Government Reductions in Policing

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I shall tell the hon. Gentleman what front-line police officers are saying to me. When I visited the Nottinghamshire police force, I saw a police officer who said to me proudly that he had been out and had made an arrest that morning and that he had had to come back and spend several hours filling in forms when, to use his words, what he wanted to do was to get back out on the streets again.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary is continuing the work started by the previous Government on bureaucracy, but this Government have a more ambitious plan to change the landscape of policing. Does she not accept that the abolition of bodies such as the National Policing Improvement Agency will result in a greater cost to local police authorities and the new commissioners? They will now have to pay for things, such as the databases, that they used to get for free.

[Mrs May]

Yes, we are getting rid of the NPIA and we are considering a number of the functions that it carries out as well as where they should best and most appropriately sit and we will make an announcement in due course. Of course, the overall cost to the public purse of such things is not likely to change much because the functions undertaken by the NPIA have been funded by the public purse. But there will be a question over the extent to which some of those functions are appropriately carried on at the centre or whether they are carried out elsewhere, potentially more efficiently and with an improved service as a result of moving them elsewhere.

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[Mrs May]

The other major item that HMIC did not look at was pay. In an organisation like the police, where £11 billion goes on pay, there is no question but that pay restraint and pay reform must form part of the package. That is why we believe, subject to any recommendations from the Police Negotiating Board, that there should be a two-year pay freeze in policing, just as there has been across the whole of the public sector. This would add at least another £350 million of savings to those calculated by HMIC.

All these savings, together with those identified by HMIC, give us £2.2 billion of savings, just over the £2.1 billion reduction in central Government grant that must be made. And even that ignores the contribution from the local precept.

[Keith Vaz]

I am grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way a second time. The permanent secretary in her Department is before the Select Committee tomorrow and we will be asking her about procurement. I welcome what the right hon. Lady has said so far about centralising procurement, but is it not better for the Home Office to make recommendations on procurement across the 43 forces, rather than still to leave it to the forces to work out collaborations between themselves?

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[Tom Brake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point, and I apologise for pre-empting it. However, I said at the beginning of my speech that the circumstances that we are in have required all parties to reappraise any prior commitments in their manifestos. Quite simply, as the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury said, there is no money.

I turn back to the previous Government’s record. Jan Berry, as the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) mentioned, said about police bureaucracy:

“I would estimate one-third of effort is either over-engineered, duplicated or adds no additional value.”

She was the person whom the previous Government chose to examine bureaucracy, and that was her assessment of police effort.

[Keith Vaz]

Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that it would have been sensible if Jan Berry had been asked to continue the work that she started? She produced an excellent report, but I understand that her work has now been transferred to the chief constable of the West Midlands, a serving chief constable. Surely it would have been better if Jan Berry had been allowed to monitor the results of her recommendations.

[Tom Brake]

I thank the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. I am absolutely certain that the work that Jan Berry has already done will inform what the chief constable and the Government are doing to address bureaucracy.

A previous Labour Home Secretary, when he was asked in April 2010 whether he could guarantee that police numbers would not fall, said that he could not. The shadow Chancellor is on record as saying that under his plans,

“you will lose some non-uniformed back office staff”.

It is interesting that the shadow Home Secretary and the shadow Chancellor cannot even agree among themselves what their position on the Winsor review is. The former has attacked the Government for initiating the review, but the latter has said that overtime and shift work savings are something that

“any sensible government would look at”.

I suggest that they need to get their house in order first.

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey), who spoke about not only his constituency’s interest in the debate, but that of his family. He can report back to his brother that he was able to raise those concerns in such a debate.

It is commendable that both the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary have sat through the entire debate, the feature of which is that Members on both sides have talked about not just the headline figures, but policing in their constituencies. On balance, Opposition Members have said that the cuts are going to affect policing negatively, and Government Members have said that the cuts are required to some extent because they can make the police more accountable, transparent and efficient.

In four weeks’ time, the right hon. Lady will celebrate her year in office as the first Conservative Home Secretary in 13 years. She has got used to the fact that when she enters the Chamber for policing debates, she does not get a standing ovation, but importantly we have heard what the Government propose to do and what the Opposition have said they would do in similar circumstances.

The Home Affairs Committee produced a report on police finances, and it was unanimous. The hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) is our resident expert on policing matters along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael), and the Committee concluded that there would be significantly fewer police service staff once the proposals were implemented. That is certainly backed up by all the other stakeholder organisations—be they ACPO, the Police Federation or other organisations that have commented on the matter. The key test for the Government is whether having fewer staff will make the police force more efficient.

I do not deny any incoming Government the right to put forward proposals to the British people and a scheme that they say will provide a better service for less money, but it will be some time before we find out what those key indicators are. As several Members have pointed out, crime is at a record low, and the question is, once the proposals are implemented, whether crime will rise. That is the challenge for this Government.

We also know that the Government’s proposals have still not been completed. There is an ambitious target not just on police finances, but on the new landscape of policing, and the election of police commissioners will have an impact on how policing operates—everyone accepts that it will. The new landscape will result in the abolition of the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the National Policing Improvement Agency, and the Home Affairs Committee is just about to undertake an inquiry into the likely new landscape.

I think that we will have to return to the subject once the Government have completed their template. As I have said, it is absolutely the right of an incoming Government to say that they propose to use taxpayers’ money in a way that will make the service more efficient, but my concern is that the template is not complete and, to some extent, the proposed cuts—or reductions, if we like to use that word—are a work in progress. We will not know the full effects until the rest of the landscape has been completed.

What the Government are doing on procurement and on the reduction in bureaucracy is excellent. The Home Secretary says that she has taken on board Jan Berry’s recommendations and appointed Chris Sims to take the matter forward, and that is a continuation of what the previous Government did. I see the previous Policing Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), is present, and whenever he got to the Dispatch Box when Labour was in government, he talked about cutting red tape. We on the Select Committee hope to look at Jan Berry’s recommendations to see whether they have been implemented and whether red tape has been cut.

Tomorrow, as the Home Secretary knows, we have the new permanent secretary at the Home Office before the Committee. It is of course important to save money on procurement and I would like to have seen more done under the previous Government to bring procurement under much greater central control. The right hon. Lady talked about local decision making, but I understand that vehicles are now the subject of central planning, so the Home Office is saying, “You can buy these vehicles, because this is the best possible deal that we have been able to make.” If that can be done with vehicles, why not mobile phones or all other aspects of procurement? Of course we would like to see local police forces collaborate—the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood reminded me that a conference on procurement is coming up in the near future, co-sponsored by Essex and Kent police authorities—and we want local decision making, but I cannot understand why the Home Office does not produce a procurement catalogue that has the best possible prices available and encourage all local police forces to buy from it. That is something that we will have to look forward to in future.

My final point, which my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) made better than anyone else, is that we need to stop consulting only chief constables about what is happening. The people who really matter are the public. In his recent speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice rejected the idea of a royal commission on policing, citing Harold Wilson’s comment that royal commissions take minutes to set up but years to report. We do not need to wait years to hear about the expectations of the public, who must be consulted.

The Select Committee intends to consult the public in an online poll on the five key things that they want police officers and the police force to do. Once we have those conclusions, I hope that they will feed into the Government’s thinking on how the new landscape operates. Without consulting the public on their expectations, there is no point in having this debate. The chief constables have a vested interest—they want to protect their budgets. Police authorities want things to stay as they are, and everyone else involved has, to some extent, the same interest. However, it is the public to whom we are accountable on policing, and therefore, in the end, it is the public to whom we have to listen.