Public Disorder

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

This work that is done in the United States is also done in the United Kingdom. One thing we can do is work harder to map and understand how many gangs there are, what their membership is and what they are doing so that we have better intelligence, but I am sure that there will be many things I can discuss with Bill Bratton when he comes to meet me shortly.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister said he did not want a sterile debate on resources, which I do not think any of us wants, but there is a division of views on whether there are sufficient police available to deal with this. I would like to praise the police in my constituency for the way they helped to avoid these events affecting Slough. If he is right that there are absolutely sufficient numbers of police, perhaps he would agree to ensure that we have a regular report to Parliament telling us how many police are available and how many are trained to deal with riots so that we can know the real facts.

[The Prime Minister]

I would welcome that, because the point is that the police availability figure today is only 12% of police officers on the beat at any one time. The hon. Lady, like me, is a Thames valley MP, so let me just repeat what Chief Constable Sara Thornton of Thames Valley police said, which is that

“what I haven’t done at all is reduce the number of officers who do the patrol functions, so the officers you see in vehicles, on foot, in uniform, on bicycles. We haven’t cut those numbers at all.”

We have not cut the number of officers or police community support officers in neighbourhood policing teams either. Thames Valley is a big force, and as the hon. Lady and I have sometimes argued against previous Governments, it is not always a very well funded force. If it can do it with these budget reductions, other forces can do it too.