Police face fewer forms

GREATER Manchester Police will no longer have to fill in long-winded forms when stopping a suspect in a street, the Government said today.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said officers in Greater Manchester, and nine other knife crime hotspots, will now radio in details of suspects stopped and questioned.

This will replace the long stop and account forms when a suspect is stopped and asked to account for their behaviour.

The move is aimed at freeing up more officer time and Ms Smith will meet senior officers today to discuss the move.

She said: “Giving police the means to dramatically reduce form-filling in these 10 priority areas will free up valuable officer time to further clamp down on knife crime.

“The recent policing green paper set out radical plans to cut red tape to allow officers to focus on the most serious crime and on local issues.”

The chief constable of Greater Manchester, Peter Fahy, said: “The biggest frustration of frontline officers is lack of discretion, disproportionate bureaucracy and the target culture.

“These changes, along with others proposed in the recent green paper, will in time enable officers to spend more time on the street.”

The move will come into force next month and be spread to the rest of the country in 2009.

In addition, a pilot scheme where the number of forms filled in by police has been cut by 80 per cent will be extended to cover the knife crime zones from today.

Officials predict the changes could save 580,000 hours of police time a year — the equivalent of 320 police officers.