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Police Grant

I congratulate everybody who has made a contribution to the debate. As I said at the start, I certainly do not traduce Members who make a case for their individual area; that is absolutely right and proper and is, in part, the purpose of the debate. It might have been helpful if I could have put a little more context on the record before the avalanche of local special pleading—I do not mean that in a nasty way. However, I shall not waste time by giving context now as I would rather respond to the many cases that have been put. As the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley) rightly suggested, I would not necessarily disagree with many of the points he made. The settlement needs to be seen in a much wider context than just this year or successive years. It needs to be seen in the context of the whole issue of voluntary mergers, to which he alluded, and what we might or might not be able to do in those circumstances. I assure the House that we are not about to revisit enforced mergers—we have gone beyond that. There is also the issue of police pay, not just this year or in coming years. The House knows that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary made it very clear that if we can reach a multi-year deal for the next three years or so, around the police arbitration tribunal index, and there is an assurance not to phase such a deal, it would give us at least the degree of certainty in terms of pay that authorities will rightly require over the next three years. Although there was a bit of badinage about the point, all those who suggested that although paperwork and bureaucracy are important it is time for more action and not merely words are right, too. Ever since the production of David Bowie's ““Life on Mars”” album and the period when the series that we have just enjoyed watching was set, we have been talking about trying to reduce the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy. I take Sir Ronnie Flanagan's point: police bureaucracy is rather like cholesterol—there is good and bad, and as the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) said, we do not want to throw out the good with the bad. We do not want to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, in the sense of throwing out good, solid audit paper trails, which protect the defendant, among others, in legal processes, in the cause of getting rid of all paperwork.