THE bureaucracy in this country has got too fat.

Every time a police officer stops someone in the street to ask questions, the officer will now have to fill in a form.

It's a brand new rule brought in to please the politically correct lobby.

Yet, when will the powers-that-be recognise that it will not achieve anything.

I know from my own experience that crime and disorder is a big concern for local people.

It's what over half the people who come to see me in my surgeries want to talk about.

Some have been the victim of a serious crime, such as a burglary; others are intimidated by rowdy, drunken behaviour in the town centre on a Friday night.

Almost all complain that we don't see the police out and about enough. That's not really the police's fault.

Bogged down

Cheshire police, like every other police force, are over-stretched, under-resourced and bogged down in paperwork imposed by Whitehall.

The police reckon these new forms will take up to seven minutes to fill in.

Not that long you might think. But what happens when the police officer stops a bunch of half a dozen louts who are hanging around on the street and clearly up to no good?

That's over 40 minutes of paperwork, just for stopping them and asking them who they are and what they are up to.

That's 40 minutes spent filling in pointless forms instead patrolling the streets and fighting crime.

Repeat that a few times during the day and you've got hours of police time completely wasted.

And it's not as if anything is going to be done with these forms once they are filled in. They will just sit in a pile at the police station gathering dust. During a recent meeting with Cheshire's Chief Constable, he told me that he had complained to the Home Office, like lots of other police chiefs.

But no one there seems to be listening. Instead, we're getting more and more paperwork and bureaucracy and red tape.

Hard-pressed

And it's not just the police who are on the receiving end. Local schools are bombarded with new directives and targets from the Education Department every week.

The headteacher of a Knutsford primary school told me recently that she spends much of her week filling in paperwork, time that she thinks would be far better spent teaching pupils and running her school.

Then there's the local health service. One Cheshire health boss showed me the 50 different assessment forms and surveys he was having to complete at the moment, all of them sent by different NHS quangos.

He would rather spend his time improving our local health care.

No wonder hard-pressed taxpayers think that they are not getting value for money.

Surely it's time to cut through all this red tape, bureaucracy and paperwork and let the frontline professionals get on with their job.

In my job as a Treasury spokesman in Parliament I've already drawn up a list of 110 quangos that we should scrap right away.

If we get rid of them then we can start to get rid of some of the red tape too. It's time to put bureaucracy on a diet.