'Useless' police forms to be scrapped in effort to cut red tape

David Blunkett will announce plans today to scrap and streamline many of the 250 or so forms used by police, in an attempt to increase the amount of time officers spend on patrol.

A Home Office report into excessive bureaucracy reveals that the equivalent of 48 officers work full time for a year in filling in just five forms that are unnecessary and obsolete.

Other ideas to save police time being considered by Mr Blunkett are to make non-police organisations deal with missing people, lost animals and lost property; force hospitals to pay for finding escaped psychiatric patients; and make security companies pay for alarms that go off by accident. Support staff could also be given the power to act as jailers in police stations.

Mr Blunkett will tell delegates at the Superintendents' Association annual conference in Cheshire about details of a study into bureaucracy and time-wasting.

An inquiry by the Policing Bureaucracy Task Force, led by Sir David O'Dowd, a former HM chief inspector of constabulary, found that officers wasted huge amounts of time completing questionnaires and forms that were unnecessary, repetitive and sometimes useless. Some issued by local authorities and government departments are thrown away.

The report highlighted three types of form that between them wasted almost 90,000 hours a year of officers' time. One, used for stolen vehicles, wastes an estimated 41,250 hours of police time per year; another, used to update the police national computer about criminal activity, wastes 34,701 hours a year; and three forms that cover nuisance and malicious calls could be combined, saving 13,750 hours a year.

Mr Blunkett will say that the unnecessary forms are to be scrapped. In all, eight of the 15 most frequently used forms are to be taken out of use.

The task force also found huge differences between police forces in the amount of details officers had to provide for the same type of inquiry. The length of missing persons forms, for example, varied between two and 32 pages.

Mr Blunkett is expected to say: "Record numbers of police officers will only be effective if we bring down the overwhelming bureaucracy they face. We have got to get officers out on patrol and into our communities rather than stuck behind their desks."

The crackdown on bureaucracy was prompted by a Home Office survey in November last year which found that only 17 per cent of officers' time was spent on patrol and 43 per cent in the station, much of this filling out forms, handling incidents and making inquiries. Officers spent just over 1 per cent of their time on foot patrol, while the remainder was spent on vehicle patrols.

The study, Diary of a Police Officer, warned that extra resources for the police service would not necessarily produce a huge increase in patrolling. It estimates that only 20 per cent of extra resources would go on more patrols.

The report also discloses that there are 129,603 police officers in England and Wales ­ the highest since records began in 1921. The total has risen by 3,922 in the year to March 2002, putting Mr Blunkett on course to meet his pledge to have 130,000 officers by next spring. A record 10,215 recruits have been hired in the past year.