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Crime (London)

I seem to be playing piggy-in-the-middle, trying to act as a third party and defend a policy that is not ours. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will find an opportunity to intervene on a Conservative Member and make a similar point. We do require honesty in the debate and in how the figures are produced. My hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey made the valid point that we need to agree which statistics are firm and fair, and reflect the changes that have been made to how crimes are counted, so that the debate is not about the statistics but about how officers are deployed or whether they are doing too much administration. That would be better than a rather sterile debate about the statistics. I hope that Members on both sides of the House would agree that the British crime survey figures provide us with a consistent level of reporting for crime and may therefore be much more accurate than other figures. They are not dependent on a change to the way in which the offences are calculated. Regrettably, it is clear from those figures that London as a region is doing very badly compared with other regions, whether on violent crime, vehicle crime or burglary. There is an issue as to how London compares with other parts of the country, even if the background is that crime is falling. London still has more than its fair share. On 1 May, Londoners will choose whom they want to put in charge of the police, to cut crime and to tackle antisocial behaviour in our capital city. They could choose the hon. Member for Henley, who in his first six years in Parliament expressed no interest in London. We looked at all the parliamentary questions that he had tabled and not one of them—