Local MP Simon Hart has paid tribute in the House of Commons to the way Dyfed-Powys Police Force is dealing with budget challenges.

Speaking in a debate on the Police Reform Bill, Mr Hart said that the force was looking into a different way of doing things in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire.

"There will be a different sort of policing as a consequence of these changes," he said. "There will be a greater reliance on technology, and things will not be quite as they were before. However, it is irresponsible to suggest that the public are somehow endangered as a result.

Mr Hart praised the way in which the Force was cutting back on areas of unnecessary cost.

"Dyfed-Powys had a simple strategy, which was to list the things that it must do, the things that it could do, and the things that it must stop doing.

"One such example was the victims of crime leaflet which was abandoned by the force as being a waste of officers' time and the public's time, and-guess what?-public satisfaction with the force went up at the same time as that measure was disposed of."

He said that at the end of the day people want the police to be fighting and preventing crime, not taking part in a PR exercise.

"We simply want our police officers to be solving crime and, better still, preventing crime, dealing with the realities of day-to-day life rather than engaging in spurious PR exercises and form filling of the sort that has dominated the political agenda for some time and that this Government are rightly seeking to reduce.

"The Government's proposals remove a thick layer of bureaucracy that take police officers out of their offices and put them back where we need them: solving and preventing crime, and closer to their communities."