Met with Dave Grant, Haringey’s police commander, this morning. Haringey police are doing really well and almost all the indicators are green (they use a traffic light system to show what’s on target, what’s nearly on target – and red shows that something is not right). The next key area they are going to tackle with the same determination as the crime reduction targets is public confidence – which is a really good area that does need some work.

A few years ago I was so fed up with hearing from local people that they couldn’t get through by phone to their local police station or that they had rung the police about a crime and no-one had come that I did a constituency wide survey on unreported crime.

Unreported crime is important – because police resources are targeted where crime is reported – therefore if people don’t bother to report it – no funding comes along and it is a self-defeating circle. The survey showed – not hugely surprisingly – that people didn’t report crimes mainly because they didn’t think there was a point. Either they couldn’t get hold of someone (short of 999) or even if they did – no one came or showed much interest in catching criminals.

Those days have diminished and with more police on the street, PCSOs, Safer Neighbourhood Panels and so on there is far more of a good relationship between police and those who are policed working together.

But there is still some work to do on better response times and making sure that the people you are responding to are looked after properly. So I am very pleased that Commander Grant is making this a priority in the coming months and look forward to the next set of great statistics in due course.