Police (New Technology) (Hansard, 14 March 1996)

§ 6. Mr. Tipping
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how he intends to fund developments in new technology to free police officers from paperwork and administrative duties. [18987]

§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. David Maclean)
The development of new technology for the police service is one of my highest priorities and resources are being provided accordingly. The private finance initiative has a major part to play in bringing forward new systems which will streamline the administrative burden on the police.

§ Mr. Tipping
Is this not a Government who have piled one lot of paperwork on top of another through successive Criminal Justice Acts? Is this not a Government who have cut the number of police officers by 186 between September 1992 and March 1995? Is this not a Government who plan to cut capital expenditure next year by £23 million? Are those not prime examples of the Government saying one thing but doing another?

§ Mr. Maclean
That was a prime example of an hon. Member being handed a question which he did not understand and reading it out verbatim. If he bothers to look at the facts, he will find that we are revolutionising police work by new systems—[Horn. MEMBERS: "Reading."] If the hon. Gentleman bothers to look at the facts, he will see that we are revolutionising police work by the introduction of the new national automated fingerprint identification system, NAFIS, costing £100 million; of the Phoenix police national computer, also at enormous cost; and of the new digital radio systems for the police, on which development work is proceeding apace, which will cost about £500 million. All in all, we have spent £750 million on police technology during the past five years and we expect to spend the same during the next five years.

§ Mr. Nicholas Winterton
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on that detailed and helpful response to the original question. Does he accept that closed circuit television is also a new technology, the installation of which in town centres can be of immense benefit to the police in reducing and deterring crime? Will my right hon. Friend consider sympathetically an application that is shortly to be submitted to his Department by Macclesfield borough council and the Cheshire constabulary for the installation of closed circuit television in Macclesfield, a development that is widely supported by retailers, local people and their Member of Parliament?

§ Mr. Maclean
The people of Macclesfield have no better advocate for their CCTV system than my hon. Friend. We are not just sympathetic to CCTV technology; we have positively encouraged it, with the £5 million of taxpayers' money that we put into the scheme last year and the £15 million that we are putting into it this year. With the future promises of expenditure on CCTV, we believe that we can have a further 10,000 CCTV cameras around Britain.

§ Mr. Winterton
And in Macclesfield?

§ Mr. Maclean
We shall consider carefully all applications, including that from Macclesfield, and the hundreds of others that I expect to receive.