Police: Records

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Absolutely. The whole principle of policing is that it represents and is accountable to the local community. If I may say so to the noble Lord, it is still absolutely vital that we get best value out of the police resources that are put in. It is a valuable course of action to follow to find mechanisms to ensure that police forces can co-operate, where they want to, on getting a better deal for the taxpayer on some major procurement or on efficiencies generally. When the police White Paper is published relatively shortly, it will offer a number of pointers for where that co-operation can potentially be encouraged.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, the rural task force was first set up by North Yorkshire Police and has been quite a success in preventing urban criminals coming into rural areas. Do the Government plan to roll out rural task forces in other parts of the country?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

A lot of those decisions are for locally elected police and crime commissioners or, in some cases, mayors, who have responsibility via their deputy mayors for policing. We are concerned to ensure that we look at a number of areas to do with rural policing. The Government are focused on a number of aspects here including equipment theft, sheep worrying and shoplifting in smaller towns. We are trying to encourage police forces to buy in to some of our general pushes. All police forces have had additional police officers this year to meet some of their targets, particularly on shop theft and anti-social behaviour.