(2) what estimate he has made of the proportion of the working day spent by police officers, (a) on front-line duties and (b) in completing (i) all administrative forms and (ii) stop and search forms in the latest period for which figures are available.
Figures for all forces for front-line policing and for paperwork at a national level are given in the following tables. Figures for paperwork for individual forces should be sought from those forces, as it is not possible for the Home Office to release them without incurring disproportionate cost. The Home Office does not collect data on time spent on stop and search routinely, but we estimate that hand written completion of stop and search forms on the street takes on average three to seven minutes. The time spent on completing the form depends on the circumstances of the individual stop.
Figures are not available on a force by force basis.
Percentage Time spent on incident-related paperwork 12.4 Time spent on non incident-related paperwork 9.3 Total time spent on paperwork 21.7 Time spent on patrol3 13.8 Frontline policing measure4 64.9 1 The information is taken from activity analysis, which is collected by all forces over a two-week period in each year and provides a snapshot of how officers are deployed. 2 Excluding Staffordshire. 3 Includes officers on foot/car/beat patrol, CID and traffic officers. 4 The frontline policing measure includes activities other than those shown in the table such as dealing with crimes and non-crime incidents.
Force Frontline policing measure (percentage) Avon and Somerset 58.9 Bedfordshire 67.6 Cambridgeshire 64.3 Cheshire 63.9 City of London 67.8 Cleveland 60.8 Cumbria 62.3 Derbyshire 71.2 Devon and Cornwall 61.3 Dorset 71.4 Durham 57.3 Dyfed-Powys 61.9 Essex 64.3 Gloucestershire 69.2 Greater Manchester 58.8 Gwent 70.9 Hampshire 66.1 Hertfordshire 66.8 Humberside 64.9 Kent 68.1 Lancashire 63.0 Leicestershire 64.5 Lincolnshire 63.4 Merseyside 63.0 Metropolitan Police 65.1 Norfolk 68.2 North Wales 63.8 North Yorkshire 63.2 Northamptonshire 64.7 Northumbria 71.2 Nottinghamshire 72.1 South Wales 62.5 South Yorkshire 70.0 Staffordshire n/a Suffolk 67.4 Surrey 64.6 Sussex 60.0 Thames Valley 62.5 Warwickshire 65.5 West Mercia 64.4 West Midlands 65.6 West Yorkshire 68.5 Wiltshire 67.2
The frontline policing measure and other measures of time spent on patrol and paperwork have been discontinued as part of the Government's commitment to reduce the burden on police forces imposed by statistical and other data. This will allow police officers to concentrate their efforts on fighting crime and being more visible.
The decision to discontinue the measure is based on the maturing relationship which exists between the police service and the Home Office around performance management. Over time a performance management culture has been embedded, and following the success that forces have had in reducing crime and the move to one centrally set target around public confidence, we believe that this approach is the right one.