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Police Grant Report

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I am sure that the Minister will have taken note and will respond. As yet, we have not received a full response from the Government on this issue; we hope that it will come shortly. We hope that urgent action can be taken on this problem, as it can be solved. It will have an impact on the Minister's budget. We have great sympathy with him; we know that he does not get up in the morning and think of a figure that he is going to allocate to local police authorities all over the country. We know that he has to bargain and negotiate with the Treasury. How better to do that than with an array of statistics and initiatives that show that the Home Office is seeking to bring down the cost of policing? My second point is about police pay. I am pleased with how the Government have handled this issue over the past few months. I never again want to be part of a demonstration where thousands of police officers, who do not have the right to strike, are forced to demonstrate against a Government who have worked with them in such close partnership over so many years. That was a terrible situation. I am glad that over the past few months the Home Office has begun proper and appropriate negotiations with the police and has given them not only a pay settlement that they deserve but the framework for dealing with these issues in future. On Saturday, I was present at a march with the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), when 100,000 British citizens marched through the centre of London. Police officers were there, although there were not a huge number. There was a moment during that demonstration when things nearly went wrong, when several young people, who are very passionate about the situation in Sri Lanka, decided to sit down on Westminster bridge and not move. The way in which the police handled that very difficult situation was absolutely superb. They persuaded the young people to get off the bridge and allow it to be reopened. That takes quality policing. In order to get quality policing, we have to pay police officers the amount of money that is appropriate to their skills. Please let us continue in that vein in future. Let us negotiate, so that we never reach a situation where they have to start demonstrating on the streets of London. My final point concerns new technology. I hope that the Minister will tell us a little about the legal action that the Home Office has instituted against the company that provided the so-called police portal, which, of course, does not work. We all want the computerisation of the police to happen. We would love to see a situation whereby the police in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and the Metropolitan police were able to access one set of information through one police portal. I think that that was the intention of the National Police Improvement Agency, but it just did not happen. We have probably wasted a huge amount of money on this issue. I hope that the Minister will tell us what is happening, because it is important that we spend our money wisely, especially in the current economic climate. Our report mentioned several examples of where Government investment in new technology would make a huge difference not only to the overall cost of policing in future but, more importantly, to the efficiency of local police officers. That means investment in hand-held computers. At the moment, there are 20,000 such devices in the country, and the Government have committed £75 million for another 30,000. However, the Committee says that there is no reason why every single police officer in the country should not have a hand-held device. The time savings are huge. When Bedfordshire police authority bought these devices for its police officers, the amount of time that they spent outside the police station increased, and the time that they spent filling in forms and doing paperwork decreased. The amount of time that they spent processing cases increased as well. BlackBerry has told us—I am not suggesting for one moment that we should go out and buy BlackBerry because it has given us this information—that its research, which it presented to the Committee during our inquiry, suggests that if every police officer had a BlackBerry, it would give them an extra full hour of time outside the police station. A lot has been said about the report by Sir Ronnie Flanagan, which is excellent; that is why the Committee adopted most of its recommendations. He talks about new technology and saving time by cutting red tape. Of course, Ministers always tell us that there is going to be a bonfire of red tape. Jan Berry has been appointed as the ““cutting of red tape”” tsar—whatever her title is; bureaucracy tsar, perhaps—and the Committee looks forward to examining her in the near future. The fact is that we need real progress on cutting bureaucracy. That is evident if one goes to any police station in the country and talks to any custody sergeant, as I did when the hon. Member for Newark invited me to visit Newark police station. I pay tribute to all the police officers there. Unfortunately, there was a minor mishap when I thought that a fridge was the place where they kept their lunch, but it was in fact the fridge for DNA samples. Even Back-Bench MPs make gaffes, not just Ministers and Mayors of London. We pay tribute to all that police officers have done and say to them, ““We want to increase your time outside the police station doing policing work.”” I urge the Minister to take the plunge and invest in new technology. When the Government make that decision, please could we have central procurement, so that Lincolnshire police buy the same equipment as the police in Staffordshire, and the police in Staffordshire buy the same equipment as the police in Bristol or London? That would mean that we do not have problems about whether people are speaking to each other properly and appropriately, and passing on information. In many high-profile cases, especially concerning children, people talk about sharing information after the event inquiries have taken place.