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Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe): If I have counted correctly—he will correct me if I am wrong—the right hon. Gentleman has so far mentioned a total of around 1,300 people. The proportion of the crime prevention budget represented by those people is less than 0.1 per cent. When will the right hon. Gentleman come on to the remaining 99.9 per cent. of our effort?

Mr. Letwin: I will proceed to that. I have considerable respect for the hon. Gentleman, as he knows, but the main problem about these ladies and gentlemen is not the amount that it costs to maintain them—although that is undoubtedly considerable—but the costs that they impose on the system by obscuring it, obfuscating and destroying incentives. How do they engage in the activity of lessening the effectiveness of our police forces? An admirable document has been produced, entitled "The National Policing Plan 2003–2006". I can best describe the wonders of that plan by revealing—I summarise—that it is about ensuring that KPIs fit into BVPIs so that they form part of the PPAF so that they can be made part of the PR so that the PSU can ensure that the Home Office delivers its PSA. That is the great work that is being done under the heading of the national policing plan.

What does that mean in practice? I shall quote at some length—I hope that the House will forgive me—from the magazine "Constabulary":

"the Home Office, attempting to satisfy the Treasury's demand for numerically measurable results, converted the initiative into a bureaucratic obstacle"—

that is, obstacles such as those I mentioned to the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer). The magazine continues:

"They insisted that persistent offenders must be defined as those who had been convicted of at least six offences in the previous 12 months."

The Home Secretary may feel that that is admirable, but the chief constables were not so persuaded. They

"complained that was a definition not of a persistent offender but of a stupid one; that it diverted their efforts from the clever offender who had evaded conviction and also from the imprisoned offender who was about to be released without any recent convictions simply because he had been locked up; that it invited them to go after the schoolgirl who had been caught shoplifting six times but not the habitual burglar who had only been caught twice."

That is an example of my point: the targets distort things.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. David Blunkett): So when the debate on bad character takes place and the Conservatives vote in the House of Lords, will they support us in ensuring that the police

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can take evidence to the courts in situations such as those that he describes, where people have not been jailed for offences?

Mr. Letwin: The Home Secretary and I have a slightly different view of the meaning of justice—that has emerged during the debates on the Criminal Justice Bill. I have never quite believed that being shown to be innocent on several occasions is a good basis for being shown to be guilty on the next. I believe that effective policing is directed towards those people about whom the police have suspicions, but that in court, proof beyond reasonable doubt of the particular offence is the greatest bulwark of our liberties.

Mr. Blunkett: So what is the definition of an "offender"? Is it someone who has been found guilty of an offence, or is it someone who is suspected of having committed an offence but has never been arrested or found guilty of it? Given the right hon. Gentleman's ridiculing of the definition of a persistent offender as one who has been found guilty six times, I presume that he would want to back the police in saying that those who have not been found guilty and designated an offender should now be designated an offender according to that definition.

Mr. Letwin: The Home Secretary needs to engage in a paradigm shift. He seems to believe that my attack is on his target, but the problem lies not only in the target, but in the idea of such a target. The police need to know which people to go after and to go after them, not spend their time working out whether those people fit the definition in the Home Secretary's national policing plan. That is the fundamental difference between us. I accept that he passionately and sincerely wants to get the same result as I do. He wants to get those people behind bars, or at least off the conveyor belt to crime. I accept that there is unity between us on that. He thinks that he can achieve that through bureaucratic targets; I think that it should be done by letting the professionals get on with the job. That is the fundamental difference between us.

Mr. John Denham (Southampton, Itchen): Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it would be sensible if the police went after not only those who are regularly convicted but those who are identified locally—for example, through the national intelligence model—as being a significant cause of crime in the area? If so, does he also agree that the national policing plan, which was published last year, makes it clear to the police that they should pursue the very people being identified by the national intelligence model? What the right hon. Gentleman has portrayed today as the contents of the plan are not in fact the contents of the plan.

Mr. Letwin: I hope that my response will not be seen as unfair, but I very much welcome that intervention because it enables me to remind the former Minister,

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who was to some degree responsible for the national policing plan, just what the chief constables said about it.

Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd): What do they think about your sheriffs?

Mr. Letwin: I think that the hon. Gentleman will reflect in a moment that that might not have been a wise intervention.

I shall quote again from an article in Constabulary:

"For many months, in private, the most senior officers in the land told Mr Blunkett their opinion of this central manifesto of the Government's attack on crime."

That is referring to the national policing plan. I apologise in advance for this, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I hope that what I am about to say is parliamentary language, but it is in a quotation. The article continues,

"One chief constable captured in a single vivid sentence the message his colleagues conveyed: "Frankly, sir, with respect, this is crap."

Mr. Denham: He did not actually ever say that; that is the problem. I hope the House will accept that, although I may not have been present at every meeting that took place between my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the chief police officers, I was there for virtually all of them. I was also present at every meeting at which the Association of Chief Police Officers was represented at the most senior level in drawing up the national policing plan. The right hon. Gentleman quite reasonably quotes from something that has been published in a non-official magazine, but I hope he will accept that those words were never said in relation to the plan, and that the plan was agreed by a whole variety of organisations, including ACPO. It would be wrong to proceed on the basis that things were any different from that.

Mr. Letwin: Because I know that the former Minister—I say this without a hint of irony—is someone who is persistently determined to tell the truth, I accept that the magazine might be wrong in the particular. However, I spend a large amount of my time—as the former Minister used to—going round the police forces of this country, and I hear what chief constables tell me when they are not under the Minister's eye and when they have not been able to be persuaded by the power of the purse. I can assure the House that the chief constables' view of the national policing plan is not something that would make happy reading for Ministers.

We cannot take lightly the demoralisation that these tactics of excessive bureaucracy have created. The gentleman who is currently the Secretary of State for Education and Skills was once a Minister in the Home Office. [Interruption.] I do not know about that. I was not in my present post at the time. I do know, however, that in December 2000, the right hon. Gentleman said one thing that was very true:

"The number of people leaving a profession may be taken as an indicator of morale."—[Official Report, 11 December 2000; Vol. 359, c. 65W.]

That is not a statement by a Conservative or Liberal Democrat spokesman or a Back Bencher; it is a statement by a Minister.

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In 1997, there were 774 resignations from the police forces of this country. In 2001–02, there were 1,644 resignations—an increase of 112 per cent. As we go round the country, the reality strikes us over and over again. I hope that the Home Secretary will attend to this; he must know that it is the case. There is intense demoralisation in our police forces as a result of the amount of bureaucracy with which they are faced. The Home Secretary can deny that to himself or deny it in public as much as he likes, but the fact remains—[Interruption.] It is not fantasy, as the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing, and Community Safety says, chuntering from a sedentary position. If she is so protected by her officials, her cars and her grandeur that she cannot understand what the ordinary police officers of this country are feeling, it is very bad news. I accept that it is difficult for reality to pervade the Home Office, but that is the reality.

Interestingly, at a recent meeting with a prominent chief constable, some of my colleagues were told—I have heard this over and over again—that there is an increasing disinclination at present even to use stop and search because of the Home Secretary's recent proposals to enforce over-burdensome reporting.

On Friday, I was in a police station in East Yorkshire—[Hon. Members: "For begging?"] I had no opportunity to beg. Police officers were telling me time and again that they simply could not bear the number of forms they were now compelled to fill in.

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