Yvette Cooper
Main Page: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley)Department Debates - View all Yvette Cooper's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Nick Herbert
I shall deal with precisely what the inspectorate said in a minute.
Funding for counter-terrorism policing has been prioritised in the police funding settlement to ensure that the police have the necessary resources to respond to the demands posed by the continuing terrorist threat. We have allocated £564 million to counter-terrorism for 2012-13, and that follows a considerable increase over previous years. Forces will receive their allocations shortly. Delivering a safe and secure Olympic and Paralympic games is a priority for the Government, and preparations remain on track. As we indicated last year, the Government are confident that the Olympic policing and wider security programme can be delivered in full for £475 million, although £600 million remains available if required.
We have set aside sufficient funding for the election this November of police and crime commissioners, who will ensure that the police become fully accountable and responsive to the demands of their local areas. That funding is additional money, which will not come from the police settlement. [Interruption.] As hon. Members seek to interrupt me from a sedentary position, let me observe that it is very gratifying to note the number of putative police and crime commissioners on the Opposition Benches. Indeed, more and more Labour Members of Parliament are jumping from the sinking ship every day in the hope of seeking refuge in elected local office.
Yvette Cooper
Given that the Minister is so isolated as he sits there on the Government Front Bench, I think that he may want to reconsider that remark. Will he tell the House how many constables could have been paid for with the money that is to be spent on police and crime commissioners?
Nick Herbert
I have said on a number of occasions that we do not expect the running costs of police and crime commissioners to be more than those of police authorities. The only additional cost will be the cost of elections, which will represent 0.1% of annual police spend. Having got itself into the position of opposing this democratic reform over the last 18 months, the Labour party is now putting up candidates, and some would-be candidates are on the Benches behind the right hon. Lady. I think that she needs to catch up: she cannot go on criticising this policy while at the same time fielding candidates.
I believe that the challenge of maintaining and improving policing as budgets fall is manageable, provided that forces do not treat this as “business as usual”. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has set out how forces can save over £1 billion a year if those that spend more than others reduce their costs just to the average. The savings identified were in such areas as legal services, estates—buildings, maintenance and services—criminal justice and custody, training, control rooms, business support, investigations, community safety and community relations. However, it is important to appreciate that the Government and forces are identifying savings well beyond the scope of HMIC’s report.
Pay accounts for the bulk of total police spending, which amounted to about £11 billion last year, so there is no doubt that pay reform and restraint must form part of the police savings package. That is why we have asked the police—along with the rest of the public sector—to accept a two-year pay freeze, which could save them at least £350 million a year. I note that the official Opposition now support that pay freeze. The first part of the Winsor review also made a number of recommendations, and the House will be aware of the Home Secretary’s recent announcement that the Government will approve the recommendations of the police arbitration tribunal. I note that the official Opposition also urged the Government to implement the tribunal’s findings. Once they have been fully implemented, those changes will save forces about £150 million a year.
Nick Herbert
My hon. Friend has made a good point. HMIC savings were predicated on forces becoming as efficient as the average. One of the points that the Government have been making is that there is no reason why we should not raise force performance to the level of the best. That is not some arbitrary target; we know that some forces are already achieving greater efficiency. We believe that there is potential for at least £180 million of savings per annum through ICT. Forces have already made substantial savings. Police spend was some £73 million lower last year than in 2009-10, and there are opportunities for forces to go further. We are using the national buying power of the police service—indeed, the whole public sector—to do things better and more cheaply. We are requiring the police to procure more and more equipment together. Those changes alone could save a further £200 million per annum by 2014-15.
Nick Herbert
I will of course give way to the shadow Home Secretary, but I wonder whether she will confirm in her intervention that she supports the savings that we seek to make through collective procurement and better IT.
Yvette Cooper
We do think it right to make savings from procurement, but will the Minister explain why, if all these things are happening, 16,000 police officers are still being lost? Will he also confirm that 4,000 officers have already gone from the front line alone since the election?
Nick Herbert
All these changes mean that there will be a smaller work force. The Government have always accepted that. Some £2 billion a year needs to be saved, and most of the spending is on personnel, although a significant proportion is not. The savings that I have described can be achieved through more efficient working and, in many cases, fewer personnel. The question is, what will be the impact on the service and the performance of the forces? That is what the right hon. Lady simply will not focus on.
Nick Herbert
The HMIC report said there had been a 2% reduction in the number of front-line officers. Judging by the hon. Gentleman’s face, he has not read that report, and I suggest he does so.
Taken together, these reforms will result in far in excess of a 12% real-terms reduction in central Government funding. They will save over £2 billion a year. In fact, they will save more than the reduction in central Government grant of 20% in real terms. Let me repeat the following, therefore: the savings identified by HMIC are over £1 billion; the savings from pay are £0.5 billion; the savings from collective procurement and IT are £380 million; and the savings from bringing every force’s performance up to the level of the best are £350 million. The total savings, therefore, amount to over £2.3 billion, exceeding the reductions in police funding while protecting front-line services.
Yvette Cooper
According to the Minister, everything is hunky-dory, because if his figures are to believed there will be no negative impact on services. Why, therefore, has the Lancashire chief constable now had to decide that his force will have to change its response times? He has said:
“If someone is absolutely insistent that they need to see an officer, they’ll see an officer. But…it might be that we negotiate either a delay or no deployment at all.”
That is clearly an example of an impact on front-line policing, and the service provided to people who live in Lancashire, as a result of the scale of the Government’s cuts.
Nick Herbert
I very much doubt that the chief constable of Lancashire police—who is one of the best chief constables in the country, and who heads a high-performing force—would accept the right hon. Lady’s characterisation of his decision. Her entire contention is that front-line services are bound to be damaged simply because police numbers are falling. That is the equation that Labour always makes, but the fact is that the latest official figures show recorded crime falling, and according to the British crime survey the crime level is stable. There are areas of concern, and chief constables are fully aware of that. We all need to work hard to stay on top of crime. However, the Opposition cannot claim that overall crime is rising, or that falling police numbers are causing crime to rise. They cannot claim that because it is not true.
In any case, Labour cannot attack falling police numbers as a result of these savings when it is committed to the same savings. The shadow Home Secretary backs over £1 billion-worth of savings as recommended by HMIC, but the shadow police Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), has told this House that when he was in office he planned to save
“£500 million to £600 million from overtime and shift patterns”.—[Official Report, 13 December 2010; Vol. 520, c. 722.]
That is far more than the HMIC’s £90 million of savings from better management of staffing rotas and overtime. Further, 12 days ago the shadow Home Secretary finally admitted that Labour backed the pay freeze for police officers and staff that is worth £350 million, and she said that that was not just for the next year but for future years as well. To be added to the £1.2 billion of savings recommended by HMIC, the savings from overtime and the pay freeze are the £150 million of savings recommended by the police arbitration tribunal and endorsed by the Labour party. In total, therefore, Labour has backed more than £2 billion-worth of cuts to police funding. Let me say this plainly: the Opposition cannot attack the cuts when they back cuts on the same scale. They cannot go around criticising falling officer and staff numbers when their savings would result in a smaller work force, too.
Yvette Cooper
The Minister can put up all the smokescreens he wants, but he knows that we will back a 12% reduction in the policing budgets over the course of the Parliament, not the 20% cut that he wants. Will he confirm that his 20% cuts are leading to 16,000 police officers being lost, and that HMIC took into account his pay freeze and all the savings that he has outlined when it projected that 16,000 police officer posts will be lost? Will he now ditch his 20% plan, change instead to our 12% plan, and save those 16,000 police officer posts?
Nick Herbert
The right hon. Lady has been caught out. The fact is that the HMIC savings did not include the pay freeze or the savings from collective procurement, which just a few minutes ago she said could be made. [Interruption.] Two weeks ago, she was forced to admit that she backed that pay freeze. Her colleague the shadow police Minister tried to disagree with that, but she has confirmed that she backs the pay freeze. Those savings are in addition to the £1 billion. [Interruption.] They are in addition to the 12%. [Interruption.] It is no use the right hon. Lady just hectoring. If she pays attention for a second, she will learn that these pay restraint savings are on top of the HMIC savings. That is the whole point. The Opposition are attacking the cuts while backing the same scale of cuts themselves; it is just that they will not admit that to police officers or the public.
Yvette Cooper
Does the Minister agree that if he shifted from 20% to 12%, he could save thousands of police officer jobs across the country and improve front-line services? If he does agree with that, why will he not switch to the far more sensible 12%?
Nick Herbert
If the right hon. Lady agreed with that herself, why does she remain committed to these 20% cuts? That is what she is committed to: the HMIC savings plus the pay savings, the procurement savings, and the savings her shadow police Minister has identified through overtime. All of that adds up to far more than 12%. [Interruption.] She is shaking her head in denial, but that is the truth of the matter. The Opposition are pretending that they are not committed to the same level of cuts, but when pushed, they have to admit that they are. Police officers will know it, and the public will know it. The Opposition cannot credibly campaign against cuts when they remain committed to these levels of reductions in spending themselves.
Nick Herbert
I certainly think it important that forces guard against what is sometimes called reverse civilianisation—the idea that reducing the number of staff will increase the demand on officers. It is about re-engineering policing to make sure that processes are more efficient. Actually, there has been a huge growth in the number of staff in police forces over the past 10 years, and there has been scope to reduce that. The simple point is, of course, that if the number of staff had not been reduced by rather more than the number of police officers, that would have impacted on the latter. There is balance to be achieved here. Furthermore, police officers cannot be made redundant anyway.
We have to get away from the idea that the quality of a front-line service can be measured only by the number of staff or how much money is spent on it. The National Audit Office’s report on mobile technology in policing, published two weeks ago, showed that under the last Government, £71 million was spent to deliver only a “basic level” of benefits. Four years later, the scheme has still not delivered value for money to the taxpayer. The NAO found that
“not enough consideration was given to how forces would use the mobile technology, how much local spending was required or how realistic were the announced deadlines”.
Let us hear less, in the constant demand to spend more money, about the focus on inputs, and rather more about value for money and how well this money is being spent.
The fact is that across the country, forces are reducing budgets while protecting, or indeed improving, front-line services. Hampshire, for example, is saving money and reducing crime, and has made a public commitment to retaining local visible policing levels. Thames Valley has reduced business support costs such as HR, removed a layer of management and is collaborating with other forces. It has saved money and is to re-deploy officers to front-line roles in neighbourhoods or on patrol. Kent police has better matched staffing levels with demand, increased police officer availability, restructured the way it provides policing services, collaborated with Essex police, streamlined support services and is realigning some of its specialist policing functions. As a result, it has been able to deploy more officers to uniformed street patrols. It has increased police visibility with the public, the head count of neighbourhood officers and staff has increased by 50%, and public satisfaction levels have increased.
It is therefore clear that, through changing the way forces do things, they can make savings and maintain or improve the service they provide to their communities.
Yvette Cooper
The Policing Minister has been generous in giving way. He boasts about the improvements in getting more police officers on to the street and into front-line jobs. Will he therefore admit that it is a serious problem that, since the election, 4,000 front-line officers doing front-line jobs have gone?
Nick Herbert
I really think that “boasting” is a silly word to use about what I am saying these forces are doing. I am describing what chief constables have done in adjusting to reduced resources, reconfiguring how policing is delivered and protecting the front line. That is not a boast from the Government; it is an explanation of how policing services can be transformed. [Interruption.] I suggest—if the right hon. Lady will draw breath—that she would do well to meet some of these chief constables and hear how they are achieving these aims.
It is clear that forces, through changing the way they do things, can make savings and maintain or improve the service they provide to their communities. Our reforms will support this change: a police professional body, to be up and running by the end of the year, setting standards, improving training, equipping professionals to do the job and helping to reduce bureaucracy; a police ICT company to help the police deliver better value to forces for their ICT spend; and a new national crime agency, a powerful new crime-fighting force working across different police forces and agencies, defending our borders, co-ordinating action on economic crime and protecting children and vulnerable people. Police and crime commissioners will ensure that the police tackle local priorities and hold the chief constable to account, and they will drive value for money.
This is a coherent agenda to build a modern, flexible and responsive police service, delivering value for money for the taxpayer and fighting crime. I commend this motion to the House.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
Today, the Government are asking Parliament to support an 8% real cut in their funding for police forces across the country next year. An 8% cut in one year alone is more than any other service is expected to make next year. Manchester’s chief constable has said that it will be
“the most difficult financial year for policing in living memory”.
Gloucestershire’s chief constable has said that his force now faces “a cliff edge”, and the Dyfed Powys police chief has said that he is
“genuinely concerned about how we will be able to effectively protect our communities and bring criminals to justice”.
Chief constables in Lancashire, Norfolk and South Yorkshire are all warning that the cuts will make it harder for them to fight crime—they are even warning that in some cases crime may rise as a result. Serious warnings are being sounded to the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice by chief constable after chief constable, but nobody in the Government is listening. Time and again, we have called on Ministers to think again and reopen the policing budget, but time and again they have refused to do so. Time and again, they have said that the police do not need the cash.
Some £31 million has been cut from Manchester’s force, with cuts of £33 million from the West Midlands police and £13 million from the Devon and Cornwall police. Big cuts are being made to force after force next year, except in London. Three months before the mayoral election, and three weeks after the polls show Boris Johnson falling behind, the Government suddenly decide to reopen the budget for London—they suddenly decide to come up with a pre-election £90 million bung. The London Mayor has spent years cutting the Met police and the number of officers in London, yet suddenly the Conservative party has panicked and is trying to bail him out. Suddenly, the party has noticed that the public are angry about the cuts that Boris Johnson has agreed to their safer neighbourhood teams, their CID units and their police officers based in schools.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the Policing Minister if he can explain why he has suddenly decided to increase this funding just three months before the mayoral election.
Nick Herbert
I did explain why this coalition Government have increased the funding, and I should point out that both parties will be fielding candidates in the election. Will the right hon. Lady tell me clearly whether she supports the increase in funding for the Metropolitan police this year—yes or no?
Yvette Cooper
We certainly support extra funding for the Metropolitan police and for forces in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Humberside and across the country, which the Minister has abandoned because those areas do not have an immediate election where a Tory candidate is starting to struggle and fall behind.
Mr Watts
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is a scandal that the Government parties are bribing the London voters because there is a crucial election, while at the same time they are cutting funding to areas such as Merseyside and to other police authorities that face major problems? Those problems are now not going to get dealt with because of the cuts.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is exactly right. This is happening from Merseyside to Norfolk and Gloucestershire; it is happening right across the country. We have been warning that the Government should reopen the funding formula for not only the Met, but other forces across the country, because the Minister’s plans are doing nothing for those other forces, which are facing those pressures. We have to wonder what the chief constables in other parts of the country have to do to get a break. Do they have to put on a blonde wig, jump on a bike and become a struggling Tory candidate to get the money they need? The Home Secretary should be more concerned about public safety than about the safety of Boris Johnson. This is a con for Londoners, it is a rip-off for the rest of the country and it is pork barrel politics at its worst.
Andrew Percy
The shadow Secretary of State will, as ever, wish to be honest with the House. If she were Secretary of State today, would she be coming to his House to cut the budget for Humberside police, in my area—yes or no?
Yvette Cooper
As we made clear, we believe that the force should have a 12% cut over the course of the Parliament. So, yes, forces would face reductions and would have to make savings, but that figure has been supported by chief constables across the country, by work done by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and by work that the former Home Secretary did before the election. That is why we think that ours is a reasonable approach to take, as opposed to making the deepest cuts in police funding seen for a generation—cuts of 8% in one year alone and cuts of 20% altogether. The hon. Gentleman’s local force is losing 500 police officers as a result of his Government’s plans. Will he be putting that on his election leaflet?
Andrew Percy
Does the shadow Secretary of State therefore agree that it may be seen as a little dishonest of local Labour politicians, who did not oppose police cuts in Humberside in 2009, under a Labour Government, to be on the streets now campaigning against police cuts, given that she has just admitted to the House that if she were Secretary of State she would be cutting my local police force today?
Yvette Cooper
Let us, again, be clear that Labour would not be cutting by 20%—we do not think that that is right. We think that the Government are going too far, too fast. They are hitting the economy and pushing it into reverse, but they are also hitting policing. The hon. Gentleman did not say whether he would be putting the cut of 500 police officers on his election leaflet, but I can tell him that we will be putting it on ours.
Nick Herbert
The right hon. Lady was a Chief Secretary to the Treasury, so I wonder whether she could assist me now. Will she confirm that the £1 billion of spending cuts that HMIC recommended, which she supports, and the half a billion pounds of pay freeze and pay reform through the Police Arbitration Tribunal decision, which she also supports—that is £1 billion plus half a billion—equals £1.5 billion, which is more than the spending reduction of 12% that she claims she is supporting?
Yvette Cooper
No, we are very clear that we support a 12% reduction and not the 20% reduction that the Minister wants. I have to say to him that if his fantasy figures added up, no police force across the country would be reducing the number of front-line officers, but forces are doing that and 4,000 officers have already gone as a result of his figures and of what he is doing. All the smokescreens in the world that he puts up will not stack up, given that police officers are being lost across the country. The reason why we believe that 12% is the right figure is because we want to protect the 16,000 police officers that his Government are getting rid of. That is why we think that we should have a balanced approach to the policing funding for the future. It is true that a 12% reduction requires pay restraint, procurement reforms and cutting bureaucracy and back-office processes—all those things have to be done within the policing budget to deliver the 12% savings. That is what police officers and chief constables are doing right across the country, but he knows what the consequences will be if he pushes them beyond that 12% because we are already seeing them. Some 4,000 front-line officers have gone already and 16,000 are to go in total. Why does he still want to support that number of police officers going?
Nick Herbert
This is an important debate and I am not clear whether the right hon. Lady does not understand HMIC’s report or whether she is seeking to present the savings in a way that is not justified. She has just said that the 12% savings—HMIC’s savings, which she has supported—include pay restraint, but they do not, as is absolutely clear from reading the report. I strongly suggest to her that she goes away to read it. Will she now accept that the HMIC savings did not include pay restraint and that by supporting pay restraint of half a billion pounds, as she has done, she is therefore going further than HMIC’s savings? Why does she not understand that?
Yvette Cooper
I am afraid that the Policing Minister is living in fantasy land. His figures simply do not add up, because 16,000 police officers are going as a result of his plans. We have made it clear that pay restraint was built into the Labour Government’s proposals from the beginning and we have supported it since; we need pay restraint to deliver the 12% savings. But if we want to protect the number of police officers, we need to have 12% savings and not 20% savings.
The Minister will also know that when HMIC carried out its report that projected that 16,000 officers would be lost, the pay freeze he introduced was already in place. So HMIC has taken into account his pay freeze in saying that 16,000 officers would go and front-line services would be hit. That is happening across the country.
The right hon. Gentleman needs to get in touch with what is happening in police forces across the country, because his coalition partners and Back Benchers are. What are they saying? Across the country—from London to Lancashire, from Norfolk to Devon—MPs are campaigning against cuts and against station closures. Listen to this, from an MP campaigning to stop station closures:
“With well-known faces out on the beat, and a high police visibility, residents clearly feel safer, and crime goes down. Residents…value and cherish their local police team, and don’t want to see their numbers cut.”
That is no rogue Back Bencher straying from the line—that was the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). I apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I did not notify the hon. Lady that I was going to refer to something that she, as a Home Office Minister, had said, which is a convention I like to respect. I had expected, however, that Home Office Ministers would be on the Front Bench to support the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, but it turns out that the Home Secretary cannot even convince her own team, never mind the country, that what she is doing to the police is right.
By the way, where is the Home Secretary? Where is she, on the day that she expects Parliament to vote for the biggest annual cut to police funding for generations?
Mr Ruffley
I respect the right hon. Lady, but she must be aware—her memory cannot be failing her that much—that throughout the previous Parliament, the Minister of State responsible for policing always opened this debate and the shadow Minister, which was a post I held for a time, always responded. She knows that full well.
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman will also know that in the previous Parliament the Government were not introducing the biggest cut to policing for generations and not taking responsibility for it. Last year, when a Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government introduced the biggest cuts to council funding in a generation, the Secretary of State came to the House to debate it and to defend it. The Home Secretary has not done the same.
The Home Secretary has a history of hiding. Yesterday, she had to be forced to the House to tell us what she was doing about Abu Qatada, and when our borders were breached, she went to ground. We have not seen her do a proper TV or radio interview for nearly six months. She is hiding from the media and hiding from this House. We miss her. We have hardly seen her since her conference fiasco with Catgate. I know she is keen on all things feline, but even Macavity used to appear once in a while. We urge her to come back. Once again, we are left with the poor old Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, with his smokescreens and his fantasy figures—hung out to dry by the Home Secretary again.
The Minister obviously has not been talking to the Prime Minister, because today the Prime Minister claimed that the proportion of front-line police officers has increased. Today we heard from the Minister that the number of front-line officers might be cut, but the Prime Minister said that the proportion has increased. That is not true, is it? I ask the Minister to confirm whether he believes it is true that the proportion of front-line police officers has increased.
Nick Herbert
I am happy to intervene on the right hon. Lady at her request. She will find from HMIC’s work—she is not on good ground here—that it is discovering, in assessing forces, that the proportion of the policing work force on the front line has increased, is increasing and will be expected to increase over the spending review period. I would not stay on this ground if I were her.
Yvette Cooper
Let us look at the published facts from HMIC, which considered the number of police officers lost in the first year of this Government. Some 4,600 police officers were lost in that year, so how many were in front-line jobs? According to the Minister, none of them should have been, but of those 4,600 officers, nearly 90% were in front-line jobs. Some 4,100 officers have gone from front-line jobs—from neighbourhood policing, CID units and traffic units. Those are the data in HMIC’s own report, and the Minister clearly has not looked at it.
Yvette Cooper
If he has looked at it, will he stand up and confirm that the HMIC figures show that in the first year of this Government the proportion of front-line officers fell and 90% of the officers who went were from front-line jobs? I ask him to confirm those facts from HMIC.
Yvette Cooper
He says he cannot confirm them, but shortly I shall hand him the figures from HMIC.
Mr Watts
Isn’t the proof in the pudding? I know from Merseyside that there are fewer police officers and will be fewer in the future. When coalition Members speak, I will bet that not one Tory MP will be able to get up and claim that police numbers in his area have not been cut and will not be cut in the future. That will be the test.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. In every force across the country, chief constables have been put in an impossible position and as a result they are saying that they have to cut front-line services. That is the impact of the Government’s decisions. The Minister is not admitting the facts. He will not stand up again and confirm the facts from HMIC, which show that in the first year more than 4,000 front-line officers have gone from front-line jobs. That is the reality of what is happening.
Mr Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the lack of candour from the Government is having a negative impact on police morale? If the Government do not support them, they are asking, who on earth will?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. The ducking and diving from Ministers shows how out of touch they are with what is happening in police forces and communities across the country. Communities know what is happening, because they can see it. Police officers are being taken off the front line and the number of uniformed officers working in custody suites, for example, has gone up, not down. In Birmingham, uniformed officers have been taken off the front line in order to monitor CCTV and, in Leeds, police officers are having to go back into the station between incidents to type up their own case notes because the support staff have gone. Whereas those officers would previously have been able to move from incident to incident, rapidly responding, they are now having to go back into the office to do paperwork instead.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
The right hon. Lady has played strongly on the fact that 16,000 police officers are leaving, with 4,000 leaving, as she claims, in the past year. How many were past retirement age and could therefore choose to go and how many were on active duty, as opposed to light duty in police stations, in which case they would not have been available for police commanders to use in proper policing?
Yvette Cooper
HMIC’s assessment was that 4,100 of the 4,600 officers who went in the first year were from front-line jobs, according to the definition of front line that HMIC agreed with the Home Office. The hon. Gentleman also raises an important issue about people nearing retirement, and he will know that in practice chief constables in many parts of the country have been forced to push officers into early retirement when they did not want to go. A Staffordshire officer whom I am meeting tomorrow has said, “I would not have finished. I am not bitter, but very disappointed. The feeling is that there is no control over the mass exodus of experience—it is just going.” That is the reality of what is happening in forces across the country.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
A number of very experienced officers in the West Midlands force have been told that they must leave, having completed their 30 years. Is it not important to bear in mind, however, what happened in August? Time and again during the terrible days of the riots, people were complaining that even with police numbers as they are there were not enough police around. They were pleading with the police to come in. If these cuts take place, if—unfortunately and tragically—we had riots once again, the situation will, as we know, be even worse.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point. We saw in the capital and major cities across the country that we needed police officers on the streets to take back the streets, calm the riots and prevent the damage that was being done, and it took 16,000 officers on the streets of London to calm the tensions and deal with the violence and the looting. Sixteen thousand officers is the number that this Government are cutting—the equivalent of every one of those police officers that it took to calm the streets of London on those awful August nights.
Julie Hilling
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is not only at times of riots, but on a Friday and Saturday, when knife crimes, street robberies and serious crimes of violence are occurring, that we need police officers on the front line? Not just at the acute time of riots, but week in, week out, we need officers on the streets.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. Communities across the country know that. They want officers on the streets. They want to see police officers doing the job in their area. It is communities that will in the end pay the price for this Government’s decision. Time and again on Monday the Home Secretary told the House not just that there was no simple link, but that there was no direct link between police numbers and crime, yet look at the evidence from the Government’s favoured think-tank, Civitas, which said that
“there is a strong relationship between the size of police forces and national crime rates...A nation with fewer police is more likely to have a higher crime rate.”
The Policing Minister sniggers. Will he snigger, too, at the HMIC, which he quoted today, which said in research published last year that
“a 10 per cent increase in officers will lead to a reduction in crime of around 3 per cent (and vice versa)”?
That is the conclusion of the authoritative HMIC analysis of all the studies and the research that have been done, and this Government decide that they want to cut 16,000 officers at a time when personal crime is already going up by 11%.
Hugh Bayley
Under the previous Conservative Government the North Yorkshire police received not one single additional police officer, and crime in our county almost trebled. Under the Labour Government there were dozens and dozens of additional police officers—more than 140—and crime started to come down. Now the police numbers are down by almost 100 and crime is rising again. Surely that makes the case.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right that we had thousands more police officers under the Labour Government. We also had a historic 40% reduction in crime.
The Conservative party used to get it. Here is what the Prime Minister himself wrote in the 2005 election manifesto for the Conservative party:
“Put more police on the streets and they’ll catch more criminals. It’s not rocket science, is it?”
No, it is not, yet now the Tory-led Government are doing the opposite. Once the party of law and order, they are cutting more from the police than from health, education, local councils or defence—more than from any other service. Personal crime, theft, robbery and violence are up by 11%, police officers down by 16,000—higher crime, fewer police, communities paying the price. This Government should cut crime instead of cutting police officers, and they should start by going back to the drawing board and voting against these plans today.