EIGHTEEN new Government Bills are currently plodding their way through Parliament.

Everyone knows the election will be called in a few weeks. Yet MPs and peers are on a ten-day holiday, including five working days when these new laws could be discussed.

Meanwhile we are getting the worst kind of pre-election tosh on TV, with the Prime Minister baring his soul for sympathy and the Tories’ almost daily botches over what seem like back-of-fag-packet proposals.

An article by Martin Kettle in the Guardian this week which set out to ‘shout down the bobbies-on-the-beat mantra’ had me looking up the parties’ proposals.

Labour are now pledging to protect the police budget from their promised spending cuts. The Tories will freeze police pay, put more of them ‘out onto the street’ by cutting paperwork, but make no promises that I can find about budgets.

The Liberal Democrats say they can pay for 10,000 more police ‘on the beat’ by scrapping ID cards. I wondered what effect this will have on local policing round here In Colne and nearby villages the number of reported January crimes has halved in the past five years.

Much of this fall is due to fairly intensive community policing. There are four wards, each with a team of a community beat manager (constable) and community support officer (PCSO), responsible to a sergeant.

Pendle Council has topped up the budget for these from Lancashire policy authority.

There are monthly ‘PACT’ meetings for residents in each ward which monitor progress on tackling problems and decide priorities. They all link in to Colne-wide and Pendle-wide systems and meetings involving the police and community representatives.

The January 2010 figures for Colne between 2006 and 2010 show a reduction of crime from 507 to 207 – a 59 per cent drop.

The fall is consistent year by year and not just due to the snow this year.

House burglaries are down 77 per cent, violent crime by 48 per cent, criminal damage by 75 per cent.

It’s about police in the community working closely with the community.

It all costs money but don't knock it. It seems to work, here in Colne at least, and it's worth defending even if we can’t do so in Parliament this week.