Police Grant Report (England and Wales)

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I would like to speak briefly about Bedfordshire, which has been very seriously underfunded for a prolonged period. It still has serious problems. I was very pleased to visit the Policing Minister with the other five Members of Parliament for Bedfordshire—Conservative and Labour—a little time ago. He will have seen the paper prepared by the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable illustrating the desperate state of funding for policing in Bedfordshire. I made the point, in Business questions last week, suggesting that the funding formula was fundamentally flawed—broken was the term I used. I hope the funding formula will be amended rapidly, so that it can provide fair funding for Bedfordshire and other authorities across the country.

We have a particular problem with knife crime that is comparable with that in Merseyside, Greater Manchester and other areas, yet we are substantially less well funded. We also have a problem with gun crime that is comparable with that in large urban areas. Again, we cannot cope because we have serious underfunding. Our police force does a wonderful job with the resources it has, but those resources are simply not good enough. Rural Wales has, per head of population, resources and police numbers that are a multiple of those available in Bedfordshire, yet it has very little crime. There is something fundamentally wrong with a formula that can give such relatively generous police funding to rural areas with very little crime, when Bedfordshire has some fairly serious problems with crime, which we do our best to deal with but really are struggling with.

We have an excellent chief constable and an excellent police and crime commissioner in Jon Boutcher and Olly Martins. They are doing their best and have provided me with detailed arguments and statistics, which the Policing Minister will have. They make the point over and again that we need a fairer funding formula to bring Bedfordshire into line with other areas.

Our area needs extra resources for policing. As I mentioned, we have crime, but we also have political extremism on both sides of the divide, and that requires extra policing too. The police do the best job they can, with the resources available, but we do not have enough resource to do the necessary job. I urge the Policing Minister to look seriously at the funding formula. It should not just be an extra bit of cash to help out in the short term. We need to consider fundamentally how it can be revised, so that it treats Bedfordshire and every other area more equitably. Overall, we still need more funding for the police in general, but the lower funding we have across the country ought to be allocated fairly, and Bedfordshire should get its fair amount.

I will leave it there. I apologise to hon. Members and to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I have to go to the European Scrutiny Committee, where we are interviewing the Foreign Secretary. It is pressing business, so I hope that hon. Members will forgive me if I leave fairly quickly after my speech.