Two cheers for Yvette Cooper’s bid to put more bobbies on the beat

With her announcement of an extra 3,000 neighbourhood police officers, the home secretary is at least trying to deliver something that people want, says John Rentoul

Today, in the politics of offering a better yesterday, Labour is promising to put more bobbies on the beat.

It is the time of year for it because local elections are coming up, outside the big cities. Never mind that local councils don’t run the police and that there are no police and crime commissioner elections this year, bobbies on the beat and a named neighbourhood police officer give canvassers something “local” to say on the doorstep.

Voters with memories longer than those of goldfish will have heard both these promises before. All parties have promised more neighbourhood patrols every year since 1829, when the first police force was created by Robert Peel, Yvette Cooper’s predecessor as home secretary, hence the “bobbies” nickname.

As for today’s promise that “each neighbourhood will have named, contactable officers”, I thought it sounded familiar. There are indeed four officers named on the website as members of my neighbourhood police team in east London, as there have been I think since the last Labour government.

Still, promising things that have already happened and that can be ticked off as having been delivered is an important part of politics: it shows that politicians care about the things that the people care about.

Indeed, much of the politics of policing is about symbolism, rather than reality. You would never guess, for example, that crime in the UK has fallen dramatically since the mid-Nineties. Of course, journalists will always focus on the kinds of crime that are increasing, some of which, such as knife crime, are serious.

It was also accurately reported that overall crime in the year to September, the most recent figures, showed a small increase. But this was an increase from the lowest level ever recorded to the second-lowest – and note that these are “real” figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, not distorted by police recording methods or whether victims reported the crime to the police.

Cooper knows better than to try to tell people that crime is at a historic low. However, she has not handled another symbolic issue so well – that of inquiries into grooming gangs.

She spent a lot of her time in interviews today saying that there was a “huge amount of disinformation” to the effect that she had cancelled them, although she did also try to make the point that “increasing police investigations” was “the most important thing”, because “these perpetrators should be behind bars”.

Most of the rest of her time was spent denying that West Yorkshire Police has a racially discriminatory recruitment policy and that the police generally spend too much of their time suppressing free speech on WhatsApp groups, emails and social media.

So she and Keir Starmer, who joined her for the policing announcement in Cambridgeshire, were not cross-examined in detail about how much new money was being put into Labour’s manifesto promise to put 13,000 more officers into neighbourhood policing roles by 2029.

Today’s announcement was of the first 3,000 of these new bobbies on the beat – but it remains vague about how many will be new and how many will be transferred from other duties.

Yesterday’s news that “safer schools officers” are to be switched from schools in London to “neighbourhood” duties has prompted a debate about whether one headline target is being achieved at the expense of another, although personally, I don’t think that police should be permanently stationed in schools at all.

The bottom line is that the Conservatives undermined confidence in visible policing by cutting spending and police numbers, only to U-turn when the cuts became an election issue for Theresa May in 2017. Real spending per person on “public order and safety” (police and courts) is still 8 per cent lower now than in 2010, as are police officer numbers per head of population. As I say, it is a good thing that crime is at a historically low level, even if most people don’t know it.

Cooper secured a decent increase in police spending in last year’s Budget but that is already beginning to feel like a fleeting golden moment. She is one of the few cabinet ministers who is actually trying to deliver what the people want – along with Wes Streeting, Liz Kendall and Shabana Mahmood.

Cooper has drawn the short straw of ministerial responsibility for the undeliverable promise to smash the gangs of cross-Channel immigration but if she can deliver on the rest of her brief – in particular, if she can cajole police forces into putting more officers in visible roles – she may earn at least a little grudging gratitude from a sceptical electorate.