Police Funding

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Wednesday 28th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Jo Platt), and I would like to congratulate our shadow team on securing this important debate.

It is very clear that we cannot keep the public safe on the cheap. The announcement of extra funding to combat crime and terror in December actually amounts to a real-terms cut in central funding for police forces of £324 million this year. The Government have ignored the police by offering far less than they need and insulted the public by expecting them to pay for it. The legacy of the Government’s cuts means that there are now fewer officers per head than at any time on record, as crime, including violent crime, rockets.

Between April 2016 and September 2017, Bedfordshire experienced a 12.2% increase in crime, a 24% increase in the number of calls requiring an immediate response and a 48.9% increase in burglary, compared with the same period in the previous year. The police have had to try to deal with that on a reduced budget, with a reduced workforce.

Bedfordshire police force is one of the smallest in Britain, but it covers Luton airport as well as the town, which carries an unusually high level of serious threats that are not normally dealt with by a force of that size. Some 40% of the force’s activity takes place in Luton. While there is insufficient police capacity to deal with the challenges in that town, it means that the rest of Bedfordshire has less than its proportionate share of police cover, for which its residents also pay.

Constituents in Bedford will not forget the words of Bedfordshire police chief constable Jon Boutcher, who said six months ago that the police did not have the resources to keep residents safe and that officers could not cope with the demand. In an interview published in The Daily Telegraph, he said:

“My officers cannot cope with the demand and no-one seems to be listening... Things cannot go on as they are. My officers are exhausted.”

He also said that he does not have the numbers to attend 999 calls, and it cannot get worse than that.

In an Adjournment debate on police funding in Bedfordshire led by the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) in November, the Minister for Policing and the Fire Service said that public safety is the Government’s No. 1 priority, and that his Government of course have a responsibility to make sure the police have the resources they need. May I remind the Minister that Bedfordshire has the third highest terror risk in the country? Yet the extra funding for counter-terrorism is nowhere near what police commissioners have asked for, and it is not effective without enough officers on the frontline to provide intelligence. The counter-terrorism police are under such a strain that some terror cases are not being investigated, and the number of serious crimes left unsolved or not investigated at all is at a record high. We are living in different times with different threats. The spate of terror attacks in the UK and Europe is a shift, not a spike, in the threat level, and it could take a generation to eliminate that. This new normality needs a robust response, and police forces need the resources and the funding to do their jobs properly.