Chris Leslie
Main Page: Chris Leslie (The Independent Group for Change - Nottingham East)Department Debates - View all Chris Leslie's debates with the Home Office
(12 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberI am very happy, again, to join my hon. Friend in congratulating police officers in Leicestershire on all their work in seeing that fall in crime. It is important; it matters to local communities; and it is clear that officers in Leicestershire and in many forces throughout the country are out there doing what we want them to do, which is to fight crime.
In Nottinghamshire, we have seen over the past financial year the fifth largest increase in crime of any police force, yet we have had the fourth largest funding cut of any authority. Will the Home Secretary look again at the funding formula and, in particular, when she reviews the damping mechanism of those formulas, think carefully about the impact on Nottinghamshire? Police officers really do make a difference to crime.
As Home Secretaries and Policing Ministers through the years have discovered, there are forces that benefit from damping and forces that do not. We committed to look at the damping mechanism in the last two years of the spending review period, but my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice has initiated that work already and is currently looking at the issue.