Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)

My noble friend is right; I suspect the comments may have been perhaps to influence an upcoming spending review. We are absolutely committed to seeing more police officers. I remember when the last Labour Government introduced police and community support officers—named officers in communities—and going to a public meeting in my constituency where they were dismissed by so many as “plastic policemen”, which was quite an insult. One year later, the praise for those officers was off the scale, because they were known to the local communities and their presence was reassuring and had a real impact. We remain committed to that and will seek to deliver it. My noble friend is right about being ambitious. One thing that worries me about the last Government—or Governments, in a sense, because we had several Prime Ministers—is that people became disillusioned with politics and are now very cynical about seeing politics and political decisions being a force for good. We will do everything we can to meet the ambitions that the country had for us and we have for the people of this country. We know that that these targets are ambitious; they are not targets that will be easy to meet—there would be no point in saying that—but we are determined to meet them, because it is what the country deserves.