Chris Philp's speech to the National Police Chiefs Council / Association of Police and Crime Commissioners annual summit

Today [Tuesday 18^th November 2025] Chris Philp MP, Shadow Home Secretary, gave a speech to the National Police Chiefs Council / Association of Police and Crime Commissioners annual summit. 

In his speech, Chris Philp MP said:

“Thank you for that introduction and for that welcome.

I think this is the fourth time I have attended this summit – twice as Police Minister and now twice as Shadow Home Secretary.  

I am working hard to get rid of the “Shadow” bit of that title as quickly as I can.

It is a great pleasure to be here with police leaders from around the country.

So let me start by saying thank you to the chief officers here and most importantly to the men and women who serve under your command.

Every day, up and down the country officers take personal risks to protect the public. Officers leave home each morning not knowing what the day will bring, or whether they will get through it unharmed. 

There are few jobs like this.

Many here attended, as I did, the National Police Memorial Day Service in Coventry Cathedral this September.  

Tiff Lynch from the Federation read out the names of the seven officers who lost their lives in the previous year.

PC Ian Minett, PC Michael Bruce, PC Frank Hawkins, PC Marcus Bennett, PC Rosie Prior, DC Karen Smith and PC Faizaan Najeeb.

We remembered the sacrifice made by officers to protect the public. And I say to all police officers and police staff: Thank you for your service.

Let me also thank the 43 Police and Crime Commissioners, many of whom are here today.

I know that you work hard and with dedication alongside your chief constables in a constructive and in a collaborative way – mostly.

I was very sorry to hear the Government's announcement last week about the abolition of PCCs.

The transfer of PCC powers to a directly elected mayor where the territory is coterminous does make sense. I support that part of the plan.

But where there is no Mayor, I do not think that abolishing PCCs is the right thing to do.  Replacing a directly elected PCC with some kind of appointed committee of local councillors with no direct mandate and no direct accountability to the public on policing issues is a backwards step.

The savings will be minimal given that the same functions will, as far as I can see, still have to be discharged.  PCCs have provided leadership, commitment and visibility and I will make the case in Parliament to keep PCCs outside of Mayoral areas.

Let me say a word about money. Always a favourite topic at this event.

In my last year as Police Minister, I increased annual funding by nearly £1 billion and provided money on top of that for the police pay rise – which was 7% in that year.  I think I was the Police Minister who delivered the biggest annual police pay rise since the 1980s.

But I know that more recent funding increases have not reflected the financial pressures being faced by forces. I warned the government last year that their funding settlement for 2025/26, the current financial year, would not keep pace with rising salaries and rising costs.

The Chief Constables of the five largest forces even spoke out publicly warn the government about the looming financial crisis engulfing policing.

But the government did not listen.

And as a result, police numbers are falling.

Back in March 2024, we hit the record ever number of police – 149,769 by headcount.  And I was counting every single one.

Yet in the year since then, we have seen officer numbers drop by over 1,300. And in the current year, we are seeing police officer numbers drop even further. In the Met alone, officer numbers will drop by 1,500 in this current financial year.

This has not happened by accident. It is not some kind of chance event.

It has happened because the current government has not properly funded the police. Falling police numbers are a consequence of their choices.  

This is not the fault of PCCs or Chief Constables. 

The fault for falling police officer numbers lies squarely with the Home Secretary.

It did not have to be this way. Just before I ended by time as Police Minister, we had record ever numbers.  

That required some inventive footwork – for example, putting up the charges for immigration visas and passports and then funnelling that into policing.  But current Home Office Ministers have not done things like that - and the result is inadequate funding and falling police numbers.  

They have made a serious mistake.

Now I expect that we will hear about the new government's Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee.

In my view, this is essentially a con. Only 3,000 of the people they refer to are actually extra new, full-time warranted neighbourhood police officers. And they are not even new.  They are being moved. 

Total police numbers are falling across England & Wales. In the meantime, the government is encouraging existing officers to simply be re-designated or re-deployed as neighbourhood officers. Or new recruits are put into neighbourhoods meaning headcounts in other areas fall due to retirement or turnover.

This is robbing Peter to pay Paul.  

Cutting investigations teams or 999 response in order to say the number in neighbourhoods has gone up is not honest. We can see through this when we look at total police officer and police staff numbers – and both are actually going down.

At the same time, I know that there are extra pressures coming into policing because of the government's chaotic prisoner early release scheme.  

Whatever you think about the causes of this, it has certainly been implemented in way that has left dangerous people being released in an uncontrolled manner.

And the government's proposed upcoming abolition of prison sentences under a year will make things worse. This will mean many more criminals will be on the streets posing a risk, committing crime, and needing to be managed and monitored.  For some volume offences, like shop lifting, it will mean that there is virtually no prosect of prison at all.  With no threat of prison there will be no deterrent.  It will be policing which picks up the pieces of this imminent catastrophe.

I therefore completely oppose the ban on prison sentences under a year. Magistrates and Crown Judges need that option to keep the public safe and to deter crime.   I will vote against those measures in Parliament.

On a more positive note, you may have seen the Shadow Chancellor announce public spending cost savings at the Conservative Party conference last month amounting to £47 billion a year – half of which are from welfare reductions and none of which are from policing.  I secured a commitment from the Shadow Chancellor that policing would receive £800 million per year from the savings to fund 10,000 extra officers – to ensure we once again have record numbers. All I need to do is win a general election in order to deliver that.

I would like to see half of these new officers intensely hotspot patrol year-round the 2,000 micro neighbourhoods – which is 5% of the total in England & Wales – with the highest crimes.

These 5% of neighbourhoods represent 25% of all crime. And we know hotspot patrolling supresses crime, it doesn't just displace it.

Preventing crime is critical.

It is welcome that overall crime has fallen substantially – total crime fell 18% over the last 8 years according to the crime survey and England & Wales.

But the public want more than just falling crime – they want to see crimes solved.

To the victim, there is no such thing as a minor crime.  

A phone stolen. A car broken into. A home violated by burglary. A shopkeepers' livelihood ruined by organised or persistent shoplifting. For the victim these are all serious crimes.

And just as with higher harm offences, the public expects action.

And the truth is that not enough crimes are solved.

From shoplifting through to rape and serious sexual assaults – we need to do better.

Only around 9% of reported crimes were solved last year. 91% of offences going unsolved is far too high. It is undermining public confidence and allowing criminals to continue to offend unpunished.

There is huge variability between forces in clear up rates – from 5% at worst to 14% at best.

The commitment made two years ago by policing to always investigate all reasonable lines of enquiry needs to be followed. Not sometimes, but every time.

That means always running crime scene images of a suspect through the retrospective facial recognition system against the ten million images stored on the police national database. The AI now means even partially obscured images or images in shadow can be matched. This is still not being done for every suspect image.

It means always following geolocation data. And it means always following up stolen goods advertised for sale.

Doing these simple things means that more criminals will be caught.

Speaking of technology, this remains an area of huge interest to me, and I know to you as well.

I will once again draw attention to the huge potential of live facial recognition to catch wanted criminals who would not otherwise be caught.  

The Met recently reported on their deployments over the last year. I commend the Met team and especially Lindsey Chiswick for their work on this. In one year, the Met deployed 1,200 times.

They scanned 3 million faces and only got 10 errors. This led to 962 arrests – 549 wanted by the courts and 347 wanted by the police for criminal offences. The arrests included 6 wanted rapists.

A number of forces now use this LFR. There are 20 vans available to use around the country.  In Croydon, the Borough I represent in Parliament, it has been so successful that we are installing permanent cameras on lampposts to make routine deployment easier – without even needing the vans.

I urge every force to use this tactic proactively and with confidence. You will catch criminals who would not otherwise be caught.

The legal framework via case law and via APP is in place. The government are going to develop some more guidelines – but I hope they do so in a way that is sensible and proportionate, and they do not strangle this tactic at birth by hamstringing it with onerous and unworkable regulations, as some extreme campaigners will demand.

I ask policing to lobby the Home Office to keep any further regulation light touch.  I will certainly make that case in Parliament.

There is a lot of other technology I could talk about – drones as first responder; knife scanning technology and the use of AI and robotic process automation – but you will be relieved to hear that may have to wait for another day

Let me say a word about non-crime hate incidents.

The Police, in my view, should concentrate on investigating and preventing crime as I have said.

Where speech does not meet the criminal threshold, it should only attract the attention of the police where criminality is likely to follow. Offensive speech is not the same as illegal speech.  

So I think non crime hate incidents should be abolished as a category. Where something is below the cranial threshold but may have intelligence value to prevent or solve crime it should be recorded like anything else. But it should not be treated specially or differently. It is wasting 60,000 hours a year of police time.

I commend the Met for saying they will no longer investigate non crime hate incidents. I encourage all forces to follow suit. For my part, I will vote in Parliament to abolish them completely.

Lord Toby Young and Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe, who will be well-known to many here, are tabling an amendment in the Lords to abolish non crime hate incidents and I hope that they succeed.

Now, It is vital that the public and politicians back the Police when they act to protect us and act to catch criminals.  

The Police often have to use force to detain suspects, conduct stop & searches, engage in high speed pursuit, use tactical contact and occasionally discharge a firearm.

I believe it is strongly in the public interest that police officers have the confidence to always act decisively when needed – of course within the law and in line with their training.

I was concerned as Police Minister, and I am still concerned today, that we are not getting the balance right.

Many officers feel that their reasonable use of force or other police powers is treated unreasonably after the event, in a way that does not reflect the pressures of dealing with an incident which demands split-second decision-making. Some incidents go into lengthy and bureaucratic IOPC investigations or even prosecutions – where common sense says that they should not.

We need officers to be prepared to take the lawful action necessary to protect themselves and protect the public. We need them to drive quickly to the scene of an attack by a terrorist to save lives. We need stop and search to take knives off the street.  

We need force to be used where necessary.

I am concerned officers are losing the confidence to exercise these powers, as required, to keep the public safe.

Some changes to improve things were announced by the last government and are being implemented by this one.

But I urge the Government to go further. I believe that it should be a defence to both misconduct and criminal proceedings is an officer can show that they materially followed their training or standard procedures in exercising police powers.  

Officers take risks to keep us safe. So, we should make sure that are always treated reasonably and fairly in return.

Speaking of police tactics, I strongly encourage the use of stop and search.

This takes knives off the streets and saves lives.

Some people say that the black community is unfairly and disproportionately affected.

This is not true. Analysis of Met Police data by the Policy Exchange shows that the rate of Stop and Search is proportionate to the offending population. This is what you would expect.

And the success rate, at around 30%, is around the same for all ethnic groups.

No one is being unfairly picked on.

I urge police forces to increase to the use of stop and search to save lives and take knives off the streets. I will seek to legislate to allow s60 suspicionless stop and search to be made permanent in high crime areas and to lower the threshold for a regular suspicion-based stop and search.

This also speaks to an important point about data reporting.  When looking at the proportionality of police action – whether stop and search or arrest rates, or anything else – it is important to compare the police data to the demographics of the offending population, not the demographics of the general population. Otherwise, people will draw unfair conclusions about police racism.

I recently wrote to Gavin Stephens and Andy Marsh making this point, and I am very disappointed that they replied disagreeing with me.

Allowing misleading data to circulate provides a basis for unfair allegations of racism to be made against the police – undermining confidence in policing and making it harder to use legitimate tactics. I ask Gavin and Andy to think again about this question.

In a similar vein I was shocked to read the Police Anti Racism Commitment which says that equal policing outcomes should be produced for each ethic group.  

How is that reasonable if the underlying pattern of offending behaviour is different between different groups? The document even brazenly says that this means treating different ethnic groups differently.

This is clearly wrong, and in fact is itself racist. Everyone should simply be treated the same and be treated equally before the law. I urge the NPCC and College of Policing, whose document this is, to consign the insidious passage I have referenced to the bin.

Let me now finish on a happier note.

The whole basis of our civilisation rests upon the lawful behaviour of our citizens.

Without it, there can be no economic activity. There can be no personal safety. Society itself could not exist.

It is the role of law enforcement to make sure this necessary condition for civilisation prevails.

Whether the Cohortes Urbane of ancient Rome, or the Ealdormen of Anglo Saxon Britain or the Sheriffs of the American West – every civilisation has needed law enforcement.

You now provide that here, in a direct tradition nearly 200 years old.

We depend upon you, and all those in politics with our country's interests at heart should encourage, support and sustain the police in the vital work that you do.

You have our backs. We should have yours. Thank you.”