Police and Justice Bill

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I am extremely concerned that we will see reductions in full-time police officer numbers in basic command units, as we have seen in Peterborough over the past three years. Fifty-two full-time police officers have been lost, and violent crime has risen from 2,761 offences in 2001 to 5,827 in 2005. In my basic command unit, detection rates are 15 per cent. for burglary, 28 per cent. for sexual offences and 20 per cent. for robbery. I worry that the democratic deficit that will be a consequence of huge regional police forces will mean that the particular policing needs of my constituency and other urban areas will be ignored, as will the specialist policing needs of rural areas under the new regional structure, as my hon. Friends have pointed out. The changes will do nothing to stop the erosion of people’s faith in the criminal justice system. I make no bones about my views. In my maiden speech on 6 June last year, I called for an elected police official for Cambridgeshire. If such an official is called a sheriff, that is fine. I believe that that is important, because I believe that the democratic deficit must be filled. Accountability is needed not only on policing, but on prosecutions at a local level. I know that that issue is slightly different, but it relates to people’s lack of faith in how structures work now. Council tax payers in the Peterborough unitary authority area now pay £46 a head for local policing compared with £20 a head in 1998, and I could entertain the House, if that is the right word, with many similar examples. The Bill reveals the Government’s fetish for structures, rather than focusing on delivery of outcomes. The Government want to talk about structures and avoid real reform, and the police service needs real reform. We need proper accountability by means of an elected sheriff or similar official. We must reform the pay and conditions of police officers, which should relate to skills, competence and results in combating crime, rather than length of service, Buggins’s turn or the canteen culture. Incidentally, I speak as the son of a policemen and as the brother of two policemen, one of whom is serving and the other of whom is an ex-policemen. We need to move away from situations in which policemen have two jobs.