CHESHIRE'S Police and Crime Commissioner is calling on the Home Office to change the rules for recording crimes because documenting one offence can keep an officer off the streets for hours.

John Dwyer (Con) gave an example of where one officer dealing with one crime actually had to make 43 reports – each taking about 15 minutes.

He told members of the Police and Crime Panel at Friday’s meeting in Crewe: “An officer locally, told me of an affray he dealt with. An affray is one crime. This affray involved, seven people.

“The seven people were assaulting each other so the home office counting rules demand that the affray is crimed and that each assault on each other, is also crimed. So we ended up with 42 other crimes being added to the one that really happened.

“Now, that might be nice in Utopia, in the sense that we can actually say 'well all these crimes have occurred', but actually we only end up ever charging one of them, and that's the affray, so there's a level of bureaucracy which has been introduced by the counting rules which I don't think the government and the home office really wanted.”

He added it costs about 15 minutes to record one crime and said if that was multiplied by 43 as in this case, that’s an awful lot of time for officers to be off the streets.

Mr Dwyer said he was currently speaking with the government, through the policing minister, about this.