Government Reductions in Policing

Angela Smith Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, because that money could be spent on keeping some of the 2,000 police officers who have been told that they will be forced to take early retirement as a result of the scale of the cuts. Electing 43 police and crime commissioners seems to be the only crime policy that the Government have. They are electing 43 new politicians in place of the thousands of police officers across the country who are to go.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

Meredydd Hughes, the chief constable of South Yorkshire, has said that Government expectations of improving performance were

“challenging if not unrealistic in the longer term.”

Does that not demonstrate beyond doubt that the service will be damaged between now and 2015?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right to mention the concerns of the chief constable of South Yorkshire. He is reported as having recently raised concerns about what would happen to crime in many areas as a result of the scale of the cuts in the Government’s plans. The cuts go way beyond the 12% that Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary said could be made through genuine efficiency savings over several years, and they go way beyond the 12% cuts that the previous Labour Home Secretary identified and promised to implement over a Parliament—they are more than 15% in real terms in the first two years alone. The Government are cutting more in the first two years than Labour proposed to cut over a Parliament.

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[Angela Smith]

On Friday, my constituent—a very senior officer in West Yorkshire police—came to see me at my surgery and asked me to put on the record in this debate his deeply rooted view that the Government’s police spending cuts will damage the service. What does the Home Secretary have to say to my constituent?

[Mrs May]

I would suggest that the hon. Lady says two things to her constituent. First, she should make it clear why the Government are having to make cuts in public spending—they are a result of the decisions taken by the previous Labour Government. Secondly, she should also make clear the commitment that Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison has given to what he calls the central drivers of the way in which West Yorkshire police will deal with the budget changes. He states that the first is that

“local policing will not suffer, the sort of policing you see when you open your curtains and the emergency response of the police at the times when people are feeling vulnerable, under threat or have suffered some criminal act or tragedy.”

On bureaucracy, we have scrapped the so-called policing pledge and done away with the last remaining national targets and we have replaced them with a single objective: to cut crime. We are scrapping the stop-and-account form, cutting the reporting requirements for stop and search, and restoring discretion over certain charging decisions to the police, and that is just the start.