Police: Reduction in Numbers

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, how many neighbourhood meetings, which the police hold regularly, has the Minister attended? Will he confirm my experience that what the public want is a police officer to respond when there is a difficulty, be it domestic, burglary or whatever? Mathematically, there is inevitably a relationship between the number of police officers employed and the response time to incidents, especially on a Friday and Saturday night.

[Lord Henley]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for talking about the need for the police to respond to individual and repeated complaints that come in. I refer her to the White Paper that we issued only yesterday, which makes it clear that we see it as vital that the police respond when complaints come in from the same individuals a number of times. That is why we talked about the community trigger in that document. The noble Baroness makes a very good point.