Police

David Ruffley Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert]

Of course we will continue to look at all these issues, and I welcome the collaboration that has taken place in my hon. Friend’s force. HMIC was clear that collaboration has to proceed at a faster pace, and we will look at all the potential incentives to ensure that that is the case.

[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend said something terribly important about mandating collaboration, which I have long argued for, particularly through the Policing and Crime Bill in 2009. He talked about collaboration in the context of procurement. What about mandated collaboration in the context of protective services?

[Nick Herbert]

There is strong potential for forces to collaborate on protective services, and again, we want to see such things happen. We have ensured in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, which is currently in Committee, that strong duties will be placed on police and crime commissioners to collaborate. It is very important that forces do that. Indeed, in a speech I gave a couple of weeks ago, I said that the age of police fiefdoms is over. There is a need for police forces to work together more effectively. The Government do not believe in forced mergers of police forces, but we cannot have 43 forces doing things all on their own when there are great savings and efficiencies to be made in exactly the sort of area that my hon. Friend represents by working together.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

It is worth reminding ourselves and the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)—after her, if I may say so, commendably feisty speech—that public spending constraint in this country is inevitable, because of record debt and record peacetime borrowing. The police services of this country cannot be exempt from the tough decisions that the Government make. Frankly, a Government who did not make those decisions would not be worthy of the name.

The police grant report before us shows that central Government funding for policing will fall by 20% in real terms by 2014-15. If the precept rises that are forecast in the Office for Budget Responsibility report to 2014-15 take effect—we have no reason to think that they will not—the real-terms cut will be 14%. In considering those stark figures, we should also have regard to two statistics. The first is that there was a 5% increase in police numbers between 2004 and 2009. In 2004, when there were 5% fewer police officers, I do not recall the world or the ceiling caving in.

We also know that police services in this country since 1997 have been incredibly well resourced. I must pay a debt of honour to the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), who was my opposite number when I was the shadow Policing Minister. He was part of a Labour Home Office that invested in the police service over the years, and from 1997 there was a 20% real-terms increase in policing. I do not recall our ever voting against those measures on police grants. So let us recall that a huge amount of money has been put into the police service in recent times.

I should like to place on record what the Suffolk police authority is receiving this year, compared with previous years. The Home Office principal formula police grant in 2008-09 was £40.2 million. In 2009-10, it was £41.5 million. The figure for 2010-11 is £42.8 million, and for 2011-12, the first year of this grant settlement, it is £45.9 million. It is forecast to fall in 2012-13 to £42.8 million for the county of Suffolk. The total formula grant, which includes moneys from the Department for Communities and Local Government settlement, was £69.2 million in 2008-09, rising to £71 million in 2009-10, to £72.7 million in 2010-11 and to £73.2 million in 2011-12. The total formula grant for policing in the county of Suffolk will fall to £68.3 million in 2012-13.

I will meet the chief constable of Suffolk, Simon Ash, shortly to discuss how those numbers will impact on policing on the ground. Here, today, we need to ask ourselves what Ministers are going to be able to do to ensure that these funding constraints do not undermine crime prevention and detection. In short, how will law-abiding citizens be kept safe from crime and from the fear of crime? The answer must be that the police will have to do more with less, and there should be scope for that.

Again, I pay tribute to the previous Labour Government to the extent that they managed to increase the number of police posts to 147,000—a record in this country’s history. Sadly, however, they did not ensure that those officers spent more time on patrol. I will not repeat the statistic from Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary that the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford used earlier. Instead, I will use one that the hon. Member for Gedling gave me when I was shadowing him. He told me that patrol officers themselves—not all police officers, and not CID—spent an average of 14% of their time on patrol. That was the statistic at the time of the last general election. Most of my constituents would find that not only utterly unbelievable but utterly unacceptable.

I am not going to lay the blame for that on the previous Labour Administration. The problem of police bureaucracy has been going on for a lot longer than that. This bureaucratic mindset is certainly not the fault of police officers, who, in my experience, especially of Suffolk constabulary, are professionals dedicated to protecting the public from harm. It is the fault of the many-headed hydra of bureaucracy, with its so-called police “doctrine”, paperwork, process and systems, that has been building up over decades. It embeds a risk-averse culture, and it stifles any can-do approach in policing.

Bureaucracy is wasting police time. I contend that, if we are to ask the police to do more with less, we have to take an axe to the bureaucracy and mean it. Unfortunately, under successive Governments of both political stripes, Ministers have too often reached for the political rhetoric of “a bonfire of regulations” and so forth. Rarely has that rhetoric been followed up with tough ministerial action to repeal unnecessary secondary legislation and unnecessary primary legislation to allow the police to get on with the job.

If we are to ask the police to do more with less, it seems incumbent on the Government of the day to reduce the burden on ordinary, hard-working police constables—an issue that has implications for the police officer numbers debate. Commenting recently on the spending reductions that were in prospect under the previous Government as much as they are under the present one, Chief Superintendent Steve Hartley of the Bolton force in Lancashire said:

“We have got to be clear—success isn’t just founded on numbers. It’s how we use people. This is not just about cuts. It’s about how we get our officers in the right places at the right time for the right reasons.”

As my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) suggested, counting the number of police officers in uniform is not a realistic measure, in the current climate, of what constitutes good and effective law and order, or good and effective policing. Surely, as a matter of logic—I have a great deal of respect for the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford, who is an extremely bright parliamentarian and understands numbers—it is not beyond the wit of man or all of us in the House to understand that what counts is the number of visible police hours delivered by a constabulary, not just the uniformed officers it has. If one hour out of every seven of a patrol officer’s time is spent on patrol, surely we can agree that, in principle, that one hour could be increased to two, three or even four hours if we cut the bureaucracy on the police.

The role of Ministers comes into play here. That bureaucracy cannot be cut by the Police Federation or by the Association of Chief Police Officers, and it certainly cannot be cut by the police constable on the street. It has to come from the top. Bureaucracy reduction must come, in the first instance, from Policing Ministers.

Since the general election, I have heard that 800,000 police hours have been saved by the current Government as a result of the abolition of the stop and account form and the streamlining of stop-and-search procedures. That is a paltry amount if we realise that there are more than 147,000 police officers—we have got to do better than that. I would be grateful if the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice set my mind at rest on this point in his concluding speech.

Two reports by Jan Berry were commissioned by the previous Labour Government—quite sensibly, as she is a well-respected and intelligent former chair of the Police Federation, which had representation on her working body, as did ACPO, members of the public, clever civil servants and others. The task was to produce a list of measures to reduce bureaucracy and red tape on our hard-working, front-line police officers. I would like to rattle through some of the bigger ticket items that struck me as important, on which I believe we should take action. I am citing from the list of conclusions in the final report produced by her reducing bureaucracy taskforce, which said:

“Consider evaluation of the Modernising Charging Pilots with a view to rolling out improved arrangements where charging decisions are taken by the appropriate person according to the complexity and seriousness of offence.”

My right hon. Friend the Minister has done some work on that, as indeed have I. The idea was that we should look again at the statutory charging regime that the previous Government introduced in 2004, and establish whether a charging sergeant could charge people with more offences in the “triable either way” category without the need for an automatic reference to the Crown Prosecution Service beforehand.

It is a thorny issue. We can see the logic behind the introduction of statutory charging—it was intended to reduce the number of cracked trials and discontinuances, which were extremely expensive for the Courts Service and for Government generally—but there is a definite sense that it has reduced the rapidity with which charging sergeants in custody suites can charge someone who is pretty likely to plead guilty, having been caught red-handed. We do not need sergeants in custody suites hanging around waiting for the CPS. All too few police stations have a CPS lawyer on site to give a quick and simple instruction or approval to the sergeant in question; most do not benefit from that luxury.

The second suggestion by Jan Berry’s team that struck me, because I have some experience of it as well, was that we should remove the requirement to complete disclosure schedules—which must be written out laboriously by uniformed officers because that is what is provided by the relevant primary legislation, although we all know that they must be checked by the CPS eventually in any case—prior to first hearing in the magistrates court. It was also suggested that we should consider shifting the trigger point for more serious offences in the Crown court to the point at which a not guilty plea is entered.

Another hardy annual is, of course, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000— “the grim RIPA”, as it is sometimes called—and the way in which it is applied to relatively routine direct surveillance operations. For instance, a police constable may wish to carry out surveillance of a supermarket car park because he has reasonable grounds for believing that a great deal of breaking and entering is taking place. Some police forces, amazingly—although not all—interpret the RIPA guidance and the statutory codes as meaning that a constable must obtain a RIPA written authorisation from his superiors, which can be extremely time-consuming, before he can go to the car park and hide behind a wall to see whether any villains are going to start breaking into cars. We must do something about that kind of ridiculous approach to applying RIPA and observing the statutory codes. One option would be to rewrite the codes. The hon. Member for Gedling said that he was interested in that option. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister can confirm that action is being taken in regard to RIPA and similar procedures.

Let us talk about this. Let us tell the police officers on the ground what we are doing for them: what the House of Commons is doing to cut the nonsensical amount of bureaucracy under which they labour. They have had enough, the public have had enough, I have had enough, and I am sure that the Minister has had enough—not of what I am saying, but of the ridiculous, endless use of rhetoric and the absence of action. Let us see the Home Office get a grip.

The next issue that I want to raise has been discussed with me by the esteemed Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). At the beginning of 2009, there were four pilot schemes in Leicestershire, the west midlands, Staffordshire and Surrey. I do not want to be too “anoraky” about the subject, but the gist of the objective was to slim down the crime and incident recording part of the duty of a police officer who arrests someone for, say, shoplifting in a store. Could not the information simply be written on a side of A4, or the equivalent on a hand-held device? It would be useful to know whether those pilots have been rolled out to every single police force in the country; and, if not, what powers does the Minister have to ensure that that is done? On many occasions, I have been wearily told that this is a matter for chief constables. The time has come for a bit of centralisation that works, in order to ensure that police forces adopt sensible common-sense procedures to reduce bureaucracy.

One key element of reducing bureaucracy and saving police time—so that officers can spend more time on patrol, apart from anything else—is getting rid of the double or treble keying of information. That is the phenomenon by which sometimes a single piece of information, such as a suspect’s address, name or date of birth, has to be keyed into different forms even if they are online because of the incompatibility of certain IT systems. It is all very easy to say, “Well, let’s just get better IT,” but the fact is that this is a very difficult and complicated issue. There are also huge resource implications in junking legacy systems, and although having one national computer system might speed things up in theory, it is not really an idea of this world. I would be grateful if the Minister gave a short answer to the question of what we are doing about having a national set of police forms available on one IT platform.

Reducing bureaucracy is the most important thing this House and Government can do to ensure the money set out in this grant goes further and is spent in a smarter way. But there is another area that should also be addressed: the general efficiency agenda, which my right hon. Friend the Minister spoke about so compellingly and, I know, from a deep well of knowledge. I just want to strike a note of caution. Having worked in the Treasury under my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and having also done the policing job as a shadow Minister in the previous Parliament, I got rather tired of the alphabet soup of consultants from PWC, KPMG and Deloitte who would regularly—and for huge sums of money, so far as I could work out—pile into a constabulary, do a report stating the mind-numbingly obvious about how the police could speed things up, and then promptly decamp. The police might follow the recommended procedures for a year or two, but the lessons they had been taught by these highly paid consultants were often forgotten, and even if not forgotten were not able to deliver the serious efficiency gains of the magnitude my right hon. Friend the Minister is talking about in the context of this settlement. We need smarter procurement, shared back-office services and, most importantly, mandated collaboration.

In concluding, I want to ask the Minister two final questions that are key to those of us who want this police grant to represent value for money so we get the most bang for our buck. First, I echo a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) about police authorities and chief constables needing to do the right thing by getting on with collaborating to save money and to squeeze efficiencies out of their budgets. In my experience—and history tells us this, too—the likelihood is that they are not going to do that if left to do so on an ad hoc basis. Therefore, when the Minister starts mandating, will he also consider imposing financial penalties on police authorities that do not mandate and do not deliver police efficiencies?

My final and most important plea is this: if we are to be taken seriously as a Government who are keen to achieve our goals, for public interest reasons and because we want the police to spend more time on patrol and less time behind their desks, we have to show that we are serious about tackling bureaucracy. Will the Minister undertake to produce an annual report to Parliament setting out the procedures, forms and processes he has abolished with an estimate by each item of the number of police hours saved as a result of those cuts in bureaucracy? I hope that my right hon. Friend will take the opportunity to use mandated collaboration and attach penalties to it, and to make a report to Parliament telling us how many police hours he has saved each year he has been the Minister, and I hope he is the Minister for a very long time.