Police Funding, Crime and Community Safety

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

Mr Speaker, you are known as the Back Bencher’s champion, and I hope the shadow Home Secretary will not feel I am criticising him too much, but I think that for him to have spent 35 minutes—over a quarter of the entire allocated time for this debate—on his speech is a discourtesy to Members on both sides who have come here to talk about this important issue.

I want just to say the following. My concern, and that of the Home Affairs Committee, is not so much about the settlement, because we said in our last report, published on 11 December, that the Chancellor was right to have done what he did, but that is only half the story. Our concern is over the funding formula. Of course the Policing Minister was right to look again at the formula and re-evaluate it, and we have noted the fact that that whole process ended in a shambles because of the Home Office’s failure to properly calculate the data, and it took an official in Devon and Cornwall to assess that something had gone wrong.

We published our report on 11 December. The Government’s response to this very important issue is now 13 days late. Chief constables and police and crime commissioners up and down the country have been waiting for this response, and for the consultation to begin. The fact is that unless we have the new formula, even the decisions made on the settlement will not give certainty to the various police forces in this country.

We had a letter from the Policing Minister in the middle of the last debate in which he said he was going to respond very swiftly, but there is a debate on Tuesday about the Committee’s report, by which time I hope we will have begun the consultation. Yesterday in our deliberations, five PCCs as well as Lord Wasserman gave evidence on PCCs, and they all said that none of them had been contacted by the Home Office about this critical issue. This has been mirrored in the emails we have received at the Committee office from other chief constables.

I ask the Home Secretary and the Policing Minister to ensure that when the Minister comes to wind up—I assume another half hour of this debate will be taken up with wind-ups—he should please tell us when the consultation process will begin. I hope he will use the examples we have given in our report so that there is an independent element to the consultation process. If that happens, we will get a formula that can be accepted by all the police forces in this country, and a formula that can remain in place for many years to come.