Police Grant Report

Debate between Matt Rodda and Chris Philp

Wednesday 7th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. The issue is not just about providing more resources, but making sure that the police can operate efficiently. For example, we are rolling out the “Right Care, Right Person” initiative, which started in Humberside, to make sure that when a mental health case is purely medical, and there is no threat to public safety and no criminality, it is handled medically by the health service. Implementing that across the country will save about 1 million hours a year of police time.

There are other administrative changes that we can make, and the redaction issue is one of them. I discussed that with the new Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, earlier this week, and I will discuss it with him again in March. Changing the rules around redaction will save very many hours of police time. There are also technology solutions that will help, not just in those 25% of cases in which the CPS decides not to charge, but in the 75% of cases in which it does charge. Automated redaction tools driven by artificial intelligence will save many tens of thousands—probably hundreds of thousands—of hours of police time. I am encouraging police forces up and down the country to adopt that technology to save a huge amount of time.

Before the intervention, I was saying that record police officer numbers and record funding are all well and good, but what the public want is results. As the Office for National Statistics has told us, the only reliable source of long-term trend data for high-volume crimes is the crime survey for England and Wales. That shows that overall crime, excluding fraud and computer misuse, which only came into the figures recently, went down from 9.5 million offences in the last year of the previous Labour Government to 4.3 million in the past year—a 55% reduction. Violent crimes went down from 1.8 million offences under the last Labour Government to just 900,000—a 51% reduction. Theft is down from about 5 million offences to 2.7 million—a 46% reduction. Robbery is down 74%, theft from the person down 40%, domestic burglary down 56%, vehicle-related theft down 39%, criminal damage down 72%, and even bicycle theft is down under this Government. The plan is working; let us not go back to square one.

As for homicide, the most serious crime of all, in the last year of the last Labour Government, there were 620 homicides. We have managed to get that down to 591. Every one of those crimes is a tragedy; every one of them is one too many. None the less, I am sure that all of us can welcome that reduction in homicide—

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

rose—

[Chris Philp]

—and I am sure that the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) is about to join me in doing just that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Rodda]

May I offer my support to our local police and say what a wonderful service they provide to our community? I was curious about what the Minister said about bureaucracy. It appears that what the Government have actually done in the past 14 years is cut police numbers very substantially and then replace some of those police officers with new officers who need to be trained. What proportion of those new officers are still undergoing some form of training or receiving support?

[Chris Philp]

To be clear, there was a reduction in police officer numbers in the coalition years—the years immediately after 2010—owing to the appalling financial conditions that we inherited. However, those police officers have been more than replaced. The total number of officers in England and Wales last year was about 3,500 higher than it was in 2010. It is therefore true to say that many officers have joined relatively recently, which means that there is a training and supervision job to do—and police forces are doing it. Retention rates are quite high. The staff survey shows quite high satisfaction rates, so with each month that passes since the influx of the past three or four years, those officers become more experienced. That will benefit our constituents and make sure that the trend of falling crime continues.

We are taking action on drugs, having closed down more than 2,000 county lines since April 2022. We are also tackling knife crime, which we discussed extensively yesterday. We are removing more than 130,000 knives through stop and search, which is important. We need to use stop and search and surrender programmes with confidence. We are investing in violence reduction units, and today we renew our commitment to funding those units and doing prevention work. We renew our commitment to hotspot patrolling against serious violence, knife crime and antisocial behaviour.

This funding settlement includes £66 million of extra money that will go to every single police force in the country for hotspot patrolling in areas where antisocial behaviour and serious violence are a problem. Where we have trialled that—for example, we trialled antisocial behaviour hotspot patrolling in parts of Essex, and serious violence patrolling in places such as Brighton—we have seen a reduction of approximately 30% in antisocial behaviour and crimes such as robbery. We know that it works. From April this year, every single police force will get that funding. I urge Members from all parts of the House to talk to their local PCCs and make sure that those hotspot patrols take place in town centres, on high streets, or wherever else, so that the public can see that the issue is being dealt with.