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Police Grant Report

He may not have the chance for it to become part of his policy in a few weeks' time, so that might be why he is so confident in making that assertion. Unfortunately, the Government's decision not to hold a comprehensive spending review that would detail proposed expenditure over a three-year period underscores that fact that they have no confidence in their rather woolly guarantees made in the pre-Budget report and repeated by the Minister today. Surely one of the key parts of policing—ensuring that we have their presence on the street—involves the amount of time officers spend on patrol. It would be fair to say that the figures on the amount of time police spend on the beat have fallen under this Administration. According to the Government's own latest figures, the amount of time a patrol officer spends on patrol has fallen from 19.1 per cent. in 2004-05 to an even lower 17.8 per cent. in 2007-08. Jan Berry, the Government's police bureaucracy tsar, when asked whether officers were spending more time on patrol now than two years ago said:""If you talk to police officers they would say it has remained the same or got slightly worse"," and she went on to point out, in what I take to be a real indictment, that only one of the 33 proposals to reduce bureaucracy in the final Flanagan review of February 2008, had been implemented.