Police Funding Formula

Debate between Gareth Thomas and Richard Drax

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax). I have always enjoyed campaigning for the Labour party in his constituency. I strongly support the idea that the next police funding formula should be based partly on the number of bars and clubs in an area, because I think that, on that basis, London would see a substantial increase in its funding.

Perhaps, as I have started off in a consensual spirit, I might invite the hon. Gentleman to agree that the number of major events taking place in a police force’s area should be taken into account as well. Wembley stadium is very close to my constituency, and requires a substantial police presence to ensure that it is policed properly and effectively.

I very much enjoyed hearing from my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Chair of the Select Committee, about the work that the Committee had done. If he will forgive me for saying so, I thought the most worrying part of his speech was his suggestion that, according to some reports, police forces will have no detailed or clear information about the funding formula until 2019. I hope that the Minister will be able to set the Select Committee’s concerns at rest. At the moment, the Metropolitan police has no sense of clarity about its funding for the rest of this Parliament from 2017 onwards. As I said in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East, there is huge concern about this in London, given the role of the Metropolitan police in tackling serious and organised crime, and its importance in the fight against cybercrime, the increasing importance of which the whole House acknowledges. There is a sense that rising crime in London is putting substantial pressure on the available police resources.

Two weeks ago, Europol published a major report on the scale of the illegal activity of people trafficking by organised criminal gangs across Europe and beyond. London was identified as one of the centres for trafficking people into this country and in which the criminal gangs manage their operations. This re-emphasises the point that London, through the Metropolitan police, needs as much resource as possible to tackle and bear down on serious and organised crime, particularly if we want to tackle illegal immigration and other forms of organised crime. Hon. Members will be only too aware of the terrorism threat that we face, and I gently suggest that London faces a particular challenge to be tackled through counter-terrorism measures. I hope the Minister will ensure that the funding formula takes account of the particular threat that London faces.

[Richard Drax]

Speaking as an ex-serviceman, I watched the atrocities in Paris and noted that the police there, who were already armed, were expected to enter the buildings immediately to rescue people. There was no time to hang around. My concern is whether we have sufficient funding and training facilities to ensure that those who find themselves in such a situation here, God forbid, are equipped to enter such buildings immediately. It costs a lot more money to equip and train people to that level of expertise.

[Mr Thomas]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. We need to ensure that police forces work collaboratively so that there are enough trained individuals. I gently suggest to him that the Metropolitan police has particular expertise to share in this regard, and that its training facility at Hendon continues to turn out extremely highly trained and effective police officers to work in the Met and elsewhere. He is absolutely right to suggest that the attacks in Paris last year brought into sharp relief the terrorist threat that we all face here in the UK and, I gently suggest, in London in particular.

An ongoing challenge for the Metropolitan police is the fact that crime is rising again. Recorded crime is up 5% in the last 12 months. Violent crime in London is up 22%. The Metropolitan police is operating in the context of 1,600 police officer posts having gone since 2010 and almost 3,000 police and community support officer posts having been axed in the last five years. In my constituency during that period, 137 police officers, sergeants and PCSO positions have been axed. We were used to neighbourhood policing involving a sergeant, three or four police constables and three or four PCSOs. We are now reduced to just one PC if we are lucky, and one PCSO if we are very lucky indeed.

More recently, we have also seen revealed the substantial pressures on the Met, which have led to more and more police officers from the suburbs, particularly Harrow, having to be moved from the borough where they normally do their policing work to police major events or to respond to rising crime in inner London. In the past 12 months, on occasion, 22% of police officer time in Harrow has been abstracted to other boroughs—in other words, 22% of the time Harrow police officers have worked has been spent not policing the streets of Harrow, as it should have been, but policing other streets in London. The Minister may argue that that is an operational issue for the Metropolitan police chief, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, and I would accept that it is, but it is an operational issue being driven by the shortage of resources at his disposal.

Harrow is one of the safest boroughs in London, but we still face significant crime problems, there is still a significant fear of crime, and significant problems with antisocial behaviour remain. My constituents and other constituents in Harrow want to know that our police officers are out policing our streets, instead of policing streets elsewhere in London. What is particularly concerning my constituents, such that I felt it necessary to intervene in this debate, is a proposal to merge Harrow’s police force with those in Barnet and in Brent to create a tri-borough command. The proposal would axe two of the three borough commanders in this area and create just one borough commander for the three areas. Brent has a bigger crime problem than Harrow and its force has the particular challenge of managing events at Wembley stadium. Barnet also faces a very different set of challenges and, again, is an area with slightly higher crime than Harrow. My constituents fear, rightly, that if there is a tri-borough commander, Harrow police will be more easily deployed into Brent or Barnet and away from Harrow.

Given the lack of investment in Harrow police station compared with that in the Wembley and Colindale police stations, my constituents fear that if the tri-borough proposal goes ahead, there will be a question mark over the future of Harrow police station. If the Minister does not feel that he can intervene to reassure my constituents in today’s debate, and I recognise his reluctance to do that, I ask him to have a quiet word with Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to encourage him to drop this plan for a tri-borough command and reassure my constituents that there will still be one borough commander accountable to us in Harrow for the quality and effectiveness of policing in our borough, instead of our having to share this with those other boroughs. On that point, I welcome the Select Committee’s report and look forward to the Minister’s response.