Police Reform

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

I join the hon. Member in praising her local team. She is right to talk about staff. There are about 1,000 staff who support police and crime commissioners. We will work with them to transition—where they need to be transitioned, and where they carry out statutory functions that we need to continue—to local authorities. It is not by any means the case that they are all losing their jobs. It is very important to stress that the function continues as is for the next two years. We will continue to work with staff, and I will be talking to police and crime commissioners about the transition a lot, I suspect.

The hon. Member highlights one of the challenges of the move to the mayoral model: there is legislation going through Parliament, and some decisions are yet to be made. I am very happy to work with her on how things will work going forward, but we are very clear about the model that we want to introduce. Where there are moving parts, we will work as best we can to make sure that we get the right outcomes.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

Having sat on a police and crime panel, let me say that I am thrilled to see the abolition of the police and crime commissioner model. This will save £20 million a year, which is the equivalent of an extra 320 special constables. In my area, the Liberal Democrat council is introducing pointless town councils, which raises local taxes. We as a Labour Government will bring down local taxes by abolishing the PCC role, which is very good news.

I want to put on record my thanks to Dave Sidwick, who has been an excellent police and crime commissioner. He is Conservative, and I am Labour, but it does not matter. We work together in service of the public, and that has yielded very good results. I must confess to having regularly experienced difficulties accessing my chief constable in Dorset. Could the Minister please set out what she thinks are reasonable expectations when it comes to a chief constable engaging with local Members of Parliament, particularly on important issues to do with policing and community safety?

[Sarah Jones]

I repeat what I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy): it is incredibly important that chiefs have a good relationship with their local Member of Parliament. It is a two-way street; Members of Parliament bring a huge amount of insight, from all their conversations with constituents, about what is important to their local community and what its fears are, and about where crime is occurring. It is very important that police chiefs have that relationship with them, so that we can help each other to deliver better services.