Police Funding

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

The Home Affairs Committee has already heard from Chief Constable Sims of West Midlands police. It organised a seminar in Cannock Chase, which is not a million miles from my hon. Friend’s constituency, where those concerns were raised. The problem is that individual police forces are currently unable to tell us precisely what effect the cuts will have locally. We will have to wait for the publication of the settlement, which we anticipate in early December. When the Minister speaks, I am sure he will tell us precisely when the provisional police settlements will be announced and placed before the House. He is smiling, so perhaps he will announce the figures today and we can question him on them. I am sure that we will hear soon. Until we do, we will not know precisely what is happening.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

Apart from the cuts, which will reduce the overall number of police, I understand that the CSR will mean a freeze on recruitment, the likely application of regulation A19, which will get rid of the more experienced officers, and a freeze on pay. Do they sound like the conditions for a highly motivated, well performing police force?

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend asks almost a rhetorical question to which the answer must be, “No—people will not be motivated if those cuts take place,” but he is right to raise those concerns. That is why this debate is important. The Home Affairs Committee is of course aware of the deep concern in the west midlands, which is demonstrated by the number of west midlands MPs in the Chamber this afternoon.

A number of police forces have already issued statements on how the CSR will affect them. In a statement on 22 November, the chief constable of Greater Manchester police and the treasurer of the Greater Manchester Police Authority said:

“Final spending details are not expected until the end of November or early December but if the headline reductions in spending totals for the Police Service are ultimately reflected in GMP’s Formula Grant and Specific Grants, the Force and Police Authority will need to find savings of £134m over the four year period…Savings of £52m will need to be found in 2011/12.”

They estimate in their report that GMP will lose approximately 2,950 posts from a total of 12,000 over the four-year period, and BBC News has reported that 1,387 officers and 1,557 civilian posts could go in Greater Manchester.

Northumbria police also issued a statement, saying that the likely impact of the cuts would be the loss of 450 members of the civilian staff out of a total of 2,500. As my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) and for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) said, it looks as though 2,000 jobs will be lost in the West Midlands police force, including 1,050 police officers over the four-year period.

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[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

It is my turn to follow the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills)—the sequence is normally the other way around—and I am very pleased to do so.

I recognise that the Minister has a tough job on his hands. Although I do not agree with a number of his proposals, I accept that his instincts are to try to make the police more efficient and to achieve a better level of performance with the resources he has. His difficulty is that the Home Office did rather badly out of the recent settlement. It is evident that, while other Cabinet Ministers went to bat for their Departments and secured good deals, the Home Secretary did not achieve quite as much. We must now live with the consequences of that. I genuinely and sincerely fear that crime will rise and that we will have terrible difficulties in some of our major cities in trying to combat the particular types of crime that we have been able to bear down on so successfully in recent years.

I do not oppose the Minister’s ambitions to achieve efficiencies and use more modern methods. In fact, I agree that change is needed. I support the better use of IT and better procurement, and I believe there is a clear argument for the police shift system to be changed, which would release more officers. We argue about the statistics—the Minister is very keen to gloat about the 11% figure—but the reality is that the police shift system is part of the problem, and I am in favour of changing that.

I welcome civilianisation where it frees police to do policing jobs. However, such an approach means there can be no benefit from the mass sacking of civilians. That is the conundrum. If civilianisation is a good process because it frees police officers to carry out policing functions, it logically follows that the mass sacking of civilians will mean that police officers are taken off front-line functions and sent back to doing civilian tasks. The Minister will have to address that problem. It is likely—my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) made this point—that the initial response of police chiefs will be to sack civilian staff, which will impact on front-line policing. As they struggle to continue to make the budget match up, they will be forced to consider how to sack police officers. The easiest way to do that will be to apply regulation A19, which will mean that some of our more experienced and senior officers will have to go. We will have the double effect of losing civilian staff while officers are taken off the street to do their work and, simultaneously, losing senior and experienced officers.

As I said to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), it seems that that will happen when there is also a freeze on recruitment and a freeze on pay. Those are not the conditions in which we can expect to get the best out of people, or motivate them to embrace change and improve performance; they are the conditions most likely to produce exactly the opposite effect.

I am particularly worried about the west midlands, because our gearing ratio means that we are highly dependent on grant. Earlier today, we met the Minister to discuss that very subject. If we experience a uniform cut in grant without any changes to the damping regime, we will lose out unfairly as a result of an exercise that means we must forgo money and resources, which will be transferred to other police areas. We will have to forgo those resources so that the council tax precept can be kept down elsewhere in the country.

That is a very good argument for what the Treasury want to achieve, and for what the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government might want to achieve. However, it is not an argument that someone who is worried about law and order and police resources should be too willing to embrace. Even at this stage, the Minister should consider whether he still has time to go back to his friends in the Treasury, explain the dilemma and see whether they can help him out of the hole that has been dug for him.

Project Paragon in the west midlands has shown that successful efficiency and reorganisation measures can be taken. However, such measures take time to deliver. Project Paragon cannot be turned on and off like a tap. If such things are to be done successfully, they need a long lead-in time. It takes a long time to deliver efficiencies. One of the by-products of such a change is that crime may rise during the reorganisation period, and there is some evidence in the west midlands to show that that is happening. I see that the Minister is nodding, because I think he also accepts that that is the case.

My concern about these very substantial front-loaded cuts is that such a reorganisation will occur far too fast in forces all over the country, at the very time when we are gearing up for major events, such as the Olympics. That is not something that we should be remotely complacent about. It screams out for re-examination, because the obvious dangers are right in front of us. We still have time to look into this issue, but if we delay too long, things will be upon us and our forces will be in chaos at the very time when demand for policing is at its highest.

I agree with the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. My view is simple: law and order always has to be our No. 1 priority. I genuinely feel that the Government have got the balance wrong. I am delighted that they have selected areas of other budgets that they feel should be protected, but there are times when I would like to hear a more convincing case for those decisions. However, I am disappointed that so little emphasis seems to be placed on law and order. Yesterday we detected the dangerous cocktail of police numbers dropping, crime rising and the courts prevented from sending offenders to prison when that is exactly where they should be, along with a promise of community punishments, albeit without the resources to make them work. That is a recipe for problems.

[Rehman Chishti]

The hon. Gentleman makes an assertion about allowing offenders to get away, but between 2007 and 2010, under the previous Government, some 80,000 prisoners were let out of prison early. Surely that was completely unacceptable, and if the hon. Gentleman’s previous comment is right, he should accept that that was wrong.

[Steve McCabe]

Actually, the reality is that under the Labour Government there was a huge rise in prison numbers. It is true that some people were allowed out one month early, but the Justice Secretary proposed yesterday that there should be a threshold in order to reduce the numbers who go to prison in the first place, which means that the courts will be hampered. Indeed, he went on to say that his preference was that people should serve half the sentence in prison and half in the community. I should tell the hon. Gentleman that his constituents will find that much less acceptable than the situation when we were in power. If he does not believe me, I would be happy to go with him to his constituency and talk to them about it, because from what my constituents tell me, I am pretty certain that I am right about that.

[Rehman Chishti]

The statement by the Secretary of State for Justice was quite clear: those who commit crime should be punished with the efficient force of the criminal justice system, and that includes going to prison. Can the hon. Gentleman show where in the Secretary of State’s statement it said that they should not be sent to prison?

[Steve McCabe]

I can show the hon. Gentleman where in the statement the Secretary of State gave the estimate for what he expected the reduction in the number of people going to prison to be. He stood at that Dispatch Box and said it, and everyone who was in the Chamber heard it—unless they have selective hearing.

I shall now return to what I was saying. There is a difficult balance. Perhaps the cuts are just too much, and the Home Office has got a particularly poor deal. I was surprised to discover, from the evidence that the permanent secretary to the Home Office gave to the Home Affairs Committee, that the Department has not carried out any research into the impact of the cuts on crime. That came from the very same permanent secretary who three years ago ordered a report on the potential impact of a recession on crime. It seems slightly strange that the man who feared then that a recession could lead to a rise in crime, and who said that we should investigate the potential outcomes, does not seem remotely troubled that a background of massive cuts and far too rapid reorganisation could have a similar effect. Perhaps it is just as well that he is planning to retire.

[Keith Vaz]

The point to emphasise is that the outcome of the research commissioned by the permanent secretary for Jacqui Smith when she was Home Secretary was that crime would rise during a recession, and that was assuming a level playing field for the number of police officers.

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[Steve McCabe]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that point. He is absolutely right.

I have one last point to make. As I said at the outset, I am in favour of the Minister’s plans to try to modernise the police force and get greater efficiency. I genuinely wish him well, and I think that some of the things that he talks about are things that we should try to do. I also think that they need a longer lead-in time. Time will tell who is right about that. However, there is one priority that I would not adopt at the moment, especially against the background of the cuts and the reorganisation and efficiency changes that we are about to experience. I would not totally change the management and accountability structure of the police at the same time. It seems ludicrous that we should be subjected to the idea of elected police and crime commissioners now. It might be a good idea—although I think that the Minister is wrong about that as well—but what on earth is the pressing need for something that will have a further destabilising effect on the police, at the very time when they have all those other issues to contend with? If the proposal is a good idea, surely there is plenty of time to discuss it, and to pilot it and see what the consequences—the benefits and downsides—are.

[Guy Opperman]

In 2008, when the previous Government made the proposal and were considering it in their draft legislative programme, was my hon. Friend in favour of it or against it?

[Steve McCabe]

I am glad to hear that the hon. Gentleman is now my hon. Friend. I do not know whether that means that he shares some of my concerns about policing, or whether I have at least one ally on the Government Benches who will talk to the Minister about such issues. Actually, it was never the Labour Government’s proposal to have directly elected police commissioners, so no, I was never in favour of that.

This is not the time for that experiment. The Minister has enough on his plate. He needs to get on and get the best deal and the best arrangements that he can from his Treasury colleagues, in order to prevent some of our worst fears from being realised. He would be better off concentrating his energy on that. We can deal with the question of police commissioners another time. What is proposed sounds like a Government in too much of a hurry, with too few resources and too few of the right priorities. If the Minister gets this wrong, not only will he suffer personally in a ministerial capacity, but our constituents throughout the country will suffer as a consequence of reckless behaviour that damages the police.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

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[Steve McCabe]

On that point, does the hon. Gentleman think that individually elected police and crime commissioners all pursuing their own individual political agendas is more or less likely to encourage force co-operation?

[Tom Brake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which I think makes a strong point. It has been put—no doubt by him, by me and by others—to the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, who is well aware of it. The legislation will clearly need to set out the requirement for police and crime commissioners to collaborate and co-ordinate activities with others. When they take on this role, they will also have to bear efficiency savings in mind, so making them will also be in their interests. We are watching that issue closely, and we will want to ensure that elected police and crime commissioners understand the need to co-ordinate effectively with their neighbours.

I believe that the report by HMIC, the Audit Commission and the Wales Audit Office provides a substantial body of evidence to support the case that opportunities are available to make significant efficiency savings. I think that they can be achieved, so long as those at the head of the forces provide the necessary leadership to drive the changes through.

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[Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)]

In the current economic climate, the police must play their part and do more with less. That is not an unreasonable request. The private and public sectors have had to make significant reductions and changes in working practices. Opposition Members constantly cite cuts of 20%, but taken over five years that works out as a 4% cut each year over the next four years, taking into consideration the fact that some funds can be raised under the local council tax precept.

There have been references to cuts in front-line officers, and I would like to offer some solutions. Politicians often come up with problems and talk about them in this Chamber for many hours, but they do not always come up with solutions. It concerns me when I hear chief constables and Opposition Members talking about cuts to the number of front-line officers.

Since I was elected for Weaver Vale, which is a mid-Cheshire seat, I have spent as much time as I can with the Cheshire constabulary, going out on night shifts in Runcorn on a Friday night and, last Friday night, in Northwich.

[Steve McCabe]

I was interested to hear the hon. Gentleman’s comment about a rise in the precept. Obviously it varies across the country. What level of increase does he think he would be able to persuade people in his part of the world to accept?

[Graham Evans]

It varies from community to community. When I was a local councillor, there was much concern about antisocial behaviour. Despite many attempts to get the local police to spend more time on the street corners, as there was concern about youths allegedly causing trouble, they could never afford the time. The parish council made a decision significantly to increase the precept to pay for the new police community support officers. I cannot give the hon. Gentleman a precise figure, but it could be significant if that community decided to increase the precept to allow a dedicated community support officer for that particular area.

The police do their best to meet the public’s expectation of having officers on the beat, but no police force can have officers on street corners every Friday, Saturday or Sunday night. The public expect to see officers on the beat, walking around, but that is not always physically possible. Credit should be given to the previous Government for the way they introduced police community support officers, because they made a difference to the perception as well as the quality of life of many citizens. Local communities can get together to pay for PCSOs.

Front-line cuts have been mentioned many times. If there is a freeze on recruitment and pay, over a few years there will be a reduction in the number of regular police officers. However, I do not hear the role of special constables mentioned in this House. I can only refer to Cheshire constabulary, but for many years the chief constables of Cheshire have spent a lot of time training and recruiting special constables.

Last Friday we had a particularly long and frosty evening. A dozen officers were on duty from 7 o’clock in the evening to 3 o’clock in the morning, half of them special constables. I was a special constable in the 1980s, so before I went out I tried on my old uniform. It fitted where it touched, so I quickly put it back in its suitcase and back in the attic. Before I went out, I looked at the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and various police reforms that were made in the ’80s so that I could prepare myself for what is going on in the 21st century.

In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the professionalism of the special constables. Half a dozen were on duty on that evening. Each one is a volunteer and an unpaid volunteer, which is not often mentioned. I hear Opposition Members talking about the big society, and there is no better example of it than the special constabulary. It comprises ordinary members of the public serving their community and they are unpaid. That is not to say that members of the special constabulary do not have the ambition to join the regular force—they do.

My point is that we have a wonderful opportunity to recruit special constables at this difficult time, when there is a freeze on regular recruitment. The training for specials is exactly the same as that given to regular policemen. If an individual wants to join a police force, they can join the special constabulary, although they will not be paid, and can train over the next two or three years while there is a recruitment freeze. During those two or three years, they can learn the ropes and how to become full-time policemen. I am sure that when they submit their CV and application to become a regular police officer in two or three years’ time, their experience will be taken into account by the chief constable. That would enable the communities I serve and represent to have front-line policing, because special constables carry warrants and can make arrests. Indeed, they can do everything that regular police officers can do.

On Friday night, I went out with the police in a minibus, in a Panda car and on foot—walking the main streets of Northwich. Policing is not straightforward. I often hear comments from the public and Members about wanting officers not in cars but on the beat, as though one could simply wave a magic wand to achieve that. If the police are to serve the whole community, there will be times when they need to be in patrol cars and times when they need to be on the beat.

[Steve McCabe]

I share the hon. Gentleman’s view that special constables make an important contribution; I have seen it for myself when I have been out on patrol with them, so I totally agree. However, they are additional officers and the average borough commander cannot place them on the rota because he is never sure how many might be available. There is a difficulty with the suggestion that the hon. Gentleman seems to be coming close to making which is that the specials should substitute for the officers who have been lost through cuts. If that approach were taken, it would become harder to plan basic policing operations because the commander would not know how many specials would be available at any given time.

[Graham Evans]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point and I agree with him, but the situation varies from force to force. The leadership and management of individual forces are important; best practice has been mentioned in that regard. Cheshire constabulary has invested a lot of time in special constables because the force is relatively small, and I respectfully suggest that other forces—I am not thinking of any particular force, but perhaps the metropolitan and larger forces—could learn a thing or two about recruiting specials.

The hon. Gentleman says that the officer in charge of his constabulary is never sure how many specials will be on duty at a certain time, but this comes down to leadership and management. The senior officers in my constituency know exactly how many special constables will be there on the all-important Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, which is when additional help is strongly appreciated. I have spoken to special constables who have ambitions to become regular policemen. They work during the day and volunteer their time in the evenings, including Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I do not say that they could be a long-term replacement, but merely point out that in the short term I do not accept what I hear chief constables say about front-line cuts in officers. There are creative ways in which specials can be used as a solution in the short term, rather than talking about headline cuts.

PCSOs also play an important role and really involve themselves in the community. I have heard worrying stories about many PCSOs being lost across the country, but they can be paid for through local precepting in town and parish councils. I also find that moneys are held in town and parish council accounts for emergencies. I encourage all chief constables and senior officers to look around their communities to see whether any funds have been siphoned or hidden away for a rainy day. I get very concerned when I hear about those vital officers being made redundant, because I do not accept that it is necessary, especially in the short term.

When I went out on Friday night and in Runcorn previously, I was struck by the fact that Cheshire force sends its police out singly. They go out on their own but have significant and efficient back-up available at a moment’s notice, which means that there are many police officers on public view. Earlier, I heard it said that 11% of officers are available at any one time, but in Cheshire a significant number of officers are out on the beat working on their own, and support is there for them very quickly if need be.

Cutting the amount of police time spent on paperwork has not really been mentioned. A previous Prime Minister talked about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. One thing that we could do as a society and as a country is to tackle the abuse of alcohol. Virtually every call on Friday evening involved people who were badly intoxicated and reliant on alcohol. They had lost structure in their lives and it was quite pitiful to be called to the streets or their homes to assist them.

I cannot help feeling that local authorities that grant long, late-night licences to clubs in town centres and elsewhere, enabling alcohol to be served at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning, put huge pressures on police authorities and forces. Things might be relatively quiet until 11 o’clock at night, but at 2 o’clock in the morning there is mayhem on the streets with intoxicated people brawling. On Friday night—I was told that it was a relatively quiet night—PC Frost was out in force but there were still several arrests of people fighting in the streets of Northwich. Local authorities have a big role to play and they need to communicate better with the police regarding recommendations on late licensing.

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[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to this constructive and well-mannered debate. Members on both sides of the House have expressed their genuine concerns in a fairly non-political way.

There has been much speculation today and in the past few weeks about the possible effects of the cuts. It is pure speculation because we still do not know what the individual settlements will be. It is disappointing to Members on the Government side that the Opposition still have not had the good grace to tell us where they would make their cuts. I thought that the answer given by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) when he was pushed on this issue was very interesting. Essentially, he said that he would go back to the Treasury to ask for more money, so perhaps the Opposition do not accept there should be any cuts whatever in policing. It would be interesting if that point were addressed in the winding-up speech.

I want to address an issue at the core of this debate—the effect that the reduction in funding will have on police numbers. I know that that is a totemic issue for the Opposition, and it is easy to understand why, because the Labour Government, in their 13 years in office, were very successful at one thing: persuading this country that only by pouring more money in can we get better results out. That is why the debate about policing has always focused on the number of police rather than what they do all day. [Interruption.] We have a record number—140,000—as someone shouts from a sedentary position, but seemingly, simply because we have record police numbers and PCSOs, Labour Members think we have record effective policing. That is simply not an equation that works.

Labour Members do not care whether police officers are on patrol, filling in forms or responding to jobs. They seem incapable of acknowledging that having more and more police officers doing more and more administrative and bureaucratic tasks does not mean better policing. Sadly for the Opposition, the debate has moved on. They need not take my word for it; they can take that of someone who knows more about policing and fighting crime than all of us in the Chamber put together—Bill Bratton, who was chief of police of the Los Angeles police department, of New York city and of Boston. He is famous across the world for putting the broken windows theory into practice. He introduced the CompStat system of tracking crimes, which is still in use today and massively reduced crime in New York city, where he devolved decision making to precinct level and got rid of a backlog of 50,000 unserved warrants. When he was chief of police in Los Angeles, crime within that city dropped for six consecutive years. In 2007, the LA police commission reappointed Bratton to a second five-year term, which was the first time it had made such a reappointment in almost 20 years.

It is fair to say that that guy knows what he is on about, and here is what he said to the Home Affairs Committee on 30 November. The Chair, the right hon. Member for Leicester East, said:

“There is a debate at the moment, obviously because of the current economic climate that will result in the numbers of police officers in a local area being reduced. Do you think there is any correlation between the numbers of officers in a particular area and the level of crime?”

Bill Bratton replied:

“As a police chief for many, many years, I would always like to have more police, but the reality is it is not just numbers but, more importantly, what you do with them. More is fine, but if they’re just standing around or if they’re not focused on issues of concern to the public, then those numbers are not… going to achieve what you would hope to achieve, which is improve public safety and reduce crime.”

[Steve McCabe]

It is only fair to say that Bill Bratton went on to caution the Select Committee against drawing too many conclusions from the American experience, because policing is organised very differently in the United States.

[Mr Burley]

I shall give another quote from what Bill Bratton said to us:

“So, I had 38,000 police officers in New York City. In Los Angeles I had 9,000. Los Angeles: 500 square miles, worst gang problem in America, 4 million residents. New York: 38,000 police officers, 300 square miles, 8 million residents, a drug crime problem. To have the equivalent of what I had in New York City in Los Angeles, I would need 18,000 police officers, I only had 9,000 but, over a seven-year period, every year crime went down in Los Angeles… the public perception of police and their effectiveness improved”,

which reinforced

“the adage: it’s not so much the numbers but how you use them, how you inspire them, how you direct them and what their priorities are.”

If it is not a matter of numbers, it is about what the police do all day, and the fact is that in this country the police spend a huge amount of time filling in forms. On 15 March 2007, I went out on the beat in Paddington with the Met, one of the more advanced forces in this country. This is what Met police have to fill in for a single domestic violence incident: a124D paper booklet in the victim’s house; an evidence and actions booklet, which is the same as an old pocketbook, but with structured questions; a custody record, in the station if someone is arrested, with the same details as are in the EAB, which they give to the custody sergeant to rekey into his computer system; a CRISS report, which is an electronic crime report filled in by the officer at the station and that is used for Home Office statistics; a MERLIN report, which involves a national computer system with details of vulnerable children from domestic violence backgrounds—the same details as in the first two forms; a CRIMINT report, which is a Met police-wide intelligence system; and the case papers—that is, the MG forms, which are Word documents that get sent to the Crown Prosecution Service for court. It is not uncommon in the Met and other police forces for officers to be off for the rest of the shift following one domestic violence incident arrest. That is what they are spending their time doing—this mad bureaucracy and paperwork. It is not about the number of police officers; it is about what they do all day on their shifts.

As we have heard recently, Home Office figures have revealed that officers now spend more time on paperwork than on patrol—just 14% of their time on patrol compared with 20% on paperwork. That is why I am delighted that this coalition, like Bill Bratton, is dealing with the reality of the cuts by focusing not on police numbers, but on what the police do all day. Only by clearing away this bureaucracy and these inefficient, wasteful practices will we get the police service that this country deserves.

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[Nick Herbert]

The police must pay their share in reducing the deficit. Contrary to what the Opposition suggest—that a poor deal was secured for the police—the deal was rather better than expected in relation to non-protected Departments.

It is important to point out that the fact that the reduction in central Government spending on the police is 20% over four years—that is clear from the settlement—does not mean a 20% reduction in the amount of money that forces will have over the period. That is an immensely important point, but I am not sure that the Opposition have fully grasped it. There is a straightforward reason: forces do not raise all their money from central Government—on average, they raise getting on for a third of their money from central Government, or nearly £1 in every £3—and the money that they raise locally is not being cut.

As has been pointed out, that means that if we assume both the OBR forecast of reasonable rises in the precept based on—[Interruption.] The OBR forecast is based on the historic trend and the precept freeze, which the Government are funding next year. That reduces the cut in police force funding over the four-year period to 14% in real terms. The Opposition must explain why they believe that the 12% cut that they concede they would have made to policing, based on HMIC advice, would leave forces strong and secure—I assume that they would not otherwise have proposed that—but that a 14% cut is Armageddon, with all the consequences that the hon. Member for Gedling says will flow?

The difference between a 12% cut in real terms and a 14% cut at the end of the four-year period is £200 million, and the Government are making specific additional proposals, to which my hon. Friends referred, including the review of pay and conditions, which is being set up by Tom Winsor. We also expect the police to take part in the two-year pay freeze, subject to the agreement of the police negotiating board, which will close that £200 million gap. Labour Members simply have not answered the question. Why do they feel able to go around campaigning on, and scaremongering about, the impact of the spending reductions that forces are being asked to make? They are clearly and simply seeking to make political capital out of the situation, yet they would have cut the police budget themselves, in precisely the same order of magnitude as that which the Government have announced—the availability of resources to the police would have been precisely the same. They are perpetrating on the public a great fraud about their position.

[Steve McCabe]

I do not think that the Minister is deliberately trying to mislead the House, but is it not fair to say that the 12% cut that the former Home Secretary mentioned would be subject to exactly the same precept conditions, so it would have been reduced in the same way as he has reduced his 20% cut to 14%? He has therefore inadvertently misled the House on that point. Of course, he also completely misleads the House in relation to the west midlands—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman may disagree with the Minister, but he cannot accuse him of misleading the House because he is using figures that the hon. Gentleman does not agree with.

[Steve McCabe]

I am happy to apologise. I was suggesting that the Minister was inadvertently misleading the House by quoting figures that do not stand up to scrutiny.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. I heard the hon. Gentleman very clearly and he said it twice. I am glad that he has clarified that he believed that it was not deliberate.