Police

Debate between Hugh Bayley and Yvette Cooper

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. Communities across the country know that. They want officers on the streets. They want to see police officers doing the job in their area. It is communities that will in the end pay the price for this Government’s decision. Time and again on Monday the Home Secretary told the House not just that there was no simple link, but that there was no direct link between police numbers and crime, yet look at the evidence from the Government’s favoured think-tank, Civitas, which said that

“there is a strong relationship between the size of police forces and national crime rates...A nation with fewer police is more likely to have a higher crime rate.”

The Policing Minister sniggers. Will he snigger, too, at the HMIC, which he quoted today, which said in research published last year that

“a 10 per cent increase in officers will lead to a reduction in crime of around 3 per cent (and vice versa)”?

That is the conclusion of the authoritative HMIC analysis of all the studies and the research that have been done, and this Government decide that they want to cut 16,000 officers at a time when personal crime is already going up by 11%.

[Hugh Bayley]

Under the previous Conservative Government the North Yorkshire police received not one single additional police officer, and crime in our county almost trebled. Under the Labour Government there were dozens and dozens of additional police officers—more than 140—and crime started to come down. Now the police numbers are down by almost 100 and crime is rising again. Surely that makes the case.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right that we had thousands more police officers under the Labour Government. We also had a historic 40% reduction in crime.

The Conservative party used to get it. Here is what the Prime Minister himself wrote in the 2005 election manifesto for the Conservative party:

“Put more police on the streets and they’ll catch more criminals. It’s not rocket science, is it?”

No, it is not, yet now the Tory-led Government are doing the opposite. Once the party of law and order, they are cutting more from the police than from health, education, local councils or defence—more than from any other service. Personal crime, theft, robbery and violence are up by 11%, police officers down by 16,000—higher crime, fewer police, communities paying the price. This Government should cut crime instead of cutting police officers, and they should start by going back to the drawing board and voting against these plans today.