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Mr. Ian Bruce (South Dorset): This is a short debate. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman is about to come to the kernel of his speech--I am sure that he is--and tell us how much more a Labour Government would give the police. Surely, any other words condemning the Government are sheer hypocrisy.
Mr. Michael: No. I am going straight to the target of the debate, which is the Government's hypocrisy in making a statement that makes it appear that they are giving money to the police, when they are in fact picking the pockets of local people to obtain the sums that are at the bottom of the finance sheet. That is what our debate should be about: that needs to be exposed.
Let me remind the House what the Conservative party promised the British people before the last general election. Page 22 of its manifesto stated:
Miss Widdecombe:
Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that we did, in fact, approve sufficient funds for 1,000 additional officers in 1992-93, that some police
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Mr. Michael:
I shall come to the numbers in a moment, but it is a fact that, in 1992-93, responsibility for deciding police establishment and police numbers had not been taken away from the Home Office. That happened in the 1994 Act. The Minister cannot evade responsibility on behalf of her colleagues. In fact, police numbers went down during that year.
It is, of course, right for police authorities to be able to consider what is best for their areas, and to agree with the chief constable the balance between spending on equipment and personnel, between police officers and civilians and at each rank. It is pretty obvious that the only reason Ministers were willing to allow subsidiarity is that they believed that it would let them off the hook in reducing police budgets in real terms.
As we predicted, police numbers went down. Before the last election, the annual report projected a total of 129,425 police officers by March 1966. The Home Office has confirmed that on 31 March 1996 the total number of officers was 126,878--more than 2,500 below the number promised. As the Prime Minister promised to fund an extra 5,000 police officers over three financial years, commencing in April 1996, it is pertinent to ask the Minister what the base line is. Is it the number of officers in March 1996 or the number of officers that, in 1992, Ministers promised there would be in 1996? Is it perhaps the number of officers before the last election, plus the 1,000 officers promised then?
That question has not been answered by the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary, although it has been asked many times. It would provide an honest starting point if Ministers answered that question: sadly, it would be an academic answer, because the latest Home Office figures show that the total number of police officers in England and Wales in September 1996 was 500 lower than the number in March 1992, immediately before the general election.
Mr. Stephen:
On the subject of questions that have not been answered, surely the point put to the hon. Gentleman by my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Mr. Bruce) is right: the hon. Gentleman cannot stand at the Dispatch Box and say that more central Government money must be devoted to the police, but refuse to commit his party to putting any more central Government money in.
Mr. Michael:
The hon. Gentleman seems not to have understood the importance of what I am saying. His party went to the 1992 general election promising 1,000 additional police officers and has not delivered that. It is now promising an additional 5,000 police officers, and it is not providing the resources or putting in the money to meet the Prime Minister's promise.
I understand that Conservative Members are practising for opposition. They want to question Ministers and we are prepared to practise answering questions, but, at the moment, it is the Conservative Government's pledges that are under scrutiny. I pledge that we will at least deliver what we promise. The basic point is that, when he spoke
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Miss Widdecombe:
As the hon. Gentleman deludes himself utterly that he is practising for government--I assure him that he is not--perhaps he could give us a foretaste of exactly what his Government will do and answer the question that was aptly put to him. How much more would a Labour Government spend on the police, and has the right hon. Member for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown) agreed to that spending?
Mr. Michael:
I look forward to the first Home Office questions after the general election, when I hope that it will be appropriate for the hon. Lady to ask the questions. She should be more interested in providing a cogent explanation of why she serves in a Government whose Prime Minister promised 1,000 extra police officers and failed to deliver that, and why her settlement today fails to deliver the promise. That is the sort of Prime Minister and Government that we have. That is why it is about time they were swept away.
The practical effect, for instance, in London is that, since the last general election, the number of police officers has fallen by 1,000. In an intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) referred to Merseyside. Between March 1992 and September 1996, the number of police officers in Merseyside went down by 351. It will lose another 215 by 2001. The people of Wirral, with whom I discussed police issues last week and again a few weeks ago, will not be impressed by that failure to support the police in Merseyside, which is implicit in the Minister's statement today.
Miss Widdecombe:
Does not Merseyside still have more police officers per 1,000 head of population than any other force outside London? As money is allocated on the basis of population, is it not also true that the Merseyside population is decreasing and that the number of officers in that force, as in others, is a matter for the chief constable?
Mr. Michael:
That is a little essay for the defence, I suppose. Merseyside has considerable crime problems. The police in Merseyside whom I visited a few weeks ago face chronic problems. The people of Wirral to whom I was listening only days ago said that they were unhappy with the lack of resources for the Merseyside police. The settlement makes matters worse for the people of Merseyside.
Ms Eagle:
Does my hon. Friend agree that the people of Wirral are extremely unhappy with being forced to pay a 50 per cent. increase in their council tax precept for the police service in the past three years, yet they have many fewer officers than before the increases?
Mr. Michael:
My hon. Friend is right. It is interesting that local people--this was clear in Wirral--see through what the Government have been up to. Those people recognise that promises are made and not kept, and that
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The Government's record on police numbers is not good. The police have to deal with worse problems because of the huge increase in crime over which the Tories have presided. Violent crime is up by 163 per cent. compared with 1979, crime has doubled and criminals are three times more likely to get away with violent crimes than in 1979 when Labour was in office. The facts about police numbers are clear. Under the Labour Government, the average increase in the number of police officers was more than 700 a year, much greater than under the Conservatives. Since 1989, the increase has been only 127 a year. Under the Labour Government, there was less crime and a greater commitment to policing and the future bodes better for the police and the public than for the past few years.
Let us put all that history behind us and look at what has happened since the Prime Minister made his new promise to fund extra officers. Last year's police grant report included an extra £20 million for the first tranche of additional officers. However, as I said in last year's debate and as is made plain on page 154 of the Home Office annual report, the capital grants allocated to police authorities were reduced by £23 million from the previous year, and that in itself was a reduction of £19 million compared with what was promised on page 126 of the 1995 Home Office annual report. I do not think that Ministers want us to look closely at the figures, but those figures are in documents that were published by the Home Office, and they cannot escape them.
It is fine for Ministers to say that they will provide extra money for police officers, but, if they keep cutting the capital budget every year, how on earth is the force expected to keep up with increased expenditure on more police, uniforms and police cars, not to mention side-handled batons and pepper sprays and all the other innovations that the Home Secretary has announced in press releases in the past couple of years? That is the context in which we look at this year's settlement.
The Home Office issued two press releases giving the joyous news that police grant was up 3.7 per cent. and that total police spending power was up 3.7 per cent. Perhaps the general public and even informed journalists were fooled by that information into thinking that the Government were giving the police an increase of 3.7 per cent. this year. I hope that the representatives of the press who are covering the debate will be fair on the Minister; I am not sure that that will have the desired effect suggested by the hon. Member for Shoreham (Mr. Stephen), because, if the Government are dealt with fairly, the coverage will be extremely critical.
I am sure that the Home Secretary cannot have harboured such dishonourable intent, but I thought it sensible to seek further clarification in case anyone felt the slightest bit misled. Just before Christmas, I tabled parliamentary questions so that the Home Secretary could clarify the position to the House. His answer appeared in columns 269-70 of the Official Report of Wednesday 15 January 1997: the increase in total Government grants to police authorities was just 2.2 per cent. but there was a flaw in the answer because it did not include the capital grants.
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I have today received a list of the capital grants that have been allocated to each police authority and they show why the Home Secretary chose not to include them in his totals. The grants are down again this year to below last year's figure, which in itself was £20 million short.
By my calculations, the real increase in Government support to the police is just £117 million, a rise of less than 2 per cent. Where is the rest of the money that enabled the Home Secretary to claim a 3.7 per cent. increase without in any way misleading the House? The answer in the Official Report of Wednesday 15 January makes it clear that the Government intend to ask local government taxpayers to stump up the cash. The Minister's figures are based on the Government's contribution going up by a miserable 1.8 per cent. and the cash demanded from local authorities going up by an average of 14 per cent.
"We are continuing to increase police numbers. There will be 1,000 extra officers this year."
That intention was confirmed by the Home Office annual report, published in March in the run-up to that general election. It stated:
"The Government plans to increase police establishments further in 1992-93 by nearly 1,000 police officers."
Once the general election was over, the Conservative party reneged on that promise. I suspect that it was partly because of the constant scrutiny from Opposition Members that Ministers decided, in 1994, to absolve themselves of responsibility for setting the police establishment by devolving decisions to chief constables through the Police and Magistrates' Courts Act 1994. When we were debating that legislation, we said we thought that that curious conversion to the devolving of responsibilities might have something to do with an intention to cut police numbers, and we were right.
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