Oral Answers to Questions

Luciana Berger Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I strongly agree that we must introduce measures to tackle electoral fraud. As my hon. Friend may know, we have announced that we will legislate to speed up the introduction of individual electoral registration to before the next general election, in 2014. Under that new scheme each person will have to register individually, whereas the current system is registration by household, and they will be asked to provide personal identifiers, including their national insurance number, to enable registration officers to verify the identity of a person before they are added to the register. That should tackle fraudulent or inaccurate register entries, which my hon. Friend rightly highlights.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab /Co-op)]

T4. Before the election the Deputy Prime Minister said that providing more police was “the only way to create safer streets.” Now the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice says that there is no link between crime and police numbers. Which is it?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

As I explained in answer to an earlier question, of course we want the police officers who are available to be out on the streets as much as possible. It is true that this is partly a question of resources—[Interruption.] Nothing is possible when there is no money. It was the outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury who said, “There’s no money left.” Those were not our words; they were his words.

We cannot provide for our schools, hospitals and police forces unless we have money. Because of the mistakes made by the hon. Lady’s party, we are pouring £120 million down the drain every single day simply to pay off the interest on her party’s debts. That is the problem that we face. At the same time, we need to reform policing to ensure that police officers can spend as much time as possible out on the beat rather than behind their desks.