Oral Answers to Questions Debate

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Department: Home Office

Oral Answers to Questions

Gerald Jones Excerpts
Monday 13th July 2020

(4 years, 4 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Rachel Hopkins Portrait Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
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What steps she is taking to allocate adequate funding to police forces.

Gerald Jones Portrait Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
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What steps she is taking to allocate adequate funding to police forces.

Rosie Cooper Portrait Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
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What steps she is taking to allocate adequate funding to police forces.

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Kit Malthouse Portrait Kit Malthouse
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The hon. Lady is quite right to draw the connections between policing and other services in the public sector. I cannot speak for the resilience or otherwise of the finances of her particular local authority. I can say, however, that the Prime Minister has tasked me and the Home Secretary with the job of driving cross-Government working to deal with some of the causal factors in crime, beyond enforcement, and we will be talking to local authorities across this country about the part that they can play.

Gerald Jones Portrait Gerald Jones
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Money for additional police officers is welcomed across the board, even though it does not take police numbers back to pre-2010 levels. Surely the Minister would acknowledge, though, that baseline budgets in police forces are being cut again this year, and capital funding is almost non-existent, so unless the Secretary of State is able to win more money for policing generally, forces will be unable to keep the officers they have got.

Kit Malthouse Portrait Kit Malthouse
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The hon. Gentleman is obviously a cup-half-empty person rather than a cup-nearly-three-quarters-full person. The biggest settlement for policing in a decade should be welcomed by everybody across this House, as it has been across the whole of the policing family. But that is not to say that policing is not without challenges and that it cannot be more efficient. While we do want to see more police officers and a better response to crime, there is always the challenge in public services to do things better for less.