Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert]

First, I should say that what the hon. Gentleman mentioned at the outset shows that I need a better pair of glasses. As to his question, he always mentions the number of officers in back-office positions—the fact that there are thousands of them will, I think, surprise the House—but he never mentions the considerable number in middle-office positions, are not on the front line. I repeat that well over 20,000 officers are not on the front line, with 16,000 of them in the middle office. Savings can be driven while protecting front-line services—something that Opposition Members neither understand nor accept.

[Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

8. What steps she is taking to reduce the burden of health and safety regulation on police officers.

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)]

We have worked with the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Health and Safety Executive to publish new guidance, in order to support police officers to do the right thing by taking a common-sense approach to health and safety rules.

[Mark Lancaster]

As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), some jobs are dangerous, and being a police officer is certainly one of them. As a bomb disposal officer, I have some empathy with a police officer who told me recently that by the time he has filled out the mountain of paperwork required for health and safety, all he has done is delay the point at which he gets on the street to do his dangerous job. Although I commend the Government on tackling this area, can we not do a bit more?

[Nick Herbert]

Working with police forces, we continue to attack bureaucracy. I pay tribute to the work of the chief constable of the West Midlands, Chris Sims, who drives these efforts by leading our reducing bureaucracy programme board. We have identified that 2.5 million police hours could be saved through improvements to form filling and other means of reducing bureaucracy. In addition to those substantial savings, we have already announced savings in relation to reducing the burden of the stop-and-account form, and scrapping the stop form, saving another 800,000 police hours a year.