Police reform and social responsibility Bill

I am not arguing for that, but speculating how the role of commissioners could develop over time. The key point that I would make to the hon. Gentleman is this: there will be pressure on elected police and crime commissioners to do things in a different way. There will be pressure on them to be far more collaborative with other forces and other police and crime commissioners, for example, as was mentioned earlier in the debate, to drive efficiencies through procurement. There is no real reason at the moment for police forces to collaborate to purchase cars or uniforms together. They have not had that driver, yet they have had increasing budgets for 10 years. The guys who are elected next year will want to work with neighbouring forces. If I were elected as police and crime commissioner for Staffordshire next year, the first call I would make would be to the police and crime commissioner in west midlands, to ask, ““Can we do things together? Could we collaborate to procure things together?”” I would have a reason to want to reduce my budget so that I can spend it on delivering the pledges that I put in my manifesto, such as a pledge to get more officers on the beat. The hon. Gentleman and I discussed Tony Blair's knife-crime summit. I was thinking through his logic after he answered my question, but I still do not understand it, so perhaps he could help. It was okay, at a national level, for an elected politician—the former Prime Minister—to hold a summit at No. 10 Downing street, inviting all the chief constables from around the country, who no doubt could have been doing other things with their time, to ask them what they were doing about knife crime, which he had identified as an issue in this country. No doubt he was coming under a lot of pressure from the public, who were contacting him and their MPs demanding that something be done, and quite rightly he called together the police forces to bang heads together and come up with a strategy to deal with knife crime. The hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) seemed to suggest that that was okay because it was a ““national priority””—I wrote down his words—but that it was not okay locally. I cannot follow that logic at all. Let us imagine that we have a problem locally—it might be knife crime or kids racing cars down a disused road. Why is it okay to have a national priority and do something about it nationally, but not to have local priorities and to do something about it locally? I cannot understand the logic at all.