Police Numbers

Part of Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 4:23 pm on 18 January 2001.

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Photo of Jack Straw Jack Straw The Secretary of State for the Home Department 4:23, 18 January 2001

I may give way shortly.

The right hon. Lady cannot evade responsibility for her own part in what happened. As a Minister in the Home Office, she came to the House in January 1997 to recommend a financial settlement to the police that could provide only a reduction in the number of officers. Yet she boasted of the then Prime Minister's commitment to provide funding for an additional 5,000 police officers over three years.—[Official Report, 29 January 1997; Vol. 289, c. 457.] That funding came into effect a few weeks before the previous general election and was for the 1997–98 financial year. As a result, under that budget and the previous four, numbers fell by 1,500 across the country and by 1,800 in the Metropolitan police.

Faced with the hard truth that police numbers were declining and would have carried on declining—as I shall show in a second—what does the right hon. Lady say? She comes up with an explanation that is so crass that it either raises questions about her intellect that I do not accept or suggests—this was well illustrated earlier—that she has decided to resort to waffle and bluff as a smokescreen to cover the manacles that the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer has attached to her on police spending.

The right hon. Lady has said: If the Home Office could afford almost 3,000 more police officers when you came to power—and did so on a smaller budget—where has all the money gone? That question was returned to her by an incredulous Jim Naughtie, who asked her where she thought all the money had gone, and she said that we were wasting it on bureaucracy, we were wasting it on press officers and we were wasting it on advertising.

We are not wasting the money on bureaucracy because overall staffing at the Home Office has gone down. Our advertising spending is on police recruitment, which I happen to think is quite important. The right hon. Lady chose to refer to press officers, but the number of press officers in the Home Office—I have already admitted to this in parliamentary answers; it is not a secret—has risen. It has risen from 19 to 27; the number has risen by eight. However, she seems to think that, for the audience in the House and across the country, going on about an increase of eight in the number of press officers is somehow an answer to where the money will come from to pay millions and billions of pounds for promises that she could never keep.