#120 Lisa Townsend: Common-sense Policing: Drugs, Gangs and Hurty Words

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Lisa Townsend is the elected Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for the Conservative Party in Surrey. In this interview, we discuss openly about the failure of prohibition, the politicisation of policing & growing crime.

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• Transcript

  Peter McCormack

  which part? Hartfordshire. Hartford, okay, so I know it so I'm in Bedford. Oh, okay, yeah, not million miles at all, yeah. And it's why I was really looking forward to speaking. Did Holly give you the background? None at all.

  Lisa Townsend

  I've come to this completely, which sometimes is quite nice, yeah. I mean, with no,

  Peter McCormack

  I'm here to fight the office of the PCC. So, no, I'm at war with my local PCC, Bedford.

  Lisa Townsend

  So you've got a new label once you had Festus, yes, Festus, who's quite interesting. I think he wants it back. Saw Festus last week at conference,

  Peter McCormack

  so I've been talking to Festus. We've got John tisard, yes, that's it, who I think is very weak.

  Lisa Townsend

  He's an interesting human. I've only met him once and I and in his defense. Let's try and give everyone a fair hearing in his defense. He was very new in but he said a few things that I thought, Oh, you're gonna struggle here.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, so the context is probably similar to most places. Maybe not Surrey, we have a town center that's dying. Yeah, we have a lot of petty crime, a lot of drugs, alcoholism in the town. I mean, the town centers just become a place where, if you've got kids, you might not want

  Lisa Townsend

  to take them. We're not experiencing in Surrey, I have to say, in the same way I'm conscious you are.

  Peter McCormack

  But there must be some spot like Guildford. Maybe there are

  Lisa Townsend

  bits of Guildford. Well, we've worked very hard at designing it out, but if we hadn't, then, yeah, we'd absolutely see I know your chief constable as well, as it happens, is that road

  Peter McCormack

  Trevor? I think I thought was Andy Smith now,

  Lisa Townsend

  oh, has it changed? Really, very recent. If it has, okay,

  Peter McCormack

  and it's great, and he's brilliant. Yeah, good. So it's the all the issues you expect. If you're coming into the town center, you are seeing an increase in homelessness, yeah, you're seeing a massive rise in just open drug dealing, taking, and HMOs, which are now cracked ends, yeah, and very obvious cracked dens, which have all the issues around them, the public car parts being places for begging and taking drugs, yeah, but people are openly smoking crack on the high street, not caring masses of shoplifting and then just kind of like roaming groups of People with issues of either drugs, alcoholism or youth on E bikes, scooters, and generally just being little shit.

  Lisa Townsend

  So what I recognize from Surrey, of that lot, as it were, is shoplifting. Obviously, ASB has decreased, actually, if you look at the long term trends in Surrey, but we are definitely seeing it without a doubt. I think I wouldn't necessarily say open crack dealing, but at a lower level, definitely cannabis. Yeah, definitely. And that dealing, so, yeah, sorry, is that we're a bit of a funny microcosm,

  Peter McCormack

  but you've got, we've got money there from people who travel into London. But you know what? Bedford?

  Lisa Townsend

  Bedford has money the villages, serious money. Bedford does around. Yeah, when you get around the villages, Bedford has some

  Peter McCormack

  serious money, but the town center. Then add to that, the town center has also suffered what other town centers suffered for, which is retail, parks, supermarkets, selling everything online, and just being hard to make money in the town center. So more and more businesses are closing. So it's like a death spiral.

  Lisa Townsend

  And you're getting in, obviously, things like you're getting in more charity shops, which have a place on the high street, but not the whole High Street. And you're also saying, I don't know, you seeing sort of Turkish barbers and dessert shops. Nobody eats that much dessert.

  Peter McCormack

  A lot of dessert shop. There must be four or five in the town center. I

  Lisa Townsend

  don't eat that much dessert. And I'm. A type one diabetic with a sweet tooth.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, so I wonder if a lot of these things do well on as the dark kitchens, whereby so we don't go to the dessert shops. But, yeah, once every couple of weeks, the kids are like, Dad, I want a milkshake and a cookie. Yeah, like that pile of stuff where you spend 40 pound and you've got two desserts, but we have got growth in that. We have got not so many of the Turkish barbers, okay, but we do have the vape shops, yeah? Oh, the vape shops. There's another one. There's one which is like a mini market vape shop. Like, I see a lot of fix your phone. No, there was one of those. But I do see, look, I think I know where the crackheads are saying, yeah, so we know where it is. The shape of the town center is changing. And then you go to the retail park, and it's not little boutique local businesses, it's national chains, but it's safe. There's no real issues. So it's a real problem. So I tried to attack it. You might have heard of this or not heard of this, but I there's not enough police in the town center because the police have stretched, so I put private security in there for three months on a Saturday as a pilot, yeah, which was to test whether this would have an impact. Yeah, there's an area called St Peter's green, which is full of drunks every Saturday, ruining it for families. We got, we got rid of them. We, you know, we were there to support the community, but it really pissed off the PCC, oh,

  Lisa Townsend

  that's it. Whereas we work, I work very closely with our bids, our business improvement districts, right? You've got across the county, and they are phenomenal. Staines is a really good example where we had particular problems. We have a retail park. We've got the town center, and then you've got a retail park, and they've they are beside each other, and they're very good at feeding each other in a really good way. So I will go and park in the retail park, because parking is easier, and I'll do the big M and S there, and I'll go to next, and I'll go to the big boots because they're the big stores I want to use. But because it's it's a short walk straight through in a pedestrianized area to the high street. I will also go to the High Street, and I'll use Waterstones, and I'll use the independent shops there, and I'll use all of those stores. But we were seeing, particularly on Sundays, particular incidents with antisocial behavior and low level crime and, to an extent, shoplifting, that's definitely increased. And the business improvement district there, and brilliant woman, Janice Santos, who runs the business improvement district there, they brought in their own security and our PCs and PCSOs. And I love them. We work with them. That, to me, is the kind of relationship where it benefits everybody, because you've got the stores like the big stores like the next and the MS and the boots who are contributing to the Business Improvement District, and therefore the business improvement district are able to hire security, and everybody knows what their job is. There's no confusion. Security aren't trying to pretend they're police officers. Police officers are happy to let security get on with it, whether it's at the cinema, you know, outside the cinema on a Friday evening, or whatever it is. And there's a club there as well. And everybody knows what their job is and gets on with it. And it works really well. And I think where, and that's got to be the key to it, to me, yeah, that's got to be the answer. And as a Police and Crime Commissioner, I think my job is to facilitate that and make that work, and to have those conversations with the business improvement district and say, right, where are you struggling with the police a bit, you know, have you got problems? Yeah, well, we've got, you know, we don't really know, have a relationship with the borough commander. Great. Let me introduce you to the borough commander. Let's have that relationship. And I think that's the thing with PCC, is we are not, we're obviously not police officers. I'm really clear on I'm not a fan of ex police officers becoming PCCs, because, because, I would say Surrey police, we've got, it's about four and a half 1000 people in Surrey police between we've got over about two and a half 1000 officers and the rest of staff. I've got a Chief Constable. I've got a brilliant Deputy Chief Constable who's actually about to retire. I've got another one about to start, who's also going to be brilliant. I can tell they don't need another police officer sitting in my chair. That's not what they need. They've got the expertise I always get. I'll occasionally, particularly my older officers, get called mom when I'm walking around and I sort of it does make me laugh a bit, because a it makes me feel very old, but also, I don't think I've earned that title. I haven't gone through I didn't go through Police College. I didn't go through as was Hendon. I haven't earned the stripes on my shoulders. I don't have stripes on my shoulders, and I haven't earned them. I've come up through politics and law in different ways. But

  Peter McCormack

  you seem popular from my research, yes, of course there may be people from a different political party who want to find reasons to criticize you. Oh, yeah, but you seem fairly popular.

  Lisa Townsend

  I think if I am, it's probably slightly by accident. Yes, I think take the credit. Well, yeah, thank you. I don't think I set out to be, I know I didn't set out to be. I think my problem with anything is I'm not a very good politician, and if I'm popular, I think that's why I'm a bad

  Peter McCormack

  politician. What was your political background? So

  Lisa Townsend

  I started working for the conservative party before the 2005 general election, okay, the central office as then was, initially as a volunteer, then doing sort of external bits and pieces, and then became business liaison, working within the party, so working with businesses and with lobbyists. And then when David Cameron, we had, obviously the 2005 general election. David Cameron became leader early 2006 and I went in doing the same job, doing business liaison, but went into work in Alan Duncan's office. Alan was shadow trade and industry as it The team then was, and this was working under the David Cameron, George Osborne, Oliver, Letwin, sort of triad of some brilliant policy and thinking coming out and working within that, and developing business policy and energy came under that team as well. So working with some really interesting people from the conservative research department and researchers who were thinking about all of those things. So I came up through that had deferred bar school to go and do that. Went back to bar school, realized criminal law was what I wanted to do. Realized quite quickly I didn't really like other Junior barristers, and odd as it might sound, I missed politics. I missed the kind of, I suppose, the immediacy of it. And so left bar school having decided I didn't want to practice law. Left bar school sort of looking around for what the hell do I do now? This is what I've wanted to do for a really long time in my early, mid 20s, what do I do? And a friend came and said, Oh, the MP I'm working for is looking for somebody to come and support in the office. He's particularly interested in Middle East. My master's was in Islamic law. And you know, I know you've got a background in Islamic law and Sharia law. Would you be interested in coming and helping him, sort of on some of that stuff. And he needs some, he needs some secretarial pa support as well. And you've been in Parliament, you get it. So I went and did that. And kind of that resentful. That's crisp and blunt, okay? And that, in itself, is a complicated relationship, but yeah, and so I kind of got sucked back in. That wasn't the plan. The plan was I'll go and do that for a few months while I figure out what I'm going to do with my life. But PCC is in a nice murder of all, yeah, actually, as it happens it as it happens it is, yeah. So I did that for about another 10 years.

  Unknown Speaker

  Stood for parliament in 2015

  Lisa Townsend

  and then went into the private sector, okay? And then this came up. The PCC role came up by chance, really,

  Peter McCormack

  okay, so in so, in Bedford, we don't have the bid anymore. Got voted out.

  Unknown Speaker

  That's really disappointing. I don't think it was

  Peter McCormack

  doing a particularly good job. Yeah, it become very bureaucratic. And I just don't think people felt like they were getting a good service, right? They did provide security for the nighttime economy, okay? Nobody had an issue with Yeah, but when I provide it as a private individual, people are very concerned. So they got called my goons, or called one council called it the Para paramilitary wing of a coffee shop. It's good. So got very criticized. We were quite transparent. We keep logs. We shared them out, but just regulations that you'll have to you know, it's not a free for all. And we worked with the police, the Chief Constable. We chiefly sweat to McCormack Andy Smith, and met with the police regularly, but the PCC was constantly critical of it, and has been. And that's the current PC. That's the current PCC, and I'm also very critical of him. So the reason I wanted to meet you is to kind of outline what my criticisms are, and here you sell it as a role, because the way I looked at it is, I'm not sure the politicization of the police is a good thing, and it there's a topic well, it feels politicized where I am, yeah, and I'm also not sure if it's a good use of budget, because we don't have enough officers, and when I look at the department, it's, I think it's budgets two and a half million. I was thinking two and a half million pounds.

  Lisa Townsend

  That's very high. I mean, I yeah, that sounds, that sounds to me like you're looking at a particular figure, but,

  Peter McCormack

  well, I think it's 2.5 million. And. And they think they asked to for it to go up to 2.7 and when you look at the jobs they're recruiting for so analysts, PR, people, and then I see the amount of PR, and I'm thinking, Hmm, you've got to prove yourself all the time as a political office. That's what does this distort things?

  Lisa Townsend

  Yeah, I think, I think they're good questions, and I think they're important questions, because there is a lot of misunderstanding around them, around that, yeah, so I think they're really good questions.

  Unknown Speaker

  Let's get into it. No, no, because

  Peter McCormack

  I considered running for PCC on a platform that I wouldn't take the salary, and I would do nothing, and I would hand everything back to the police to run. Yeah, I would remove my entire department, and I would give my budget to the police more of a statement, yeah, but that could be very naive. I could, I obviously don't know the role. I don't know, I don't know why it was brought in. Really, I kind of do for oversight,

  Lisa Townsend

  but I've seen replacing. Remember, it wasn't new. Yes, that's an important thing, that oversight was there the governance, it's the governance piece. Is the important? Was the important piece there? And before Police and Crime Commissioners, you had police authorities which were made up of councilors, politicians, people who'd been elected to their by their local but you know, Ward by Ward, and they elected within, you'd have the police authority made up of, let's say, for argument's sake, 12 councilors and some members of the public as well, but mostly councilors. And then within that group of councilors, they would elect a chairman and a deputy chairman of the police authority. Now, certainly in Surrey, those people earned more than I do and my deputy does combined. So you're not saving anything in that in that sense. And they had one of their roles was being chairman of the police authority, or deputy chairman of the police authority. And they were elected because they were elected by their constituents, by Ward, but to be a local council and not to be chairman of the police authority. And it was felt, and PCCs were in the 2005 and again, in the 2010 conservative manifesto, it was felt that actually what's needed is somebody that the public can look to and vote for and say, right, that is the person whose job it is to hold the force to account. Which is good, which is good. So, so they weren't. It wasn't. Let's politicize the police. Let's bring in somebody, for the first time, who was elected to oversee this. It was, let's have somebody who the public can actually name and see and who's who's elected solely to do that, as opposed to a ward councilor who, you know could be doing lots of other things, and isn't, you know, isn't held to account, arguably, in the same way as a PCC is so. So they were brought in to do that. There were a lot of independents elected originally, including in Surrey, actually, and so independence did quite well. And I think that's partly because of this politicization, as you say, of the police, but that message was put out quite a lot at the beginning. I take a different view on that, which is that there is always going to be, there are always going to be attempts to politicize the police. We're seeing it an awful lot at the moment, right, we can see police being this political football that gets kicked around by all political parties, quite frankly, and individuals, which arguably leads chief constables and senior police officers to have to defend themselves. I mean, Mark Rowley is frequently on LBC, having to defend the Metropolitan Police. Other chief constables find themselves occasionally in the same position of feeling they have to defend the police. You've got the National Police Chief's Council and the chairman of that who is a former who is the former Surrey Chief Constable, having to defend the police. I don't think the police should be having to defend themselves against political attacks. I can understand why they need to, and particularly somebody like Mark, who is again a former Surrey Chief Constable, but actually, the police have always been politicized, so it's me, as Police and Crime Commissioner in Surrey who should be taking those political attacks. I would argue, because I am a politician, aim them at me. Don't aim them at my chief constable. Let me defend it, because he can't. He can't come out and say what he thinks about certain things, because that's not his role, and he wouldn't. And you don't shy away, and I don't shy away from it, and that's one of the reasons why I'm a bad politician, because I'm quite happy to say what. Think about stuff.

  Peter McCormack

  I could make the argument that makes you a good politician. It's an argument. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily make me a party politically good one, no, but self censorship is censorship, and I think we see a lot of that. Yeah, we do.

  Lisa Townsend

  And I understand it. I understand why people self sense, and we all do it to an extent, right? It's just, it's just manners. What's your point? But it, but it can lead to bad outcomes.

  Peter McCormack

  I mean, you threw yourself right into the trans issue. I agree with you 100% Yeah, as somebody who's a women's football team, yeah. You know this is, this was an issue for us at one Yeah. And I think it was a lack of backbone and cowardice for many people that allowed that to become an issue. It wasn't. We don't need to get into that now, but I would make the argument that makes you a good politician, because that's what we're looking for in politics. And we haven't had for a long time.

  Lisa Townsend

  We haven't had it, and I do think that one of the reasons we've got ourselves politically into the mess that we have, and I do think we're in a mess politically, is because as a political class, we, and I'm prepared to take, you know, certain amount responsibility for this. We have been telling the voters a story, if you like, that's not necessarily true. I also think that the electorate, and I say this as a member of the electorate, I think we have to take some responsibility for this. I genuinely believe that by and large, we get the politicians we deserve. Yes and yeah, that's I will discuss that. But I do think, and I think that we've entered into this very weird time where you look at the last general election, where all parties but labor won. So let's look at labor. Labor was saying things that I think most of us were looking at and going, that's just not possible. The spending doesn't add up, the promises don't add up, the numbers don't add up. And you can say that about other parties just as easily, but label one, and we're now, you know, over a year later and going well, obviously that didn't add up, but we knew that right, the electorate entered into a bargain with a political party that surely it knew couldn't live up to that, and yet, as politicians, as a political class, we keep telling people, oh yeah, the triple lock. That's fine. Triple lock is safe. What a load of utter rubbish, 4.8% utter crap, right? I mean, I do think the triple lock is one of those things that we have got to be honest about as conservatives, apart from anything, and say it's just no longer sustainable. And it hasn't been sustainable, actually, for a really long time. And it was a, it was a political convenience to suggest that it was, and I don't think the British electorate are stupid by any means. No. And they could have entered into this sort of we've entered into this bargain whereby we'll tell you lies, you'll believe them, and then when we can't deliver it, you'll hold us accountable for it. And we go through this constant I mean, you can pick anything the NHS, you can pick policing pick. So how do we get out of that? I suppose, yeah.

  Peter McCormack

  I mean, so my sympathy for the electorate is, where are our options? Yeah, where are our options when you went to the ballot box at the last election again, I didn't vote. I didn't believe in any party. We had a conservative party that let the country down for, I wouldn't say, 14 years, a significant part, and we were due for a change, and what we offered was a labor party that made promises. But I don't think people this is the problem. I think with the electorate. I don't know the electorate really understands basic economics. Yeah, and that's should be the starting point, is if you understand basic economics, because I think we, most a lot of us, there's lots of issues we care about, but most of all, we care about the money in our pocket at the end of the month, and everything's downstream from that. But it's very tough for the it's very tough because to become a politician, you have to, you have to come to terms the idea that you will have intrusion into your life. You'll be harassed, you might get murdered. I mean, it's true, you're not gonna earn that much money. I mean, you're smart, you know, it's a good, an intelligent person these days leaving universities, probably thinking about, how do I get to my first six figure salary, and how do I start earning quarter million pound a year? It's probably issue. Not gonna earn much. It's like being in the MBA. You could be only be there for three years, and then you back out into the private sector, it's tough, so I don't think, I don't think it's designed in a way to attract the best people.

  Lisa Townsend

  Oh, not at all. No, no, it absolutely isn't. And any of us who went into the who were in the private sector and then came into politics, or came back into politics having been in the private sector, will have taken a pay cut. Yeah,

  Peter McCormack

  and look, so. People have come in with, like, fucking money. I mean, excuse my language,

  Lisa Townsend

  but in itself, is a problem. That's part of the problem, but I

  Peter McCormack

  also think that's helpful. So someone like Rupert Lowe, yeah, I find interesting, because he doesn't need his salary, and he says what he thinks Andrew Griffith is also, you know, been successful in the private sector. No, is Andrew Chris, are you thinking of the conservative Yes, Shadow Cabinet? Yes, yes, yeah, but I'm not sure it's Andrew. I'm thinking of he was the guy. Was it sky, or was that Andrew? We had him in here.

  Unknown Speaker

  You've had Andrew.

  Peter McCormack

  I know it was the other guy. I forgot his. I'm so bad with names, I think everyone's names. But anyway, so

  Lisa Townsend

  we don't attract hunt in my own patch is one who, you know, made money and went in. Philip Hammond obviously made money and came in and, yeah. And I remember very early on, when I was at university and having a visit from a former cabinet member of Thatcher's, actually, and I think I was the only girl around the table as any woman around the table at this dinner, and somebody asked him for advice. One of the, dare I say, Tory boys, asked him for advice about going into politics. And his advice was before you do that, the thing you need is independent wealth. Yes, because, and he'd worked his way up in insurance business, and he said, because you need that. Because what you want to be is in a position where, if you are a minister, or you are in the cabinet, and you are earning a obviously sizable salary compared to your MP salary, particularly, then you want to be in a position where if you disagree with the Prime Minister, you disagree with your government, you're in a position to resign and not have to think about, if I resign on a on a principal, am I going to be able to pay the mortgage? Am I going to be able to still my kids still go? To be able to go to be able to go to school, if you're putting your kids through private schools, which a lot of them were and do, and that sort of stuck with me as well, that to put yourself in a position where you've reached the heights of politics and you're in the cabinet and you're earning a significant salary, not to be able To take a principal position and resign, as you know, people like Robin cook did and others have done, famously, because you were worried about whether you could pay the mortgage. and here's how they'd look if humans vanished.

  Peter McCormack

  I mean, 100% agree, but I think there's more points. Yes, you have to be able to afford, I mean, Ian Dent's book how Westminster works, or why it doesn't have you read it, yeah. I mean, that outlines all that. But you also have to be able to take principle positions and accept the criticism that comes with that absolutely. And some people, I think, fear the media, fear social media, fear backlash from friends and certain circles in the community, which means you don't get tend to get people who act with both principle integrity, because of all these different fears,

  Lisa Townsend

  you've also got experience. And I think one of the dangers with that particular view of independent wealth and getting yourself to that position is also that, let's be honest, that immediately removes whole cohorts of society from becoming parliamentarians, which is also really dangerous, because we want people from different, you know, and I think this as a conservative, we want people who are nurses and teachers and manual workers to aspire to that as well. So it's, how do we balance that? I think the answer is, we need to pay our particular MPs, and this is not a case of PCCs, but I think we need to pay our MPs

  Peter McCormack

  better. Oh, no, I totally agree. I mean, I would, I look at Singapore, they pay them somewhere half a million pound a year. I would absolutely pay that.

  Lisa Townsend

  And you do that, and you that is the point at which you can say no second jobs. And we are going to be very restrictive on what you can claim and all of that, yeah.

  Peter McCormack

  But then also the second job thing is interesting, because part. Politics was meant

  Lisa Townsend

  to be a part time job. Always. It was only ever intended to be a part time job. It's not anymore,

  Peter McCormack

  because of the demands that come from it. But, yes, but then also, you know, you can think about that again. If you're paying someone half a million pound a year, they've got even more to lose. I don't like by the way, I don't like the whip. You don't like the whip. I don't like the whip. I understand why it exists, yeah, but I don't like the whip. I don't like that. Somebody who's been a politician for years can be suspended for disagreeing on a point of principle, yeah. That, to me, is also a look. The whole thing's, that's the thing. The whole thing's just a mess, like, I don't even know if you can be fixed.

  Lisa Townsend

  Well, one of the things, I mean, I'm very fortunate. I do think, as a Police and Crime Commissioner, I've been spoiled politically, which? Which has put me off seeking a parliamentary role? Yeah, because don't take the whip, I can obviously be suspended by the Conservative Party. The conservative party can say You said something which we find unacceptable, and we don't consider you. We are therefore suspending your membership of the party, which would mean I could no longer call myself a conservative, PCC, but I would still be a Police and Crime Commissioner. I'm held accountable solely by my constituents, the 1.2 million people who live in Surrey, the 900,000 electors in Surrey, they're the people who hold me accountable. They're the only people who can remove me from my position short of me committing a criminal offense. Offense similar to a mayor, very similar, and in fact, a lot of particularly the new mayors will take in the PCC role. Sadiq Khan is PCC, Andy Burnham's PCC. Tracy Brabin is a PCC. The new mayors that are coming in, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk will be mayor and PCC.

  Peter McCormack

  So yes, we have a labor PCC and conservative mayor. And actually, that creates a conflict, yeah, and it creates a political

  Lisa Townsend

  Is it a healthy conflict? Do you think because not all conflict is bad?

  Peter McCormack

  Sometimes, yeah, but ultimately, actually, now I didn't know there are people who did both roles. Now, you've said that just kind of makes sense. Yeah.

  Lisa Townsend

  So, so, yeah. So to Sadiq Khan, is the Police and Crime Commissioner for London, so he is the person the Met is slightly different, because Mark Rowley does have to answer to both the Home Secretary and to and to the PCC, who is Sadiq. Manchester is probably a better example, where Andy Burnham is also the Police and Crime Commissioner, and therefore the person with responsibility for appointing Steve Watson, who is a brilliant Chief Constable and Greater Manchester. Yeah, and it does. It does make sense. Surrey is looking at going that way, like I said. Hampshire is going that way in May Sussex, Norfolk, Suffolk

  Peter McCormack

  Essex, so you could become mayor and PCC in

  Lisa Townsend

  theory, if Surrey goes that way, and I put myself forward and sort of went through all the stages, then yes, and certainly my opposite numbers in Sussex and in Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk is becoming one mayoral but with two police forces. My opposite number there in Suffolk is they are all the Conservative candidate for mayor in those areas for May. And if they win, they will go from being PCC to being mayor with the PCC now there is a requirement for those for those mayoral roles to appoint a Deputy Mayor for policing. So Andy Burnham has Kate green, who's his Deputy Mayor for policing. And you can, you can delegate certain responsibilities, but ultimately, the mayor is the Police and Crime Commissioner.

  Peter McCormack

  Legally interesting. So, so where does your Where does your remit start and end? And where does the chief constable's remit, start and end and do they essentially report to you.

  Lisa Townsend

  So PCCs, under the legislation, have responsibility for the totality of policing in their police

  Peter McCormack

  area. Sounds like the Chief Constable does report to you. The

  Lisa Townsend

  Chief Constable has operational independence from me, from the home office, from the Home Secretary, from the government. So I set the Police and Crime Plan. I appoint the Chief Constable. So our current Chief Constable, Tim de mayor, who I appointed back in January, just over two years ago, who's brilliant, he's been in force for two and a half years, has made a genuine difference to the, I mean, really quite dramatic difference to the force. So my role is to appoint him if something went horribly wrong, my role would be to suspend and dismiss him.

  Peter McCormack

  What would be considered horribly wrong outside of, like, personal,

  Lisa Townsend

  oh, we've seen it happen in recent years where PCCs have had to suspend and then ultimately dismiss so gross misconduct in office,

  Peter McCormack

  outside of gross misconduct, can it be poor performance? Yes, it could be. It could

  Lisa Townsend

  be full performance. There's a process to go through, of course, as you'd expect, and you'd want there to be a process. There is a process. But yes, so I set the Police and Crime Plan in consultation with. The residents and various other people, and then the Chief Constable has to have regard for that. Chief Constable doesn't have regard for their PCCs, Police and Crime is going to find they're very quickly in trouble with the PCC. But the PCC owns I mean, again, you get back to the totality of policing, but the PCC owns the budget. So Surrey police's budget is about three 20 million pounds a year. We get 45% of that from the government. We get 55% we're the only county in the country where more of that comes from our taxpayers, which is an issue. Why is that an issue? Because we're the only we're the only county. We're the only police force in the United Kingdom where more of more of policing is paid for by council

  Peter McCormack

  tax again. So why is that an issue? So for example, if the mayor came forward and said, I mean, just even in of the village I live in, yeah, very recently, we're now getting it's like a plague of driveway crime, where people are just coming on, checking doors and stealing. My son's car was broken into, sunglasses, a wallet, and something else was stolen. But on the camera we're seeing, it's almost nightly, and we've got all the issues in the town. I've told you the other villages have got issues. If the mayor came forward and said, We want to increase the police's budget, we're going to add 10 pound, 50 pound to the council tax. I'm going to pay it immediately. Yeah, I don't care where the budget comes from, as long as it's I want better policing. And there are people like that, I think, for Surrey residents. And this is not just policing in Surrey, it's Surrey overall, the funding formula means that Surrey is arguably penalized for being comparatively wealthy, and that's a problem for a lot of constituents, and what it means is that when we're asked by the home office to pay for things that we don't necessarily think is a best use of money, Surrey residents are still having to pay over and above

  Lisa Townsend

  our neighboring forces. And for you know, there are, there are parts of the country where 60% of policing is paid for by the home office. But I

  Peter McCormack

  would be more interested in knowing, does central government pay per capita for policing? No. How do they decide?

  Lisa Townsend

  Well, that's that's where you get into the economics of the funding formula. Yes. And Angela Rayner, while she was still in post, launched a new sort of review into it. And unsurprisingly, because it's a labor government, places like Surrey and sort of conservative, traditionally conservative, if you like, home counties are definitely going to lose out. And we think that Surrey County Council will lose out by about 50 million pounds a year under Angela Rayner's. So it is politicized. Oh, it's massively politicized. Oh yeah, it's enormously politicized, massively so what it means is when the when council tax comes around each year. So that budget that Surrey police have, I'm we get told, right, this is how much you're getting for the for the coming financial year from the treasury, from the home office. But that's with the expectation that I raise council tax by the maximum amount that I am allowed to the government tells me I can.

  Peter McCormack

  So you can raise council tax, yes, as well as a mayor can

  Lisa Townsend

  so separate we don't have a mayor in Surrey. Oh, okay, so as Police and Crime Commissioner, I'm the person with responsibility in Surrey for raising council tax to fund

  Peter McCormack

  policing only. So everything you raise it by goes purely to

  Lisa Townsend

  police, purely to policing. I like that though, yeah. I look our councils, I like it too, because I think it's and that is why I think the role of PCC is really important. Because if the public look at me and go, Okay, you've raised again our council tax by the maximum amount. So last year was 14 pounds on a Band D, which is an average property, we don't think you spent it properly. We think crime is going up. We don't feel safe. We think you spent it badly. We're not going to vote you in next time. Yeah, I'd like that's a direct consequence, and so that's that would be part of my argument in favor of PCC is you've got somebody you can hold responsible, as opposed to a police authority. Who also had that? But who do you hold responsible for on the police authority? So,

  Peter McCormack

  so will tisard in Bedfordshire be able to do the same, add something to it? So, so, again, I like that. I'm interested. I tell you why I like that, because our village is having a conversation at the moment about bringing in someone like, Is it blue line, or one of these private security initiatives to come in and just provide security around the village because people are concerned and worried for their safety and fed up with a crime, but we would rather have provided by the police, of course. And so if the PCC came out and said, I want to raise it by x, it's probably going to be lower than what I would be spending, because it would be aggregated across the whole of the county. Okay, that's where it then comes down

  Lisa Townsend

  to it. And you asked about sort of the Chief Constable, is it's up to me too, because the PCC owns the budget and the estate and all of the assets and every contract, and I. All of that. So I could say, let's say Godalming, which is a lovely town in Surrey, very safe, but not without problems, because nowhere is let's say the people of Godalming say, right, yes, I am happy to pay an extra 14 pounds a year on my band D property, because that's what the PCC is asking for. And we like her Police and Crime Plan. We like the fact that she's put more police officers. She's paying for more police officers, and we have more officers than Surrey, than Surrey has ever had, thanks to uplift, but it's down to the Chief Constable as to where he chooses to put those officers. That's not down to the Police and Crime Commissioner. Okay, that is very specifically an operational matter that is reserved entirely for the Chief Constable,

  Peter McCormack

  and that's great, because if they understand what's happening, that's see, it's interesting because our Council's broke. Like most councils we're facing, we're on the edge of a section 114,

  Lisa Townsend

  okay, and Surrey is famously broke. I mean, we've got woking, spellthorn and Runnymede, all of which are in the top five of the most broke councils in the

  Peter McCormack

  country? Well, it's, but it's, it's clearly so. So when people are frustrated with the council or at being broke, my point is that this is happening up and down the country. The statutory demands have increased, but the funding has been cut. You get the business rates reset as well. There's this intense pressure on the councils, and it's no wonder they're running out of money. There's no wonder they've got no money for public services. I mean, the cuts we're facing at the moment is they're cutting free parking in the towns and the discretionary payments spend that councilors have to do certain projects, I suspect bus services for schools. I haven't heard about that just yet, there's regular updates every week that this has been cut, that's been cut. And look, the mayor had tried to do some ambitious projects. There was a town center redevelopment, and he bought some property to do that, and now he's facing these challenges that basically he shouldn't have really done it because the money wasn't there. And we've got this issue that needs addressing in that the central government, which is running out of money, is offloading too much pressure onto the councils who have no money. And even if he does, the 5% rise in the council tax not gonna make a difference. Actually, they've also they're cutting the so the poorest people in the in the town who receive relief from council tax. They're probably gonna have that removed as well. And so we're actually attacking the poorest people with this. I mean, it's the whole thing. The whole thing Lisa is a mess.

  Lisa Townsend

  It does. And you've got, I mean, Surrey. Surrey is no different. You've got, you've got our councils that are in particular amounts of debt, and that's one of the reasons why Surrey is going through local government reform at the moment. And you've got the County Council, which is, and this will be no different from Bedfordshire, where Adult Social Care, right? It's come through the roof, through the roof, and we know what's happening. We know, you know, we know all about demographics, and we know about the aging population, and that we're going to have 9 million people over the age of 70, and not that, not that long, but we have introduced legislation. We can start killing them now. Well, it's gonna go through the House of Lords, but some so we've got, we've got that time bomb, yes, right along with our sort of, sort of family and education piece and send in particular, especially educational needs, which we're also seeing, you know, as a massive, massive time bomb. And councils, county councils, in particular, where you've got a county council, are having to pick all of that up and that can't emergency housing. Emergency housing. Yeah, all of this

  Peter McCormack

  at a time where people are losing their jobs, businesses are closing. The economy is staying

  Lisa Townsend

  nighttime. Economy in particular, as you'll know from Bedford, I own a bar. You own a bar, yes.

  Peter McCormack

  And we have halved in two years, and two or three bars are closed down. People aren't going out. They even got disposable income. Look every direction. This is, this is the

  Lisa Townsend

  squeeze is coming from everywhere, yeah, and local residents are really struggling. A local businesses are struggling. And it's I find it really interesting. I've been having this debate with labor and the Lib Dems for 20 odd years. You know, when they sort of talk about the local community and they talk about businesses, and it's like it's the same. Why do we talk about them as though they're two separate cohorts, they are the same. People who do you think are running your businesses and employing people

  Peter McCormack

  locally? Well, so I think we've very similar pages here. This is interesting. So when you talk about the plan, what does the plan mean? Yeah. And do you? Do you? Do you write that in cooperation with the Chief Constable. So, Chief

  Lisa Townsend

  Inspector, I keep, do I keep to change? Yes. Chief Constable, yes. Chief Constable, yes. Chief Inspector is a different Yeah, the lower rank. So the Chief Constable, um, in consultation with Yeah, it's probably fair, but ultimately it's, it has to be my plan. I'm the person who's elected. I suppose

  Peter McCormack

  I'm sorry, one question on that, yeah, Does anything come down from the party that says we think you should be. It's purely independent. It's

  Lisa Townsend

  purely independent. There are suggestions, and this is one of the things you know, different home Secretaries have different priorities. I mean, I remember a few years ago, when suella was home secretary and kit Malthouse was policing minister. The big theme was bringing down homicide. For example, I think Surrey was, at the time, the second the force with the second lowest homicide rate in the country. And so it was never going to be, we're talking like four people a year. We're talking low numbers. Yeah, we're talking very low numbers. So so for example, that would that, or they wanted all the measures focused on reducing homicide, quite rightly. They weren't wrong. But for example, for Surrey, that was never going to be leading in my Police and Crime Plan, because our numbers were comparatively very low and tended to be domestic homicide. And the way you deal with that is obviously slightly different, so different home secretaries and different governments will have different priorities, but it really is up to you as Police and Crime Commissioner, and I was elected. We are elected to an extent, on manifestos, the same as all politicians are. And mine was really around back to basics policing, by which I mean police officers getting back to doing what only police officers can do, ie not recording non crime hate incidents.

  Peter McCormack

  So can you tell them to not do that?

  Lisa Townsend

  I can. I can, I can say to the Chief Constable, these are the things I want you to prioritize. And therefore, the funding that I'm making available to the police forces is sort of loosely on the understanding that these are the things, because these are things that Surrey public are telling me they want prioritized and also, as the person who hires and poor appoints the Chief Constable, you are obviously looking to appoint somebody who believes in sort of your model of what the police should be doing.

  Peter McCormack

  And the police have a choice in that. When my car, somebody hit the back of my car, I've reported it, nothing was done. So they made a choice to do nothing. Yeah, and a lot of people have complained that they've stopped reporting crime because nothing happens. Because the police have to make a choice, yeah. And I think, and that's operational independence, yeah. When we see on Twitter the police knocking at somebody's door because they said some hurty words on Twitter, I think there's like a frustration. But you have the ability to say to the Chief Constable, I would rather you didn't focus that. I'd rather you focus on, yeah, absolutely, whatever. Okay,

  Lisa Townsend

  yeah, absolutely. And the chief constable can say, well, PCC, I don't agree with you, Commissioner. I think I think you're wrong, and I am going to focus on this. And that is when you would get into disputes with your chief constable.

  Peter McCormack

  Okay, so when you develop your plan, how did you come to your plan? How do you make a decision what you want them to focus on?

  Lisa Townsend

  So my second plan was easier than my first, because my second was done with three years of experience and a lot of a lot of talking to police officers, a lot of talking to everything from local councilors to our domestic abuse charities, bereavement charities, drug and alcohol misuse, the health sector mental health, which is a huge thing within policing, and, of course, most importantly, constituents. What do they want? What are they saying? You know, I attend residents meetings every week. So my second plan was based partly on, these are the things that are coming up, and I think what people want and what I think is doable and deliverable, and then consultation. So two waves of consultation, one which was with partners, and that's everybody from domestic abuse charities and commissioned charities and the NHS and schools. We did a huge amount of consultation with schools. So what do you want in the Police and Crime Plan? And then we took that basket of things that came out and went out to the Surrey public and said, right, this is what's come up. What are your priorities within this? Is there something we've missed, and then all of that combined sort of led to the Police and Crime Plan? And what was the summary of your plan, if you had to explain? Yeah, so elevator. So it's prioritizing, Back to Basics policing, which is really important for me, sorry, police living within its means. As a conservative, you know, it's public money. This is public money that we are spending every pound that we spend could have been spent government. Could have chosen to spend it somewhere else, right? They could have spent it on cancer care. They could have spent it on education. They could have spent it on making sure that your grandmother gets the best care possible. In the NHS, the government have said, No, that pound is going towards policing. So we have a duty. And I know the chief constable who talks about this very eloquently in Surrey, the Chief Constable feels that very strongly, and that was an important part of his pitch to become Chief Constable. So that's really important part of my plan. So are we spending taxpayers money sensibly, particularly in a county where they're paying more than others are.

  Peter McCormack

  But even that, respecting that It's public money, is something which we don't hear enough. We should, we should hear very Thatcherite, yeah, gosh, but it is because she all, she was always very clear that the government has no money. We only have your money. Yeah, yeah. But, but that doesn't come from the Labor Party. At the moment, they act like, No, it doesn't like our money is their money. And it doesn't come from policing.

  Lisa Townsend

  It's not just the Labor Party. It doesn't come from the public sector. I don't think, and

  Unknown Speaker

  I do find myself having to remind people

  Lisa Townsend

  within policing, and it's very odd being a conservative politician working very firmly within a public sector body. In a way, it's really interesting. I do find myself, on a daily basis, at times, having to remind people, particularly as we're coming up to budgeting, discussing budgeting, this is not our money. This is public money. And we talk about massive contracts in placing, you know, we're talking about a contract at the moment for rebuilding HQ. We're talking 10s of millions of pounds. It's not our money. She needs a new HQ. We need to reap our current HQ is falling apart, unfortunately, and therefore it's costing us, or costing the public, a lot of money because it's falling apart. But every pound that we spend is public money. So that's a really important part of my plan, preventing violence against women and girls, women and children particularly, is a really because people were telling us that is really important to them, and

  Peter McCormack

  which is a growing problem, by the way, in Bedford as well. Yeah, it is. It's a

  Lisa Townsend

  growing problem everywhere. And part of that is because, part of that is a good thing, and it's because we're seeing reporting going up. We know there are a number of crimes which we know are massively under reported, and domestic abuse, domestic violence against women and children, is one of them. So I was very clear when I was first elected to my Police and Crime panel, who was slightly shocked when I said it to them, they said, Oh, well, you know, you'll want to see domestic abuse reports come down. Absolutely not. I want to see domestic abuse reports go up because we know it's not being reported. So I want to see the reports go up because we can't deal with a problem. This is true of everything, right? It's the same in the NHS. It's same in policing. We can't deal with it if we don't know about it. Yeah. So please, please, report. So my one thing I'm constantly telling my residents and residents group is report, report, I understand, because you do get you've just highlighted it beautifully, that vicious cycle where people don't report it because they think the police won't do anything. So the police don't do anything because they don't know about it. And you get into a vicious circle there. And we saw that with shoplifting. Well,

  Peter McCormack

  this is what the police keep saying in Bedford, the shop owners. I mean, even myself, I feel like I've been the victim of crime at least once a month in the last year owning multiple businesses. That's going to happen, but personally as well, I very rarely report it. One, it takes a lot of time. And two, nothing will happen. And the police keep telling owners, the business. They want to keep reporting this. When you start reporting it, you see, I mean, there's sheer volume of things that people are experiencing at the moment

  Lisa Townsend

  is high because we can't, you know, so we can't police by anecdotes. Yes, we can't police because, you know, a nice road somewhere in, you know, Farnham or Godalming or Shepparton, says we're experiencing a spike in burglary. Okay? Where are the reports show us where it's happening, and that'll allow us to build a picture of what sort of time is it happening. Are there particular people who are targeting these homes? Right? Because we can police that. So I'm constantly saying to people, report, report, because, if nothing else, yes, we'll get a no PCC, and certainly no Chief Constable wants to see a spike in any particular kind of crime. But when we see that a we can and we'll tackle it, but also we have to, because there's a little bit of name and shame here. And in Surrey, I remember a few years ago in Surrey, The Times was the times, it was front page, and it had Surrey. It was around shoplifting. It was when the shoplifting spike started with cost of living crisis, and they had Surrey as the county with the lowest or the police force with the lowest reported shoplifting. And some people in the county were patting themselves on the back and going, Oh, well done us utter crap, like absolute gold plated bollocks. Were we experiencing the lowest shoplifting in the country shop but shop owners weren't reporting it, and they weren't reporting it because they didn't think that the police would do anything about it if they did. But it's been normalized as well now, and it became normalized, and now what we've seen is we've seen shoplifting rise shop we actually saw earlier on, and it's now come down. We saw nearly a 30% rise in shoplifting in Surrey, and that was because it was being reported. Yeah, it's

  Peter McCormack

  is it 2.2 billion a year now? Yeah, but it's what's really interesting is, I've been looking into why the shops don't deal with it. They actually just look at a percent of sales. They raise the prices, so shoplifting is now a tax on the consumer.

  Lisa Townsend

  Yeah, certainly for larger stores. And I visited boots in Nottingham recently, I went to their security where in Nottingham, so they have a they have a massive boots of a whole. Village, basically outside of out, just outside of Nottingham, where their headquarters is. And I went to visit their security CCTV center and everything, because a boots is a high street name that we all know, and they are targeted for shoplifting, yeah. And I was really interested to see how they were doing it. And they got in touch to say, come and have a look and see what we're doing. And they're doing some really interesting, innovative things actually around it. But one of my concerns that I put to them was, I'm not seeing your store I speak to your store managers, and your store managers will sort of say, Yeah, well, we're not really incentivized to report it. And they showed me some of the CCTV of stuff and with some really, I mean, they are doing some genuinely innovative and interesting work. But I watched one where these two guys had gone into a boot store not in Surrey, had cleared a load of expensive products off a shelf and walked out and this was all caught on body security. Security, yeah, body cam. And I said, well, at what point were they stopped? Oh, they weren't. Well, then where's the disincentive? Why wouldn't they just come back and do it again? haven't we decriminalized under 200 pounds? No, is that a myth? That is such a myth, if I get nothing else out of my conversation, brilliant of you today it is to dispel this myth. So where does that come from? Don't know, and that's a really good question. I've spent a few years trying to find out where that myth came from. And it is a myth. I was in a Sainsbury's in Red Hill, which is near Reigate. Yeah, my auntie used to live there. Okay, yeah, big Sainsbury's in Red Hill. I was there on attachment with the force, and we were talking to some Sainsbury's there have they employ security, support them. Somebody came in, was seen taking, I think it worked out about seven pounds, 50 worth of goods. I think it was red. I think it was not the red blood, it was PIMS, which might be the most sorry crime ever. And was stopped and put through the system. He was looked up on the system, and because he was recently released from prison on license, he was sent straight back. He was he was arrested, taken into custody, and went straight back to prison for seven pound 50, yeah, so the 200 pounds is an absolute

  Peter McCormack

  Well, I'm glad that is a myth. I mean, I don't know why the security guards aren't stopping people. I'm sure some stores would rather it be attack attacks on the shopper than have an instant which maybe leads to security I'm told.

  Lisa Townsend

  What I'm told by sort of stores, is that, well, we don't want to put our security guards at risk, or we don't have anybody. We don't so we could, we could stop them, because, of course, they can. We could stop them and we could detain them, but we don't have anywhere in store, we can detain them, and then we don't know how long it'll take the police to come but again, you get into this vicious circle of, okay, so where's the deterrent then? So what's to stop somebody if they've been in, stolen 500 pounds worth of products from a boot shelf and walked out and not been stopped, what's to stop them doing it again next week or tomorrow? Well,

  Peter McCormack

  there's endless videos on Twitter of people going to Greg's and just picking up a drink and a sandwich, walking out, going into Tescos and stealing alcohol. And I almost question is, why even have security? What? Why is their job? Apart

  Lisa Townsend

  from that's yeah, because they're clearly not a sufficient deterrent. But

  Peter McCormack

  the weird thing is the remodeling of stores now, you know, our local Tescos have got the big perspex. Is it per specs? Whatever there was, there were almost like prison cells for the people at the checkout counter, oh yes, to protect them in a little Sainsbury's started as covid and has sort of since become Yeah, security, yeah. And we've actually seen people, like, even rip them down to get behind them to steal the cigarettes. We've seen in our local there's a Sainsbury's near us. If you take a steak off the shelf, yeah, there's a big beep that goes off to let Yeah, to let them know that someone's picked a steak off the shelf, and it's like what we're doing is we're putting in alerts and systems, but we're not actually dealing with the root cause, which is saying this is unacceptable,

  Lisa Townsend

  and it's quite depressing, it is, and it's frustrating when I speak to security staff. Are in stores, and I say to them, pointed out to one recently, one of my local stores, they did. You know, I've just watched somebody put a bottle of whiskey and just walk out with it, did you? Oh, yeah, I saw. Why didn't you? I'm not allowed to put hands on. I can't legally put hands on. Yes, you can. Yeah. Well, that's weird, because they can legally put hands on, course. Well, most can legally detain. My

  Peter McCormack

  security staff in my bar, can put hands on people if they are fighting. You can. I choose not to, yeah,

  Lisa Townsend

  but yeah, no, we all have statutory powers, and that's why you employ security staff is to put, if necessary, hands on and for them to take that judgment.

  Peter McCormack

  Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, I imagine, like, I say the Tesco Sainsbury's happened happy with it being a tax on because consumers and don't want to face the backlash of somebody maybe stabbing a security guard, yeah?

  Lisa Townsend

  And that's, that's a choice, but we need to be honest about that choice is being taken. And that was my that's my challenge to those stores, is, if you are saying, No, our security people are not going to challenge, be honest that's a decision and a choice you're taking about it, and that is that means as consumers, we are all paying more.

  Peter McCormack

  I want to, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, you when you talked about the rise of shoplifting, and you said, alongside the cost of living crisis, yeah. And so one of the things really interesting is actually even beyond that, it's middle class shoplifting that's going on in the moment. So in our cafe, we have nice Cutler in these nice little milk jugs. Lovely people are stealing. They're coming over the coffee and thinking, I just want that. Yeah, I like it. I'm taking it. Then they're not feeding a drug habit. No, they're not trying to steal nappies, because they've got no money to, you know, for their for their baby. And my friend, she's got a clothes store, she said, all the time, people are just coming in and stealing things. And they are, you look at them, these are what you think.

  Lisa Townsend

  We've seen it. We've seen it in Surrey certainly you speak to certain stores. I mean Space NK is one which is a, yeah, very nice cosmetics store, and various branches of that, when I've spoken to managers there, they're quite open about the fact that the kind of shoppers who come in and use it. I'll be on people like me, right, middle class women in our mid 40s, but I think it will go in for a rush. It's not because they need it, right? So we're not talking like you say. We're not talking about a product that somebody needs. Nobody needs a new retinol. It's not a product they need. It's almost certainly a product they can afford. So why are they doing it? And it's and that's a really good question. I don't have the answer to that. I wish I knew, yeah, what is making them do it? Because imagine being caught in the shame, oh, the Yeah. I don't understand what leads somebody to do that in the first place out of other than out of need. So why would you do it? And why would you put yourself through like you say, the

  Peter McCormack

  shame of it, you can understand a heroin addict, you know? Yeah, all they care about my next fix, yeah, I'm gonna go into, I don't know. I was gonna say Debenhams. We don't have them anymore. I'm gonna go into next and I'm gonna steal. I'm gonna steal, I don't know, pair of jeans, pair of jeans for a fiver, and I can buy, yeah, get a hit. Like, I understand

  Lisa Townsend

  somebody who can't feed their family and is saying I need to be able to buy food for my baby. Yeah, you can understand

  Peter McCormack

  it. You can justify that. But like, and even youngsters, I get why I need a couple of things as a kid, some sweets wore worse. But like, again, I can understand that. I just don't understand where this middle class Crime Wave has come from. Yeah? And perhaps, maybe we've squeezed the middle class more than we thought we have.

  Lisa Townsend

  I don't know. I don't think it is that it must be for a rush. Yeah? Well, then that's it, and that's the bit I don't understand. I don't, I don't, I don't get that rush. I've never shoplifted in my life. I don't understand it. But certainly the shoplifting, and sort of, say, cost of living crisis, is a really lazy shorthand. Because actually, what we're seeing increasingly, with a lot of our shoplifting, and particularly our high value shoplifting, isn't somebody feeding a heroin habit, certainly not in Surrey. It's not, it's not necessarily somebody doing that. I'm not saying that doesn't exist. It does, but it's stealing to order. It's organized criminal. Yeah, yeah, it's organized crime. And that's where we've seen the real increase. Are people targeting, like you said, targeting meat, targeting alcohol, targeting chocolate.

  Peter McCormack

  I was told, chocolate, yes, that's what they said in the Sainsbury's, they'll come in and steal 1000 pound of chocolate. And they and I said, why? They said there's a secondary market on Facebook, okay, where people are going to say, I've got a bag of chocolate. Here 50 pound of chocolate. You can have it for 20 pounds. And people are going, I'll take that. I'll pay for that.

  Lisa Townsend

  Yeah, because, and again, I'd argue those people who are paid for that are complicit. Of course, they're complicit. Of course. You know that. You know what you're getting is not, it's the old sort of del boil. It fell off the back of a truck.

  Peter McCormack

  But that goes, I mean, that complicity can go through a lot of things we don't always. I mean, I was talking to my friend who works at the mayor. I was talking about, he said the biggest problem they find face with drugs crime is the complicity of middle class people doing cocaine and not realizing the impact

  Lisa Townsend

  without a doubt. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's something that drives me. I've, I've such a nerd. I that's probably a reason I became a Police and Crime Commissioner. I've never taken an illegal drug in my life. I have no interest in it. It's never, it's just never interested me. I've taken a lot. I can fill you in. There you go. You can you can fill me in. This is a good balance. This is an important balance. So I don't, so I don't understand it. But this naivety, or willful naivety, that doing a line of coke at the weekend with your sort of mates when the kids have gone to school, the kids have gone to bed, is somehow not contributing to the county lines. Problem that we see that's really damaging to our communities is just is so negligent.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, it's my old my old life This. I haven't done drug for nearly 15 years, but I used to. I used to work in London, work in advertising. So it was a cliche. It was there. I was a cliche. But what it is, if you don't understand it, do you like a glass of wine? I certainly do. You like a glass of wine. Some people like a lot of coke. That's that's what the difference is. And what happens is you don't spend time thinking about it. You don't rationalize it. You might go to a car park somewhere, or park up by a park and meet some guy you don't know who says gonna be there in 15 minutes. Takes an hour, and you don't and you kind of have good relationship with them. You talk to them, you talk to them, you make a joke with them. You don't connect the dots all the way through to what really is happening, which is a massive increase of guns coming into the country.

  Lisa Townsend

  Kids being forced to, say, a 10 year old who's being forced to sort of take part in a county line where they, you know, where they're being as if there's modern slavery elements, where they are being threatened with the worst kind of violence? Yeah, probably it's all part of the same, yeah. But we, I don't think we've had that public conversation enough about that. We haven't had that because,

  Peter McCormack

  I mean, like, as my friend said at the police, he said, this is, this is one of the major issues, and it's leading to more drugs, more violence, more comes coming into the country. And he his belief is that's the biggest problem. He said, like, I mean, all drugs are a problem. Yeah, weed, not so much.

  Unknown Speaker

  Yeah, I agree. There's a scale,

  Peter McCormack

  but there's a scale. But he said, Because the thing is about cocaine, because it's taken by middle class people, they'll spend 6070, 80 pound on a gram. They'll maybe buy five grams, and that's, that's a good business, yeah? And then not accepting the consequences of what they're doing. And there's, like, a hypocrisy for from complaining about crime and then contributing

  Lisa Townsend

  to it. Oh, without a doubt, there is, there is an out. There's a massive hypocrisy around it. And as you've said, on a number of issues, a lack of education around it and people not understanding. And those of us who are in a position to do so, who are elected, quite literally, to do so, need to be better at explaining that and having comes back to that point earlier honest conversations with the public about what makes a difference. We talk about visible placing. A lot we talk about the importance of visible placing. Everybody wants a Bobby on the reality is that the bobby on the beat is not dealing with the worst crimes that are happening in our communities. They're not able to. They are not dealing with so we've seen, obviously, a reduction. We all know about the reduction in violent crime over the decades, certainly true in Surrey and everywhere else, we have seen over the decades, a trend. We've had a reduction in violent crime. We've had a reduction in burglary offenses against the person, all of these kind of crimes. We have seen a massive increase in fraud, Computer Misuse, those kind of things. We know that domestic abuse is a real problem within our communities. The Bobby on the beat isn't doing anything to deal with those crimes, the crimes that are happening to the most vulnerable, that are happening to your elderly mother or grandmother in her home, who is being scammed on the phone or is being scammed through the computer, who is helping the woman and her children who are being abused by her coercive controlling partner.

  Peter McCormack

  Okay, so is that a case of resources have been realigned to deal with those, and therefore you may be seeing less bodies on the beat, because there's less, there's an element of that. And I think again, that

  Lisa Townsend

  policing is kind of hidden. Then, yeah, it is, because crime is hidden. So we've gone, we've gone from a position, quite rightly in the UK, where you. Police were there the sort of the contract, if you like, that sort of policing by consent, which is so vital in the UK, so important to our policing system, has gone from dealing with crimes in the public sphere, so dealing with your sort of nighttime economy, you know, your Brawl outside a pub, to dealing with things like burglary, those kind of things, public order, violence against the person, all of those kind of things which happened very much in public, to dealing increasingly with crimes that are happening behind closed doors, which was a place originally where police didn't go, you know, it's not that long ago. I you know, within our lifetime, and you and I are about the same age where it wasn't, you know, raping your wife wasn't a crime, right? That was only what 91 that became a crime. So, well within our lifetimes, yeah? Well, within our lifetime, I didn't know that. Yeah. So, Jesus Christ, I think you're 1978 I am. Yes, I'm nine time January, 1980 so you and I are in that sort of xennial. I think we're called, you know, we're on the cusp. We're on the cusp. We had an entirely analog childhood, but an entirely digital adults, right? So, so these things are very much within our, you know, within our lifetimes. So, and there was very much thing where police didn't, you know, they didn't that a man and his, you know, his castle, and you didn't go in and that was dome, that was domestic, and you didn't go in there, and that was between a man and his wife. And obviously policing, quite rightly, is now going into the spaces to protect the vulnerable, protect the children, protect the woman or man who may be experiencing abuse. And obviously we've had the rise of the Internet. Obviously, you know, again in our lifetimes, where we have allowed, we've allowed, but we've It has enabled crime to take place from anywhere to anywhere, yes, and so policing, obviously, has had to change. And so the bobby on the beat is no longer the front line against all crimes, and particularly not the most you know the crimes that are harming the most vulnerable that he's he is not he or she or Bobby on the beat is not now your front line. So many cases and police officers need to be and police staff need to be increasingly more comfortable on, I'd say, the digital beat, or at least as comfortable on the digital beat as they are on the physical beat. And walking down your high street in Farnham or Guildford or woking or Red Hill,

  Peter McCormack

  is that different police officers or police officers trained in a wider it's

  Lisa Townsend

  a bit of both. Okay, it's a little bit of both. You've got your neighborhood officers who will be doing both. They will be both and quite and should be both, patrolling your high streets. Our PCSOs are phenomenal. You know, certainly in Surrey, we've got the most brilliant people as PCSOs, who, of course, are police staff, but they are the ones who are really on the front line when it comes to things like shoplifting and preventing shoplifting and taking reports and making sure they're fed through. And our PCs are doing all of that as well, but that same PCSO or PC may well be spending their afternoon, you know, back at the station, speaking to victims of coercive and controlling behavior about the financial abuse that they're facing, or speaking to somebody who's been a victim of romance fraud, yeah, which is massive, huge Problem, yeah, recently, absolutely, it's a huge problem. So, so they're doing both. You also, then will have economic crime teams whose jobs are purely to do that, and can do brilliant things that I'd be honest, I couldn't do, don't understand, and whose job is to sort of delve into the kind of, you know, the bank statements and the bank accounts, and look for that paper trail, and you will have police officers who whose job is to, you know, our roads policing officers, another phenomenal group whose job is to basically police our roads 24/7 and you know, Surrey is particularly vulnerable because we have that stretch of the M 25 that is the busiest and most dangerous stretch in of highway in Europe. And you know, to get back to your point about drugs, we are now finding there's more drug driving than drink driving in Surrey.

  Peter McCormack

  Okay, interesting, because people feel like it's easier to get away with. I

  Lisa Townsend

  think there's an extent that people think that, of course, there's no limit. There's there's no amount of drugs in the system that's acceptable roadside test, yes, we can, yeah, there are swabs for all of the, you know, most prolific drugs. They can be roadside tested, and then you could be taken to a station, obviously, and have blood tests done. And the same, exactly the same as with alcohol, no different. So drugs

  Peter McCormack

  is an interesting one. So I grew up quite liberal with drugs. I spent a lot of weed as a kid, and then I've had my experience with cocaine, which I've been very honest about. I was actually an addict, and I had to go through a process of coming off it 15 years clean, but I used to be so the libertarian. And me, feels like any adult should be able to make a decision they want.

  Unknown Speaker

  And and I'm also,

  Peter McCormack

  I'm also, I feel like prohibition just doesn't work. I agree, but at the same time, I'm seeing the devastating effects of drugs within our local community, which is quite severe, and what I haven't come to I haven't so chatting to my friend at the Met, I was chatting regularly at pick his brain. He said, prohibition is whack a mole. He said we're dealing with Albanian gangs, Turkish gangs, Iranian gangs. Oh, Chile. I didn't know Chilean now, big one in sorry, right, okay, and prohibition is essentially created a market, but there's a market that's ultra violent, ultra dangerous, and every single time they arrest somebody, someone steps in their place, they can never end it. He privately has said to me, it's time to reconsider prohibition. Now. It's a hot, difficult subject for people to even think about the idea that we would I mean, even marijuana is difficult to accept. Yeah, and I got to the US a lot, and pretty much almost every state has either decribbleized or legalized it.

  Unknown Speaker

  States like Colorado doing really interesting things. I think

  Peter McCormack

  they are there is a downside. The entirety of New York smells of weed. Like you hear that. That's one of the things. That's one of the criticisms. Yeah, maybe they can engineer the smell away. And similar, we were just in I got back from Las Vegas a couple of days ago, again, but marijuana is not a drug most people worry about too much. Yes, there's a criminal side to it. I think the big worry is cocaine, heroin, crack, yeah. What's your honest, open view on this as an issue?

  Lisa Townsend

  Yeah, this is, this is one of the areas where I get into trouble for being great honest. And I'm going to depart from a lot of my conservative PCC colleagues on this, I'm not a libertarian. I've said that. I'm very much a one nation conservative. But there are certain issues, and drugs is one of them where it seems pretty bloody obvious to me that we've been doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and that cannot be intelligent or sensible, and I'm I'm not remotely ideal. One of the reasons I'm a one nation conservative is because I don't buy into sort of this ideology and treating sort of various sort of political views as religion. I'm a Roman Catholic. I get the religion bit. I just don't think that in politics plays together. And so as a as somebody who I would consider myself a pragmatist, it's just the bloody obvious. It doesn't work. Prohibition, as we have designed, it does not work.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, prohibition always creates a black or gray market, and it's always it's always run by the most dangerous, violent people.

  Lisa Townsend

  And I was, I grew up. I mean, you know, I'm very different to you, in the sense that I never tried any illegal drug. Part of that is I'm type one diabetic. I'm diabetic since I was nine. And I was told very early on, you know, don't, don't do anything that would mess with that. And so I had my first alcoholic drink at 18, right? My 18th birthday, I'm that geek, so I was always very risk averse in that sense. But my parents were always very when I was growing up, they were very much, you know, I was getting so at school in the early 90s, right? It was all Don't do drugs. Kids, yeah, we remember the Leah Betts, yeah, Leah bets Absolutely. We've all, we all remember those pictures in the newspapers, and it was, don't do drugs. Kids, and, you know, I'd come home and talk to my parents about it, zamo, oh, zamo, the death of zamo. Death of zamo, yeah, just, you know, those adverts, you know. The sort of say no drugs, but they were effective at scaring people. Yeah, they were. They absolutely were. And I know I'm not arguing against their effectiveness, but I would come home and talk to my parents about it and sort of because the thing I couldn't quite get in my book, then, why, given all of these things, given how awful it is, why are people doing it right? If it's so awful, why do people still do it, yeah, and because it's fun. But this was it. And so this was my parents, and they would say, because it's fun, you know, there is, there is a reason I don't do drugs, but you have to understand why people do in order to understand it, you know. And it was very much, you know, your father and I, you know, smoked weed and whatever, and it is fun up to a point, you know. And there is a reason why people do it, but there's a really good reason also why you shouldn't do it.

  Peter McCormack

  But there's also an education piece, like the Leah Betts thing, yeah, we were told she died from taking ecstasy. It was the water. It was the water, the water. Yeah, it was the water. And also, I mean, I'm glad I don't do cocaine anymore, because especially, but I had some fun doing it. I'm not gonna lie, but it's actually, there's been a lot of deaths in the US because they're kind of fentanyl into it now. That's and when I used to go raving, we used to get kits to test our little pills just to make sure there's nothing cut in it. And so, again, as a libertarian, I hate regulation, but at the same time, it's an unregulated market. I think this. I just think I'm in Bedford. I just found out there's been a spate of illnesses and deaths because of a bad batch of heroin, yeah, which is, again, people are cutting things.

  Lisa Townsend

  Fentanyl is terrifying. I mean, you look at what's happening in the US, yes, and it's absolutely terrifying. And we're seeing an element of it here. It started happening way, but it was happening here, and we are going to have to do something differently to get it right. And that cannot be just straightforward prohibition. It can't be. It doesn't work. I think you're right. Marijuana is a different drug. Marijuana, the other thing we've got to be honest about is marijuana, as is being smoked now, is not the drug it was in the 60s, stronger. It's a lot stronger, right? And so, and we have to be honest about that as well, and we have to be honest about the medicinal uses that are available. And how do we, how do we make the best use of that? How do we? I tax it. I'd regulate it and tax it. I do the same with prostitution. I do the same with other

  Peter McCormack

  here we go, right. Okay, so this is interesting, but the Okay,

  Lisa Townsend

  I say this, I say I'm not a libertarian, but there are things where I just think, you know, the markets have a really important role to play.

  Peter McCormack

  Markets are efficient. Okay, so this is interesting. I'll come back to prostitution. So on the drug scene, the problem, I don't know if you've seen the problems that's happened in California, where they've now overtaxed it, and then they're now growing it illegally, and there's illegal markets for it, which is a problem. But I think the bigger point is at least having the conversation an independent podcast can meet a a very independent thinking conservative PCC, and have an open conversation, and other people are going to hear this, and they're going to have their view, they're going to have their view. But these were topics which were kind of people shy away from previously or banned topics, but the drugs thing is not working. We have drunk drug gangs operating up and down the country. We have county lines, which we know is an awful issue, but we have Middle Eastern gangs. We have we have Eastern European gangs, and I say the amount of guns coming to the country is terrifying. It is. So let's have a conversation. If you can, if you destroy this market by making it legal, then you're going to remove a lot of criminality, which means the police can target other things. And I guess what you're saying is, I would tax it and use the taxation towards the downstream problems that will come from addiction? Yeah, yes,

  Lisa Townsend

  I absolutely would, yeah. And I think that the first step in that is having the conversation about it. I mean, one of the conversations that's been happening in recent months, and is an ongoing conversation, is, should we reclassify cannabis as Class A which is a conversation that is being had very seriously, certainly amongst Police and Crime Commissioners and others. And I know I'm an outlier for certainly within my own cohort, for saying no,

  Peter McCormack

  but is that because they want to? Is that? Is that it's not to do with the effects of somebody smoking cannabis, it's more to do with who is dealing with it and being able to punish

  Lisa Townsend

  them harder. I think there's an element of that. There's an element of all drugs bad, but we have to be able to say some harms are worse than others, yeah, and without dismissing the very real harms, particularly of as we were saying, you know, can. Of this is not the same as it was in the 60s and 70s. We're dealing with a very different thing, but then we can't really get to grips with that if we're not dealing with it in a regulated way. So, you know, issues around psychosis, and I've, you know, I've done, I've spent a lot of time, both in Parliament and as a PCC, dealing with mental health and researching and policy around it. And there's, there's no doubt in my mind, from everything that I've read, that there is, there is definitely a link between cannabis use and poor mental health, but a lot of that comes from the kind of cannabis that's being that's out in the system at the moment. But to suggest, it seems to me nonsensical to suggest that cannabis should be in the same category as heroin or crack. Okay, great. That just seems to me madness. And I've not spoken to a single police officer privately who thinks that is sensible. And then you get into the idea, okay, well, let's say that we let's say we do accept that all drugs are equally bad, and therefore we make them all class. A who thinks we're going to be able to place that on current resources,

  Peter McCormack

  and it's not going to change. Nobody's going to say, Oh, they've made it pass out. I'm going to start

  Lisa Townsend

  smoking weed. This is it so? And we know that. We know that from a county lines point of view, organized criminal gangs point of view that, and we're certainly seeing it locally, that it's not just cocaine and heroin, it's it is, increasingly cannabis that's being dealt as well, and that is becoming part of it. And it seems to me that okay, but the idea that the way of cracking that dealing with it is not to make everything Class A

  Peter McCormack

  has there other sympathetic voices that you've you'd have to name names, but within the police or other PCCs who have shared similar view. Are you a total outlier?

  Lisa Townsend

  I think there are privately sympathetic voices of people who will get in touch and go, by the way, what you said in that meeting, I agree with you. I'm not going to say it publicly, but I agree with you, and that's interesting. I think it was very interesting. There was a one of my counselors had posted something on Facebook a while ago about this conversation, specifically around reclassifying cannabis as Class A and had put his own views on Facebook and said, Look, I may be out of touch here with my constituents, but my view is this, what was really interesting, and he's in what I would say, quite a bellwether bit of Surrey. And I looked at his Facebook, and because he'd said to me, you might find this interesting, given your views, and the comments were overwhelmingly, yeah, why are we worrying about cannabis when we have all of these other problems, and it is really interesting, because it does come back down every time to the smell. They're coming for us. They're coming for us, for thought, please. And it does come back down to the smell, which I think is really interesting. That's what people don't like. They don't like the open dealing, and they don't like the smell of it. They don't necessarily have a problem with the person who, in their own home wants to light up. And why would they? I mean, yeah, why would they? Because what is, ultimately, what is the job of the state, is what it comes back down. But isn't that what it comes back down to? What is the job of the state and the police? I, you know, I feel very strongly about this place is the most visible element of the state at its most.

  Unknown Speaker

  You know, it's mraconian, I suppose, arguably.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, this is, I mean, this is, this wraps everything we've spoken about, the politician, the electorate. I think, I think we also need an honest conversation about the role of the state, because at the moment, yeah, we can't afford it. It's too big. It's being grifted in every single direction, and we have an economy that's stagnant, like all these different forces coming at us. Because I think we've lost we don't, I think some people don't, don't have a proper understanding what the role of the state

  Lisa Townsend

  and covid. I think covid had a and furlough, and you can argue for and against furlough all day long, and I'm sure you have, but I think that covid, when we went into particularly lockdown and furlough came in, we suddenly had a lot of people who weren't proud business owners, people who had never claimed anything from the state suddenly finding that they were able to pay their mortgage or their rent because the state was supporting them to do so, and they needed the state to support them to be able to do that. So. And we were glued to our televisions every evening, watching, you know, whether it was Boris or whoever it was, telling us what the latest figures were, and clapping on nurses, clapping on nurses on a Thursday evening. And God, nurses do the most phenomenal job. And yes, you know, have not been thanked enough during or since or paid enough during or since covid and we became entirely we became this nation that was just more dependent on the state than certainly in our generation we had ever been. We were looking at it was state broadcasts. We were looking to right every evening to find out where we could go, when we could go there, how long we could go there for were we going to be able to travel to see family at Christmas? Where are we going to be able to go to our parents funeral? Where are we going to be able to go to a friend's wedding? We became entirely dependent on the state for all of our information. Our entire lives were quite literally dictated by what the state and the government of the day said we could and couldn't do, and for an awful lot of us, we were dependent on getting a payment from the states so that we could pay our rent, pay our mortgage, all of that we were, I'm not a parent, but you know, so many of my friends were, you know, suddenly having to do the job of the state at home, yeah, right, with children. And you'll have had to, you'll have done that. Why don't you get this? My god, yeah, the respect for teachers went through the roof, right? And, and then all of a sudden that disappeared, not overnight, because it wasn't there was a tapering, but that went and you have a whole cohort of people, a whole generations, who kind of went, hang on a minute. You're meant to fix everything, but you fixed everything, and now we've got problems. Why aren't you fixing the problems? So of course, we have become more reliant on the state. It was, yeah, you know, it just seems to me a very obvious thing that was going to happen. And I'm not saying that the state shouldn't accept it. That's not my argument. But we have not come back to my earlier point. I suppose we have not, as politicians, been good enough at explaining to people that was an unusual situation that is not sustainable. Because if you try to sustain that, and there are certain, arguably, politicians trying to sustain an element of that, and they will always be on the left. Yes, let's be honest, they will always be on the left. Then this is where you end up in a situation where the economy is stagnating, where we've got too many people out of work, and where you have state reliance, and those people have always been around. I mean, I remember a university, one of the things that would remind me of why I joined the Conservative Party in 1997 when they were very conservative. So John Major was still Prime Minister. We were coming up to the I was 17, we were going up to the 97 general election. It wasn't going to be a good year.

  Peter McCormack

  No, I really liked William Hague, by the way. Yeah, I really liked him. I actually thought he would have been a great Prime Minister.

  Unknown Speaker

  Brilliant. Yeah, absolutely, he still would be.

  Lisa Townsend

  But yeah, and I remember being at university, and I had a good friend at university who University who was and is labor to her core. And I remember her saying to me, I was having a conversation about, you know, why? Why are you conservative, and why are you labor? Because she absolutely believed to her core that choosing not to work and to live a life where the state paid for your house, your rent, your outgoings, was a was a right, I'd say human right. We didn't really have that vocabulary slightly different, but what was a right?

  Peter McCormack

  But? But this is what makes me so angry, because the state aren't paying for it. Somebody else goes, I'm paying for it. You're paying for it. And that's what really, I got into a spat with a guy on Twitter this week where he said, but one, he wanted to ban private landlords. Oh, yeah, that argument. We don't need to get into that one. But he said that housing is a human right. And I said, No, it isn't. Oh, what point did it become a human right? Because we were humans without homes before we got out the caves. And if you believe every human should is a human right, then you believe that other people should work and build homes for other people, but it's a deeper point on that is that the every time you think the state should step in, you're actually asking your neighbor to work harder. And so I it's not that I don't believe that there can be some collective good that can come from this at times, but this idea that, this idea that the state should step in and do everything. Is really asking workers to step in and do everything. And I think some people miss that connection.

  Lisa Townsend

  I think they do. It's a very easy it's a very convenient lie to tell yourself, isn't it? It's a really convenient lie to say that. Well, there is this thing called the state, and it lives somewhere in London, and it has infinite money, and it has infinite amounts of money, yeah, and it can do no wrong, and it should just deal. Ever do it, do everything. And it's a very convenient lie that socialism tells people.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, this goes back to me putting the private police in the town. The people who rejected it and hated it were all from the left. They were Labor Party voters, Green Party voters, and probably some Lib Dems and it and it was very clear that the conservative voters thought this is a great idea. And the point that was made is like, well, this is an unaccountable private security force. I said, Well, it's not unaccountable. It's accountable to the law, but it is private. And they say, Well, who that? Who else who gets? It's me. Is the person paying gets to decide whether they're doing a good job or not. Well, who do we make a complaint to? Well, you can make it to me. And if the law is breached, they can make it by that route, of course. And they couldn't understand this. It's that everything should be provided by the state. And that's where we got into a disagreement. And then I think this is almost the Battle of our times. Now, this is what we're facing as a country. There is a hard push for more social. And I people say it's not socialism. To me, it's backdoor socialist, pseudo social, whatever you want to call it. Is it the state in control of everything, or back to more kind of sovereign, small state individuals? And I think that's quite a battle that we're facing. Some at the moment. It's interesting. So I mean, I obviously had to talk about PCC and policing, but you obviously have a broad set of ideas, political ideas. Would you consider running for office again, for

  Lisa Townsend

  as an MP, I at the moment, no, and I think, as I said earlier, part of that is because I've been a bit spoilt by being a Police and Crime Commissioner, where, as I said, I don't take the whip. I I have, I have an executive function. So I look at my colleagues in Parliament, particularly, you know now that the Tory party is in opposition and I spent 10 years working in Parliament, so I not as obviously as an MP, but as a staffer. So I do understand the job, and a lot of it is around signposting constituents to, you know, relevant services. There's obviously some amazing work in terms of, you know, law making that can and should be done. And I'm constantly lobbying my MPs, non crime, hate incidents. I wrote a letter to her, you know, to sort of to one of my MPs yesterday, saying, you know, he'd written to me about non crimeate incidents, and I sort of wrote back saying, you know, as a parliamentarian, please do everything in your power to legislate against them. Get rid of them. They're dreadful. They just need to go and so that they, you know, MPs have a vital, really important but I look at what I can do in my role, and I probably, I think, I think it's about 10 million pounds over the last four and a half years that I've commissioned services around domestic abuse, you know, drug and alcohol misuse, rehabilitation, reducing reoffending, homelessness.

  Peter McCormack

  Does that go to support charitable efforts?

  Lisa Townsend

  So it's a real mix. So some of the so you can direct budget, yeah, into charity, yeah, absolutely. So that's, that's my main role. I would see that as the most important thing that I

  Peter McCormack

  do. Does that come out of the police's? Did you say three 50 million?

  Lisa Townsend

  Some of it comes at 320 Yeah, an element of it does. Most of it actually comes from money that my office has bid for to the home office or to the Ministry of Justice, because there's chronic funds.

  Peter McCormack

  Yes, we have chronic underfunding locally for these services, and they're not joined up. Yeah, so part

  Lisa Townsend

  of a part of the important role of the PCC, and we've talked about the governance piece, which is really vital, but the and Crime Commission, a bit is absolutely important. This was the bit that the police authorities weren't doing, which is commissioning services locally. And I think that's probably the single most important thing I do, if you are a if you are somebody who is living in Surrey and thinks, what's my pcc ever done? For me, it is about commissioning those local services to make sure that we are reducing reoffending, and Surrey has the second lowest reoffending rate in the country. We're really proud of that it doesn't happen by accident. It happens because we're directing resources into the right place. So sometimes it'll be, for example, the county council are commissioning domestic abuse refuge, and I will go in and CO commission or. I will fund a youth worker, so that there is somebody to work with children in a domestic abuse refuge, so that they have a full time worker who is just dedicated to working with, you know, four and five year olds, something like that, or is going in to do counseling for people. That's the most important work, I think, actually that we, that we do, and that's a really important part of it, that is all taxpayer money, yeah, but

  Peter McCormack

  it's, it's kind of, it's, it's, I kind of understand it in that spending time with the local service providers who are looking after homeless addicts, women who actually, they said, don't even use the term sex work, because this is, this is coercion. It's coercion. It's more than slavery, yeah? Or it's our addiction and desperation. Yeah? This isn't some people, they say there's a choice. They just choose to be, yeah, sex worker. But other people, they're not choosing to be a sex worker. They are being raped or forced into it. Traffic will need the money. They there's chronic underfunding for all these services, but they've said, if we have the funding, we can stop reoffending, we can, we can get people back into civil society, but when budgets are cut,

  Lisa Townsend

  yeah, I've had my victims budget cut by 4.4% this year by the government. And that's that's a real challenge. So as Police and Crime Commissioners, we have statutory responsibility for victims in our force areas.

  Unknown Speaker

  Yeah, to have my victims budget cut by 4.4% is means I am having to scrap around for money elsewhere. Do

  Peter McCormack

  you ever sit there anything? Where's all the money going? Where is it all going? Well, I

  Lisa Townsend

  mean, we're taxing more than ever. We're taxing more than ever. Where's it going? I mean, look at the NHS. Yeah, right, it's better funded than it's ever been, not just under this government, under the last government, too. Mental Health has had more money than it's ever had, and yet, in policing, we are experiencing a mental health crisis, in the sense that our police officers are having to spend more and more time dealing with people in mental health crisis, which cannot be right, because what they're not therefore doing is able to spend time dealing with crime. I mean, I had a conversation, this is going back, sort of two or three years, with somebody senior in mental health services in Surrey who said to me, Well, Lisa, the thing you've got to understand, and I hear that a lot, thing you've got to understand, is that, you know, all these public all of our pub as public services, we're all struggling. I said, Yes, thank you for that lesson. But the difference is, I'm not walking into my local hospital, St Peter's, and saying, Can I borrow two nurses, because there's been a burglary in Woking, and I need some support with it. That is what you're asking every day, every night of the week, and they are spending hours and hours and hours dealing with something that is a health crisis.

  Peter McCormack

  How is morale in the police struggling?

  Lisa Townsend

  Yeah, I think because I'm one of the things I love talking to young police officers, new, you know, new shiny police officers, you know, when they come in at 19 or 21 or whatever, and sort of saying to them, Why policing? I'm fascinated. Why did you come into policing? It's 2025, all of these options were available to you. You're a bright young lad living in Surrey, living in one of the wealthiest parts of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Why policing? And ultimately, it comes down to public service, which is brilliant to hear and they want to catch the bad guys. They don't want to be sitting in hospital with somebody who's experiencing a mental health crisis because somebody in the NHS through a broken system, and it's not you can't blame any individual hasn't been able to help that person. I mean, I was looking at, we have a every PCC will have access to the their sort of chiefs overnight log of the main crimes, or, you know, the main incidents that happened overnight. And I was looking this morning on the train on the way in to come and see what were the main incidents that happened. And there were sort of three or four main incidents. And the first one was a desperately sad was a suicide, okay, of a 40 year old male who had been experiencing clearly experiencing mental health issues for some time, who had gone missing was reported to the police was a high risk missing person because of his background, believed by The family potentially to have not been taking his medication and unfortunately took his own life, and, you know, things like that, you just kind of think that's where the state has let somebody down, and the repercussions of that will be across. This individual's girlfriend, it was his stepfather, I think, who'd originally reported him missing. His girlfriend had voiced concerns about him. They were they believed he wasn't taking his medication. He had shown signs over recent days, weeks, possibly months, of not being well. What are we doing if we're not it's a 40 year old man, and we know that. We know that men in that age category, we know that men aged 1850 we know that they are the highest risk of suicide. What are we doing for our men and boys as a state if we are not protecting them from this, because this is not somebody this is not somebody who wasn't showing signs. This is somebody who was on medication, but was off his medication now without knowing all of the details and but there I hear too many of those.

  Peter McCormack

  So what? What should we be doing? In your opinion, we should be intervening early,

  Lisa Townsend

  and I hear, and I think we all do far too many cases, whether it's from parents or whether it's from individuals themselves, who say I called a helpline and I was told that

  Unknown Speaker

  I wasn't considered high enough risk.

  Lisa Townsend

  And I didn't I didn't say that I was suicidal, so I wasn't considered a high enough risk, or I've been on a waiting list for six months, or I've been and I've spoken to my psychiatrist, and I've said that I can't take the medication that I'm on because it's giving it's making me feel this way and that way and the other, and therefore, I'm not taking it, and I'm not getting a referral for another For more help,

  Peter McCormack

  and so it's underfunding. But is

  Lisa Townsend

  it underfunding? Though, I think that's a I don't know that it is straightforward under funding. Is it underfunding, or is it funding not finding its way to the right places? Which is a nuanced answer. There is, yeah, there is, I don't think it's as easy as underfunding. I think it's we are not prioritizing. And part of the problem is in the NHS is we've tried to prioritize everything. And this idea that we have the best health service in the world.

  Peter McCormack

  Does anyone actually think I don't think so. I think it's a sacred turd. It is, it

  Lisa Townsend

  is, it's become a religion. And that's really in the same way that I think ideology and politics can be really dangerous. I think it's really dangerous in the

  Peter McCormack

  NHS. Well, you're not going to win an election campaigning for austerity. You're not going to win an election campaigning for changing the NHS. I mean, you know, the reform of just suggested some outline ideas of maybe reform in the NHS, and then from the greens and from the labor from them, then it's like they want to destroy the NHS, yeah. NHS, we understand when it was created, what it's created for. We're in a very different world now. It doesn't work. I use the private sector works a lot better. Yeah. I'm not saying we should get rid of, no, some socialized health care, no.

  Unknown Speaker

  And it's and I would, I would argue for, I

  Lisa Townsend

  would argue for an NHS that is free at the sort of point of use for those who need it every day of the week. You know, I'm a type one diabetic who, you know, uses more than my fair share of the NHS, and have done since I was a child, and it's kept me alive. And I look over at sort of my cohort in the US, and it's horrific, the amount of money they're paying for insulin, and diabetics are dying because they can't. I've never had to pay for a vial of insulin in my life, and that's kept me alive, but it's also meant that, because I get excellent care under the NHS for my diabetes, it also means that I'm not, I don't have kidney problems, I don't have retinopathy, I don't need limbs, amputating, which in itself is safe. You know, prevention is always better than cure, obviously. So there are arguments for it, but the idea, but the NHS is not free at the point of use, universally, you know, dentists are not free at the point of use, and the cost of failure is huge. Is absolutely massive. You look at the negligence bill in the NHS, it's absolutely massive. I have said I think West streeting is trying very hard to do some really good things. I think we have to, sort of, you know, whatever side of the political fence you're on, I think when you see somebody on the other side trying to do some good and I think West streeting is really trying to do some really good things. And I feel for him, because he's up against a machine in terms of the BMA and the NHS that is largely going to be against him, and a political party that is not naturally going to find it easy to do some of those things as well.

  Peter McCormack

  It goes back to an honest conversation. Though we have a stagnant economy, we have growing unemployment, we have a state that's growing, we have a pension system. We can't afford borrowing is up. We've got a budget next month, which,

  Lisa Townsend

  let's wait and see. Well, I see today, I mean, today you've got, I don't know whether it's streeting or who is asking for it, but asking Rachel Reeves to allow them to use more of the private sector in the NHS. And if you're Rachel Reeves, and you're doing this, pragmatic pragmatically, makes sense. Of course, it makes sense. It's a no brainer. Is she going to face political backlash? Of course, maybe, yeah, almost certainly, from the Labor Party or from elements within the Labor Party. But it's you've got to choose. Right to govern is to choose, make the right choice and don't make it based on what one of my poll numbers going to look like next week. That's easy for me.

  Peter McCormack

  I was trying to just get to the point I was trying to make is that borrowing is increasing. Interest rates are high. Our bonds are bond rates, again, too high. Inflation is going to bite again. It's like, what point do we what point do we say? Basically, we are broke and we can't afford this, and people keep avoiding having that conversation, and so we just make everything a little bit worse, which means it's going to be less money for the NHS. I mean, I know they increase it, or there's going to be less for the police. There's less somewhere we're going to lose the money. Somebody's got to give right? Yeah, and I think I go back to this point. It's basic economics. We're we're not, we're not being honest with people.

  Lisa Townsend

  We're not, we're not being remotely honest with people, and we have got to be honest with people about it, whether it's in policing, whether it's in the NHS, whether it's in government, whether it's if you keep voting for the stuff in this manifesto, any given manifesto, and expect it to be delivered, and then get disappointed when it's not, and then vote for the promises again, we end up in this death spiral.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, this is going to meet Sue. Is your election at the same time as a general election?

  Lisa Townsend

  No, we are on a separate cycle. So I was really, I was reelected last year in May. Last year, PCCs are next up for election in May 2028, so we're every four years, every four years still, yeah, obviously. So we have fixed terms, yeah. But is four years the right amount of time?

  Peter McCormack

  The reason I asked that is, yeah, so I was very skeptical of peace PCC is coming into this just because of my experience locally. I can understand that, but I'm hearing these great arguments. The problem is, our PCC locally is not popular in any way at all. I don't think he's done a good job at all. And that isn't just, I think that's across the board, but there's no way of getting rid of I know there's ways, but it's very hard to get rid of it without an election, same as your local MP, right?

  Unknown Speaker

  Sure, but I'm wondering if

  Peter McCormack

  it perhaps a bit like you know, the US has its midterms as the two year cycle, perhaps this should be a two year cycle. I know that put pressure on you, but do you need four years to be able to do the job? I think you do. Yeah. Can't prove yourself in two years.

  Lisa Townsend

  I don't think you can and my first term was three years Okay, and it's not particularly coming in after my predecessor was voted in as a conservative, but then went into, left the party and became an independent. And you come in with a different set of priorities, inevitably, and with different things that you want to do, and it does take time, because, you know, the 10 million pounds I've talked about that we've put into local services that takes time to turn around, you're saying to us, you're saying to a domestic abuse refuge, you know, here's 750,000 pounds in order to be able to house this many women or do this program. That program that takes time to work itself through. I was two years into my term before I appointed my first Chief Constable. I needed those couple of years to understand I would not. I felt very fortunate that I was not in a position of having to appoint a chief constable early in my term, you know, my first year or so, I wouldn't have understood enough to have been able to do that. I felt a couple of years I now understand enough to know the kind of things that the Surrey public wants out of a Chief Constable, how the force works, what the budget looks like, what the challenges are going to be for a Chief Constable coming in. And so was able to appoint the right person. I had four candidates, all of whom could have done the job, all of whom, on paper, looked great, one of whom was head and shoulders clearly above the rest. But on paper, not necessarily.

  Unknown Speaker

  Did you have to sack somebody to put that person No, you didn't No

  Lisa Townsend

  and he has come in and has done a genuinely phenomenal job, has turned the force around and has made Surrey one of the best performing police forces in the country. But I needed the time to maybe understand what that needed, what the force needed, and what that role needed, and then he needs time to be able to it wouldn't been fair for me to say after his first year, right? Well, I'm judging whether you get to stay on based on your first 12 months,

  Peter McCormack

  and in terms of when people vote for a PCC, it's probably a hard question to answer, but how much are they voting for the person? How much are they voting for the party? Oh, I think it's party. So, so primarily, 2028, might be quite difficult for you could do a great job. Yeah, and still. But if a turquoise PCC candidate comes up, they might just win, because they're

  Lisa Townsend

  turquoise, absolutely. And so that's, yeah, that's actually a problem, yeah, of course. And that's, that's problem with all party politics, isn't it? And that's but

  Peter McCormack

  it's slightly different in that so I think it's some there's, there's a there's a strong argument for why people may vote for a reform government, because they feel let down by the Conservatives and the labor and they just want something different. And I would say there's, there's parts of the Reform Party that making sensible, good arguments. They might not be asked to do it, but they're making sensible, good arguments that are resolvating with voters. But a PCC or a mayor could be doing a fantastic job, but because the parties let the country down, they might lose their position, and that's really sad.

  Lisa Townsend

  Yes, and it happened, I think it happened last year. I think Festus yes was very much a Festus who I think was doing a brilliant job as Police and Crime Commissioner in Bedfordshire. Yeah, Commissioner in bedshire was a victim of that conservative backlash that we saw in 2024 that we saw last year. I survived it, because in Surrey, I faced the Liberal Democrats. Rather than don't really have much labor, we have a very small amount of reform. There wasn't a reform candidate against me, Festus was definitely a victim of that. I think we had other conservative PCCs who were a victim of that last year, of that backlash, anti conservative backlash. I think all politicians, all politicians like to kid themselves that we have a substantial personal vote. I think that's absolute bollocks. Must be a little, but there must be some. I think certainly first, I was first elected in 2021, after a 10 I'd been selected 10 weeks before the election. Nobody knew who I was, right? Yeah, I had a very small, and I am talking minute vote of women who voted for me purely because of what I'd said about I don't think biological males can ever be women regardless of how they dress. Yeah, and I'd said that very early on, because I was, I know, crazy behavior. I was asked about it, and I was asked about it, and I said, Yeah, this is what I think. And so there was a very small number of women who voted for me and who wrote to me afterwards to say, I've never voted Tory in my life, but I voted for you because you're the only one who said this. But I won in 2021 because I was wearing a blue rosette and was the Conservative candidate on the ballot paper. Yeah, last year, there will have been a slightly more people who will have gone, oh yeah, no, I think I've heard of her. And isn't she the woman who said that trans women can't be women, or has sort of stood up for this or said that, but generally speaking, it will be because I was conservative and because I was against the Liberal Democrats who are not particularly trusted on law and order. They don't, you know, even Liberal Democrats don't. Voters don't really vote Lib Dem on law and order.

  Peter McCormack

  But there's a visibility issue then, yeah, which,

  Lisa Townsend

  yeah, that's, that's, nobody knows who their PCC is, generally speaking. I mean, say we are the same. Know It was, it was a bit higher in Surrey. It depended, because it depended on whether you had other elections going on at the same time, which in parts of Surrey we did, and in parts of Surrey we didn't. But PCCs are, we're sort of the Forgotten bit of the political system. Nobody talks about us. We don't talk about ourselves terribly much. We're sort of, you know, when we're a big thing in our own living room, right? Yeah, and particularly at a time when I think what the general election last year was, what 60% was turned out. I mean, you didn't vote, right? You're politically, somebody who is interested in intelligence, all of that. You didn't vote. I get

  Peter McCormack

  attacked for that, but I say not voting is a vote. I'm making a point.

  Lisa Townsend

  You're making a point. Yeah. I mean, I would like to see a system, almost Australian style system, where you could turn up to a ballot paper and tick none of the above. So you're forced to vote, but you have to, but you are making a point that I'm absent in myself from all of these. I don't trust any of these people, because I think that would in itself tell us something, but yeah, PCCs are we're not. We're not sort of, we're not a cohort of people who are well known even within our own communities, which is interesting when you consider what we do and the fact that we own all of the budget for policing, all of the assets, and can appoint, and if necessary, dismiss a Chief Constable and have that commissioning power. Mayors are better known. I think that's a really good argument in favor of mayors and having that PCC role rolled in as well.

  Peter McCormack

  Do you do you want? Will you go for re election in 28 Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And it's such an unfair question, but let me ask you in a different way, do you think there will be PCCs who will defect because they think they're doing a good job and want to stay in that job?

  Lisa Townsend

  Oh, we've had one. Oh, you've had one. Yeah, we've had one. The Leicestershire PCC was a conservative, was a conservative MEP for years, yeah, and affected to reform is, I mean, I don't know, I haven't spoken to him about it, but I assume, because he thought that was the only way of getting reelected.

  Unknown Speaker

  Well, because

  Peter McCormack

  so reform, like say, I think there are areas of reform that they've got good arguments. I think Zia Youssef makes very good arguments.

  Lisa Townsend

  Yeah, I think, I think he's, yeah, he's thoughtful. Yes, yeah. I don't necessarily agree with him, but he's thought he's thinking about things.

  Peter McCormack

  Yeah. Richard Tice, I disagree with but what I'm saying is I'm seeing some rational, practical thinking and arguments being made, but building a party with hundreds of councilors and hundreds of MP candidates and mayoral candidates, that's a big job. Yeah, and there may be people who will run for PCC who will win it because they're reform and they're not really qualified, and could do a terrible job, and that would be my worry. So that's and

  Lisa Townsend

  that's an argument against PCCs. It's a sort of single point of failure, isn't it? Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, there's a, I mean, Lord Blair, he's not a fan of PCCs. No, no, they tend not to be so

  Peter McCormack

  conscious of time. This has been brilliant. I could talk to you for hours.

  Lisa Townsend

  Are you a top hand, by the way, yeah, I thought so. Was it something I said I read it before. Is it my

  Peter McCormack

  general demeanor? I was gonna make fun of you because all my friends are top toner fans. So I think I'll just leave a kind of like a, like a big question in well, actually, no, I wanted to ask you about how much time are police officers wasting not policing? Is there too Is there too much paperwork? That's what local police said to me. And said, endless, yeah.

  Lisa Townsend

  Can that be solved? Yes, yeah. I think police officers are spending an awful lot of time doing that, and I think there are good reasons and bad reasons for it. Some of it is because, quite rightly, policing as the most visible arm of the state at its most coercive, quite rightly has to justify what it does so if it comes to your if it comes and enters your home and arrests you in front of your children, and takes your mobile phone and your computer devices, then it's quite right that officer who does that has to go back and justify that decision, right? And that is going to involve a certain amount of form filling to explain how they came to that decision, why they did it, why they think that it was the only way of dealing with that issue. So let's say you were reported something Well, I believe that arresting Peter and taking his devices was the only way in order for us to be able to conduct an investigation. To determine whether he committed a crime or not. That's going to involve, inevitably, an amount of form filling. Have we gold plated that? Yes, yeah. And a lot of that is down to home office reporting rules and the kind of things. And I think it's the duplication that the police officers get very frustrated with, and I get frustrated with there should be a much easier way of doing it. It's crazy that in 2025 we haven't come up with one way of an officer being able to say, this is what happened, this is what I did, and that being duplicated across systems. So yes, it can absolutely be reduced, and it's very frustrating. So that's a massive element of what police are doing that they arguably shouldn't be or could definitely be reduced. And I also think there's a massive amount of error terror in the system police officers doing things and being really worried that they are going to be found at fault for doing it, which stops them doing things which is terrible. Yeah, it's a real problem, and that leads, unfortunately, to more form filling and this sort of thing of I need to justify every justify every single decision that I've taken and every thought I had. And then the other side of it, as we talked about a little bit, is around things like mental health and police doing things that police really shouldn't be doing, and that's whether it's doing the NHS job, doing the job of checking on family members because they haven't been heard from for a week, when really, you know, you could probably drive from Guildford to woking and check on your mum. Yeah, and we do get that, still less so, but we still get an element of that, so that there's, there's, there's an element of that happens as well, or things like non crime, hate incidents where police really shouldn't be spending time. And you know, there is an idea that's all that police do, which is absolute rubbish. That is the idea that police are sitting on Twitter looking for stuff is rubbish. But of course, you get reports in. And you know, like I said, I've been reported for a number of non crime, hate incidents, the things I've said on Twitter, or I've said in the media, or I've said to podcaster like you. And so somebody reports it, which means a police officer, because it's been reported, then has to go and look at it. Just all that bollocks needs to go, all of that bollocks needs to go. Just needs to go. All of that needs to go. So yes, they are doing things cut down on that. I'd be a very happy PC, sir.

  Peter McCormack

  And just a final question. So based on your experience so far and doing the role if you were talking to central government, what are the big changes that you would like to see within policing? Yeah,

  Lisa Townsend

  make it easier for police officers to use their discretion, whether it's around hate crime, yeah, and non crime hate incidents. I mean, get rid of hate non crime hate incidents. First of all, allow police or train police officers properly and allow them to use their discretion without fear of being hauled up in front of whether it's the court of public opinion or a misconduct trial. When they've taken a decision, go back to what is the motivation for taking the decision?

  Peter McCormack

  What? Give me a good example where that may happen.

  Lisa Townsend

  So we've seen police officers. We see police officers get and because as PCC, I deal with complaints, deal with complaints against police officers once they've been through the system, and you get vexatious complaints against police officers because somebody doesn't like something, and body worn camera has been brilliant, actually, because you're able to say, Well, no, they didn't say that, they demonstrably didn't say that, or they did redo your rights when you're saying they didn't, because we've got it on body worn camera. But it's back to this error terror again. Allow police officers to use their discretion and trust themselves and trust them until they have proven otherwise. Yeah.

  Peter McCormack

  Interesting. Lisa brilliant, I really enjoyed this. I think two hours just flew by. Then there's so much more we could talk about, especially autogamous Shit we'll do another time. Yeah, I'm really interested to dig into this a bit more at some point, I think it's really interesting. I'll be interested to see what happens with your reelection. And, yeah, you've definitely shifted my view on this, because I have, I just, I just think I've got a very negative view, because I don't think our PCC is doing a great job. So yeah, we'll see. But thank you, appreciate that. Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone for listening. Thank you see you all.

  Unknown Speaker

  Soon.