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Policing in London

Yes, I was going to come to that point shortly, but I am happy to engage with the hon. Gentleman now. The case can certainly be made that the increase in police officers in the last few years and the introduction of safer neighbourhood teams has had a positive effect, both in providing reassurance to the public and in reducing some crimes. Other crimes have not been reduced; they have increased. We must address those serious issues. There are important questions about the number of police officers on the beat, their visibility and mechanisms to ensure that they can remain there. We do not know whether the trend is going to be sustained. It is important that we apply value-for-money tests to arguments that are put to us about falls in crime and that we see those falls in context. Before we pat ourselves and the MPS on the back too much for the performance over the last couple of years—I did welcome some of the reductions—it is wrong not to see that in the context of the last 10 years. To jump ahead further, let me raise something of which the MPS does not like to be reminded: the comparison of the performance of the New York city police in the 1990s with that of the Metropolitan police during the past decade in which their resources have increased significantly. In the 1990s, there was a significant—42 per cent.—increase in the work force on the streets in New York, which was about twice the increase in London. However, crime fell by a huge 75 per cent. over that period, so there was a disproportionately large fall in crime in New York in the 1990s.