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Mr. Letwin: The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting speech. First, does he agree that, according to the evidence, the constable involved in that project was not often on the streets? That seems to me to vitiate much of what has been said publicly. I am glad to note that the Home Secretary agrees.
Secondly, does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is not solely, or primarily, a question of reassurance, but primarily a question of preventing crime and disorder where it would otherwise occur, and depriving the criminal fraternity or gang of the environment in which crime persists?
Mr. Oaten: I take the right hon. Gentleman's point. There is a danger in some of the simplistic language that we have all used in speaking of increasing the number of police. The three main political parties tend to become involved in a Dutch auction in which we hear 9,000 from the Government, 10,000 from the Liberal Democrats and 40,000 from the Conservatives. That approach is too simplistic. We should try to make a genuine assessment. Perhaps what we need is an independent assessment of the number of police who are actually needed. I probed the right hon. Gentleman on that because I was horrified that he had plucked the 40,000 figure from the air on the basis of some evidence from America. A system based on such evidence does not strike me as sufficiently robust. To take the heat off the issue, the three parties should possibly assign a standing commission or review body to establish a realistic level of policing that is needed.
Let me deal with the Conservative proposals in more detail. The right hon. Gentleman was prepared to take many interventions on the generality of the issue, but was not prepared to take many relating to the detail and substance of the proposals. He believes in devolution, or localism, and as a Liberal I support that. I do not want
to knock the Conservatives' suggestions, because they are genuinely trying to achieve a different form of delivery, and we support that trend. It contrasts slightly with the Government's approach during their first five or six years in office—although I am interested to note that over the past year they have placed much more emphasis throughout the public services on the need for fewer targets, and the need to devolve down and let go. The difficulty is that there is too much of the nanny state in this Government for them to be prepared to let go.
Mr. Blunkett: Kiss granny good night.
Mr. Oaten: I would thoroughly recommend that to the Home Secretary. Political thinking is, however, moving in the right direction. I do not think that the Conservatives have responded to many of the dilemmas relating to letting go of control. The most astonishing feature is the 40,000 figure: I am bewildered by how they arrived at it. The right hon. Gentleman is living in a fairytale world if he thinks that the cash needed to fund additional police numbers can be based on stumbling across some island for asylum seekers.
Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes): Where?
Mr. Oaten: Let us set aside for a moment not just the "where" question, but some of the legal issues arising from the Geneva convention on refugees, before even getting on to the subject of cost. Until we get answers to these questions, voters would be well advised to take the figure of 40,000 with a large pinch of salt. If the target is not to be met from some magical island, the shadow Home Secretary will have a difficult job convincing his shadow Chancellor to fund the proposals, given the shadow Chancellor's agenda to cut public spending.
Mr. Letwin: I am sure that in due course we will have many happy hours debating our asylum proposals. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will bear it in mind that in a couple of months he will hear a great deal from us about how we intend to tackle the legal issues. I expect that we will not agree about them, but our proposals will be clear-minded and extremely radical.
Mr. Oaten: I cannot wait. If the right hon. Gentleman can bring an atlas and identify the island, that would be useful. Perhaps he could also help me understand the 40,000 figure. We have no published costings for it, so the best analysis that I have been able to come up with is that he took a calculator and keyed in the budget for the immigration and nationality directorate, which happily comes to £1.74 billion. He then pressed the appropriate button and divided that sum by the cost of training and paying a police constable—about £44,000 a year. Magically, that produced the figure of 40,000 police officers. I suspect that that is where the figure came from, not just from New York. Perhaps he will provide a more reasoned explanation for the costing.
Mr. Letwin: So that the debate does not continue tediously, let me explain that the savings of about £1 billion in the asylum and immigration system that we hope to achieve, which we can debate in due course, are
intended to fund only the first four years of the programme, at about £50,000 a head. It is the New York experience, not the asylum facts, that leads us to the numbers. I have been entirely open about the fact that we do not yet know how we would fund the second Parliament of a Conservative Government, and I admit that I am not yet ready to assume that there will be a second Parliament of a Conservative Government, although I very much hope that there will be.
Mr. Oaten: In the unlikely event that the right hon. Gentleman gets the first one, we will see what happens with the second one.
Mr. Blunkett: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if the figure is based entirely on the New York ratio, and New York lost 3,000 police officers last year, as it did, the figure is now down to 37,000 officers, presumably achieving the same goal?
Mr. Oaten: The Home Secretary highlights the folly of basing a system in this country on the system in New York.
I shall deal now with elected police authorities and elected sheriffs. If, under the system, decisions about money are to be devolved, it is difficult to see how the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) would be able to achieve the targets. Would there be some binding condition that the money that came through had to be spent on extra police? If that were not a binding condition, what controls would be in place to make sure that the target of 40,000 could be achieved?
An important issue is involved. If £1.8 billion is available for extra policing, has the Conservative party worked out that extra police represent the best use of that money? Are there other police priorities that should be put in place? How does the Conservative party know that the number of extra police should be 20,000, 40,000 or 60,000?
I welcome the record number of police officers announced by the Secretary of State earlier this month, and I hope that the Government will not allow numbers to slip, as they did in 1997. If major new resources are to be spent on further increases, such as the Conservatives suggest, surely that should be on the basis of evidence. I ask the right hon. Member for West Dorset to get out of the bidding war and join me in calling for a standing commission on policing. Such a body, independent of Government and staffed by experts, should examine the case for a large increase in police numbers, consider the costs and the potential benefits, and recommend a figure towards which we could all work.
I shall touch on a couple of other aspects of the Conservative proposals. We did not hear much about sheriffs. I am not sure whether the right hon. Gentleman even mentioned the word. It did not feature in the consultation paper, but it featured prominently in the press coverage last week. Sheriffs were an idea imported from England and were ideally suited to the lawless conditions of the wild west, but is the lawlessness of Bristol and Manchester the lawlessness of Dodge City and the wild frontier? Can we expect sheriffs to go out on a Saturday night and take direct control? The American model of policing is not necessarily suited to this country. For a start, in America there are 18,000 US
police departments. Imagine the issues of joined-up working if we moved towards much greater devolution along those lines. Assuming that sheriff powers were to be meaningful, another nightmare scenario was raised earlier. How would the right hon. Gentleman feel about the prospect of a BNP-sponsored candidate winning a directly elected election on a low turnout in, say, Bradford or Oldham? We trust our police to wield their power for the good of the whole community, not in the interests of one section of it, but there is a danger that that could start to happen in the event of such elections.There is another danger. The areas that most need reform and change may be those in which the electorate are less likely to get engaged in the process. We could end up with a chattering class culture of people who are heavily involved, while people in areas with more problems to be tackled are not involved.
Mr. James Paice (South-East Cambridgeshire): I join other Members in congratulating the hon. Gentleman on his appointment.
Is it not somewhat odd that although the Liberals espouse a local income tax—in other words, local people paying a local tax decided by local representatives—the hon. Gentleman does not want to give such local representatives any control over the police?
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