Lord Vaux of Harrowden
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(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
The noble Baroness will be aware that a number of ongoing reviews on matters such as dismissals are due to conclude very shortly. She makes some very good points about victims, and we are committed to delivering justice for victims and putting some of the vile offenders referred to behind bars for longer, but there is obviously still a long way to go. We have previously discussed at the Dispatch Box some of the factors the noble Baroness mentioned and, while I will not go into them in detail again, I note that programmes such as Operation Soteria are delivering meaningful results.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
The noble Lord was quite right in saying that I was going to mention fraud. The Statement says that crime is falling, excluding fraud. Fraud remains a substantial growth industry and now accounts for over 40% of all crime against the individual. The noble Lord agreed last week that the current level of law enforcement resources aimed at it is insufficient. He skilfully shot my fox earlier by referring to the national fraud strategy that is to be issued this week, which is an improvement on “imminently” and “shortly”. How many of these 20,591 officers who have been recruited have specialist fraud skills?
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
The noble Lord asks a question which I cannot answer at the moment. I will endeavour to find out those statistics and I would hope that some of those questions about resourcing will be dealt with on publication of the strategy this week. As regards the overall uplift, as I said earlier, 91% of the new intake, as it were, are involved in frontline policing.