Police Grant Report

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Wednesday 7th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Louise Haigh]

If that is the case, I am delighted for Sussex police that it is recruiting additional officers, but that comes in the context of severe cuts and a fall in police officer numbers over the past seven years.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that any current recruiting follows year-on-year consecutive cuts to police numbers? Southwark has lost 200 police officers and PCSOs despite having the highest volume of 999 calls in London, experiencing a terror attack last year, and seeing high rates of moped and knife crime.

[Louise Haigh]

My hon. Friend is right that the context is seven years of prolonged, deep cuts from this Conservative Government that have led to police officer numbers falling and crime rising. Looking across Europe for international comparisons, we see that only Lithuania and Iceland, both of which are suffering deep depressions, chose to cut frontline policing by proportionally more than we did over the past 10 years. These choices have not been made out of necessity; they have been made out of ideology. Promises to the British public have been broken time and again. That is why we were right to treat the Policing Minister’s statement before the Christmas recess with a heavy serving of scepticism. He told us the settlement would give the police “the resources they need.” When Opposition Members doubted him, he told us to go away and read the detail so that we might feel more positive. Well, we have, but we are not.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has also read the detail and said that it did not meet the level of investment required. It is not hard to see why. The council’s funding document, which was submitted to the Home Office ahead of the settlement, requested £450 million for local policing alone, not for the entire service, as the Minister has sought to claim. It estimates that inflationary pressures on local forces add up to £209 million—not to mention cost pressures of £38 million and the additional pressure of the unfunded pay rise announced last year. Taken together, all of that will almost entirely wipe out the funding raised from precepts, meaning that local people will be paying more and getting less. As has been said, that will happen on top of an eighth year of real-terms cuts in the support the Government give to local forces. The flat cash settlement this year will equate to a cut of £100 million over the next year, so it is not difficult to see why commissioners across the country are calling the settlement “smoke and mirrors.”

I turn to the precept, because it is not additional money from Government, as the Minister tried to claim. Any additional money will come if PCCs take the decision to increase their policing precept. Once again, the Government display the worst type of localism: passing all the blame on to local decision makers while refusing to fund the tough decisions that they have to make.

What is more, this method of funding the police is fundamentally unfair. The areas that have taken the biggest hit from funding cuts since 2010 stand to gain the least from the maximisation of the precept. For example, the West Midlands, which has lost a staggering 2,000 officers since 2010, will raise a little over 2% from the precept. By contrast, Surrey, which has half the population, will raise almost the same in cash terms as the West Midlands, but by maximising the precept it will be able to raise 7.5% of its budget. When it comes to public safety, the settlement creates winners and losers based on postcode. The police funding formula at least made an attempt to fund forces based on need, but it seems to have been kicked into the long grass yet again. The alternative—funding the police through the precept—means that community safety depends on the ability of the local community to pay.

Before I conclude, I want to discuss reserves, which the Minister was keen to dwell on and which have been published with greater transparency this month. When the unfunded pay settlement was announced last year, police forces were lectured over their levels of reserves and were advised to use them for the 2% unconsolidated increase. The figure bandied about for the total amount of reserves is £1.6 billion, but the Minister knows full well that the vast majority of that figure is earmarked for capital projects or for known future spending. The real figure of usable reserves is £378 million, as the Minister’s own publication shows. Much of that is routinely being used for day-to-day policing as a result of cuts, and there is a danger that some forces will be put in the vulnerable position of not being able to respond to an emergency. In fact, the last available HMIC analysis revealed that only nine forces out of the 43 have more than the 5% level of reserves recommended by the Audit Commission, so the attempt to continue to distract us with the reserves is transparent, and the public and police leaders across the country will see right through it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly given the horrific events of the last year, I want to turn to counter-terrorism. Nobody who has read the report of David Anderson, QC’s review into the four fatal attacks in the spring and summer of 2017 can be in any doubt about the strain on counter-terror policing. In one chilling excerpt, he notes:

“On 21 March 2017, prior to the Westminster attack on the following day, investigation of Khuram Butt”—

one of the London Bridge attackers—

“was suspended. Investigation of the other SOIs”—

subjects of interest—

“investigated under the operation had been suspended the previous week, due to resourcing constraints brought on by a large number of P1 investigations”—

that is, priority one investigations.

Mark Rowley, the national lead for counter-terrorism policing, told the Home Affairs Committee in October that counter-terror policing was dealing with a 30% uptick in operations. He warned that

“dealing with this uplift in work at the moment is a real stretch”,

and that counter-terrorism had been put on an “emergency footing”. He continued:

“Given that we now have a growing number of subjects of interests we are investigating and a very big growth in the number of investigations…we have a bigger proportion of our investigations that are at the bottom of the pile and getting little or no work at the moment.”

I am certain that will horrify the public, as it horrifies me. I am equally certain that the public will wish the Government to give counter-terror policing the resources it needs to counter that threat. It is therefore staggering that Ministers have chosen, through this settlement, to give counter-terror policing just half of the resources it requested to keep the country safe.

Police chiefs are now openly warning, in an unprecedented way, of tough choices as a result of Ministers’ failure properly to resource their efforts in a threat climate described as “stratospheric.” If the first duty of any Government is the safety and security of their citizens, the responsibility of the Opposition is to make sure the Government keep to that promise. The failure properly to resource the counter-terror effort alone would be justification enough for the Labour party to vote against the police grant today, but in fact this settlement fails to meet not only our security needs but the needs of local policing and of the communities that are most in need.

The Minister has said time and again that he will ensure the police have the resources they need to do the job. There will not be a single chief constable in this country who can tell him that he or she has the resources needed to fully protect the public and provide a professional service in the current climate. Under the Government’s watch, crime is soaring and the public are exposed. The Government must urgently think again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), who has spoken this afternoon, as she has done on a number of occasions, with great passion and clarity on the type of policing we want to see in our country and how it is delivered. Conservative Members are clear that there is a widening gulf in the Labour party on this issue. I am convinced that the vast majority of Labour Members, like all Conservative Members, support our police and policing. We follow up our speeches and words with our actions in that sort of support.

I am not sure I will take lessons from some Labour Front Benchers—I exclude the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) from that, because she spoke with great force and passion. We have a shadow Chancellor who believes that MI5 should be disbanded and the police should be disarmed. We have a shadow Home Secretary who has just left her place but who has, over the years, with her party leader, supported and revelled in IRA terrorism. We have also had the police berated by some for policing, quite properly, industrial action. When I asked the question, which again got no answer, about what the Labour party would do differently on this grant, we were reminded of the manifesto pledge of 10,000 extra police, yet even with all the months that have elapsed since that general election, Labour still has no idea how they would be funded and how much it would cost.

I will, though, take some lessons from my right hon. Friend the Policing Minister. Until the most recent reshuffle, it was my pleasure and honour to serve both him and my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security and Economic Crime as their Parliamentary Private Secretary. Both are men of complete integrity and are dedicated to combating crime in this country. They are, one might say, the Batman and Robin of the Home Office. I will not say which is which; I shall leave that to my right hon. Friends to fight out.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) did earlier, I pay tribute to the work of the Dorset constabulary under the leadership of Debbie Simpson, our chief constable, who is leaving office having served five years as chief and 35 years as a copper. I also pay tribute to Martyn Underhill, Dorset’s police and crime commissioner. Martyn and I do not agree on everything, but what is beyond doubt is his commitment to trying to ensure the very best deal for my residents in North Dorset and for those throughout the county. He has just finished his consultation, in which 79% supported an additional £12 on the precept for band D council tax to deliver the sort of policing that people in the county quite rightly want to see. He is a good example, in a county that splits broadly 50:50 between rural and urban—certainly in population terms—of what can be done with imagination and fixity of purpose.

I pay huge tribute to PC Claire Dinsdale’s work leading Dorset’s rural crime team, which was the result of our commissioner responding to an issue and to which he has provided manpower and resources to combat rural crime, including wildlife crime and crime on farms. That is an illustration of how fixity of purpose and determination to clamp down on waste can ensure that money is best focused on the delivery of services. I recommend that model to other authorities.

As my right hon. Friend the Minister pointed out, the nature of crime in this country is changing, so the nature of policing has to change, too. The idealised picture of Dixon of Dock Green wandering around the beat, knowing every little old lady and little old man and clipping schoolchildren around the ear for scrumping apples is a rather nostalgic picture that brings a lump to many people’s throats. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) laughs; perhaps there are no apples to scrump in Liverpool—I do not know—but there are certainly plenty in North Dorset. We do not run through wheat fields in North Dorset; we are frightfully well behaved because we know of the rural police team.

I am absolutely convinced that, in difficult circumstances, this year’s grant will continue to deliver the requirement of a changing policing response to the type of crimes people face, so the Government will have my support on the motion.

[Neil Coyle]

On terrorism and the threat that we face, does the hon. Gentleman know why the Government have not yet taken up the opportunity to close the loophole on terrorism insurance? That would help the police to do their job and to protect businesses from terror attacks. While I am on my feet, may I suggest that, whatever he believes the shadow Home Secretary to have done, it is deeply offensive to suggest that she has ever revelled in IRA attacks on this country?

[Simon Hoare]

On the latter point, I direct the hon. Gentleman to the comments made by the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). She said that every activity moved one step closer to a united Ireland and should be celebrated. I will leave it up to the hon. Gentleman to decide whether to use the word celebrated or revelled, but I think that we know where her sentiment was at that time.

I was privileged to serve on the Investigatory Powers Bill Committee. My hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General and the then Security Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), performed a balancing act with the often competing and rather tense environment of the civil libertarians on one side and the civil lawyers on the other, and a political imperative to keep the country safe. That is always kept under review. We all know the figures—I am not going to bombard the House with the statistics—but I do not think that anybody could seriously question the commitment of Conservative Members and the Government to combating terrorism in all its forms and to ensuring that our law enforcement agencies and the laws under which they prosecute are always fit for purpose, with an element of flexibility to meet new challenges.

I urge my right hon. Friends the Home Secretary and the Policing Minister to look favourably on the proposal to merge Devon and Cornwall police with the Dorset constabulary. They are collaborating hugely well at the moment and that is clearly the next stage. It will deliver savings that can be focused on frontline policing in the great county of Dorset, to the benefit and safety of my constituents.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

And how dare Ministers talk about Labour’s record on crime and counter-terrorism? Members should look at our record in government of funding the police adequately and then look at this shambles of a police grant, which provides barely 50% of what the Metropolitan police asked for to tackle terrorism. We are facing an unprecedented terror threat. We saw it last year with the attacks on this place, across London and in Greater Manchester, and we know that the nature of the terror threat evolves all the time. How on earth can the Minister stand at that Dispatch Box and defend a police grant that would fund barely half of what the Metropolitan police asked for?

The fact is that the Conservative Government are presenting a proposal that no one should support. We should send them back to the drawing board and tell them to come back with a proper plan to protect our communities with adequate funding that does not leave my constituents paying high levels of council tax for a service that is not as good as the one that they had before.

[Neil Coyle]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I am grateful to the idiot Minister for suggesting that he needs to talk to Sadiq Khan. Does he agree—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I do not think I can possibly have actually heard what I think I heard the hon. Gentleman say. I trust that he will immediately withdraw what he said, and say it, very briefly, in a different form.

[Neil Coyle]

I withdraw the comment, but I think that my point will make the case. Does my hon. Friend agree—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman will not make a point in this Chamber by using language that is unsuitable for this Chamber.

[Neil Coyle]

And I have said that I withdraw it.

Does my hon. Friend agree with me, with Sadiq Khan and with the Home Office’s expert panel that London should receive its full share of the national and international capital city grant, which would deliver an extra £280 million to the Met?

[Wes Streeting]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. Conservative Members constantly attack the Mayor of London, but, as I have said, it is clear from the crime profile throughout the country that it is not individual police and crime commissioners who are responsible; it is the central Government cuts that are being heaped on them by the Home Office. It is a total disgrace.

People see through the spin, not because politicians like us have arguments in this place, but because they have listened to what the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has said. They have listened to what was said to the Home Affairs Committee by Mark Rowley, the outgoing head of UK counter-terrorism policing. They have heard what police constables have had to say. The Government can blame the Mayor of London as much as they like, but they know that their cuts are ultimately responsible for the rising crime across the country, and they need to redress the situation as a matter of urgency.

I have absolutely no intention of voting through a police grant proposal that will lead to real-terms cuts in policing, taxpayers paying higher taxes for a poorer service and a disgraceful position that leaves local government enforcement officers doing the job that the police ought to be doing. The fact that the Minister has come here today and quoted those statistics with a straight face reflects poorly on him, but it reflects even more poorly on a Government who should be cutting crime rather than cutting police.