WHAT price the return of the beat bobby?

This was the question we put to Chief Constable Nigel Burgess in the wake of the overwhelming evidence that this is what the people want.

He wouldn't be pinned down on an exact figure - but said he would need to quadruple the amount of police already employed for there to be any noticeable effect.

He has a budget of £111 million to cover all areas of policing. He, the police authority and public consultation groups decide together in which areas to spend the money.

He says he could easily spend double that amount of money and still need more.

Mr Burgess claims he takes the issue of the beat bobby very seriously but repeats once again that beat bobbies are not cost effective.

Nor, he says are they the answer to beating crime.

"The traditional vision of the officer wandering randomly around his patch, waiting for something to happen is a thing of past. It was unsophisticated policing," said Mr Burgess.

"Everything has changed and not just for the police. Lifestyles, morals, mobility, communications, jobs, transport and leisure.

"Criminals have become much more sophisticated, they travel much further, they are much more knowing about policing and they are much less concerned about authority," he says.

Successful detection comes from crime pattern analysis, intelligence gathering, surveillance advanced forensic science, DNA and much much more.

This is nothing new. Campaigners say they have heard it all before. They say they need beat bobbies, they feel comforted by seeing the officer. So what is his solution?

Mr Burgess' way forward is for there to be community teams or rural policing teams, groups working in a geographical area, groups of villages or neighbourhoods.

"They won't be patrolling in cars or in the streets but collecting criminal intelligence, targeting problems with local youths, visiting people to find the underlying causes, encouraging people to join neighbourhood watch groups and liaising with parish councils and other agencies and meeting the residents," he says.

Mr Burgess wants to re-establish the daily contact that has been lost with the disappearance of the beat bobby through a network of information contact points in shops, libraries, council offices, supermarkets and garages.

"I would like there to be one trained person, who can give the public information on police matters and who will have a telephone line to the police station for people to use if a crime has been committed.

What Mr Burgess can't deny is that villagers do feel comforted by seeing the uniformed beat bobby.

But he claims that these people are the law abiding citizens, the elderly. There are many who have no such respect for authority.

However some police forces do value the beat bobby above everything else. In Humberside, we found one that did.

There, Chief Constable David Westwood says in a report entitled Quality of Life Policing that highly-visible foot patrols, when sent out effectively, are the best way to tackle nuisance crime. And so the budget for them is generous.

Mr Westwood also believes that nuisance crime is just as important to the people of Humberside as the more sophisticated terrors of paedophilia and computer fraud.

A spokesman for Humberside Police said: "Mr Westwood does not wish under any circumstances to set up against what the Cheshire force thinks.

"Nonetheless, he has set out his philosophy in public. He stands by it, and it is popular."

It's popular here too. So bearing that in mind what would it take for Mr Burgess to change his mind.

"I suppose if every single person said that they wanted the beat bobby to return I would have to take another look at it," he said.

So maybe that is the answer: To flood Mr Burgess with letters so he has no alternative but to look at the situation again.

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.