Police

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Wednesday 13th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hanson]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. It is important that all those who murder police officers are brought to justice. If there is evidence to enable that to happen, it should be presented.

As I was saying, there is a clear difference between the Government and Her Majesty’s Opposition on the proposals before us. The settlement continues on the path that Labour has opposed since 2010, and I shall give the Minister a little hint by saying that we shall do so again today. The proposals will result in a loss of about £2 billion from policing budgets in England and Wales over three years. The Conservatives—and, by association, the Liberal Democrats—are cutting police funding by 20% over that three-year period and 15,000 police officers are being lost by 2015; 7,000 have already been lost in the first two years of this Government. That is a higher number than the experts predicted, and a higher number than Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary said would be safe. This is damaging morale in the police service.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman has consistently opposed the Government’s proposals. Will he make it clear what he would suggest instead? What does he think is the right amount of money, and where would he get it from?

[Mr Hanson]

I will come to that in a moment. In 2010, in the debate on the policing grant, I was the policing Minister, and I stood at the Dispatch Box where the Minister has just been standing to propose a 12% reduction in police funding over three years. I know that the hon. Gentleman was not here at the time, but the former Liberal Democrat Member for Chesterfield criticised that budget proposal and reminded us that the Liberal Democrats, including the then Member for Cambridge, were going to go into the election promising 3,000 more police officers on the beat. Would the hon. Gentleman like to intervene on me again to tell me how 123 such officers have been lost in Cambridge? Is that related to the 3,000 extra officers or not?

[Dr Huppert]

I am happy to answer the right hon. Gentleman’s questions, and I hope that he will answer mine. I am sure that he will be delighted to know that further recruitment of police constables has been announced, and that there will be an increase in the number of police constables performing local policing in Cambridgeshire. I am sure that he welcomes that. He will also know from our manifesto that part of the money to pay for extra police was going to come from savings from the ID card scheme. However, we had not realised quite how much of that money had already been wasted by the Labour Government before the election.

[Mr Hanson]

I presume that the Liberal Democrats had also not quite realised how much money was going to be spent on tuition fees or on a range of other things. Let me put it this way: that represents one Liberal Democrat broken promise among many others.

According to House of Commons Library figures, 30,000 fewer crimes were solved this year, including 7,000 crimes of violence against the person. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) cannot have heard what I said. He is heckling from the Front Bench, and asking how much a Labour Government would spend. The Labour Government committed to a 12% reduction in police funding. The current Government, whom the Liberal Democrat Minister supports, are proposing a third year of a 20% reduction in spending on policing. The Minister and the Whip—the hon. Member for Cheadle—stood for election in their constituencies, as did other Liberal Democrats, on a pledge to put 3,000 more police officers on the beat. Will the Minister now intervene to tell me at what point during the election campaign in Taunton Deane he told people that he would preside over a cut in numbers of 345 in his own constituency’s police force?

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[Mr Hanson]

The hon. Gentleman must be—as well as many other things—not listening to what I am saying. This is the third year of a three-year budget proposal. We proposed 12% cuts; he is proposing 20% cuts. Next year and the year after, we will have a further debate—when a Labour Government are returned in two years’ time, we will have a further debate—but at the moment we are talking about a figure for the third year. I have given him a figure—a 12% reduction versus the 20% reduction. He needs to listen and to recognise that.

[Dr Huppert]

Rather than returning to that aspect of the discussion, I would like to ask the right hon. Gentleman how long he thinks the delay might be before we see crime going up—his premise is that there might be a delay—and for how many years crime will have to continue going down before he accepts that it is still going down, despite what has happened since 2010?

[Mr Hanson]

Historically, crime levels have fallen over many years. That has been continuous since 1995, throughout my time in the House of Commons. The key question for the hon. Gentleman is how we develop that in future. Policing is, in part, about catching criminals and solving crime, but it is also about community reassurance and many other areas—dealing with floods, policing football matches, crowd control and policing demonstrations. None of those is about policing crime. Part of the reason crime is falling is that the Labour Government did good work in bringing together probation, prisons and policing to look at reducing the number of serious offenders. The number of first-time offenders going into the system fell under Labour, as did the number of offences per person. There is a range of issues; I just worry about potential difficulties arising downstream.

Again, however, the hon. Gentleman does not need to listen to me. Earlier the Minister mentioned the new head of the College of Policing, so let me give him a quotation from the head of the College of Policing, from a BBC News story on 25 January, under the headline “Outgoing Hampshire Chief Constable Alex Marshall warns on cuts”:

“Hampshire’s outgoing chief constable has warned further cuts to budgets could seriously impact police services. Alex Marshall oversaw a reduction of more than 800 posts”

in his force,

“but said more major cuts would be ‘very difficult’.”

The Minister’s Government have just appointed that person to the College of Policing, so it is not just me and Conservative and Labour police and crime commissioners who are raising those concerns: it is professional police officers as well.

[Mr Hanson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding me what Chief Constable Chris Sims has said. I have mentioned the former chief constable of Hampshire; let me turn to the chief constable of Kent, who has said:

“The cuts, if they are 20%, will take us back to 2001…that’s…a significant drawback into police numbers. Clearly there is a potential impact that crime will rise.”

Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester police, said that 2012-13 was

“the most difficult financial year for policing in living memory”.

The chief constable of Lancashire has said:

“Let me be…clear. With the scale of the cuts…we are experiencing…we cannot leave the front line untouched.”

The chief constable of Dyfed Powys, Ian Arundale, said last year that we are approaching a cliff edge on policing. These are serious people. [Interruption.] The Minister again shouts, “Where’s the money coming from?” I have explained to him, very clearly, the difference between 12% and 20% cuts in policing. This Minister is supporting a 20% cut in policing, having gone into the election arguing for 3,000 more police officers. This Minister is taking 15,000 police officers off the streets of Britain, when he promised at the election to put 3,000 more police officers on to the streets of Britain. I will let the British people judge on that in due course and we will argue about those issues in due course. [Interruption.]

If the Minister wants to have a discussion about Eastleigh, I can tell him that John O’Farrell, the Labour candidate, will certainly be able to campaign strongly, given the 295 police officers lost because of the votes of Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members today. I look forward to the Labour campaign in Eastleigh focusing on crime and punishment. I also look forward to reminding the people of Eastleigh that the Liberal Democrats proposed 3,000 more police officers, along with no rise in tuition fees and various other issues that they have broken their promises on. [Interruption.] The Minister appears to have been injected with something over the last couple of hours, because he is really quite frisky. He seemed to be hyper throughout his contribution; now that he has sat down, he still seems to be hyper. I do not know who will win the by-election in Eastleigh; the people of Eastleigh will choose their next Member of Parliament. The key question they need to ask is: who is going to stand up against the coalition Government? I suspect that neither a Liberal Democrat nor a Conservative MP will do that. Let the people of Eastleigh make that judgment.

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

[Mr Hanson]

I think the hon. Gentleman has had his fair share. I always like to give way to Members, but if he will allow me, I will try to finish and allow other Members to have their say.

There is much we can talk about, but one thing is clear. This settlement will damage policing yet further. It will damage the ability of police officers across the country to serve their communities. It is the wrong settlement—it is the third year of a very damaging settlement. I want to stand up for policing and for our communities and to fight and reduce crime. I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends to reject this tawdry settlement from the Government.

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[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Because of his profession, he knows about these issues. I am sure he is an assiduous Member who works tirelessly on behalf of his constituents. One of the public’s first concerns is whether they can see their local police officer—the bobby on the beat—walking around, and whether they can go to the local police station and report crimes and feel safe as a result. Not all of us can have a Dr Who-type TARDIS—I certainly do not—but it is important that we give that visibility in respect of both the physical building and police officers.

Where responsibility for counter-terrorism will lie is not yet settled. The Government are ring-fencing its £563 million budget, and I support that, but there is to be a new landscape of policing, and a decision needs to be made soon as to whether it will stay with the Metropolitan police or move to the National Crime Agency. My distinguished colleague from the Home Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), will correct me if I am wrong, but I think we recommended in one of our reports that it should go to the National Crime Agency, as counter-terrorism is a national issue.

[Dr Huppert]

indicated assent.

[Keith Vaz]

Another Select Committee member, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) is also present, and he is nodding in agreement. We suggested that in part because we were worried the NCA might not have enough to do, which is, indeed, the case at present. It has very few staff and it is not yet established to the satisfaction of the Government and the Select Committee. We need to have a decision on this matter soon, and we were promised a decision after the Olympics. I do not know whether the Minister wants to answer that question now, but if not, I am happy to wait until the winding-up speeches.

I am also concerned about the huge amount of money currently being spent on historical investigations. The Select Committee has asked witnesses about that on many occasions. At present we have Operations Alice, Elveden, Weeting. Tuleta, Pallial, Yewtree and Herne. We heard only yesterday from the Home Secretary that Herne—which has been under way for the past year, with a number of police officers involved, and at a cost to the taxpayer of £1.2 million—will now be taken over by the chief constable of Derbyshire. That operation deals with important issues involving undercover agents and the recent public revelations, and a lot of money is being spent on these matters. I calculate that £44.8 million is currently being spent on the police investigating other police officers who have failed to come up to scratch. A lot of money is going to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, too, to deal with past errors by certain police forces, such as at Hillsborough. In discussing the reduction of the grant to local police and crime and commissioners, we need to consider all the money currently being spent on all these operations.

The hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds is the spokesman on good procurement in this House, and we have had many discussions about the matter. I welcome the decision of the deputy mayor of London, Stephen Greenhalgh, to take a careful look at how the Metropolitan police have spent their procurement budget. He took evidence from Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe on the issue. When we commission companies to act if the public sector cannot act, we must choose only companies with a good track record. Only yesterday it was announced that G4S was going to have to hand back to the taxpayer about £70 million. We should take into account the expenditure from the police budget that goes on companies such as G4S. The Select Committee was very clear that, as a result of the big mistakes G4S made, it ought to have handed back all its management fee of £57 million plus all the other money it ought to have spent. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North became an internet hit with his famous “humiliating shambles” soundbite. He will always be remembered for uttering those words on the Select Committee—and for many other words uttered, too, of course—because it was, indeed, a humiliating shambles. As the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds has said, we ought to be very careful about dispensing public money to private companies that do not come up to scratch.

Finally, I want to say a few words about the need to carry people with us. The Minister, who has responsibility for security matters, is an avuncular type who seeks consensus. We will see that when he comes to the Dispatch Box. I will not say he is the most courteous of the Home Office Ministers as the others might get upset if I were to do so, but he does not pick a fight. The current Home Office policy is, in effect, picking a fight with the people who have to implement the changes, however. Now is not the best time to be cutting police officers’ pensions, forcing them out under rule A19 and cutting their pay retrospectively—although I perfectly understand why we might need to make changes for new recruits.

I remember my last conversation with Paul McKeever on this subject. He passionately supported treating police officers with the respect, courtesy and dignity they deserve. My only real row with the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), was about police pay. He was quite robust with me when he asked me not to go on a demonstration under the last Labour Government in support of the police who were having their pay cut. I said to him then—and I say to the Home Secretary and Home Office Ministers now—that we must carry the work force with us. If we say we have the best police service in the world, the only way to express our admiration for what the police have done is to treat them with proper respect—to have a dialogue with them, to stop cutting their pay and conditions, to speak to them because they know best day in, day out. As we have seen recently in Manchester and other parts of the country, they lay down their lives for us. They go out in the morning and they do not know whether they are coming back at night, unlike all of us in this Chamber today. If we do not carry them with us, the world-class brand reputation that we currently have will be damaged for ever.

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[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the Select Committee Chair, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), and I agree with the vast majority of what he said, as is so often the case.

I want to begin by joining many other Members in paying tribute to Paul McKeever. He was an impressive man and it was a great pleasure to work with him. He had a real sense of energy and great commitment to his cause. He was a great man, and it was a huge shock when I heard he had passed away. I look forward to working with his replacement, Steve Williams, and I hope he will bring similar energy to the task and articulate the police officers’ case for a long time. I also want to pay tribute to all the other police officers and the police staff, who do such a great job.

The report is detailed, and anyone who wants to know how complex Government funding formulae can be should take a look at it. There are some charming delights, including hyper-accurate figures that do not necessarily equate with reality—but that is how the formula works.

The key issue is the total sum and how it is allocated. The Minister of State, Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), outlined well that the sums are what was agreed in 2010. I share his pleasure at the fact that the cuts that have had to be made since in other areas of public expenditure have not been passed on to the police. We would, of course, like to spend more on policing. As with so many areas of the public sector, it would be great if there was more money to spend on everything, so this is a very easy thing to say. Would I like more money in Cambridgeshire? Yes, please.

The right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) read out a number of quotes from chief constables saying that they would have more money—that is a shock! I would be concerned about any chief constable’s future if they were to say publicly, “I don’t want any more money. Frankly, I can’t think of any way I could possibly spend that extra cash.” We would all like to see more money in this area, but we know that we are in straitened times. We know that there was no money left when this Government took office and that of every £4 being spent £1 was being borrowed—that simply could not continue.

The right hon. Gentleman argued in favour of 12% cuts as opposed to 20% cuts. It is worth highlighting the fact that those figures apply to the amount of money that goes from Government to the police and do not take account of the amount generated locally, so the actual effects are rather smaller than that. Disappointingly, what he did not do was to answer my repeated question about where he would get the money from. If I had an extra spare billion quid, I, too, would love to spend it on a range of things. We could have a fascinating debate about how to spend it. He simply said that he was going to spend it without saying where he was going to take it from, and that is a cheap thing that should not be done by an Opposition.

I used to be leader of the opposition on Cambridgeshire county council. I insisted that we put together a costed budget and take it through the same scrutiny process as the administration’s budget, and Councillor Kilian Bourke has done that incredibly well this year. It would be fantastic if the Opposition in this place were to provide fully costed proposals and subject them to the same scrutiny as the Government’s proposals, so that one could see where they are just coming up with fanciful sums. I was disappointed not to hear that answer from the right hon. Gentleman.

We also have to deal with an issue about the future. It is fantastic that crime has fallen almost everywhere in the country, and everyone in this House should celebrate that, but it is easy to sound the alarm and to say, “It is a bit worrying. In the future it might go up.” It might do, because nobody knows exactly what will happen, but if someone does not put some sort of time scale on how long they think this will take—this was the point of my question to the right hon. Gentleman—they can keep saying that for ever. They can keep worrying people for ever that things might get bad. If they want to make a genuine prediction, they need to have some sense of when they would accept that they have not seen the level of crime going up.

Times are tight, so we have to prioritise spending on policies that reduce crime and achieve the goals of the police. The key is how we spend the money we do have. I am pleased that we are cutting spending on a list of things that the right hon. Gentleman was concerned about that. I am pleased that money is being saved by not having CCTV cameras across the entire country, with so little regulation. I am delighted that we are spending money on an excellent commissioner on surveillance cameras, who will make sure that CCTV is used only where it is useful and genuinely proportionate. I am extremely pleased that we are cutting the money that was spent storing the DNA of innocent people—in some cases, people who had never been even accused of any crime. I am very pleased that we are saving money in respect of internal exile without trial and on identity cards. I wish that we had saved more of the money that went on identity cards and that it had not all been blown.

I would still like money to be saved in other areas. I am very concerned about the increasing spread of Tasers. I am in favour of Tasers as a replacement for firearms—as a step downwards. However, if we believe in policing by consent, having more and more non-firearms officers with Tasers risks escalation. There are huge concerns about the use of Tasers, which, as hon. Members will know, have been misused in a number of cases.

This Government have made proposals in their draft Communications Data Bill and plan to spend £1.8 billion on them. They have already spent £400 million and the previous Government spent a huge sum on all their attempts to have the intercept modernisation programme—billions of pounds that could have been spent on more useful projects. I hope that no party in this place will spend money willy-nilly, without looking at how it is being spent and what the benefits might be.

In order to have better prioritised spending, we could do a lot about transparency. We need to be careful that the move to police and crime commissioners does not reduce that transparency. We could also learn a lot more, and I am pleased that the College of Policing is being established. The Liberal Democrats have a policy to go slightly further and have an institute for policing excellence, which would be linked with universities, to try to find out the best things that we could do. I hope that we will see a strong link between the College of Policing and universities, in order to find out what is happening, because we have many expert researchers. For example, Professor Larry Sherman, at the institute of criminology in Cambridge, is a world expert on how to police effectively and efficiently to achieve the goals that we want. Such an approach would allow us to find out how police time is spent and make sure that it is actually used effectively and efficiently. I am in favour of visible policing, but that is not measured by how many police officers are on the books; it is also about how much time those officers can actually spend out on the streets, rather than having to do all the bureaucratic work they have been doing when I have been to visit them over the past few years. They spend far too much time struggling with IT systems and with paperwork, whereas we would like them to be out on the streets delivering visible policing, just as they would.

We could make improvements in a number of other areas. I still believe that this country’s drugs policy does not make the best use of police time. It sucks up vast amounts of police time for very little benefit. We spend more than any other country in Europe but the incidence of drug use is among the highest. There are better alternatives, such as the Portuguese model. Earlier this week, I was talking to the chief superintendent in Brighton, Graham Bartlett, at the launch of “Breaking the Taboo”, a film by Sundog Pictures, which I recommend right hon. and hon. Members have a look at. He is doing some extremely good work in Brighton, reducing crime by having a far more enlightened, semi-Portuguese approach, and I recommend that to many.

There is also a lot to say about the police’s role, not just in detecting crime, but in stepping in much earlier. I have spoken in this place before about a police officer who was in my patch when I was a county councillor. He was then PC Nick Percival, but he has been promoted significantly since. He had a very effective approach, which he developed, whereby he used e-mail to chat to people and tell them where he was. People got the visible policing by getting a weekly e-mail from him saying where he had been and what he had been up to. He also focused on working with young people, who were often bored during the holidays, and set up a brilliant scheme of giving vouchers during the holidays to children who were seen by a police officer or a police community support officer playing well. Whichever class got the most vouchers got a £15 voucher for the local shops. The effect in the area was that kids were playing on the grass hoping a police officer would see them. That made for a better relationship between young people and the police, and it reduced the amount of crime. In his first year on that beat, PC Percival reduced the amount of crime and antisocial behaviour by 50%. He did not detect very much and he did not arrest many people, but he halved the crime rate. That is the sort of thing we want to see.

Far more can be done about information sharing with other agencies: We could get non-confidential information shared between hospitals and the police, a matter that the Select Committee on Home Affairs has examined before. We could provide public access to local crime statistics, so that local knowledge can be used. We could get neighbourhood watches more involved—more plugged in—and we could share some of the information with universities.

We could also share information and co-operate on a broader scale, too. I am very concerned about some of the Home Secretary’s proposals on opting out of co-operation arrangements with the European Union. On that, I do share the concerns of the right hon. Member for Delyn. I do not always agree with the Association of Chief Police Officers, but it has said that opting out of those arrangements would lead to

“fewer extraditions, longer delays, higher costs, more offenders evading justice and increased risk to public safety.”

I hope that the Home Office will reflect very carefully on that advice.

Good policing and policing by consent is not always just about the total amount of money—we should not always just throw more money at a problem. For example, stop and search was a huge issue under Labour. From 2008, an officer in the west midlands was 28 times more likely to stop and search a black person than they were to stop and search a white person, and there are similar figures for Greater Manchester and the Met. An officer was 10 times as likely to stop Asian Britons as they were to stop a white person. That was a big project. It was a bad project. It put a lot people off and it created a lot of hostility, and it was expensive. The level of stop and search under terrorism legislation fell by 90% between 2010 and 2011 under changes that this Government made. We restricted it, and that saved money and improved relationships. We do not want to do things that cost the police time and money, and turn young people against the police.

One key measure is that crime is down, and I hope that that will continue for many years to come. I hope that the money will be spent effectively. There was some discussion earlier about the Liberal Democrat manifesto, and I am delighted that so many hon. Members have read it. I only wish more of them adopted more of it. Its section on crime started off by stating one simple aim:

“We will focus on what works to cut crime.”

That is what we said then and that is what we will do now.

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[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

Before I begin my contribution to this important debate, I pay tribute to a WPC Fiona Bone and WPC Nicola Hughes, both of whom were officers in the Greater Manchester police force, which is my local police force. They went to attend a routine burglary call at short notice, and they were both shot. It is a perfect example of what my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) said about police officers who, perhaps unlike any other professionals, do not know what they are going to face when they leave home. We therefore owe them a great duty of responsibility to ensure that their best interests are looked after.

The Minister says that crime is falling. We agree: it is falling at this moment in time. If I understood him correctly, he is, in effect, trying to take credit for that, but crime began to fall just before 1997, when a Labour Government came to office. When we did so, the morale of the police force was at an all-time low. The Labour policy of increasing the number of front-line police officers; introducing thousands of bobbies on the beat, police community support officers and neighbourhood policing units; the record investment in rehabilitation centres for people addicted to drugs and alcohol; the fact that we funded various youth services and increased the number of drug rehabilitation centres; the policies of diverting young people from the criminal justice system: collectively, all those things led to a significant fall in crime. While crime was falling, no Opposition politician at the time, whether Liberal Democrat or Conservative, who appeared on television or radio or in the print media, ever acknowledged that crime was going down. In fact, every time they appeared on radio and television when Labour was in power, they argued that crime was rising. I am glad that finally that mindset has changed and that they recognise the true state of affairs.

We have been told that a 20% cut in the police budget will save money and decrease the budget deficit. However, figures show that that is not working. The deficit is £7 billion higher than it was in the same period in the previous financial year, which shows that austerity measures, which have been criticised by the International Monetary Fund, a conservative institute, are not working. Let me help the Minister: we should make cuts if, in the long run, we save money—to use a modern phrase, we should make smart cuts. What often prevents people from committing crime is the sight of a police officer, and what reassures people is the sight of a police officer. Many Members while knocking on doors in their constituency have heard their constituents say that they want to see more visible policing, as they are reassured when they do so.

Government cuts have already led to cuts in the number of police officers. For example, in the north-west region, in March 2010, police numbers were 19,649. In September 2012, they were 17,708, with a reduction of 1,986 police officers. Those cuts will continue for the next year, so by 2015 there will be 2,951 fewer police officers. I am sorry, but no one can convince me that that will not have an impact on policing and crime.

[Dr Huppert]

May I put to the hon. Lady a question that I put to the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson)? Let us say that next year crime is still coming down, and the year after that, it is still coming down. At which point will she accept that crime is, in fact, continuing to come down and looks like it will keep going for a while?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Let us see what happens in the next few years, because many austerity measures are under way. The cuts have only just begun to hit, and, in the next few years, they will really hit people. Everyone knows that because of economic difficulties certain crimes will rise, including lesser crimes such as breaking into vehicles, stealing small items and selling them for quick money.

Although crime is falling, fewer crimes are being resolved. This aspect has not been touched on. In the north-west, at least 2,296 fewer offences of violence against the person have been solved. Previously, a much higher number of such offences were resolved. In the coming years, once the cuts in police numbers are implemented and the full impact is felt, a rising number of crimes will be left unresolved.

The Minister boasted that recruitment was not a problem and that the Government were doing everything they could to encourage recruitment and create a better police force, but that is not the impression that I get from police officers on the front line. Let me tell the House about Police Constable Turnbull, who came to see me in my constituency office. He said that he had joined the police force many years ago, full of hope and with a high level of dedication to duty. I know that he will continue in that way, but he said that morale in the force, especially among younger police officers, was at an all-time low. Officers are unhappy with all the cuts that are taking place.

In particular, the constable talked about the police pension, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East referred. New recruits know the terms and conditions on which they are coming in, and can decide whether to join the police force on that basis, but to take away people’s pension rights retrospectively, when they have spent 10, 15 or 20 years contributing towards their pension, is plainly unfair and will not help police morale. Morale affects performance—if people are happy, they perform better; if they are demoralised, their performance may be affected. I hope that will not happen, because we have an incredibly good police force, one of the best in the world. Sometimes we do not give the police enough credit for all the good work that they do.

I conclude by quoting two senior police officers. Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester, said that 2012-13 was

“the most difficult financial year for policing in living memory”.

Things will only get worse, not better, so imagine what it will be like next year and the year after. Steve Finnigan, chief constable of Lancashire constabulary, has already been quoted, but it is worth reminding Ministers of what he said. As the Association of Chief Police Officers lead on police performance management, he was asked whether he would be reducing front-line policing in order to meet the Government’s budget cuts. He replied, “I absolutely am.” He has also said:

“Let me be really clear. With the scale of the cuts that we are experiencing . . .we can do an awful lot of work around the back office . . .but we cannot leave the front line untouched.”

Finally, I ask the Minister to consider this. Labour’s plan for cuts of 12% over the Parliament is a proportionate response to deal with the deficit. This is confirmed by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, who said that this, as well as the work of the previous Government, would deliver front-line services without a great deal of impact on them. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), I ask the Government to re-examine their proposed course of action and to consider the Labour proposal.