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Police spend eight minutes an hour on beat
Police officers spend only eight minutes in every hour out on patrol despite Government pledges to cut bureaucracy, new figures have revealed.
By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent
Home Office data for the 43 police forces in England and Wales show that just 13.8 per cent of police time was spent on patrol in 2007-08.
It means that in a typical 12-hour shift worked by an officer, an average of only one hour and 39 minutes is spent on the beat.
Time spent on patrol has fallen in recent years. In 2004-5 it accounted for 15.2 per cent of police time, but the figure declined steadily to a low-point of just 13.2 per cent in 2006-7, before recovering very slightly last year.
The figures, released by ministers in response to questioning by Conservative MP Paul Bone, show that the Government has failed to secure a significant improvement in the amount time spent on frontline policing, despite massive investment in new neighbourhood teams.
The Tories claimed the statistics were evidence of Labour's failure to combat red tape in the criminal justice system. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: "This latest figure demonstrates not only that police are spending a woefully small amount of time on the beat, but also that this problem is getting worse.
"This is because of the plethora of Whitehall targets that Labour have heaped on the police.
"We cannot even begin to combat the scourge of crime that is blighting communities up and down the country while we have our police spending 85 per cent of their time off the beat."
Another set of figures on "frontline police activity", as defined by the Home Office, shows an increase of just 0.6 per cent in the past three years, to 64 per cent. The tiny improvement means that officers still spend more than a third of their time on non-frontline duties.
Home Office ministers have previously admitted that the frontline policing measure includes time officers spend in police stations completing paperwork relating to an incident.
Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, which represents 140,000 rank-and-file officers, said the figures reflected the experience of constables on the beat.
"I am not surprised to hear that the amount of time officers are spending on patrol has shown little increase," he said.
"This is what is reflected by anecdotal evidence on the ground, where officers tell us that they are absolutely over-burdened by bureaucracy, form-filling and sitting in front of computer screens, when they want to be out fighting crime and fighting criminals.
"It is disappointing to see that despite so many initiatives across the country, including many from Whitehall, officers are still not able to get on with the job they want to do."
But the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Ken Jones, insisted that measuring the time spent on patrol was an unfair yardstick for police performance.
"The measure is artificial," he said. "If senior officers allocated officers to be highly visible the figure would be higher, but if you want them to catch thieves they become drawn into more and more bureaucracy.
"The Government have made commitments to deliver on cutting red tape. It is a huge challenge but I do detect a real mood swing amongst politicians, both in government and in opposition."
A Home Office spokesman said: "The percentage of time spent on patrol needs to be considered alongside other activities. Time spent on patrol refers only to time when an officer is patrolling, but engaged in no other duty.
"Activity - such as advice to a member of the public - carried out while on patrol is recorded separately."
Figures obtained by The Sunday Telegraph last year showed that only one in 58 officers is on patrol at any given time, taking account of shift patterns, weekends, holidays, breaks and time spent on other duties.
Just 2,400 out of the 143,000 officers in England and Wales were out on the beat at any one time, or about four officers for every town of 90,000 people.
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