§ Dr. CableTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what estimates he has made of(a) the number of traffic police officers and (b) expenditure on traffic police, within (i) the Metropolitan Police and (ii) UK police budgets as a whole (1) at the latest available date and (2) five years ago. [59894]
§ Kate HoeyThe information requested as regards England and Wales is not collected centrally and could be obtained, from each police force, only at disproportionate cost. The allocation of resources to different functions is an operational matter for individual Chief Constables.
Traffic policing does not necessarily occur independently of other police work and the number of officers deployed to the traffic division is not indicative of the money spent on traffic policing. A large part of traffic officers' time is spent dealing with ordinary crime. It is an advantage that traffic officers deal with matters unrelated to traffic and that beat officers will also deal with traffic offences, thus contributing to more efficient ways of policing.
The Commissioner tells me that an internal review showed that there were 760 traffic officers in Metropolitan Police in June 1998, costing £39,436,913. There are no reliable figures available for the number of traffic officers employed five years ago. However, there were 875 traffic officers in post before the Metropolitan Police Service's restructuring in April 1994, at an estimated cost of £41,617,204.