Policing and Crime

Charles Walker Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point, and the sadness of the Opposition’s position is that they would not be making such very important decisions that can lead to a better and improved service to the public. I commend my hon. Friend’s local force for being willing to make such decisions.

I said that I would respond to the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) on the difference between the 12% cuts, which HMIC suggested could be made, and the Government’s cuts. He and other Opposition Members who have raised the point in the past, including the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford, have obviously neither read nor understood the HMIC report, so let me tell them what it said.

HMIC found that more than £1.15 billion per year—12% of national police funding—could be saved if only the least efficient police forces brought themselves up to the average level of efficiency. Well, the state of the public finances that Labour left us is such that all forces must raise themselves up to the level not of the average but of the most efficient forces. That could add another £350 million of savings to those calculated in HMIC’s report. But HMIC did not consider all areas of police spending. It did not consider IT or procurement, for example, and it makes absolutely no sense for the police to procure things in 43 different ways, and it makes absolutely no sense to have 2,000 different IT systems throughout the 43 forces, as they currently do.

With a national joined-up approach, better contracts, more joint purchasing, a smaller number of different IT systems and greater private sector involvement, we can save hundreds of millions of pounds—over and above the savings identified by HMIC.

Likewise, HMIC did not consider pay, because that was outside its remit, but in an organisation such as the police, where £11 billion—80% of total revenue spending—goes on pay, there is no question but that pay restraint and pay reform must form part of the package. That is why we believe, subject to any recommendations from the Police Negotiating Board, that there should be a two-year pay freeze in policing, just as there has been across the public sector. That would save at least £350 million—again, on top of HMIC’s savings.

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

I know that being in opposition is difficult, but I really hope we were not as bad as that lot over there during our time in opposition.

Would it not be possible to have a royal commission on police terms and conditions? The police do a wonderful job, and we need to maintain high morale and ensure that they do not bear a disproportionate burden of the cuts that we have to make as a result of the financial mismanagement of the Labour Government.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the behaviour of the Opposition today.

On the proposal about the royal commission, the cuts we have to make and the timetable within which we have to make them means that we have to make decisions now. However, we are not just making those decisions as a Government. I set up the independent review into police pay, terms and conditions under Tom Winsor, who has produced his first report. The proposals from that report are now going through the Police Negotiating Board, and decisions will be taken by the Government once those proper processes have been gone through. At the beginning of next year, he will report on the second part of his review. I felt that it was important for the police that we ensured that an independent reviewer looked at these issues who could fully take into account the impact of all the changes.

I remind any hon. Members who are considering the royal commission proposal that in its report last summer HMIC said, in very stark terms, that there is no time for a royal commission because of the nature of the decisions that have to be taken and the speed at which they have to be taken.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

A number of those chief constables, including the chief constable of Kent, have made it absolutely clear that they are going to protect neighbourhood policing. Perhaps the right hon. Lady should reflect on the evidence given by the chief constable of Greater Manchester to the Home Affairs Committee, when he said that an artificial numbers game had been necessary under the last Labour Government, with the result that some officers were being put into back-office roles that need not be undertaken by officers.

Crucially, all the savings that I have set out can be made while protecting the quality of front-line services. At the same time, as I have made clear in response to several interventions, we are reviewing police pay, terms and conditions to make them fair to police officers and to the taxpayer. If implemented, Tom Winsor’s proposals to reform police pay and conditions will help the service to manage its budgets, maximise officer and staff deployment to front-line roles, and enable front-line services to be maintained and improved.

[Mr Charles Walker]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs May]

I am going to make a little progress.

[Mr Walker]

It is a microscopic intervention.

[Mrs May]

I will complete this point and then I might be generous to my hon. Friend.

Winsor proposes rewarding those with specialist skills, those who work unsocial hours, and those who are on the front line. His proposals are comprehensive, wide-ranging and far-reaching. They are things that the Labour party never had the guts to do. Given that the Labour party would be cutting £7 in every £8 that we are cutting this year, the shadow Home Secretary needs to tell the House where her cuts would fall.

[Mr Walker]

My right hon. Friend is as wise, charming and insightful as ever. However, I think that the Winsor review is a trifle too aggressive on police terms and conditions, and I hope that she will bear those concerns in mind when independently reviewing Winsor’s recommendations.

[Mrs May]

There is indeed a process that is taking place in relation to the proposals of the Winsor review. The proposals are before the Police Negotiating Board at the moment, and there will be a proper process to consider its decisions. My hon. Friend will have noticed that the Winsor review identified significant savings that could be made by changing the terms and conditions, and then proposed to plough half that sum back into improved pay and terms and conditions for the police.

We want not only to manage the cuts that we are having to make, but to make the police service better. The Labour Government spent a lot of money on policing in the boom years, but they spent it all on making simple things very complicated. They made an industry out of performance management and league tables; created a forest of guidance, manuals and pointless paperwork; and hugely increased the number of bureaucrats, auditors and checkers. At the same time, they did nothing to increase police visibility, nothing to increase public accountability and nothing to reform and modernise the service. We are putting that right. We are slashing the bureaucracy that Labour allowed to build up.

Earlier this month, I announced measures that would save up to 2.5 million man hours of police time each year. That is on top of the measures that we have already taken to scrap all Labour’s targets and restore discretion to the police. We have got rid of the policing pledge, the confidence target, the public service agreement targets, the key performance indicators and the local area agreements. We have replaced them with a single objective: to cut crime. I want police officers chasing criminals, not chasing targets. The Government do not put their trust in performance indicators, targets or regulations. We put our trust in the professionals and in the public.

Let me address the third fallacy in the Opposition motion. Police and crime commissioners are not an American-style reform; they are a very British and very democratic reform. The Labour party certainly did not consider democratic accountability to be an alien concept when the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) said in 2008, when he was the Minister for Policing, Crime and Security, that

“only direct election, based on geographic constituencies, will deliver the strong connection to the public which is critical”.

I could not agree more.