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Dr. Jenny Tonge (Richmond Park): In my constituency, efficiency savings have meant the closure of a sub-police station in Ham. Local volunteers kept going until recently, but sadly that will not continue. The main police station in Richmond town centre, an area which is widely regarded by the Metropolitan police as the drinking centre of London, is manned in the evenings only during the summer. For the rest of the time, the residents have to be content with a telephone on the wall. How does my hon. Friend feel about that as an efficiency saving?
Mr. Davey: I share my hon. Friend's concern about that type of efficiency saving. New Malden has also lost a police station, and my constituents tell me that they do not wish to see efficiency savings such as that. The Home Secretary goes on about efficiency savings. Last Thursday, warming to his theme, he quoted the former Conservative Chief Secretary to the Treasury--the quote was taken in turn from the memoirs of Lord Baker--as saying of the police:
- "We have thrown money at them and we have the highest level of crime in our history."
Who could disagree with a search for efficiency savings or with the notion that the police, like all public services, should focus far more on outputs? We do not disagree with that analysis, but we do not share the Government's logic that basic budgets can therefore be cut.
As a member of the Liberal Democrat Treasury team, I studied last year New Zealand's experiment in budget setting by output. Output budgeting drives greater efficiency and enhances accountability because Ministers, Parliament and the public can see more easily how taxes are being spent. The estimates that Parliament receives become thick tomes rather than a few pages. They mean something, and debate can flourish about what is wanted from the police.
We agree with a focus on outputs, but I enter one note of caution. There can be perverse outcomes when budgets for public services are set in terms of outputs, with purchased amounts of services measured and targeted. Towards the end of one financial year, Wellington traffic police had carried out nowhere near the number of breathalyser tests that it was contracted to perform, and to meet its contractual obligation, the police brought Wellington to a standstill, breathalysing almost everyone in a motor vehicle.
Despite such occasional absurdities, output budgeting has largely worked in New Zealand. Directly relevant to this debate is the fact that when a public service analysed what it was trying to achieve, the result was not cuts. Indeed, in many areas, the police realised that more spending was needed.
That is the crucial lesson which I wish to share with Ministers. Focusing fully on outputs, such as reducing fear of crime, might make it clear that more resources are needed. To reduce the fear of crime, we need high-visibility policing, including, at least in some areas, more bobbies on the beat.
I have read the Metropolitan police's policing and efficiency plans for 1999-2000, which were published yesterday, and I saw how Government and the police plans are evolving towards output budgeting. A start has certainly been made. Building on inherited performance targets and indicators, the plans attempt to set out what the Government are trying to achieve with the police and to set out intermediate targets to measure and attain those objectives.
However, detailed consideration of the efficiency plan makes it clear that the Government's approach remains input budgeting. They have set out the outputs that they want, but those outputs are not driving efficiency plans. Instead, those plans are clearly driven by the desperate need to plug the gap in the Met's budget left by Government underfunding rather than by a more strategic analysis of roles, responsibilities and processes.
That is not to say that the efficiency plan is not excellent and might not achieve results similar to those of pure output budgeting: it is, and it might. It is right, for example, to tackle absenteeism and sickness rates, and to reduce them. If that is done, the police officers lost to budget cuts may, at least partially, be offset by the fact that at any one time, fewer officers will be off sick.
It is right to reduce the cost of buildings, to be more efficient in procurement and to use technology to cut costs. However, because the efficiency plan has had to
come up with very large figures for savings, over a short period, setting very ambitious targets, one is left with the concern not only that the targets will not be met, but that something is being lost under this approach. What is being lost might be services or features of the Met police that ought to be retained, such as the police stations mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge).
Let me illustrate the problems with examples from my constituency. Kingston division has been hit hard in recent times. We lost more than 40 officers under the Tories in just the two years before the election. Last year, we were threatened by another round of major cuts, and only by hard lobbying of New Scotland Yard did the police community and consultative group and I manage to bring about a rethink.
Mr. John Greenway (Ryedale):
How many of the 40 officers were in senior ranks?
Mr. Davey:
A few of them were in senior ranks, but many others were ordinary beat officers who have been lost to the Metropolitan police or transferred to inner London. They are certainly not on the streets of Kingston.
Instead of our losing officers, New Malden police station was closed. This year, the Metropolitan police commissioners are back with proposed cuts of 14 officers next year, and eight more from April 2000. All the cuts are the direct result of Government cuts to the Metropolitan police budget.
Kingston is doing its bit towards efficiency drives. In February 1998, Kingston division lost 702 police staff days to sickness. A year later, that had been cut in half to just 328 days, which is excellent. Also excellent is the fact that, with intelligent policing, the burglary rate in Kingston fell last year by 33 per cent.--the fastest fall in any London division. That is brilliant work by the police officers of Kingston division, and I thank and praise them for it.
These efficiency savings and good performances have not prevented the budget shortfall creating other real problems. To start with, New Malden police station remains closed, which is very bad news for an area in which the police presence was appreciated and had a deterrence value. People must go into Kingston to report crime, which may even have distorted crime figures. There is no doubt that closure represents a significant worsening in the police service to New Malden. The sooner the station is reopened, the better.
A second major issue is response times, particularly to areas on the perimeter of the division. The Metropolitan police's policing plan acknowledges how budget cuts are affecting performance:
In Kingston, we have felt the reality of that. Constituents tell me that when there are problems in Chessington, say from a gang of youths on Hook parade, or problems in Worcester park around the station with vandals and graffiti, the police response time has dropped. That is borne out by figures supplied to me by our excellent new chief superintendent, Alan Given, showing that Kingston police
arrived at emergency calls within the 12 minutes target more than 90 per cent. of the time last year, but performance has dropped this year to 85 per cent.
A third issue is concern about recent upsurges in youth crime and petty crime in general. Local people see a direct link between this upsurge and the reduction in the number of permanent beat officers in the division. Gerald Lambert, a local neighbourhood watch co-ordinator, told me this week:
In Kingston, and probably elsewhere in the Metropolitan police area, there is a feeling that when the local police do well, they are punished. There are perverse incentives in the police formula for London. If that formula were fully applied to Kingston, we would lose many, many more police officers. Why? Because crime statistics suggest that we have relatively little crime by comparison with central London, and that there has been a great deal of success in recent years.
Where would such reductions take us? As Roland Kerr, of Kingston Vale neighbourhood watch puts it:
Other places in London are being hit by the cuts. That is why the main focus of this debate is the Londonwide budget. Indeed, my constituents want the whole of London's police to be better resourced. Mr. Higson of the Cambridge Road estate residents association in Kingston put it very well when he wrote:
"In recognition of the increasing demands for police services, and the resource constraints on the Service, the MPS Charter target for responding to emergency calls within 12 minutes has been adjusted from an 85 per cent target to an 80 per cent target".
That is an admission that services are being downgraded.
"More and more I hear neighbours and colleagues telling me that they do not bother to report petty crimes because they are so common, and they know the police do not have the resources to deal with them."
The reality of the cuts is a loss of officers, and no amount of efficiency savings can hide that. It is all very well for the Government to talk about community policing, zero tolerance and tackling persistent youth offenders, but in Kingston, despite superb and improving efforts by the local police, such talk is treated with derision.
"I am appalled not just by the reductions but by the continued reductions, year after year. At the "nth" degree we will have no police".
We must recognise that places such as Kingston are not over-staffed, whatever the formula says. I urge Ministers to revisit the London police resourcing formula to make sure that success in reducing crime in areas such as Kingston is not punished.
"We feel at times government concentrates too much on the cost of fighting crime to the extent they ignore the cost of crime to the citizen."
That brings me back to what are probably the core issues for this debate: whether efficiency savings can make up for real-terms budget cuts facing the Metropolitan police, and whether, when crime is reduced, we should cut back on resources. Efficiency savings ought to be a bonus to a local police force, so that it can develop services, not a continual requirement that must be met if wholesale redundancies are to be avoided. Efficiency savings are difficult to make when total budgets are pared back so much. When will anyone judge that the scale of year-on-year efficiency savings has become impossible to meet? Surely Ministers do not think that that model can continue in perpetuity.
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