Police Grant Report

Philip Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

rose—

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

rose—

[Nick Herbert]

I give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) and then to my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies).

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Herbert]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. Of course there are greater opportunities for the 43 forces to share services and to procure collectively. I will say more about that later, if she will forgive me.

I promised, perhaps unwisely, to give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley.

[Philip Davies]

I agree with everything that the Minister has said so far: nothing that he is announcing today will in itself cause a problem to the police. My concern is not what he is saying but things said by other Ministers that will drive up pressures on the police. For example, the Secretary of State for Justice has decided not to send persistent offenders to prison but to let them out into the community, and to stop the police using CCTV and DNA to their full capacity. Does my right hon. Friend accept that these things are putting upward pressures on the police that are not consistent with what he is announcing?

[Nick Herbert]

I knew that it was a mistake to give way to my hon. Friend. He must not inadvertently misrepresent what my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary said about the use of imprisonment. We have said that we must do more to reduce reoffending. Reoffending rates, particularly in relation to short-term prison sentences, are far too high. We must break the cycle of crime. That means doing far more, innovatively, to ensure that offenders can be supervised and supported using “payment by results” models. I am sure that when my hon. Friend investigates that more closely, he will welcome the radicalism in what we are saying.

The Government will play their part in helping to protect the front line by reducing the burden of bureaucracy on forces, which several of my hon. Friends have mentioned. The Home Secretary has already announced that we will scrap the central targets, overt and back-door, that have bedevilled policing, and we are reviewing the nature of force inspection with the same aim. Labour’s 10-point policing pledge will go. The previous Government spent £6 million of taxpayers’ money on promoting that pledge, including on totally misleading advertisements that claimed that 80% of police time would be spent on the beat—adverts that were censured by the Advertising Standards Authority. We know what that pledge was about—propaganda and spin. That discredited Government have gone, and so has their approach.

In place of the centralised, bureaucratic accountability of the past decade, which undermined professionalism and added cost, we will introduce local democratic accountability. The introduction of directly elected individuals in 2012, together with a new focus on outcomes rather than processes, will not only strengthen the links between the police and public but unshackle police forces from Whitehall’s tick-box tyranny. We want the police to be crime fighters, not form writers. We want forces to work for local people, not for Whitehall officials or Westminster politicians.