Police Grant

Mark Hendrick Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

He’s lying!

[Mr Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

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[Mr Speaker]

Order. I did not hear anything said that was out of order. If I did not hear it, I cannot act on it. At this point, the hon. Member for Preston (Mr Hendrick) is intervening, so we will hear that. If somebody wants to raise a point of order or whatever, he or she is free to do so, but I cannot comment on something that I did not hear.

[Mr Hendrick]

When the Chancellor announced in 2016 that police budgets would continue to be protected in cash terms assuming council tax was maximised, I—like many others—welcomed the news. Last year’s cuts to grant funding were a uniform 0.6% and this year’s provisional settlement outlined a further 1.3% cut to direct resource funding. How does that square with what the Minister said?

[Brandon Lewis]

I can only repeat what I said earlier: last year, we protected police spending when the precept is taken into account. The overall level of government funding allocated to police is exactly as announced in the 2015 spending review at £8.497 billion.

I am delighted that the Policing and Crime Act 2017 received Royal Assent on 31 January because it allows us to ensure that we are working towards implementing many provisions that will further help policing to reform and deliver in the future. The Act ensures that collaboration between police forces and with other public services to better tackle emerging threats can go further and faster, providing efficiencies to ensure that money is spent on the frontline delivering for the communities in which the police work. There is substantial evidence showing that closer collaboration between the emergency services can improve public safety, secure more efficient services and deliver better value for money for taxpayers.

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[Mr Hendrick]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the funding formula review has been shrouded in mystery, the Minister having given no details of the main indicators to be implemented in its outcome? He cannot even tell us when the review will be finished, which leaves police forces—which will be on the end of the funding, once the formula is introduced—scratching their heads over the future.

[Holly Lynch]

My hon. Friend is right. When the report was produced, I was a little confused about whether it referred to the formula for next year or the year after that, because we had not been given the necessary detail about what is coming up. He is also right about the uncertainty that that has fostered in police forces that are trying to respond to the challenges they face.

Efficiencies alone cannot offset the cuts. We know that the amounts that police and crime commissioners can collect through the precept vary greatly, with the poorest unable to finance the shortfall in the grant required to meet the demand, as outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and others. West Yorkshire is the fourth largest force, taking in Leeds, Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield. The Leeds district alone is bigger than some forces. With our diverse communities, we have a lot to offer, but sadly that sometimes presents challenges as well, as many of us know. We encompass a number of Prevent priority areas, and our socio-economic characteristics and pockets of deprivation increase policing needs, with demand similar to that faced by the West Midlands and Greater Manchester police. We take in some of the urban areas, such as Leeds and Bradford—bigger than others in the north—but also cover some of the sweeping rural areas that straddle the Pennines.

We have already heard from some hon. Members that the formula should be based on population size, but I do not believe that the police grant recognises the pressures from complex, evolving crimes, such as cybercrime, human trafficking, the demands of preventing child sexual exploitation and missing persons inquiries.

To provide an example, the Black Health Initiative in Leeds estimates that some 2,600 women and girls in the city have undergone or are at risk of female genital mutilation. West Yorkshire police and our police and crime commissioner, Mark Burns-Williamson, are working with organisations to combat this risk, but as the Home Office knows, this is sensitive and painstaking work.

We face challenges relating to firearms and serious and organised crime in West Yorkshire. Hon. Members will be aware of the firearms incident that occurred just outside my constituency after Christmas, and nobody needs any reminder that we lost our dear friend Jo to a man in possession of a firearm in the region. Increased awareness of exploitation in all its ugly forms—from child sexual exploitation, of which there were 609 cases last year in West Yorkshire, to human trafficking, of which there were 142 recorded cases in West Yorkshire—means that policing priorities have rightly changed to reflect that, but the resources allocated from central Government have not.

During my time with the West Yorkshire police, I was able to see the difficulties of having constantly to divert crews into locating missing people, which is compromising neighbourhood policing work and eating into the number of officers available for 999 calls. In the 24 hours leading up to the shift that I did with officers, Calderdale police had safely recovered nine vulnerable missing people and were involved in looking for an additional seven the following day. As colleagues have already mentioned, the pressures caused by cuts to other services have an impact on policing at the same time as it faces its own financial pressures.

The weekly average for Calderdale is 43 missing people, with 416 a week going missing across the force. West Yorkshire police responded to more than 20,000 occurrences of missing people last year, which is staggering and completely unsustainable. We have had a safeguarding uplift to meet that demand, but those officers have come from neighbourhood policing, so the numbers are down across the vital neighbourhood policing teams that I work so closely with in my role as an MP—I am sure others do, too.

I have sought to spend time shadowing frontline services in my constituency since my election in order to understand the work that they do and the pressures they are under to inform my work here on their behalf. Again, the rhetoric in the Minister’s statements seems so far away from what I have seen and from the conversations that I have had. When I visited out-of-hours mental health services, I spent all night sat with two police officers who were unable to leave someone detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. They had to listen to and then call off the call for assistance—on bonfire weekend—because they could not leave a young nurse on her own with a gentleman who did not agree that he should be detained and who was becoming increasingly aggressive.

I have been out with the Halifax Street Angels, a great initiative through which volunteers seek to ensure that people have a safe time on their night out in my constituency. That alleviates some of the pressures on the police, and conforms to the idea of the big society in action. However, they expressed concerns to me that the demands on the police are so high that they cannot always respond when the volunteers encounter fights or potentially violent individuals, and the good will and partnership working are being undermined. Such organisations start to lose confidence in the police if they cannot respond when they are needed, which then really undermines some of the great partnership work that goes on.

The Minister is well aware of my concern, already expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), that reduced numbers mean that officers themselves are particularly vulnerable to assaults when they are out on their own as a single crew. I hope that the Minister will consider any and all measures to protect officers, including the measures outlined in my ten-minute rule Bill.

Ahead of the publication of the revised funding formula that we expect in the spring, I ask the Minister to factor in the different demands placed on forces beyond simply population and geography. We need a formula that recognises the imbalance between the amounts that different forces can harvest through the precept, and the Minister needs to adopt a formula that genuinely meets the demands on policing and allows officers to do the job that they do so well.

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[Mr Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Lancashire has been one of the top-performing police forces in the country for many years, and in some ways it has been a victim of its own success. Despite the improvements in its performance and efficiency, it has been on the receiving end of this Government’s cuts for a number of years. Given that success, however, I pay tribute to County Councillor Clive Grunshaw, our police and crime commissioner, and especially to Chief Constable Steve Finnigan, who is retiring this year after giving many years’ service to the people of Lancashire.

The police face financial and demand pressures as partner services are cut, and they also face the challenges posed by uncertainty about the future. The financial uncertainty caused by the return of the police funding formula review particularly affects forces such as Lancashire’s. Last time, mistakes were made in the process which suggested that Lancashire would lose about £25 million a year, on top of the £76 million-worth of savings that have been made since 2010. Even when the figures were revised, it was clear that more than £8 million a year would be taken out of its annual policing budget. That meant that it faced savings of more than £100 million a year by 2020, in comparison with 2010, which is the equivalent of more than a third of its budget.

Reform of the police funding formula is overdue, as has been pointed out by the Home Affairs Committee and by Members here today. It is vital for the new formula to represent accurately the demands on police forces. All forces need to be adequately resourced, but that must be done without disadvantaging other areas where tough choices are already being made so that necessary savings can be delivered. My constituents tell me repeatedly that they do not want resources to be taken out of policing, and have therefore supported increases in the policing precept. Further cuts will have an impact on officer numbers, as about 80% of the constabulary’s total budget consists of staffing and officer costs.

When the Chancellor announced in 2016 that police budgets would continue to be protected in cash terms, assuming that council tax was maximised, I, along with many others, welcomed that news. Last year’s cuts in grant funding were a uniform 0.6%, and this year’s provisional settlement outlined a further 1.3% cut in direct resource funding. While those cuts are considerably better than was originally expected in 2015, they still mean that Lancashire must absorb normal inflation and other Government-imposed cost pressures, such as the national insurance changes, the national living wage, and the introduction of the apprenticeship levy. As a result, it must still deliver £4 million of savings in 2017-18, with a further £14 million to be found by 2019-20.

I am also disappointed that there is to be a further reduction in police capital grant in 2017-18. Regular IT replacement cycles impose a significant cost on the force, but that investment is vital to ensure improved productivity and efficiency in future years. The reduction in grant means that the burden on scarce revenue resources is increased, as borrowing to meet those costs is an unattractive option in view of the relatively short life cycles of IT assets.

The Minister did not mention top-slicing in his opening speech. The value of top-slices will have increased significantly in 2017-18, by over £100 million. That increase is more than the assumed year-on-year increase in precept income from the 2016-17 level nationally. It could be argued that local taxpayers are, in effect, funding the growth in national programmes.

There is no information about the detailed plans for the £175 million transformation fund for 2017-18. Until that information is provided, the treasurer of my council will be unable to gauge how much of the funding might be returned to the service. In recent years, the Government have shifted towards creating funding pots for the police service to bid for, and that bidding process can be laborious and possibly fruitless at a time when resources are thinly stretched. We would also like an assurance that the proposed £525 million increase in the transformation fund in 2018-19—to provide a total fund of £700 million—will not be met by further top-slices in the grant that is distributed to police and crime commissioners. A further reduction of that magnitude in direct funding for policing would have a very detrimental effect on the ability of forces to deliver their services to the public.

The top-slice taken to fund the emergency services network programme has increased significantly, at a time when the implementation of the network is consistently being pushed further and further back. It concerns me that, according to the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the new programme, the December 2019 cut-off point may not be met. That may mean that the existing Airwave contract will be extended, at a potential cost of nearly £500 million. At a time when resources for policing are stretched to an unprecedented level, it does not seem prudent to remove funding from forces to pay for a programme that is not making progress. I would be grateful for any information or reassurances that the Minister and the Department can provide about the ability to meet the timescales in question, or about the protection of individual forces’ budgets from any overrun costs arising from the ESN or the extension of Airwave contracts.

I would also appreciate more certainty in general about the future level of top-slicing. It has increased each year, but at inconsistent levels, which makes the forecasting of future resources and their allocation extremely difficult. The Government are making financial planning and the prudent management of public funding considerably more difficult than they need to be.

Mental health services have received a great deal of media attention recently. It is widely understood in the sector that mental health is a key driver of demand for policing. When I met my local chief constable a couple of weeks ago, I was told that 80% of incoming calls to the police were not even crime-related, and many involved mental health problems. While the police have received relative protection from this round of Government austerity, the same cannot be said of many of our blue light partners. Local government has been severely affected and, despite additional resources, the pressures on health are well documented and have been made clear by other Members. As a result, the service is facing increased pressure from cuts to other sectors’ funding. I therefore ask Ministers present today, the Home Office and other Departments to ensure that investment in other relevant sectors, such as the health service, the courts and the prisons, is maintained in order to generate benefits for the police service. Cutting these other services is having an indirect effect on the operation of the police service.

I ask the Minister to speak to the Chancellor and make representations on this year’s Budget. I hope that the Government, and the Chancellor in particular, will take account of the issues I have raised, in order to improve the police service to the people of Lancashire and elsewhere throughout the country.