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Police Grant

I am grateful to the Minister. The 2004 White Paper promised to free up the equivalent of 12,000 extra police officers for front-line policing by 2008 and claimed at the time that 7,700 forms had already been made obsolete across 43 forces. By last year, that claim had grown: it was said that nearly 9,000 forms had been cut. The problem is that Ministers will not list the forms; we have asked them to put such a list in the Library. My sense of the situation must logically be right—if Ministers know that 9,000 forms have been cut, they must know their names; if they know those, they can publish and release them. I urge the Minister to do that. What I have asked for is not only demanded by politicians; the Police Federation pointed out that the Home Office has provided it no information about what the forms were or how frequently officers used them. We are not talking about any old form—we want the most frequently used forms to be cut, not only the forms that might be used once every two years. The Police Federation has not received any information on those allegedly abolished forms or on how long each form took to fill in and thus it does not know the average time saved as a result of the alleged cutting of the forms. We have asked for the information on a cross-party basis. If we know what the Government think they have cut from the police force case load, that will assist our work on red tape. The Minister is keen to talk about a cross-party dialogue—not all the time, but quite a lot of it—and we are happy to enter into that, depending on the subject. What I have just mentioned should not really be a party political issue. The police are crying out for a reduction—but not in all paperwork. Sir Ronnie Flanagan famously said that police paperwork is a bit like cholesterol; there is good and bad cholesterol. In respect of the point made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg), I should say that an example of good cholesterol would be the PACE codes and legislation requiring proper tape recordings of what witnesses say. However, there is a lot of bad cholesterol—useless paperwork—as well. In conclusion, the time that all police officers spend on incident-related paperwork increased from 10.3 per cent. in 2004-05 to 11.4 per cent. in 2006-07. As a result, the percentage of time spent on patrol fell from 14.2 per cent. in 2003-04 to 13.6 per cent. in 2006-07. Those are the most recent trends, and they show that the police are spending more time on paperwork and less time on patrol. For too much of the time, our police officers are form-fillers rather than the crime-fighters that they wish to be. We know that we have to cut our cloth as a result of this tight settlement, but these efficiencies must be driven forward at the level of the bureaucracy and in other arenas. Activity-based costings are very important, but I will not detain the House with the arcane parts of that aspect. If the Minister is so committed to cutting paperwork, why did he tell me last week in a written answer that the Home Office post of national bureaucracy adviser, which was set up to slash police red tape, has been vacant since April 2006? No one has been doing that job for 18 months. I know that the Minister and his Home Office officials try hard to improve the efficiency of the service, but we have to go back to basics. Unless we can get improvements not only in the amount of paperwork that the police are subject to but in the efficiency of the processes, this police settlement will not be delivered, and we will not have the policing that this country so desperately deserves.