Police

Tom Brake Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert]

I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s support and I hope this approach will command support across the whole House, because it does make sense for the 43 forces to procure together where that will make savings; and the savings are quite considerable.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Pursuing that point, if there is some rationalisation among the 2,000 IT systems, would that not also lead to significantly more effective policing and a reduced risk, for instance, of systems being out of synch and data getting lost between different systems?

[Nick Herbert]

I agree with my hon. Friend that making these efficiencies and improvements in business processes is about not just saving money, but improving the quality of the service. Those two things are not incompatible, and it is time we stopped talking as though they were.

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[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

I have a sense of déjà vu in this debate, partly because we had a dry run of it a few weeks ago, and partly because I heard an excellent opening speech from the Minister during that debate. I am afraid that mine will suffer because other Members may have the same sense of déjà vu when they hear some of my points.

My starting point for the debate is the same as the Minister’s, which is that there are some inconvenient facts: we have the worst deficit in the G20 and the largest peacetime deficit since the second world war, and we are spending £120 million a day on the interest alone on our debt. Those are inconvenient facts, but they are givens, or known knowns, as Donald Rumsfeld might say.

[Mark Tami]

I seem to remember that the Lib Dem manifesto promised 3,000 extra police officers on the streets, so the cut equates to 13,000 fewer than they promised. Does that indicate how we should treat Lib Dem manifestos?

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[Tom Brake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his rather predictable intervention, but immediately before it I was explaining—he clearly was not listening—why the Government are having to take these decisions. He and the former Ministers on the Opposition Front Bench must accept responsibility for that.

I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), because we expect the Opposition to come forward with some solutions, but during her speech I detected only one sentence in which she referred to the £1 billion of cuts that they would make and said that they would do something about back-office functions and procurement. So that is the Opposition’s solution. That is the one sentence that the Opposition’s spokesperson provided, stating how they, if in government, would have resolved the problems that we face.

[Stephen Twigg]

Will the hon. Gentleman not acknowledge that, in that one sentence—I think it was more than one sentence—of my right hon. Friend’s speech, she referred specifically to the report of Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary? The figure is not one that we have plucked off the top of our heads; it is based on the HMIC’s view of the savings that can be made without damaging front-line services.

[Tom Brake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Of course he is right, and the Government have based their measures on the HMIC report as well, but people who read and listen to this debate will want to hear exactly what impact HMIC’s recommendations, if implemented, will have on, for example, staff numbers, a point to which the official Opposition’s spokesperson did not respond. She ducked and dived on that point.

The Opposition can pretend that the £40 billion of cuts that they intended making, including 20% cuts throughout Departments, would have gone unnoticed, would have had no impact on front-line services and would have left police forces throughout the country unscathed, but we know, they know and people outside know that that is completely untrue.

There is no point disguising the fact that the settlement is tough. That is true, and it impacts on police budgets. As the Minister said, in 2011-12 there is a 4% reduction in cash terms. In 2012-13, there is a 5% reduction, but, thanks to the HMIC report and the measures that police forces are already taking throughout the country, much of the reduction can be made through greater efficiency.

Police forces are already delivering many examples of such efficiency. In one local example, Sutton and Merton police forces are looking at sharing a custody suite, and if successful in those two force areas, the idea might be rolled out across the whole Met police force area and in others further afield. That is exactly the sort of measure that police forces and police authorities should pursue.

The Minister quite rightly identified what is possible through IT systems savings and, as I said in an intervention, we can derive not only cash savings from that source, but great improvements in efficiency and the likelihood of resolving cases, as the communications problems between different systems are addressed.

One issue that I raised in the previous debate, and on which I hope the Minister has had time to do some work, is training for senior officers. The HMIC report identifies that there was no commonly held belief that those officers needed a detailed understanding of how to ensure that the efficiency savings—the mergers—took place effectively. The Government, HMIC or others might be able to assist with training to ensure that officers are equipped to take such tough decisions, because there are real differences between forces’ proposals.

Some forces are coming forward with a headline figure for the number of officers they are going to cut, while others are coming forward with a range of options—particularly on back-office and procurement—that could identify significant savings without the need to cut staff numbers, which some forces seem to have gone for as the first rather than the last resort.

I want to raise some specific Met issues. The Minister will be aware that the force has not yet taken a decision to cut sergeant numbers by 300; it is considering the idea, but it says it

“will be directed by final analysis and must reflect operational delivery.”

I urge the Met to maintain those officer numbers, but if that is not possible, to look at some of the proposals that I mentioned, particularly on sharing back-office functions, joint custody suites and the like to ensure that the number of police officers in the safer neighbourhood teams is maintained at the level at which it is currently set.

Equally, as I said earlier, safer neighbourhood teams may be undertaking tasks that are not their responsibility. I mentioned the example of drive-outs from petrol stations, which are taking up an inordinate amount of time in the case of at least one of my safer neighbourhood teams. After I raised that case, the local force have asked to meet me to discuss it as a wider issue, so it clearly affects not just one safer neighbourhood team but several in the borough. If a large proportion of their time is spent trying to deal with a problem that the petrol companies should be able to resolve technologically, we should look at the issue carefully to try to free up officer time to concentrate on things that really do need police intervention.

[Mr Burley]

If we want to help the police with their finances, does the hon. Gentleman agree that perhaps now is the time for premiership football clubs to start thinking about making a greater contribution to the costs of policing their football matches instead of all those police being deployed purely at taxpayers’ expense?

[Tom Brake]

I entirely agree. Given the stringent financial circumstances in which the Government are operating, that is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be considered.

The Minister referred to the review of staffing and overtime arrangements. Although I agree that very high levels of overtime are costly, and that needs to be looked at, such overtime often allows the police to undertake special tasks that they could not do otherwise and can do without the need to grow the number of full-time police officers. This requires some flexibility. Simply saying “No more overtime” would severely constrain some of the activities that the police are undertaking and that people clearly welcome and want to happen.

There are clearly many measures that the police can take to cut back to ensure that they are making the right level of efficiency savings. If the police undertake such actions, which are documented in the HMIC report, and if they look at the best practice that exists in police forces around the country, they can make the savings that they are being required to make without an impact on front-line services.

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[Stephen Twigg]

Absolutely; I concur with my hon. Friend. Of course, that is not the only promise that the Liberal Democrats made to the British people last May that they have broken. They made that promise knowing, as my hon. Friend said, what the Budget position was. It was a deeply irresponsible pledge to make.

[Tom Brake]

Does the hon. Gentleman not also agree that it would have been appropriate for the Labour Government to announce that the structural deficit was £12 billion higher than they led the public to believe?

[Stephen Twigg]

The figures were very much in the public domain. To be fair to the Conservative party, it did say that it would prioritise cuts. There is a specific issue about the Liberal Democrats having said one thing in opposition and saying the complete opposite now that they are part of the coalition Government.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I am grateful to be called to speak in this important debate, especially as cuts in policing will impact so greatly on my constituents. We heard earlier from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) about how Merseyside police force is heavily reliant on funding from central Government, and I shall reiterate some of the important points that he made.

Some 82% of the force’s budget comes from the formula grant. Only the City of London, Northumbria and West Midlands forces are more reliant on formula grant funding. Can the Minister explain to the people of Liverpool why the real-terms percentage cut facing Merseyside in the 2011-12 financial year is 5.8%, while Surrey— which receives only 51% of its funding from central Government—is receiving a cut of just 3.7% in real terms?

The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice said to the Liverpool Echo on October 15 last year:

“The priority is...helping police officers working on the front line.”

Merseyside police chief constable, Jon Murphy, has said that his force is doing, and will do, everything it can to maintain front-line policing. In fact, since 2004 Merseyside police have made maximising police numbers on the streets a priority. As a result of rigorous efficiency savings, which have been recognised nationally by the Department, and reinvestment in frontline policing, Merseyside police have increased police numbers by hundreds of officers. But we are very concerned that the Government have made no allowances for the extensive efficiency savings already made, before cutting the formula grant so harshly. It will now be impossible to maintain front-line police levels when Merseyside police will see real-terms funding cuts of 7% in 2011-12 and 8.8% in 2012-13.

Merseyside police are having to cut 200 police officers and 80 police staff by March of this year. In addition, a moratorium on police recruitment is continuing until 2012, and this will result in roughly another 200 police officers going in that financial year. That means that Merseyside police will lose close to 10% of its police officers by March 2012. Tough choices have already had to be made, including the closure of the dedicated antisocial behaviour unit.

To substantiate those savage cuts, the Policing Minster has said that there is no simple link between police numbers and crime levels. However, I would like to bring to his attention a number of studies that contradict that. A study of crime rates and police numbers across Europe published on 7 January by the think-tank Civitas—I mention Civitas because it is a think-tank that the Government are normally inclined to listen to—suggests that there is indeed a clear link. Using the most recent data from the “European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics”, Civitas compared the number of police officers per 100,000 of the population and recorded offences per 100,000 of the population. Civitas said that the data suggest

“an association between police officers per head of population and crimes per head. A nation with a larger proportion of police officers is somewhat more likely to have a lower crime rate. A nation with fewer police is more likely to have a higher crime rate.”

However, that is not the only study to suggest such a link.

[Tom Brake]

Is it not also true, however, that the Civitas report says:

“police numbers and resources are far from the only contributor to police effectiveness”?