performing force in our region. What on earth would I get from merging with forces that are not as good? It is as simple as that. We would lose resource, and people would be pulled away to go to Blackpool, Preston or—if we go the other way—Northumbria. For example, Windermere still has a police station, and Ambleside has a police station. They are about a mile apart. The reason is that, in summer, it will take you two hours to get between those, and 18 million people visit that part of this country.

Chair

That is the unique thing that you have, as I have in my area—tourists.

David Allen

Absolutely. One size does not fit all. As Donna said, bigger is not always more efficient or more effective. If it was, the Metropolitan police would be the most effective police force in the world. It is not, by a long way.

Chair

As the MP for Alton Towers, I definitely have tourists coming to my constituency. Andy, do you want to finish off?

Andrew Huddleston

Just briefly, Chair. I think there is a benefit to our national unit sitting nationally, rather than with an independent police force. You talked about your Three Shires Head problem; central co-ordination is still needed to perform that. Whether it is over eight forces, as it has been recently for the GPS thefts, or whether it is over three forces that are larger, there is still a necessity for co-ordination to bring people together. We have it now with the ROCUs: they cannot always agree who is going to pick up a job. That needs central co-ordination. Lastly, big is not always beautiful. We have seen this with some of the big forces that have big rural areas. They are not always the best. Some of the smaller forces are exceptional at what they do.

Chair

Thank you so much for that. Are there any further comments—no? Thank you for your time. It has been really informative and helpful for this inquiry.