Policing

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I again place on the record that she has been tireless in her advocacy on behalf of her constituents and in challenging me about police resources. I hope that she will welcome the additional investment in her police force, if the police and crime commissioner maximises the precept flexibility, and she will be looking forward to holding the PCC to account on how those resources are allocated.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

Londoners are absolutely sick and tired of the spectacle of Tory MPs crying crocodile tears in their local papers about police station closures, and then coming to the House to cheerlead the cuts that make them necessary, but perhaps that is why London Tory MPs are an endangered species. Is not what the Minister has announced today the worst of all worlds? He is asking people to pay more in taxes, he is cutting support from central Government and he is still not giving the police the funding they need to tackle the crime that is blighting our communities.

[Mr Hurd]

Now the hon. Gentleman has got that entirely artificial rant out of his system, let us examine the facts. The proposals to close police stations are controversial in London, but they are the decisions not of the Government but of the democratically elected—as it happens, Labour—Mayor, and he is accountable for that. The Mayor has got most such decisions wrong, but I see he is changing many of them—he certainly is in my area—and I congratulate him on doing so. The fact of the matter is that the Metropolitan police, and I speak as a London MP, is relatively well resourced compared with the rest of the system.

[Wes Streeting]

Get real!

[Mr Hurd]

The hon. Gentleman tells me to get real, but the reality is that if we look at the performance of the London Met now as compared with 2008, there are—on the latest figures I have seen—100,000 fewer crime incidents and broadly the same number of police officers, and it is £700 million a year cheaper for it to run the policing system. In his world, those are cuts; in my world, they are efficiencies. The Met does a great job and is on a journey to becoming even more efficient, and this funding settlement, with the increased investment for it, will help it to do so.