Communities are suffering because of the “potential under-use of stop and search”, a Tory MP has suggested.

Philip Davies claimed stop and search numbers had reduced dramatically as a result of “politically correct chatter”, adding: “One of the reasons is that the police are fearing stopping and searching people in case they are branded racist.”

The last thing police needed, he argued, was “meddlesome politicians” interfering in their operational work.

The MP for Shipley said: “It’s totally unacceptable to have a situation where officers are leaving criminals free to commit crimes simply because they want to avoid having complaints about racism against them.”

His comments during a Westminster Hall debate on the effect of police stop and search powers on BAME communities drew sharp rebukes from Opposition MPs.

Labour’s Naz Shah, who brought the debate, branded stop and search a “blunt tool for the prevention and detection of crime”, adding it had a “profoundly negative impact on police-community relations”.

The Bradford West MP said stop and search was neither the solution to crime problems nor a substitute for intelligence from good relationships with communities. She said: “For many in our BAME communities, racial profiling and discriminatory policing is real. It is corrosive and it is undermining trust in public institutions.”

She added: “On the ground the ease with which police officers can use their discretionary powers together with their widely divergent views about what constitutes as reasonable suspicion means that stop and search has become the go-to power for social control, and one that is influenced by unconscious biases or outright racial prejudices.”

Figures for 2017, she said, estimated that black people were searched at over eight times the rate of white people.

Ms Shah warned society was at risk of “allowing stop and search to regress back to unacceptably high levels of disproportionality”.

The Prime Minister, she argued, had allowed disproportionality to increase and the pace of reform to grind to a halt.

Mr Davies said recent changes in the culture on stop and search was “very much hurting parts of these communities”.

He said: “They are suffering not from the over-use of stop and search as (Ms Shah) would contend, but the potential under-use of stop and search.”

Young lives being lost on the streets, he said, were “predominantly not white”.

He added: “So, when it comes to the most serious offences of all, murder, it is clear that black people, in particular black males, are far more likely to be victims. They are also more likely to be murderers.”

Mr Davies argued the evidence showed the community much more likely to be stopped and searched and yet found to have done nothing wrong were white people, adding: “They are the facts - they might be inconvenient facts for people who have a particular agenda, but they are nevertheless the facts.”

Ms Shah intervened, saying that right from the offset black people were being much more stopped and searched in comparison to their white counterparts.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott intervened, asking: “For the avoidance of doubt, are you saying that the disproportionate levels of stop and search exercises on black people, on Muslim people, people from south Asia, is because we are more criminal?”

Mr Davies replied: “For certain offences black people are more likely to be found guilty of offences than white people, that’s a fact.” He said that on the evidence it may well be that this should result in a change to the recent policy of stop and search, and “it should be used more”.

Ms Abbott said: “It is my view that nothing has poisoned relationships between the police and the communities that they serve, nothing has poisoned those relationships more than non-evidence based stop and search.”

She said Mr Davies talked about the support among ethnic minorities for stop and search used fairly: “But he missed that important word: everybody supports stop and search where it is used fairly, the concern arises when there is no evidence to justify the stop and the search and the concern arises when it is felt there is disproportionality.”

Mr Davies, intervening later as Security Minister Ben Wallace responded to the debate, said Mr Wallace was in a "difficult position because he's got to defend the Prime Minister's remarks on stop and search when she was home secretary which are virtually indefensible and which are unravelling as we speak on the streets of London at the moment".

Mr Wallace told MPs: "We all accept stop and search is a tool, and we can use it and we can use it well.

"The best tool is when the community picks up the telephone, speaks to our local police forces and we manage to arrest the people who carry the knives and are dealing the drugs before they are on our street."