Public Disorder

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. HMIC has said that those savings are available. It did not take into account the pay freeze for police officers, the increased pension contributions or some of the extra work that we have done to cut paperwork. That is why I feel so confident in saying that on average 6% cash reductions over four years should lead to no reduction in visible policing.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

We owe a debt of gratitude to our police services this week, but crisis policing is not an alternative to embedded, sustained, community policing. So I was disappointed when visiting damage in my constituency to talk to safer neighbourhood sergeants who are losing their jobs today and being made to reapply for them, as part of 300 safer neighbourhood job losses in London alone. The Prime Minister says that when circumstances change we must change. He must now change his policy of damaging the leadership of London’s safer neighbourhood police service.

[The Prime Minister]

As I said, what we saw in London over the past few days, where we have 32,000 officers in the Met, was a greater deployment of more of those officers on to the street. Frankly, it was not good enough that there were only 3,000 deployed when this started. It shows how much can be done, getting up to 16,000 deployed, with help from outside. Those numbers will be available at all times in the future, even with the reductions that we are making in budgets.