Jack Lopresti
Main Page: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)Department Debates - View all Jack Lopresti's debates with the Cabinet Office
(13 years, 4 months ago)
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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.
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
Will elected police commissioners have the power to authorise the use of water cannon, troop support and such measures, or will they have to let others further up the chain of command make those decisions?
The Prime Minister
Those decisions must always be an operational matter for the chief constable. Let us be clear—I do not think that the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband) fully understood this—that we are talking not about electing chief constables, but about electing commissioners who will replace the police authorities and to whom the chief constable will be accountable.