Call to end police 'job for life'

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Annual fitness tests for police and an end to the "job-for-life" culture are among the proposals in a Lib Dem policy document on fighting crime.

Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said more officers were needed on the streets to catch criminals.

But he said there also needed to be an urgent review of working practices to make it easier to sack those who could not do their job properly.

The party said it would also jail fewer criminals for minor offences.

And it would give police authorities the power to set their own budgets without the threat of capping.

Mr Huhne called for an end to the police 30-year "job-for-life" culture and said he would give chief constables more power to link pay and promotion to skills and ability rather than seniority.

'Legislative diarrhoea'

Frontline officers should face annual fitness tests and it should be easier to remove those who are underperforming.

Launching a policy paper entitled Cutting Crime by Catching Criminals, Mr Huhne accused both Labour and Conservatives of "populist posturing" over tough sentencing, while ignoring evidence which suggests the best way to bring down crime is by improving detection rates.

Prison should be reserved for "serious offenders and serial offenders", he added.

Mr Huhne - whose party claims it would pay for 10,000 more police by scrapping ID cards - said: "We rely on prison far too much.

"First, reoffending is appallingly high, as prisons are colleges of crime.

"Secondly, the chances of being caught are still far too low, as only one in 100 crimes leads to a conviction.

"We do not need to increase the severity of punishments, but we do need to increase the chances of being caught. Catching criminals works better than posturing about penalties."

Mr Huhne accused Labour of "legislative diarrhoea" when it came to law and order, claiming that since 1997 the government had created 3,600 new crimes, including the offences of selling a grey squirrel, impersonating a traffic warden and importing Polish potatoes.

But while the number of criminal offences and the prison population have soared, detection rates have fallen sharply from 34% at the end of the 1980s to around 28% now, he added.