Queen’s Speech

Lord Bach Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the elected police and crime commissioner for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. I start with a short tribute to Ron Hogg, the former police and crime commissioner for Durham, whose life was celebrated yesterday at Durham Cathedral. He was in a past life a senior police officer, before being elected PCC in 2012. He was an outstanding and popular police and crime commissioner who called himself the “police and victims commissioner” and focused relentlessly on victims of crime. He will be long remembered.

In the short time available, I want to concentrate on the Government’s very welcome commitment to increasing the number of police officers by 20,000 over the next three and a half years; a welcome step, as I said, but one that needs perhaps to be examined in a little detail. The Government have called this,

“an unprecedented drive to increase the ranks.”

In a sense it is, but it is worth recording that in 2010 the number of serving police officers was 171,600. By March 2019, there were just over 150,000 officers, which represents a decrease over those years of 12%, 21,000 officers having left.

When the new police officers are in place, we will simply have cancelled some of the cuts brought about by the measures that Governments thought were necessary but which in my view were a mistake. For local context, in Leicestershire we had over 2,300 police officers in 2010. When I started in 2016, this figure had fallen to 1,800; that is, 500 fewer police officers on the streets of an area whose population had grown by 10% to 1.1 million. Recorded crime has doubled.

Our Chief Constable Simon Cole and his team are being asked to do much more with far less against a rapidly shifting backdrop that remains fairly unpredictable, not least because of Brexit. Our share of the new officers will be about 400; that is great, but it is worth pointing out that we have a long way to go before we will have increased the number sufficiently to get back to the necessary figures.

Another challenge that I raise, in a gentle spirit, is this: it looks as though the Government will be allocating £750 million to fund the recruitment of these 20,000 new police officers. But will police and crime commissioners and chief constables actually receive that money? The figure may be nearer £630 million; the rest, as the Government have already said, must come from that old favourite, efficiency savings.

I fear that the promise of 20,000 police officers set out in the manifesto is underfunded by over £100 million. Finding that sort of money for a police force after a decade of austerity, in an environment where approaching nine-tenths of the cost are taken up by salaries, will be a challenge, to put it mildly. Indeed, if it is £630 million for 20,000 police officers, that is £31,500 per post. The actual cost of a police officer is much nearer £50,000 per officer so there will be underspending—an underfund —unless we are very careful. On top of that there are the infrastructure costs associated with the increase in police officer numbers, recruitment, training, ICT, vehicles and equipment, and those non-salary costs are not captured in the on-costs of police officers.

Of course, the policy change is very welcome but all Governments, whatever their complexion, are fond of giving with one hand and taking away with another. With all the pressures that there are on police forces up and down the country—those pressures of course include recruitment as well as serious violent crime and other matters that the House knows well—I argue that it would be a major error for the Government to limit the amount that police and crime commissioners are able to precept in the coming settlement. That settlement is of course now out of date but, because of the election, the new one has not yet been announced; perhaps it will be announced next week. I really hope that the Government will bear in mind, in the spirit of what they are trying to do, that they should ensure that chief constables’ powers are not limited by too little precept.