Police: Bureaucracy

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what information her Department holds on the proportion of the working time of (a) all police forces in England and (b) Avon and Somerset Constabulary which was spent on (i) different types of non-frontline duties, (ii) frontline duties spent on incident-related paperwork and (iii) frontline duties not spent on incident-related paperwork in each year since 1997. (274404)

The figures for England and Wales are given in the table. Figures for individual forces should be requested from the force in question.

*Table 1: Front-line policing, incident-related paperwork, and other activities, by year, for England and Wales*¹
Percentage
	Front-line policing (FLP)	All other activities	Incident-related paperwork	FLP excluding incident-related paperwork
2003-04	63.6	36.4	10.3	53.3
2004-05	62.3	37.7	9.9	52.4
2005-06	63.6	36.4	10.8	52.8
2006-07	64.2	35.8	11.4	52.8
2007-08	64.9	35.1	12.4	52.5
¹ Data for Staffordshire are not available for 2007-08 and these figures therefore exclude Staffordshire.

Volume 492: debated on Friday 15 May 2009