All governments try to use figures to support their policies, their actions and the results.

"Tell me what you want to say and I will give you the figures to prove it" - seems to be the way government statistics are compiled.

As politicians we are used to having to delve deeply into the details in order to get at the truth.

This week we saw a prime example of "playing the numbers game" taken too far as the Government, without a dent of embarrassment, pulled a fast one on the police forces of England and Wales.

Some will remember the Home Secretary announcing an additional 5,000 police officers at the Labour Party Conference.

A little investigation revealed that, though constabularies would recruit 5,000 new officers, there would be no account taken of the numbers of officers leaving the force, or retiring, and so the final number of extra officers would be somewhat less than 5,000.

Then came the Government's masterful stroke: it invited the constabularies to bid for the number of officers they required to meet targets for reducing crime.

This was duly done, but unfortunately our chief constables required some 8,000 officers when all the bids were counted up. So, of course, their requests had to be scaled down, so as not to be more than 5,000.

This would have been quite acceptable if the Government also reduced the targets that the police had indicated they would be able to achieve with the 8,000 additional officers.

No such luck.

Mr Straw triumphantly announced "agreed targets" for the police to meet, forgetting to mention, of course, that these were agreed on the assumption that police forces would receive the number of officers for which they had bid.

Cheated

It is perhaps not surprising therefore that many police officers now feel cheated.

And who can blame them?

I would say to Mr Straw: "If we really want to get the best from an already demoralised police force, tricking them into this sort of political escapade is not very clever."