We have heard depressing testimonies from all ranks, from West Yorkshire's Chief Constable in this newspaper, down to the PCs on our streets, describing how legislative and regulatory hyperactivity has distorted police priorities and tied them to their desks with red-tape.

Their experiences are borne out by the statistics which show it now takes 10 hours to process an arrest. As a result, the public only see a police officer for the 14 per cent of his time actually spent on patrol. It is clear that unnecessary bureaucracy is sapping officers' time and morale and reducing their effectiveness.

It is for this reason that the Conservatives have announced plans to reform the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) the law regulating police surveillance – to slash the paperwork which is getting in the way of routine policing.

RIPA was designed to prevent the abuse of powers to monitor criminals, but as is often the case under Labour, the Act has produced a perverse outcome.

The current laws mean police are required to complete excessive forms to allow them to monitor volume crime, such as vehicle theft and burglary. In some cases, officers wanting to follow a burglar with a number of previous convictions – who they believe is going to commit a crime – have faced more than 13 hours of paperwork to obtain permission.

Sir Norman Bettison, the man who leads West Yorkshire's officers, summed it up succinctly recently, saying: "Urgent action is… required to slash the red tape that is tying officers to their desks and keeping them off the streets, where the public want to see them."

Labour have achieved a rare feat – a system which not only keeps police off the streets filling in forms, but actually discourages officers from trying to tackle the everyday crime that blights communities and makes the public feel less safe.

Conservatives will revise the RIPA framework so that authorisation is not required in a range of circumstances. This means allowing officers to use CCTV cameras, conduct plain clothes patrols and set up surveillance to help the victims of repeat burglary without wasting time filling in forms. We want to empower officers to tackle volume crime and provide them with the necessary tools to do so – not hold them back with red-tape.

These proposals build on existing Conservative plans to slash police paperwork. By scrapping the stop and account form and replacing stop and search forms with an oral recording procedure, we would save over a million police hours per year – freeing up officers to get back on the street.

As well as cutting paperwork, we will restore discretion to the professional police officer. A Conservative government will abolish "statutory charging" in straightforward magistrate court cases, restoring discretion to the custody sergeant and eliminating the reams of paperwork that police currently prepare for the Crown Prosecution Service.

We would also give officers more capability to respond to incidents on the ground, by giving sergeants the power to stop and search for a limited period, when a serious crime has been committed.

And we will take our reforms even further, empowering not just police officers but local people too. We would introduce directly-elected police commissioners, to make police forces directly accountable to their local communities. In consultation with local people, commissioners would set local policing priorities and the police budget.

Forces will be required to hold quarterly beat meetings, allowing communities to hold the police to account for their performance. As Boris Johnson is already pioneering in London, a Conservative government will give local people far more information about crime in their area. Detailed statistics, online and in map form, will allow people to compare local crime levels more easily month on month, year on year.

These are some of the policies that drive our vision of law enforcement. This is only part of the answer to fighting crime – we must also address its causes, including family breakdown, binge-drinking and drug abuse. But, unless we have the courage and the determination to deliver real police reform, we will not be able to begin to rebuild the safer communities we all want.