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Crime (London)

There we are: crime in London is falling even as we speak. We need to put the figures in context, and to do that we have to recall that there once was a Conservative Government. That is not easy to do, but we must not forget the lessons that we learned at the time. Under the Conservatives, police numbers in London peaked at 28,455, but then, on 1 September 1994, the Government implemented the Sheehy report, and police pay was cut. When I was first a Member of Parliament, two police officers who worked in Camden borough visited me in my surgery. One was earning £4,600 a year less than the other because he had been employed after the Sheehy report was implemented. What impact did Sheehy have? By March 1995—six months after it was adopted—police numbers in London had fallen by 1,800. When this Labour Government came to office in 1997, the police training college at Hendon was empty. Police officers could not be recruited because they were not being paid enough. The first thing that this Government had to do was sort out police pay. As soon as we made the money available to employ officers, police numbers started to rise. Police numbers in London have increased consistently under this Labour Government, and crime has fallen in response. Since 2002-03, almost every type of recorded crime has fallen, in line with the extra police numbers funded by this Labour Government and our Labour Mayor.