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Mr. Blunkett: It is important to put it on record that we have not introduced the new reforms to stop and search in East Yorkshire.
Mr. Letwin: Is that not remarkable? It was not in East Yorkshire but elsewhere that the report about stop and search was given to a colleague. I will have a private conversation with the Home Secretary and tell him where it was. In East Yorkshire, coppers were showing me other forms that they had to fill in and were telling me of their demoralisation. I have no reason to suppose that they were trying to mislead me; they were giving me an impression that emerges over and over again.
There is another point that is at least as important, if not more so, as demoralisation, resignations, chief constables feeling that their priorities are distorted or complaints by the Police Federation, although all those are of some importance. The most important point is where the attention lies. As in any organisation, the effectiveness of the police will depend on where they are focused. They can be focused only on one of two places. They can either look upwards to the Home Office or downwards to the customers they are meant to be serving: the populations on whose behalf they are policing. It is not possible to face in both directions at once.
The common experience of people at all levels in the police force today is that they are being driven to look upwards, which will diminish and not increase their attention to their customers. In May, the chairman of the Police Federation said:
- "We are seeing more and more priorities, targets and diktats handed down from the centre but often they fail to reflect public concerns and divert—that is my point—police resources away from the kind of policing the public want and indeed the style of policing that can make a genuine difference to tackling disorder."
Mr. Robert Key (Salisbury): Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Home Office police forces also need to look sideways? If he casts his mind back to a visit to Bulford in my constituency, he will recall that he came across the Ministry of Defence Police's DARE—drug abuse resistance education—project, which is educating children in schools against drugs and alcohol. He will recall that, in many areas, Home Office police forces are working closely with the MOD police and the military police and we must see this in the round if we are serious about neighbourhood policing.
Mr. Letwin: Of course my hon. Friend is right. The DARE project is a good example of the long-term attitude to policing that I am recommending. I suspect that not a single target set by the Home Office has ever been brought closer to fulfilment by the DARE project. I suspect that if chief constables were to follow exclusively the recommendations of the national policing plan and try to fulfil the targets set for them by the Home Office—I pray that that will never be their sole objective—they would pay no attention all to the DARE project, which seeks to lead youngsters away from drugs. The Home Secretary wants that to happen just as much as I do, but he is creating an apparatus that has the opposite effect.
James Purnell (Stalybridge and Hyde): The right hon. Gentleman has been speaking for nearly half an hour and has not even mentioned his policy from his party conference about increasing police numbers. Is that because it has fallen apart so badly that he has already ditched the policy? If he is not to have targets, performance monitoring or a national police plan, how will he enforce his policy in the first place?
Mr. Letwin: I am sorry to ask the hon. Gentleman to exhibit just one and a half minutes' more patience, but my next plan of action is indeed to mention our policy.
Mr. Letwin: I have taken many interventions from Labour Members, I hope to the benefit of debate, but I shall take none further as I have been invited to pursue this issue.
Before I move on to describing the alternative that we proposed at our party conference, and which we will continue to propose during the next 18 months—hopefully, we will eventually have the opportunity to implement it—I want to point out that it is not just the Conservative party, the constabularies of this country and ordinary electors who have noticed that there is a problem. The Home Secretary certainly speaks the language of community policing, and as if he wants to increase the focus on the customer, but that does not persuade even The Guardian—a journal which I think supports the Labour party on the whole. One of its leaders stated:
- "New Labour doublespeak continues: much talk of devolution to local basic command units, while new powers are consolidated at the centre. Stalinism won't work because constables have to have discretion."
I want to congratulate the Home Secretary, although I hope that he will not object and think it a brussels sprout congratulation. [Interruption.] The Home Secretary referred to me in that way in his party conference speech, so it is his phrase, not mine. I want to congratulate him on increasing very significantly this year the rate at which he is increasing police numbers. Some 9,000 extra coppers have been recruited since the election. The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) reduced police numbers when in his previous post, which was not the right direction in which to go; indeed, he needed a little encouragement in such matters. To the current Home Secretary's credit, he has increased police numbers, which is marvellous. We have 9,000 extra coppers—just 1,000 fewer than the number of additional administrators taken on since this Government took office.
The strike rate is now respectable. As I understand it, the Home Secretary has allowed the police forces to employ more than 4,000 additional coppers in the financial year. Marvellous. That rate now needs to continue for seven or eight more years. We need to achieve a figure of some 40,000 additional police officers, and I do not believe—I hope I am not being over-optimistic—that any Labour Member in the House today, or anyone who has the right to sit on the Labour Benches, disagrees with that well-known fact.
Mr. Mark Oaten (Winchester): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Letwin: I would not normally do so, but as the hon. Gentleman is making his first appearance in the House in his current guise, I feel compelled to give way.
Mr. Oaten: I am most grateful. Can the right hon. Gentleman explain how he arrived at the 40,000 figure? What independent assessment informed him that this country needs 40,000 extra police officers?
Mr. Letwin: I shall indeed tell the hon. Gentleman how we came by that figure: it is not an independent
assessment—it is ours. Indeed, it is the responsibility of a possible future Government to assess that matter. We looked at the level of policing available in New York, which is the most successful example of neighbourhood policing in the world. Since it began its new neighbourhood policing and its serious attack on disorder, it has reduced crime by about 60 per cent. on a sustained basis over 10 years.The level of policing that we recommend for this country is per capita almost identical to that in New York. That was the basis on which we derived our figures. We then cross-checked—this will interest the hon. Member for Winchester who is also concerned about rural areas—against the question of how we could be sure that a police officer would be available for every parish in this country. We found, not altogether to our surprise, that roughly the same number would enable that to occur. If this country were one in which our cities were policed as in New York and in which our rural areas were able, after many years of failure, to have a police officer in charge of the parish who knew the parish, it would make a huge difference to public confidence in the control of public order in this country.
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