Crime and Policing

That is an entirely fair point, and I agree, but the focus of this debate and of my speech is on police bureaucracy. That leads me on to a pledge, which I am sure Labour Members recall, made in 2002 by the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett). He promised a ““bonfire of the paperwork”” to free up more police time, which he said would save 90,000 hours a year. The Home Office then set up a policing bureaucracy taskforce, which published a report with 52 change proposals, which it claimed would"““enable patrol officers to invest the time equivalent of 22,500…in improved quality of service on the streets.””" The taskforce said that that would be achievable within three to five years, but today—nearly 10 years later—not a single update has been published nor follow-up audit made available on how many of those recommendations were implemented and whether that was successful. The reality is that the recruitment of additional police officers and a public commitment to develop neighbourhood policing will have little impact unless the major bureaucratic obstacles facing the police in this country are removed. The annual cost of non-incident-related police paperwork in England and Wales has been estimated to be about £625 million. Police have to produce planning and review team performance improvement reports, more than 100 pages long, every month. Paradoxically, under Labour, while the Home Office increasingly attempted to micro-manage the police from the centre, it showed weak leadership in other areas of policing, where I think the centre has a role to play in driving through reforms and improving collaboration. Huge savings could be made from, for example, ensuring IT compatibility, joint procurement and sharing of back-office functions such as fleet management, uniforms and administrative functions. That is why I am delighted that the coalition Government are no longer focusing on police numbers—we are not playing the numbers game. Instead, we are focusing on police outcomes, improved by clearing away bureaucracy and inefficient, wasteful practices. Yes—referring to the shadow Home Secretary's remarks—we need a big society, because the alternative to a big society is a big state, and not only is a big state unaffordable, but it infantilises people and discourages them from taking responsibility. It is Labour's big state that leads directly to the sort of horrendous incident that occurred in Manchester in 2007, when two police community support officers stood by as a 10-year-old boy drowned in a local pond, because the health and safety rulebook said they could not intervene. If the coalition is to leave the police forces of the United Kingdom one major legacy, let it be this: it is time once again to allow the police to serve the public, rather than the statistical whims of the Ministers in Whitehall.