Police Grant Report

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate. I wish to start, as I am sure every Member would, by paying tribute to the police officers and staff from Bedfordshire police. Everyone who serves as an officer or member of staff in a police force does so in a noble profession; they keep us safe and look after the most vulnerable. We cannot thank them enough for what they do.

In Bedfordshire, in the settlement, we now have 1,369 officers, which is 135 more than we had back in 2010, and we have a budget that has gone up to £136.1 million, which is an increase of 5.4%. It would be remiss of me not to say thank you for those increases. Gratitude is sometimes somewhat slow to come off the lips of politicians, but occasionally it is due and where it is due I pay it gladly. The Minister knows well that the Bedfordshire police finances have been sustained in recent years only through a series of special grants. Last year, he was kind enough to give us two of £3.6 million each, making a total of £7.2 million. It was only because we had those two special grants, which we have had for a number of years now, that we have been able to balance the books. I am sure he will agree that that is not a sustainable basis on which to go forward, and he will therefore not be surprised to hear me raise again the issue of the funding formula. In Bedfordshire’s case, this goes back to 2004 and the introduction of damping, which has taken about £3 million—the equivalent of about 95 officers on our streets—off our budgets. We are starting to make good on some of that with the increases, but it is not sustainable to leave Bedfordshire police finances where they are with the current funding formula.

This is not just about increases in budgets, because we have to look at what those budgets are asked to do. The Minister will know that we have a high number of organised criminal gangs and of county lines gangs in Bedfordshire. He will also know that from time to time we need hundreds of officers to police things such as Traveller funerals. If we look at Operation Venetic, we see that Bedfordshire had 26 packages of intelligence, whereas Hertfordshire, a much larger county, had only 11 and Cambridgeshire, bless it, did not have any. That illustrates the extent of the demand in Bedfordshire, whose budget has been adversely affected by the introduction of damping from 2004. This is not just about the total officers; it is also about where those officers are based. The largest town in my constituency is Leighton Buzzard. In 1988, it had a police station, with an inspector, six sergeants and 27 constables— 34 warranted officers in the town. Now we have a shared emergency services hub. Unfortunately, we do not have a 24/7 first responder presence, which we used to have. It takes time for officers to travel to where the crime is. They do not have magic carpets or a TARDIS to get from A to B. If they are travelling from Luton or wherever, that takes time. It is often low-paid staff in our pubs and clubs who have to deal with the first five or 10 minutes of the fight. That is not the role of bartenders and people working in hospitality, so where those officers are matters and sorting out the funding formula will enable us to deal with that issue.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Is the hon. Gentleman concerned that the closure of some police stations might make it quite a long journey to take somebody from an incident to the police station for the processing, taking too much time out of their shift, and we are perhaps getting to a point where there are not as many arrests as we would expect for the types of crimes that our constituents are seeing on the streets and would like to have tackled? Does he share my concern that the closure of police stations is not allowing us to deal with that antisocial behaviour on our streets?

[Andrew Selous]

The hon. Lady is right; time spent taking offenders to custody suites is time when those officers cannot be on the streets doing their job. However, we cannot spend the same pound twice. I would like to see a 24/7 first responder response, and there are ways we can do that. We have a large public estate, and I think we need to be a bit more imaginative about how and where we base our police officers, because the primary focus is on having officers on the beat in our large centres of population 24/7.

On the police funding formula review, I have been asking every Policing Minister about this since I was elected in 2001, and I was pleased to have confirmation from the Prime Minister recently that we are moving forward and are going to deliver on this. I also received a letter from the Minister himself, in which he said that the consultation on the police funding formula review would take place this summer—so I have it in writing in an official letter from the Home Office. I was very pleased indeed to read that. It sounds as if the train has left the station. This is about being fair to Bedfordshire and those other forces that have been left out, and I look forward to swift implementation. The Minister talked about effective transition arrangements for that review. I want it to be effective but I do not want it to take too long, and I hope he will bear that in mind.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

This is welcome news, but it will be interesting to see when the train actually arrives. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that part of that review has to involve the fundamental question of what the split should be between central Government funding and what is raised locally?

[Andrew Selous]

The right hon. Gentleman is right, in that no one likes paying council tax—I have often called it the most unpopular tax in the UK. The primary focus for us in Bedfordshire is to have a well-funded force, to have enough officers and to have them in the right places, and our greatest issue is the resolution of the funding formula issue. This Government have committed to that, and they have done so very publicly. We will have the consultation this summer. It needs to deliver, and deliver quickly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Selous]

On the point about focusing on where county lines come from, they also come from Luton, which is another reason why Bedfordshire needs to be treated fairly.

[Kit Malthouse]

As my hon. Friend knows, we have been happy to fund Operation Boson, which has been dealing with serious and organised crime and drug dealing in and around Luton—which, as he says, is a particular hotspot. Our county lines settlement provides some money for receiving, or importing, forces to try to step up to the plate. However, I hope all those forces will realise that there will be a huge impact on violence specifically in their areas if they co-operate with the operations coming out of those three big exporting forces, and I hope that people will look carefully at both the funding formula and the impact of the overall investment package on their force before drawing a negative inference.