Davis Kelvin: Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:525. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau):I will start on the Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill at the conclusion of the regulatory impact statement which says: “Currently Police is unable to charge for most of the functions designated under the Policing Act 2008.” except in certain circumstances such as the recovery of licensing fees for firearms. This means that the New Zealand Police has limited or no control over demand-driven services and is unable to expand its resources to meet expanding demand. Well it just seems strange to me—if there is expanding demand then there should be an expanding budget to go with that expanding demand. As my colleague Phil Goff has said the police budget has actually been cut. In fact in Budget 2014 the police received significant cuts. The output expenses for police were reduced from $1.503 billion to $1.461 billion—that is over $40 million in cuts this year. These cuts are putting real strain on the police force.I have just heard Mike Sabin say that morale in the police force is up there. The reality is that under National the average number of police resignations per month has skyrocketed compared with under Labour increasing from 14.2 resignations a month in 2009 to 50.7—50.7—police resignations a month in 2013. To claim that morale in the police force is actually on the rise is a misnomer. Up in the north I have family in the police I have friends in the police—in fact I have been contacted by policemen who are concerned about their jobs and in fact their stations will be closed as Phil Goff mentioned. They have rung me—obviously they do not want to be named—to say that they are really concerned about small police stations such as the one in Kawakawa where I was born and bred and are worried about their jobs.The budget cuts are one of the big drivers of the strain on police. Those cuts as Phil Goff has said reduce their core operating expenditure—for example $3.5 million was cut from general crime prevention $7 million was cut from investigations and $7 million was cut from primary responses. As Phil Goff said the old ranchslider has been broken into but because the police are under strain and so many officers are resigning every month there are fewer of them to go out and do those investigations in a timely manner. There is also another cut of $10 million to road policing. These are the core functions of the police that are being put at risk as a result of those cuts.But the Minister was right—there is some public appetite for the recouping of some costs. I will just go through a few of them. Of the 102 submitters who responded to the question of whether the police should be able to recover the costs of certain services 66 percent broadly supported the proposal. A large number of these submitters commented that cost recovery would be appropriate in certain or limited situations where the services are not core police functions and where the benefit is to only an individual user or private organisation. So of the 35 submitters who were mostly opposed to the police introducing cost recovery for certain services some were concerned that it could set a precedent for a range of police services being user-pays and that the charging could not be applied appropriately to public policing.One of the things we are a bit concerned about is this thin end of the wedge towards privatising our police force. Another issue raised by some of those opposed to the police recovering costs was the possibility of a cost recovery regime leading to inequitable treatment of paying customers versus non-paying customers. We would hate to see the situation in New Zealand where the protection of the police came at a price and where the level of police service received by people such as my constituents in Te Tai Tokerau who do not have a lot of money would be different from those who do have a bit of money behind them.As has already been raised today the New Zealand Teachers Council was one organisation that did not support this proposal. It said: “A vital part of the education safety path for children is the mandatory requirement in the Act that the council carry out Police vets for those applying to be registered as teachers … to assist in determining whether an applicant ‘is of good character and fit to be a teacher’ …”.As a former principal myself we police-vetted all staff not just teachers—librarians caretakers office people—because we wanted to make sure that everybody was fit to work with children. The Teachers Council says there should be no charge for police vetting for teachers because “Police vetting has a significant public benefit in accordance with the principles for exemption in the original consultation document; Police vetting is part of the primary functions of the police and in no way an ‘additional service’; The Council is not a profit-generating company or organisation and the cost of vets would fall directly on teachers or schools;” or on the council itself.There was an equation somewhere in the notes that said there are about 450000 police vets carried out in any given year. Basically $7.70 would be the cost per police vet. That is fine to say now that it is $7.70 but who is to say that in years to come it will not become $27.70 or $50.70 and that it will not start to cost about the same as what we hear it does over in Australia? The Teachers Council said there are “few if any further efficiencies to be generated in the Police vetting system for teachers and charging will not reduce demand or costs incurred;”. That is a great point—just because we charge to recover costs for police vetting it does not mean we are going to reduce the number of police vets needed.The Teachers Council is opposed to any proposal that would make the council subject to cost recovery for a process that a statute requires it to undertake. So here is the statute that says it must vet all teachers—it is the statute that says that—and now they are saying that the council has to pay for it. Again as has been mentioned today where are those costs going to fall? Are they going to fall on schools? We know that schools are underfunded as they are. We know that schools struggle with money as it is and here we are placing another cost on them. So there are 40000 police vets a year through the Teachers Council. That is an average of more than 3300 per month—about 13 percent of the number of vets made each year. So 13 percent of any police vetting comes through the Teachers Council and schools wanting to have staff police vetted.I agree with the Teachers Council that this is actually part of the core function of the police in terms of maintaining public safety. Under section 9 of the Policing Act 2008 one of the core functions is maintaining public safety. This is actually about maintaining the safety of the most vulnerable in our society—that is our young people who are in schools. It is about crime prevention as well because if we can stop people with dubious histories of offending against children then we are actually preventing crime as well.We support this bill going to the select committee. I think there is a lot of debate that needs to be had around the bill there are a lot of questions that need to be asked and organisations need to submit and have their voices heard but the Labour Party does support this bill going to the select committee. Kia ora.