Cooper: Police cuts worse than thought as Tories miscounted ‘thousands’ of roles

Potentially “thousands” of policing roles were miscounted by the last government, meaning cuts to officer numbers were “even worse” than expected, the Home Secretary has said.

Yvette Cooper told MPs the Conservative government had cut the number of neighbourhood policing officers “probably by more than 10,000”, but that the method of measuring was “so ropey and so all over the place we can’t even be certain what the precise cuts were”.

The Government’s new Crime and Policing Bill includes a range of measures from tackling knife crime to anti-social behaviour, which will be supported by the recruitment of 13,000 extra neighbourhood policing roles.

Opening the debate on the Bill’s second reading, Ms Cooper told MPs: “Already, the police forces have been working with the Home Office on plans, some ways to recruit new police officers, some to recruit new PCSOs, some to redeploy existing police officers, but then to backfill by recruiting other officers to take up their posts as well.”

She added: “I have to tell the House that the cuts to neighbourhood policing over the last decade were even worse than we had thought.

“The previous Conservative government was so indifferent to neighbourhood policing that they did not even keep a proper count of who was doing that work.

“They treated, too often, the neighbourhood police officers just the same as 999 response officers or local detective teams, and the Home Office guidance actually allowed forces to report some of their response officers as neighbourhood police instead, and they didn’t have proper checks in place.

“As a result, I can tell the House that hundreds and even thousands of officers and PCSOs were miscounted under the last government and the Home Office and National Police Chiefs’ Council will, later this month, have to publish revised force-by-force figures so that communities properly can see what is happening in their area.”

Ms Cooper said the Tories “halved the number of PCSOs”, adding “they’ve curbed the number of neighbourhood police officers, probably by more than 10,000”.

She continued: “But you know what? We can’t even be precise, because their measuring of neighbourhood police officers was so ropey and so all over the place we can’t even be certain what the precise cuts were.

“This Government is committed to increasing neighbourhood policing and PCSOs by 13,000.”

On the Bill’s other measures, Ms Cooper outlined changes designed to tackle knife crime.

Ms Cooper said: “The Bill increases from six months to two years imprisonment the maximum penalties for offences relating to the sale and possession of offensive weapons.”

She added: “We will also bring forward amendments to the Bill in this House to introduce stricter age verification checks, the stringent two-step age verification system for online knife sales so customers have to submit photo ID at the point of purchase and again on delivery, and it’ll be a legal requirement to hand a package containing a knife to a buyer alone.”

Ms Cooper said amendments will also be brought forward to introduce “personal liability measures for senior managers of online platforms that fail to take action on illegal content concerning knives and offensive weapons”.

She added: “We’ll introduce a requirement for sellers to notify bulk or suspicious sales of knives to the police because we’ve seen cases where effectively young people were able to become effectively arms traders buying huge numbers of illegal weapons that should not have been sold to them and then distribute them in the community as well.”

The Bill would also establish a new criminal offence of spiking and stop registered sex offenders who continue to pose a threat from changing their name.

They would only be able to change their name on official documents such as passports, or aliases or names online, if officers monitoring them agreed to it.

Ms Cooper added: “It’ll also make grooming an aggravated factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences as these are some of the most vile and damaging of crimes.”

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp accused the Government of “copying and pasting” large parts of the Bill from previous Conservative proposals.

Mr Philp said: “I congratulate her for using the CTRL+C and CTRL+V function on her Home Office computer, and emulating so many of the measures in the previous Bill.”

He also warned that police numbers could be cut if more funding is not provided, telling the House: “The funding pressures this coming financial year, which starts in just a few weeks’ time, are about £116 million more than the funding increase. There is a gap.

“The consequence of that gap is that police forces across England and Wales, the 43 forces, may have to cut 1,800 officers in order to make that funding shortfall up.”

He added the Tories will table an amendment to the Bill calling for a statutory national inquiry into grooming gangs to be established.

Mr Philp added: “For some reason, the Government have only set up local inquiries in five areas. Some local authorities are refusing to hold inquiries, which I think is scandalous. We know about 50 towns are affected, so having inquiries into just five of those towns is not good enough.”

He went on: “We need a national statutory inquiry and we intend to amend this Bill to do that if the Government won’t agree to one. We need to get to the truth.”

The Bill later received an unopposed second reading and will undergo further scrutiny at a later date.