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Policing

I was going to come to that, but I am very happy to respond to the right hon. Gentleman and to repeat what I have said to him, to which he has kindly referred. The development of partnerships between the police and local authorities and, indeed, other partners was an important step forward, and he played a particularly central role in ensuring that that was delivered under the previous Government. I think that it is widely accepted that such partnerships can be effective in reducing crime, and the Government wish to see them strengthened and continued, in spite of diminishing resource. Up and down the country, I have seen action-oriented partnerships with a purpose that are not bureaucratic and that can deliver the kinds of results that the right hon. Gentleman was discussing. Others are more bureaucratic, and they need to adapt to the new world in which resources are at a premium and to ensure that their focus is very action-oriented, but we wish the partnerships to continue. We also wish to ensure that the police and crime commissioners are part of the arrangements and do not work against them, and we have conferred duties on all sides to ensure that. I am happy to endorse the important principle of partnership. We need action locally and nationally to ensure that policing is structured such that can it meet the demands both of the volume of crime and of the population, in relation to the day-to-day antisocial behaviour and crime issues affecting it. However, we must also ensure that policing is equipped to deal with more serious issues, which, in the end, also affect people's everyday lives. Drugs issues, for example, are linked to serious and organised criminality. A new strategic policing requirement will ensure for the first time that police forces and the newly elected police and crime commissioners are equipped to deal with those national threats. The creation of the National Crime Agency, along with the Organised Crime Co-ordination Centre in an intelligence-led approach and the introduction of police and crime commissioners is a strong, coherent and powerful response to the challenges that I have described. The Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East, reflected on the Government's ambition to declutter the policing landscape, and I welcome the fact that he noted that that would not necessarily relate to the number of bodies but could involve a more logical ordering of the existing national policing bodies. I of course believe that the phasing out of the National Policing Improvement Agency was the right decision, and I have said so to the Select Committee. There were accountability issues, in spite of the many good things that the agency did and does—I certainly join others in paying tribute to its functions, and I have noted the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). Wishing to change the accountability arrangements for the functions, however, to find a better home for them, is not the same as saying that the Government do not value them. The agency clearly does important things, but it has become a kind of Christmas tree quango, with many policing functions loaded on to it and ownership and responsibility for what it was doing neither clearly with the Government nor with the police service. We think that it is both coherent and right to seek greater accountability for the agency's two principal functions. Of course, it is responsible for many other things. On the one hand there is IT and the development of improved information and communications technology for policing, which is so important, and has been referred to, and on the other is the training and development function, which is equally important to policing's human resources. Separating those functions by creating a police-owned and led ICT company, for which the police service will accept responsibility, is the right solution to ensure better IT and a more coherent approach. These issues have bedevilled policing for too many years, and since we are having a sensible debate, we must reflect on why, even after more than a decade of rapidly rising resource for policing, we have still ended up with police IT systems that, frankly, are not good enough. They are disjointed, require multiple keyed entry by police officers and add to the bureaucratic burden.